Telling the story of your trauma and naming your emotions is a vital and courageous step in the healing journey. Many people have a list of things from childhood that they’ve vowed to never say out loud. 

These secrets, bound by shame, often feel unbearable to even acknowledge to ourselves, much less another person. Speaking our story with trusted people begins to lift this weight and sets us on a path to healing. And is an important and powerful part of the journey of recovery.

Along with this, acknowledging the thinking distortions and limiting beliefs that often arise from trauma is equally important. As we get into recovery and start getting into reality about our childhood trauma, we start to connect some dots and get clarity around some of the ‘why’ underneath our behavior, beliefs about ourselves and how we operate in relationships.

These pieces of the healing journey are foundational and a powerful beginning.

But if you stop there you limit the healing possibilities available to you. A therapy or recovery process that emphasizes primarily left-brain activity (i.e. telling the story, changing behavior, cognitive acknowledgment of emotions) doesn’t fully address the profound and pervasive impact of childhood trauma.

It’s essential to recognize that we can’t separate our minds from our bodies. It’s not possible. We experience emotion in the body. Our thoughts elicit sensations in the body. Our body is always involved. Always.

For most of us, survival from childhood trauma meant disconnecting from our bodies—often through dissociation or shutting down emotions. As children, it was too overwhelming to stay present in our bodies, and this pattern often continues into adulthood. Our brains adapt to operate in this fragmented way, making it even more challenging to reconnect.

Comprehensive treatment for childhood trauma must embrace a whole-body approach. When you truly engage with the effects of trauma, you experience it on multiple levels:

• Mind: Your thoughts, images, judgments, and beliefs about yourself and what happened

• Body: Body memories and other physical sensations, breathing changes, tears, crying

• Heart/Soul/Spirit: Feeling lost, unsure of what’s real and what’s not, feeling unsafe in the world and in relationships, hiding, feeling shut down

• Sense of Self: Self-doubt, feelings of worthlessness, and a lack of a sense of belonging

The trauma that you experienced as a child impacted the whole of you, and you carry that with you every day. I did too.

A Holistic Approach to Recovery

Adopting a head-to-toe, inside-and-out approach to recovery helps you connect to the reality of your experiences. When you were shamed by your mom, it affected your thoughts and beliefs—and you carry that shame in your body. When you were hit by your dad, it hurt your physical body—and over time it may have affected how you saw yourself. 

Any abuse and neglect that you experienced impacted you in body, mind, and spirit.

I believe that childhood trauma recovery must include body-based elements. This could look like simply paying attention to physical sensations during therapy and being curious about them.  Or you might work with a therapist trained in experiential modalities like Somatic Experiencing or Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy. The key is to involve your physical body in the therapeutic process.

Outside of your work in therapy, embracing a whole-body experience involves:

• Movement: Engage in yoga, stretching, or walking to connect with your body

• Self-Care: Ensure you get adequate rest, stay hydrated, and schedule regular health check-ups

• Listen to and trust your body: Learn to identify and respond to feelings of hunger, thirst, tiredness, comfort, and discomfort

This is a gentle process. Take your time. Seek support from others who are also navigating their own whole-body recovery journey.

Starting Your Whole-Body Recovery Journey

If this holistic approach is new to you, consider these steps to begin shifting your recovery process:

• During Therapy: The next time you see your therapist, pay attention to any physical sensation that comes up during your session. Notice it without judgment and tell your therapist what’s happening for you. The two of you can approach it with curiosity to see if there’s anything to learn from it. And if there’s nothing clear that comes from it, that’s OK. The point here is to get used to paying attention to what’s happening in your body.

• Dialogue with Your Body: Write a letter or engage in a dialogue with your body, acknowledging all it did to help you survive your childhood.

• Emotional Awareness: When you feel an emotion, try to identify where it shows up in your body. And if you can, try to describe it – does it have a color, texture or shape?

Trauma affects our entire being, not just our thoughts and emotions. So we must approach trauma healing that way also – with our whole being. This holistic approach allows us to fully process trauma rather than merely analyzing it intellectually. It’s a courageous journey—one that can lead to profound, embodied healing.

The road may be long, but embracing the entirety of our trauma experiences is the surest path to wholeness.