Trauma Stored In The Body: What It Feels Like

My phone charger next to my bed stopped working, so I replaced it.

A few months later a lightbulb in the bathroom went out, so I replaced it.

Then the microwave stopped working, so I called a handyman. "Probably just wore out from age," they concluded. But it wasn't that old.

When the house caught fire, I realized there was a problem in the electrical wiring.

This is what happens when trauma gets stored in the body. It finds different ways to signal that all is not well, but the health problems manifest slowly, and in different ways – masking an underlying connection.

This is what happened to me. An appendectomy gone wrong that led to an open abdominal surgery, and six years of complications where doctors responded to my symptoms, but couldn't tell me why they were happening in the first place. "You should be well," they'd say, while puzzling over test results. Each new procedure or prescription from each new practitioner came with the confidence of someone who had successfully helped every patient except me. "This will fix it" – except a few months later, there was a new reason to go back.

If your house burns down, your soul doesn't get another one in this life, so I took my tinderbox on the road, where I found that taking out some of the charge actually made it livable. Turns out that healing my nervous system eased my physical symptoms, and after six years of being in and out of hospitals, it's now been four years since I've felt inexplicable abdominal pain.

I thought my story was crazy. But what's crazier is how not a single person has doubted it's true. The second I say, "It was trauma," I'm not met with a, "Wow, really?" I'm met with a nodding head and, "Say more."

We are in the midst of an inflection point in our understanding of the human body, trauma, stress, and what it means to live well. I'm not having to do work to explain myself or tell people this matters. I'm entering a conversation where I'm one more piece of living proof it's real.

What It Feels Like To Have Trauma Stored In The Body

Maybe you can relate to some of these scenarios:

• You walk into a room and emotions come up that you can't explain or don't seem to match the environment.
• Someone at work is angry at you, and you can't think straight or even say anything in response. You might even feel exhausted, like you need to lie down.
• You feel like you aren't the person you want to be in relationships, but you find yourself unable to control your response.
• Someone made a mistake, and you snap at them. Your anger is disproportionate to what they did. You are no stranger to conflict.
• You're hyperaware of everyone's emotions, and change your behavior to keep the peace.
• You describe yourself as someone who is sensitive to light, sound, touch, and crowds.
• Even a deadline doesn't motivate you to get started. You know you're going to miss it if you wait one more day, but you feel powerless.
• You've gotten an injury while working out.
• You get sick often.
• You have chronic muscle pain or chronic health issues related to the digestive, hormonal, respiratory, or circulatory systems.
• You struggle to fall asleep at night, and your mind is very active.
• You wake up tired.
• You have coping mechanisms or addictions that you suspect are unhealthy, but you don't know what you'd do without the temporary relief they give.
• You feel uncomfortable asking for or receiving help.
• You feel disconnected from your life.
• You feel anxious all the time. You catch yourself holding your breath or breathing quickly for no apparent reason.
• You know you're working too much, but you also feel like the more work you put in, the better the product. You hold yourself to high standards at the expense of your quality of life.
• You know the 24/7 news cycle isn't good for you but you feel like you can't look away.
• You're pretty sure that you're the problem. "I'm bad at relationships" or "I don't deserve this" or "I'm afraid of commitment." You know that if you were a better person, your life would be better.

This is the challenge with trauma. Is this a diagnosis, or is this just what it means to be a human in 2026?

Why Western Medicine Misses Trauma As An Underlying Cause

I was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) in 2016, but it wasn't until 2022 that I realized the diagnosis was connected to my physical health issues. This is a systemic failure of Western medicine and I think every part of the system is at fault: specialized practitioners, health insurance, and big pharma.

Specialized Practitioners

I was the emergency doctor's problem until I was the general surgeon's problem until I was the gastroenterologist's problem. I was the urologist's problem until I was the emergency doctor's problem until I was the radiologist's problem. Then I was the gastroenterologist's problem again. Then I was the colorectal surgeon's problem. And then I was the radiologist's problem again.

Western medicine is designed to respond to symptoms, and they do it very well. Specialization itself is not the problem; specialization is what has allowed practitioners to become experts and ultimately do a better job by focusing deeply on their particular area of the body.

But for a patient with different symptoms, it means getting passed around like a hot potato while everyone says, "Not my problem" and ultimately no one is assigned to figure out the big picture.

Health Insurance

In the U.S., health insurance determines who gets paid and how much. Billing codes are tied to treatments and diagnoses. The general practitioner (also known as the primary care physician) is arguably the person responsible for seeing the picture of the whole patient – in one annual checkup that happens in about 15 minutes where they ask you about your sex life and make sure you're not depressed. They see four patients an hour; they're not actually paid to Sherlock Holmes your medical records and tell you, hey wait a minute, your C-PTSD might be connected to your colonoscopy.

The mind has long been a place of mystery for humanity, its ailments not as easy to dissect and identify as its physical manifestations. And along the way, health insurance actuaries decided that it was too complicated to cover, not all that important anyway, and thus the head became an "add-on" to the body. Even dental and vision are separate coverage; disappointingly, the government reinforced that practice with the Affordable Care Act.

When it comes to mental health care, if you're lucky, you get five to ten visits at a reduced co-pay, and then anything else you have to pay out of pocket. The thinking behind this is that five to ten visits should be enough to solve your problem – and if it's not, it's certainly enough to put you on drugs.

Big Pharma

The majority (roughly 65-70%) of all health and medical research is funded by pharmaceutical companies. (The government makes up an estimated 25-30% of funding, with philanthropic organizations accounting for 5-10% of funding, according to a 2022 Research!America report.)

You can't put trauma healing in a pill that you can prescribe to someone for the rest of their life. You can, however, prescribe pills for anxiety, depression, ADHD, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, sleep, pain, and hormones.

Good luck getting a trauma diagnosis when it's better for capitalism to put you on a cocktail of pills.

What It Means To Have Trauma Stored In The Body

As I explored trauma and nervous system healing in my own personal health journey, I got certified as a trauma-informed coach, where I started to understand the gap in the current system of practitioners.

If you have a mental health issue, you go to talk therapy. If you have a physical health issue, you go to an organ/system specialist. If you have trauma, you have a mental and physical health issue, because trauma is stored in the body... and there isn't one practitioner in the current Western medical system who is covered by health insurance for that.

What Is Trauma?

Here's what psychological trauma is: your nervous system senses a threat, and activates one of the four "F" states (fight, flight, freeze, fawn) in order to save you. Trauma occurs when the nervous system does not complete the stress response because it gets overwhelmed by its intensity, and is unable to process and integrate the experience. The body remains in high alert to prevent similar events from happening again.

People subject to stressful events over a period of many years can develop complex trauma, which shapes their sense of safety in the world, and how they behave; Pete Walker's book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving details how the four "F" states can manifest in personality traits and behaviors as the person sees the world as a place to "survive."

What Are The Four "F" Stress Responses?

Here are brief explanations of what happens to the body during the four "F" stress responses:

• Fight: Muscles tense, breath speeds up, heart races, emotions like anger arise in order to prepare you to defeat the threat.
• Flight: Muscles tense, breath speeds up, heart races, emotions like anxiety arise in order to prepare you to run from the threat.
• Freeze: Breath slows, heart rate slows, the body feels stiff, numb, or even cold, you dissociate in order for you to become "invisible" to the threat.
• Fawn: Muscles tense, breathing slows, you become hyper-vigilant, bracing for response to appease the threat.

Why The Window of Tolerance Matters

Our ability to process stress depends on whether we can tolerate the event without our nervous system shifting into fight or flight (hyperarousal) or freeze or fawn (hypoarousal).

When the body activates one of these responses but cannot complete the response, the experience gets stored as trauma in the body.

The simplest example is when a child doesn't feel safe at home. The child can't fight the parent because the parent is more powerful than them, and they can't run from the parent because the parent is the only thing keeping them alive. So they "stomach" the experience, and it becomes trauma.

Growth Happens Inside Your Comfort Zone

Everyone says growth happens outside your comfort zone. Trauma research flips that notion on its head. What children in Namibia taught me about our ability to improvise and adapt.

Adventure to AwakenClara Ritger

What Healing Trauma And Its Physical Symptoms Looks Like

Screaming into a yoga bolster and throwing your tiny fists around like it matters. Standing up for yourself when your body is telling you you're in danger. Hating yourself on the side of a mountain, and hating yourself for hating yourself when you should be happy. Making the same mistake over and over again until the day it finally clicks.

Oh sorry wait am I spoiling too much of my memoir? 🙃

Look trauma healing ain't pretty and I'm not going to pretend that it is, but if you're down to walk into the dark places the upshot is that you'll no longer be scared of the dark.

Importantly, you need to hold your child's hand while you do it, and I recommend finding support systems to do it safely.

These may include:

• therapist / psychologist
• trauma-informed somatic coach
• support groups
• meditation
• journaling
• books
• yoga
• movement
• nature
• JOY

I'm not joking about the last one.

You cannot heal your trauma until you expand your capacity for joy. Why? Because joy is fundamental to building a sense of safety in your body. Your body will not surface trauma for healing until it believes you can handle it. And you can't handle going to the darkest depths until you can meet the darkness with an equal amount of light.

So here's the step-by-step that worked for me:
joy >> safety >> trauma healing >> physical healing

Which in practice was:
backpacking Africa >> meditating & volunteering >> EMOTIONAL ROLLERCOASTER >> idonthaveanypain???

Work With Me

If this post resonates with you and you'd like to release some stored tension in your body, expand your capacity for joy, and build a system of support for handling stress through meditation, yoga, somatic movement, and trauma-informed practices, I offer 1:1 coaching and a group somatic meditation course. Learn more here and reach out to the email address listed on the page if you'd like to explore working together.