Trauma and the Body: How Unresolved Stress Affects Your Health

You might not think of yourself as someone who has experienced trauma. The word itself can feel too big, reserved for war veterans or survivors of extreme abuse. But trauma isn't defined by the event. It's defined by how your nervous system responded to the event, and whether it was able to complete that response.

 Many people carry unresolved stress in their bodies without realizing it. They come to us with physical symptoms that don't have clear medical explanations: chronic pain, digestive issues, hormonal imbalances, difficulty conceiving. They've been to specialists. They've had tests. Everything comes back normal, but they don't feel normal.

 Often, the missing piece is the nervous system. And often, the nervous system is holding something it hasn't been able to let go of.

 What Is Trauma, Really?

 Trauma is not the event itself. Trauma is what happens in your body when an experience overwhelms your capacity to cope.

 When you face a threat, your nervous system mobilizes a survival response. Fight, flight, or freeze. This is adaptive. It's designed to help you survive. The problem comes when that response doesn't complete, when the energy mobilized for survival gets stuck in your system.

 This can happen for many reasons. Maybe the threat was ongoing and there was no safe moment to discharge the activation. Maybe you had to keep functioning, to take care of others, to go back to work. Maybe you were young and didn't have the resources to process what happened. Maybe the experience was too overwhelming for your system to integrate at the time.

 When the survival response doesn't complete, your nervous system can get stuck in a pattern. It may stay on high alert, scanning for danger even when you're safe. Or it may shut down, leaving you feeling numb, disconnected, or chronically fatigued. These patterns can persist for years, even decades, long after the original event has passed.

 This is what we mean when we say trauma lives in the body. It's not just a memory. It's a physiological state.

 How Unresolved Trauma Affects Your Health

 When your nervous system is stuck in a trauma pattern, it affects every system in your body.

 Hormonal balance depends on a regulated nervous system. Chronic stress keeps cortisol elevated, which can disrupt your thyroid, your sex hormones, your sleep-wake cycle. Women with unresolved trauma often have irregular cycles, difficulty ovulating, or unexplained fertility challenges.

 Digestion is directly connected to your nervous system state. The digestive system has its own nervous system, the enteric nervous system, and it responds to stress. Chronic activation can lead to IBS, bloating, food sensitivities, and nutrient absorption issues.

 Immune function is affected by prolonged stress. The landmark ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) Study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that people with trauma histories had significantly higher rates of autoimmune disease, chronic illness, and early death. The body carries what the mind tries to forget.

 Pain can be a manifestation of unresolved trauma. The body holds tension, braces against perceived threats, and over time this can become chronic pain that doesn't respond to conventional treatment.

 Sleep is often disrupted. Your nervous system may not feel safe enough to fully rest. You might have trouble falling asleep, wake frequently, or feel exhausted even after a full night.

 Fertility and reproductive health are particularly sensitive to nervous system state. Reproduction is a parasympathetic function. It happens when your body feels safe. If your nervous system is stuck in survival mode, conception and pregnancy can be affected.

 Many women come to us after years of unexplained symptoms. They've been told it's stress, or it's in their head, or they just need to relax. What they haven't been told is that their symptoms make sense, that their body is responding to something real, and that there's a way to address it at the level of the nervous system.

 The Kinds of Trauma We See

 Trauma doesn't always look dramatic. Some of the most impactful experiences are subtle, chronic, or relational.

 Developmental trauma occurs in childhood, when a child's needs for safety, attunement, and connection aren't consistently met. This can shape the nervous system in ways that persist into adulthood.

 Medical trauma can result from surgeries, hospitalizations, invasive procedures, or frightening diagnoses. The body remembers these experiences even when the conscious mind has moved on.

 Reproductive trauma includes infertility, pregnancy loss, traumatic birth, and NICU experiences. We see this often in our patients and cover it in depth in our article on reproductive trauma.

 Loss and grief can be traumatic, particularly when the loss is sudden, unexpected, or involves complicated circumstances.

 Relational trauma comes from relationships where safety was compromised, whether through abuse, betrayal, neglect, or chronic conflict.

 Intergenerational trauma is passed down through families, often without anyone realizing it. Research has shown that trauma can affect gene expression in ways that influence the next generation. But it also passes through patterns: how your mother held anxiety in her body, what your family didn't talk about, the way fear or grief was managed by shutting down. You may carry patterns that didn't originate with you. In our work, we often see women whose bodies are holding something older than their own experience, something that makes sense only when we consider what their mothers or grandmothers went through.

 You don't need to identify a single traumatic event to benefit from this work. Sometimes the body holds patterns that developed gradually, from chronic stress, from environments that didn't feel safe, from years of pushing through without adequate support.

 Why Talk Therapy Isn't Always Enough

 Talk therapy can be valuable. Understanding your story, making meaning of your experiences, developing insight, these matter. But trauma isn't stored in the thinking brain. It's stored in the body.

 You can understand exactly why you feel the way you feel and still feel that way. You can know intellectually that you're safe and still have your body react as if you're not. This is because the nervous system doesn't respond to logic. It responds to sensation, to felt safety, to signals from the body.

 This is why we work somatically. We work with the body directly, helping the nervous system complete what it couldn't complete at the time of the original experience. This often allows shifts that years of talking about the problem couldn't produce.

 How We Work with Trauma

 We approach trauma through the nervous system, using a combination of acupuncture and somatic work.

 Acupuncture for Nervous System Regulation

 Acupuncture directly affects the autonomic nervous system. It activates the parasympathetic response, helping your body shift out of chronic stress and into rest and repair. For people carrying trauma, this can be profound. Many have never felt their body truly settle.

 Regular acupuncture creates a new baseline. Over time, your nervous system learns that safety is possible. The chronic activation begins to resolve. Sleep improves, pain decreases, digestion normalizes, hormones rebalance.

 Somatic Experiencing

 We use Somatic Experiencing (SE), a body-based approach developed by Dr. Peter Levine specifically for working with trauma. SE works with the nervous system directly, helping it complete the survival responses that got interrupted.

 This isn't about reliving the trauma or telling the story in detail. It's about noticing what's happening in your body, tracking sensations, and allowing your system to move through what it couldn't move through before. Sometimes there's shaking, sometimes tears, sometimes just a deep breath and a settling. The body knows what it needs to do. Our job is to create the conditions for that to happen.

 SE is gentle. We work at a pace your system can handle. The goal isn't to overwhelm you with intensity. It's to slowly build your capacity for regulation, to expand your window of tolerance, to help your nervous system learn that it can move between activation and rest.

 Chinese Herbs and Supplements

 We use Chinese herbal formulas to support the nervous system and address the physical manifestations of chronic stress. Different patterns require different approaches, and we prescribe based on your specific presentation.

 Certain supplements can also support nervous system healing. Magnesium, B vitamins, adaptogens, and omega-3 fatty acids all play a role. We assess what your body needs rather than following a generic protocol.

 What This Looks Like in Practice

 A woman came to us at 30, recently engaged and wanting to prepare her body for pregnancy. She'd stopped birth control six months earlier, but her cycles were still irregular. She was anxious about getting pregnant but couldn't quite articulate why.

 As we talked, she mentioned something she hadn't told many people. In college, she'd had an abortion. She'd grown up religious, and at the time, she felt like she couldn't go to her family or friends. So she went through it alone and never really processed what happened. She stuffed it down and moved on.

 But her body hadn't moved on. Since then, she'd struggled with anxiety. It was always there, a low hum of activation she'd learned to live with. Now, as she thought about getting pregnant, the anxiety was intensifying. She was scared, though she couldn't fully explain what she was scared of.

 When we worked somatically, the connection became clear. Her body was still holding the experience from years ago: the fear, the isolation, the grief she'd never let herself feel. And now, as she approached pregnancy again, her nervous system was activating around the unfinished business.

 We started with acupuncture to regulate her nervous system and support her cycles. We added herbs. And we did somatic work, creating a space where she could finally feel what she hadn't been able to feel at 19.

 In one session, as she tuned into her body, she noticed tightness in her lower belly. I asked her to stay with it. As she did, her hands moved to rest on her abdomen without her thinking about it. She noticed the tightness wasn't just tension. It was protection. Her body had been guarding that area for over a decade.

 As she let herself feel what was underneath the protection, tears came. Not dramatic sobbing, just quiet tears and a deep exhale she said she'd been holding for years. Her hands softened against her belly. Her shoulders dropped. The guarding was releasing.

 Afterward, she said it was the first time she'd felt connected to that part of her body without fear.

 Over three months, her anxiety settled significantly. Her cycles became regular. And something else shifted: she was no longer scared about getting pregnant. She felt ready.

 After she got married, she conceived on her first try. She told us the pregnancy felt different than she'd imagined it would. She wasn't waiting for something to go wrong. She could actually enjoy it.

 Read stories from women we've worked with →

 Your Next Step

 If you've been carrying symptoms that don't have clear explanations, if you've been told it's stress but haven't been offered a way to address that stress at the level of your body, there may be something here for you.

 We work with many people who have tried other approaches without resolution. Often, the missing piece is the nervous system. When we address what's happening there, everything else can begin to shift.

 Learn more about our Fertility & Health path or contact us at 212.432.1110 or info@fafwellness.com.