Not What Happened. What Didn’t - attachment & relationships
A Somatic Understanding of Developmental Trauma
What If Trauma Isn’t What You Think It Is?
When we hear the word trauma, most people think of big, obvious events:
An accident. A loss. Abuse. Neglect.
But trauma is not defined by what happened.
It’s defined by how the nervous system experienced what happened and whether there was enough safety, support, and co-regulation to help the body return to balance.
In other words:
Trauma isn’t just what happened to you.
It’s what didn’t happen that should have.
Developmental Trauma Is Often Invisible
Developmental trauma refers to early, repeated experiences that shape how we relate to ourselves, others, and the world.
You may not remember anything “traumatic.”
But if you experienced:
A parent who was emotionally unavailable or overwhelmed
A lack of consistent attunement, mirroring, or soothing
Being praised for performance but not for presence
Environments where emotional expression wasn’t safe
Then your nervous system may still be wired for survival, not connection.
This kind of trauma doesn’t leave bruises.
But it lives on in the body, in breath, posture, pace, and presence.
How “What Didn’t Happen” Gets Stored
When a child feels afraid, sad, or angry and no one helps them process it, those feelings don’t disappear.
They get stored in the body as tension, hypervigilance, or shutdown.
Because children can’t regulate on their own, they need a regulated adult to help them feel safe.
When that support is missing, the child’s system adapts.
It might learn to numb, avoid, please, or stay small to maintain closeness.
And those adaptations, while intelligent at the time, can linger long into adulthood.
How It Shows Up Later
Unprocessed developmental trauma can show up in subtle but persistent ways:
Trouble relaxing or resting without guilt
Fear of expressing needs or taking up space
Chronic people-pleasing or self-abandonment
Difficulty trusting safety, even when it’s available
A constant low-level anxiety or emotional flatness
These are not character flaws.
They are survival patterns, rooted in the absence of early relational safety.
What Somatic Healing Offers
Somatic therapy doesn’t ask you to remember everything.
It invites your body to complete what it couldn’t finish at the time.
That might look like:
Feeling a boundary that was never allowed
Shaking out tension that’s been there for years
Breathing fully after decades of shallow inhale
Expressing anger or grief finally with support
It’s not about digging up the past.
It’s about letting your nervous system know: This moment is different.
Final Thought
You may not remember the moment you stopped feeling safe.
But your body does.
And it doesn’t need an explanation.
It needs presence.
Because sometimes, healing isn’t about what you survived, but about what you never got to receive.
The pain of what didn’t happen is real.
And your body already knows how to heal, slowly, gently, in its own time.
Before you go, I invite you to pause.
Developmental trauma isn’t always loud or obvious.
Often, it lives in the spaces where nothing happened, where comfort never came, where tears were never met.
Somatic Guided Practice
I have created a guided practice that offers a gentle opportunity to feel into what was missing, without pressure, without reactivating the story.
To begin making space in the body, for grief, for permission, for presence.
