10/19/2025
“I hope your therapist understands one thing incredibly well when helping you heal trauma.
Trauma doesn’t care what you’re talking about in counseling.
Trauma doesn’t care what you think your problem is.
It just hurts.
It hurts at the cellular level.
It hurts in your chest, your gut, your skin.
It hurts before you even have a thought about why.
That’s the part that most of us don’t understand.
We try to solve the hurt with stories.
We connect it to money.
We connect it to s*x.
We connect it to our job, our partner, our childhood, our parents.
Our mind wants a reason so it can protect us from feeling powerless.
But trauma isn’t logical.
It’s mechanical.
It lives in the body long after the story has ended.
That’s why it’s so tricky.
Your brain tells you, “I’m upset because of my relationship.”
But what’s really happening is your nervous system is echoing an old wound.
You’re not wrong to feel it.
It’s just that the body is remembering faster than your mind can understand.
This is why healing isn’t about finding the perfect story.
It’s about learning to feel the sensations that live underneath every story.
The tightness.
The shaking.
The restlessness.
The sudden drop in your stomach.
The wave that makes you want to run, fix, or explain.
That’s trauma trying to finish what it never got to complete.
When something painful happens, your body prepares to fight, flee, or freeze.
If you’re young, powerless, or trapped, that energy has nowhere to go.
So it stays.
It hides in your muscles, in your breath, in the speed of your thoughts.
And years later, something small, a tone of voice, a look, a delay in a text, reactivates the same loop.
It’s not that you’re overreacting.
It’s that your body is still reacting to something that never ended.
You can’t think your way out of that.
You can’t logic your way out of that.
You can only learn to stay with it long enough for it to move through.
That’s why somatic work matters.
That’s why breathwork and meditation matter.
That’s why the simplest act of noticing what’s happening inside your body matters.
Not because they erase your pain, but because they teach your body that it can survive feeling it.
Healing doesn’t mean you stop hurting.
It means the hurt stops owning you.
It means you can feel sadness without collapsing.
You can feel fear without shutting down.
You can feel anger without needing to destroy or disappear.
You can sit inside discomfort and know you’re safe now.
And this part is important: your trauma doesn’t just show up in your pain.
It shows up in your joy too.
It’s why joy can feel unfamiliar, even frightening.
Because when your body’s been organized around protecting itself, ease feels unsafe.
Love feels too exposed.
Peace feels suspicious.
So you reach for chaos again, not because you want to suffer, but because chaos feels like home.
You know how to survive there.
You don’t yet know how to relax in safety.
That’s what the real work of therapy is about.
Not just understanding what happened to you, but teaching your nervous system that it’s over.
That you can rest now.
That you don’t have to stay on guard in every conversation, every decision, every silence.
The hardest part is that your mind still wants to make sense of it.
It still wants to name the reason, identify the source, and link it to every moment of your life.
That’s what the brain does when it’s afraid, it searches for control.
But control and healing don’t live in the same room.
Healing lives in surrender.
It lives in noticing, without trying to fix.
It lives in softening when your impulse is to brace.
It lives in the moment you stop asking, “Why does this still hurt?” and start saying, “It’s okay that it does.”
Because trauma isn’t healed by solving the story.
It’s healed by feeling what the story never let you feel.
Every time you stay present with your pain, your body learns something new.
It learns that this time, you’re safe.
This time, you’re not alone.
This time, you’re allowed to feel it all and still exist afterward.
That’s how the old loops start to dissolve.
Not through force, but through kindness.
Not through logic, but through presence.
Not through understanding the pain, but through allowing it.
Because when you stop confusing the trigger for the source,
you stop building your life around the pain.
And you start building it around the truth.
You stop trying to fix what’s not broken.
You stop searching for safety in people who can’t provide it.
You stop blaming the world for the echoes inside your body.
And for the first time, you start to feel space.
Breath.
Stillness.
The kind of peace that doesn’t need to be earned.
That’s when you know you’re healing.
Not when the pain disappears, but when it stops defining who you are.
That’s the moment the real healing begins.
When the story loses its grip,
and your body finally remembers what safety feels like.”
Derek Heart
