What Your Posture Says About Your Trauma Story

I have so many clients tell me, “well, I don’t know where to start…I can’t remember most of my childhood.” Sometimes, we feel like lost narratives–questioning what actually happened to us as kids. Here’s the good news: your body holds a map of every experience you’ve ever had, and these maps show up in the way we carry ourselves. 

Trauma impacts the shape of our posture, and this posture points us to the wounds we experienced in our various developmental stages. Let’s take a look at how trauma affects our posture, what your posture says about your trauma story, and some somatic practices you can do to move the trauma out of your body.

How Trauma Affects Your Posture

If you are reading this, you probably already know that trauma stores itself in the body (it is not purely mental). What you may not know is that our posture reflects the muscle memory of the survival skills we learned as kids. This muscle memory continues with us into adulthood and puts our nervous system on autopilot in response to a stressor. Without thinking about it, we take on the posture of our survival years and override or disconnect from our True Self. 

A quick example:

My go-to survival posture is mostly in my neck and shoulders. When I am under stress, it is as if my whole body collapses in on itself. My shoulders curve inwards, my neck feels like it is retracting into my thoracic cavity (almost a turtle-like sensation), my jaw tightens, and I turn completely inward. It is the feeling of wanting to make myself small–so small that I almost can feel like I’m not really there. I disappear, and in disappearing, can hide myself from the terror I experience in the presence of another person’s anger. I remove myself in an effort to avoid adding any more fuel to the other person’s rage. I choke it out by choking out my own existence.

Even as I write this, my whole body feels this deep cringe…I don’t want to do this, but my shoulders and neck naturally take on this tension (even in the calm moments). It’s become muscle memory.

All of this becomes habituated when we don’t fully process our trauma. Peter Levine, a renowned trauma expert, talks about how animals instinctively shake off stress after a traumatic event, completing the trauma cycle and releasing the tension. However, as children, we were often conditioned to be still—whether in school or at home, where stillness was seen as a sign of respect or safety. In authoritarian or abusive environments, freezing or fawning might have been the safest option available to us. 

So what happens when that release doesn’t occur? The unprocessed trauma gets locked into our bodies, carried in our posture. This is where state-dependent memory comes into play—when we unconsciously return to the same posture we held during a traumatic event, we are also re-entering the emotional state associated with that memory. 

Understanding Your Body’s Trauma Map

Rosenberg, founder of Integrative Body Psychotherapy, discusses that there are various tension bands throughout our bodies that form during different developmental stages when we experience a traumatic event. These tension bands affect our posture. They are as follows:

• Forehead

• Throat

• Chest

• Abdomen

• Hips

For example, if you had to hold your emotions in as a child, swallowing your tears and making yourself small to avoid threats, you might have developed a defensive posture. Hunched shoulders, a lowered head, and crossed arms could have become your body’s way of protecting itself. The tension might have settled in your jaw and neck, creating a feeling like a lump in your throat.

On the other hand, some might have developed a compensating posture to cope—hips forward, an open stance, appearing “large and in charge.” But even this posture, though it may seem confident, is a way of managing underlying trauma.

Take a moment and check in with your body. What tension bands are holding tension in this moment? What does this say about your survival skills and learned ways of coping? What does it say about your trauma story?

Building Resilience With Your Posture

The good news is that posture can be a powerful tool for releasing this trauma from your body. Practicing a new way of holding your body can help complete the trauma response sequence, releasing stored trauma from the body. By expanding our movement vocabulary, we increase our ability to respond to stress and triggers in healthier ways. This builds resilience.

Put It Into Practice

Try this simple exercise: 

1. Slowly straighten your spine, lift your chin slightly, and curl your lips into a slight smile. 
2. Notice how this feels in your body. Does it feel lighter? More hopeful? If so, linger there for a moment. 

If it feels too exposing, return to your regular posture, and then try lifting your spine again, this time placing a hand over your heart or taking another protective action that feels right for you.

1. Practice this throughout the week and observe how it impacts your mood and overall sense of self.

*Sources: NICABM, Mayer Wellness, Peter Levine’s Taming the Tiger, Rosenberg, Rand, and Asay’s Body, Self, and Soul.