11/18/2025
When I found Assisted Lymphatic Therapy I was told that emotional trauma congests the lymphatic system in just minutes. This post elegantly and passionately describes how this happens….
🫶✨ The Lymphatic System of a Griever
Post 4/30 — The Weight of Silence
There are wounds the world never sees.
The ones you bury so deeply inside yourself that even your own breath feels too loud around them.
Tonight’s piece is for every soul who has ever carried a trauma so heavy, so unspeakable, that your body learned to whisper what your mouth could not. 🕊️
There comes a moment in grief, in shock, in survival, where your entire system shuts down to protect you.
Your mind freezes.
Your breath flattens.
Your chest tightens.
Your body becomes a shelter from a storm it never asked to weather. 🌧️
And somewhere in that silence, your lymphatic system becomes a witness to the pain you don’t yet have words for. 💚
When trauma hits your nervous system, it hits your lymphatic system too.
Stress hormones rise.
Your vagus nerve constricts.
Your body prepares for danger long after the danger is gone.
Your lymphatic vessels slow.
Inflammation grows quietly.
Weight begins to shift, not because you are weak, not because you don’t care, but because your body has shifted into survival mode. ⚡
Trauma steals more than peace
It steals sleep 😔
It steals hormones
It steals digestion
It steals lymphatic flow
Many of us don’t talk about how a broken heart can become a swollen body.
We don’t talk about how fear can feel like pressure behind the collarbones.
We don’t talk about how grief can sit in the abdomen like a stone.
We don’t talk about how the body holds on when the soul is exhausted. 🫂
But I saw it in myself.
The night my world changed, my body changed with it.
I watched myself move differently.
I watched fatigue crawl in where energy used to live.
I watched insomnia take over nights that used to be peaceful.
My weight shifted without warning.
Food became both comfort and punishment.
My lymphatic flow slowed down so much that I felt swollen from the inside out. 💔
Trauma doesn’t just scar the heart.
It rewires biology.
It rewrites hormones.
It reshapes the physical body in ways most people never understand.
🧠✨ A moment of education: What trauma does to your glymphatic system
The glymphatic system is your brain’s waste-clearance network — the nighttime cleansing pathway that flushes out toxins, inflammatory proteins and metabolic waste while you sleep.
But trauma changes that.
Trauma keeps the brain in survival mode.
It stops the nervous system from dropping into deep, slow-wave sleep — the only time the glymphatic system can fully open.
Without deep sleep:
CSF flow slows
Toxins accumulate
Neuroinflammation rises
Brain fog worsens
Memory becomes heavy
And you wake up feeling unrefreshed even after hours of sleep 😞
Your brain isn’t broken.
Your glymphatic system has simply not felt safe enough to rest.
This is biology doing everything it can to protect you.
💚✨ Returning to the heart of the piece
If you are reading this and you feel like your body has betrayed you, please hear me:
It hasn’t.
Your body has only been trying to protect you.
And protection sometimes looks like holding on.
Holding fluid.
Holding inflammation.
Holding weight.
Holding memories your brain couldn’t process.
Holding the pieces of you until you feel safe enough to breathe again. 🌿
Healing begins the moment you recognise that your body is not the enemy.
Your body has been carrying a story too heavy for you alone.
Tonight’s piece is for the ones who survived.
The ones who kept walking with broken lymphatic flow, broken glymphatic flow, broken sleep, broken hormones, broken hearts.
The ones who are slowly learning that healing is not about getting your old body back.
It is about loving the body that kept you alive. ❤️🩹
You are not behind.
You are not failing.
You are still here.
And your body, your brain, your lymph, your spirit
are ready for a gentler chapter. 🌙
Your healing is coming.
And this time, you do not walk alone. 🤍
