How My Body Remembered What I Couldn’t Say
A story about trauma, truth, and learning to stand.
*Content Note: This post contains descriptions of childhood trauma and physical injury that may be activating. Please read with care and support.
I didn’t know my body had a story to tell until it started screaming.
The pain had always been there - in my shoulders, my knees, my ankles, my feet - but I thought it was just bad posture, bad luck, or the way I was built. I didn’t understand that what I was carrying wasn’t just pain. It was a memory. It was survival. It was unspoken truth.
And then I started healing. And as I softened, my body started speaking.
My Ankles: Where the Ground Was Taken From Me
My ankles have always been weak. I sprained them again and again during the years before and after I was taken from my mother. I had no idea that instability in the body could reflect instability in life, but it makes sense now: my foundation had been shaken, so my body mimicked that instability.
“Childhood trauma can disrupt the development of the vestibular and proprioceptive systems, which regulate balance and coordination. If your environment feels dangerous, your body prepares to flee - not to stay grounded.”
My Shoulder: Where the Freeze Locked In
The worst pain has lived in my left shoulder, ever since the night I was placed in my first foster home. Something pinched in my neck and back that night and never fully released. But the injury started even earlier.
I had been throwing myself in front of my stepdad to save my siblings and mother all my life. I walked away, but barely. One morning, after a long night of partying, he beat me until he dislocated my shoulder - and then he kept going. As I got ready for school that day, I vowed he would never see me cry again. I hardened that day and the first night in state custody, that hardening made its home in my upper neck and back.
That trauma sat in my shoulder like a stone for decades. A physical freeze echoing the emotional one. Even after years of body work and stretching, that should refused to let go - until recently. When it did, a new pain lit up on the right side of my neck, as if my whole system was finally beginning to rebalance.
“A dislocated joint without proper treatment can cause long-term instability, muscular guarding, and fascial bracing. These responses are not just physical - they’re neurologically wired to trauma, especially the help never arrives”
My Knees: Rage With Nowhere to Go
A few years after foster care, I skated downhill into a truck and hurt my left knee. The next day, a group of friends stood me up on my birthday. Shortly thereafter, I started having fits of rage - but I kept them inside. I had no idea that both the physical and emotional blows were connected.
Pain would move through my knee like fire, especially when I felt unsupported or trapped. Looking back, I can see how I stored my rage in my legs because I couldn’t express it anywhere else.
“The lower limbs often store trauma responses like fight or flight, especially when escape was the only option. Repressed rage often hides in the hips, knees, and legs - where movement is either shut down or forced to compensate for frozen upper bodies. ”
My Legs: The Body I Abandoned to Survive
I’ve realized recently that my legs have atrophied, not from lack of use, but from disowning them. I had to. I used to run from my oppressor regularly. So fast and so terrified that I couldn’t feel the lava rock under my feet. And I kept running. Over and over again, until my legs became a symbol of my fear.
I didn’t live in them. I ran from them. I left them behind.
The Revelation: Collapse or Flight
As. I began tuning into my stems, I realized they had only ever known collapse or flight. They’ve either buckled in fear or depression or they’ve sprinted away from it. They’ve never learned to stand - not really.
That’s what I’m doing now. For the first time in my life, I am learning to stand. Not in survival, not in fear - but in truth.
This is how I’m learning to stand - by reclaiming the body I once had to leave behind.
The Bigger Picture: How Trauma Rewires the Body
What I’ve described here is more than personal. It’s scientific. It’s structural. It’s spiritual.
Trauma reorganizes the nervous system - especially when it happen early and no repair is offered. You can end up:
Disconnected from your limbs
Chronically imbalanced
Living with pain that medical scans can’t explain
Stuck in freeze, fight, or flight long after the danger is over.
And then one day, your body starts talking.
Maybe it’s your feet aching after grounding work. Maybe it’s your shoulder cracking open during breathwork. Maybe it’s that old knee flaring as you finally say the truth out loud.
It’s all connected. And it all counts.
Why I’m Telling This Now
In the two years after COVID, I regularly contemplated suicide and contacted a hotline on multiple occasions. I was boxing my demons in the dark - isolated and wasting away.
What I needed most in my darkest night wasn’t silence or sugar. I needed proof I wasn’t crazy. I needed to know that someone else’s body remembered too.
So I’m writing this for anyone whose pain never made it onto an X-ray. For anyone who ran so hard they forgot they had legs. For anyone who is trying - finally - to stand.
Blog Series: This is part of an ongoing project by Reverend Krysta Kalapana on trauma, body memory, and spiritual healing.