Getting My Body Back

The Body Remembers What the Mind Can’t Explain

I want to dig right in and discuss how emotions become trapped in the body, specifically when one is betrayed or emotionally abandoned, or we are dismissed so repeatedly that the reality the emotions map out for us cannot be validated. This all lands in the body in ways we can’t solve or outthink. There is a path forward through acknowledging the trapped memory that is in your limbs, cells, and central nervous system. This path can mean that there is healing in getting your body back, taking it back gently, and validating it is not all in your mind.

There are certain moments, especially when we’ve been betrayed, emotionally abandoned, or repeatedly dismissed, when something deeper than thought happens. It is not just the mind that suffers from the “what happened”. For example, with betrayal, the “what happened” may not be obvious, even if it is felt. There is overt betrayal that can be easily pointed out, cheating on a partner, for example, but the subtle acts of betrayal are often what sting and last. The micro-injuries are the emotional tears that lead to feeling less certainty and faith in our solid ground. Many of us cannot always access the storyline in our minds that describes our mind’s hasty interpretation and that parks itself quite deeper than we realize. The body stores these hasty interpretations, “no one cares”, “I don’t matter”, “I should have done something”, “I am not good enough”. These are destabilizing, so we brace ourselves and hold them down.

When your feelings are denied long enough, your nervous system learns to tense, resist, brace, collapse in protection, and guard. You can walk, talk, and look normal, and even make your reality feel unrecognizable. “I’m fine”. No one can see it, and you lose touch with it yourself. The result? Tension in the chest that never leaves, but you know as the new normal, and you carry on. Exhaustion that sleep can’t fix, but you explain away with other factors, as self-betrayal numbs your awareness. A held breath that comes with every rushed meal as you begin to fuel rather than feed and sip your energy rather than consume it.

Emotions that emerge sideways through pain, panic, or disconnection become outsourced to quick venting, short-lived self-help efforts, logarithm-influenced scrolling for supportive reels, shopping, or emotional eating. Emotional cutoff starts to occur when we outsource. When individuals disconnect from their feelings or from others to avoid emotional pain, they end up putting feelings in cold storage. Here, they may be out of sight, but they are still there, developing freezer burn and becoming effortful to defrost.

None of these are signs of being broken; however, they are signs of how deeply your body tried to protect you. You can’t logic your way through a heartbreak that lives in your fascia, the space between cells and their liquid membranes, or that lies in your breath, your shoulders, and your gut. But there is a path forward. Getting your body back means accepting it knows something, even if that knowing feels like a train wreck. That feeling is the ignorance we hold, preferring the cognitive explanation that is quick, efficient, and flattening of messy emotions.

Brokenness, if we felt it, would only last briefly before it becomes an invitation to stop arguing with the body and start listening to it. When we make room to feel what was never allowed, to name what had no words through movement, breath, sounds, or stillness, you allow your body to speak and recover a calm knowing, a way of being held in presence and being attended to. This isn’t about fixing. It’s about returning to yourself and the life that is waiting underneath all that bracing. You don’t have to live on mute. The memory that is stored in your limbs can be honored and slowly released. This body of yours is not in your way; it is the way. Your body is worthy of remembering, and it’s waiting for you to notice and release.

Getting My Body Back, a Personal Experience

I didn’t want to shake and cry. It’s summertime and I had a great day yesterday on a beach, in a bathing suit that loved me with style and made me choose my new self over the old, hiding, shrinking one. When I woke up the next day, my body knew it was a summer day, but the heat felt like a burden and not the gift it had been the day before. I never shirk the start of the day, I face it, but I did and slept in an hour. I was ashamed that I didn’t bounce to my yoga mat like a woman still healing, intent on body memories and violation being a past infection, and out of place in the new wakefulness.

I wasn’t her, and I felt stolen from. Walking didn’t help, weights and sweat only took me further from solid and not towards it. Suffering the yoga mat now, I let my body remember. It shook with sorrow, and the hope I had for summer love, that ended up riddled with red flags and expiration dates on every moment. It was the date; this day three years ago was still in my body. The reminder wasn’t so much on the calendar, I just felt it there in the season and the day registered, but I tried to stretch it out from the edges of my realization. Instead, I shook on the mat, all the resistance gone, the resistance I wanted to be there before the choice to be open, not after. I pulled inward on my side for protection, then rolled back on myself and tried to lie flat. I remembered there were poses, “hip openers,” they call them in yoga. I wasn’t the Life Force Yoga Certified Practitioner, or the Certified Clinical Trauma Professional Level 2. I wasn’t the Licensed Mental Health Counselor. I was the child and the woman, betrayed of emotional safety and trust and the openness it takes to receive, and I let it all tell me the story again. I heard myself say, “I don’t want to be stuck in this”. Surprisingly, something answered, “You don’t have to be, it’s just what happened, I don’t think we were done yet”.

I thought I had to be over it, healed, unaffected, and a perfect recipe for secure attachment. My body said, “No”, those are ideas. It wanted me to listen, and I figured out why. Only I know what happened, and if I don’t let my body tell me its story, I won’t trust it to ever open again, or rather, it won’t trust me! Suddenly, there was no betrayal, violation, abandonment, or neglect to watch for, save the ways I could end up doing this to myself. I sat up and invented a new somatic tool to share.

SOMATIC RELEASE PRACTICE:

Where it Lives Moves Through You Now

Set aside 10-15 minutes. Find a private, safe, quiet space. Have a journal nearby.

1. Land in the Body: Sit or lie down. Close your eyes or just soften your gaze if that is more comfortable for you.

   1. Take three slow breaths, focusing on breathing into “the full column of you”, from the hips up the ribcages, into the shoulders, up the back of the neck and into the top of your head.

   2. Let your inhale be long on this journey and take your time with the exhale.

   3. Feel the ground underneath you and say to yourself: “Right now, I am safe enough to notice myself.”