How to Know if You Have Emotional Trauma Trapped in Your Body

• You’re suddenly experiencing a lot of pain, without any obvious physical cause.
• Your physical pain started at around the same time as a major life event/transition or difficult experience.
• You know that you had emotionally traumatic experience(s) in the past, and intellectually you’re “over it”, but you continue to be easily triggered, and consistently slip into old behavioral/emotional patterns.

In some situations, when an emotionally overwhelming event happens, your system will choose to protect you by converting some of your emotional pain into physical pain somewhere in your body; basically it stores it until later, when you’re better able to process it.

This is a highly intelligent move. Sometimes your nervous system just can’t handle that much input, especially when multiple stressors are happening at the same time. (Maybe you just lost your job, and then a loved one dies, for example). Your system prioritizes what it can process now, and what has to wait until later.

Sometimes your social or cultural conditioning makes it hard for you to allow yourself to access or express your emotions. Dysfunctional beliefs like “men shouldn’t cry” or “women shouldn’t get angry” short circuit your healing process. Instead of letting your emotions arise and flow through you, you unconsciously redirect the emotional pain immediately into physical pain or dysfunction.