Part 1: When the Body Remembers: Understanding Trauma Through the Nervous System

You can’t think your way out of a trauma response.

Let me repeat—no matter how intelligent you are, you can’t think your way out of a trauma response. This is not due to a lack of insight or strength. It’s the way your nervous system learned to survive.

This is something I come back to again and again in my work with trauma. So many people walk into therapy burdened by the belief that they’re broken because they know what’s happening but still can’t seem to change it. They’ve read the books or followed the social media advice. They understand the patterns. And yet, when something reminds them—consciously or not—of past pain, their body reacts with urgency and fear.

This is not a failure or a sign of weakness. This is physiology.

The nervous system doesn’t think logically or critically. It doesn’t speak through language or insight. It speaks through sensation, rhythm, and memory—deep, implicit memory that often lies beyond our conscious reach. This is why we can’t simply talk ourselves out of a panic attack.

When we experience trauma—whether it’s a single overwhelming event or the slow erosion of safety over time—our nervous system encodes those experiences as threat, not as a story, but as a felt sense.

We often experience the same physiological patterns:

– Heart racing

– Breath disappearing

– Muscles tightening or going limp

– The world going silent—or deafeningly loud

– Time distorting

– Self-isolation

– Shrinking or collapsing inward

These are all signs that we are in survival mode. And survival mode does not care that you’re late for work, or that your friends are waiting. It only cares that you live through this moment.

These are the physiological states of fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. Most people have heard of fight-or-flight, but the nervous system holds more nuanced strategies to protect us.

• Fight: If the threat feels beatable, we become combative. Anger is our armor.

• Flight: If escape is possible, we flee—sometimes physically, sometimes emotionally. Perfectionism and anxiety can be forms of flight.

• Freeze: When fight or flight fail, we go still. Numb. Invisible. This isn’t weakness—it’s one of the body’s most protective responses.

• Fawn: Especially in relational trauma, we please. We over-adapt, hoping we can prevent harm by being what others want us to be.

These responses are not flaws. They’re brilliant adaptations. Even if the original threat is long gone, the body still remembers.

Healing doesn’t begin with thinking differently. It begins with feeling differently. It begins with safety—not the idea of safety, but the felt experience of it.

That’s why, at the Integrative Trauma Collective, we create spaces grounded in what we call the SSS Experience: Safe, Secure, and Stable. These are the foundations of healing. When safety is real—not forced—then the body begins to soften. The nervous system can finally consider the possibility: Maybe I’m okay now.

Stay with us for Part 2, where we explore how somatic therapy helps us reconnect with the body’s wisdom—and begin the slow, sacred process of renegotiating trauma.

Written by: Dr. Nick Monzon, Psy.D, SEP