Why ‘Getting Over It’ Doesn’t Work: How Trauma Lives in the Body and Brain

Healing seems like an easy blueprint; eat healthy, wake up early, write your emotions out, read books that will grow you, workout, spend time with others and expand your career.

The only thing is, this doesn’t work. 

It’s a blueprint that society has created for another highlight reel, one that only works if your wounds are surface-level. 

But when you’re healing from deep wounds, one’s that still grip at your chest or from the feeling that something's wrong even though everything is fine, that blueprint seems to crumble. 

Because there is no grief designed to be felt, which is key to healing. 

When we run, it only chases us more.

Living in our bodies, trauma will always show up if we don’t heal it. Sometimes in obvious ways, such as a trigger that makes us weep, or an illness that seems to appear out of nowhere, even though we eat healthy, wake up early, write our emotions out…Trauma needs to be seen. There is no timeline to it. 

Trauma isn’t like a “normal” memory you can file away. It’s stored in pieces.

Trauma shatters, like a glass vase dropped on the floor. It breaks into a million different pieces the moment the event happens. And those pieces don’t come together all at once. They show up slowly, in fragments; through a smell, a place, a face, a sentence that sounds just a little too familiar. Each one is a piece, and suddenly the vase starts to come back together. 

What if the little pieces didn’t have to be such a bad thing?

What if your triggers weren’t here to haunt you, but to say, “Hey, I’m still hurting, will you sit with me for a moment?”

Being triggered doesn’t mean you’re broken or that you’ve gone backwards.
It means your body is still trying to finish what it never got to.

That’s what trauma does: it loops your nervous system back into survival mode. Even when nothing’s actually wrong, your body responds like it’s in danger, because that’s what kept you safe back then.
Dissociation, numbness, spiralling thoughts, they’re not flaws. They’re strategies. And at some point in your life, they worked. That’s why they’re still showing up, not to ruin your life, but to protect what they believe still needs guarding. You are not broken for still feeling it. You are not behind because the world kept moving while you stayed frozen in one moment.

Healing isn’t a checklist, it’s a conversation. A long, messy, sometimes silent one between your body and your past. And healing doesn’t happen when we shame ourselves for being stuck. It happens when we finally stop running, sit with the pieces, and say: “I’m listening now.”

So no, “getting over it” doesn’t work. But getting through it does. Not in a straight line. Not all at once. But piece by piece, breath by breath, until one day, the vase doesn’t feel shattered anymore. It no longer cuts, it just exists.

And that’s enough.
That’s healing.