How Trauma Affects Your Body (And How to Heal)

Part 4 of a 4-Part Series on Cellular Health and Nervous System Regulation

By: Joy Stephenson-Laws, Holistic Coach, J.D., Founder

Catch up on the series:

Part 1: The Foundation Most People Get Wrong — Nervous system regulation, sleep, hydration, nutrition, movement, and stress management
Part 2: The Building Blocks — What supplements actually do and when you need them
Part 3: The Messengers — How peptides work and why they matter

Here's something most doctors won't tell you, because they either don't know it or don't know how to treat it:

Your body will not heal if it doesn't feel safe.

You can eat perfectly. You can take every supplement. You can try the most advanced peptide therapy. You can sleep eight hours, drink enough water, and do everything "right."

But if your nervous system is stuck in survival mode — if your body believes at a fundamental level that danger is near — it will resist healing. It will stay inflamed. It will burn through nutrients faster than you can replace them. It will ignore the signals telling it to repair.

I've spent over 40 years as a healthcare attorney and holistic wellness coach, and I've seen this pattern repeat itself over and over. People do everything they're supposed to do, and they still can't heal. They're exhausted, confused, and starting to believe their bodies have failed them.

But their bodies haven't failed. Their bodies are doing exactly what they're designed to do: prioritize survival over everything else.

In Parts 1-3, we talked about what your body needs to heal: foundation, building blocks, and signaling. But there's one layer we haven't fully explored yet — the layer that determines whether your body can actually use any of it.

That layer is safety.

Nervous system regulation. Emotional health. Trauma healing. The felt sense in your body that you are not currently under threat.

This isn't "woo-woo." This isn't positive thinking or manifestation or pretending everything is fine when it's not.

This is biology. This is how your nervous system works. And understanding it changes everything.

The Nervous System: Your Body's Threat Detection System

Let's start with the basics, because most people don't actually understand what the nervous system does.

Your nervous system has one primary job: keep you alive.

It's constantly scanning your environment, your body, and your relationships, asking one question over and over: Am I safe right now?

Based on the answer to that question, your nervous system puts your body into one of two states:

State 1: Safety (Parasympathetic — Rest and Repair)

When your nervous system detects safety, it allows your body to do all the things that keep you healthy long-term:

Digestion works properly — you produce enough stomach acid and enzymes to break down food and absorb nutrients
Your immune system functions normally — it fights off infections without overreacting
Inflammation decreases — your body isn't constantly in defense mode
Healing accelerates — blood flow goes to tissues that need repair
Hormones balance — your body makes growth hormone, sex hormones, and thyroid hormones properly
Your brain functions clearly — you can think, remember, focus, and regulate your emotions
Your cells respond to signals — including the peptides we talked about in Part 3

This is the state where healing happens.

State 2: Threat (Sympathetic — Fight or Flight)

When your nervous system detects threat — real or perceived — it immediately shifts your body into survival mode:

Digestion shuts down — who needs to digest lunch when a bear is chasing you?
Your immune system goes on high alert — inflammation increases everywhere
Blood flow diverts to your muscles — so you can run or fight
Healing slows or stops — repair isn't a priority when survival is at stake
Stress hormones flood your system — cortisol, adrenaline, norepinephrine
Your brain narrows its focus — you can't think clearly, you react
Your cells become less responsive to healing signals — even if you're taking supplements or peptides

This is the state where survival is prioritized over everything else.

Here's the problem:

Your nervous system can't always tell the difference between a real threat (a car coming at you) and a perceived threat (a critical email from your boss, a fight with your partner, a traumatic memory, chronic financial stress).

So it treats them the same way. It puts you into survival mode. And if those perceived threats never stop — if you're dealing with chronic stress, unresolved trauma, constant overwhelm, or living in an environment or relationship that doesn't feel safe — your nervous system stays stuck in threat mode.

Not for minutes. For months. For years. Sometimes for decades.

And that's when everything breaks down.

What Chronic Threat Mode Does to Your Body

When your nervous system is stuck in survival mode for too long, here's what happens:

Your digestion fails. You produce less stomach acid. Fewer enzymes. Your gut motility slows. Even if you're eating nutrient-dense food and taking high-quality supplements, your body can't absorb them properly. Remember Part 2? This is why stress destroys nutrient absorption.

Your gut lining breaks down. Chronic stress increases intestinal permeability — leaky gut. The protective barrier becomes compromised. Food particles, bacteria, and toxins leak into your bloodstream. Your immune system sees them as threats and attacks, creating more inflammation. This is why you can't heal your gut without healing your nervous system.

Your immune system malfunctions. In survival mode, your immune system stays on high alert. It overreacts to everything. That's how you end up with autoimmune conditions, chronic allergies, frequent infections, or inflammation that won't resolve no matter what you try.

Your body burns through nutrients faster than you can replace them. Stress depletes magnesium, B vitamins, vitamin C, and zinc at an accelerated rate. You need more just to stay functional, let alone to heal. This is why people who are chronically stressed feel exhausted even when they're supplementing.

Your cells stop responding to healing signals. Even if your body is producing peptides (Part 3) or you're using therapeutic peptides, your cells won't respond properly when they're in survival mode. The message gets delivered, but nobody's home to receive it.

Your sleep becomes fragmented or impossible. If your body doesn't feel safe, it won't let you drop into deep, restorative sleep. You wake frequently. You have nightmares. You lie awake at 3 a.m. with racing thoughts. Your body is staying vigilant because some part of you — usually unconsciously — believes danger is near.

Your body ages faster. Chronic stress accelerates aging at the cellular level. It shortens telomeres (the protective caps on your DNA). It increases oxidative stress. It breaks down tissues faster than they can be repaired.

You can't think clearly. Brain fog. Memory problems. Difficulty making decisions. Emotional dysregulation. All of this happens when your nervous system is in threat mode, because survival doesn't require complex thinking — it requires fast reactions.

Bottom line: chronic threat mode destroys your body's ability to heal, no matter what interventions you try.

The Trauma Connection: Why Some Bodies Never Feel Safe

For some people, chronic threat mode isn't just about current stress. It's about trauma.

Trauma isn't just "bad things that happened." Trauma is what happens inside your body when you experience something overwhelming and your nervous system can't process or discharge the threat response.

That trauma gets stored in your body. Not as a memory you can consciously access, but as a pattern — a way your nervous system learned to respond to the world.

Here's what that looks like:

A child grows up in an unpredictable household. Sometimes things are calm. Sometimes there's yelling, violence, neglect, or emotional abuse. The child's nervous system learns: The world is not safe. I must stay vigilant at all times.

That child becomes an adult. The household is long gone. But the nervous system pattern remains. The body still scans for threat constantly. It still reacts as if danger is near, even when objectively, the person is safe.

This is what the ACEs Study (Adverse Childhood Experiences) proved. People with high trauma scores — even when they ate well, exercised, didn't smoke, and did everything "right" — had dramatically higher rates of chronic diseases. Heart disease. Autoimmune conditions. Digestive disorders. Chronic pain.

Why? Because their nervous systems never felt safe. Their bodies stayed in survival mode. And that survival mode, over decades, destroyed their health.

Trauma lives in the body. And until it's addressed, the body will not fully heal.

This is why therapy matters. Why somatic practices matter. Why creating safe relationships and environments matters. You're not just "healing your mind." You're changing the biological state your body lives in every single day.

Feel-Pause-Act: The Foundation of Nervous System Regulation

In Part 1, I introduced you to Feel-Pause-Act — a simple tool for nervous system regulation that I write about extensively in my book From Chains to Wings: A Poetry Revolution for Healing.

Let's go deeper now, because this practice is more powerful than it might seem at first.

Feel: Notice what's happening in your body right now. Is your chest tight? Is your breathing shallow? Is your jaw clenched? Are your shoulders up by your ears? Is your stomach in knots?

Most people walk around completely disconnected from their bodies. They don't notice the signals until the body is screaming — panic attack, chronic pain, complete exhaustion.

Feeling is about reconnecting. It's about tuning in to what your nervous system is trying to tell you. Am I in threat mode right now? Am I safe?

Pause: Create space between the trigger and your response. This is the most important step. When something happens — someone criticizes you, you get bad news, you remember something painful — your body wants to react immediately. Fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

The pause interrupts that automatic reaction. Even just a few seconds of pause activates your parasympathetic nervous system — the brake pedal on stress. It gives you time to choose a response instead of just reacting from a trauma pattern.

Act: Choose a response that supports safety and regulation rather than one driven by fear, old wounds, or survival instinct.

This doesn't mean suppressing your feelings. It doesn't mean pretending everything is fine. It means responding in a way that actually helps rather than making things worse.

Maybe that means setting a boundary. Maybe it means asking for what you need. Maybe it means removing yourself from the situation. Maybe it means doing a few minutes of breathwork to calm your system before you respond.

Every time you use Feel-Pause-Act, you're doing something profound:

You're teaching your nervous system that you can handle what's happening. You're showing your body that you're not helpless. You're creating a new pattern — one where you have agency, where you can regulate, where you don't have to stay stuck in survival mode.

Over time, this changes everything.

The Complete Toolkit: Practical Ways to Regulate Your Nervous System

Feel-Pause-Act is foundational, but it's not the only tool. Here's a more complete toolkit for nervous system regulation:

1. Breathwork: The Fastest Way to Signal Safety

Your breath is the most direct way to communicate with your nervous system. Slow, deep breathing activates your vagus nerve, which signals to your body: We're safe. We can relax.

Try this: 4-7-8 breathing. Inhale through your nose for 4 counts. Hold for 7 counts. Exhale through your mouth for 8 counts. Do this for 3-5 minutes.

The long exhale is key. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system and tells your body to shift out of threat mode.

2. Somatic Practices: Releasing Trauma Stored in the Body

Trauma doesn't just live in your mind. It lives in your muscles, your fascia, your tissues. Somatic practices help your body complete the stress response and release what's been held.

Options:

Trauma-informed yoga
Somatic experiencing therapy
TRE (Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises)
Dance or movement therapy
Massage or bodywork (with a trauma-informed practitioner)

The goal isn't to push through or power over. The goal is to allow your body to release what it's been holding.

3. Therapy: Healing the Wounds That Keep You Stuck

Talk therapy helps, but for trauma, you need approaches that work with the nervous system, not just the conscious mind.

Especially effective:

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
Somatic Experiencing
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy
Polyvagal-informed therapy

These approaches help your nervous system process and integrate trauma so it stops running your life from the background.

4. Safe Relationships: The Most Powerful Regulator

Your nervous system co-regulates with other nervous systems. That's a fancy way of saying: being around calm, safe people helps your body feel calm and safe.

This is why isolation is so harmful. And why toxic relationships are so destructive. Your body is constantly reading the people around you and adjusting its threat level based on what it senses.

Safe relationships — with a partner, friends, family, therapist, or community — are one of the most powerful tools for nervous system healing.

Safe relationships feel like:

You can be yourself without performance or pretending
You're not walking on eggshells
Your feelings are validated, not dismissed or minimized
There's room for conflict without fear of abandonment or retaliation
You feel seen, heard, and valued

If you don't have these relationships yet, that's okay. Building them is part of the healing process.

5. Boundaries: Protection Is Medicine

Boundaries aren't selfish. They're survival.

If you're in an environment or relationship that constantly triggers your nervous system into threat mode, no amount of supplements or peptides will help you heal. You have to protect yourself.

That might mean:

Limiting contact with toxic people
Saying no to demands on your time and energy
Leaving a job, relationship, or living situation that's destroying your health
Reducing exposure to news, social media, or other sources of chronic stress

Boundaries are hard, especially if you've been taught that other people's needs matter more than yours. But without them, your nervous system will never feel safe enough to heal.

6. Nature: Your Nervous System's Reset Button

Time in nature — especially green spaces, water, and sunlight — has measurable effects on your nervous system. It lowers cortisol. It reduces heart rate and blood pressure. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system.

You don't need to go hiking in the wilderness (though that's great if you can). Even 20 minutes in a park, sitting by water, or walking barefoot on grass makes a difference.

Your nervous system evolved in nature. It knows how to regulate there.

7. Creative Expression: Processing What Words Can't Capture

Sometimes your body holds things that language can't reach. Creative expression — art, music, writing, dance — gives your nervous system another way to process and release.

You don't have to be "good" at it. You don't have to show anyone. The point is to let what's inside come out in a form that your body understands.

8. Sleep Hygiene: Creating Safety for Rest

We talked about sleep in Part 1, but let's connect it to nervous system regulation.

Your body won't let you sleep deeply if it doesn't feel safe. So sleep hygiene isn't just about blackout curtains and no screens. It's about creating an environment where your nervous system can relax.

That means:

A bedroom that feels safe and calm
Addressing nightmares or night terrors (often trauma-related)
Dealing with sleep apnea or other physical issues that trigger threat responses
Using breathwork or meditation before bed to signal safety
If you share a bed, making sure that relationship feels safe

9. Nervous System-Friendly Movement

We talked about movement in Part 1, but let's be more specific here.

For people with trauma or chronic nervous system dysregulation, intense exercise can make things worse. It adds more stress to an already overloaded system.

Nervous system-friendly movement includes:

Walking, especially in nature
Gentle yoga or stretching
Swimming
Tai chi or qi gong
Dancing in ways that feel good to your body
Strength training with adequate rest and recovery

The goal is movement that helps your body feel strong, capable, and safe — not movement that pushes you into more threat.

10. Orienting: Teaching Your Body to Notice Safety

This is a practice from Somatic Experiencing. It's simple but powerful.

Several times a day, pause and slowly look around your environment. Notice what you see, hear, smell, feel. Notice what's actually happening right now, in this moment.

Your body is often stuck in the past (replaying trauma) or the future (anticipating threat). Orienting brings you into the present and helps your nervous system notice: Right now, in this moment, I am actually safe.

Over time, this practice helps your nervous system update its threat assessment. It learns that safety is possible.

Bringing It All Together: The Complete Healing Framework

Let's tie everything from this entire series together, because now it should all make sense.

Part 1: Foundation

Your body needs the basics: nervous system regulation, sleep, hydration, whole food nutrition, movement, and stress management. These create the environment where healing can happen.

Without this foundation, nothing else works.

Part 2: Building Blocks

Your body needs raw materials: vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and other nutrients. These are the supplies your cells use to build, repair, and function.

But if your nervous system is dysregulated (Part 4), you can't absorb these nutrients properly. You're burning through them faster than you can replace them.

Part 3: Signaling

Your body needs instructions: peptides and other signaling molecules that tell your cells what to do with the building blocks.

But if your nervous system is in survival mode (Part 4), your cells won't respond to the signals. The message gets delivered, but nobody's listening.

Part 4: Safety

Your body needs to feel safe. This is the layer that makes everything else possible.

When your nervous system is regulated, when your body feels safe:

Your digestion works, so you can absorb nutrients (Part 2)
Your cells respond to healing signals (Part 3)
Your sleep improves (Part 1)
Your inflammation decreases
Your hormones balance
Your immune system functions properly
Your body can finally heal

The hierarchy looks like this:

Safety (nervous system regulation) → Foundation (sleep, nutrition, hydration, movement, stress management) → Building Blocks (supplements) → Signaling (peptides)

You can't skip the bottom layers and expect the top layers to work.

But when you address all four layers together, that's when real, lasting, transformational healing becomes possible.

Why This Matters: You're Not Broken

If you've been doing everything "right" and still struggling to heal, this is probably why.

It's not that you're broken. It's not that your body has given up on you. It's not that you're not trying hard enough.

It's that your body is stuck in survival mode. And in survival mode, healing isn't the priority. Survival is.

Understanding this changes everything.

It means the problem isn't you. The problem is that your nervous system is responding to threat — real or perceived — the way it was designed to.

It means healing isn't just about taking the right supplements or eating the right foods. Healing is about creating safety — in your body, in your relationships, in your environment — so your nervous system can finally shift out of survival mode.

It means you're not weak for needing therapy, for setting boundaries, for leaving relationships or situations that are destroying your health. You're protecting yourself. You're creating the conditions where healing can actually happen.

Your body isn't failing you. Your body is waiting for you to feel safe enough to heal.

The Work Ahead

This work isn't easy. It's not quick. There's no pill, no supplement, no peptide that can do it for you.

Healing your nervous system requires:

Facing things you've been avoiding
Feeling things you've been numbing
Changing patterns that feel familiar even if they're harmful
Building new skills for regulation
Creating (or finding) relationships and environments that feel safe
Sometimes grieving what you didn't get, what you lost, or what was taken from you

It's hard. And it's worth it.

Because on the other side of this work is a body that can finally heal. A life where you're not just surviving. A nervous system that can relax, that can trust, that can feel safe enough to let you thrive.

Final Thoughts: You Have More Power Than You Think

Here's what I want you to take away from this entire series:

You have more power over your healing than you've been told.

Not unlimited power. You can't positive-think your way out of trauma or chronic illness. You can't manifest perfect health while ignoring the basics.

But you can create the conditions where healing becomes possible.

You can regulate your nervous system. You can address trauma. You can provide your body with the foundation, building blocks, and signaling it needs. You can protect yourself from people and environments that keep you stuck in survival mode.

You can do this work. And when you do, your body will meet you there.

Because your body wants to heal. It's designed to heal. It's just been waiting for you to create the safety it needs to do so.

That work starts now.

What You Need to Remember

Your body will not heal if it doesn't feel safe.

Your nervous system has two states: safety (rest-and-repair) and threat (fight-or-flight).

Chronic threat mode destroys digestion, nutrient absorption, immune function, sleep, and cellular response to healing signals.

Trauma lives in the body and keeps your nervous system stuck in survival mode.

The ACEs Study proves that unresolved trauma creates chronic disease, even when people do everything "right."

Feel-Pause-Act is a foundational tool for nervous system regulation.

Additional tools include: breathwork, somatic practices, trauma therapy, safe relationships, boundaries, nature, creative expression, sleep hygiene, nervous system-friendly movement, and orienting.

The complete healing framework: Safety → Foundation → Building Blocks → Signaling.

You can't skip layers and expect healing to happen.

You're not broken — your nervous system is responding to threat the way it's designed to.

Creating safety (in your body, relationships, and environment) makes healing possible.

This work is hard, but it's worth it.

This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your health routine, especially if you're dealing with trauma, chronic illness, or mental health conditions.

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This completes the 4-part series on How Your Body Actually Heals.

Go Back to Part 3: The Messengers
Go Back to Part 2: The Building Blocks
Go Back to Part 1: The Foundation \

How Your Body Actually Heals Part 4