Your Body Keeps the Score: What Stored Trauma Actually Looks Like
Your Body Keeps the Score: What Stored Trauma Actually Looks Like
By Leslie Burgie, APRN | Nurse Practitioner · Women's Hormone Health · 9D Breathwork Facilitator
Trauma doesn't always announce itself. For many people, it lives quietly in the body — as tension that won't release, emotions that arrive without context, or a nervous system that can't find its way to rest. Understanding what stored trauma actually looks like is the first step toward being able to address it.
What We Mean by "Stored Trauma"
The phrase "the body keeps the score" — popularized by psychiatrist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk — refers to the way traumatic experiences are encoded not just in memory and thought, but in the physiology of the body itself. Muscle tension, altered breathing patterns, changes in heart rate variability, hormonal dysregulation, and chronic nervous system activation can all be downstream effects of unprocessed traumatic experience.
This is not metaphor. It is biology. When a person experiences an event that overwhelms the nervous system's capacity to process and integrate — whether that's a single acute event or a chronic pattern of relational stress, neglect, or threat — the body encodes that experience in ways that persist long after the event itself has passed.
From a clinical perspective, what this means is that many of the symptoms people carry — chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, emotional numbness, difficulty trusting, somatic symptoms without clear medical cause — are not signs of weakness or disorder. They are signs of a nervous system that responded appropriately to something overwhelming, and never fully received the signal that it was safe to come down.
What Stored Trauma Looks Like — And How to Recognize It
Stored trauma doesn't always present as flashbacks or overt PTSD. In clinical practice, I see it more frequently in subtler, chronic presentations:
Chronic tension patterns
Tightness in the jaw, shoulders, hips, or diaphragm that persists despite massage, stretching, or physical therapy. The body is literally holding something — and it often releases when the nervous system finally feels safe, not before.
Emotional responses that feel disproportionate
Significant emotional reactions to relatively minor triggers — a tone of voice, a specific smell, a particular kind of interaction — that arrive faster and stronger than the situation seems to warrant. This is the body's threat-detection system (the amygdala) responding to pattern-matched cues, not to the present moment.
Numbness or disconnection
The opposite presentation — feeling emotionally flat, disconnected from the body, or like you're moving through life behind glass. Dissociation is a protective response the nervous system developed to survive overwhelming experience. When it becomes a default state, it can make it very difficult to feel joy, connection, or presence.
A nervous system that cannot rest
Difficulty falling asleep, waking in the night, an inability to fully relax even in safe circumstances, or a persistent sense of waiting for the next thing to go wrong. The survival system is still running — because at some level, it doesn't believe the emergency is over.
Physical symptoms without clear medical explanation
Chronic pain, digestive issues, autoimmune flares, and other somatic symptoms can have many causes — but unprocessed trauma and chronic nervous system dysregulation are significantly underrecognized contributors to physical health presentations.
Why Talk Therapy Alone Often Isn't Enough
I want to be clear: therapy is valuable, and I always encourage people to work with skilled therapists alongside any somatic practice. But Dr. van der Kolk's central argument — and one that aligns with what I see clinically — is that trauma is stored below the level where language operates. Talking about it is not always enough to release it.
The prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain that processes language, narrative, and insight — goes partially offline during trauma. The experience gets encoded in the limbic system and the brainstem, in the regions of the brain that govern threat response, survival behavior, and body sensation. To access and release what's stored there, you often need to work at the body level.
Insight doesn't always translate into physiological change. Understanding why you feel the way you do is different from your nervous system finally, genuinely feeling safe.
Where Breathwork Comes In
Somatic approaches to trauma work — those that engage the body directly — have grown significantly in research validation over the past two decades. EMDR, somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, and active breathwork all work at the body level, beneath the narrative and the analytical mind.
9D Breathwork in particular works at the intersection of several mechanisms simultaneously. The active breathing pattern shifts nervous system state and creates access to material held below conscious awareness. The immersive sound technology — binaural beats, solfeggio frequencies, somatic coaching — guides the nervous system into a state where it feels safe enough to release what has been held. The result, for many people, is a felt experience of something old finally moving through and out of the body.
Crying without knowing why. Spontaneous release of tension that has been present for years. A felt sense of the emergency finally being over.
This is not a cure for complex trauma. Deep trauma work requires sustained support, therapeutic relationship, and time. But breathwork can be a profoundly meaningful part of a larger healing process — providing somatic experiences of release and safety that reinforce the work being done in therapy.
A Note on Safety
For people with significant trauma histories, active breathwork can occasionally surface material quickly and intensely. I take this seriously in my practice. Before every session I provide clinical context about what to expect and what to do if the experience feels like too much. The instruction is always the same: soften the breath, open your eyes, and come back to the room. You are always in control of the depth of your own process.
For individuals with complex PTSD or severe trauma histories, I recommend working with a trauma-informed therapist concurrently with any breathwork practice, and discussing breathwork with your provider before beginning.
You Don't Have to Carry It Forever
If any of this resonates — if you recognize patterns of chronic tension, emotional reactivity, numbness, or a nervous system that doesn't know how to rest — I want you to know that these patterns are addressable. Your body learned them for good reason. And with the right conditions, it can learn something different.
My live 9D Breathwork sessions through The Breath Detox are designed as a clinically informed, gently held space for exactly this kind of work. Twice monthly via Zoom, $27 per session. Upcoming dates and registration at thebreathdetox.com.
About the Author
Leslie Burgie, APRN is a nurse practitioner, women's hormone health specialist, and certified 9D Breathwork facilitator based in Ohio. She operates two virtual practices: Optimize & Elevate (optimizeandelevate.com), a women's hormone health practice serving Ohio, and The Breath Detox (thebreathdetox.com), a 9D Breathwork facilitation practice. Her clinical work focuses on the intersection of HPA axis regulation, hormonal health, and somatic nervous system healing.