Why You Might Feel Unsafe in Your Body After Trauma
There’s a certain kind of exhaustion that comes when even your own body doesn’t feel like a safe place to experience life.
Feeling disconnected from your body is far more common than most people realize.
Research shows that nearly half of people with trauma histories experience significant dissociation - a protective process where your system pulls you away from overwhelming thoughts, emotions, or sensations.
It might look like zoning out, feeling numb, or moving through your day like you're watching it happen from a distance. And for many, it becomes so familiar that it's hard to even name what's happening.
Meanwhile, over 90% of women report some degree of body dissatisfaction, often reflecting a deeper struggle with trusting or feeling at home in their bodies. These patterns aren’t just about food. They’re often about trying to regulate a body that doesn’t feel like a safe place to be.
Disordered eating behaviors, another form of body disconnection, affects millions of women across the lifespan.
You’re not alone if embodiment feels complicated, confusing, or overwhelming.
It’s not something we talk about enough, how deeply unsettling it is to move through life feeling apart from yourself.
Maybe you find yourself zoning out during conversations, struggling to feel present even in moments that "should" feel good.
Maybe you look in the mirror and feel... nothing.
Maybe being alone with your own sensations feels overwhelming, or even intolerable.
This not-feeling-in-your-body state doesn’t always look dramatic — sometimes it just feels like you’re floating through your own life.
If you’ve ever wondered, "Why don't I feel like I’m actually in my own body?" — you’re not imagining it. And you’re not alone.
Why You Might Feel Disconnected From Your Body
When you live through experiences that overwhelmed your ability to stay connected — whether that's emotional neglect, chronic criticism, trauma, or chaotic caregiving — your body adapts.
It learns to pull back from sensation.
It learns to move through life while tucking the most tender parts of you far away.
This is about how smart the human system is when it needs to be (to learn about what happens to the brain after trauma, head here)
When the body doesn’t feel like a safe place to experience feeling, it finds ways to make those feelings quieter.
It finds ways to let you keep going — even when "going" felt impossibly hard.
What Dissociation Can Actually Look Like
For many people living with trauma and dissociation, this sense of detachment becomes so familiar they hardly notice it’s happening.
Sometimes it looks like:
Losing track of time while scrolling on your phone.
Feeling like you’re watching yourself perform life instead of living it.
Smiling and making small talk while feeling miles away inside.
Struggling to register hunger, fullness, or emotional needs.
Living in a constant low-grade numbness that’s hard to explain.
It exists on a spectrum. Everyone dissociates sometimes — but when disconnection becomes a way of life, it’s often because it had to be.
It’s not a flaw.
It’s not a failure.
It’s a way your system learned to hold too much with too little support.
Body Shame, Disordered Eating, and the Loss of Embodiment
For many people, the story doesn’t stop at dissociation.
It spills into their relationship with food.
With hunger.
If you grew up learning that your body was a problem to be fixed, criticized, or controlled, or that your worth depended on how your body looked, it makes sense that being in your body would feel complicated.
Disordered eating is often less about food itself, and more about trying to manage the deep discomfort of being in a body that never felt fully accepted.
When embodiment feels unsafe, disconnection through food rules, restriction, bingeing, or hyper-focus on appearance can feel like temporary ways to create control, or distance. To learn more about healing body image through embodiment, head here.
And shame?
It teaches you to mistrust your body’s signals. To treat your own needs as liabilities.
Healing that relationship starts by seeing it for what it is: not vanity.
Not weakness.
But a strategy for navigating a world, and sometimes, a childhood, that made it hard to be at home in yourself.
Why Feeling Unsafe in Your Body Makes Sense
When your earliest experiences taught you that certain feelings, fear, anger, sadness, joy, were unwelcome or dangerous, it’s natural that your body, the place where those feelings lived, would start to feel unsafe too.
Embodiment doesn’t just "click back on" because the danger is over. Embodiment rebuilds slowly, relationally. Through choice, safety, and trust, not force.
But What Does It Actually Mean to Feel Safe in Your Body?
"Feel safe in your body" It's a phrase you might hear a lot on social media. But what does it actually mean?
It doesn’t mean that nothing hard will ever happen again.
It doesn’t mean living in a state of bliss or perfect relaxation.
And it definitely doesn’t mean “just thinking positive” or “letting it go.”
Feeling safe in your body means:
Your internal sensations don’t automatically feel overwhelming or threatening.
You can feel emotions, energy, or sensation move through your body without panicking, shutting down, or needing to escape.
You can stay with yourself — even when you’re uncomfortable — without abandoning yourself.
It’s about having enough internal capacity to experience the ebb and flow of life without getting hijacked or having to disconnect completely.
Safety isn’t a constant state you arrive at once and for all.
It’s a relationship you build with yourself. Slowly, gently, with curiosity instead of force.
Healing Isn't About Forcing Connection
You can’t shame yourself back into your body. You can’t bully yourself into feeling safe.
Healing isn’t about forcing anything.
It’s about building tiny bridges of trust, again and again, at the speed your nervous system can actually tolerate.
Some days, that might mean sensing your feet on the floor.
Some days, it might mean noticing that you can't feel much at all — and letting that be enough for now.
How to Gently Begin Rebuilding Trust with Your Body
Here are a few ways to start. Not as demands, but as invitations:
Place a hand over your chest or belly. Not to feel anything specific. Just as a hello.
Notice the texture under your feet. Even if it’s just your socks on the carpet.
Sip something warm and notice the way it moves through your body.
Name three things you can hear right now.
Sit near a window and feel the light on your skin. No agenda. Just being.
Reconnection doesn’t have to be grand.
Tiny noticing is powerful. Tiny noticing is enough to start.
You Are Already Building New Pathways
If embodiment feels far away, that's not because you’re failing. It’s because you're asking your body to enter a new kind of relationship.
Embodiment after trauma isn’t about arriving at some final, healed version of yourself. It’s about learning to stay, even gently, with what’s real right now.
It’s a relationship based on respect, permission, and slowness.
You’re learning to hear yourself again. You’re learning to listen without forcing, without fixing, without rushing.
If you want some extra support for these quiet practices, we created something for you:
[Tiny Bridges Back to Your Body: A Gentle Embodiment Guide] — a free guide to help you practice reconnecting on the days when it feels hardest.
You don't have to do this perfectly.
You’re allowed to come home one tiny bridge at a time.
We want you to know that healing from trauma and dissociation is possible.
Here at Reclaim Therapy we are a team of trauma specialists who specialize in treating complex PTSD, PTSD and eating disorders. We provide EMDR therapy, somatic therapy and trauma therapy to support people to reclaim their lives from traumatic experiences and dissociation.
If you’re looking for a trauma therapist near me, we’re so glad you found us. We would be honored to support you in your healing process.
🧡,
