What if the anxiety you’re experiencing today isn’t really about what’s happening in your life right now? What if it’s actually your body still responding to something that happened decades ago? Our client came to us with an ACE score of two — which is a way of measuring how much childhood trauma someone has experienced. Even with a relatively low score, one particular night from her childhood had lodged itself so deeply into her nervous system that decades later, her body was still reacting as if the danger had never passed.
She had been living as a perfectionist her whole life, trying to maintain control over everything. But when a family crisis erupted years after her childhood trauma, her carefully constructed defenses crumbled. Her heart would race uncontrollably, and she’d jump awake from sleep. After getting up to use the bathroom at night, she couldn’t calm herself down. Despite being physically weak, her nervous system was stuck in overdrive. She was exhausted—mentally, emotionally, and physically—trying to control what her body refused to calm.
After so many years of fighting her symptoms, the turning point didn’t come from another attempt to manage them. It came from releasing an image her childhood brain had created to survive—an image she didn’t even know she was still carrying.
Like many, when Sandra was very young, she experienced a traumatic event that would shape her nervous system for decades to come. One night, she was shocked awake from her sleep by the sound of her alcoholic parent abusing her brother.
The situation was so severe that the police were called and the family was evacuated. After this event, which became the “last straw,” they went into hiding, eventually obtaining a restraining order that stopped the ongoing abuse they had been enduring.
Still, even though Sandra and the rest of her family were no longer in physical danger, the memory of abuse had already embedded itself into Sandra’s energetic makeup. For Sandra specifically, it had lodged itself in her heart center, affecting her confidence, relationships, energy levels, and even her ability to trust others again. And like many childhood trauma survivors, it would stay that way for decades.
Flash forward many years: Sandra’s father had passed away, but the family business had now become the center of lawsuits among family members, and everything fell apart.
Her anxiety and stress “flipped out,” as she described it. She came to us experiencing:
She had been holding feelings of being vulnerable and unimportant in her chest and heart center, along with an intense fear of the future. She knew something had to change, and she knew that simply talking to someone about her anxiety wasn’t enough.
Eventually, Sandra found Modern Holistic Health and went through our Mind-Body-Energy program, which addresses trauma not just as a mental or emotional issue, but as something that gets stored throughout the entire energetic system of the body.
Through our Mind-Body-Spirit Program, we guided her through a process that looks beyond traditional talk therapy or symptom management. This program combines neuroscience, energy medicine, and subconscious re-patterning techniques to help release stored trauma from the body’s energetic systems. In her case, it revealed how the shock from that childhood night—being jolted awake to witness abuse and then going into hiding—had become energetically lodged in her heart center. Once that energetic imprint was identified and released, her nervous system finally began to reset after decades of overactivation.
The most powerful tool we used with Sandra was called “suppressed image and emotion repatterning.”
How it works is that when someone experiences trauma, their reptilian brain (the most primitive survival part of the brain) creates an image of what they wish they could have done to stop the danger.
For a small child who is completely powerless in a terrifying situation, this survival response gets suppressed along with the trauma itself. But it doesn’t disappear—it remains trapped in the body, along with all the highly charged emotions and negative beliefs created during that traumatic moment.
When we asked her what image her brain had created during that childhood trauma, she immediately knew: “I wanted to knock him down and tie him up and stand over him like a hero, like a comic book hero.”
And the feeling associated with that image? Bravery.
For the first time, she recognized that beneath all the fear and helplessness she’d carried since childhood, there had also been courage—a powerful impulse to protect and take action that never had a chance to be expressed. That buried strength had remained trapped right alongside the trauma itself.
Here’s what had happened in her system: this positive feeling of bravery got suppressed right alongside the image of tying up her father to save the family. All of this became entangled with the trauma itself—the feelings, the highly charged emotions, the negative beliefs she created in that moment.
So years later, when she needed to feel brave to face the court case over her father’s estate, what got triggered? The earlier childhood response. Her body went right back to that night when she was a powerless child, and her nervous system activated all those trapped responses: the racing heart, the inability to calm down, the overwhelming anxiety.
This is how trauma gets recapitulated into our present-time events. We see our old hurts getting replayed in new situations, and it triggers those highly charged feelings all over again.
After we released that suppressed image and emotion, something shifted. Her body finally let go of the survival response it had been holding for decades.
The results were measurable and dramatic. According to her symptom tracking sheet:
The woman who had been physically weak and emotionally overwhelmed was now able to move through her life with a calm nervous system. The shock that had been trapped in her heart center for decades had finally been released.
Traumatic shock, especially from childhood, becomes stored in specific areas of your body’s energetic system.
A simple way to think of your energetic system is like the operating system of your body—you can’t see it, but it’s constantly running in the background, coordinating how energy moves through different pathways to keep everything functioning properly, from your organs to your cells.
For Sandra, what she experienced affected her heart center, which makes sense given that her symptoms included a racing heart and inability to calm down.
Traditional approaches that only address anxiety as a mental health issue miss this crucial piece: your body is literally holding the trauma and continuing to react to it.
One of the most fascinating aspects of her case was discovering that the feeling of bravery had been suppressed right alongside the traumatic event. Her brain had created a heroic image (tying up the abuser like a comic book hero) as a survival response, and that got buried along with everything else.
This explains why, when she needed to access bravery in her adult life, her nervous system instead activated the childhood trauma. The positive feeling and the traumatic experience were tangled together.
The family lawsuit and court case weren’t just stressful in their own right. They were triggering her childhood experience of powerlessness in the face of family dysfunction and an abusive parent. Her body didn’t distinguish between “then” and “now”—it simply responded to the similar emotional territory with the same survival response.
This is why managing current-day stress often isn’t enough to resolve anxiety. If childhood trauma is being retriggered, you have to address the original wound.
Our client had been physically weak her entire adult life, despite being a perfectionist who tried to maintain control. Once we released the trapped shock and survival response from her system, she was able to gain physical strength and exercise again.
This demonstrates how emotional trauma can literally impact your physical vitality and strength.
The breakthrough came when we brought the suppressed image to light. Even though Sandra wasn’t always consciously remembering her traumatic childhood in her everyday life, being in a safe environment with our trauma-informed practitioners allowed her the space she needed to uncover what was always just below the surface.
Once she did, she was able to let it go and create space for new experiences, new emotions, and more freedom to be who she really is.
Maybe you’re reading this and recognizing yourself in Sandra’s story. Maybe you’ve tried everything to manage your anxiety, including medication, therapy, and breathing exercises, but your body still won’t calm down. Or, maybe you jump awake at night or your heart races for no apparent reason. Or maybe you’ve even been told it’s “just stress” or “just anxiety,” but nothing seems to help.
The truth is, you’re not alone, and you are not broken.
Sandra’s story shows that sometimes anxiety isn’t actually about your current circumstances. Sometimes it’s your body still responding to something that happened long ago, when you were powerless and your survival brain created responses that never got released.
Even if you had “only” one or two adverse childhood experiences, that doesn’t mean the impact was small. A single night of shock, especially one involving violence, evacuation, or threats to your safety or your family’s safety, can embed itself so deeply in your nervous system that it continues influencing your body decades later.
You might recognize yourself in this story if:
Sandra’s recovery proves that healing from childhood trauma doesn’t always happen by talking about those experiences or learning coping strategies (though those can help). For many people, it’s about releasing what’s been buried beneath your conscious thoughts that you may not even be aware of.
When you work with a holistic, trauma-informed practitioner, you have the opportunity to safely access and release those stored experiences, so your body and mind can finally reset and heal at the deepest level.
Modern Holistic Health specializes in helping people heal from “unexplainable” chronic illness, unresolved trauma, anxiety, depression, autoimmune conditions, metabolic issues, and neurological disorders.
We use an evidence-based approach with data-driven solutions to help create a holistic healing plan to enhance your quality of life and give you a deeper understanding of what’s truly driving your symptoms and how to heal from the root cause.
