You've probably heard people say "the body keeps the score." It's become something of a cultural catchphrase, thanks to Bessel van der Kolk's ground-breaking book. But what does it actually mean in your daily life? What does it look like when your body is still carrying trauma that your mind may have moved on from?
In my work as an integrative psychotherapist in Kyneton, I see this every day. People come to me having done years of talk therapy, having read the books, having intellectually "understood" what happened to them. And yet something still doesn't feel right. They're still anxious. Still exhausted. Still bracing against a world that, on paper, is perfectly safe.
That's because trauma doesn't just live in your thoughts and memories. It lives in your body. It lives in the way your shoulders creep toward your ears. In the way you hold your breath when someone walks into the room. In the low hum of dread that follows you through an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.
Here are five signs I commonly see in my practice that suggest your body is still carrying unresolved trauma. If any of these resonate with you, I want you to know: there's nothing wrong with you. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It just hasn't received the message yet that the danger has passed.
1. You're Always on Alert (Hypervigilance)
Do you find yourself scanning rooms when you enter them? Sitting with your back to the wall? Flinching at unexpected sounds? Do you notice that you're constantly monitoring the people around you, reading their moods, anticipating what might go wrong?
This is hypervigilance, and it's one of the most common body trauma symptoms I encounter. Your nervous system got stuck in a state of heightened alertness after a threatening experience, and it never fully came back down. It's like a smoke alarm that goes off every time you make toast. The alarm itself is working perfectly. The problem is the calibration.
People who live with hypervigilance often don't even realise they're doing it. It feels normal because it's been your normal for so long. But it takes an enormous amount of energy. By the end of each day, you're utterly drained, and you might not understand why. You haven't done anything particularly strenuous. But your nervous system has been running a full security operation since the moment you woke up.
2. Chronic Tension and Unexplained Pain
Your jaw is clenched. Your shoulders are concrete. Your lower back aches for no clear medical reason. You grind your teeth at night. Your stomach churns. You get headaches that seem to come from nowhere.
When trauma doesn't get processed, the survival energy that was mobilised during the threatening experience has to go somewhere. Often, it gets stored as chronic muscular tension. Your body literally braces for impact, and it doesn't stop bracing. Years later, you're still holding on, still guarding, still armoured against something that happened a long time ago.
I see this frequently in my somatic trauma healing work. Someone comes in with chronic neck and shoulder pain, and as we gently bring awareness to that area, memories or emotions begin to surface. The tension isn't random. It's meaningful. It's your body's way of holding what was too much to process at the time.
This is why massage, physiotherapy, and even pain medication sometimes only provide temporary relief. They're addressing the symptom without reaching the cause. When the underlying trauma is addressed at the nervous system level, the chronic tension often begins to release on its own.
3. An Exaggerated Startle Response
You jump at the sound of a door closing. A car backfiring sends your heart racing. Someone touches your shoulder unexpectedly and you flinch away, hard. Then you feel embarrassed, because your reaction was clearly disproportionate to what actually happened.
An exaggerated startle response is your nervous system's way of telling you it's still primed for danger. When we experience trauma, the brain's threat-detection centre (the amygdala) gets turned up to maximum sensitivity. It starts treating minor stimuli as though they're genuine threats. The gap between "unexpected sound" and "full-body alarm response" becomes almost nonexistent.
This can be isolating. You might avoid social situations because you're afraid of how you'll react. You might feel like you're "too sensitive" or "overreacting." But you're not overreacting. Your nervous system is reacting appropriately to what it believes is happening, based on what it learned during the original trauma. It just needs help updating its information.
Does This Sound Familiar?
If you're recognising yourself in these signs, you don't have to keep living this way. Somatic trauma therapy works directly with your nervous system to help it release what it's been holding. I offer a free 15-minute discovery call to explore whether this approach might be right for you.
Learn About Trauma Therapy in Kyneton4. Dissociation and Feeling Disconnected from Your Body
Sometimes the sign isn't that your body is doing too much. It's that you can't feel it at all.
Dissociation exists on a spectrum. At the mild end, it might show up as "zoning out" during conversations, feeling like you're watching your life from behind a glass wall, or losing track of time. At the more intense end, you might feel physically numb, struggle to identify what you're feeling emotionally, or have the sense that your body doesn't quite belong to you.
This is your nervous system's most powerful protective mechanism. When fight or flight aren't options, the system shuts down. It goes into a freeze state, numbing you out so you don't have to feel what's happening. It's an extraordinary survival strategy. But when it persists long after the threat has ended, it robs you of your ability to be present in your own life.
Understanding Your Window of Tolerance
In trauma therapy, we talk about the "window of tolerance" — the zone where you can experience emotions and sensations without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down. Trauma narrows this window. Somatic therapy gently widens it again, helping you stay present with more of your experience without tipping into hyperarousal (panic, rage, anxiety) or hypoarousal (numbness, shutdown, disconnection). The goal isn't to never feel distressed. It's to build a nervous system that can move through distress and come back to centre.
People living with dissociation often describe feeling like they're "going through the motions." Relationships feel flat. Pleasurable experiences don't land the way they should. You might feel disconnected from your own desires, your own needs, your own sense of who you are. This isn't a character flaw or a lack of effort. It's trauma, living in your nervous system, keeping you at a distance from the fullness of your own life.
5. Sleep Disruption That Won't Resolve
You lie awake with a racing mind. You fall asleep easily but wake at 3am in a state of alert. You have vivid, disturbing dreams. Or you sleep for ten hours and still feel like you've been awake all night.
Sleep is when your nervous system is supposed to rest and restore. But a traumatised nervous system struggles to let its guard down enough to enter deep, restorative sleep. It's still scanning for threats, even in the dark, even in the safety of your own bed. The result is sleep that's fragmented, shallow, or haunted by nightmares that replay or symbolically represent the unprocessed experience.
Chronic sleep disruption has cascading effects. It impairs your emotional regulation, making you more reactive and less resilient. It affects your physical health, your immune system, your capacity to think clearly. It feeds into anxiety and depression. And it creates a vicious cycle: the less you sleep, the more dysregulated your nervous system becomes, and the harder it is to sleep.
I've seen many clients who've tried every sleep hygiene tip in the book. They've restricted their caffeine, darkened their bedroom, put away their phone. And while those things are helpful, they don't address the root cause: a nervous system that doesn't feel safe enough to truly rest. When we work with that underlying activation through somatic approaches, sleep often improves naturally, sometimes in ways that surprise people who've struggled with it for years.
Why Talk Therapy Alone Often Isn't Enough
If you've experienced any of these signs, you may have already tried talking about your trauma. Perhaps in therapy, perhaps with trusted friends, perhaps through journalling. And that work has value. Understanding your story and making meaning from your experiences is an important part of healing.
But here's what I've learned in my clinical work: understanding isn't the same as resolution. You can have a perfectly clear narrative about what happened to you and still carry the physical imprint of that experience in every cell of your body. That's because trauma is stored in the nervous system, not just in the thinking brain. And the nervous system doesn't speak the language of words. It speaks the language of sensation, movement, breath, and regulation.
This is why somatic approaches to trauma therapy can be so transformative. Rather than just talking about what happened, we work with your body's direct experience. We notice where you're bracing, where you're numb, where the energy is stuck. We gently help your nervous system complete the survival responses that were interrupted during the original event. And as those responses complete, something remarkable happens: the alarm system begins to reset. The chronic tension starts to soften. The hypervigilance comes down a notch. Sleep improves. You start to feel like yourself again, maybe for the first time in a long while.
What Somatic Trauma Healing Looks Like
If you're imagining something dramatic or confronting, let me reassure you. Somatic trauma therapy in my practice is gentle, paced, and always led by you. We don't force anything. We don't push into overwhelming territory. Instead, we work at the edge of what your nervous system can handle, slowly expanding your capacity to feel, to be present, and to let go of what you've been holding.
A session might involve noticing what's happening in your body as we talk. It might involve gentle attention to your breath, your posture, or a particular area of tension. Sometimes there's movement. Sometimes there's stillness. Always there's presence, attunement, and the felt sense of safety that your nervous system needs in order to begin releasing what it's been carrying.
I work from my practice in Kyneton and also see clients in Melbourne and online in Australia or internationally. Wherever you are, the work is the same: meeting your nervous system where it is, with compassion and skill, and helping it learn that it's safe to come home.
You Don't Have to Keep Carrying This
If you've read this far and something in you is nodding, I want you to hear this: healing is possible. Not just understanding. Not just coping. Genuine, felt, embodied healing. The kind where your body actually lets go, where your nervous system learns a new way of being in the world.
You've been carrying this for long enough. You don't have to figure it out alone.
If you'd like to explore whether somatic trauma therapy might be right for you, I offer a free 15-minute discovery call. No pressure, no commitment. Just a conversation with someone who understands what your body has been trying to tell you.