When Your Body Keeps the Score in a Language You Never Learned to Speak

Or: how we’re all walking around with invisible bruises in a world that keeps poking them.

Picture this:

It’s 2 AM. Again.
You’re scrolling through strangers’ confessions like prayer beads, each swipe a genuflection to the god of not-being-alone.

And then—stop.
That post. That wound that looks exactly like yours.

Your chest becomes a fist.
Your breath becomes a ghost.
And in that terrible, perfect moment you see it:

Maybe you’re not uniquely broken.
Maybe you’re just… human.
In a world that forgot what that means.

The Truth That Breaks Before It Heals

Here’s what Dr. Gabor Maté whispers like a lullaby to our collective nervous system:

Trauma isn’t what happened to you.
Trauma is what happened inside you when no one helped you hold it.

The storm is the event.
The trauma is the water damage after—living with buckets in every room, pretending the ceiling isn’t caving.

• Big-T trauma announces itself: abuse, death, catastrophe.
• Small-t trauma whispers: the thousand tiny ways you learned you were too much, or not enough.

Sometimes the whispers cut deeper than the screams.

The Performance of “Normal”

We call it normal. But is it?

• Anxiety is as common as breathing.
• Loneliness has doubled in a decade.
• Kids are choosing death over this version of life.

This isn’t health. This isn’t living.
It’s a collective hallucination.
We’re standing in a burning building, arguing about the feng shui.

Your Pain Wears Disguises

Addiction. Burnout. Overwork. Doomscrolling.

Not weakness. Survival.

“Don’t ask why the addiction,” Maté says. “Ask why the pain.”

Wine, work, screens, people who hurt us—these are nervous systems reaching for regulation the only way they know how.
We’re all children who never grew out of needing to be held. And in a world that doesn’t hold, we hold whatever we can.

Your Body: The Most Honest Friend You Have

The body doesn’t lie. Can’t lie.

• Swallow your “no” and your throat remembers.
• Smile through rage and your gut keeps score.
• Betray yourself and your cells take notes.

The “nice” ones, the “good” ones? Their bodies eventually become tsunamis.

Because what the mouth won’t say, the body will.

The Geography of Healing

Healing isn’t a destination with a gift shop.

It’s Tuesday morning tears in the car.
It’s saying “no” and letting guilt sit in the passenger seat.
It’s authenticity—not as performance, but as refusing to betray yourself again.

Maté offers a compass: RAIN

• Recognize
• Allow
• Investigate
• Nurture

Four steps. Like remembering you had legs all along.

You Were Never Meant to Heal Alone

We evolved in circles. In tribes. In arms that held us.

Now we’re trying to meditate our way out of capitalism, to therapy-app ourselves back to wholeness in overpriced rooms.

But healing requires:

• Bodies that hold bodies
• Communities that see us without performance
• Nature that remembers us back into belonging

And if sometimes the fall feels too sharp? Not every dip needs rescuing—but some do. If this is one of those times, please visit our Crisis Resources for quiet, steady support.

The Revolution Is a Returning

Maté’s truth is simple:

We’ve lost the plot. Forgotten the song. Mistaken the map for the territory.

But the small, stubborn voice inside that whispers this isn’t right?
That’s your North Star.

Not brokenness.
Not weakness.
Just your body remembering home.

A Soft Landing

Healing isn’t about fixing.
It’s about befriending.

Some days you’ll feel nothing. Some days everything. That’s not failure—it’s the spiral dance of becoming.

You were never broken.
You were always enough.
You’re just human in an abnormal world.

And being human? That’s the revolution.

With gentleness for every unseen bruise,
The Undelulu Team