When Words Aren't Enough: Why Your Childhood Still Lives in Your Body

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being told you're "overreacting" your whole life. The relationships that feel like walking on eggshells. The chronic tension in your jaw, your shoulders, your belly. The ways you've learned to make yourself smaller, quieter, more manageable—and still, somehow, it's never enough.

Maybe you've been in therapy before. You've talked about your childhood, your patterns, your triggers. You understand why you are the way you are. But understanding hasn't changed the fact that your nervous system still floods with panic when someone's tone shifts, or shuts down completely when conflict arises.

You're not broken. But you are carrying something.

What Nobody Talks About: The Body Keeps the Score

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's research reveals something most of us intuitively know but rarely name: when children grow up in environments where caregivers are "emotionally absent, inconsistent, frustrating, violent, intrusive, or neglectful," their developing nervous systems adapt to survive. Not just emotionally—biologically.​

He calls this "complex trauma"—the cumulative impact of "multiple, chronic and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events" that usually happen within families. This doesn't only mean the kinds of abuse that make headlines. It includes emotional neglect, unpredictability, growing up with addiction or mental illness in the home, witnessing domestic violence, or simply being raised by people who couldn't provide the attunement and safety every child needs.​

When this happens during critical developmental windows, "children are unable to modulate their arousal. This causes a breakdown in their capacity to process, integrate, and categorize what is happening".​

The aftermath? Van der Kolk's research documents what many of us live daily:

• Emotional reactions that feel out of proportion—rage that erupts, panic that paralyzes, numbness that descends like a fog

• Bodies that carry chronic pain, digestive problems, headaches, or unexplained medical symptoms

• Relationships organized around either clinging or fleeing, hypervigilance or complete shutdown

• A persistent sense of unsafety in the world, even when objectively safe

• The exhausting work of managing your internal state just to get through a normal day

The landmark Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study found that adults with histories of childhood adversity face dramatically higher rates of "depression, suicide attempts, alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, domestic violence," as well as physical illnesses including "heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, skeletal fractures, and liver disease".​

Your nervous system learned early that the world is dangerous and unpredictable. It's still acting on those instructions.

The Limits of Talking It Out

If you've done traditional talk therapy or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), you might have had the frustrating experience of knowing what you need to do differently but being utterly unable to do it when it matters.

There's a reason for this.

Van der Kolk explains that people with complex trauma histories "have little insight into the relationship between what they do, what they feel, and what has happened to them". More crucially, when triggered by reminders—a certain look, a tone of voice, a feeling of abandonment—"they tend to behave as if they were traumatized all over again—as a catastrophe".​

In those moments, you're not in the thinking part of your brain. You're in survival mode. And no amount of cognitive reframing or rational analysis can reach you there.

Van der Kolk found that "insight and understanding about the origins of their reactions seems to have little effect" on these deeply ingrained nervous system patterns.​

CBT works with thoughts. But trauma isn't stored in thoughts—it's stored in the body, in the nervous system, in the parts of your brain that operate far below conscious awareness.

You can understand why you shut down when your partner seems distant. You can even develop excellent coping strategies. But when it happens—when that familiar wave of panic or rage or numbness rises—your body takes over. The thinking brain goes offline.

This is why so many people spend years in talk therapy feeling like they're going in circles. 

The problem isn't that you're not trying hard enough or not insightful enough. The problem is you're using a tool designed for one part of the brain to fix something lodged in an entirely different part.

A Different Door In

Van der Kolk emphasizes that healing complex trauma requires addressing what he calls "a breakdown in the capacity to regulate internal states". This means the work isn't primarily cognitive—it's somatic, relational, and experiential.​

He writes: "Mastery is, most of all, a physical experience: the feeling of being in charge, calm, and able to engage in focused efforts to accomplish goals. Children who have been traumatized experience the trauma-related hyperarousal and numbing on a deeply somatic level".​

If trauma lives in the body, healing must happen there too.

This is where somatic-based approaches—including Expressive Arts Therapy, somatic experiencing, and body-centered modalities—offer something fundamentally different from traditional talk therapy.

The Three Stages of Healing

Van der Kolk outlines three essential phases of trauma recovery, none of which begin with talking about the trauma:​

1. Establishing Safety and Competence

Before anything else, your nervous system needs to learn—through direct experience, not intellectual understanding—that you are safe now.

This happens through what van der Kolk calls "neutral, 'fun' tasks and physical games" that allow you to experience "what it feels like to be relaxed and to feel a sense of physical mastery".​

In Expressive Arts Therapy, this might look like:

• Working with clay to ground into sensation

• Using rhythm and sound to regulate your nervous system

• Creating collages or paintings that bypass verbal processing

• Movement practices that help you inhabit your body with curiosity rather than fear

These aren't distractions or "coping skills" in the traditional sense. They're direct interventions into your nervous system, teaching it—at the level where it actually learns—that engagement can be pleasurable, that your body can be a source of safety rather than threat.

2. Working with Re-enactments

Van der Kolk notes that traumatized people "tend to communicate the nature of their traumatic past by repeating it in the form of interpersonal enactments"—unconsciously recreating familiar relational patterns even when they cause suffering.​

These patterns don't shift through insight alone. They shift through new experiences.

Somatic and expressive arts approaches create what I call a "third space"—not your thinking mind analyzing the pattern, not the raw replay of the pattern itself, but a symbolic, embodied space where the pattern can emerge, be witnessed, and gradually transform.

Maybe you paint your rage. Move your grief. Sculpt the younger version of yourself who learned to be small. These aren't metaphors for healing—they are the healing, happening in real time through your body's own wisdom.

3. Integration: Reconnecting Body, Emotion, and Meaning

Trauma fragments experience. Sensations become disconnected from emotions. Emotions become disconnected from memory. Memory becomes disconnected from narrative meaning.

Van der Kolk describes the goal as helping people "develop new connections between their experiences, emotions and physical reactions".​

When you create an image, then notice where you feel it in your body, then gradually find words for what's emerging—you're literally building new neural pathways. You're integrating what trauma tore apart.

This is body-led processing. Not talking about your experience, but moving through it, with your body as guide.

Why Expressive Arts Therapy Works Differently

One of the most liberating aspects of expressive arts approaches is this: you don't need to have the words.

Van der Kolk observes that traumatized people "often are literally 'out of touch' with their feelings, and often have no language to describe internal states".​

Many of my clients come to me after years of talk therapy saying some version of: "I don't know what I feel. I just know something's wrong."

Perfect. We don't start with talking. We start with making.

Your hands know things your mind has forgotten or never had words for. Your body holds truths that language can't capture. Through paint, clay, movement, sound, collage, writing—through the multiple languages of creative expression—you access parts of yourself that cognitive therapy simply can't reach.

And crucially, you do this in a way that doesn't re-traumatize. You're not forcing yourself to "go back" and relive the past. You're creating something new, in the present, with support and containment.

What Becomes Possible

Van der Kolk's work points toward a simple but profound truth: healing happens when people learn they "are repeating their early experiences and helping them find new ways of coping by developing new connections between their experiences, emotions and physical reactions"​

This isn't about erasing your history. It's about fundamentally shifting your relationship to it.

Healing can look like:

• A nervous system that knows how to find its way back to calm after activation

• The capacity to feel your emotions without being destroyed by them

• Relationships where you can stay present even in conflict or intimacy

• A body you can inhabit with curiosity, even tenderness

• The gradual, astonishing realization that you are not the terrible things that happened to you

Van der Kolk offers a pointed criticism of conventional treatment: "Unfortunately, all too often, medications take the place of helping children acquire the skills necessary to deal with and master their uncomfortable physical sensations".​

The same applies to adults. Medication can be helpful for managing acute symptoms. But it cannot teach your nervous system that you are safe. It cannot build new neural pathways. It cannot give you the embodied experience of mastery and agency that is the foundation of healing.

Your Body Has Been Waiting

You've spent so much of your life trying to think your way out of what you feel. Analyzing, understanding, managing, controlling. And still, your body keeps the tally—in tension, in pain, in the ways you brace against connection or collapse under stress.

What if healing wasn't about finally getting your mind to override your body's responses?

What if it was about finally listening to what your body has been trying to tell you all along?

Your nervous system learned to protect you in the only ways it knew how. Those strategies made sense once. They kept you alive. But they're not serving you anymore.

You can learn new ways of being—not through force or discipline or "positive thinking," but through gentle, embodied practices that teach your body what safety actually feels like.

Not as an idea. As a lived experience.