Completing The Trauma Loop
Why talk therapy is often not enough...
*This is not medical advice. These are reflections from my own journey, combined with a little science to help meld it together. As someone who has spent the majority of his life escaping his body, slowly returning to it was the first time I understood what “healing” actually meant.*
There’s something primal and poetic in how wild animals handle threat. Watch a deer after it narrowly escapes a predator…its body shakes, almost violently, releasing the charge of survival. Then it exhales-a long, full-body sigh-and returns to grazing like nothing happened. No therapy session. No years of talk. Just a biological reset.
That’s the trauma loop completing itself. And somewhere along the way, through cultural changes and societal pressures, we humans have become so disembodied that we've forgotten how to do it.
When life wounds us, through heartbreak, loss, abuse, or the slow grind of chronic stress, we don't shake it off. We freeze, adapt, endure, absorb. We might talk about it. We might even intellectualize it, crafting stories around our pain. But rarely do we allow the body to finish what it started: to discharge the survival energy that got locked inside when we couldn’t fight or flee.
The result? We carry that charge. We carry it for years, often lifetimes. And it accumulates with each additional, unacknowledged trauma thereafter.
When trauma is not physically released (somatic energy), our bodies respond exactly as they were designed to-by staying on high alert. Cortisol levels creep up. Inflammation simmers. Systems meant to handle temporary threat become overwhelmed. Over time, that translates into what we call “chronic illness,” the body’s way of waving a white flag. Sadly, we often reach for medications and therapies to quiet the noise, which only tends to make those signals louder.
Our bodies are speaking to us, and the modern world and Western medicine have taught us that the treatment is to pacify, ignore, and “biohack,” rather than listen. As a believer and practitioner of the scientific model, I've had to reckon with the fact that, while science has given us so much, it will never solve chronic disorders, chronic pain, trauma, or bring us what we're all craving more than anything-happiness. Because these are, at their core, not truly “diseases.” They’re signals from our body that we've never taken the time to truly appreciate. Our bodies are not meant to be “treated,” they're meant to be loved, listened to, and fully entangled into our human experience.
A 2024 study from Brain, Behavior, and Immunity showed that people with unresolved trauma had significantly elevated cortisol and inflammation markers. Cortisol, being one hormone in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) feedback loop, appears to, downstream, affect a whole host of other hormones. Examples of how this may show up: activation of autoimmune disease genes (rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis), endocrine dysfunction (PCOS, hypothyroidism, metabolic adaptation and difficulty losing weight, irregular periods, erectile dysfunction, infertility), metabolic disorders (hypertension, type-2 diabetes, high cholesterol), sleep disorders (insomnia, sleep apnea), and psychiatric illness (depression, anxiety, PTSD, Alzheimer's).
A quick aside and tie-in from my GLP-1 article:
Sometimes, what feels like a broken metabolism-constant hunger, or “food noise”-isn’t about calories. It’s the nervous system searching for safety and resolution. The chronic dysregulation, through hormonal adaptation, throws off hunger and fullness cues, leading the body to reach for food as a form of self-soothing. Because, evolutionarily, the lack of food was one of the biggest risks to human survival. When we ignore the hunger signals, suppress them, or drop calories to an unsustainable level, our bodies don't care that we're “dieting for summer” or are unhappy with “those last 10 lbs of fat.” They perceive this as a threat and an opportunity to stockpile calories for the potential of perpetual famine. Unlike the days of our ancestors, this threat isn’t short term. We live in it. Chronically. We're in a constant state of stress, and many have forgotten what it feels like to not be on a diet. And so the signals continue the increase. Our metabolisms continue to downregulate and preserve resources. Our hunger signals continue to worsen. The food noise gets louder. When we’ve lived in this perpetual survival mode, eating can feel like the quickest way to ground ourselves and give us a momentary sense of dopamine relief. It’s not a flaw, it’s what our bodies were designed to do. And as we begin to heal and feel safer in our bodies, that noise often softens, not through restriction or suppression, but through regulation. My concern with GLP-1 medications is not that people are benefitting from them. More than anything in this world, I want universal health and happiness…Its that they're benefitting from them now. But, as we continue to see, our bodies will adapt. The medications will either stop working or require dangerous or unsustainable dose increases, and we’ll be in the exact same spot we started in. Possibly worse. If we can pair them with sustainable movement, wholesome foods, nervous system relief, and deep trauma work, we may have the chance to foster long-term results.
Cortisol may be just one hormone, but it doesn't act alone in a vacuum. Like a conductor in a symphony, it influences (and is influenced by) a whole orchestra of hormonal pathways. When cortisol remains out of tune for too long, it throws off the rhythm of every other pathway its enmeshed with. This hormonal crosstalk can ripple outward, contributing to the tangled web of conditions we see today. It's not the only cause, but it is a powerful thread in the tapestry. And it's the thread we choose to ignore most often.
So how do we begin again? How do we complete the trauma cycle our ancestors’ bodies knew by instinct?
One answer lies not in thinking more, but in feeling more.
Somatic practices help us reenter the body, softly and safely. Somatic Experiencing Therapy, for example, is less about storytelling and more about sensing. It invites us to notice subtle shifts… a tension in the jaw, a flutter in the belly, a spontaneous yawn. These aren’t just quirks—they're the body speaking. And when we listen long enough, it starts to unwind.
Yoga, especially slow, breath-led practices, offers a similar path. Not as high intensity fitness, but as nervous system medicine. It’s in the gentle hip openers where tears come. In the stillness of savasana where the shake returns. Inhale, exhale. Another loop loosens.
And then there are “the medicines”…those old-world, Earthly molecules meeting modern neurobiology.
Psychedelic-assisted therapy is becoming one of the most powerful doorways into trauma healing, not because it helps us escape the body, but because, paradoxically, it helps us come home to it.
Take psilocybin. Often described as inducing a “mystical experience,” what it really does is dissolve the illusion of separation. The self softens. Emotions surge. And perhaps for the first time, we don’t just remember our pain-we feel it, safely, in the body. Psilocybin creates a deeply embodied experience, often described as heart-centered, somatic, and spiritual all at once. This embodied emotionality seems to facilitate what researchers call “memory reconsolidation,” where the traumatic memory is revisited, re-felt, and refiled, but now from a place of presence rather than panic. It's neuroplasticity in action!
Compare this to ketamine, which is gaining traction in clinical settings for trauma and depression. Ketamine works differently: it lifts people out of their bodies, offering distance from pain. It can be a powerful disruptor of depressive loops and intrusive thoughts. But it’s also more likely to be a disembodied experience. It creates a break in the pattern through dissociation, but not always a completion of it. Many find relief with ketamine, but its effects often fade faster, requiring more long-term/less spaced-out treatments. There may be less emotional catharsis, fewer tears, less shaking. Like watching your pain from a cloud rather than walking it back home.
Both medicines have value. But when it comes to completing the trauma loop, not just managing symptoms, psilocybin offers a more somatic, integrative path.
That path isn’t always easy, and not everyone is at the point in their journey where it feels right. It’s not always euphoric. But it’s real.
And perhaps the most revolutionary part of all this is remembering: we were never broken. Our bodies weren’t wrong. They just got stuck trying to protect us. The deer doesn’t judge itself for trembling. It shakes, it breathes, and it moves on.
So can we.
Whether through a breath, a stretch, a medicine, or a quiet moment of presence, each time we let the body speak, we give it permission to finish its sentence. To sigh. To tremble. To exhale.
To complete the loop.
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