The Body Remembers

I didn't go to rehab to get clean. I didn't go to rehab at all, in fact. I struggled good and long trying to heal on my own.

The Past That Follows You

Between 19 and 21 years old, I was an on-again, off-again illicit drug user. I don't know how many random bathrooms I could have died in while shooting up something I scored on the street. I would swallow enough pills to kill a horse. I would try anything anyone handed to me. At that time, I had no regard or reverence for my own life.

I wasn't intentionally trying to hurt myself. I just wanted to feel something, to experience something more than I had. There was some kind of illusive truth I was hungry for, and I went looking for it in some dark places.

My parents and I had been estranged for about 18 months, and when I finally came "home," completely broken, they took me back into their home with open arms.  They hadn't known where I was during that time, except for the few months I was living with my sister in Austin, TX. They never asked me for more detail and I didn't volunteer them, so we never spoke about it. I hadn't so much as considered what their experience was during that time, or how they handled it alongside everything else going on in their lives. I hold them so dearly for that, and for the weight they must have carried. As for me, I was grateful to be alive while a few of my friends no longer were. I didn't go to rehab after that because I wasn't acutely suffering from withdrawal. But I had no container, no mental or emotional support, and no intentional recovery system. I just sucked it up, got clean, grieved, and moved forward with my life pretty much in a vacuum, picking up the pieces as best I could.  It eventually became a distant memory of myself that I no longer related to.

The level of "self-ick" that time in my life left me with is unparalleled. I had believed my actions at the time were ones of rebellion and self-liberation. Like most drug-users, I wasn't present to the self-harm and the mechanistic coping that it was. Hardcore, traumatic things happened in my life at that time. Besides the drugs, -death, suicides, assault and injury, and a major health crises all occurred in a short period. 

Unexpected Confrontations

Today, that was almost 30 years ago. I did a lot of healing over the next decades. I made my life into a concentrated container for healing through much of my 20s and 30s. 

So you can imagine my surprise when all of these old and icky feelings resurfaced in a breathwork session I did at the end of 2025.

I believed I had wholeheartedly healed that time of my life.  Those feeling were over and done!

I'd forgiven myself, asked for forgiveness, grown, evolved, and recovered from that phase. But when, 15 minutes into a local Saturday morning community breathwork session, these intense, icky, awful feelings suddenly rose from within me, there was nowhere to hide. All I could do was acknowledge them. I thought, there is no way I can get through this space if I don't acknowledge what's here. In that moment, I had only one choice: breathe through it and discover what was there to be felt.

What it's Like to Feel Something That's On its Way Out

In those moments of breath, I was experiencing new awareness around my own shame, which had stashed itself somewhere in the subconscious holding tank of my body. Similar to muscle tension or armor you aren't aware you're holding, and even less aware how it may be affecting your mobility or posture, this shame was refracting through everything in my path like light through a prism. As I breathed I could feel how I projected this energy into my future, unknowingly.

However nuanced, I could sense it had been affecting how I put myself out into the world creatively and professionally, protecting itself from being detected by others.  I could see it shaped what and how I shared anything about my past, (guarded, and aloof), and even how I engaged in my friendships and intimate relationships. It revealed itself in how I held myself in rooms with strangers with a subtle defense, and how I judged others because of its invisible presence.

And now, in the light of breathing through what was coming up, I could feel this shame like sticky cobwebs, being expunged from my entire system. Hidden pockets of self-loathing emptied into the heaving currents of my lungs and rode the waves of my breath straight out of my body. It was as if my body was opening a time-capsule and emptying its remaining contents.

Keep breathing, I told myself. You've got this.

My experience, this time, was different from times in the past. I could feel the self-ick, but without getting pulled into the story, and without collapsing from guilt or shame at the harm I had caused to myself and others. As I continued to breathe, I was able meet the feelings with new awareness. I was able to hold what was coming up and be with it. Witnessing it without any judgement was all that was being asked of me in those moments.

What I've Learned From the Ick

An hour later at the end of the breathwork session I was euphoric, and not just from the extra oxygen.

What I had felt highlighting of a few things for me:

First: healing is never linear. The body remembers everything.

Second: we can suddenly find ourselves feeling old feelings, but we can meet them in new ways.

Third: if we're holding feelings from the past, even dormant ones, it will color our experience of the present.

Lastly, and maybe the most impactful for me: it isn't our past that dictates our path, but our relationship to the past that does.

Re-experiencing those feelings after so many years — that was a gift. Beautiful illumination reaching all the way back into the recesses of where those memories were held.

The gift was in realizing that despite all my years of personal development, therapies, and experiential healing work, there were still un-integrated parts of me from that time. I had thought about it a lot. Written about parts of it a million times. Gone over pieces of it with therapists, counselors, friends. Yet there hadn't been a time when I had total transparency and vulnerability with myself about the entirety of what I had experienced and how it impacted me.

We embody experiences and emotions that inform how we move in the world. We sometimes adapt to trauma so well that it's hard to see, hard to differentiate from who we truly are. It becomes a part of us that gets expressed in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways.

Healing, of course, isn't one-and-done. It is a sincere part of life, if we wish to keep evolving.

I know the body to be an intricate dance partner to our subconscious drivers and motivations; that body and mind are intradependent. The part of me that waxes poetic sees this as the passageways of our subconscious, intricately latticed into our physiology.

If we find ourselves revisiting issues, especially ones we thought  resolved, what matters is that we meet them as the person we are now. Not the one we were then.

I was 19, and then I was 28 years past it, and my body was holding all of it, waiting patiently until I gave it a way to speak. That's what the breath did. It brought something forward that I could meet as the person I am now. Which is the only reason I could meet it at all. The somatic practice of breathing reached deep into the folds of soma and brought what was still there to be felt, through the body and out of me. It also reminded me, yet again, how intelligent our systems are. Learning from this intellgence is a gold mine of knowing one's self.  It's the root of somatic work.

It Takes As Long As It Takes

As a somatic practitioner, but more to the point, as someone who has gotten to know myself in the trenches of my own personal healing work, here's what I can share: unmetabolized trauma doesn't integrate. It goes quiet, and it waits.  The work isn't about digging it out. The work is in becoming someone who can meet what arises, for as long as it takes.

If this resonates for you or touches a nerve that you notice in yourself, take a moment to thank yourself for how far you've come, regardless of where you are. Because if we are truly living, there is always more to learn about ourselves, and always opportunities to change the relationship with who we've been.

** If you're reading this and need of help or guidance in your own process of healing, please reach out and know that I'm here to support you. You can also find an international list of trained and qualified somatic providers at https://findatherapist.theembodylab.com/