Why I Stopped Fighting My Trauma Responses

I spent years running from the very sensations that wanted to heal me.

Every racing heart, every tight throat, every surge of anxiety felt like evidence that I was broken. So I fought them. I tried to think my way out, breathe my way through, or simply push past the discomfort.

I equated healing with relief. Progress meant feeling lighter, freer, calmer.

Then someone suggested something that rattled me to my core: What if tension wasn't the enemy?

What if the very sensations I'd spent years trying to escape were actually trying to communicate something essential?

When Your Body Speaks a Different Language

The shift happened during a somatic practice session. I was lying on the floor, eyes closed, no agenda except to breathe.

Suddenly, I felt this sharp constriction in my throat. Like a dam holding back a flood. My chest tightened. My jaw clenched.

Instead of my usual response of trying to make it stop, I stayed.

What came wasn't thoughts or memories. It was pure sensation: a surge of sorrow, deep and ancient. My body was telling the truth I had long silenced.

The tension wasn't random dysfunction. It was the residue of years I spent holding in what I didn't feel safe to speak. Fear, violation, the grief of being unseen.

My mind had always minimized it: That was a long time ago. You're okay now. It wasn't that bad.

But my body remembered. My body never forgot.

In that moment, I realized healing wasn't about narrating a coherent story with words. It was about letting my cells complete a cycle they'd been holding for decades.

The tension in my throat wasn't dysfunction. It was unfinished communication.

The Science Behind Cellular Memory

What I experienced that day aligns with emerging research on how trauma lives in our bodies.

Scientists now understand that trauma can register within our bodies on a cellular level, with evidence proving that as humans, we store memories, experiences, and emotions in our cells.

This explains why traditional talk therapy, while valuable, sometimes falls short. We're trying to heal cellular stories with cognitive tools.

The neurochemistry supports this too. The catecholamine family of neurotransmitters, including dopamine and norepinephrine, play crucial roles in our stress responses, while oxytocin-containing circuits can be activated to promote resilience and neurochemicals healing.

When we sit with tension instead of fighting it, we're allowing these natural healing processes to unfold.

Our nervous system has what researchers call neuroception. It constantly scans our bodies, other people, and the environment for cues of safety and danger.

What we often call "symptoms" are our nervous system's intelligent responses to perceived threats. They're not malfunctions. They're communications.

From Pathology to Protection

This reframe changes everything about how we approach trauma recovery.

Instead of asking "What's wrong with me?" we begin asking "What did I need to survive?" That question shifts the entire paradigm from pathology to protection, from shame to honor.

When someone makes this shift from being at war with their body to being in companionship with it, the entire landscape of their healing changes.

At first, there's often grief. Grief for all the years spent trying to fix, fight, or silence parts of themselves that were asking for care.

But then something softens. The body becomes less of a battleground and more of a companion. Wounded, yes, but wise.

Instead of asking "How do I stop this anxiety?" they begin asking "What is this part trying to protect?"

Instead of collapsing in shame, they start getting curious about their triggers, noticing them as echoes of past pain rather than signs of current failure.

The Art of Staying Present

Learning to befriend tension isn't about diving deep into every sensation or trying to decode every response.

It starts much simpler than that.

It might mean placing a hand on your heart when it races and saying, "I'm here."

It might mean naming aloud, "I feel tension in my chest," and then letting that be enough.

It might mean breathing into your belly and reminding yourself, "I don't have to figure this out right now. I just have to stay with myself."

Tension isn't asking you to solve it. It's asking you to accompany it.

That transition from resistance to witnessing is subtle but unmistakable once you've felt it. It often begins with tension that feels loud: clenching, racing thoughts, urgency to do something.

But if you stay present long enough, breathing and softening around the edges of discomfort, something shifts.

The volume turns down, not because the sensation disappears, but because you're no longer fighting it.

Physically, it might feel like a loosening in the jaw, warmth spreading through the chest, or tears rising without agenda. Sometimes it's quiet. Sometimes it's a deep exhale from somewhere older than language.

Tension as the Threshold of Reclamation

When someone is reclaiming their story, moving from "this happened to me" to "this lives in me, but it is not all of me," tension is almost always present.

Not because something is wrong, but because something true is being remembered.

Tension becomes a kind of gatekeeper. It asks: Are you ready to meet this part of your story with compassion, not judgment? Are you willing to stay long enough to listen to what it still needs to say?

The power of tension is that it slows us down. It won't let us rush past the parts of the story that were never fully witnessed.

And in that very slowing, in staying, authorship becomes possible.

To reclaim a story isn't to erase the pain. It's to choose how that pain lives inside us now.

Tension is the moment when that choice becomes available. It's the space between reflex and response, between collapse and clarity. It's where agency is reborn.

We reclaim our stories through the tension, not around it.

Because in that embodied pause, when we stop fleeing and start listening, we find the voice we thought we lost.

You're Not Broken, You're Thawing

If I could speak to my earlier self in those moments when discomfort felt unbearable, I wouldn't give advice or try to explain anything.

I would sit beside them quietly and say: I know this feels like too much. But it's not proof that something's wrong with you. It's proof that something in you is alive and still trying to reach you.

What feels unbearable isn't a failure. It's life trying to move through the places where it once got stuck.

The tightness, the trembling, the tears. They're not signs of weakness. They're signs of intelligence. Of survival. Of truth finally surfaced after being held for too long.

You're not broken. You're thawing.

There will come a day when this very tension, this ache that once felt like the edge of undoing, will become the doorway to your greatest becoming.

This discomfort, sacred and overwhelming as it is, isn't the end of the story. It's the beginning of remembering you still belong to yourself.

And you always have.

The Path Forward

Tension isn't a detour on the healing path. It is the path.

It's the body's invitation into a deeper relationship with the parts of us that were too young, too tender, or too overwhelmed to speak at the time.

Now they're speaking through sensation, through tightness, through pauses that ask us to listen differently.

Healing doesn't happen because we force ourselves through the tension. It happens when we realize we don't have to walk through it alone.

You're not alone in your thawing. You're not wrong for needing time. You're not too much for feeling deeply.

Every trembling moment, every deep breath you take instead of pushing it down, that's the story beginning to shift. Not because it's being rewritten, but because it's finally being witnessed.

This work is tender. It's holy. And it's yours.

Walk gently. Trust the wisdom in your tension.

Your story isn't over. It's just beginning to speak in a fuller voice.