On developmental trauma, early experience, and the limits of understanding.
You may know exactly why you respond the way you do.
You know the history, and you recognize the patterns. Perhaps you’ve spent years exploring them with your psychologist or counsellor. You can easily trace your reactions to early relationships, or difficult experiences that required you to adapt long before you understood what was happening.
And yet. A conversation becomes difficult, and suddenly you cannot find your words. A loved one withdraws, and your body responds before you’ve had time to consider what their withdrawal means. You feel the familiar tightening, and the urgency to repair, or maybe the opposite: a quiet disappearance into yourself.
You definitely understand what’s happening, but understanding doesn't necessarily change it.
The body does not live in the past
We speak about trauma as something stored in the body, as though the body were a container holding experiences that have never been released.
I find this description incomplete. The body is not simply preserving what happened. It is continuously responding to what is happening now, informed by what it has encountered before. It anticipates and organizes around possibilities. It protects.
These responses are not necessarily memories in the usual sense. More often, they are familiar ways of meeting the world, shaped through repeated experiences, sometimes overwhelming, or too early to be part of a coherent narrative.
The past does not sit still in the body. It actively participates in how the present is experienced.
When experience begins before language
Developmental trauma doesn’t always trace back to a clearly identifiable event. It may emerge through the accumulated experience of relationships: what was expressed, what had to be hidden, how closeness was negotiated, how discomfort was met, or how much of oneself could safely show up.
These experiences often begin before language is available, or at ages when a child has words but cannot yet understand the larger circumstances in which they are living. The resulting adaptations may become so ingrained that they are difficult to recognize as adaptations at all.
We may become exceptionally attentive to others while barely noticing our own needs. We may appear remarkably independent, and experience closeness as confusing or demanding. We may move between reaching for connection and withdrawing from it, without understanding why both impulses feel equally compelling. We may have outbursts of anger, then collapse into shame and guilt.
Why insight may not be enough
Understanding can be deeply meaningful. It can bring context, recognition, awareness and relief to experiences that once seemed inexplicable.
But insight and embodied change are not the same process. I encounter this discrepancy frequently in my work.
We understand that a relationship is different from those we knew as children and still find ourselves preparing for an old outcome.
We know that expressing a need is reasonable, yet experience an immediate tightening when we try.
We recognize that conflict does not necessarily threaten connection, but our bodies will move toward withdrawal before we can remain present.
We continuously seek validation for our decisions, big and small, and become easily dissuaded from them in the absence of external support.
There is no contradiction here. What we understand consciously is only one part of how we respond. The body also participates through patterns of relating that may have developed over many years; these responses are not defective, but are often remarkably persistent because they have been practiced in the service of adaptation. They deserve to be approached with curiosity and acknowledgement rather than force.
What becomes possible through somatic work
Somatic work offers a way to explore experience beyond explanation.
The work often begins with something small: a change in breathing as you describe a conversation, the impulse to turn away when someone comes closer.
There is no need to manufacture a particular experience, return to overwhelming memories, or produce an emotional release. Attention turns toward what is already happening, sometimes allowing familiar responses to become more perceptible.
The work need not be dramatic, nor does it impose a different response. It makes room for experience to unfold with greater support, awareness and choice.
Change does not necessarily mean becoming independent of others
There is another assumption I often encounter: that healing should make us less affected by relationships. Less vulnerable to disappointment and hurt. Less dependent on reassurance, and less “needy.”
But our capacity to be affected by others is not necessarily something we need to overcome.
For people whose early experiences shaped difficult relationships with closeness, the possibility of reaching toward someone without losing themselves can be far more meaningful than becoming entirely self-sufficient. So might the ability to disagree without immediately preparing for abandonment.
Perhaps the change is not that we need others less, but that we can be more fully ourselves while needing them.
Beginning with what is already here
There is no single sequence through which developmental trauma must be explored.
People can arrive with a detailed understanding of their histories, or with very little explicit memory.
We just begin with what is present, and sometimes, that’s difficult to name. We know that we’re not feeling well, but cannot quite put a finger on what is happening. What we do know is that the body does not arrive to be corrected. It is already alive, responsive, and capable of discovering ways of participating in experience that were previously unavailable.
Working Together
My approach to developmental trauma draws on integrated somatic trauma work, and perceptual exploration.
You can read more about my approach to Developmental Trauma and Somatic Work, or explore Online Somatic Sessions if you're interested in working together remotely.
I offer individual somatic sessions in person in Edmonton, Canada, and online to clients locally and internationally, where appropriate.