Your Body Remembers What You Forgot

The mind moves on. The body keeps the receipt.

In this reflection we explore the memory that lives in muscle and bone.

You smell something and suddenly you are seven years old, standing in a kitchen that no longer exists. You hear a song and your chest tightens before you remember why. Your body knew before your mind caught up.

This is why you can think you are over something and still feel your stomach drop when you see a name on your phone. Why you can believe you have moved on and still flinch at a raised voice. The mind narrates. The body remembers.

Trauma specialists talk about implicit memory. The kind that does not come with a story attached. You do not recall the event. You just feel the response. The racing heart, the urge to flee, the sudden need to make yourself small. Your system is reacting to something it recognizes even when you do not.

This can feel like betrayal. You did the work. You processed. You understand what happened and why. And yet here is your body, stuck in a past you thought you left behind.

But the body is not betraying you. It is protecting you. It learned something once about what is dangerous, and it does not want to learn the lesson twice. The problem is that the body does not know the difference between then and now. It just knows the pattern.

Sometimes the body needs to complete a response it was never allowed to finish. The run it could not take. The scream it could not release. The collapse it could not afford. Somatic work creates space for those interrupted impulses to finally move through.

You are not imagining it. The tension in your neck, the knot in your stomach, the way your jaw clenches at certain words. These are not random. They are records. They are your body saying: this happened, and I have not forgotten.