What Happens After Trauma? Understanding Your Nervous System
- Brainz Magazine
- Nov 11
- 10 min read
Written by Tracy Ann Messore, Integrative Coach
Tracy Messore is well-known when it comes to trauma recovery and nervous system healing. She is a bachelor's-prepared registered nurse, certified trauma coach, and the founder of Integrative Coaching. Through her specialized courses and integrative approach, Tracy guides trauma survivors to heal and reclaim their authentic identities.
I was seven years into my nursing career when I had a moment that would alter the trajectory of my entire life. I was working in the psychiatric unit, and a patient came in exhibiting all the classic signs of a panic attack, rapid heartbeat, shallow breathing, trembling, and an overwhelming sense of doom. As I administered care and ran through my clinical protocols, something unexpected happened, I recognized myself in her symptoms.
For years, I had been experiencing these same physical responses, the racing heart, the hypervigilance, the way my body would tense at unexpected sounds. I had written them off as stress, as exhaustion from long shifts, as just part of being a busy professional. But watching this patient struggle to breathe while her nervous system hijacked her body, I finally understood. My body was trying to tell me something I had been refusing to hear.
I was a trauma survivor living in a state of constant physiological alarm, and my medical training had given me all the tools to recognize it in others, but I had been blind to it in myself.
The education we don't get about trauma
Here's what I learned in nursing school about trauma, how to assess for physical injuries, how to stabilize patients in crisis, and how to document and report. Here's what I didn't learn, trauma doesn't just live in our memories, it lives in our cells, our muscles, our automatic responses. Our nervous system can become stuck in survival mode long after the danger has passed. That healing from trauma requires more than processing memories, it requires helping the body complete cycles it never got to finish.
As a registered nurse with a bachelor's degree who has worked across multiple disciplines, from rehabilitation to geriatrics, psychiatric care to hospice, I've witnessed trauma from every angle. I've seen it in the adolescent psych patient whose body stays locked in fight-or-flight. I've seen it in the dementia patient whose early trauma resurfaces as their memory fades. I've seen it in the addiction recovery unit, where substance use was often the only way people knew to regulate their overwhelmed nervous systems. I've seen it in the hospice patient whose body finally relaxes after decades of hypervigilance.
But it wasn't until I began my own healing journey from nearly two decades of abuse that I truly understood the disconnect between what we know intellectually about trauma and what our bodies are actually experiencing.
Your nervous system: The surveillance system that never sleeps
Let me explain this in terms that connect the medical science with what you're actually feeling in your daily life.
Your nervous system is like a highly sophisticated security system installed in your body. It has one primary job, keep you alive. To do this, it's constantly scanning your environment for threats, processing millions of data points every second, and making split-second decisions about whether you're safe or in danger.
This system operates largely outside of your conscious awareness. You don't decide to increase your heart rate when you sense danger, your body does it automatically. You don't choose to tense your shoulders when you hear a certain tone of voice, your nervous system recognizes a pattern and responds before you've even consciously registered what's happening.
This is the autonomic nervous system, and it has three primary states, explained through polyvagal theory:
The ventral vagal state: Safety and connection
This is your optimal state. When your nervous system perceives safety, you can think clearly, connect with others, feel curious and creative, and respond flexibly to life's challenges. Your heart rate is regulated, your breathing is easy, and you feel present in your body.
The sympathetic state: Mobilization and survival
When your nervous system detects a threat, it activates your sympathetic nervous system, the famous "fight or flight" response. Your heart races, your muscles tense, stress hormones flood your system, and all non-essential functions shut down. This is a brilliant design for short-term survival. It gives you the energy to run from danger or fight off a threat.
The dorsal vagal state: Shutdown and disconnection
When a threat is overwhelming and there's no way to fight or flee, your nervous system has one more option, shut down. This is the "freeze" or "fawn" response. Energy plummets, you feel numb or disconnected, you might dissociate or feel like you're watching your life from outside your body. This is also survival, if you can't escape, your body protects you by disconnecting you from the full experience of what's happening.
When the alarm system gets stuck
Here's what happens with trauma, your nervous system learns that the world is dangerous, and it gets stuck in survival mode. The threat might have passed years ago, but your body didn't get the memo. Your alarm system is still scanning for danger, still responding as if you're under threat, still preparing you to fight, flee, or freeze.
This isn't a choice. This isn't a weakness. This isn't something you can "just get over." This is your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, protect you, based on information from your past.
What this looks like in real life
When the sympathetic is stuck:
You're constantly on edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
You have trouble sleeping because your body won't "turn off".
You overreact to minor stressors, a text message can send you into a tailspin.
You feel anxious even when nothing is objectively wrong.
You're always busy, always moving, unable to rest.
You scan rooms for exits, check your phone compulsively, struggle to sit still.
When the dorsal vagal is stuck:
You feel numb, disconnected, or "flat".
You struggle with motivation and energy.
You might cope by "disappearing" into sleep, TV, or scrolling.
You feel like you're going through the motions of life without really being present.
You have trouble connecting with others emotionally.
You might describe feeling like you're "watching your life happen" rather than living it.
The oscillation:
Many trauma survivors swing between these states, anxious and wired one moment, exhausted and shut down the next.
You might push yourself into overdrive (sympathetic) until you crash into shutdown (dorsal vagal).
Relationships feel chaotic because your nervous system is constantly shifting.
Why traditional approaches often fall short
After my moment of recognition that night in the hospital, I did what many people do, I sought traditional talk therapy. And while it helped me understand my trauma cognitively, I noticed something frustrating, my body wasn't getting the message.
I could talk about my abuse, I could intellectually understand the patterns, and I could even have insights and breakthroughs in therapy sessions. But the moment I heard a certain tone of voice, or someone moved too quickly in my peripheral vision, or I had to navigate a conflict, my body would respond exactly as it had always responded. Heart racing. Muscles tensing. Breath is becoming shallow. Or alternatively, shutting down completely, going numb, disconnecting.
This is because trauma isn't just a story stored in your memory, it's an incomplete defensive response stored in your nervous system.
Think about it, when you experience trauma, your nervous system mobilizes all this energy to help you survive. But if you couldn't fight (because you were overpowered) or flee (because you were trapped), that survival energy never gets discharged. It stays in your body, keeping you in a state of activation.
It's like revving a car engine with the brake on. All that power has nowhere to go.
The body remembers what the mind wants to forget
As a nurse, I understand the physiology of trauma in ways that helped me make sense of my own experience. When you experience something traumatic, your body releases stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart rate increases. Your breathing becomes shallow. Your muscles tense. Your digestive system shuts down. Your immune system is suppressed. All of this is normal and adaptive in the moment of danger.
The problem is when these physiological responses become chronic. When your nervous system stays in this activated state, those stress hormones don't just disappear, they continue to circulate. Your muscles don't just relax, they remain tense, creating chronic pain. Your breathing doesn't return to normal, it stays shallow, depriving your body and brain of optimal oxygen.
Over time, this creates a cascade of health issues:
Chronic pain and tension
Digestive problems
Sleep disturbances
Weakened immune system
Difficulty concentrating
Memory problems
Increased inflammation
Cardiovascular strain
This is why trauma survivors often present with a constellation of physical symptoms that don't have clear medical explanations. It's not "all in your head", it's in your body, in your nervous system, in your cellular memory.
The missing piece: Somatic awareness
This is where my journey took a crucial turn. I discovered somatic healing approaches, body-based methods that work directly with the nervous system to help it complete those defensive responses that got interrupted during trauma.
Somatic healing is based on a simple but powerful premise, if trauma is stored in the body, then healing must also involve the body.
This doesn't mean traditional therapy isn't valuable, it absolutely is. Understanding your trauma, processing your emotions, and changing your thought patterns are all important pieces of healing. But they're not the complete picture.
True healing requires helping your nervous system learn, at a physiological level, that you're safe now. That the threat has passed. That it can release the protective patterns it's been holding onto.
What your body needs to heal
Your nervous system needs three things to begin healing from trauma:
1. Recognition
You need to develop awareness of what's happening in your nervous system. When are you in sympathetic activation? When are you in dorsal shutdown? What triggers these shifts? What does safety feel like in your body?
This isn't about judging yourself for your nervous system responses, it's about becoming curious about them. "Oh, I'm feeling my heart race right now. My body is moving into mobilization. I wonder what it's responding to?"
2. Regulation
You need tools to help your nervous system shift out of survival states and back into a state of safety and connection. These might include:
Breathwork that signals safety to your nervous system
Movement that allows your body to complete defensive responses
Grounding techniques that bring you into present-moment awareness
Co-regulation through safe relationships, where your nervous system can sync with someone else's calm system
3. Resilience
Over time, with practice, your nervous system can develop more flexibility, the ability to move in and out of different states as appropriate, rather than getting stuck. You build capacity to handle stress without tipping into survival mode, or to move through activation and return to calm more quickly.
This is what I learned to do for myself, and it's what I now teach others through my integrative coaching approach.
Your authentic self is waiting
Here's what I discovered on my healing journey that surprised me most, beneath all that nervous system activation, beneath all those protective responses, beneath all those survival strategies, there was a version of me I had forgotten existed.
When you live in survival mode for long enough, you don't just lose your sense of safety, you lose your sense of self. The real you, the authentic you, gets buried under layers of hypervigilance, people-pleasing, perfectionism, self-protection, and disconnection.
As my nervous system began to heal, something remarkable happened, I started to remember who I was before trauma taught me I wasn't safe to be myself. I started to notice preferences I had suppressed, boundaries I had abandoned, dreams I had set aside, and qualities I had hidden.
Your authentic self hasn't disappeared, it's just been in hiding, waiting for your nervous system to tell it that it's safe to come out.
The path forward
Understanding your nervous system is the foundation of trauma recovery, but it's just the beginning. In my work as an integrative coach, I guide people through the process of:
Learning to recognize their nervous system states
Developing somatic tools for regulation
Processing stored emotions that the body has been holding
Reconnecting with their authentic selves
Breaking generational cycles so their children don't inherit their dysregulated nervous system
Building lives that honor both their healing journey and their dreams for the future
This work combines my nursing knowledge with somatic body-based healing techniques and polyvagal theory. It's practical, it's evidence-informed, and it's grounded in both medical science and lived experience.
A message from one survivor to another
If you're reading this and recognizing yourself in these descriptions, if your body has been trying to tell you something and you haven't known how to listen, I want you to know, you're not broken. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It's just working with outdated information.
You can't think your way out of a nervous system stuck in survival mode, but you can help your body learn that it's safe now. You can give your nervous system new experiences of safety, connection, and regulation. You can teach them that the past is the past, and the present moment offers different possibilities.
As a nurse, I can tell you the science. As a trauma survivor, I can tell you the truth, healing is possible. Your body can learn to feel safe again. Your nervous system can find its way back to regulation. And your authentic self, the one that's been hiding all this time, can emerge.
The journey starts with understanding. And understanding starts with listening to what your body has been trying to tell you all along.
Note: This article presents these concepts through the lens of the author's nursing training, personal healing journey, and professional coaching practice. The explanations and applications are the author's own interpretations designed to make complex scientific concepts accessible to trauma survivors.
Read more from Tracy Ann Messore
Tracy Ann Messore, Integrative Coach
Tracy Messore is well-known when it comes to trauma recovery and nervous system healing. She is a bachelor's-prepared registered nurse, certified trauma coach, and the founder of Integrative Coaching. After enduring decades of generational trauma and abuse, Tracy transformed her pain into purpose by combining her nursing expertise with somatic body-based healing and polyvagal theory to help trauma survivors break free from survival mode and rediscover their authentic selves. Through her specialized courses and integrative approach, which addresses the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual dimensions of healing, Tracy guides people through processing stored trauma, regulating their nervous systems, and breaking generational cycles.
References and further reading:
The concepts discussed in this article are informed by established research in trauma and nervous system regulation:
Polyvagal Theory: Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. W.W. Norton & Company.
Somatic Experiencing and Trauma: Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books.
The Body and Trauma Storage: Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books.
