The Body Can Balance the Score: Interoception and Trauma Recovery

Bessel van der Kolk's landmark work told us that the body keeps the score. That trauma leaves its imprint not just in memory and narrative but in the nervous system — in patterns of activation and shutdown that persist long after the original threat has passed. New 2025 research takes this further. The body doesn't just keep the score. Given the right conditions and the right support, the body can balance it.

What the 2025 Research Shows

A peer-reviewed study published in PMC in 2025 explored the role of interoceptive awareness — the ability to notice and attend to physical sensations arising from within the body — as a pathway to trauma healing and well-being. Drawing on the Community Resiliency Model and informed by Polyvagal Theory and neuroscience research, the study found that body-based self-care interventions focused on interoception can support nervous system regulation, build resilience, and reduce trauma-related symptoms across diverse populations.

The study placed particular emphasis on the role of the autonomic nervous system and the vagus nerve in regulating emotional and physiological states. When the vagus nerve is well-toned and responsive, people are better able to move between states of activation and rest — to feel what they feel without being overwhelmed by it, and to return to a state of regulation after stress or challenge.

What Interoception Means in Practice

Interoception is simply the ability to feel what is happening inside your body. To notice the tightness in your chest before you consciously register that you are anxious. To feel the hollowness in your stomach when something important has shifted in a relationship. To sense the warmth that spreads through you when you feel genuinely safe and held.

Most trauma survivors have a disrupted relationship with these internal signals. Some have learned to shut them out entirely — to live in the head and stay out of the body, because the body once felt dangerous. Others are overwhelmed by sensation — flooded, unable to tolerate what they feel. Either pattern represents a disruption in the body's capacity to use its own information effectively.

Somatic therapy works directly with interoception. It helps clients gradually rebuild their capacity to feel — to tolerate sensation without being overwhelmed by it, and to use the body's signals as guides rather than threats.

Why This Changes Everything

When we can feel our bodies safely — when we have enough nervous system regulation to be present with our own internal experience — everything else becomes possible. Relationships deepen. Sexuality opens. Creativity returns. The capacity for joy, for presence, for genuine connection with other people all depend on the ability to inhabit our own embodied experience. This is not a peripheral benefit of trauma healing. It is the center of it.