5 Subtle Signs You’re Healing from Dissociative Trauma

When I was a teen, I had excruciating chronic hip pain. On one trip to the doctor’s to figure it out, they did the classic reflex test where they hit my knee with a small paddle to watch my leg reflexively shoot out. Except my leg didn’t do that. “That’s weird…” said the doctor. “Did you hold your leg back on purpose?” “Huh?” I responded. I certainly hadn’t.

That memory stuck with me even though at the time I didn’t know what it meant.

Doing yoga several times a week, which I started at age 20, turned out to be the perfect treatment for my hip pain and has been ever since.

It would be another decade and a half before I would understand my dead reflexes.

At age 31 I finally got the diagnosis I really needed: Major Depressive Disorder. I also finally got the healing I really needed and started pouring myself into reading everything on trauma I could.

Embodiment Journey, Left to Right:

• Left: me in Peru in 2007. Very Floating head

• Center: me in Austin, Texas in 2016. Getting more present—less far away look in my eyes, but still some.

• Right: me in Boston in 2023. Years of therapy, yoga, and intentional emotional healing. Feeling comfortable in my whole body.

Please note: a picture is just a 1 second snapshot, not a whole story. There are photos from these times when I look better or worse but these help tell this story.

Dissociation & Trauma

At some point in my 30s I started to understand dissociation, a common trauma response. It’s the nervous system’s way of protecting us when something feels too overwhelming to fully process. We go up into our heads and out of our bodies. I look back on my teens and 20s and call myself a “floating head”—very bookish but not at all present in my body.

The types of traumas that may cause someone to dissociate are sexual or physical trauma or physical or emotional neglect. For kids, when our needs aren’t met or we’re being exploited, we simply do not have any of the tools needed to get through the experience, yet we must survive them—as living creatures, surviving is our instinct.

So, our brains create dissociation, and we pretend we feel nothing. Genius, actually! Healing from dissociative trauma means gently returning to presence, learning to feel again, and rebuilding trust in our bodies and inner world.

According to the Psychiatry.org entry for dissociative disorders:

Dissociative disorders involve problems with memory, identity, emotion, perception, behavior and sense of self. Dissociative symptoms can potentially disrupt every area of mental functioning.

Examples of dissociative symptoms include the experience of detachment or feeling as if one is outside one’s body, and loss of memory or amnesia. Dissociative disorders are frequently associated with previous experience of trauma.

Getting back into my body has been a lifelong practice that started with learning to practice regular yoga but also especially learning how to sit with uncomfortable emotions. To start practices to sit with uncomfortable emotions, download my free guide: My Emotional Self: A Starter Guide.

A few months ago, at a hostel in Türkiye, I was making a meal in a shared kitchen with other fellow travelers. I was chatting with someone and accidentally knocked over my glass. My hand shot out instantaneously and the glass did not fall, spilling only a couple of drops of liquid.

“Wow, amazing catch!” the fellow traveler remarked.

“My reflexes are BACK!” I thought.

I’ve had quite a few other experiences like this during the past few years that let me know that I’m no longer dead inside, playing dead to escape the pain.

Here are 5 Subtle Signs you’re Healing from Dissociative Trauma:

1. Your reflexes are faster - You’re more connected to your body, so you actually catch the glass instead of watching it fall. Especially if we had a lot of stressful experiences in early life, the nervous system shuts down to survive. We may feel so confused that we can’t mobilize during dangerous situations but our nervous system long ago learned to “play dead” because it was the only option.

2. You stop bumping into things or catching your clothes on doorknobs - As your nervous system calms, your spatial awareness improves—you're more in your body than hovering outside it. I used to always catch a piece of clothing or a purse strap on door knobs until I started intentionally slowing down and noticing my surroundings.

3. You stop forgetting where you put your keys (or other items) - Your brain isn’t spending all its energy scanning for danger, so it can actually remember where your stuff is. You’re in your body and so there’s a felt sense of what your body just did, guiding you to where you left the thing. Also, being more present means you may be more likely to have a system in place—always putting your keys in the same place, habitually. Less chaotic actions, more systems.

4. You notice subtle emotions before they explode or turn into chronic pain - Being more present in the body means noticing emotional cues like tense muscles or internal heat. We may feel our fists start to clench or our throats tighten. We may notice our stomach starting to feel upset. Then we can do practices to regulate instead of ignoring these cues. We can calm our nervous system, unclench our fists, roll back our shoulders, go for a walk, journal our feelings, and then release it all. We don’t take it out on a loved one or unsuspecting coworker and we don’t let it coalesce into greater bodily harm.

5. You notice when you feel full - Over-consuming food or substances can be a way of trying to feel something—pushing oneself to the brink of what the body can handle. For those with eating disorders such as bulimia or fitness addiction, after they finally make themselves feel something, they have to follow it up with either a purge or a punishing workout. When we come back into the body, we notice when we feel hungry and when we feel full. When I first started my journey back into my body in 2015, I would take slower bites of foods and notice whether or not I was enjoying them, tossing the food if I wasn’t. This was a huge step for me as I would previously chomp on whatever I had to completion, regardless of whether I was enjoying it. This led me to quit sugar on January 1, 2016 because I noticed my body wasn’t enjoying sugar.

Helpful Resources:

• For practices on starting to heal, download My Emotional Self: A Starter Guide here.

• I help people heal and come back into their bodies! Learn more about working with me 1:1 here.

• I teach people how to quit sugar! Learn more here.