The body keeps the score, and talk therapy is how we discover why

I started reading The Body Keeps the Score, which is a book written by Bessel van der Kolk about trauma, and how it stores in the body. How it’s as much a physical ailment as it is a mental one.

I’ve learned, just within the first chapter, that I’ve never really had a chance to just sit and spill it all with a therapist. I’ve never had a therapy session or two dedicated to just talking about what happened to me, in the way I need to to feel heard. In therapy for the longest time, over twenty years at this point, I’ll touch upon it in bits and pieces, but never all at once. Things are always redirected to treatment methods and I’ve kept wondering, is it something I’m not doing right? Is therapy not working because I’m failing repeatedly?

And then I realized, I have a terrible trigger that therapy itself is triggering: my need to just be heard. To be believed. To be able to tell my story and what happened to me in the way I need to, as I need to. Instead, I’m redirected or it’s straight into treatment with only bits and pieces to go on. For the longest time, I had no idea what was happening to me because no one explained what PTSD meant for me, what it was doing or could do to me, or what it could affect, because no one had just let me sit for like an hour, or a few sessions, to just say everything.

There is a reason there are things my therapists have never heard over the years. Things I’m ashamed to talk about that are trauma responses, things I’ve kept to myself wondering if there’s something wrong with me. Because I’ve never been able to explain, I’ve never felt like it wouldn’t be inappropriate or burdensome to just say some of the darkest things that I need to let out.

I need to learn how to cry again. I need to learn how to imagine fun, creative things again, but I can’t when all I can obsess over is trying, again, to type my story in just the right way. Maybe I’m not explaining well enough. I’ve written and published two fictional books based heavily on my experiences, and it still doesn’t feel like it’s out of me. I’ve written endless blog entries, cycled over the same things, tried to word things in just the right way, and I keep doing this over and over and over. It’s all I can write about in my fiction. It’s all I can journal about. It seeps into all of my creativity. I am obsessing over my memoir right now because I just want to say everything, every last bit, and not feel like I’m being a burden or an attention-seeker or being too much, like people have told me throughout life.

I just need to talk. I need someone to listen to me and my full story, believe me, and then help me. I need to say everything without being made to feel like it’s wrong to dwell in the past. If I can’t address the past properly, then how can I move forward with anything?

©2025 Shane Blackheart