Your Body Is Not a Problem to Solve

The Body Keeps the Score was groundbreaking. It was meant to liberate us from the old mind–body split that has shaped Western medicine for centuries. And yet, its misunderstanding has created another trap: we’ve begun to police ourselves through the body. Instead of freedom, many of us now live under a new vigilance—constantly scanning, analyzing, and critiquing every sensation. We wonder, Is this tension proof of my trauma? Am I doing healing right? What was meant to open a door into compassion has, in many cases, become another performance of self-surveillance.

We scan our sensations for evidence of trauma, trying to locate it, name it, and fix it—as if healing were a scavenger hunt for the “right spot” or the “right memory.” The body becomes another place to measure our progress, another site of perfectionism. Instead of softening into relationship with our inner world, we tighten the reins—chasing some future version of ourselves that will finally be “healed enough.” And in that chase, we miss the very thing we long for: presence. We trade intimacy with what is arising right now for the fantasy of who we might become once the pain is gone.

The deeper question is not simply where we carry our pain but what the pain is asking of us. When we prod at our bodies as if they’re vaults of buried secrets, we risk treating healing like extraction—pulling pain out instead of sitting down with it, listening to it, and learning its language.

Because trauma isn’t simply lodged in the muscles or fascia like dust in a corner. The nervous system is not a storage unit; it’s a living, breathing organism. It carries our personal histories, yes, but also the patterns our bodies rehearsed again and again in the name of survival. What shows up in sensation is less about discovering a hidden file in the archive and more about recognizing the nervous system’s ongoing attempts to protect us.

The body’s vigilance is brilliant, and often misplaced. Like an overactive smoke alarm, it rings out of devotion, not accuracy. That flutter in your chest during conflict, that sudden numbness in your legs—these are not signs that you’re failing at healing. They are reminders of how devoted your body has been to keeping you safe, even if its strategies no longer fit the present moment.

So healing is not about forcing the body to “let go.” It’s about entering into dialogue. When grief wells up, we don’t rush to purge it; we turn toward it and ask: What is this sorrow teaching me about love? About loss? About being human?

This is where depth psychology meets the nervous system. The psyche speaks in images and symbols; the body speaks in sensations and impulses. Together, they form a conversation. Our task is to listen—to thank the protectors for their service, to remind the body that not every moment is a battlefield, and to allow the wisdom beneath the symptom to be revealed.

Healing is not erasure. It is integration. It’s expanding our capacity to stay present with what arises, letting grief and fear become teachers rather than enemies. Healing, then, is less about what we do to the body and more about how we relate to it. Less about extracting pain, more about learning its language. If we can shift from fixing to listening, from erasure to reverence, we begin to discover that the body was never our enemy. It has been our companion all along, waiting for us to pay attention.

Madeleine