How to Feel Embodied After Trauma

Emotional Badass

Nikki Eisenhauer

Health & Fitness, Self-improvement, Mental Health, Education

4.8 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Dissociation isn't a personal failure, it's your mind's brilliant survival strategy when trauma overwhelms your system. The mind and body intentionally separate during abuse, creating distance like a referee stopping a brutal boxing match, but this protective mechanism can persist long after you're safe. You learn what it means when your body won't feel what your mind knows is true, why safer people trigger more alarm bells than dangerous ones, and how trauma flip-flops your natural safety detection system. Through five embodiment exercises, you practice reuniting fragmented parts by feeling baby smiles, warm morning rituals, pet devotion, music's beat, and uncontrollable laughter. Integration requires strength training your emotional muscles through repetition, moving wisdom from head knowledge down into body knowledge where real healing lives. This reintegration work isn't optional if you're now in safer circumstances with adult choices available, because continuing to live by what abusers taught your nervous system means they're still abusing you today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the show.
0:02.8	This is Emotional Badass, where Moxie meets Mindful.
0:06.3	I'm your host, Nikki Eisenhower, life coach and psychotherapist.
0:10.0	And on today's episode, I'm discussing how to be embodied after trauma.
0:15.9	This is an episode that shows you how to feel.
0:30.4	Music that shows you how to feel. Many highly sensitive people have felt so overwhelmed emotionally most of their lives
0:37.0	that a coping strategy develops of becoming
0:40.8	disembodied, dissociated, disconnected, depersonalized.
0:46.9	We have lots of words for it in mental health.
0:49.9	The head and the body working together but with separation instead of a healthy and normal
0:57.8	integration where head and body share the same space or the same frequency are intimately
1:05.0	connected. I believe most highly sensitive people feel degrees of this mind-body separation, this dissociation,
1:15.0	from a constant lifelong overwhelm. The most severe cases of dissociation, de-personalization,
1:24.0	whatever word we want to use for this separation of the self, the most severe cases
1:29.9	tend to be childhood sexual abuse or severe physical abuse, severe fear or abandonment. People with
1:38.9	truly repressed memories, I was one of those people once upon a time that have memories resurface years later
1:47.1	have been the most extreme cases of feeling this separation of mind and body, the dissociation
1:55.9	of moving away from feeling. We still feel, but it's almost like feeling through glass
2:05.7	or feeling from miles away.
2:09.4	And this makes sense that people with such abuse
2:13.3	would be the most extreme on this spectrum.
2:16.4	In the moment, survival mode engages during something horrendous.
	...

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