You've probably come across the phrase "the body keeps the score" — Bessel van der Kolk's book put it into common speech. But what does that actually mean once you're living an ordinary life? What does it look like when your mind has more or less moved on, and your body hasn't got the memo?
A lot of the people I sit with in Kyneton have done the talking already. Years of it, in some cases. They've read the books, they can tell you what happened to them and why it landed the way it did — and something still isn't right. They're still anxious. Still tired in a way sleep doesn't fix. Still braced against a world that, on paper, is perfectly safe.
Trauma doesn't only live in your thoughts and your memories. It lives in your body. In the way your shoulders climb toward your ears. In the breath you hold when someone walks into the room. In the low hum of dread that trails you through a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.
What follows is five of the ways this tends to show up. If you find yourself in any of them, the first thing to say is: there's nothing wrong with you. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was built to do. It just hasn't had word yet that the danger has passed.
1. You're always on alert
Do you scan a room as you walk into it? Take the seat with your back to the wall? Flinch at a sound you didn't expect? Are you forever reading the people around you — their moods, their tone, what might be about to go wrong?
This is hypervigilance, and it's one of the most common body trauma symptoms I come across. After something threatening, the nervous system gets stuck up in a state of high alert and never quite settles back down. Like a smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast — the alarm is working perfectly, it's the calibration that's off.
The strange thing about hypervigilance is that you often can't see you're doing it. It feels like just how you are, because it's been how you are for so long. But it costs a fortune in energy. You get to the end of the day wrung out and can't quite say why — you haven't done anything strenuous. Underneath, though, you've been running a full security operation since the moment you opened your eyes.
2. Tension and pain with no clear cause
Your jaw is clenched. Your shoulders have set like concrete. Your lower back aches and no one can find a reason for it. You grind your teeth in your sleep, your stomach churns, headaches arrive out of nowhere.
When trauma doesn't get to finish — when the survival energy that surged up during the threat had nowhere to go — it has to live somewhere. Often it gets held as chronic muscular tension. The body braces for impact, and then it just doesn't stop bracing. Years on, you're still holding, still guarding, still armoured against something that's long over.
This comes up often in somatic work. Someone arrives with neck and shoulder pain they've had for years, and as we bring some gentle attention to that part of the body, feeling or memory starts to surface. The tension was never random. It means something. It's the body holding what was too much to feel at the time.
This is partly why massage, physio, even pain medication can help for a while and then the pain comes back. They're meeting the symptom without reaching what's underneath it. Work with the trauma at the level of the nervous system, and the tension often starts to let go on its own.
3. You startle far too easily
A door closes and you jump. A car backfires and your heart's off. Someone puts a hand on your shoulder you didn't see coming and you flinch away hard — and then you're embarrassed, because the size of your reaction so plainly doesn't match what just happened.
An outsized startle is the nervous system telling you it's still braced for danger. After trauma, the brain's threat-detector — the amygdala — gets turned right up, and starts reading small, ordinary things as genuine threats. The distance between "unexpected sound" and "whole body on alarm" all but disappears.
It can leave you isolated. You start avoiding things because you don't know how you'll react. You decide you're "too sensitive", that you're "overreacting". But you're not overreacting. Your nervous system is reacting exactly as it should to what it believes is happening — going on what it learned the first time round. It just needs help bringing its information up to date.
Recognising yourself in any of this?
If you are, you don't have to keep living braced like this. Somatic trauma therapy works directly with the nervous system to help it let go of what it's been holding. I offer a free 15-minute call so we can feel out together whether this way of working might suit you.
Read about trauma therapy in Kyneton4. You feel cut off from your own body
Sometimes the sign isn't that the body's doing too much. It's that you can't feel it at all.
Dissociation runs along a spectrum. At the gentle end it's "zoning out" mid-conversation, watching your own life from behind a pane of glass, losing a chunk of time. Further along it can be a physical numbness, not being able to name what you're feeling, the eerie sense that this body isn't quite yours.
This is the nervous system's most powerful protection of all. When fight and flight aren't on the table, the system shuts the whole thing down — drops into freeze, numbs you out so you don't have to feel what's happening. As survival goes, it's extraordinary. But when it keeps running long after the threat is gone, it quietly takes your own life away from you while you're still living it.
Your window of tolerance
In trauma work we talk about the "window of tolerance" — the band in which you can feel your feelings and sensations without getting swamped or going numb. Trauma narrows that window. Somatic therapy widens it again, bit by bit, so you can stay with more of what you're experiencing without tipping up into hyperarousal (panic, rage, anxiety) or down into hypoarousal (numbness, shutdown, disconnection). The aim isn't to never be distressed. It's a nervous system that can move through distress and find its way back to centre.
People living with dissociation often say they're "going through the motions". Relationships feel flat. The good things don't land the way they should. You can lose touch with your own wants, your own needs, your own sense of who you are. None of this is a flaw in your character or a sign you're not trying. It's trauma, living in the nervous system, holding you at arm's length from your own life.
5. Sleep that won't come right
You lie there with a mind that won't stop. Or you drop off fine and snap awake at 3am, wide alert. The dreams are vivid and disturbing. Or you sleep ten hours and wake feeling like you were up all night.
Sleep is meant to be where the nervous system rests and puts itself back together. But a traumatised nervous system can't drop its guard far enough to get down into deep, restorative sleep. It's still on watch — in the dark, in your own bed, where nothing is wrong. So sleep comes fragmented, shallow, or broken up by nightmares that replay the old experience or stand in for it.
And it spreads. Run short on sleep and you've got a shorter fuse and less to draw on; it wears on your body, your immune system, your ability to think straight; it pours into anxiety and depression. Then it loops: the less you sleep, the more wound-up the nervous system gets, and the harder sleep becomes.
Plenty of people arrive having tried every sleep-hygiene trick going. Cut the caffeine, blacked out the bedroom, banished the phone. Those things help, but they don't touch the root of it: a nervous system that doesn't feel safe enough to properly let go. Work with that activation underneath, somatically, and sleep often comes right on its own — sometimes to the genuine surprise of people who've fought it for years.
Why talking about it often isn't enough
If any of this is familiar, the odds are you've already talked about your trauma. In therapy, with people you trust, in a journal. That work matters — understanding your story and making some meaning of it is part of getting well.
But understanding isn't the same as it being resolved. You can have a clear, well-worn account of what happened to you and still be carrying the imprint of it in your body. Trauma is held in the nervous system, not only in the thinking brain — and the nervous system doesn't deal in words. It deals in sensation, movement, breath, the rhythm of settling and rousing. That's the level the healing has to reach too.
This is why working somatically can get somewhere talk on its own can't. Rather than only talking about what happened, we work with what the body's actually doing — where you're bracing, where you've gone numb, where the charge has got stuck. Slowly, and at your pace, the nervous system gets to finish the survival responses that were cut off at the time. As they finish, the alarm starts to reset. The tension eases. The hypervigilance drops a notch. Sleep comes back. People tend to put it simply: they start to feel like themselves again.
What this work actually looks like
If you're picturing something dramatic or confronting, you can set that down. The somatic work I do is gentle, paced, and led by you. Nothing gets forced. We don't go barging into overwhelming territory. We work right at the edge of what your nervous system can take, and let that edge widen — your capacity to feel, to stay present, to put down what you've been carrying — a little at a time.
A session might be noticing what's stirring in your body while we talk. It might be some quiet attention to your breath, your posture, a particular knot of tension. Sometimes there's movement. Sometimes there's stillness. There's always presence and attunement, and enough felt safety for the nervous system to start loosening its grip on what it's been holding.
I work from my room in Kyneton, and also see people in Bendigo and online across Australia or further afield. Wherever you are, the work is the same — meeting your nervous system where it is and going at its pace. And one thread I try not to lose hold of: the point isn't for you to need me. We're working toward the day you can walk out and carry yourself.
You don't have to keep carrying this
If you've read this far and something in you keeps nodding along, that recognition is worth trusting. In my experience, the body can learn a different way to be in the world — not just coping better, but actually letting go of what it's held.
You've carried this long enough. You don't have to work it out on your own.
If you'd like to feel out whether this kind of work might suit you, I offer a free 15-minute call. No pressure, nothing to commit to. Just a conversation with someone who has some sense of what your body's been trying to say.