To me, trauma isn't only about what happened to you. It's also about what happened inside you and what your mind and body had to do to survive it.

What therapy, time, and insight can do is help the thinking part of the brain understand and contextualize those experiences. That’s genuine and important work. But it doesn’t always fully update what the body holds, which is why a woman can intellectually understand that she’s safe now and still find herself flooded with anxiety in situations that bear even a passing resemblance to earlier experiences of threat, abandonment, shame, or loss of control.