Your Body Remembers Everything

Understanding Big T & Little t Trauma and How to Finally Heal

Transforma Health | Body & Mind

The body doesn't forget. It can hold every shock, every loss, every moment of feeling unsafe or unseen. It does so as a form of protection, acting as both boundary and buffer between you and the outer world. As our largest organ, the skin and the systems beneath it carry far more than we've been taught to recognise. Big T and little t trauma alike can be stored as a form of body memory, not exactly in the way our mind remembers events, but relationally, somatically. And sometimes, what has been deeply tucked away finds its way back to the surface. Through sensation. Through pattern. Through an emotional trigger. Through fascia, through a nervous system that learned to guard you and never quite received the message that the threat had passed.

I came to this work not through a textbook, but through listening deeply to my own body and learning step by step, to understand what it was expressing.

Early in my healing journey, I noticed that my symptoms didn't add up to any single diagnosis. No doctor I encountered at the time was fully examining let alone connecting the physical patterns I was experiencing with intuitively what I had understood were their emotional, psychological roots. What I had, thankfully, was curiosity! and determination. And a deep knowing that the answers existed somewhere. That thread eventually led me to the whole body and mind approach, and at the time early on, was known as naturopathic + psychosomatic medicine: the formal study of the relationship between psyche, emotion, and their expression in the body and treated holistically. My own healing, layered with this knowledge, profoundly shaped the way I practice. It's what brought me here and it's what I want to share with you.

Whether you carry what we call Big T trauma, a distinct, overwhelming event or the quieter accumulation of little t experiences that were never fully resolved, this is for you. Because the path to healing isn't always about finding the right supplement or the right diagnosis. Sometimes, it begins with learning to listen to what your body has been trying to say all along.

What Do We Actually Mean By Big T and Little t Trauma?

The word trauma comes from the Greek for wound. And this is where Dr. Gabor Maté invites us to begin: not with the event itself, but with what it leaves behind. Trauma is not what happened to you, it is the wound that formed in response. This distinction matters enormously. When I set out to find thinkers who perceived the body and emotional experience the way I did, finding Maté's book was like I had finally been confirmed. Here was a physician, a man with an entirely different life story to mine, who had arrived at almost exactly the same understanding I had been living, feeling, and quietly researching since I was in my teen years. That the emotional and the physical are not two separate conversations, but one. Dr. Maté had found the clinical language for it and it resonated deeply.

That discovery was both a relief and a kind of permission. It confirmed what my body had already been telling me was true and gave me a framework I could carry on throughout my studies and into practice, into language, and into the room with patients who arrive and sometimes carry that same deeper knowing that something interrelated is at play.

"Trauma is not what happens to you. It is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you." The Myth of Normal, 2022 | Dr. Gabor Maté

Here's the language and here's how to better understand the big umbrella term "Trauma", the distinction between Big T and little t trauma becomes less about scale and more about impact. Both can leave wounds. Both live in the body and both deserve attention.

The visible wound

Big T Trauma

• Accidents & serious injury

• Physical, sexual or emotional abuse

• Violence or assault

• Natural disasters

• Sudden loss or bereavement

• War or displacement

• Medical trauma or crisis

The quiet accumulation

Little t Trauma

• Emotional needs chronically unmet

• Absence of warmth or belonging

• Chronic shame or criticism

• Being unseen, dismissed, or silenced

• Humiliation in formative moments

• Unpredictable or unstable caregiving

• Good things that simply never came

Little t trauma is not only the presence of harm, it is also the absence of what should have been there. In other words, it could've been the safety that wasn't there. The comfort that didn't come. The feeling of being truly seen or heard and accepted, that was missing. Your nervous system registered all of it as a threat, and responded the only way it knew how: by adapting, shrinking, and learning to hide the parts of you that felt unsafe to show.

What traditional medicines have long understood and perhaps have had difficulties putting into language and what modern science is now confirming, is that the body holds these wounds not as story, but as energy. As charge. As a field that has not yet been allowed to complete its movement. This is not something I encountered in a textbook. I grew up with a relationship to these traditions, studied them formally, and have spent over a decade refining how they work alongside naturopathic and functional medicine in a clinical setting. Plant medicine, energy work, meridian-based bodywork, the frameworks of shamanic and native traditions. These are not references I make from a distance. They are tools I work with, in practice, with real patients, in real time. What this looks like in a session is perhaps simpler than you might expect. I begin where any clinician would, with a thorough whole-body assessment: labwork, metabolic markers, a full symptom picture. But running alongside that is a broader and older diagnostic language: how your body feels qualitatively, whether it runs hot or cold, contracted or open, dry or damp, what your tongue may look like, where you may feel shifts in your body (or mind). I ask about your emotional landscape as carefully as I ask about your physiology. What is present? What is missing? What has never been given space? I may integrate for example the organ clock from Traditional Chinese Medicine, the meridians of the energetic body as many native medicines have mapped and documented, the understanding of fragmentation that shamanic traditions have named for centuries and so forth. This lens sits naturally inside the same consultation as your bloodwork, because in my experience, separating them was never the answer. It turned out to really be the problem.

Healing becomes possible when we work with the body and mind across all of its layers physiological, emotional, energetic. Not as separate therapies, but as one conversation. This is the foundation of my integrative approach at Transforma Health.

The language changes. The wisdom doesn't. Across modern science, body-mind medicine, and shamanic tradition the understanding essentially is the same. The body remembers and often holds what it has lived through. And given the right conditions, it also knows how to let it go.

So What Does Healing Actually Look Like?

Healing doesn't always require you to revisit the past or spend hours analysing or finding the words for what happened. In fact, some of the most profound shifts I've witnessed in practice happen not through talking, but through the body itself showing us where it needs to move, shift, and release. When the body is gently guided and given the right conditions, it can release what it has been holding, without needing to explain why it held it in the first place.

This is what I want people to know: the body has its own intelligence. It tells a story, and our job is "simply" to listen to it and understand it a little better. Through somatic therapy, energy work, plant medicine, nutrition, and bodywork, we create the space for that release to happen naturally. Sometimes the mind understands afterwards and finds it easier to let go. Sometimes the mind already understood but the body was still holding on, still carrying that weight, or that blockage. Either way, when the body releases, something shifts at a deeper level than words alone can reach.

What we in integrative and naturopathic medicine offer is time, we take the time to listen thoroughly, with the attention toward multiple layers of the human, and a whole-body and mind approach, alongside the therapeutic methods to support it. Rather than suppressing or managing symptoms with medication alone, we take a whole-person approach, gradually helping the nervous system, the metabolic system, or the hormonal system, etc. to Re-learn or simply learn to form a more smooth and healthy response. Plant medicine, nutritional support, energy work, somatic bodywork, and psycho-emotional methods each address a different layer of the same wound. Together, they support the body's natural efforts to move toward health and a state of homeostasis.

"The body has been waiting for this conversation. And it already knows the way home." Transforma Health | Tiffany

Does this resonate or feel familiar ?

If you feel like your symptoms return over time, like your being passed from doctor to specialist, to the next specialist and feel like you would benefit from a whole-body mind assessment? A Clarity Session offers you orientation and further a thorough holistic assessment. Proceeding with a personalised integrative plan, so you finally know what you're working with and where to begin.

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