I thought I’d healed from my C-PTSD. Thirteen years after diagnosis, I could finally talk about my trauma without triggering. But pregnancy revealed something unexpected: PTSD physical symptoms that persisted despite all my emotional healing. Blood sugar crashes. Chronic inflammation. Unexplained fatigue. This post is about the hidden ways trauma lives in your body – and what to do about it.
I want to share something vulnerable with you.
It took me 2 years after my C-PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) diagnosis to finally start looking inward and be motivated to truly heal. This was 2 years of counselling, psychology and talk therapy that seemed to level me out during the sessions, but after the sessions I felt no different. Whilst there isn’t anything inherently bad in talk therapy (in fact it can be extremely helpful for people who need to express), it is important not to forget to treat the physical body that has been affected on a cellular level.
Whilst it’s been over 13 years now since I was given this diagnosis and it’s been 4 years since I felt confident I had integrated my trauma on a conscious level. I can speak about it openly and honestly without physical triggers – so from a conventional medicine perspective, most of my healing has been done. But, since being pregnant, I have noticed ongoing health issues that have got me searching for more answers.
I’ve consciously processed the trauma, I’ve done a lot of work to calm my nervous system. I’ve created a life that is calm and peaceful, most of the time. And I live with such purpose in my work – yet my body seems to be feeling the effects of my PTSD through ongoing inflammation and blood sugar dysregulation.
Your body isn’t broken. It learned depletion as a survival strategy.
I know there is something else underneath the surface, despite all the healing I’ve done. All the nervous system work, meditation, movement, breathwork, somatic therapy, diet and nutrition work that I’ve done – underneath it all, the missing piece is understanding a system that learnt depletion after extreme stress. Whilst I did most of these healing modalities in isolation – the missing link was integrating them, so my body could learn a new way of operating that didn’t involve depletion.
3 Ways PTSD Still Affects Your Body (Even After Emotional Healing)
Depending on the type of trauma and where a person is in their healing journey, it can affect the body differently. The earlier the healing stage, the more obvious the symptoms – for me, very early on, my symptoms manifested as physical pain and tension. As you continue to move through your healing journey, the symptoms can become less obvious and more subtle. You may not even notice them until you push your body to do something new (e.g. in pregnancy, menopause or training for something big – a big hike, a marathon etc).
This post is for you if you’ve done some healing around your trauma but still feel depleted.
1. Your stress hormone system runs quietly depleted
After years of your body producing high cortisol during trauma, the system can downregulate into a chronic low-grade depletion. This means, even if you’ve healed emotionally and feel genuinely calm, your adrenal output never really fully recovers. This means you don’t feel “stressed” but your physical body can’t meet normal metabolic demands.
How this shows up subtly:
- You need to eat more frequently (or feel irritable, shaky or foggy)
- Exercise feels depleting rather than energising – you crash instead of feeling good
- You’re more sensitive to fasting, missed meals, or dietary changes than seems normal
- Blood sugar drops, despite eating regularly or well
- Pregnancy, illness or other physical stressors reveal something is “off” that wasn’t obvious before
Supporting research: Yehuda, R., et al. (2007). “Cortisol metabolic predictors of response to psychotherapy for symptoms of PTSD”
2. Your nervous system defaults to subtle protective states
Your vagus nerve (the longest nerve in our body that controls our nervous system) tone is lower than optimal, keeping you at 10-15% more activated than you realize – this affects your digestion, sleep, and how your body responds to food.
How this shows up:
- You have unexplained digestive issues or food sensitivities
- Your blood sugar responds unpredictably (even when you eat well)
- You feel disconnected from your body signals until they’re extreme
Supporting research: Hauschildt, M., et al. (2011). “Heart rate variability in response to affective scenes in posttraumatic stress disorder”
3. Your energy production runs less efficiently
Years of stress hormones damaged your mitochondria (your energy cells), so your cells use glucose inefficiently – this means you can often burn fuel without producing proportional energy.
How this shows up:
- You have fatigue that seems disproportionate to what you’re actually doing
- Brain fog and poor exercise recovery are your normal
- You function fine, but operate on a narrower margin with less resilience
Why Integration Is the Missing Piece
I was doing all the right things – eating well based on my bloodwork, meditating daily, managing my nervous system – but my skin still flared, my blood sugars still dropped, and I still crashed. The shift came when I stopped treating these as separate practices and started weaving them together: nervous system work while eating, while doing mundane tasks. Understanding which emotions needed attention and when. Laughing and connecting more intentionally. The healing wasn’t in doing more – it was in integrating what I already knew into how I actually lived.
Trauma didn’t just happen in your mind or emotions or metabolism – it organised your entire physiology.
This is why healing from PTSD at this deeper layer requires integration. Not just nervous system work in isolation. Not just bloodwork without the somatic piece. Not just nutrition without understanding how your body learned depletion as a survival strategy.
The work I do sits at the intersection of all these layers – reading what your bloodwork reveals about survival patterns, addressing metabolism through targeted nutrition, working with fascia and nervous system so your body remembers safety, and doing all of this in relational space where your system can finally let go.
Because trauma organized your entire physiology – mind, emotions, metabolism, structure. Healing it requires working with all those layers at once, held in the kind of witness and presence your body needed then, and still needs now.
What’s Next
If this resonates with where you are in your healing journey, I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at sophia@musclesense.au or follow along as I continue to develop this integrative approach during my maternity leave.