Somatic Trauma Response: What the Body Is Holding
Trauma is not only a psychological event. It is also a physiological one. The experience of being overwhelmed by threat produces lasting changes in the brain, the autonomic nervous system, and the body's stress response systems — changes that can persist long after the original events are over and that manifest not only as memories and emotions but as physical sensations, movement patterns, and bodily responses that arise in the present when something resembles the conditions of the past.
Bessel van der Kolk's work, synthesised in The Body Keeps the Score, brought neurobiological research on trauma to a wide audience and established the foundational claim: trauma encodes itself in the body's systems, not only in explicit memory. The traumatised person may not be able to recall specific events in narrative form, but their body responds — in tension, in startle, in collapse, in the racing heart and tight chest of a triggered alarm response — as if the threat were present now. This is not imagination or weakness; it is the nervous system operating as it was designed to operate, but without an accurate signal from the present that the danger has passed.
Stephen Porges's polyvagal theory describes three hierarchical states of the autonomic nervous system. The ventral vagal state — the state of social engagement, safety, and connection — is the baseline from which healthy relating and exploration are possible. Under threat, the system moves into the sympathetic state: fight or flight, the mobilisation of physiological resources for action. If fight or flight cannot resolve the threat — if the person is overwhelmed, outnumbered, or immobilised — the system can drop into the dorsal vagal state: freeze, collapse, shutdown, the physiological response to inescapable threat. In trauma, the nervous system can become dysregulated in ways that produce rapid, involuntary shifts into survival states in response to present-day cues that carry the signature of the original threat.
Peter Levine's somatic experiencing approach proposes that trauma occurs when a defensive response cannot be completed. In animals, the mobilisation of the fight or flight response that successfully fights off or escapes a predator discharges the physiological activation through the completion of the defensive movement. When the defensive response is blocked — the person is overwhelmed, immobilised, or dissociated — the physiological activation remains held in the body in an incomplete, frozen state. Somatic experiencing works with this through titrated, non-overwhelming contact with the body's experience, supporting the gradual completion of interrupted responses.
The specific somatic presentations of trauma are recognisable: hyperarousal (chronic muscular tension, an exaggerated startle response, hypervigilance, physical restlessness, difficulty settling), hypoarousal (fatigue, heaviness, numbness, collapse, a pervasive sense of flatness or disconnection), and the intrusive somatic re-experiencing in which body sensations, physical responses, and movement impulses recur when trauma is triggered without necessarily involving conscious narrative recall. The approaches that work specifically with the body — somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, trauma-informed yoga, and the bilateral stimulation incorporated into EMDR — address trauma at the level where it lives. Maia, the AI companion in Asclepiad, offers space for beginning to understand what the body is holding.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Asclepiad designed for somatic trauma response?
Asclepiad is well-suited to understanding the somatic dimensions of trauma — the polyvagal framework, the concept of incomplete defensive responses, and what body-focused approaches offer. For structured therapeutic work with somatic trauma, somatic experiencing (SE) practitioners are listed through the Somatic Experiencing International directory (traumahealing.org); EMDR-trained practitioners through EMDR Association UK (emdrassociation.org.uk).