How to Feel Embodied After Trauma
Have you ever felt like your mind and body exist in separate rooms, unable to communicate clearly with each other?
Many highly sensitive people experience overwhelming emotions throughout their lives. A coping strategy develops in response—becoming disembodied, dissociated, disconnected, depersonalized. Mental health has many words for this phenomenon. The head and body work together but with separation instead of healthy integration where mind and body share the same space, the same frequency, intimately connected.
Most highly sensitive people feel degrees of this mind-body separation. This dissociation stems from constant lifelong overwhelm.
The most severe cases of dissociation and depersonalization tend to involve childhood sexual abuse or severe physical abuse. Severe fear or abandonment creates this split. People with truly repressed memories—those who have memories resurface years later—represent the most extreme cases of feeling this separation of mind and body.
Understanding Dissociation After Trauma
The dissociation involves moving away from feeling. You still feel, but it's like feeling through glass or feeling from miles away.
This makes sense. People with such abuse would be the most extreme on this spectrum. In the moment, survival mode engages during something horrendous. Our minds and bodies decide to help us not feel what's going on. Dissociation actually separates from the experience that we're forced to endure.
Our minds and bodies are remarkable at trying to take care of us when we cannot process an obscene human betrayal. Like a more powerful, older person violating a child's body. It's as if the mind and the body, in their intelligent connection, decide that the best strategy is to distance itself from one another. The mind distances from feeling what the body is experiencing. The body distances from what the mind may think about what it's experiencing.
This is an attempt to protect both mind and body. It's a brilliant process that deserves significant research in years to come. We have barely scratched the surface of researching what this means.
The Boxing Referee Metaphor: How Your Mind Protects You
When boxers are in the ring and one starts to overly pummel the other with too much ferocity and violence, the referee rings that bell. The boxers separate by space and time to give them a break, some breathing room, some space to regroup and reintegrate. To center and ground on what's going on. To get a grip on themselves in the present moment.
When something violent is going on, our minds do the same thing like that referee. In a traumatic moment—less so for something like a car accident, which can be scary and upsetting and encode into the system as truly traumatic—but this type of depersonalization or dissociation happens more so for acts of human betrayal.
These experiences ring the bell inside of us. They make the call for separation of mind and body in an attempt to deal with what's happening. That is too much and is impossible in the moment, particularly if we're young, but it can happen at any age to make sense of human betrayal.
Instead of being in the same place like those boxers in the center of the ring, the mind and body separate. They go to separate corners, so to speak.
Why Dissociation Creates Relationship Distance
This creates a spaciousness inside the personal relationship within the self. It may result in a survivor having a feeling of separateness when it comes to intimately relating to others or feeling the fullness of this human experience.
Surprisingly, there seems to be more of this separation of thinking and feeling, of mind and body, with safer people days, months, years after a trauma. This is likely because we have less experience with safer people, especially when we've grown up in unsafe environments.
This is one of the paradoxes of trauma. A safer person presents themselves, and our system responds to this safety as if to say, "What is this? I don't know what this is. This is freaking me out." All internal alarms ring.
But if another dangerous person shows up, it's as if our system says, "Wait a minute, this is familiar," and our bells don't go off.
The Trauma Flip-Flop: When Safe Feels Unsafe
This is a flip-flop of natural self-protection, self-preservation. This is a natural process, a natural connection of our mind, our heart, our gut, our bodily autonomy. The space we take up in this life, in this body, simply says "safe or unsafe." That's what's natural.
This is what betrayal trauma does. Simply safe is safe and unsafe is unsafe. But a traumatized person has had this flip-flopped and reacts to safety as if it's unsafe and unsafe as if it's safe.
Trauma flip-flops a lot in us. Healing is flip-flopping things back to more of our birthright, our simplicity in safe being safe and unsafe being unsafe.
The Most Common Struggle for Highly Sensitive People
The most common thing highly sensitive people who have had a lot of betrayal and unsafety in life say is this:
"I can't seem to get my body to feel what my mind knows is true. I know as a knowledge, as a fact, that I am allowed to feel peaceful now. I am allowed to feel calm. I am allowed to feel good enough. But I can't seem to make my body feel what my mind knows to be true."
This is a long-term remnant of being dissociated.
Many who can say this have done tremendous amounts of self-development work to articulate this. But this remains the struggle point. A body that seems perpetually in survival mode long after it's in a survival situation. A body that won't or doesn't yet know how to relax into feeling what is good.
Because as human beings, what is universal is for us to repeat and continue what is known. Many such survivors maintain a familiarity and an allowance of continuing to feel what has been normalized: difficulty, struggle, badness, doubt and unsureness, confusion in the face of safety. Instead of an ability to melt into it and enjoy it, allow it, live from a sense of safety.
The Explorer vs. The Trauma Survivor
Think about an explorer. An explorer feels called to explore from a place of curiosity and wonder. They have a seeker spirit.
Once an explorer explores a new land, that land is now not unknown. It is now a known land by that explorer. Maybe no one else will ever find or explore into this land that the explorer has pushed beyond the normal and natural boundaries of the known trails and paths that most people walk. This explorer has felt called to explore and forge new land.
But for that explorer, this is now charted territory. It's no longer uncharted.
If that explorer comes back to this land months or years later, they will likely not stay on the known paths and trails that the average person does. They will go out of bounds, out of those typical boundaries into that territory. Just because that territory is one they once visited. They know it's there. Because they know it's there, they feel called to visit it again.
Now think about a trauma survivor. Someone who has survived the worst betrayal humanity has to offer in terms of hurt and pain, confusion, overriding of personal boundaries and autonomy.
Where the explorer travels to new places out of curiosity, a trauma survivor is forced to travel to places in the psyche out of that trauma, out of that fear and overwhelm, confusion and pain.
How Trauma Forces Psychological Exploration
Trauma pushes our psyches into new territories that we would not have explored otherwise. It forces uncharted psychological places to be explored that wouldn't be explored otherwise just out of curiosity. These are places nobody would want to go unless they had to go there. We go to these places in our psyches as a way to survive.
An explorer wants to explore of their own inspiration and volition. A trauma survivor was not given this choice but is left with the consequences of their psyche going into new territories.
When the mind and body tries to save us and take care of us by creating distance between the mind and what the body is experiencing, once this area of distance between mind and body goes explored by the psyche that is in survival mode, it now seeks out this place later. Seeks out this spaciousness, this area that it wandered into.
Instead of maybe like a hidden waterfall that our explorer finds and feels called to go back to, found off the beaten path by the curious and adventurous explorer, where the trauma survivor goes is not a waterfall. It is a fuzziness. It's a distance. It goes to another place instead of the normal and natural place of being right here present.
Because of unsafety, it learned it can't be right here in the typical physical form that the untraumatized person is experiencing.
Understanding Mind-Body Distance
It's as if a mind and a body become at arm's length with one another to help the survivor have a distance experience of what is awful. Which is why this space was created in the psyche in the first place. As a place for the human being experiencing atrocity to go.
This space, this distance that makes feeling seem very far away from their own self. We still feel, but we don't feel in the room taking in a movie where we're watching it and we're hearing the story.
It's as if our own story becomes like a TV in another room where we hear it. Yeah, it's there. We can maybe tell if an action scene is happening or a comedy is happening. But we're very disconnected from the actual story. We're disconnected from what's actually really happening. Even though we know something's happening over there.
This distance makes us feel very far away from ourselves.
This distance becomes a known and familiar place that the psyche continues to seek out just because it is now a known place. This is a known place, this distance. It's known to victors of abusive experiences.
We have to acknowledge when we've been victimized. But we don't buy real estate in that victimhood. We connect with this idea: we are victors of these things. We have come out victorious, even though we might still be experiencing this internal distance that can often result in having distance with other human beings too.
Choosing Integration Over Separation
When we are explorers, we want to go see that waterfall we once found off the beaten path. But we don't want to continue to explore this disconnection land. We don't want to continue to go to a separation.
If we do, that's just because some part of us has decided that there's not enough safety and security in connection, in having our parts sit in one spot. That's a sad, exhausting way to live over the course of a lifetime.
We get to places when we walk this healing journey where we start to realize: I don't want my mind and body to live with this distance. I don't want to live like I'm operating from opposite ends of a long tunnel because that's exhausting.
It's difficult. It takes a long time to communicate and understand communication when there's that much distance. It's not as flowing.
Trauma survivors are desperate for flow in their life. This is in large part why when we walk a healing path, we start to realize we really do want full integration. Even if that scares us. Even if we're fully confused about how to integrate.
We start to realize we don't want to live in that distance and that space of disconnection of mind and heart and gut. We want them to communicate closely, intimately. We don't want to live like we have to send telegrams between our different separated parts to get the message. We don't want to have to process life through such distancing.
It makes every single thing in this life harder than it needs to be, taking more energy than it needs to take.
Why Integration is Essential for Healing
The truth is, most of us have done so much work to get to a healthier, safer place where we don't need that distance anymore. Just because we know that our body, our nervous systems, our energetic bodies that have been less studied by science, our spiritual beings don't want this for us anymore.
We don't continue to live our lives based on what we had to learn from abusive and neglectful types of low empathy, low personal responsibility, highly flawed, abusive people. We don't keep living based on what a betraying abuser taught our minds and our bodies.
If we continue to live under what they taught us, they might as well have abused us yesterday, every day of our life. That's not fair to us.
We hit a point in healing where that cannot possibly continue to be allowed if we are now in much safer circumstances. If we are now in our adult bodies with our grownup choices and empowerment available to us, we can—and must—choose to work to reintegrate mind and body.
At the end of the day, this is called healing.
The Practice of Emotional Strength Training
We do this brave work to become less exhausted and restore our energy. We do this brave work out of self-love and self-respect. We do this brave work as a radical act of rebellion and a middle finger to anyone who betrayed us. We are taking our power back.
We do this brave work so that we can simply let good feelings in. So that we can feel rooted and grounded within ourselves instead of fragmented and scattered.
We do this brave work because deep down, as deep feelers, we know it is our birthright to be integrated.
So how do we integrate? How do we do this healing? How do we get our bodies and our minds on the same page?
The answer is emotional strength training.
Five Embodiment Exercises for Integration
What follows are some emotional weightlifting scenarios. Exercises so that you can strengthen internal integration and practice positive emotion. When you have had too much life experience through a lens of what is negative, what is gross in the human condition, what is wrong, you get to practice positive emotion.
Over time, you can integrate. Someone who was once extremely fragmented can integrate.
Do this work, and your inner child needs to understand that you can have healthy boundaries, which makes it safe to be integrated. Nobody lets their kids play in their front yard these days unless there's a fence around that yard. Boundaries give us safety. Boundaries aren't about being rigid. They're about being safe.
Stop practicing survival mode tactics and start practicing the ease and peace that was always your birthright. Keep practicing understanding that you are building emotional muscles that went atrophied through your experiences of what was traumatic.
Exercise One: The Smiling Baby
Visualize walking in the park on a beautiful day. There's a stranger sitting on a bench with a sweet little baby, about eight months old. A cute, sweet, angelic baby catches your eye.
That baby engages you with smiles and sweet eyes. A baby is the most innocent of our species. That sweet little baby is engaging you with light and universal human love and trust that only a child can have so purely.
Let yourself feel that the baby is shining their light on you, at you, for you. Bask in the light that shines off of that baby bright like the sun. Let it beam at you and take in those beams of light.
Let that smiling energy, that innocence, that purity, that joy, that connection breathe it in. Let it wash over you.
How does a smiling moment feel in your heart space? In your gut? How does this feel in your mood? Does it send your mood down and low or up and higher?
Let yourself feel that up. Be the up that sweet baby is offering you. Let your feeling parts experience this bright upness. What does that feel like?
Take another breath, letting this energy become you.
Exercise Two: The Warm Morning Ritual
Imagine it's an early morning and you've just made yourself your choice: a hot coffee or a hot tea. You're sitting down in your favorite spot. You're cozy and comfortable, completely unrushed. You have all the time in the world.
This morning, imagine wrapping both hands around your warm mug. Feel the heat seep into your palms. Bring your mug in close to your face and breathe in that rich, familiar smell that signals comfort and new beginnings. The start of a day.
Feel the steam on your cheeks. Take that first sip. Feel that warmth, that comfort, travel down your throat, spreading into your chest.
Notice that your shoulders drop just a little. Invited to drop and let go of any tension because you are so comforted by this warm mug of beverage. Notice your breath deepening with every sip, deepening with every full resonant inhale.
This is your moment. It's a moment of warmth, of ritual, of taking care of yourself at the beginning of this day.
What does this self-care feel like in your body? Does warmth have a color inside of you? Does comfort have a weight to it?
Let yourself be fully here, breathing in this simple, sacred act of warmth and comfort, of self-nourishing.
Exercise Three: Unconditional Pet Love
Imagine it has been a long, hard day out and about in the world. You are so grateful to be home. You walk through the door and there they are: your pets. Imagine all the pets you have ever wanted. They're there for you.
Tail wagging, body wiggling in joy. Or maybe that slow blink from your cat that says, "I'm happy you're back home."
Pure, uncomplicated joy at your existence. Your pets don't care what you accomplished today or what you forgot to do. You are the good thing that's happening in their lives today. They love you. They believe in you. They rejoice at the sight of you.
Allow yourself to feel into that sense of being wanted, of being missed, of another being who spends their day waiting for you. Your pets love you for who you are, not how you perform. Your pets love you fully in your best moments and fully in your worst.
They are the purest unconditional love, and you deserve this love. You are so lovable.
Where does that land in your body? Where does this pet love sit inside of you? Maybe your chest softens and opens a little. Maybe you laugh without thinking. Maybe you catch yourself smiling as you receive the energy from your pet. Maybe your whole body softens.
Maybe you feel tearful. If you do, don't squirm away from any tearfulness. You're allowed to be overcome with the beauty of a pet's most ideal love for you.
Let yourself feel the release of those tears if they're there, or a release of walls that have maybe built inside of you that you can now be aware of. Take those walls down, not with a blast, but intentionally, safely, brick by brick.
Feel what it feels like to matter. You are the most important person in your pet's lives. That's a big deal.
Let yourself matter. Allow yourself to feel the feelings that go along with the truth that you are some one's or some being's absolute favorite person on this whole entire planet. Let that truth settle into your bones.
Exercise Four: The Beat That Moves You
Imagine that a song comes on. This is no soft, sweet, angelic folk music song. This is a song with a beat. This song has a booty-shaking beat. Maybe the song is one you haven't heard in years, or maybe it's your current favorite.
Breathe into this beat. Let that beat find you. Let yourself feel that beat. Notice that suddenly as that beat moves in and through you, your body wants to move.
You didn't think that thought from your head. Your body thought it from its bodily intelligence. The beat is telling it to move, not your head.
Your foot taps. Your head bobs. Your face scrunches with the feel-good funk of this music, this beat. Maybe your whole body sways or dances when no one's watching. You are not thinking about it. You're just feeling it and letting your body respond.
It wants to move, and you're allowing this body to move with the beat. The rhythm is pulling something alive out of you. You are feeling this music and the music is feeling you.
Notice that aliveness. Where does it live? Where does it spark? Where do you feel this energy that thrums through your body? Is it in your hips, your chest, your fingertips, your spine? Is it in your muscles, your nerves, your very skin?
This is your body saying yes, yes, yes. Your body remembering it knows how to feel good. It knows how to let go. It knows how to respond to beauty. It knows how to be moved by something outside of yourself. It knows how to ride the wave of that beat, of that movement.
What does it feel like when your body just lets go? When your body is allowed to embody the beat, to move from the music and with it?
Exercise Five: Uncontrollable Laughter
Remember the very last time, or one time, whatever time comes up for you, that something struck you as genuinely funny. Maybe it was absurd. Maybe it was just perfectly timed hilarity. Maybe it was stupid funny.
The laughter comes and it just keeps coming. When was the last time you laughed in this way?
Hear yourself giggling. That laughter bubbles up and out of your body. What a wild thing to try to control or not allow. Let laughter, let joy, let the silliness and absurdity of life be released in your laughter.
Let it move through every part of your being: your mind, your heart, your gut, even your bones. You are laughing till your belly hurts. Laughter tears are squishing from your eyes as your face scrunches in laughter. You can't even catch your breath in the best way.
You might howl with laughter. You're laughing so hard, a little pee might pee out. You try to stop laughing, but the more you try to stifle the deep body giggles, the more your laughter goes off again. Like laughing when you're in the principal's office or laughing when you're not supposed to in church. It just gets funnier and funnier and funnier.
Allow yourself to feel that laughter. Feel that beautiful loss of control that's actually a safe loss of control. Let your body take over in this best way of releasing laughter. Allow the lightness. Enjoy the beautiful way the laughter shakes loose whatever was tight and rigid, constricted and strict inside of you.
Notice how your whole body participates: your diaphragm, your face, your lungs, your whole body shaking. Every cell.
This is joy making itself known. So much joy it is uncontainable. Laughter is a music your body can make and feel, and every cell feels the vibration.
This is your nervous system saying, "We don't need fight or flight or fawn. We're safe. We can let go. We can laugh. We can be present with joy. We can feel this joy all in one place right now, right here."
What does that laughter do to you? What does it feel like? What does this kind of letting go show you? Teach you? What does it leave you feeling? Are you tingly? Are you energetically lighter?
The Path Forward: Practice and Patience
These exercises are emotional weightlifting scenarios so that you can strengthen internal integration and practice positive emotion. You don't have to love all five exercises. Maybe one really speaks to you. If it did, let that be a sign to practice with that imagery, to practice with that emotionality.
Keep practicing any wisdom you've picked up from other healers and modalities. Yoga helps. This word means to yoke, to unite, to bring together. When we get into yoga, we don't just go to class. We cultivate a yoga practice. We emotionally strength train as a practice.
Over time you can and will integrate. Know that it feels impossible until it doesn't. It is not possible for you to integrate, no matter how severe your trauma was.
While emotional strength training continues, just like physical strength training, this is the answer to how to be healthy. How to control for all the factors that we actually can today.
You learn these fragmented ways of being to save your own life. Don't make that wrong or bad. Your psychological and physical selves decided this. Maybe even your spirit did this for you, not to you.
Stop feeling put upon, cursed by this outcome. Let's respect what you did to survive. It's just time now to let this go, like when we have to let go of the diaper and potty train, just simply because that's the next right step as a person. That's the next right step in being a fully functional person and growing from baby into adult.
It is time to let go of this trauma response born of that trauma because it's no longer needed.
You will never again be as small or helpless or vulnerable as you were as that child or as you were as a younger adult who was trying so hard to figure things out and just could not have known what you could not have known yet.
Now you know more. It is time to integrate.
Episode Tags
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- Abuse 16
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- Anger 9
- Bullying 6
- Childhood 37
- Codependency 10
- Covid 4
- Crystal Catalina 4
- Depression 15
- Detachment 2
- Disassociation 4
- Emotions 75
- Existentialism 2
- Faith 1
- Family 28
- Fatigue 4
- Focus 3
- Gratitude 11
- Grief 13
- Guilt 2
- Healers 7
- Healing 52
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- Overthinking 8
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Episode Tags
- ADD 1
- Abuse 16
- Alcohol 3
- Anger 9
- Bullying 6
- Childhood 37
- Codependency 10
- Covid 4
- Crystal Catalina 4
- Depression 15
- Detachment 2
- Disassociation 4
- Emotions 75
- Existentialism 2
- Faith 1
- Family 28
- Fatigue 4
- Focus 3
- Gratitude 11
- Grief 13
- Guilt 2
- Healers 7
- Healing 52
- High Sensation 4
- Hope 1
- Hypervigilance 7
- Introverts 6
- Lonliness 7
- Love 3
- Manifesting 5
- Manipulation 19
- Masculinity 1
- Men 1
- Mindfulness 38
- Money 10
- Music 3
- Nutrition 2
- Overthinking 8
- PTSD 12
- Parenting 12
- People Pleasing 8
- Perfectionism 6
- Pets 4
- Relationships 19
- Resiliency 14
- Sadness 1
- Self Esteem 17
- Self Love 11
- Self Respect 1
- Self-Care 26
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