You’ve probably made peace, at least on the surface, with your past. You don’t dwell on it. You function well. But your body hasn’t necessarily received the same memo. You carry tension you can’t account for. You’re exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t touch. Your stomach is unpredictable. You startle easily. A particular tone of voice or a specific smell can send you somewhere you can’t quite name, and it takes longer than it should to come back.
This isn’t psychosomatic in the dismissive sense. It’s physiological. Childhood trauma, particularly the chronic relational kind, shapes the developing nervous system in ways that don’t simply resolve when the circumstances change.
Why the Body Holds Trauma
When a child experiences repeated stress or threat without adequate protection or soothing, the nervous system learns to stay alert. That alertness becomes the baseline. The body is primed for danger even when the environment no longer warrants it, because the system was built for the original conditions, not the current ones.
This shows up in adult life in ways that can seem confusing or disproportionate:
- Chronic muscle tension, particularly in the shoulders, neck, jaw, and chest, that doesn’t respond fully to physical treatment
- Fatigue that persists regardless of how much sleep you get, because the nervous system never fully switches off
- Digestive problems, including IBS, nausea, or appetite disruption, that have no clear physical cause
- Hypervigilance, a low-level sense of alertness or unease that other people don’t seem to share
- Startling easily, or having strong physical reactions to things that others barely notice
- Sleep difficulties, including trouble falling asleep, waking in the night, or nightmares
- Physical responses to emotional triggers that arrive before your conscious mind has caught up
None of these are signs of weakness or imagination. They are signs that the body is still doing the job it learned to do, and that it hasn’t yet received reliable enough evidence that things are different now.
What Therapy Can Offer
Therapy for developmental trauma doesn’t ask you to talk your way through a list of memories. It works with what’s present, including what shows up in the body, the moment-to-moment experience of being in the room, the subtle ways anxiety or shutdown arrive in a session, the patterns that become visible over time in the therapeutic relationship.
Paying attention to the body in therapy isn’t a technique bolted onto the work. It’s a recognition that trauma is stored there, and that a nervous system learns safety not primarily through understanding but through repeated experience of a different kind of relationship.
If you recognise yourself in any of this, it might be worth exploring what that recognition is pointing to. I’d be glad to have an initial conversation. Get in touch at samanthamerry.co.uk/contacts.
Further reading
- The Body Remembers — Babette Rothschild
- Hunger — Roxane Gay (memoir on the body and trauma)
- Burnout — Emily and Amelia Nagoski
- Speaking of Psychology — APA podcast
Samantha Merry is a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist and Clinical Supervisor in private practice in Bromley, South East London. She works with adults in longer-term psychodynamic therapy, with a particular interest in trauma, dissociation, and complex family dynamics. She is currently undertaking a Professional Doctorate in Psychotherapy and Psychological Trauma at the University of Chester. samanthamerry.co.uk