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; it does however, invite the body into the conversation. Rewriting traumatic memory isn’t erasure—it’s the process and integration of reclaiming your body’s capacity for safety, joy, and connection, one sensation, breath, or completed impulse, at a time.
