Mind the Body Podcast

Coming Home to Your Body - Healing After Complex Trauma : Episode 14

• Yvette Vuaran • Season 1 • Episode 14

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🎧 Episode 14: Coming Home to Your Body – Healing After Complex Trauma

What happens when the body no longer feels like home?

In this episode of Mind The Body, I explore how complex trauma shapes the nervous system, disconnects us from the body, and affects the way we experience ourselves, relationships, and the world around us.

Drawing on the work of Judith Herman, Caroline Garland, Ruth Lanius and colleagues, and Gabor Maté, I discuss why disconnection from the body develops as a survival response, how trauma is stored in the body, and why healing needs to happen at the sensory and nervous system level.

In This Episode

  • How complex trauma affects the body and nervous system
  • Why disconnection from the body develops as a survival response
  • The relationship between trauma, body image, and relationships
  • How EMDR and somatic approaches support healing

A Question to Sit With

Where in your life might your body be trying to come home?

References:

  • Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books.
  • Garland, C. (Ed.). (2002). Understanding Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Approach. Karnac Books.
  • Lanius, R. A., Harricharan, S., Kearney, B. E., & Pandev-Girard, B. (2025). Sensory Pathways to Healing from Trauma: Harnessing the Brain’s Capacity for Change. The Guilford Press
  • Haverly, C., & Young, E. (2026). Trauma-Informed Bodywork. North Atlantic Books

Content Note

This episode discusses complex trauma and childhood relational trauma. Please listen with care.

Take a breath, stay curious, and explore what it truly means to Mind The Body.

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Hello and welcome back to Mind The Body. I want to start today's episode by reading you a quote. Home is a connection to all parts of us. The darkness and light. A dawn and dusk of experience embodied in breath and exhaled through life. This quote from the book, Trauma-Informed Body Work. Really moved me and made me think about how trauma can deeply affect our relationship with our body. There is a particular kind of longing that some people carry without quite knowing what it is, a sense that something is missing, that they are not quite where they should be. It sits somewhere underneath the every day. And it is only later, sometimes, much later, when the work of returning to the body has begun that they recognize what it was. They were homesick not for a place, for themselves, for their own body. In my practice, I've noticed that home is rarely how people describe their bodies. Often the body feels quite separate from the mind, like something that belongs to someone else, something they observe rather than live in. When I sit with someone who has a history of complex trauma, that distance from the body isn't surprising to me you see, survival strategies don't automatically fall away. When the present is safe, the distance remains. And what began as protection becomes so familiar that it stops feeling like a response to something. It just feels like you. Today I would like to explore three things. First, what is complex trauma and what does it actually do to the body? Second, what does it feel like to live disconnected from your body? And why does this disconnection appear in more places than we might expect? And third, what does returning to the body look like And why that return needs to happen at the level where trauma was stored. By the end of this episode, I hope you'll understand why the distance from your body makes complete sense and why coming home to it is possible. So let's begin. Let's start with understanding what complex trauma is and what it actually does not just to memory or to mood, but to the body itself. Judith Herman in her landmark work, trauma and recovery made a distinction that changed the way we understand trauma clinically. She separated single incident trauma from what she called complex trauma, the kind that is chronic, relational, and inescapable. An environment, often a childhood. Complex trauma is relational at its core, meaning it happens inside relationships, often the earliest ones, the relationships we had no choice but to depend upon. And when those relationships were also the source of fear, confusion, shame, or neglect, the developing self. Had to find a way to survive inside that contradiction. GABA Mate has described trauma as the invisible force that shapes our lives, the way we live, the way we love, and the way we make sense of the world. And what I find interesting is the word invisible. Because complex trauma so often has no obvious marker, no single event to point to. Just a force, it's felt everywhere, but named nowhere. What complex trauma does is reorganize the self around survival, and when the body is where the pain was held, disconnecting from it can be the only option. It's the most intelligent thing the nervous system could do to stay safe. Psychoanalyst Caroline Garland helps us understand why that adaptation can be so total and so lasting. She reminds us that the word trauma itself is borrowed from the Greek where it referred to a piercing of the skin, a breaking of the bodily envelope. Freud used it metaphorically. The mind like the body has a protective shield. And when that shield is broken, what comes through cannot always be contained or processed. It leaks, it fragments, it finds its way into the body. Instead, garland described trauma as a kind of foreign body, something that becomes encapsulated in the mind, unable to be digested or symbolized. It doesn't get worked through. It sits there and its presence, disrupts the mind's ordinary capacity to think, to make meaning, to put experience into words. And when experience can't be put into words, the body carries it. Instead, memory becomes fragmented. Not a coherent narrative, but pieces sensory, discontinuous. Without context. This is why so many survivors struggle to locate their experience in time. What people share often doesn't have a clear sequence, because that's how it was stored. Memory doesn't move in order. It jumps, and the body which holds all of it, becomes somewhere it no longer feels possible to live. Renee Dekar famously said,, I think therefore I am. But Ruth Lanius and her colleagues propose something different. I sense. Therefore I am the body and its sensory experience as the foundation of the self. And this is why in my work I combine psychodynamic psychotherapy with EMDR, the relational and the somatic working together, talking creates meaning, context, relationship. But when trauma is stored at the sensory level, the body needs to be met there too. Bottom up approaches work at the level of sensation and the nervous system working their way up toward meaning and integration for many of the people I work with. It's this combination that makes the difference. Which brings me to the second thing I wanna explore today. What does living disconnected from the body actually feel like? From my work as a therapist working at the intersection of trauma, body image and attachment, there is a pattern. I notice people have difficulty being in a body. They feel genuinely disconnected from it and able to feel it from the inside. There is often a very particular quality to that disconnection. The body is observed, watched and assessed, but not felt for many people with a history of complex trauma. That has been the case for so long that it doesn't register as unusual. It is simply how things are. And it doesn't always look the same. For some, the body is somewhere they can't feel distant, muted, hard to locate. For others, it's the opposite. They are acutely, almost unbearably aware of every sensation, every feeling in the body registers as alarming. The nervous system is overactive on high alert. I see this in the consulting room. A client startling at a door closing, at an unexpected noise. The body braced for something that isn't coming, but that it was once taught to expect. Both are trauma responses. Both make complete sense when you understand what the nervous system learned to do to survive, but there's something else I've noticed and I think it is important to say. The disconnection from the felt sense of the body and the disturbance in how the body is perceived are not separate things. They're intertwined. The person who has lost access to sensation from the inside very often also experiences significant distortion in how they see themselves from the outside. A body that can't be felt becomes a body that can't accurately be seen, and I wanna stay with that for a moment. Because body image disturbance is so often understood as a cultural problem, a media problem, a confidence problem, and whilst those things are true, what I see in the consulting room tells a different story. The distortion in how the body is perceived is often rooted in something much earlier and much deeper. It is rooted in the rupture between the self and the body. That trauma created and that disconnection extends beyond the body itself. When we are not present in our bodies, we are not fully present in our environment either. The world becomes something we move through rather than something we inhabit. People describe feeling like they are behind glass. They're there but not quite there. The texture of things, the quality of a room, the feeling of ground underfoot, all of it feels slightly out of reach because the body is how we meet the world, and when contact with the body is lost contact with everything around it can be lost to. This is why the therapeutic environment matters so much. Research is now showing that safe social connection directly affects the brain's threat response. That feeling safe with another person is not just psychologically important, but neurologically significant. The consulting room needs to be a place where the body can begin to feel safe enough to be present. A secure base for the mind and for the body before any words are spoken. The nervous system is already reading the room. Deciding whether it is safe enough to be seen and then that disconnection moves into relationship because the person who is monitoring their body from the outside, who is managing how it looks, who has no reliable felt sense of being in it. That person cannot be fully present with another person. Part of them is always elsewhere. Watching, managing, performing. It shapes, how safe it feels to be looked at, how tolerable it is to be known. Whether closeness feels like something to move toward or something to pull away from, and what I've come to understand is that the disconnection from the body self, the disturbance in how the body is perceived and the difficulty with relational intimacy, often these are the same wound showing up in different ways. That is what complex trauma does. It disrupts the entire system through which we know ourselves and reach toward others. And that brings me to the third thing I want to explore. How do we actually find our way back to the body? The body doesn't remember the way the mind remembers. It doesn't store experience as narrative, as a story with a beginning and an end. It stores it in sensation, in smell, in sound, in the quality of light in a room, in the feeling of a particular texture under the hand. This is how the body remembers in the senses, and this is why a piece of music or a particular smell can suddenly make something present even though it belonged to the past. It is also why the work of processing trauma cannot happen through language alone, because the memory isn't held in language. It's held here. In the body, in the nervous system, in the sensory traces of what happened and to reach it, you have to work at that level, which is exactly what EMDR does, this is a part of my work as A-E-M-D-R practitioner that feels most alive and meaningful to me. EMDR eye movement desensitization and reprocessing works at the level where complex trauma lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the places where experience was stored before it could be put into words. What the bilateral stimulation does. Bilateral stimulation, meaning the movement from side to side, that is central to EMDR, is engage both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously, Ruth Lanius and her colleagues in their work on sensory pathways and trauma. Help us understand why this matters. Trauma memory is stored differently to ordinary memory. It stays live sensory. Present tense. EMDR works with the brain's own capacity to process and integrate. What was too overwhelming to digest at the time and what this means in practice is that the processing doesn't happen through the story. It happens through the body, through sensation, through image, through the nervous system beginning to metabolize what it couldn't before. The body isn't just the sight of the wound, it is the work. It becomes the sight of the processing. And this is where I wanna say something that might surprise you, because when we think about helping someone return to their body, the instinct is often to suggest relaxation, breathing exercises, stillness. And for some people in some states that is exactly right. But Ruth Lanius and her colleagues offer an important caution here for those who are in a state of chronic shutdown, emotionally numb, disconnected, persistently flat relaxation exercises can actually deepen that shutdown. When the parasympathetic nervous system is already in overdrive, encouraging more stillness can intensify feelings of helplessness and numbness rather than relieving them, it can actually make someone feel more cut off, not less. This is why understanding which state someone is in matters so much clinically. The nervous system that is flooded and overwhelmed needs something different to the nervous system that is shut down and collapsed and getting it wrong. However, well intentioned Can move someone further from their body rather than closer to it. What Lanius and her colleagues point toward instead for those in shutdown states is activation. Gentle Trit, movement based activation. Walking, using the in sensor muscles, something that raises the heart rate just enough. Keeping the person within what is called the window of tolerance, that zone where the nervous system is neither too flooded nor to flat to begin to process, and one of the most simple and powerful tools in trauma-informed work is orientating, turning the head, noticing the room, feeling the feet on the floor, focusing on something in the room, the weight of the body in the chair. The nervous system asking its most fundamental question, am I safe right now? Orienting, is the body answering that question? And it is often where the work begins. Vesti. Activation. Our sense of balance of where we are in space is also emerging as important in this work. It grounds the body in the present moment, in this room, in this body right now, which for someone whose nervous system has been living in the past is transformative. I notice when something shifts, when a person who has spent years describing their body from the outside begins to speak about what they can feel from the inside. For someone with a long history of complex trauma, making contact with sensation, even briefly, even partially, can feel both unfamiliar and profound. The body beginning to be a place again rather than a problem. And what becomes possible in that space is the beginning of a different relationship with the self return to the body doesn't necessarily mean the pain disappears, and it doesn't mean the history is erased. It means the body stops being somewhere you have to disconnect from in order to survive. It means that sensation becomes information again rather than threat. It means the breath which has been there all along becomes something you can actually feel. And slowly the body that was once the place where something too difficult to name lived becomes somewhere it is possible, tentatively gradually to come home to. So we have covered three things today. First complex trauma reorganizes the self around survival. And when the body is where pain was held, Disconnecting from it was the most intelligent thing the nervous system could do. Second living disconnected from the body shows up in more places than we might expect in the way the body is perceived, in the way the world is experienced, in the way we reach toward others or pull away from them. And third return is possible through the body, through the sensors, through the slow, careful work of helping the nervous system learn that the present is safe. The question I wanna leave you with is this, where in your life might your body be trying to come home, and what would it need to feel safe enough to do that, I wanna return to that quote I opened with home is a connection to all parts of us, the darkness and light, a dawn and dusk of experience embodied in breath and exhaled through life. I think what moves me about those words is that they ask us to be connected to all of it, to the darkness and the light. For those who have lived with complex trauma, that connection was interrupted often, early, often in ways that were completely outside their control. The body became a place to disconnect from rather than a place to live. But the capacity for return to the body is there. The nervous system that learn to protect can also learn to settle. The body that held the pain can also become the place where something shifts. It is the possibility of coming back to yourself, breath by breath after years of being somewhere else. That to me, is what the work is for is. Until next time, stay curious.