When You Understand Your Trauma but Your Body Still Reacts
By Ryan Snodgrass, LMFT, LPCC
We often arrive to therapy with a desire to experience something different—a different type of relationship, a different view of ourselves, or a different outlook on our lives and futures. We spend time asking ourselves why? Why we respond the way we do or why something seemed to impact us so deeply.
Why is an important part of the process. One simple question can lead us on a path of greater self-understanding, self-compassion, and self-awareness. It can help us make sense of where we've been and how we learned to move through the world.
And sometimes, it prepares us for the next question: What now?
What do we do when we understand the pattern, but still find ourselves repeating it? When we know we're safe, but our body still braces? When we understand why we learned to respond a certain way, but knowing hasn't necessarily changed the response?
Knowing and experiencing aren’t always the same thing
We can know that conflict doesn't mean a relationship is ending and still feel panic when someone we love is upset with us. We can know that rest is necessary and still feel uncomfortable when we aren’t being productive. We can know that we are safe and still find our body tensing, bracing, panicking, or shutting down.
Understanding why a response developed can help us meet it differently. But understanding a response doesn't always mean it will change.
Some responses were learned before we even knew how to speak. They can be quick and familiar, and though they cause us pain now, they were the very thing that kept us safe back then.
Our responses often make sense somewhere
Disconnecting may have helped us manage our overwhelm. Hypervigilance allowed us to prepare and anticipate. Please others was a skill that kept connection close. Staying busy, isolating, becoming overly independent, taking on responsibility, and all of our other protective patterns are just that- protective. Often what we judge most once was the most instrumental for our survival.
What creates difficulty now was adaptive at first, but it doesn’t mean we need to keep every response we’ve learned. And understanding why we did it breeds insight, but not all layers of healing can be touched by insight alone.
Our bodies are part of the conversation, too
Our experiences don't exist only in the stories we tell about them. We experience life, and trauma, through our bodies as well. We might find ourselves spending so much time looking for the right words to explain or solve our problems, we forget our first language wasn’t language at all- it was sensation.
Sometimes we notice sensations clearly. They speak loudly within us through tense shoulders, racing hearts, or shallowed breathing. Other times, it’s a quiet whisper that just feels off.
This is where somatic therapy can come in
We begin to listen to our bodies not to ignore our thoughts and memories, but to become aware of what is happening within us as we think and remember. We’re invited not just to think about what has happened, but to notice what we experience as we do.
We might notice sensation, movement, breath, emotion, activation, or impulses. It might feel like a tightening in our stomach when we imagine letting someone down. Or we might notice how our body moves without even intending to as we talk about a relationship where we’ve struggled to take up space.
We notice the body not to make a judgment or assessment, but to simply witness ourselves—to become curious and attentive to experiences that words alone can’t always honor.
And as we pay attention, we may discover an impulse: our body wanting to move, express, protect, defend, or create distance. Even as we recall situations we have long since left, we may notice that some part of us still responds as though we are there.
Trauma is not just about what happened. It can also be about what happened within us and what we carried forward—the protective responses that may not have had the opportunity to fully unfold.
Change doesn’t always come from just understanding. Sometimes it arises from allowing something different.
Hypervigilance, for example, isn't necessarily the problem. Being on guard may have been exactly what our system needed when something felt unpredictable or unsafe. The difficulty comes when that same protection continues to show up in places where it is no longer needed.
The response isn’t the problem. It’s just misplaced.
What does somatic therapy actually look like?
Somatic therapy can look a lot like what we already imagine therapy to be. We talk. We reflect. We make meaning of our experiences. But we also leave room to notice what is happening beyond the words.
We might slow down when something shifts. Notice where we feel an emotion rather than only naming it. Pay attention to an impulse to move toward or away. Experiment with allowing a movement that our body already wants to make. Or simply stay with an experience long enough to notice what happens next.
Sometimes the work is subtle. A deeper breath. A softening in the shoulders. The realization that we’ve been holding tension we weren’t aware of. Other times, there may be a desire for movement, sound, or larger expressions. There isn’t a right response we’re trying to create.
We don’t always have to tell the whole story
There can be tremendous value in telling our stories. Putting language to something we have carried alone can help us make meaning of it, understand ourselves differently, and experience being witnessed in places where we may not have been before.
But sometimes there aren’t words, and perhaps not even full memories. Words aren’t the only way.
In somatic therapy, you work with what is present now. Not every detail needs to be shared or experiences to process the wound it left behind. And we don’t have to relive our past to have an abundant future.
The goal isn’t to be calm all the time
A misconception that we often carry is the idea that we have to be calm, or happy, all the time. That a regulated nervous system is one that’s always at ease. That once we do enough work we won’t get overwhelmed, reactionary, anxious, or shut down.
But that’s not how we’re designed. Fear alerts us to danger. Anger helps motivate change and tells us what matters. Activation, rest, and everything else have an important purpose. And a regulated nervous system is one that can be in relationship with all of those with greater capacity, flexibility, and without losing ourselves along the way.
Progress isn’t asking to never be activated again. It’s noticing it sooner, changing our pattern quicker, and staying connected to ourselves longer.
We aren’t erasing our responses. We are teaching them when they’re needed, learning how to be in relationship with them, and developing more possibilities.
Experiencing something different
This brings us back to where we started.
We often enter therapy wanting something in our lives to feel different. And while understanding why we became who we are can be an important part of that process, there are some things we may also need the opportunity to experience differently.
We may understand why we learned to make ourselves small. And then we get to discover what happens when we take up a little more space. We may understand why receiving care feels uncomfortable. And then we get to experience someone showing up for us without immediately needing to give something back. We may understand why conflict feels threatening. And then we get to experience disagreement alongside connection, repair, and continued relationship.
We may understand why our bodies learned to brace. And then, little by little, we get to notice the moments when we don't have to.
Somatic therapy offers an invitation to notice what we've learned, what we've carried, what we still need, and what might become possible when we have the opportunity to experience something different.
We don't have to stop asking why. Sometimes, we simply get to start asking what now, too.
About the Author
Ryan Snodgrass, LMFT, LPCC, is the founder of EMBER Therapy & Wellness in Carlsbad, California. She specializes in experiential, relational, and somatic approaches to therapy, integrating Somatic Experiencing®, psychodrama, psychodramatic bodywork, EMDR, and other experiential practices in her work with individuals, couples, and families.
