The Biology of Trauma: Why Somatic Healing Isn’t Woo — It’s Science

Skepticism is healthy.

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In fact, it’s one of the reasons I respect people who question “somatic therapy.” I understand the hesitation — the body-based approaches can sound vague, even mystical: “Feel your feelings in your body?” “Let your nervous system guide you?”

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But beneath the language of embodiment lies one of the most rigorously supported truths in modern neuroscience: trauma is a biological condition.

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Trauma Is Not a Story — It’s a State

When we think of trauma, we often think of what happened: the event, the abuse, the war, the neglect. But the science tells us that trauma isn’t the story, it’s what happens inside the body as a result of what happened.

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When something overwhelms our ability to cope, our autonomic nervous system (ANS), the network that regulates heart rate, breathing, digestion, and threat responses, shifts into survival mode. The sympathetic branch surges with adrenaline (fight or flight), or, if escape feels impossible, the dorsal vagal system shuts the body down into freeze or collapse.

In evolutionary terms, this is brilliant. It keeps us alive. But if those states become chronically activated, if the body never receives the signal that the danger is over, the same systems that saved our life begin to imprison it.

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That’s why trauma survivors so often live with symptoms that don’t respond to logic: chronic anxiety, dissociation, emotional numbness, digestive issues, fatigue, pain syndromes, or autoimmune flares. These aren’t “psychological” weaknesses; they are biological consequences of a nervous system stuck outside its window of tolerance.

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Somatic Work: Resetting the Body’s Operating System

Somatic therapy doesn’t ask you to “believe” in anything mystical. It simply recognizes that the nervous system needs to complete what it couldn’t finish.

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In a regulated state, your body oscillates between activation and rest, what physiologists call homeostasis. When you’re startled, your pulse rises, your muscles tighten , then, once safety is restored, your breath deepens, your shoulders drop, your digestion resumes.

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Trauma interrupts that cycle. Somatic approaches like Somatic Experiencing, Polyvagal-informed therapy, and Psycholytic Somatic Integration Therapy (PSIT) work to reestablish it. Through gentle awareness of bodily sensations, slowed pacing, and non-interference, the body begins to discharge stored energy and re-enter balance.

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This is not suggestion or placebo. Functional MRI studies show changes in the brain’s threat circuits and improved connectivity between the prefrontal cortex (thinking) and limbic system (emotion). Heart rate variability (HRV) improves. Inflammatory markers drop. Clients begin to feel safer in their own skin.

The Mind Is Embodied

Modern neuroscience, from Antonio Damasio to Bessel van der Kolk, has dismantled the old Cartesian split between mind and body. Emotions are not “mental.” They are somatic events, neurochemical and visceral patterns felt through the body.

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When we say, “My stomach is in knots,” or “My heart sank,” we’re describing real, measurable changes in vagal tone, muscle tension, and hormone output. The body is the stage upon which the drama of the psyche plays out.

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Somatic therapy simply invites awareness into this stage. It doesn’t replace insight or talk therapy; it integrates them. Because without including the body, we are talking about trauma from the very system that got us stuck — the cognitive one — while the body still holds the score.

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Skepticism as an Ally

So to the skeptics: your doubt is welcome. It’s the same discerning mind that protects you from false promises and shallow solutions. But when you look closely, you’ll find that somatic work isn’t opposed to science, it is science, simply translated into the language of human experience.

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To feel is to be physiological. To tremble, cry, or breathe deeply is to let the body complete the stress cycles that biology has always known how to finish. Healing isn’t magic. It’s the restoration of natural order, the return to homeostasis.

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In that sense, somatic work isn’t about leaving science behind. It’s about returning science to its source: the living, breathing, sensing human being.

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