How Trauma Energy Gets Stored in the Body and What Helps It Release
- Jan 9
- 8 min read
Updated: Jan 12
Jenna McDonough is a trauma-sensitive emotional regulation specialist who supports adults and children through meditation, mindfulness, breathwork, somatic resets, and sound healing. She is the creator of the PEACEFUL: Mindful Moments for Every Age app and author of Kind Kids. Her mission is to make emotional well-being accessible to all.
Trauma doesn’t only live in memory, it lives in the body. When a stressful or traumatic experience isn’t fully processed, its energy can remain stored in the nervous system, shaping how we respond, react, and even how we feel physically years later. Understanding how trauma energy gets “stuck” is the first step toward releasing it safely and effectively.
What does it mean when trauma gets stored in the body?
Everything on Earth carries vibration and energy, even objects that appear completely still. The human nervous system is no different. When a traumatic event occurs, the body mobilizes energy to respond to the threat. If that energy is not fully discharged, it can remain stored in the system.
Over time, this unresolved energy may act as a trigger, causing reactive responses instead of regulated ones, or manifest physically as chronic pain, illness, inflammation, anxiety, or fatigue. What we often label as “symptoms” are frequently the body’s attempt to protect and communicate.
Why the body responded differently each time
Over the course of four years, I was involved in three car accidents. None of them were due to any fault of my own, yet each one offered a powerful lesson in how trauma energy moves, or doesn’t, through the body.
The first accident, while often labeled “minor” by others, caused significant physical damage to my spine. It came with its own challenges and consequences. However, for the purpose of understanding how trauma energy is processed, it was the latter two accidents that revealed the most striking contrast.
Both incidents happened on the same road, only 50 to 100 yards apart, though I was traveling in opposite directions. I was not driving the same vehicle, but both were large SUVs. I was struck on the passenger side both times. My child was in the backseat both times. The time of day and weather conditions were nearly identical.
The most significant difference was this:
I saw the first accident coming.
I was completely blindsided by the second.
There were many layers that compounded the trauma in both situations: my child being present, the physical injuries, and the recklessness and distraction of the other drivers. But for this comparison, one factor stands out above all others: what happened to my body immediately after the impact.
The first accident
In the first accident, I noticed the car ahead of me drifting. I tried to slow down, but it happened too quickly. The driver, believing she had missed her turn, didn’t look and turned directly into the front passenger side of my vehicle. The impact deployed the airbags and pushed my car off the road into a preserve and trees.
I was shaken, but I was able to remove myself and my child from the car. A fire truck arrived and suggested we skip the hospital and follow up with our personal doctors instead. Not knowing any better at the time, I allowed the firefighters to bandage my bleeding arm and waited for my husband to arrive.
My husband took our child to the doctor. With my car towed and no transportation, I needed medical care myself. I was still in a fight-or-flight state and not emotionally ready to get back into a car, so I decided to walk.
The doctor’s office was only a few minutes away by car, but on foot it was a 15–20-minute walk. I remember the feeling of every step. Years later, I still feel immense gratitude for the nurse practitioner who gave up her lunch break to see me, examine my arm, which was burned and torn from the airbag, and dress the wounds.
Afterward, I walked to a small, local pharmacy where everyone knew me. They told me I was in shock. I filled my prescription, walked the rest of the way home, reunited with my husband and child, and began dealing with the practical aftermath of the accident.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that, through all of this, my body was moving. Walking. Orienting. Discharging and slowly returning to safety.
The second accident
Just over two years later, I was driving the same road this time in the opposite direction. The same child was in the backseat.
Out of nowhere, an SUV ran a stop sign at a high rate of speed. I saw a flash of black out of the corner of my eye, and then we were hit. The vehicle struck the front passenger side of my car, fishtailed, hit the rear passenger side, and once again pushed us into a preserve full of trees. All the airbags deployed. My child started crying.
This time, shock set in immediately. I never saw it coming. I remember sitting on the side of the road repeating, “I can’t believe this just happened again.”
I was taken to the hospital by ambulance, placed in a wheelchair, and left in a waiting room crying until my husband arrived with our child. We were told it was safer for him to come separately in his own car seat rather than have our child transported in the ambulance.
After several hours, I was discharged and went straight home and straight to bed.
That night, when I closed my eyes, the accident replayed in full sensory detail. The black flash. The sound of impact. The smell of the airbags. The metallic taste of blood from where the airbag hit my face. Every time I tried to sleep, my body relived the event. This continued for weeks.
The critical difference
Admittedly, the second accident was more severe, but the difference in impact went beyond severity alone.
Both accidents required physical and emotional healing. Yet mentally and neurologically, the first resolved far more quickly than the second.
The defining difference was movement. After the first accident, I walked. I moved. My body discharged the energy of the trauma and gradually returned to my window of tolerance.
After the second accident, I was still. I went from the crash to the ambulance, to the wheelchair, to my bed. The trauma energy had nowhere to go.
My body never completed the response. The energy stayed, and it stuck.
Ultimately, what I was experiencing forced me to seek support sooner rather than later. In my case, EMDR became a critical part of helping my nervous system process and release what had remained frozen.
What is “stuck energy,” really?
“Stuck energy” is a somatic term used to describe what neuroscience refers to as unfinished threat response patterns in the brain-body stress system that did not complete after trauma.
This concept is supported by the work of Bessel van der Kolk, whose research shows that trauma is not only remembered cognitively but held in the body, breath, and nervous system. When the brain cannot fully process an experience, the body often continues to respond as if the event is still happening.
What happens when trauma energy isn’t released
When trauma energy remains unresolved, several long-term effects may occur:
Dysregulation of the stress response system
Increased inflammation and immune activation
Elevated cardiovascular disease risk
Brain-circuit changes that keep the system hyper-alert
Chronic pain and somatic symptoms
Emotional and physiological ripple effects across the lifespan
How to move trauma energy immediately after an event
In the moments following a traumatic experience, gentle movement is often the most effective intervention.
This may include:
Walking or marching in place
Pressing your feet firmly into the ground
Shaking your arms, hands, or legs
Brushing your body with your hands
Orienting visually to your surroundings
Animals instinctively do this. After freezing in response to a threat, they shake to discharge energy once danger has passed. Humans have the same biological capacity, we’ve just forgotten how to trust it.
What if the trauma is old and showing up physically?
When trauma is not processed at the time it occurs, it often settles into the body. Research consistently shows that unresolved stress can express itself through chronic tension, digestive issues, pain, anxiety, fatigue, and a persistent sense of being “stuck.”
Healing older trauma requires a layered, integrative approach. I strongly advocate starting with licensed medical or mental health professionals. Once that foundation is in place, body-based practices can help restore movement and regulation.
Practices that help release stored trauma energy
Meditation
Mindfulness and body-based meditation improve interoception, the brain’s ability to sense internal states. Studies show these practices calm the amygdala while strengthening the prefrontal cortex, allowing the nervous system to move out of survival mode.
By directing breath and awareness into areas of tension, the body gradually restores rhythmic movement and safety. I often describe this like a jellyfish expanding on the inhale, softening on the exhale.
Sound healing
Sound works through vibration and frequency. Because the body is largely water, sound travels efficiently through tissues and fascia. Research shows sound can promote parasympathetic activation, reduce cortisol, and improve nervous-system coherence.
Breathwork
Slow, rhythmic breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, supporting emotional regulation and physiological calm. Clinical research shows breathwork can reduce anxiety, PTSD symptoms, and chronic stress by directly influencing autonomic balance.
Energy healing
While not always framed within Western medicine, emerging research suggests energy-based practices influence heart-rate variability (HRV), a key marker of nervous-system resilience. These practices are particularly helpful when trauma is preverbal or difficult to articulate.
Healing is about completion, not erasure
Healing does not mean forgetting what happened. The body doesn’t need the experience erased, it needs it completed.
Trauma occurs when the nervous system cannot finish its response to threat. Healing happens when safety, movement, and regulation allow that response to resolve.
Listening to the body is the first act of healing
Your body is not working against you, it is protecting you. Symptoms are not failures, they are signals.
When we shift from asking “What’s wrong with me?” to “What does my body need now?” healing becomes possible.
A final grounded takeaway
Trauma does not stay stuck because you are broken. It stays because your system did what it needed to survive.
With the right support, pacing, and tools, survival responses can soften. Movement can return. Regulation can be restored.
Your body is not the problem. It is the pathway forward.
If you are noticing the effects of past trauma in your body, consider beginning with professional support and exploring gentle, body-based practices that restore safety and movement. Healing happens in layers and each step matters.
“When the body is given safety, movement, and time, even the oldest trauma can soften, integrate, and finally let go.”
Author reflection | Jenna McDonough
This article was written from both professional training and lived experience. I’ve felt firsthand how trauma moves through the body and what happens when it doesn’t. Understanding that my symptoms were not failures but signals from a nervous system seeking safety changed everything. My hope is that this perspective helps normalize body-based healing, reduce shame around trauma responses, and remind readers that healing is not about force, creating the conditions for regulation and integration to unfold naturally.
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Read more from Jenna McDonough
Jenna McDonough, Emotional Regulation Specialist
Jenna McDonough is a meditation and mindfulness teacher, children’s book author, and emotional regulation specialist dedicated to helping people of all ages live more peaceful and present lives. She supports adults and children in recognizing, understanding, and moving through their emotions with meditation, mindfulness, somatic resets, breathwork, and sound and energy healing, all offered through a trauma-sensitive approach that ensures safe and empowering experiences. She is the founder of the PEACEFUL: Mindful Moments for Every Age App and the author of Kind Kids: The Adventures of Hurley, Pearl, and the Pink Soldiers of Kindness, and the creator of meditation and healing arts courses designed to foster emotional intelligence, resilience, and compassion.
