Step 4 of 6 · Heal From Discrimination & Prejudice
The Body Remembers
The Body Remembers
Step 4 · 11 min
🎬 Video lesson coming soon
The body keeps score.
This is not metaphor. Bessel van der Kolk's research shows that traumatic experience — particularly chronic relational trauma — is stored in the body's nervous system in ways that continue to shape behaviour, sensation, and relationship long after the traumatic situation has ended.
This lesson is about the body's role in trauma and recovery — and what it means to begin to feel safe again.
Trauma in the body: how the nervous system stores what the mind cannot fully process
Trauma responses: hypervigilance, freeze, fawn, and why they made sense
Somatic recovery: beginning to feel safe in the body again
The role of professional support in trauma recovery
The trauma-survival responses: when the nervous system encounters threat, it activates one of four responses:
Fight (active resistance to threat), flight (escaping the threat), freeze (immobilisation — playing dead, dissociating), and fawn (appeasing the threat — agreeing, complying, making the threatening person comfortable to reduce danger).
In chronic relational abuse, fight is often impossible (too dangerous or futile) and flight may be too dangerous. The nervous system defaults to freeze and fawn — which is adaptive in the situation, but which becomes the default response pattern even in safe situations after the abuse has ended. Understanding this — that your automatic responses of compliance, self-silencing, or emotional numbing were survival responses, not character flaws — is both accurate and important.
Hypervigilance: the state of chronic threat-readiness that develops in response to unpredictable danger. The nervous system that could not predict when the next episode of abuse would occur remains on high alert — scanning for danger signs, startling easily, interpreting ambiguous cues as threatening. This is not paranoia or weakness. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to keep you safe.
Somatic recovery — beginning to feel safe in the body — is a gradual process that often requires professional support: specifically trauma-focused therapy (EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Trauma-focused CBT). It involves, gently and at the right pace: expanding the window of tolerance (the zone of activation in which the nervous system can function and process), building bodily safety through safe, nourishing physical experience, and gradually allowing the stored trauma to discharge from the nervous system.
Professional support: recovery from complex trauma is best supported by a trauma-trained therapist. In India: iCall, NIMHANS, and the growing network of trauma-trained clinical psychologists provide this. The waiting is worth it.
Find a comfortable position · Read slowly
Find a comfortable position. Let your eyes soften or close.
Take a slow breath in — and a longer breath out.
Now, with genuine curiosity rather than judgment, begin to notice your body.
Start at your shoulders. Are they raised toward your ears? Are they braced? Just notice. On your next exhale, let them drop a little — not forcing, just inviting.
Move to your jaw. Is it clenched? Many people who have lived through sustained threat carry tension here without knowing it. Let the jaw loosen slightly. Let the teeth part just a fraction.
Now your chest. Place one hand there gently. Breathe into the palm of your hand. Notice what the chest feels like — tight, heavy, guarded? Whatever is there, you don't need to fix it right now. You're just acknowledging it.
Your belly. Your hands. Your back.
And now — silently, to the part of your body that has been holding all of this — say: "Thank you. You kept me safe the only way you knew how. You don't have to stay on guard in the same way anymore."
You don't have to feel the truth of that yet. Saying it is enough.
Breathe slowly for three more breaths. Then gently open your eyes.
Your nervous system was not failing you. It was doing exactly what it learned to do in a situation of real and unpredictable danger.
Recovery is not about overriding your body. It is about teaching it, gradually, that the threat has passed — and that it is safe now, to rest.
The next lesson is about trust — including the hardest kind: trusting yourself again.