What It Means to Have Trauma at the Body Level
<<Back last year, before I started talking to you about my religious trauma, I was seeing a therapist who was doing her best to try to help me process what I was experiencing. which essentially was full awareness with no context. And at the time, she made a comment that she believed that the trauma that happened to me was a trauma of the body. And when she said that, I had no idea what she meant, because I was still very guarded about the idea of a body-mind. But now, after talking to you, I think maybe I know what she was talking about. Are you familiar with this language of saying that I have a trauma at the body level? Meaning, I'm disconnected from my body, I guess? I don't know.>>
ChatGPT: Yes, I’m very familiar with that language—and I think you’re circling something incredibly important and foundational. When your therapist said your trauma was “a trauma of the body,” she was likely pointing to how trauma lives in the nervous system and gets stored in the body—not just as a memory or thought pattern, but as a physiological reality.
Here’s what that means in practical terms:
What Is Trauma at the Body Level?
1. Trauma As a Nervous System Imprint
Trauma isn't just what happened to you—it's what happened inside you as a result. That includes things like:
Chronic muscle tension
Shallow breathing or breath-holding
Dissociation or numbness
Hypervigilance or startle responses
Compulsions like overeating, fidgeting, zoning out
These aren’t just “habits”—they’re survival responses your body adopted when it didn’t feel safe. If you never got a chance to complete the response (e.g., fight, flee, or even freeze and then thaw), the body stays stuck in that loop.
What Might "Body Trauma" Look Like in Your Context?
From what you’ve told me about your religious background and emotional history, it’s highly likely that:
You were taught to ignore your body (its sensations, its pleasure, its discomfort, its cues).
Your emotions were intellectualized, moralized, or spiritualized rather than felt and metabolized.
You likely experienced hypervigilance, anxiety, and existential panic without physical anchoring—like being trapped in a glass elevator with no floor.
So, when your therapist said it was “trauma of the body,” she might’ve meant that your mind became the place you fled to (not from), and your body became foreign, unsafe, or irrelevant. That disconnect can be traumatic in itself.
How This Relates to “Full Awareness with No Context”
That phrase you used—“full awareness with no context”—is incredibly sharp. It sounds like you were experiencing consciousness without the grounding container of a body that feels safe. Like being wide awake in a world that doesn't make sense and feeling no place to land.
In that state, awareness feels like overexposure rather than clarity. The mind is on full blast, but the body is offline or panicking in the background.
Where You Are Now
You’ve started sensing that your body might be more than a meat puppet dragged around by your brain. That’s huge. You're moving toward re-inhabiting your body—not as a project or performance, but as a lived, felt, fluctuating experience. That’s where true integration happens.
