Reconnecting with Your Body After Trauma: Without Going into Overdrive

Written by Roland Bal

When you are emotionally hurt and feel overwhelmed, you disconnect from the body. It is a safety mechanism to maintain some level of functioning, however compromised that might be. It also entails that emotional residue still lives in the body, and the only way to start resolving post-traumatic stress is to release and integrate that high energy charge.

And this needs to be done with care.

Using the felt sense to come back into the body will activate and bring into awareness suppressed emotion and feeling, which may have been shut out for seemingly good reasons. This is the core challenge: you need to reconnect with the body to heal, but the body is exactly where the pain is stored. Moving too fast floods the system. Moving too slow keeps you dissociated. The work is in finding the pace that allows you to be with what is there without being overwhelmed by it.

Hurt Vulnerability and the Need for Boundaries

Most early life and childhood trauma is centred around trust that has been severely hurt and suppressed anger that has not been allowed to be expressed just yet. And this is vital in understanding the relationship between coming back into the body without going into overdrive, and re-negotiating healthy levels of vulnerability and managing boundaries.

When you are emotionally hurt and feel overwhelmed, you disconnect from the body. It is a safety mechanism to maintain some level of functioning, however compromised that might be.

When we have been hurt, vulnerability is perceived as something to be avoided or seen as weak. Out of that avoidance we start to build a defensive character structure around it. This is not a conscious choice. It is the nervous system organising itself around the expectation that openness will lead to pain. And it makes coming back into the body feel dangerous — because the body is where that vulnerability lives.

It would need an initial allowing of vulnerability to feel again, and simultaneously monitoring and applying healthy boundaries — to decide what you can hold, and when it is good to let things rest and dig no further. By re-learning what it is to open up, you are creating new possibilities, and through re-learning what it means to set limits, you can discern with clarity when and with whom you may open up.

You need both on board in a balanced way.

How the Extremes Show Up

The disconnection from the body does not look the same for everyone. It often swings to extremes, and you may recognise yourself in one or more of these patterns: you are overprotective of your private space. You tend to shut people out or lock yourself up at home. You are snappy with others and cut them off, finding fault or being dismissive. Or the opposite — you are too trusting of people in entering or staying in relationships, and unable to say no to others. Many people waver between these extremes, sometimes within the same day.

These are not personality flaws. They are the nervous system trying to manage the gap between what it needs — safety, connection — and what it learned to expect — violation, neglect, unpredictability. The body remembers the original conditions even when the mind has moved on, and so the protective patterns persist long after the original threat is gone.

The Timing of Suppressed Anger

Behind both extremes — the rigidity and the collapse — there is almost always suppressed anger. But working with that anger requires careful timing. If you address your suppressed anger too soon, you would destabilise, because you need your pleasing response in place in order to survive emotionally. If you were to express your suppressed anger before the proper foundations have been laid, that expression of anger would cancel out your fawn response with the result that you would feel inadequate, unheard and unseen, and which potentially would be retraumatising.

This is why the process cannot be rushed. There is a sequence to it. First you build enough containment — enough capacity to hold discomfort without being swept away. Then, gradually, the anger can surface in a way that is constructive rather than destructive. Healthy anger becomes the foundation for boundaries, for saying no, for marking where you end and someone else begins. But it has to arrive in its own time, not because a therapist or a technique pushed it out before you were ready.

Coming Back to the Middle

To contain emotion is to have enough energy and resilience to stay with your internal suffering without reacting to it any further — neither getting too focused on what you feel, nor getting pushed out of staying with the emotion, causing you to dissociate. This is a hard one.

To build up resilience to assist containment requires that you slowly go into uncomfortable emotional territory and track your ability to hold what you are feeling. If you go overboard, it is necessary to take a step back and disconnect from your felt sense or focus on something else for a little while. This back-and-forth — approaching and retreating — is not a sign of failure. It is the mechanism through which the nervous system gradually expands its capacity. Each time you go a little further and come back without being overwhelmed, you are building resilience.

Through using a robust cognitive framework and using the resources of your body, you can create a future of possibilities again within a sense of containment and with resilience. And this is a process. I am not promising it is easy. It is hard work but can be done. The body that once became a place you had to leave can, over time, become a place you choose to return to — not because the pain is gone, but because you have built enough capacity to be there with it.