How Trauma Impacts the Nervous System & How to Heal It
/By Concentric Therapist Mara Hundrieser-Acosta, LPC, NCC, RYT
Trauma is a word that most of us are familiar with in our current culture. At times, it feels like it has been over used to describe everyday annoyances, such as getting their coffee order wrong, or getting constructive feedback among many other things that are just part of everyday life.
On the other hand, we have people that have been through actual traumatic situations and are experiencing real symptoms that sometimes we can’t see with our eyes. Some of these symptoms live in their nervous system. I would like to explore beyond some symptoms that come to mind with trauma, such as hypervigilance, mood changes, depression, intrusive thoughts, and anxiety. Yes, these are symptoms related to trauma and they are important to keep in mind, but I would like to go deeper into the nervous system. Repeated activation of the stress response leads to excessive stress hormone release over time and maladaptive activation of the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis (also known as HPA axis), ultimately producing cardiovascular problems, inflammation, and metabolic disruption like high cholesterol, insulin resistance, and autoimmune diseases to name a few.
How Trauma Impacts the Body and Mind
Trauma can impact or cause dysregulation problems. According to the research done by Dr. Stephen Porges, who developed The Polyvagal Theory, holds that we rely on our newest evolutionary nervous system responses to help us return to safety, but when those fail, we regress to older evolutionary responses. Dr. Stephen Porges himself frames this precisely: the issue often isn't the traumatic experience itself, but the person's difficulty making sense of the traumatic event/s and the physiological response that event triggered for many survivors, the event is bad enough, but the lasting change to their physiology and nervous system is what most profoundly impairs their ability to adapt.
When we experience something overwhelming, the brain prioritizes survival over language and logic. The prefrontal cortex: our thinking and narrating brain goes partially offline, while the amygdala and brainstem take over. This is why trauma memories often feel fragmented, wordless, and visceral rather than linear and narrative. The body just wants to survive.
What gets imprinted isn't just the story of what happened, but the felt sense of it: the racing heart, the frozen limbs, the held breath, the braced shoulders. Without a pathway to process and release, these body states can persist for years, even decades after the original event.
According to the PolyVagal Theory, individuals stuck in the sympathetic state often carry a narrative of fear, distrust, dysregulation, and anxiety, while those stuck in the dorsal vagal state carry one of loneliness, disconnection, and numbness. Healing, in this model, is largely about restoring access to the ventral vagal state rather than eliminating the defensive states entirely. Trauma is a disruption in autonomic regulation and flexibility, pushing the nervous system toward defensive states and limiting access to socially engaged regulation. People that are having these kinds of responses tend to become more withdrawn, and start to experience intrusive thinking, or spiraling. Through time when the trauma hasn’t been processed through the body the physical symptoms start to emerge.
The three-state hierarchy
1. State: Ventral vagal Function: Social engagement, safety, connection Presentation: Regulated, “window of tolerance”
2. State: Sympathetic Function: Mobilization (fight/flight) Trauma Presentation: Hypervigilance, anxiety, reactivity
3. State: Dorsal vagal Function: Immobilization (freeze/shutdown) Trauma Presentation: Numbness, dissociation, collapse
FREE Photo COURTESY by Laura Smetsers on Unsplash
Does it ever feel like talk therapy isn’t enough and as time passes by, you still experience strong dysregulation, anger, anxiety, body pain, high blood pressure, stomach issues (just to name a few) when you encounter situations that trigger your past trauma. In addition to that I wonder if your body ever feels detached from itself as you were processing trauma during a therapeutic session because even though one can understand the context, your nervous system might not know what to do with that information. Does it feel like there should be something more, something that shakes you up, that makes you feel connected to yourself again. I believe that talk therapy is the gateway to getting connected back to ourselves, yet it’s not the only ingredient that is needed when one starts their healing journey. People that experience trauma might carry it in their bodies and might not even realize that it has become fused into their nervous system that it's so hard to tell it apart from who you once were to who you have now become.
Do you ever wonder what could happen when we stop treating the mind and body as separate and learn to listen to both?
In order for talk therapy to be more effective we need to get into our body. If you are wondering how I can get into my body, let me tell you a bit about Somatic therapy.
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Somatic therapy is a body-centered approach to mental health that recognizes the inseparable connection between our physical experiences and our emotional wellbeing. The word somatic comes from the Greek word soma, meaning body. Unlike traditional talk therapy, which primarily engages the mind through language and cognition, somatic therapy works with the body's sensations, movements, posture, and physiological responses as direct pathways to psychological healing.
At its core, somatic therapy operates on a foundational premise: our bodies hold memories, emotions, and unprocessed experiences, often long after our conscious minds have moved on. Stress, grief, fear, and especially trauma don't simply vanish when a difficult moment passes. They can become stored as tension, chronic pain, altered breathing patterns, or a nervous system perpetually stuck in "fight, flight, or freeze."
Somatic therapists work carefully within what's called the window of tolerance — the zone of arousal in which a person can process difficult experiences without being overwhelmed (hyperarousal) or shutting down (hypoarousal). By tracking body signals moment to moment, a somatic therapist helps clients stay in this window — making the work genuinely healing rather than re-traumatizing.
As more research has been done on the impact of trauma on the body, modalities and theories have been developed in order to help people that are struggling with the trauma in their body.
"The body keeps the score." — Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Somatic therapy draws from neuroscience, attachment theory, and body-oriented psychology. Here are some of the most used Modalities and descriptions of each.
Somatic Modalities:
Somatic Experiencing (SE); Peter Levine, Ph.D.
Mechanism: Titrated tracking of body sensation to complete truncated defensive responses.
Evidence Status: Effectiveness and key factors show promising results but still require more unbiased RCT research; PubMed first RCT (Brom et al., 2017) with 63 participants supported efficacy for PTSD.
Best Fit: Dissociation-prone clients, somatic complaints, clients who shut down under exposure-based work
PolyVagal Theory; Stephen Porges, PhD.
Mechanism: reframes the autonomic nervous system as three hierarchical states rather than a simple sympathetic/parasympathetic split. A phylogenetically "newer" ventral vagal complex (linked to the smooth facial nerve) supports calm, social engagement and is meant to inhibit the sympathetic system.
Evidence Status: Porges and defenders (e.g., via the Polyvagal Institute) dispute the "debunked" framing and argue the theory has been revised over time in response to critique; the debate is live and unresolved as of mid-2026.
Best Fit: Treat it as a clinical heuristic-metaphor rather than a validated neurophysiological model. It's widely used in trauma therapy, somatic and body-based interventions, and educational-pediatric settings as a vocabulary for talking about states of safety, activation, and shutdown, and many clinicians report it's useful for helping clients make sense of bodily reactions.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy; Pat Odgen, PhD
Mechanism: Integrates body awareness with cognitive-emotional processing, tracking procedural/implicit memory.
Evidence Status: Established clinical model, part of the broader evidence-based trauma therapy landscape per the field's list of evidence-based trauma therapies and models, which includes somatic-sensorimotor psychotherapy alongside EMDR, IFS, and polyvagal-informed approaches.
Best Fit: Attachment-based work, developmental trauma, complements your Gottman/attachment fluency well
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR); Francine Shapiro, PhD.
Mechanism: Bilateral stimulation, most commonly eye movements, integrates cognitive, emotional, somatic, and neurological components to facilitate reprocessing of traumatic memories.
Evidence Status: Gold-standard, NICE guidance recommends EMDR alongside trauma-focused CBT for adult PTSD.
Best Fit: Single-incident trauma, memory-specific processing.
Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TSY); David Emerson, E-RYT 200 & Jane Turner in collaboration with trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
Mechanism: Interoceptive awareness, choice-making in the body, co-regulation.
Evidence Status: Six RCTs on yoga with women exposed to childhood violence showed significant PTSD symptom reduction compared to waitlist controls, with reductions comparable to CBT exposure techniques, EMDR, and pharmacological treatment; prolonged yoga therapy also significantly improved dissociative symptoms.
Best Fit: Complex/developmental trauma, dissociation, clients who can't tolerate verbal processing yet.
Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE); David Berceli, PhD.
Mechanism: Uses neurogenic tremors — a physiological mechanism, not a psychotherapeutic one — to discharge excess tension without requiring clients to narrate trauma details.
Evidence Status: Practitioner-reported/emerging; developed by Dr. Berceli, who evidenced its potential to reduce reliance on psychotherapy or medication through workshop delivery.
Best Fit: Adjunct/self-regulation tool, group settings, clients averse to talk-based disclosure.
Neurofeedback/Biofeedback; Barry Sterman PhD and Joe Kamiya, PhD.
Mechanism: Direct ANS/brainwave regulation training.
Evidence Status: Cited by Van der Kolk as a physiological (non-disclosure-based) intervention alongside yoga. Dr. Joe Kamiya conducted studies using electroencephalogram (EEG) to look at consciousness.
Best Fit: Chronic hyperarousal, complex PTSD, clients where talk therapy has plateaued.
Creative Arts/Psychomotor Therapies
Mechanism: Working with the body, sensory awareness, and connecting to the senses as a route to emotion regulation in stress and trauma.
Evidence Status: Theoretical/emerging integration with polyvagal framework per 2024 Frontiers review.
Best Fit: Non-verbal clients, adolescents, expressive work.
“Trauma is not what happened to you. It's what happened inside you as a result of what happened to you.” — Gabor Maté, M.D.
Let’s Explore the Benefits of Somatic Work
Somatic therapy offers a range of benefits that extend well beyond symptom reduction, often producing lasting shifts in how people inhabit their bodies and navigate the world.
Nervous System Regulation: Reduces chronic states of hyperarousal (anxiety, hypervigilance) or hypoarousal (numbness, depression, dissociation).
Stress & Anxiety Relief: Teaches the body to complete stress cycles, lowering baseline cortisol and reducing reactivity over time.
Trauma Resolution: Addresses trauma stored in the body that may not respond fully to cognitive approaches alone.
Chronic Pain Reduction: Many people report relief from chronic tension, pain, and somatic complaints with no clear medical origin.
Increased Body Awareness: Builds the capacity to notice internal signals — hunger, fatigue, emotions — before they escalate.
Improved Relationships: Better nervous system regulation often translates to less reactivity in relationships and improved capacity for intimacy.
Sense of Embodiment: Many clients describe feeling more "at home" in their bodies — less dissociated and more fully present
Increased Resilience: Regular somatic practice builds the nervous system's capacity to recover from stress more quickly.
Your Body Is Wise. It's Ready to Help You Heal.
Somatic therapy invites us to stop working against our bodies and start working with them. If this resonates, consider reaching out to a therapist who incorporates somatic work, any of the somatic treatment modalities above, or a certified somatic practitioner. In the meantime, you can learn more about Concentric therapists offer and the work we do in the practice by visiting our Trauma Therapy page.
This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical or psychological advice. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional or crisis line such as 988.
About Concentric Counseling & Consulting:
Concentric is a mental health group practice offering individual therapy, couples and relationship counseling, tween and adolescent support, family therapy, couples intensives, and consulting and supervision services. Our therapists work with a wide range of concerns, some of which include anxiety, depression, mood-related challenges, complex and developmental trauma (C‑PTSD), relationship and family difficulties, school and peer issues, relational trauma, mind–body connection, life transitions, acute and chronic stress, grief and loss, identity and purpose exploration, substance misuse, and unresolved family‑of‑origin experiences.
Many of our clinicians and therapists also bring additional areas of specialization, which you can explore on their individual bios.
We provide care 7 days a week, with in‑person sessions available at our Chicago offices in The Loop and Sauganash neighborhoods, as well as virtual teletherapy for added flexibility.
Services offered in English, Spanish (Español), Romanian (românǎ), MANDARIN (普通话), and basic KOREAN (한글)
If you are ready to learn more or get started with us, please reach out to us here.