The Somatic Truth About Healing: Why It Often Feels Like Falling Apart
When healing begins, it often doesn’t feel like what we’ve been taught “healing” should look like. It doesn’t always start with lightness or clarity. It begins with discomfort, tears, trembling, restlessness, like your system is waking up after being frozen for a long time. This is your nervous system beginning to thaw.
The Less Discussed Survival Response: Freeze
When life becomes overwhelming from chronic stress, trauma, burnout, or emotional overload, the nervous system activates a lesser-known survival response: Freeze (also known as shutdown). This is not a flaw. It is your body’s last-resort intelligent design to conserve energy and keep you alive while still having to “function” and complete tasks under capitalism.
In a freeze state, everything slows down:
Your energy drops
Emotions feel muted or distant
You may feel disconnected from yourself or others
Numbness, exhaustion, and fog become familiar
This is protection, not weakness. But if your body never receives the message that it’s finally safe, the very response that kept you alive can begin to limit your aliveness.
The Thaw: “Why Am I Crying at a Random Social Media Post?”
As your system starts to thaw from freeze, sensations and emotions begin to move again. It’s like your system unplugged itself to survive, and now you’re slowly re-attaching the wires: sensation, breath, emotion, and presence. Sometimes this reboot is gentle and slow. Other times…everything comes online at once.
When reconnection happens, you may notice:
pressure in the chest
tingling in the stomach
a lump in your throat
sudden waves of emotion that usually felt like “nothing”
This is not your system breaking. It is quite the opposite; it is the system waking up.
Feeling again—no matter how messy or inconvenient—is living proof that your body is returning to life. Even if that “return to life” happens during a staff meeting or while scrolling Instagram at midnight (no judgment).
Why Feeling Again Can Feel Like Too Much
As your system reconnects, emotions that were once buried begin to surface: grief, anger, longing, joy. It can feel intense because your body is thawing after a long winter.
Think of when a numb hand warms up, the pins and needles are uncomfortable, but they signal circulation returning. Your nervous system is doing something similar: reconnecting the pathways between sensation, emotion, and meaning.
This is repair.
Integration: Moving Slowly Through the Thaw
Somatic healing requires softness, not urgency. It’s not about chasing catharsis—it’s about building enough safety to stay present. This thawing is a gradual reclaiming of your body’s natural rhythm. It is a sacred and messy journey to your body remembering, “I CAN feel again.
Here are supportive ways to move through thawing:
Ground daily: gentle movement, grounding touch, or slow breath
Hydrate + nourish: your system needs fuel to process emotion
Rest generously: healing is metabolically demanding
Name what you feel: “I notice heat,” “I feel pressure,” “I feel sadness”
Seek co-regulation: connect with a therapist, friend, or community
If you find yourself trembling, crying, or sensing more than usual—pause and breathe.
You’re not falling apart.
Your system is waking up.
Walking Beside You on the Journey of Reconnection
As a somatic therapist and guide, my work isn’t about fixing anyone. It’s about walking alongside you as your system remembers what it has always known how to do, slowly reawakening the parts that once went numb to protect you.
Shutdown, numbness, over-functioning—none of these were failures. They were brilliant survival strategies and now, your system is inviting you into something new.
A thawing.
A returning.
A remembering.
Ready to Thaw with Support?
If you’re ready to gently reconnect with the parts of you that went into hiding, my offerings provide resourced, somatic spaces for this work:
Rooted Presence Membership
You don’t have to thaw alone.
