Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Tries to Forget

Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Tries to Forget
In recent years, there’s been a quiet but important shift in how we understand trauma and emotional healing.
We’re learning, both through research and lived experience, that healing doesn’t come solely from revisiting the past through talk therapy. It comes from integrating what the body has held onto long after the mind has moved on.

Your body remembers what your mind tries to forget.
And it will continue to speak through symptoms, tension, fatigue, pain, until it’s heard.

The Mind-Body Connection in Practice
At Discover Balance, I often work with clients who arrive with physical symptoms:

• Chronic constipation
• IBS
• Tension headaches
• Sleep disturbances
• Body-based anxiety

Many of these individuals have already seen specialists. They’ve done tests. They’ve tried medication or lifestyle changes. And still, something doesn’t shift.
That’s because the root of the issue isn’t purely physical.
It lies in the nervous system in subconscious emotional patterns shaped by earlier life experiences, many of which have been suppressed or unprocessed.

Why Hypnotherapy and Somatic Work?
Hypnotherapy is more than just relaxation. It’s a tool for reaching the subconscious, where old patterns and beliefs are stored. But more importantly, it can also be used in connection with the body.
Rather than endlessly revisiting the trauma itself, we help the client:

• Create a sense of internal safety
• Reconnect with parts of the body that have been ignored or “shut down”
• Gently rewire how they relate to stress, emotion, and self-care

This is often referred to as working both top-down (cognitive/emotional) and bottom-up (somatic/body-based).

What This Might Look Like
In session, this work can be surprisingly simple but deeply impactful.
Here are three common tools I use with clients:

1. Improving sleep and nervous system regulation
   Through guided visualisations, we calm the body enough to restore rest often one of the first foundations for healing.
2. Recognising triggers in a relaxed state
   We introduce moments of awareness noticing where tension arises, while the client is in a safe, calm space so they can respond rather than react.
3. Making one small, integrated change
   Through subtle suggestion, we encourage shifts in behaviour: taking a walk before breakfast, placing a hand on the heart when overwhelmed, allowing rest without guilt.

Over time, these micro-adjustments create new neural pathways.
And healing begins.

A Real-Life Example
One client I worked with had battled severe constipation for years. She was frustrated, physically uncomfortable, and feeling hopeless.
But through our sessions, she began to uncover emotional events from her early life, times when it wasn’t safe to speak up or assert her needs. Her body had held that pattern of contraction for decades.
As she reconnected with herself through hypnotherapy, something changed.
The tension softened. The symptoms improved. And most importantly, she no longer felt at war with her body.
The Takeaway?
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You don’t need to relive your trauma to heal it.
You need to feel safe enough to listen to your body and respond with care.
When the mind and body are brought back into connection, change happens.
And it lasts.