The Body Keeps Score… But It Also Keeps Secrets

There are stories you cannot tell. Not because you’re hiding them. Not because you’re in denial. But because your nervous system filed them somewhere your language doesn’t reach. Your body remembers what your mind re-wrote. It remembers the night you froze.
The moment you dissociated. The sound of the door. The way someone’s breath changed before they exploded. The feeling of being watched. The shame that landed in your stomach and never left. You may not remember the details. But your muscles do. Your vagus nerve does. Your breath does. Your startle reflex does. Your chronic inflammation does. We’ve all heard the phrase from Bessel van der Kolk — “The body keeps the score.” He’s right. But what doesn’t get talked about enough is this: The body doesn’t just keep score. It keeps secrets.

Trauma Is Not the Event. It’s the Adaptation. Trauma is not defined by what happened. It’s defined by what your nervous system had to become to survive it. Two people can experience the same event and walk away differently — not because one is stronger, but because nervous systems are shaped by history, attachment, genetics, safety, and repetition. If you were chronically criticized, your nervous system may have become hyper-vigilant. If you were unpredictably loved, you may have developed anxious attachment patterns. If you experienced relational betrayal, your body may brace during intimacy even when your mind says, “This person is safe.” If you were ashamed of emotion, your throat may tighten when you try to speak up. These are not personality flaws. They are procedural adaptations. And procedural memory lives in the body.

Why You “Know Better” But Still React. This is where clients get frustrated. They’ll say: “I know I’m safe. So why am I panicking?” “I trust my partner. So why does my chest tighten when they don’t text back?” “I understand my trauma. I’ve talked about it. So why am I still triggered?” Because insight lives in the prefrontal cortex. Trauma storage lives subcortically — in the amygdala, hippocampus, brainstem, autonomic nervous system. The part of your brain that analyzes is not the part that reacts. You can cognitively understand that a raised voice isn’t dangerous. But if your nervous system encoded raised voices as threat when you were six, the body fires first. The body does not wait for committee approval from your logical brain. It moves to protect. Every time.

We talk about fight and flight. But freeze is quieter. Freeze is the child who went still instead of screaming. The teen who dissociated instead of confronting. The adult who smiles while shutting down internally. Freeze is dorsal vagal dominance — the nervous system hitting the “shutdown” circuit when activation feels too overwhelming.

Symptoms of freeze can look like:

• Chronic fatigue
• Brain fog
• Dissociation
• Feeling unreal
• Emotional numbness
• Low motivation
• Collapsing posture
• Autoimmune conditions

People in freeze often think they’re lazy. They’re not. Their nervous system learned that immobility increased survival.

Trauma Hides in Micro-Tension. You can often see trauma before someone speaks. Shoulders slightly elevated. Jaw clenched even at rest. Breath shallow and high in the chest. Pelvis tucked forward defensively. Eyes scanning constantly. Foot positioned toward the exit. The body organizes around protection. When threat is chronic, the protection becomes chronic. Muscles that brace daily don’t relax just because the environment changed. The body needs repetition of safety to reorganize.

I love insight work. Understanding attachment patterns. Naming narcissistic abuse.
Identifying cognitive distortions. All of it matters. But if trauma is stored in implicit memory and autonomic state, then purely verbal processing can plateau. You can retell your story in perfect chronological order and still wake up sweating at 3 a.m. Because storytelling is not the same as nervous system discharge. The body requires completion. Completion means the defensive response that was interrupted gets processed. The freeze thaws. The fight energy discharges. The flight impulse resolves. That doesn’t happen through logic. It happens through state-based work.

Brainspotting works on the principle that “where you look affects how you feel.” Eye position correlates with activation in specific neural networks. When a person holds a gaze position linked to traumatic activation, the subcortical material begins surfacing.

It might show up as:

• A tremor in the hand
• Heat rising in the chest
• Tears without a clear narrative
• A body memory
• A sensory flash
• A subtle internal shift

The therapist doesn’t force content. We follow the nervous system. We titrate. We resource. We allow the body to process in its own language — sensation. Often clients say, “I didn’t even know that was there.” Of course they didn’t. It was stored before language.

Trauma creates core beliefs in heightened states. “I am not safe.” “I am too much.” “I will be abandoned.” “I have to perform to be loved.” These beliefs are not created by logic. They are encoded by experience. Hypnotherapy allows access to the state in which those beliefs formed — but in a controlled, safe, resourced way.

When the nervous system is calm enough, we can revisit the imprint and introduce corrective experience:

Safety.
Protection.
Agency.
Choice.
Boundaries.
Witnessing.

The body registers the update. Not because we argued with it. But because we gave it a new felt reality.

This part matters. Not all chronic illness is trauma-based. But chronic nervous system dysregulation absolutely impacts inflammation, immune function, digestion, hormonal balance, and pain perception. When the body lives in sympathetic dominance (fight/flight), cortisol remains elevated. When the body lives in dorsal shutdown, metabolic processes slow. Long-term dysregulation has physical consequences. Which means healing trauma isn’t just emotional work. It’s physiological recalibration.

You cannot think your way into safety. You must experience it. Repeatedly.

In therapy, safety looks like:

• Co-regulation
• Attuned eye contact
• Predictable structure
• Consent-based pacing
• Titration of activation
• Repair when ruptures happen

The nervous system learns safety relationally. It unlearns danger relationally. Healing happens in connection because trauma often happened in connection.

Here’s what I wish more people knew:The body that learned hypervigilance is incredibly perceptive. The body that learned to endure is resilient. The body that survived is intelligent. Your symptoms are not evidence of weakness. They are evidence of survival. And when we approach them with curiosity instead of shame, something shifts.

Instead of asking:
“What’s wrong with me?”

We begin asking:
“What did my body learn?”

That question changes everything.

One of the most profound moments in somatic work isn’t dramatic. It’s subtle. A client will pause mid-session and say,

“My shoulders just dropped.”

Or:

“I didn’t realize I was holding my breath.”

Or:

“I feel… heavier. In a good way.”

That’s regulation. That’s integration. That’s the nervous system realizing it doesn’t have to stay on guard. Not because we forced it. But because we allowed it to complete what was unfinished.

The body keeps score. Yes. But it also keeps secrets. And when we create the right conditions — safety, attunement, pacing, relational repair — the body slowly begins to release what it has been holding alone. Not all at once. Not violently. But steadily.

 And in that steady release, something extraordinary happens:

You don’t just remember what hurt you.

You remember that you survived it. And your nervous system finally begins to believe you’re not there anymore.

https://medium.com/@misfitmindtherapy/the-body-keeps-score-but-it-also-keeps-secrets-4636cf0703f4