When the body remembers
Sometimes the body remembers what the mind has learned to quiet.
You may feel tension, tightness, fluttering, heaviness, bloating, or waves of overwhelm that appear without a clear story.
These sensations often come from emotions that never had the space, safety, or support to move through you at the time they were first felt.
The body holds these experiences gently in your breath, your muscles, your digestion, your energy, until you are ready to meet them.
Why the body remembers
Body-held emotions form when your system has been carrying more than it can process in the moment.
When experiences feel overwhelming, unsafe, or simply too much for your mind to handle alone, your nervous system steps in to protect you.
Instead of letting the emotion move through, it absorbs the impact and stores the feeling in the body.
The nervous system doesn’t separate emotional stress from physical threat. It reacts to both in the same way.
Your heart may beat faster, your breath may tighten, your digestion may slow or become more sensitive, and your muscles may hold tension without you realising it.
These reactions are not random. They are the body’s way of bracing, preparing, and managing what felt like “too much” at the time.
Over weeks, months, or years, these protective responses can become patterns.
A tight chest, a tense jaw, a fluttering heart, a nervous stomach, or a constant feeling of being “on alert” can become familiar, even when nothing is wrong around you.
The body continues to hold what the mind didn’t have the space or safety to feel.
This is not your body failing you, it is your body protecting you in the only way it knew how.
It remembers the experiences that shaped your nervous system so that you could keep going.
How it shows up in the body
When emotions settle into the body, they tend to appear first as sensations rather than thoughts.
Because the nervous system responds to emotional stress the same way it responds to physical threat, your body may release cortisol and adrenaline even when nothing dangerous is happening.
These chemicals create physical shifts & changes in the heart, the breath, digestion, and muscle tone that can feel confusing when there’s no clear trigger.
Below are the ways body-held emotions most commonly appear:
• tension in the chest, throat, or belly
• a racing or fluttering heart
• tight or shallow breathing
• sudden warmth, shakiness, or pressure in the body
• digestive sensitivity (knots, butterflies, nausea, bloating)
• jaw, neck, or shoulder tightness
• restlessness or an inability to fully relax
• fatigue after emotional overwhelm
• anxiety that feels physical rather than mental
• a sense of being on edge or easily startled
• feeling overwhelmed by small things
• irritability or sudden emotional intensity
• numbness or emotional shutdown
• difficulty feeling safe or settled
• a lingering sense that “something is held inside”
How therapy can help
Working with body-held emotions means looking at your experiences on every level: physical, emotional, environmental, and internal. We explore not only what you feel, but where you feel it, why it appears there, and what the body is trying to communicate through each sensation.
In our work together, physical symptoms are not random. Each carries emotional information.
We explore the story behind each symptom, linking your body’s reactions to the patterns, relationships, environments, and experiences that shaped them.
We also look at how your lifestyle interacts with your emotional world.
Certain foods, sleep patterns, nervous-system habits, and stressors can intensify inflammation, amplify anxiety, or deepen fatigue.
Together, we gently adjust the things that influence your inner state, giving your body the support it needs to settle and heal.
Throughout this process, we look at the whole person in their environment. Your relationships, culture, identity, responsibilities, history, and living conditions all shape how your body holds emotion.
Therapy becomes a space where we trace these patterns clearly, linking what happens inside you to what happens around you. This approach gives you both understanding and tools.
As you start recognising the emotional roots of physical reactions, the body no longer needs to express them so loudly. Inflammation eases. Tension shifts. Energy returns.
You begin to respond to your life with clarity instead of survival.