The Body Keeps the Score
NATALIE HEINZ
As I began my counseling career, I was encouraged to read The Body Keeps the Score. I didn’t realize how impactful the book would be. I work in the foster care system where everyone in counseling - and the entire system - is deeply connected to trauma. But the reality is that most people are affected by some kind of trauma in their lives. The body holds onto this trauma. Have you ever lost someone close to you? Do you ever feel impacted by their loss around the anniversary of their death even if you did not consciously remember that it was around that date? That’s how the body “keeps the score.” Your body remembers the trauma. It knows what has happened to you. It is impacted in the same way you are. One goal in treatment is to integrate these two parts of yourself. It’s not enough to talk about the trauma. And in trauma work, it’s often difficult to express or put words to the trauma. It’s also necessary to work the body through the trauma.
There is often a disconnect between the body and the mind. But this connection is healing. So in the trauma world, it is encouraged to do “bottom up” approaches. First you work the body - yoga, taekwondo, massages - and then you can work with the mind. We also find healing simply in the body work. Everything is connected.
As an enneagram type one, I fall in the gut triad. However, I didn’t understand the connection between my type and my body. I spent a year every day practicing mindfulness and yoga. That year was a difficult year where I was trying to work out my own trauma of a miscarriage. In that year, I had another miscarriage as well. But I learned a lot about myself. I learned how to connect my body to my mind. I learned what it felt like to actually relax my body. I learned how to be more aware of myself. I experienced the ways my body “kept the score.” Through that year, I sought out other ways to heal my body and be aware of my body.
This connection to the body helps me in every part of my life. It allows me to better understand the way trauma impacts the body. The body was made in a very important way, integral to every part of you. The connection is often not valued enough. But the value brings so much healing.
The pandemic has brought us all into a collective experience of trauma. We are all touched by this in some way. We are all grieving something or someone we lost through the pandemic. Maybe it’s alone time. Maybe it’s a vacation or time with family. Maybe it’s a loved one. Maybe it’s time with coworkers in the office. Maybe it’s the ability to safely go out to eat. It is tempting to think that with vaccine roll outs that the pandemic is over. But it’s not. And none of us will be the same coming out of this experience. We all will have to work through this collective trauma. Remember the ways your body holds this trauma and remember how important it is to connect to your body. And most importantly, remember to include your close relationships in what healing may look like because we are all experiencing this together.
Natalie is a wife, mother, therapist, and enneagram one. She works at the Children’s Home as a licensed clinical professional counselor working as a supervisor to therapists in foster care. She has been married to her high school sweetheart, Bryan, for the past seven years. She has two angel babies, Andrew and Ellie, and a one-and-a-half-year-old son, Ezekiel. She enjoys yoga, counseling, foster care, and the enneagram.