Why the Body Holds It: A Somatic View of Stress, Integration, and Healing
Across all of the transitions we’ve explored — endings, relocation, single parenting, identity shifts — one theme keeps returning:
the body is not separate from the experience.
It is where experience lands.
It is where it is processed — or not processed.
It is where meaning becomes sensation, and sensation becomes story.
From a somatic perspective, this is not metaphor. It is biology.
Why the Body Holds Experience
Your nervous system evolved to keep you alive, not to make you happy or calm.
Its primary task is to detect safety and threat, and to organise your body accordingly.
When something stressful, overwhelming, or emotionally significant happens — a loss, a rupture, a sudden change, a sustained demand — your nervous system mobilises:
Muscles tense
Breathing shifts
Attention narrows
Heart rate changes
Hormones are released
All of this is intelligent. It is the body preparing to respond.
The problem is not that the body mobilises.
The problem is when that mobilisation does not get to complete and resolve.
When stress, uncertainty, vigilance, or emotional load becomes chronic, the nervous system stays partially activated. The body stays slightly braced. The mind stays slightly alert. The system never quite returns to baseline.
And so the body “holds” what the system has not yet had the conditions to process, express, integrate, or release.
What Prolonged Nervous System Activation Does
When the nervous system remains activated over long periods of time, several things happen:
The stress response becomes the default state
The body produces stress hormones more easily and more often
Sleep becomes lighter and less restorative
The immune system is affected
Digestion and hormonal balance are disrupted
The mind becomes more reactive, anxious, flat, or fatigued
Emotional responses become sharper or duller
Thinking becomes more rigid, more catastrophic, or more self-critical
This is not psychological weakness.
It is physiology.
A nervous system that does not feel safe does not prioritise growth, creativity, connection, or healing. It prioritises protection.
And protection, over time, is exhausting.
Why Awareness Matters
From a somatic point of view, healing does not begin with insight. It begins with awareness.
With noticing:
When your body is tense
When your breath is shallow
When your jaw is tight
When your stomach is clenched
When your thoughts are racing
When you feel numb, flat, or disconnected
These are not problems. They are signals.
They are the nervous system communicating its state.
Noticing them is not about fixing them — it is about bringing relationship to them.
And relationship changes physiology.
Why Relational Presence Regulates the Nervous System
This is where the work of people like Daniel Siegel becomes so helpful.
Siegel speaks about the nervous system as inherently relational — that our capacity to regulate ourselves develops through being regulated with.
As infants, we cannot soothe ourselves alone. We borrow the nervous system of another. We settle because someone else is settled. We feel safe because someone else is present, attuned, and responsive.
That pattern never fully goes away.
Even as adults, our nervous systems still respond to:
Being seen
Being heard
Being understood
Being met without judgement
Being in the presence of calm, regulated attention
This kind of presence stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system — the branch responsible for rest, repair, digestion, immune function, and integration.
It allows the body to move out of protection and back into restoration.
This is not abstract.
It is measurable in heart rate, breathing, muscle tone, hormone levels, and brain activity.
Why Talking Helps the Body
When you speak about experience in a space that feels safe, attuned, and non-judgemental, several things happen at once:
The emotional brain (limbic system) becomes linked with the thinking brain (prefrontal cortex)
Sensation becomes language
Implicit experience becomes explicit
Chaos becomes narrative
Isolation becomes connection
Siegel calls this integration — the linking of differentiated parts into a coherent whole.
When experiences are integrated, they no longer need to be held as tension, vigilance, or symptom.
They become memory rather than threat.
Story rather than alarm.
Past rather than present.
This is how new neural pathways form.
Not through forcing positive thinking, but through allowing experience to be felt, named, understood, and held in relationship.
Over time, the brain learns:
this can be felt and survived.
this can be spoken and met.
this does not require permanent protection.
And the body softens.
This is Not About Fixing Yourself
Somatic and relational work is not about becoming better, calmer, or more evolved.
It is about allowing the system to complete what it could not complete before.
To finish responses that were interrupted.
To metabolise emotions that were too much at the time.
To integrate experiences that were overwhelming, confusing, or isolating.
It is not self-improvement.
It is self-return.
Why this Matters
Because when the body is not given the conditions to process experience, it does not forget it.
It holds it.
In muscle tension.
In fatigue.
In anxiety.
In numbness.
In illness.
In disconnection.
In patterns that repeat without our consent.
And when the body is given those conditions — awareness, presence, safety, relationship, time — it knows how to heal.
Not dramatically.
Not instantly.
But quietly, steadily, intelligently.
The way living systems always do.