Unreleased Grief & Trauma is Stored In The Body

Beginning in childhood, I carried a hard, painful knot, like a ball, in my upper stomach. It kept me up at night and was always there when I woke. I wouldn’t be able to eat when I became anxious or worried (which was most of the time). I got unexplainable rashes and skin issues. My neck and upper back would sometimes get a “kink” so bad that I wouldn’t be able to move my head.

Emotionally, I felt anxiety and worry 85% of the time. As a naturally movement oriented child (and adult) it was worse if I became sick, during east coast winters, or when I didn’t move my body.

After I had my son, I was terrified and anxious all of the time that something would happen to him, or to me, and that I would wind up abandoning him. Even leaving him for short periods was too difficult and overwhelming. While I felt fortunate to be able to stay home with him while many friends went back to work at the office, I couldn’t let go of ruminating on intrusive feelings of worry. I got shingles at age 30 when he was only 9 months old. I was constantly at the Dr. because my whole body hurt. All of the time. I had digestive issues, depression and started self-medicating my anxiety with unhealthy behaviors. I was convinced I had cancer --somewhere, but all they could find in my clinical diagnosis was anxiety and — “burn out.”

The simultaneous loss of my dance career coupled with the complexity of motherhood - and then divorce - pushed me to the brink, and I couldn’t ignore my feelings and unmourned losses and buried trauma any longer.

That’s when I began gestalt based therapy and began to train in trauma informed somatic coaching work. I could finally trace my physical and emotional symptoms back to how I learned to stuff my feelings and fears in childhood, as well as learned about the complex loss and trauma I’d endured living in a highly dysfunctional family that I thought all along was “normal”.

Unexpressed and unreleased grief and trauma cause physical and emotional symptoms, especially if you have learned that the way to deal with your emotions is to “stuff” or hold in your emotions, power through it, or just “move on”.

Have you felt any of these symptoms related to unreleased/unmourned grief, loss or trauma?

EMOTIONAL: you can feel numb or “flat", stuck, shut down, depressed, lonely, prone to people pleasing, highly anxious, fearful of authority figures, angry, shame, waiting for the other shoe to drop, hypervigilance, feel highly irritable and exhausted all of the time —trying to hold it all in.

PHYSICAL: back aches, severe muscle tension, racing heart, panic attacks, digestive problems, skin issues and rashes, insomnia, nightmares, twitching, trembling or shaking, headaches, unexplainable body pain … (to name a few)

It’s unavoidable to accumulate losses, heartbreak and pain through living. Even positive changes can lead to losses which in turn we can carry as unmourned grief and pain in our bodies if it’s not processed, mourned and released.

If these resonate, you’re definitely not alone.

Even if your journey is just beginning, know it’s not too late to start to feel whole, alive and vibrant again.

Steph