There is a growing wave of content online challenging one of the most widely accepted ideas in modern trauma healing — that the body stores trauma. Articles, podcasts, and social media posts are pushing back against what has become almost a cultural given, and if you have stumbled across any of it, you may be feeling confused, frustrated, or quietly wondering whether everything you thought you understood about healing has just been pulled out from under you.
Take a breath. It hasn’t.
What is actually happening is a necessary — and long overdue — conversation about nuance. And nuance, unfortunately, does not travel well on the internet.
I want to offer you a different perspective. Not one that simply defends the status quo, and not one that throws the baby out with the bathwater. This is the perspective I have held throughout my clinical career, long before this debate became trending content: that the mind, the body, and the soul do not heal in isolation. They never have. And the sooner we stop arguing about which one matters most, the sooner people can actually get better.
What the Debate Is Actually About
Much of the current criticism is directed at the work of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, particularly his landmark book The Body Keeps the Score. To be clear — his work is important, and the core truth it points to is sound. Trauma does not live only in the mind. It leaves a measurable imprint on the nervous system, the brain, the immune system, and the body’s stress response. That is not in dispute.
What IS being challenged — and fairly so — is how his work has been interpreted, simplified, and in some cases commercialised by the broader wellness world.
The idea that you can “release trauma from your hips” in a yoga class, or that shaking your body is all it takes to heal complex childhood wounds, or that somatic work alone is the answer — this is the oversimplification that critics are rightly pushing back against. And on that point, I agree with them.
But here is where the debate loses its way: in rejecting the oversimplification, some voices are now swinging to the opposite extreme — suggesting that the body plays no meaningful role in trauma healing at all. That is equally incorrect. And it leaves the people who most need clarity standing in the middle of a crossfire, not knowing which way to turn.
Let’s Start With the Science — Because the Body IS Energy
Before we go any further, let’s address something that often gets dismissed as “woo” but is, in fact, basic physics.
You are made of atoms. Every cell, every tissue, every organ in your body is composed of atoms — and atoms are, at their most fundamental level, energy. They vibrate. They have frequency. This is not a spiritual claim; it is quantum physics. The chair you are sitting on, the screen you are reading this on, and the body you inhabit are all, at their core, energetic structures.
Why does this matter? Because when we talk about trauma being “held in the body,” we are not talking about memories being literally filed away in your shoulder muscles like documents in a cabinet. We are talking about the body’s energy systems — its nervous system, its stress response architecture, its cellular and neurological patterns — being shaped and altered by overwhelming experience.
A real-life example: Think about what happens in your body the moment someone raises their voice at you unexpectedly. Before your conscious mind has even processed what is happening, your heart rate increases, your muscles tighten, your breathing changes, and your stomach drops. Your body responded first. That is not metaphor — that is measurable, physiological reality. Now imagine that response being triggered repeatedly over years of childhood, with no safe adult to help regulate it. The body does not simply forget that. The nervous system learns it as a baseline. That is what we mean when we say the body holds trauma.
The Body Does Hold the Pattern — And Here Is What That Actually Looks Like
This is the part of the debate that frustrates me most, because the evidence is not abstract. It is sitting in people’s bodies right now, and it is hiding in plain sight.
Take the psoas muscle — the deep hip flexor that connects your spine to your legs. It is one of the most trauma-relevant muscles in the human body, and not by coincidence. The psoas is directly wired into the autonomic nervous system and is one of the primary muscles involved in the fight/flight response. When we perceive threat, the psoas contracts. It braces. It prepares the body to run or fight. In people who have experienced chronic stress or repeated trauma, the psoas can become locked in a state of near-permanent contraction — not because of a physical injury, but because the nervous system never received the signal that it was safe to let go.
The same is true of the neck, the jaw, the shoulders, and the chest. These are not random sites of tension. They are the body’s unresolved activation looking for somewhere to live. When someone experiences a trauma trigger — a tone of voice, a smell, a situation that echoes something from the past — the muscles respond before the mind catches up. The body is not storing a memory in the way a hard drive stores a file. It is holding the pattern of the trauma response. The bracing. The readiness. The physiological echo of an experience the nervous system has never been allowed to complete.
To say that this is not “real” storage, and therefore the body plays no role in trauma, is like saying that a scar is not real evidence of a wound because the original injury is gone. The pattern remains. The body keeps the record. And that record lives in the muscles, the nervous system, the stress response, and the energy systems of the body in ways that are measurable, observable, and clinically significant.
A real-life example: Consider someone who tenses up every time their phone rings unexpectedly — long after the relationship that made unexpected calls frightening has ended. Their mind knows they are safe. Their body has not received that memo. Their shoulders rise, their jaw tightens, their breath shortens. That is the trauma pattern living in the body. Not a memory. A response. And it will keep responding until it is consciously worked with — at both the body and the mind level.
What the Science Actually Supports
The neuroscience here is well established and does not require van der Kolk to defend it. Research consistently shows that trauma:
- Alters the structure and function of the brain, particularly the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex — the areas responsible for threat detection, memory, and rational thought
- Dysregulates the HPA axis, which governs the body’s stress hormone response
- Suppresses immune function and increases chronic inflammation
- Disrupts the autonomic nervous system, affecting heart rate, digestion, sleep, and pain perception
These are not fringe claims. They are published, peer-reviewed findings. The body is not a passive bystander in the trauma experience — it is an active participant. And it carries the evidence of that participation long after the original event has passed.
A real-life example: Consider someone who experienced emotional neglect as a child — no obvious abuse, no dramatic incident, just a consistent absence of attunement and safety. As an adult, they may struggle with chronic digestive issues, persistent fatigue, or a low-grade anxiety they cannot explain. Their mind may have made a kind of peace with their childhood. But their nervous system is still running the old programme. Their body is still braced for a threat that no longer exists. This is not imagination. This is biology.
So Why Isn’t Somatic Work Alone the Answer?
Here is where I part ways with the more enthusiastic corners of the somatic healing world — and have done so throughout my career.
Somatic work is powerful. Working with the body, with breath, with movement, with nervous system regulation — these are not optional extras in trauma healing. They are essential. But they are not the whole picture.
Trauma lives at multiple levels simultaneously. It lives in the stories we tell ourselves — the beliefs formed in the aftermath of wounding that say I am not safe, I am not worthy, I am too much, I am not enough. It lives in the emotional body — in grief that was never allowed to be felt, in anger that had nowhere to go, in fear that became a permanent background hum. It lives in the soul — in the disconnection from self that happens when survival becomes the primary mode of existence. And yes, it lives in the body — in the nervous system patterns, the muscular holding, the physiological dysregulation.
You cannot shake your way out of a core belief. You cannot breathe your way through a wound that has never been named.
A real-life example: Consider someone who goes to breathwork sessions regularly. They feel something shift in the room. They leave feeling lighter, more open, sometimes emotional. And then life resumes. They don’t journal. They don’t work with a therapist. They don’t look at the patterns showing up in their relationships or ask themselves the harder questions. The breathwork is real. The release is real. But without the conscious work to meet what the body is surfacing — to name it, understand it, and integrate it — nothing actually changes. The relief becomes a pressure valve rather than a pathway. And they find themselves back on the mat next week, releasing the same thing again.
Awareness of what needs to be done does not automatically mean people will act on it. And acting on it — showing up to the somatic work — does not automatically mean people will do the deeper conscious work alongside it. Both require a choice. Both require courage. And both are necessary.
The Conscious and the Somatic Must Work Together
This is perhaps the most important point in this entire conversation — and the one that the current debate is almost entirely missing.
Somatic work without conscious direction is like starting a car and leaving it running in the driveway. The engine is on. Something is happening. But you are not going anywhere. For somatic work to be truly effective, the mind must be in the conversation. You have to signal the body — tell it what you are working with — so that the release is targeted, meaningful, and integrated rather than simply a temporary discharge of tension.
When you go for a walk to move anger through your body, you are not just walking. You are consciously identifying the emotion. You are intentionally directing your body to work with that specific energy. You are completing the stress cycle with full awareness of what you are completing it for. That is fundamentally different from movement that happens without that conscious direction — where something may shift in the body, but the mind has no idea what it was, where it came from, or what to do with it next.
The body needs to be told what it is working with. And the mind needs the body to complete what the mind alone cannot resolve. This is not a competition between two approaches. It is a conversation between two parts of the same system.
A real-life example: Think about physiotherapy after a serious injury. The physiotherapist does not simply manipulate the body and send you home. They explain what they are doing and why. They give you exercises to do consciously between sessions. They ask you to pay attention to what you feel, where you feel it, and how it changes. The conscious engagement is not separate from the physical healing — it is part of it. Trauma healing works the same way. The body does the work. The mind directs it. Together, they integrate it.
The Case for Integration: Western and Holistic, Together
This is the philosophy I have held since the beginning of my clinical work, and it is not a trend or a positioning strategy — it is simply what I have observed to be true, again and again, in the room with real people doing real healing.
Western psychology gives us the framework. It helps us understand the cognitive patterns, the attachment wounds, the relational dynamics, the diagnostic picture. It gives us language for what has happened and why. It is precise, evidence-based, and essential.
Holistic approaches give us the tools to reach what language cannot always access. The nervous system. The energy body. The parts of the experience that were pre-verbal, pre-cognitive, stored not as memories but as sensation, as reflex, as pattern. These approaches do not replace the clinical work — they complete it.
The debate currently raging online is, at its core, a false choice. It is asking people to decide between the mind and the body, between science and soul, between the clinical and the holistic. But that choice has never been real. The most effective healing happens when all of these are honoured simultaneously — in the right sequence, with the right support, and with both the conscious mind and the body fully engaged in the process.
A real-life example: Think of it like treating a broken bone. Western medicine sets the bone — it provides the structure, the diagnosis, the precise intervention. But rehabilitation — the movement, the strengthening, the gradual return to full function — is what makes the healing complete. You would not skip the setting of the bone and just do physiotherapy. And you would not set the bone and then do nothing. Both are necessary. Both serve a different and essential function. One finds the problem. The other helps the body integrate the healing. Together, they close the loop.
This is how I understand the relationship between Western psychology and holistic healing. And it is why, in my clinical experience, the combination consistently produces outcomes that neither approach achieves alone.
What This Means for Your Healing Journey
If you have been told that somatic healing is the answer — and now you are reading that it is not — I want you to hear this clearly: the people telling you that somatic work is everything are partially right. And the people telling you it is overblown are also partially right. The truth, as it so often does, lives in the integration of both perspectives.
Your healing does not have to choose a side. You do not have to pick between your mind and your body, between science and soul, between the clinical and the holistic. The most effective healing I have witnessed — and facilitated — happens when all of these are honoured simultaneously, in the right sequence, with the right support.
The body does hold the imprint of what you have been through. That is real. And the body alone cannot heal it. That is also real. What heals it is the willingness to work at every level — to bring the mind, the body, and the soul into the process together, and to trust that they are not separate systems competing for priority. They are one system, asking to be met whole.
If this has raised questions for you about your own healing journey, or if you are unsure where to begin, I offer a free 30-minute clarity call. There is no obligation — just an honest conversation about where you are and what might help. Book your free 30-minute call here.
Mona-Lize Moolman is a trauma-informed therapist and human connection specialist working globally online. She combines Western psychology with holistic healing methodologies to support deep, lasting transformation at every level.
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