Healing Trauma When You Can’t Leave the Situation

You don’t have to escape your environment to begin healing—because trauma lives in the body, not just the mind. And while safety is essential, healing can start now, even in the midst of ongoing stress.

The Biology of Trauma: Your Body Is Speaking

Trauma isn’t stored in thoughts—it’s held in your nervous system, your fascia, your muscles, your cells. When you’re trapped in a toxic system—narcissistic abuse, scapegoating, coercive control—your body enters survival mode:

• Sympathetic activation: hypervigilance, anxiety, racing thoughts—"fight or flight."

• Dorsal vagal shutdown: numbness, fatigue, dissociation—"freeze or collapse."

This isn’t weakness. It’s biology. Your body is saying:

“I am under-resourced. I am not safe. I am not enough to handle this.”

And it’s right.

But that message also reveals what you need to heal.

What Your Body Is Asking For

Healing begins by listening. When stress turns to trauma, it’s often because core resources are missing. Your body is craving:

• Rest—not just sleep, but nervous system safety

• Food and metabolic stability—trauma dysregulates energy

• Inner connection—reclaiming your felt sense of self

• Emotional reciprocity—relationships where you’re seen and felt

• Validation—someone who says, “Yes, this is real. You’re not crazy.”

• Support—not fixing, but being with you in the pain

Sufficient felt, embodied support can keep stress from becoming trauma.

Even one attuned presence can shift your nervous system from threat to safety.

What Overwhelms the System

Your body wasn’t designed to endure endless betrayal, gaslighting, or grief without witness. These experiences trigger deep overwhelm:

• Narcissistic and scapegoat abuse

• Sudden loss of a loved one, a friend, a job or other significant loss

• Discard by friends during grief and/or abuse

• ACEs—especially preverbal, preaffective trauma

• Ancestral patterns of suppression

• Systemic control and isolation

• Spiritual warfare and psychic attack

• Unrecognized grief and invalidation

• Chronic dieting (keto, carnivore, fasting, vegan without balance)

• Sleep deprivation—when the body restores, repairs, rebuilds

• Chronic over-giving and over-sharing (common in empaths)

• Forced caretaking—especially when not a choice

• Disability and sensory deprivation (e.g., blindness, hearing loss)

These aren’t just “hard times.” They’re biological emergencies—and your body remembers every one.

Glucose: The Brain’s Essential Fuel

As Ray Peat, PhD, emphasized:

“The brain consumes about 120 g of glucose daily—it’s virtually the sole fuel for human brain function.”

When blood sugar drops, the body activates survival mode:

• Cortisol and adrenaline rise to break down muscle and fat for fuel, while the body's energy resources are diverted from PFC (pre-frontal cortex in the brain) and internal organs to provide energy to muscles and limbs for fight or flight

• Free fatty acids (as PUFAs - polyunsaturated fatty acids) flood the bloodstream, blocking glucose uptake

• Lactate builds up, increasing inflammation and excitotoxicity

• Ammonia rises, impairing detox and brain function

This is not a path to health—it’s chronic metabolic stress, which mimics famine and worsens trauma.

Peat’s work shows that sucrose (glucose + fructose) from ripe fruit, honey, orange juice, or even table sugar:

• Stabilizes blood sugar better than starches

• Reduces cortisol and adrenaline

• Supports liver detox of stress hormones

• Fuels the brain and protects against neurodegeneration

• Improves thyroid function, driving metabolic recovery

“The protective effects of sugar, and the harmful effects of excessive fat metabolism, are now being widely recognized.” — Ray Peat

Chronic carb restriction—especially in trauma survivors—depletes the very fuel needed to regulate the nervous system.

Including adequate glucose is not indulgence. It’s biological support for healing, clarity, and resilience.

Healing While Still in the Fire

Can you heal while still in the situation?

Yes—but not by enduring. By resourcing.

You’re not broken. You’re adapting.

Healing now means:

• Building internal safety—through breath, grounding, somatic awareness, your conscious presence in your body

• Receiving external validation—finding one person, therapist, or community who sees you, believes you, doesn't accuse you of "being dramatic" or "catastrophizing"

• Honoring your body’s signals—when it says “I need rest,” you rest, when your stomach growls, you eat

• Creating micro-liberations—small acts of sovereignty, like writing this post

This is how you reclaim your nervous system.

You Are Not Alone

If this resonates, it’s because your soul knows the truth:

Healing is possible—even here.

My courses—Safe & Nourished: The 6-Week Trauma-Informed Metabolic Reclamation Plan and Re-Membering You: A Trauma-Informed Path to Empath Sovereignty—were created for people like you:

• Held down by trauma, but rising

• Still in the storm, but building an inner sanctuary

• Ready to transform survival into aliveness

And if you’re ready to go deeper, one-on-one sessions can help you navigate this terrain with support.

You don’t have to wait until you’re free to begin.

Your body is already calling you home.