Trauma

3rd January 2026

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 — the tension that won't release, the startle response, the numbness or pain with no clear medical cause — is not bottled-up emotion waiting to be discharged, 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.

This is why so many people feel certain the answer must lie somewhere in the body itself. And there is something right about that intuition: the body is where the trace has lodged. But the body is not where the

solution lies. What looks like a somatic problem is really a problem of language — or rather, of its absence. The experience wasn't processed because it couldn't be; there were no words adequate to it at the time, or no one to receive those words, or both.

The task of therapy is therefore not to discharge pent-up feeling from the body — not to "complete" some interrupted defensive response, or to shake or breathe the trauma out. It is to help the person find ways of putting that once-unassimilable experience into language. This is painstaking, often slow work. It does not mean simply recounting events. It means finding words that actually do something, that locate the person in relation to what happened — who they were, what it meant, how it changed them. As experience becomes speakable in this fuller