The Body Keeps the Score: 8 Physical Signs Your Childhood Trauma Is Still Running Your Life
I spent years thinking I’d outgrown my childhood damage through sheer achievement and willpower. Turns out, my body had been keeping a detailed record of every moment I felt unsafe, unloved, or invisible and it was running my entire nervous system without my permission.
The truth about childhood trauma that nobody wants to admit?
It doesn’t stay in childhood.
While you’ve been busy becoming the most competent person in every room, proving you’re worthy of love and safety through performance, your nervous system has been stuck in 1999, still trying to solve problems that a seven-year-old couldn’t handle.
Your body remembers what your mind desperately tries to forget. And if you’re someone who’s mastered the art of looking like you have your shit together while secretly feeling like you’re falling apart, this is your wake-up call.
Because that chest tightness during normal conversations? The way your jaw clenches when someone raises their voice? The fact that you can’t sit still without feeling guilty?
That’s not anxiety. That’s not being “high-strung.” That’s your childhood trauma, still running the show.
Why Your Body Won’t Let Go
Nobody explains this about childhood trauma: your nervous system developed its operating manual when you were too young to know better. Back when you learned that love was conditional, safety was negotiable, and the only way to survive was to be perfect, invisible, or indispensable.
That little kid did an incredible job keeping you alive. But now you’re an adult, and your nervous system is still using survival strategies designed for a world that no longer exists.
“Your trauma responses didn’t disappear when you learned to excel. They just got more sophisticated.”
But your body can’t tell the difference between your childhood bedroom and your current life. So it keeps protecting you from dangers that ended decades ago, creating physical symptoms that feel random but are actually perfectly logical responses to a nervous system that never learned to feel safe.
8 Physical Signs Your Childhood Trauma Is Still in Charge:
1. Your Chest Feels Like It’s Going to Explode During Normal Interactions
You’re having a regular conversation (nothing threatening, nothing intense) and suddenly your chest feels like someone’s sitting on it. Your heart races. Your breathing gets shallow. You feel like you’re about to die, but nothing dangerous is actually happening.
This is hypervigilance wearing a business suit. Your nervous system learned early that people can turn dangerous without warning, so it scans every interaction for threats. That casual conversation triggered some micro-expression, voice tone, or body language that reminded your nervous system of someone who hurt you when you were small.
What’s really happening: Your fight-or-flight response is firing at every perceived threat, even when you’re objectively safe.
Why it started: As a kid, you had to become an expert at reading the room to survive. Now your nervous system treats every room like it might be dangerous.
2. You Can’t Relax Without Feeling Guilty or Anxious
Rest feels selfish. Sitting still makes you jumpy. You’ve convinced yourself you’re just “motivated” or “driven,” but your nervous system equates stillness with danger.
Children who grew up in chaotic or unpredictable environments learn that staying alert and useful equals staying safe. Relaxation meant you might miss the signs that someone was about to explode, leave, or hurt you.
What’s really happening: Your nervous system believes that if you’re not constantly producing, performing, or fixing something, bad things will happen.
The physical toll: Chronic muscle tension, exhaustion that sleep doesn’t fix, inability to enjoy downtime without your mind racing.
3. Your Jaw Stays Clenched (Even When You Sleep)
You wake up with a sore jaw. Your dentist mentions teeth grinding. Your face feels tight even during good days. You might not even realize you’re doing it.
Jaw clenching is how your body prepares to fight or stay silent. Children who couldn’t speak up, couldn’t fight back, or had to suppress their needs learn to hold that tension in their jaw. It’s literally your body getting ready to protect you by staying quiet or biting back.
What’s really happening: Your body is permanently braced for conflict, even when you’re asleep.
The deeper impact: Chronic jaw tension affects your entire nervous system, keeping you in a subtle state of defense mode 24/7.
4. You Hold Your Breath During Stressful Moments
Notice what happens to your breathing when someone’s upset with you, when you’re waiting for bad news, or when conflict arises. Chances are, you literally stop breathing.
This is freeze response in action. When fight or flight wasn’t options as a child, your nervous system learned to disappear by making yourself as small and still as possible. Holding your breath was part of becoming invisible.
What’s really happening: Your body is trying to disappear when it perceives emotional danger.
Immediate impact: Shallow breathing keeps your nervous system activated and prevents you from accessing your full mental capacity when you need it most.
5. Your Stomach Is Constantly in Knots
Your gut clenches before difficult conversations. You lose your appetite when stressed. You might have digestive issues that doctors can’t explain, or you feel nauseous when people are upset (even when it has nothing to do with you).
Your gut learned to prepare for emotional poison long before your brain could process what was happening. Children absorb the emotional climate around them through their bodies, and the stomach is where we first feel that something’s wrong.
What’s really happening: Your enteric nervous system (your “second brain”) is still on high alert for emotional toxicity.
Connection matters: That “gut feeling” about people? It’s real. Your stomach learned to detect unsafe people before your mind could.
6. You Startle at Everything
A door closes too loud and you jump. Someone approaches from behind and your whole body jolts. Unexpected sounds make you feel like you’re having a heart attack.
Exaggerated startle response means your nervous system is constantly expecting danger. Children who lived with unpredictable people (explosive anger, sudden mood swings, or emotional unavailability) develop nervous systems that are always ready to be ambushed.
What’s really happening: Your nervous system has the sensitivity settings cranked to maximum because it learned that threats can come from anywhere, anytime.
Something to remember: Even in safe environments, your body hasn’t updated its threat assessment system.
7. You Can’t Handle Being Touched Unexpectedly
Someone puts their hand on your shoulder and you flinch. Surprise hugs make you tense up. You need to see physical contact coming or it feels overwhelming, even from people you love.
Your nervous system learned that touch can be dangerous, inappropriate, or come with strings attached. Even innocent physical contact can trigger your defense systems because your body remembers when touch wasn’t safe.
What’s really happening: Your nervous system is protecting you from touch that might not be safe, wanted, or appropriate.
What makes this tricky: This can affect your ability to receive comfort or affection, even when you desperately want connection.
8. Your Body Hurts for No Medical Reason
Chronic headaches. Muscle tension in your shoulders and neck. Back pain that comes and goes. Joint aches that doctors can’t explain. Your body holds onto stress in ways that create real physical pain.
Trauma gets stored in your tissues. The hypervigilance, the chronic tension, the inability to fully relax… it all shows up as physical pain. Your body has been braced for danger for so long that the muscles forgot how to let go.
The real toll: Years of living in fight-or-flight mode creates chronic inflammation and muscle tension that manifests as physical pain.
What doctors miss: This is why trauma survivors often have multiple unexplained health issues that traditional medicine can’t fix.
Your Nervous System Isn’t Broken — It’s Working Perfectly
Listen to me: these responses aren’t flaws. They’re not weakness. They’re not evidence that you’re broken or “too sensitive.”
These are the brilliant adaptations of a nervous system that kept you alive when you were small and powerless. Your body learned to scan for danger, brace for impact, and prepare for the worst because sometimes that was exactly what you needed to survive.
“The problem isn’t that your body remembers. The problem is that your body doesn’t know the danger is over.”
Your nervous system is working perfectly for the life you were living twenty years ago. It just hasn’t gotten the memo that you’re safe now.
What Your Body Needs to Hear
Your childhood trauma responses were adaptive then. They’re not serving you now. But beating yourself up for having them will only make them stronger.
Your body needs to learn that it’s safe to relax, safe to take up space, safe to trust that not every interaction is a threat assessment. This isn’t about positive thinking or willpower… it’s about literally retraining your nervous system through your body.
Four simple ways to begin:
Notice without judgment. When you catch yourself chest-breathing, jaw-clenching, or startling at normal sounds, just notice. “Oh, there’s my nervous system doing its job.”
Breathe like you belong here. Long exhales tell your nervous system that you’re not running from a predator. Four counts in, six counts out.
Move the stored energy. Shake your hands. Roll your shoulders. Let your body discharge some of that trapped tension.
Speak truth to your nervous system. “I’m safe right now. That was then. This is now. I’m not seven years old anymore.”
Your body has been protecting you with the information it had. Now it’s time to give it new information: You survived. You’re safe. You get to take up space now.
The scared kid inside your nervous system did an incredible job keeping you alive. But you don’t need to live like you’re still in danger.
Because you’re not.
— Cody Taymore
Kill The Silence
If this gave you clarity, peace, or just helped you feel a little less alone — and you want to support more work like this — you can leave a small tip here.
Free tactical tools, nervous system blueprints, and recovery guides
I also publish on Medium.
If you want more essays on trauma, recovery, and high-performance survival,
Follow Me Here
My Therapist Extorted $126,000, Controlled My Life, and Almost Destroyed Me
This post reflects my personal lived experience. All events are documented through verifiable communications, contracts, and official reports. This story includes allegations that have been reported to state and legal authorities.
You just keep on knocking it out of the park!
This is an awesome read! I’ve never seen this explained before, and I have also shared it with my husband. Thank you!!