When Trauma Lingers: How Abuse Affects Your Nervous System

Abuse doesn’t just leave emotional scars—it imprints itself on the body. Your nervous system remembers long after the bruises fade, the manipulation ends, or the yelling ends. Your body becomes the vault that stores every fight, every threat, every terrifying moment when you didn’t feel safe.

This is why survivors of abuse so often say they feel “on edge” or “numb” or “not like themselves”—because their nervous system has been rewired by trauma.

The Body Keeps the Score
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of the groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score, explains how trauma reshapes not just our minds but our entire physiology. For someone who has endured abuse, especially prolonged or repeated abuse, the nervous system becomes stuck in survival mode.

The body doesn’t distinguish between real-time danger and the memory of danger—it reacts the same way. And over time, this chronic activation wears you down.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn
When you experience abuse, your brain’s alarm system—particularly the amygdala—kicks into high gear. It sends signals to your body to fight, flee, freeze, or fawn (people-please to stay safe). Your heart races. Your muscles tense. Your breathing changes. Cortisol floods your system.

Now imagine this happening again and again. Your nervous system never gets the message that you’re safe. It becomes hypersensitive, constantly scanning for threats, even when there are none.

This can result in:

• Hypervigilance: Always on edge, easily startled, struggling to relax.
• Emotional dysregulation: Intense reactions to small stressors.
• Digestive issues: Because when you’re in fight or flight, digestion takes a backseat.
• Chronic pain and fatigue: The body’s energy is diverted to survival, not healing.
• Sleep problems: Nightmares, insomnia, waking in panic.
• Difficulty concentrating: The brain struggles to focus when it feels unsafe.

Why You’re Not “Overreacting”
If you’ve been told you’re too sensitive, overreacting, or living in the past, hear this: you are not broken. Your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do—keep you safe. The problem is, it hasn’t received the signal that the threat is gone.

Survivors often carry shame for their reactions, not realizing those reactions are normal responses to abnormal events. You’re not crazy. You’re a human being whose nervous system has been injured.

Healing Is Possible
The good news is that your body is also capable of healing. Just as trauma changes the nervous system, healing practices can help retrain it.

Some powerful tools include:

• Trauma-informed therapy (like EMDR, somatic experiencing, or internal family systems)
• Breathwork and grounding exercises
• Safe relationships and environments
• Movement: Gentle exercise, stretching, walking—anything that reconnects you to your body
• Faith and spiritual connection: Knowing you are deeply loved and never alone
• Rest: Deep, restorative rest helps calm an overstimulated system

You Are Not Alone
If you’ve felt like your body has betrayed you, I want you to know—it hasn’t. It protected you the best way it knew how. And now, step by step, it can begin to learn safety again.

You are not too damaged. You are not too far gone. Healing might not be linear, but it is possible.

Your story matters, and your body matters. You deserve to live in a body that feels safe again.