Trauma isn't just a story we tell about the past — it's a state the nervous system gets stuck in.

Sometimes in the therapy room someone tells me about a difficult conversation with a parent, or a decision they can't make, or a relationship that keeps going wrong in the same way. And partway through, I notice something small: a hand squeezed tightly, a held breath, a voice that's gone slightly quieter than it was a minute ago.

I might ask, gently, "What's happening right now, in your body, as you say that?"

More often than not, there's a pause. Sometimes surprise. Sometimes a kind of relief — as if no one has asked that question in a very long time.

Trauma isn't a story. It's a state.

One of the things I try to hold with clients, especially those carrying complex or developmental trauma, is that trauma isn't just a story we tell about the past. It's a state the nervous system gets stuck in — a pattern of anticipating, bracing, collapsing, fawning, or fleeing that was once necessary and intelligent, and that the body hasn't yet learned is no longer needed.

This is part of why intellectual understanding alone so rarely resolves it. A person can understand exactly why they shut down in conflict, can trace it back to a single event or a chaotic or frightening childhood home, and still shut down in conflict. The understanding lives in one place; the pattern lives somewhere else — in the shoulders, the gut, the throat, the breath — in the body's nervous system.

Pete Walker's work on complex trauma names this well: the freeze, fawn, flight and fight responses aren't personality flaws or character weaknesses. They're survival strategies, laid down early, often before language, and stored in the body as readiness rather than memory.

You don't remember them the way you remember a fact. You re-enter them.

Working with sensation, not just content

In sessions, this means I'm often as interested in how something is being said as in what is being said. Not instead of the story — the story matters, and deserves to be heard fully — but alongside it.

I might ask someone to notice where in their body a feeling lives. Is it a weight, a tightness, a hollowness, a heat? Does it have an edge, or does it spread? What happens if we just stay with it for a few breaths, without trying to fix it or explain it away?

This isn't about performing mindfulness or forcing calm. This is about the body's story. Sometimes what arises is anything but calm — a wave of grief, a flash of anger, a trembling that wants to move through the legs. My job isn't to manage that away. It's to help the nervous system discover, often for the first time, that these sensations can be felt and survived in the presence of another person who isn't frightened by them.

That's the quiet work of trauma-informed therapy: not exorcising the past, but slowly teaching the body that it's safe now to feel what it once had to suppress in order to get through.

The relationship as the regulating field

None of this happens in a vacuum. The nervous system regulates in relationship — it always has, going back to infancy, when a caregiver's steady presence was often the only thing that could bring a dysregulated body back to baseline. In the therapy room, something similar is available. My own steadiness, my willingness to stay present without rushing someone out of a hard feeling, becomes part of what makes the work possible.

Staying with difficulty, and being present to it, without needing to change it, is invaluable. Presence, in this sense, isn't passive. It's active attunement and integration: noticing, tracking, occasionally naming what I'm sensing in the room, and trusting that the relationship itself is doing therapeutic work even when nothing is seemingly being "solved."

Coming home to the body

The American Jungian therapist James Hollis writes about how we spend the first half of life building an ego that helps us survive, often at the cost of parts of ourselves we had to leave behind. I see something similar happen in the body. We learn, early and understandably, to override sensation — to power through, to disconnect, to live from the neck up because the neck down wasn't safe to inhabit.

Therapy, done well, is partly an invitation to revisit that territory, the forgotten parts of who we once were and still are. Not all at once, and always gently. Slowly, at a pace the nervous system can actually tolerate, a person's sensations begin to wake up — first as information, then as something closer to home. And as their sensations wake up and integrate, they become more whole again, more genuinely themselves again, and not someone who's too frightened or angry to live the life they were meant to live.

It's slow work. It doesn't always look dramatic from the outside. But it's often where the deepest change actually happens — not in the insight, but in the body finally being allowed to exhale, tell its story, and guide us back to safety.

I work with people who have experienced trauma, in childhood or as an adult, as a single event or repeated over many years. If something here speaks to you, you're welcome to get in touch.