You may already know where it comes from. You’ve talked about it, you’ve understood it, you can even explain in great detail why you react the way you do. And still, when something similar happens, your body responds the same way it always has: a tight chest, shaking legs, a blank mind. If understanding it were enough, that wouldn’t happen. So, does trauma live only in your mind?
The limits of the talking cure
Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, proposed making the unconscious conscious so the patient could get better. He believed in the talking cure: remembering and putting into words what happened would bring the insight needed to integrate the experience. For much of the 20th century, that was the way trauma was approached.
The problem is that this doesn’t line up with what current research proposes. As I explain in Not Everything Is Trauma: The Difference Between Trauma and a Trigger, according to the criteria of Karen Saakvitne that Janina Fisher builds on, trauma is something that overwhelms your capacity to process. If trauma breaks precisely that capacity, does it make sense for the solution to be “processing it” with the mind alone?
That’s where the traditional approach starts to show its limits. Talking is still important, but activating traumatic memories without the resources to hold them can be counterproductive, especially when the activation is very high. It’s not something that gets resolved intellectually, just by discussing the story and its roots.
What happens in your brain
During a traumatic event, the amygdala takes control. It’s the brain’s emotional center, it works like a fire alarm, and it’s in charge of encoding strong emotions. When it goes off, activity in the prefrontal cortex decreases.
One of the most cited studies on this is by Scott Rauch, Bessel van der Kolk, and their team, published in 1996 in Archives of General Psychiatry. They scanned the brains of people with post-traumatic stress while they listened to an account of their own trauma. They found more activity in emotional areas and a marked drop in Broca’s area, the region responsible for speech. Van der Kolk calls it speechless terror: what you lived through can literally be left without words.
Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean the amygdala only activates during trauma. It also takes part in ordinary memories. That’s why, if you remember a snowy peak in Huaraz, you also remember the cold, the excitement, and the atmosphere, not just the image. The difference is that in trauma, the amygdala takes control and the prefrontal cortex shuts down.
When the past feels like the present
When you remember something, the prefrontal cortex organizes the experience: it gives it a coherent structure, integrates it with the rest of your memories, and lets you tell it as a story. If that part was offline during the trauma, the memory gets stored without that order. It remains more like implicit learning: sensations, emotions, a smell, a sound, tension in the body.
That’s why traumatic memories tend to be blurry, and why remembering precisely isn’t always possible, or even useful. You’re trying to logically organize something that, by definition, wasn’t stored logically.
Janina Fisher explains that implicit memory carries more emotional weight than declarative memory, and that you can’t choose when it shows up. It’s activated by external stimuli, and you often don’t recognize it as a memory, but as the present. You feel the same thing you felt back then, but you believe it’s what is happening now. And if you don’t recognize it as a memory, you end up absorbing it as part of your personality: “I’m insecure,” “I’m aggressive.”
The body speaks too
If trauma has somatic effects, and it usually does, your body will react before your reasoning does in similar situations. That reaction interferes with how logical your decisions are and with how you see what’s happening. Sustained worry can end up as shaking legs or a psychosomatic condition.
The opposite is also true, and this is the part that interests me most. If the body can activate the mind, it can also calm it. It’s not a one-way relationship, it’s a constant conversation between both systems. Van der Kolk develops this idea in The Body Keeps the Score, one of the best-known books on trauma. If you’re interested in the topic, it’s a good place to start.
Treating the wound where it lives
If trauma lives in the body and is regulated there, it makes sense that its treatment no longer depends only on talking. Approaches like Pat Ogden’s Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and EMDR bring the body directly into the therapeutic process. Not as an add-on, but as a central part.
The evidence on EMDR is solid. Since 2013, the World Health Organization has included it among the recommended treatments for post-traumatic stress, alongside trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. A meta-analysis published in 2024 in Psychological Medicine, led by Simonne Wright and using individual data from 346 patients, found no significant differences between EMDR and other psychological therapies for post-traumatic stress. It’s not a magic technique, but it stands alongside the best-supported treatments we have.
And I also say this from personal experience. EMDR helped me deal with a lot of trauma in my own therapy. It allowed me to feel much of what I had been blocking and to process those physical sensations so I could integrate them. It also opened my mind to the real relationship between mind and body, because I lived it. That’s why today I work so much with the body’s signals in session.
So, does trauma live only in your mind? No. It also lodges in your body, it’s stored in a memory that doesn’t always have words, and it can be regulated from both sides. Mind and body aren’t two systems fighting for control, they’re a single system that can be trained in either direction.
References
Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.
Rauch, S. L., van der Kolk, B. A., Fisler, R. E., Alpert, N. M., Orr, S. P., Savage, C. R., Fischman, A. J., Jenike, M. A., & Pitman, R. K. (1996). A symptom provocation study of posttraumatic stress disorder using positron emission tomography and script-driven imagery. Archives of General Psychiatry, 53(5), 380-387.
Saakvitne, K. W., & Pearlman, L. A. (1996). Transforming the pain: A workbook on vicarious traumatization. W. W. Norton & Company.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
World Health Organization. (2013). Guidelines for the management of conditions specifically related to stress. World Health Organization.
Wright, S. L., Karyotaki, E., Cuijpers, P., Bisson, J., Papola, D., Witteveen, A., Suliman, S., Spies, G., Ahmadi, K., Capezzani, L., et al. (2024). EMDR v. other psychological therapies for PTSD: A systematic review and individual participant data meta-analysis. Psychological Medicine, 54(8), 1580-1588.