Trauma comes to seem as if it is “stored” in the body when something has happened that could not be brought into words at the time. What then shows itself through physical symptoms is not bottled-up emotion, but the trace of an experience that never found a place in meaning. The symptom functions, in this sense, like a bodily message that speaks without quite knowing what it is saying.

The task of therapy is therefore not to discharge pent-up feeling from the body, but to help the person find ways of putting that once-unassimilable experience into language. As it becomes speakable, the symptom no longer has the same work to do. Relief comes through making sense, rather than through emotional release.

This follows Freud’s decisive early insight that founded psychoanalysis: hysterical suffering does not require physical catharsis, but speech. The body was never the true container of the trauma; it was simply where what could not yet be said made itself felt.