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Where trauma lives in the body

If trauma is incomplete survival energy trapped in the nervous system, where does it live? The answer involves three interconnected systems: our sensory awareness, our muscular patterns, and our connective tissue.

Interoception​

The nervous system receives information through multiple sensory channels:

  • Exteroception is the sensing of the external world through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch
  • Proprioception is the sensing of body position in space through signals from joints and muscles
  • Interoception is the sensing of what’s happening inside the body: heartbeat, breath, gut feelings, muscle tension, temperature. This information tells us whether we are hungry, tired, anxious, or calm; not as a thought, but as a felt sense.

Trauma can disrupt all three channels, but interoception is particularly vulnerable. This capacity is foundational to self-regulation: we cannot regulate what we cannot feel.

How trauma disrupts interoception​

Trauma commonly disrupts this internal communication in several ways:

  • Numbing and disconnection — To cope with overwhelming sensation, the nervous system may dampen interoceptive signals. People describe feeling ‘numb’, ‘empty’, or ‘disconnected from the neck down’. This protects against pain but also cuts off vital information.
  • Hypervigilance — Alternatively, trauma may make the body hyper-alert to internal signals, interpreting harmless sensations as dangerous. A regular heartbeat becomes ‘something is wrong with my heart’. Ordinary digestive sensations become cause for alarm.
  • Misinterpretation — Trauma can scramble the meaning of body signals. Excitement may be experienced as fear. Relaxation may trigger anxiety, because letting the guard down feels dangerous. The signals are there, but the interpretation is distorted.
  • Fragmented awareness — Some body areas may be accessible while others are blank. People commonly report being able to feel their head but not their belly, or their chest but not their pelvis. The body map becomes incomplete.

Reconnecting with the body​

The good news is that interoceptive awareness can be developed. Like any skill, it improves with practice. This is the work of somatic therapy: learning to feel the body again.

Try it now: establishing a baseline

Pause for a moment and turn your attention inwards. What do you notice in your body right now?

You might ask yourself:

  • Where do I feel sensation?
  • What is my breath doing?
  • Is there tension anywhere?
  • Warmth or coolness?
  • What does my gut feel like?

Try to describe what you notice precisely. Rather than ‘I feel bad’, something like ‘I notice tightness in my throat and heaviness in my chest’.

You might notice a lot. You might notice very little, or nothing at all. For some people, particularly those with trauma histories, turning attention inwards can feel threatening or uncomfortable. If it feels like too much, simply stop and return to reading.

This brief check-in is a form of interoceptive practice. Done regularly, it builds the capacity to sense and regulate your internal state.

Chronic muscle tension​

Trauma also lives in our muscles. When we face threat, the body’s instinctive response is to curl into a protective ball (the foetal position). This brings the limbs close to protect vital organs and makes us smaller. The muscles that create this curling are the flexor muscles on the front of the body.

When the nervous system remains stuck in defensive mode, these flexor muscles remain chronically contracted. This creates what some bodyworkers call the interior muscle pattern:

  • The masseter in the jaw leads to clenching, teeth grinding, and TMJ issues
  • The sternocleidomastoid (SCM) at the front of the neck creates forward head posture and chronic neck tension
  • The anterior spinal muscles along the front of the spine cause collapsed posture and difficulty standing upright
  • The quadratus lumborum (QL) at the sides of the lower back contributes to lower back pain and restricted rotation
  • The psoas and iliacus (deep hip flexors) create hip tightness, lower back pain, and restricted breathing
  • The adductors in the inner thighs contribute to leg tension and pelvic floor issues

You may recognise this pattern in yourself:

  • Difficulty standing fully upright without effort
  • Chronically tight jaw or grinding teeth at night
  • Lower back pain that doesn’t respond to stretching
  • Tight hip flexors (difficulty with lunges or hip extension)
  • Feeling ‘braced’ or ‘guarded’ in the belly
  • Shallow breathing restricted to the upper chest

Fascia​

These muscles do not exist in isolation. They’re connected by fascia: the connective tissue that surrounds and penetrates every muscle, organ, and structure in the body.

Fascia creates a continuous, three-dimensional web. It contains more sensory nerve endings than the skin, is highly responsive to stress and emotion, and can hold tension patterns for years or decades.

‘It commonly comes as a big surprise to many people to learn that our richest and largest sensory organ is not the eyes, ears, skin, or vestibular system but is in fact our muscles with their related fascia. Our central nervous system receives its greatest amount of sensory nerves from our myofascial tissues.’

— Robert Schleip, Fascial Plasticity

Think of fascia as the body’s ‘fabric’: a continuous sheet that can become tight, restricted, and bound when we experience stress and trauma.

The deep front line​

Fascia researcher Tom Myers identified what he calls the deep front line: a myofascial meridian that runs through the core of the body. This continuous line of tissue connects:

  • The inner arch of the foot
  • Up through the inner leg and adductors
  • Through the psoas and iliacus
  • Into the diaphragm
  • Up through the deep neck muscles
  • To the jaw and base of the skull

This is essentially the same as the interior muscle pattern described above.

Because fascia is continuous, releasing tension in one area often affects distant areas: for example, when the psoas releases, the jaw may relax. Conversely, chronic jaw tension can create neck and shoulder tightness, affect breathing patterns, contribute to low back pain, and influence pelvic floor tension.

How fascia holds trauma​

Fascia holds trauma in several ways:

  • Physical restriction — When we experience threat, the fascia tightens protectively. In chronic stress or unresolved trauma, this tightness persists, creating restricted movement patterns, areas of density or ‘binding’, compensatory patterns throughout the body, limited range of motion, and chronic pain without clear structural causes.
  • Sensory memory — Fascia is richly innervated with mechanoreceptors and nociceptors. It can hold sensory memories of traumatic events, patterns of bracing and protection, and embodied responses that trigger automatically.
  • Emotional holding — Research suggests that emotional states influence fascial tone. Fear and anxiety increase fascial tension. Safety and connection allow fascial softening. Chronic emotional states create chronic fascial patterns.

Implications for somatic work​

Understanding fascia helps explain several phenomena:

  • Why release takes time — Fascial patterns built over years need time to reorganise. Hydration and reorganisation of tissue happens gradually.
  • Why release spreads — Fascial continuity means release in one area affects others. The body works with fascial chains, not isolated muscles.
  • Why emotional release happens — Fascia holds emotional patterns somatically. Physical release of fascial restriction can trigger emotional release.
  • Why hydration matters — Fascia needs water to be pliable and responsive. Dehydrated fascia is more rigid and resistant.
Complementary approaches

Practices that keep fascia mobile and responsive can support trauma healing. In addition to regular movement, these include myofascial release, massage, yoga, stretching, and Rolfing and other Structural Integration approaches.