July, 2025 - Jaya Hollohan

Have you ever flinched when someone touched your shoulder, or felt your chest tighten for no obvious reason? These reactions aren’t “all in your head”—they’re stored in your body. Known as body memories, these sensations are imprints left by unresolved trauma, encoded not in words, but in our tissues and nervous system responses.

Through somatic therapy, we can begin to rewrite traumatic memory—not by erasing the past, but by inviting the body into feeling, integrating and writing a new script for how we would like to live now.

What Are Body Memories?

Body memories are implicit, wordless experiences that live in the nervous system. You might notice them as:

A sudden freeze response during conflict
Startling easily at loud voices or unexpected touch
Persistent muscle tension or shallow breathing under stress

These are not flaws. They are survival strategies. Your body, doing its best to protect you, encoded trauma responses to help you avoid harm. The problem is that these protective patterns can get stuck, keeping you living a loop from the past, where the body still feels like the trauma is happening now.

Trauma Is Timeless—Until We Rewrite It

Unlike the mind, the nervous system has no sense of time. Without completing or healing thwarted fight, flight, or freeze (FFF) responses, trauma becomes “timeless.” That’s why something that happened years ago can still feel urgent, raw, and present, and we often reenact these unintegrated memories in our present in an unconscious attempt to heal them.

As trauma expert Peter Levine says:

“Conscious, explicit memory is only the tip of a deep iceberg… The submerged strata of implicit experience (or unconscious) move and motivate us in ways the conscious mind can only imagine.”

This is why talk therapy, while powerful, may not always be enough. The body remembers, even when the mind has moved on.

How Trauma Gets Stored in the Body

During a traumatic event, stress hormones flood the brain, disrupting the hippocampus (which organizes explicit memory) and ramping up the amygdala (which governs emotional memory). The result? Instead of a coherent narrative, we’re left with sensory fragments—sounds, smells, body sensations—frozen in time.

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk explains:

“Traumatic experiences create powerful, isolated sensory fragments… fixed and static… carved into the brain, body, and psyche.”

These imprints don’t update easily. Without somatic or other related mind-body based therapies, they can continue to drive physical and emotional symptoms for years.

Rewriting Memory with Somatic Therapy

Somatic therapy reconnects you with the language of your body—sensation, breath, movement, and our felt or “gut sense”. It creates a bridge between the past and the present, helping you:

Recognize your body’s trauma signals without judgment
Invite in new bodily sensations
Re-pattern your nervous system over time

This isn’t about reliving trauma. It’s about rediscovering what safety feels like. Feeling into the body and reimagining new possibilities of our felt sense, images or movements, and embodying them, can create small shifts that repeated over time begin to rewire your body’s sense of safety. For example, relaxing your shoulders by 1%, taking one deep breath every hour, placing your hand over your heart when feeling overwhelmed, naming one sensation that feels good and anchoring it with a breath or gesture.

These shifts additionally support vagus nerve tone, aid in nervous system regulation, and help your body to update its story.

Your Body is Ready to Heal

Your body is not broken—it’s communicating about past experiences that are looking for healing now. Somatic therapy doesn’t bypass the mind; however, it does invite the body into the conversation. Rewriting traumatic memory is the process of reclaiming your body’s capacity for safety, joy, and connection, one sensation, breath, or completed impulse, at a time.

Ready to see what’s possible when you support new body memories to take root and guide life?

Join our Monthly Somatic Integrations, where we practice the rewiring of what our body knows into the potentials of what it yearns to be.

To explore this theme more in a brief video, plus a related somatic exercise, please click here!

Do you ever find yourself second-guessing that inner voice? You know the one ~ that quiet knowing that whispers guidance about relationships, career moves, or life decisions. One moment, you trust it completely; the next, you wonder if you’re just being paranoid or overly sensitive.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many people struggle to trust their inner guidance, especially those who’ve experienced difficult life events or challenging relationships.

When Your Inner Compass Feels Broken

There’s something fascinating happening in your nervous system that most people don’t understand. Your body is constantly processing information ~ reading environments, people, and situations at a level far below conscious awareness. This ancient survival system has kept humans safe for thousands of years.

But sometimes, this system gets inundated, overwhelmed and dysregulated.

Past experiences can create patterns that influence how we interpret present-moment information. What feels like intuition might sometimes be an old protective response. What seems like overthinking might actually be wisdom trying to break through.

The challenge isn’t that your inner guidance is broken; it’s that the signals can get mixed up with other responses your body has learned over time.

The Hidden Connection Between Past and Present

Here’s what is rarely discussed in mainstream wellness conversations: the same parts of your brain that process survival responses, also house your deepest wisdom. This creates a complex relationship between protection and guidance that can feel confusing to navigate.

When you’ve experienced stress, trauma, or overwhelming situations, your nervous system develops sophisticated strategies to keep you safe. These strategies are incredibly intelligent, but they can sometimes interfere with your ability to access clear inner guidance.

You might notice this showing up as:

Feeling anxious when making decisions that should feel exciting
Doubting positive opportunities that others can clearly see are good for you
Feeling overwhelmed by too many choices
Experiencing physical tension when trying to ‘listen to your gut’
Feeling a tight sensation in your chest when making decisions
Sensing your shoulders rising when certain topics come up
Noticing your breathing becoming shallow around specific people
Oscillating between complete confidence and total uncertainty

How to Distinguish Between Intuition and Protective Responses

What if the solution isn’t about getting better at making decisions but about understanding the difference between authentic inner knowing and protective responses?

Learning to recognize different types of inner information can be transformative. This awareness helps you understand what your system is communicating and respond appropriately. It’s about developing the capacity to recognize what type of information you’re receiving so you can react accordingly.

Why Traditional Advice Falls Short

Most advice about trusting your intuition assumes you’re starting from a regulated, safe nervous system. ‘Just listen to your heart’ or ‘trust your gut’ can feel impossible when your system is still processing unresolved, potentially traumatic experiences.

This is why traditional intuition-building exercises sometimes backfire. If your nervous system is in a protective state, trying to force deeper listening can actually increase anxiety rather than create clarity.

The missing piece is often nervous system awareness and regulation. When your body feels genuinely safe, accessing inner wisdom becomes much more natural and trustworthy.

The Body Knows Before the Mind Knows

Your body processes information incredibly quickly ~ integrating environmental cues, relational dynamics, and subtle energetic information before your conscious mind even registers what’s happening. This is why you might feel uncomfortable in certain situations before you can logically explain why.

The key is learning to work with your body’s intelligence rather than overriding it. This means developing skills to:

Notice subtle physical sensations and what they might be communicating
Create enough safety in your system to access deeper wisdom
Distinguish between different types of inner information
Honor both protective responses and authentic guidance

Creating Space for Authentic Guidance

The journey toward trusting your inner wisdom isn’t about becoming more intuitive; it’s about removing the obstacles that prevent you from accessing the wisdom that’s already there.

This often involves working with the nervous system patterns that developed to keep you safe but may now be limiting your access to clear guidance. It’s about creating enough internal safety and regulation, so that your deepest knowing can emerge naturally.

Some people find this happens through somatic practices that help to regulate the nervous system. Others discover it through mindfulness approaches that create space between stimulus and response. Many find that working to integrate the stuckness in both the body and the mental/emotional patterns stored within it, creates the most effective and sustainable changes.

Your Wisdom is Waiting

The truth is, your inner guidance system isn’t broken… it’s just been working overtime to keep you safe. With the right support and understanding, you can learn to access the clear, grounded knowing that exists beneath protective responses.

This work takes patience, compassion, and often the support of others who understand the intricate relationship between healing and wisdom. But the result ~ living from a place of authentic inner knowing ~ transforms not just decision-making but your entire relationship with yourself, others, and the world.

Ready to explore what becomes possible when your body’s wisdom guides your choices?

Join our Monthly Somatic Integrations, where we practice the art of listening deeply to what your system already knows.

To enjoy a brief video on this theme, and learn another somatic exercise to support your gut instinct, click here!

Month: July 2025

Creating New Body Memories ~ A Somatic Key to Trauma Healing!