They told me they were born into war,bombs falling, debris everywhere. The landscape of their childhood for years.
Their father had left to work in another country, sending money home to keep the family alive. Their mother carried the full weight of survival: always stressed, always anxious, always worried, always tired.
During the session, shame and guilt for having feelings surfaced.
When a gazelle is chased by a lion, survival is everything. The body leaps into fight-or-flight to meet the threat. If the gazelle is caught, it is eaten. If it escapes, its body shakes and trembles, discharging the flood of cortisol and adrenaline, before calmly returning to graze.
But we humans are different. Our bodies can remain locked in fight-or-flight for years, even decades. The body remembers. The images, the stories, the “movies” of what happened can be replayed unconsciously, looping through the entire organism long after the danger has passed.
And what more effective way to hold the organism there than through shame and guilt, shame for having feelings, guilt for even allowing them to exist.
In war, survival at any cost is the only priority. Feelings are not useful; they might even be dangerous.
Yet in the session, when shame and guilt were given space, not seen as flaws, but as the body’s intelligent, necessary response, the only way the nervous system could endure the unbearable; something shifted. Their body began to shake. Sweat poured. Tingling spread everywhere. At the end they said it felt as if they had been running for a year and suddenly stopped: utterly exhausted.
Shame and guilt had not been enemies to fight or wounds to heal. They had been guardians, protective mechanisms that silenced feelings too dangerous for survival, not just for them, but perhaps also for their family and community. What they needed was not fixing, but recognition. Space. Witnessing.
The body was never wrong. On the contrary, it was expressing its immense, ancient wisdom. A wisdom shaped across eons of survival, alive in every trembling, sweating, exhausted moment.
Even though we can't understand most of the time.
10 - 09 - 2025