How the Body Stores Trauma

I came across a soul-touching piece the other day that describes so well how the body and mind store the pain of our lived experience. This story with its frank representation of the impacts of trauma quickly brought me to tears and I share it here with you in hopes it can normalize the natural response one has after one experiences great pain.

The story “The Good Fairy” is an adaptation by Jan Mullen from a report by Tara Brach of a client, “Rosalie” encountering an internal guide in session.

The Good Fairy

From the corners where the silence remains, there came the urgency to go to a mountaintop and scream out the whole truth. I sent out a prayer to God, to the universe—“It’s too painful, I can’t take it!”—and she came to me, the power of my mind, the energy of the universe, an angel of God in blue, like the Good Fairy in the Wizard of Oz, waving a wand.

I sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom, looking up, about 8 years old.

She said, “Sweetheart, here’s the deal. There’s too much going on here and I don’t have the power to make it be gone, to make it be okay, or even to help you cope with it in a way that’s not going to cause you some pain. What I can do, Sweetheart, is help you get through this time now, help you get through it as it is going on. It will come back, but it will come back to you only at a later time, when you’re able to handle it and there will be someone to help you.” So I said, “Okay, because I can’t take it anymore.”

She waved her wand and said: “I am going to send things that are happening into different parts of your body, and your body will hold them for you like a treasure chest, like a time capsule.

Your heart, your heart is broken and I’m going to have to let your rib cage close in around your heart and let your heart constrict so that you don’t feel the pain of your heart breaking. And I’m going to really tighten up your neck and let it be a fortress with very thick round walls, so that what you are feeling doesn’t get up to your mouth, and you can’t speak the words. You can’t cry out for help and can’t scream out in rage. And you can’t breathe too deeply to feel what’s going on in your body. And that fortress will keep the knowledge of what’s happening in your body from connecting with your head so that you will not be fully conscious of what’s going on. And I will tie up your ears so that you hear but don’t take too much in.”

“And this is what I will do with your mind. It will store the truth in a deep place, sealed away behind steel doors of fear. But it will, for now, help you to live with, accept, and believe the lies you are told, that you deserve this and that this is the way your life has to be.”

“I want you to be fairly still as a child and rather shy, so we don’t interrupt what we’re going to put very carefully in place. And it will stay this way. You will have trouble feeling and being close to people, but it will be your way of surviving.

And you, my darling, will be a very functional human being in spite of all this pain because you have a strong spirit and can hold all this in. And I will be helping you.”

“You will not forget everything. You will be visited by vague discontents, questions, or flashes of images that will lead you, like markers on a path, to explore what happened. And I will leave a voice inside of you, like a spark of light, that will urge you to reconnect with your whole self, to find this person you are now, who is calling out for help and whose heart is utterly breaking. It may not be clear, this voice! It will manifest as an urge inside of you, but it will be your lost self speaking as it can through your aching body to come back and find yourself.”

“When the time is right, you will begin to open up. It will be a very long process.

It may take as long to heal as you’ve been in pain and in the frozen place. Finally, your body will no longer be able to hold all this in. Your muscles will begin to give way, you will feel an urgency to do physical healing, and that will begin the process of really unwinding your body and releasing what it will have been holding all these years. There will be physical as well as emotional pain in the process. But by then you will be strong enough, safe enough and old enough to bear the truth. You will have a special friend, who will be the grownup you, who will hold you as no one else can, as you find yourself again.”

“As all this begins to unwind, you will struggle to release your mind from the falsehoods it had learned so you could survive, and the doors of fear barring it from the truth. The mind may at first believe that only the person who gave you this pain has the power to take it away, and there will need to be a period of building trust that this is not true. You will struggle to release the flow between the mind and body and come back together wholly. But you will do it, because you are a capable person with a heart yearning to love. I don’t know exactly how it will unfold, but the universe will move you through it. You will have to be very patient, very brave, very courageous, but it will be your training, your fire walk, your healing. And when you are through it, you will be a whole person: new but still the same.”

“Now I want you to go to bed. I will wave my wand and you will go to sleep, and when you wake up, you will forget I was here. You will forget you asked for help and you will not feel your daily pain. This is the only way I know to get you through this. You are a beautiful child. I don’t know the reasons this terrible burden came to you, but I love you.

You will have to love yourself enough to heal, so that the rest of your life will be lived to its fullest, full of light. The memory of pain will still be there, but it will be in perspective. One day you will be whole again. Until then and for always, I love you.”