How We Heal Trauma Memory: The Neurobiology of Trauma Healing

Healing trauma memories isn’t about forgetting the past — it’s about reprocessing it in a way the brain can finally recognize as over.

In Somatic Therapy, we work with the body’s implicit memory systems to revisit traumatic experiences while also staying anchored in the present moment. This is what makes healing possible — the brain registers a mismatch between the past and the present, and finally receives the signal: you are safe now.

How Does This Work?

Traumatic memories are stored differently in the brain than ordinary memories. While most experiences are processed and filed in the hippocampus, the region responsible for long-term memory, overwhelming or traumatic events follow a different route.

When someone is in a state of high activation or shutdown, the brain bypasses the hippocampus entirely and sends the memory to the amygdala — the brain’s threat detection center. This is where emotionally charged, danger-associated memories are stored.

These trauma memories are imprinted along with the somatic experience that was happening at the time — physical sensations, emotional intensity, and states of helplessness. That’s why the body can re-experience trauma when something in the present moment feels even vaguely familiar. The nervous system reactivates those stored patterns to protect us from perceived danger.

Additionally, during trauma, the prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for reasoning and regulation — often goes “offline” to prioritize survival. In cases of pre-verbal trauma (trauma experienced before language development), the prefrontal cortex may not have been developed enough to process and store the memory consciously. As a result, these memories become encoded not as narrative, but as somatic memory — felt rather than remembered.

What Makes Healing Possible?

In Somatic Therapy, we go into the body memory associated with a traumatic event, or the body’s expression of the memory of the event - even if we can’t remember it cognitively. When we access these stored experiences in a regulated, supported environment — such as a somatic therapy session — while simultaneously staying grounded in the safety of the present moment, the brain recognizes something different. There’s no longer a threat, yet the old memory is still active. That mismatch is what allows the brain to update its internal map.

This process may happen spontaneously through body sensations, emotional release, or imagination. A corrective experience — whether real or visualized — while the original neural pathway is active, gives the brain the opportunity to re-categorize the memory and store it in the long-term memory system.

This is known as Memory Reconsolidation. It’s the neurobiological process by which trauma memories are transformed — no longer stuck in a protective loop, frozen back in the time of the traumatic event(s), but integrated into the present as part of the past that’s now over.

In Somatic Therapy, we don’t try to erase what happened. We help the body experience something new. A different outcome. A shift in physiology. And over time, a new relationship to the memory itself.

This is what it means to rewire.

This is what it means to heal.