When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot Reach
On somatosensory approaches to trauma, and why the body has to be part of the conversation
Rose in Solitude by Karina Da Paixao Teixeira
I am writing a book on intrusive memories. It may become a fictional autobiography about my traumas and my ongoing experiences of disturbing recollection of fragmented memories from childhood. It has to be fictional, here and there, because my perpetrators are alive. In my own journey to survival, I became an artist, a registered nurse and a therapist. So, I have a theory that trauma can also lead you to a meaningful life, even when confusion still comes.
I have been studying Experiential Reframing and other somatosensory approaches because I see effectiveness on both chronic psychosocial and existential trauma. Before I go further, it is worth being precise about what those two things actually are, because the distinction matters clinically.
Chronic psychosocial trauma is repeated relational harm that accumulates over time, within the systems a person depends on for safety. This is where childhood trauma occurs. No way to fight or flight. It includes emotional or physical abuse, neglect, domestic violence, community violence, prolonged bullying. What makes it particularly complex is that the harm is interpersonal and often comes from attachment figures, which means the nervous system cannot fully distinguish between the source of threat and the source of safety. The schemas that form around this kind of trauma tend to be deeply embedded because they were built slowly, reinforced repeatedly, and organised around survival within a relationship. Van der Kolk's work is useful here: the body encodes this kind of chronic exposure differently from a single event, often producing a diffuse, pervasive dysregulation rather than a clean trigger-response pattern.
Existential trauma is different. It refers to acute events that threaten life or bodily integrity. A car accident, an assault, a medical emergency, a natural disaster. The threat is sudden and external, and while the nervous system response is equally powerful, the event itself has a beginning and an end. There is often a clearer narrative around it. The cognitive and perceptual systems, while disrupted, are working with a bounded experience.
The key clinical distinction is this: chronic psychosocial trauma tends to produce character-level adaptations, what Jeffrey Young would call early maladaptive schemas, because the repeated experience shaped how the person came to understand themselves, others, and the world during development. It is much more than a scar. The imprint of fragmented memories built the architecture. Existential trauma, by contrast, tends to produce a rupture in a previously more stable sense of self and world. The person knew who they were before. The work is different in each case.
Why the body has to be part of it
Traumatic memory is primarily perceptual and somatic, not narrative. It is encoded during high cortisol states when the hippocampus is partially offline, so it does not get stored as a coherent story you can simply talk through. It gets stored as fragmented sensation, body states, and conditioned fear responses. You can narrate the event without touching the encoded experience.
This is the neurobiological reality: trauma memories are not stored in the prefrontal cortex, where rational thought lives. Trauma is visceral. It is stored in the body, in the experience of fight, flight, freeze, or submit. When signals are sent to the brain, often as a wrong prediction of threat, those memories are triggered without conscious awareness. The individual feels them physically, not intellectually.
This is why cognitive restructuring can fail to reach the implicit and nonverbal components of trauma. It is also why a significant number of clients drop out of exposure treatments. They cannot sustain the somatosensory weight of what gets activated in the retelling process, leaving past trauma alive and activated rather than moving toward resolution. Talk therapy is not enough. Not here.
Rather than entering through narrative and thinking downward into the body, somatosensory approaches enter through the body and work upward. The body is the gateway, not the destination.
Experiential Reframing and the somatosensory search
Rogers and White's research on Experiential Reframing is interesting in this context. Their somatosensory search approach makes particular sense for chronic trauma, where cognitive search tends to either miss the material entirely or land on the wrong thing. The body holds what the narrative cannot access.
Rather than asking someone to cognitively recall what happened, you ask them to feel their way back through the body's memory. That is a meaningful clinical distinction, and it aligns with van der Kolk, Porges's polyvagal work, and Ogden's sensorimotor approach. Trauma work in this frame might begin with psychoeducation, discussing with a client the neurobiology of trauma, how conditions and environment cause nervous system injuries, how encoding affects both memory and response. And crucially, resources are identified first: the successful strategies a client has already developed, before moving toward traumatic material. The client's own experience of coping becomes part of the treatment.
I say this not only as a clinician. Because of my own intrusive memories and flashbacks, I understand from the inside what Rogers and White describe: trauma as the result of poor integration between the cognitive and perceptual memory systems. That is not an abstract definition. It is something you live.
On resistance, and what Erickson understood
Cognitive Behavioural approaches help, but not always with clients who are presenting resistance. This is where I borrow from Ericksonian paradoxical interventions.
Symptom prescription: a person with insomnia is instructed to stay awake as long as possible. Restraining change: the therapist advises not to move too quickly. By removing the pressure, ambivalence decreases and motivation increases. In reframing, we change the meaning of the symptom without changing the fact. Anxiety becomes a system of alertness rather than a malfunction. Utilisation takes this further: the client's resistance itself becomes part of the therapeutic process. If a client is sceptical, that scepticism becomes part of the induction. Whatever the client brings is useful material.
Erickson also understood that strategic positioning and contradiction from the therapist can disrupt rigid patterns of thinking, creating a cognitive opening in which new responses can emerge.
Why does this work? Because, as Victor Carrión's work on Cue-Centered Therapy makes clear, PTSD feeds on avoidance. Paradoxical prescription removes the effort of suppression. And when a client chooses to produce a symptom on instruction, they demonstrate control over something they believed was uncontrollable. That shift, from helplessness to agency, is itself therapeutic. These techniques often bypass the conscious, critical mind and speak more directly to unconscious patterns. Erickson knew this. Posttraumatic growth has a way of teaching it too.
I want to be clear about something. These interventions are most effective when delivered within a trusting therapeutic relationship and calibrated carefully to the individual. Used clumsily or without sensitivity, they can feel manipulative. Erickson's genius was partly in his exceptional attunement to each person, which made techniques that look strange on paper feel natural and even obvious in the room. They have since influenced strategic therapy (Haley), brief therapy (MRI/Watzlawick), and narrative approaches, and remain a rich area of study.
This is food for thought, drawn from research, from practice as a counsellor and registered nurse, and from my own survival. We still need further substantial research on the neurobiology of trauma to establish Experiential Reframing's effectiveness with the rigour it deserves. But the direction feels right. The body has been trying to tell us something for a long time.
With curiosity and care for your story,
Karina
If you're curious...
Carrión, V. G. (2016). Cue-Centered Therapy for Youth Experiencing Posttraumatic Symptoms: A Structured, Multi-Modal Intervention. Oxford University Press.
Erickson, M. H. (1985). Life Reframing in Hypnosis. Irvington.
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. Norton.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation.
Norton.
Rogers, S. D., & White, S. L. (2017). Experiential reframing: A promising new treatment for psychosocial and existential trauma. Practice Innovations, 2(1), 27–38.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin.
Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide. Guilford Press.