The Trauma You Didn’t Know You Had

When most people think of trauma, they think of major life events — accidents, abuse, or loss.

But in this episode of Healing Beyond the Symptoms, Dr. Leah Hahn D.C., explains something most people have never been taught:

Trauma isn’t just what happened to you — it’s what your body still carries.

This includes not only “big T” trauma, but also small, everyday stressors:

• growing up in a critical environment
• years of overwork or burnout
• always feeling like it’s unsafe to rest
• chronic pressure to perform or please others

Over time, these experiences shape the nervous system and create patterns that show up in the body — often without us realizing it.

How Hidden Trauma Shows Up

Dr. Leah breaks down how unprocessed stress can manifest physically and emotionally:

• chronic muscle tension and guarded posture
• shallow breathing and low energy
• difficulty relaxing, even when nothing is wrong
• emotional reactivity or shutdown
• anxiety, numbness, or overwhelm

These patterns are not personality traits.

They are nervous system adaptations.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn:

• The difference between “big T” and “small T” trauma
 • How the body stores unprocessed stress over time
 • Why overachievers and caretakers often carry hidden trauma
 • How trauma shows up in posture, breath, and emotional responses
 • Why awareness is the first step in healing
 • How safety allows the nervous system to release stored patterns
 • The role of Network Spinal care in nervous system reorganization

Timestamps

[00:00:00] – Hidden Trauma: Stress You Didn’t Know You Carry

[00:00:45] – Redefining Trauma: Big T vs Small T Stress

[00:01:30] – How Trauma Shows Up in Your Body

[00:02:30] – Emotional Triggers & Nervous System Responses

[00:03:00] – Real Story: When Overwork Becomes Trauma

[00:04:00] – Creating Safety to Start Healing

[00:05:00] – Combining Nervous System Care + Therapy

[00:06:00] – Dr. Leah’s Personal Healing Journey

[00:07:00] – Why High Achievers Stay Stuck in Stress

[00:08:00] – Hidden Patterns That Keep You in Survival Mode

[00:09:00] – How to Start Releasing Stored Trauma

[00:10:00] – Awareness: The First Step to Healing

[00:11:00] – Why Avoided Emotions Show Up in the Body

[00:12:00] – Rewriting Patterns & Choosing Healing

[00:13:00] – Key Takeaways: Awareness, Safety & Healing

Dr. Leah also shares a powerful client story — and her own personal journey — highlighting how awareness, safety, and nervous system care can lead to profound healing.

If you’ve ever felt like:
 “I don’t know why I feel this way…”

This episode may help you understand what your body has been holding.

You are not broken.
 Your body has been protecting you.

And with the right support, those patterns can change.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Not all trauma looks like a big dramatic event. Sometimes it's the subtle everyday stress your body never fully processed. And it shows up years later as tension, fatigue, anxiety. This is the trauma that you didn't even know you were holding. Welcome to Healing Beyond the Symptoms, the podcast that helps people discover the root causes of their health struggles and take back control with science, strategy, and self-awareness. I'm Dr. Leah Hahn, a chiropractor and functional wellness doctor who believes that true healing starts beneath the surface. So let's dive in. So we really need to define trauma and maybe in some cases redefine trauma. Most people think of trauma as the big T events, accidents, abuse, loss. But trauma can also be classified as the small T events, microstressors that build over time. Maybe it's how you grew up. Maybe it's growing up in a really critical household. Maybe it's spending years of overwork. Maybe it's always feeling like it's unsafe to actually rest. Trauma isn't just what happened to you. It's what your body still carries from those experiences. So how does this show up in life and in our bodies? Muscle and posture patterns is a big one. Having guarded shoulders, having a very clenched jaw, collapsed chest, meaning you're forward, you're actually guarding this heart chakra area. It can be unresolved pain and chronic tension, the kind of tension that never resolves itself. It just lingers, it hangs around, it shows up when your system slows down, or even as your stress increases. It can show up in your breath, your respiration, your and your energy. So you may be taking shallow breaths. You may have a sense of like chronic fatigue. It may be difficult relaxing even when there's nothing wrong. Your brain is searching for what could be wrong. The body stays braced for what is to come versus staying present and being able to experience ease and a sense of well-being. It also can show up as emotional reactivity, overreactions, shutdowns that feel out of proportion to the actual moment. It can be tears that come out of nowhere, anger, sadness, or it could be a feeling of numbness, depression, wanting to escape conversations. An example that I really wanted to share with you today was a patient once told me, I thought I was just sensitive, but my body was actually carrying years of stress. I never processed. In this patient's situation, her body literally was carrying years of unresolved trauma. She was what I will look at as like an overfunctioning individual. She worked, she homeschooled her kids, she was consistently on a weekly basis designing all of their curriculum. She was working on rental properties that their family owned until she would absolutely crash. And she would spend days in bed with immune system issues, colds, flus, but terrible headaches and migraines, chronic tension that was debilitating and just literally pain throughout her body. It wasn't until her body felt safe enough to heal. So she had been in care with us for probably right around the four to five month time period. And she started to do real cleanup work. Her body started to move into a state of safety where she was in a parasympathetic mode. And on a deep level, she was literally finding safety after so many years of overfunctioning, chronic overwhelm. And really what happened at that point is she became aware of long-held stored memories of trauma. So we had her start working with a therapist. She came into our office twice a week for network spinal sessions. When we combined that talk therapy along with the support and the reorganization of the nervous system, it allowed her to one, become aware of that trauma, but also acknowledge it emotionally and mentally process it. But at the same time, she was helping heal her body and find that state of resiliency and adaptability. It gave her body access to new patterning, new ways of creating awareness, reorganizing, healing, and again, acknowledging the patterns that she had also used to cope, to not feel, to not deal with that chronic trauma. Over time, she's felt new energy, more resiliency, more peace. She was healing her mind and her body. And it started with creating safety and allowing her body to move into healing and nervous system reorganization. In my own life, I've experienced lots of small tea events, chronic stress, overwork throughout high school and college and chiropractic school, constantly pushing to do more, be better, accomplish more, that overachiever mentality. And underneath, driving so much of it was people pleasing, which that's that fawn response. It's a very adaptive, sympathetic nervous system response, which can be a protective mechanism. Again, it's adaptive, but it kept me in a state of overriding my own body's signals. It almost was like it wasn't important to me because I had bigger goals in mind. So by overriding my own body's signals and my own needs was almost like ignorance as a survival mechanism. And it cost me. Over time, I had immune system issues, fatigue, brain fog, terrible sleep issues for years, never feeling like I got restorative sleep. It wasn't until I took my own nervous system care and reorganization seriously that I moved into a state of safety and could reclaim my own health. My healing process really involved having to make major life shifts, making time for rest, those micro resets throughout the day that I talk about all the time are part of my day on a daily basis. Breathing practices, meditation, walks in nature, all of it. But it started with safety and awareness. And with that awareness, I was able to really acknowledge my patterning and start to shift into a state that honored my well-being. Sometimes you might not even realize it's trauma that's affecting you. The nervous system is adaptive. It hides stress so you can function in the moment. Over time, those hidden patterns become normal. They become the way that you cope, the way that you function. The body is brilliantly adaptable. So maintaining the stress physiology becomes your primary way of operating. So things like being an overachiever, a workaholic, a caretaker, especially long-term, all of these things put you into a mode in which you are surviving. You're dealing with the small traumas, but also disconnecting in a way that keeps you functional. But that may not be tending to your health and your well-being that creates peace or connection and healing. That's why so many people say, I didn't know how much I was holding until my body finally let go. So how do you begin to release hidden trauma? Well, awareness is key. Notice when your body starts to feel heavy or tight or numb. Then I want you to provide gentle signals of safety, breath work, grounding. Maybe you go outside and you put your feet on the earth, supportive touch, all of those things can help your body to realize that it's actually safe. Reframe stuck as protective. Instead of blaming yourself, recognize your body has been protecting you all along. Can you acknowledge the patterns you have been using as a form of protection? And then I really encourage you to seek nervous system-based care. Network Spinal helps the body reorganize storage stress patterns, making it possible to finally release what's been hidden. Let's reframe all of this. You can't heal what you don't acknowledge. And I don't mean overanalyzing or digging endlessly into the past. I mean noticing, being honest, allowing yourself to see what's already there. Healing often begins with acknowledging our emotions, all of them. The ones that feel easy and the ones that we'd rather avoid. It's noticing when someone else may be projecting onto us. It's listening to the cues coming from the body. It's becoming aware of where we feel safe enough to be fully ourselves, of the patterns that no longer serve us, of how our nervous system responds under stress. And it's understanding that our past experiences, especially painful ones, may have shaped us, but they don't have to define us. No one else needs to validate your trauma for it to matter. You don't have to share it, you don't have to explain it, you don't even have to revisit every detail. But if healing is the intention, there does need to be an acknowledgement that something had an impact. Feeling emotions can be hard. Avoiding them is often how we learn to protect ourselves. Disconnecting, minimizing our needs, staying busy. These are nervous system strategies, not personal failures. But unacknowledged experiences don't just disappear, they show up in the body, and anxiety that seems to come out of nowhere, in restless sleep, and physical symptoms that don't have a clear explanation. What isn't felt or named often finds another way to be expressed. Healing doesn't require us to relive the past or dissect every experience. It begins with recognizing that something shifted us, that the nervous system adapted to keep us safe. The protective patterns formed for a reason. And sometimes those patterns, once helpful, are no longer supportive. The first step of healing is awareness, not judgment, but just acknowledgement. Is this independence or a learned response from having to rely only on yourself? Is this being easygoing or a fond response rooted in people pleasing? When we bring these patterns into awareness, we create choice. Choice to respond differently, choice to choose relationships that feel safer. Choice to prioritize rest over constant striving. A choice to move toward peace instead of chaos. Healing isn't about erasing the past. It's about knowing yourself well enough that the past no longer runs the present moment. And that awareness, that gentle, honest acknowledgement, is where healing truly begins. I want to go through some tactical takeaways from today's episode. Trauma isn't always obvious. Sometimes it's the subtle stress your body has carried for years. The body holds trauma in posture with breath and reactivity, even if the mind has moved on. With safety and nervous system support, hidden trauma can release and create space for healing. Thanks for joining me today on Healing Beyond the Symptoms. If you've ever felt like something deeper was holding you back, even after years of therapy and self-care, know this. Your body still may be carrying unprocessed trauma. And the good news is that those patterns can change. To learn more about how your body may be storing unprocessed trauma, book a consultation at BodyImbalanceCiropractic.com and follow me on Instagram at Body Imbalance Wellness Center for daily tools and encouragement. Until next time, breathe deep, listen in, and remind your body, it is safe to heal, and awareness and acknowledgement are keys to healing. Thanks again for joining me today on Healing Beyond the Symptoms. If you've been curious about network spinal or if you've tried everything else and still feel stuck, I want you to know this. Your body is not broken. It's patterned, and those patterns can change. If you're ready to experience how gentle care can lead to profound transformation, I'd love to invite you to book a wellness consultation at BodyInBalanceCarepractic.com. Together we'll look at what your body needs to finally release, reset, and thrive. Until next time, breathe deep, trust your body, and remember, gentle can be powerful.