Chapter 8: The Body Becomes the Storyteller

Back in Chapter 6, I wrote about how our bodies are living records of what happened during our time in uniform.

Over time, I’ve learned how trauma impacts the nervous system. Situations of intense overwhelm—combat, sexual trauma, or deep emotional pain—don’t always get stored as clear memories. Instead, they leave an imprint in the body.

Here’s how past trauma has shown up in my body:

• Jaw clenching and shoulder tension

• Chronic fatigue and pain

• Gut issues

• Shallow breathing

• Irregular heart rate

• Sensory-triggered flashbacks (set off by sound, smell, etc.) Like cars backfiring, the sound of gravel crunching under boots, and diesel fumes.

A soldier’s body remembers what the mind tried to forget.

Even when the mind can’t remember or explain what happened, the body keeps acting it out—becoming a walking logbook of untold stories.

Here’s the key: the first draft of every traumatic story gets recorded in our body.

And many of those stories have never been heard.

Letting the Body Tell Its Story

To hear these stories, I had to learn that the body speaks in sensation—not words.

While my mind tells stories in words, my body tells them through physical sensations:

• A clenched jaw might come from holding back anger.

• Shallow breathing might come from carrying an untold story of anxiety or fear.

• A tight chest might hold grief that was never allowed to surface.

• Numbness might be my body saying, “That was too much”, a jammed signal  trying to hold back what felt too overwhelming to feel.

“No Story Left Behind” doesn’t just mean the stories we can remember. It includes the ones that have lived inside us without words—until now.

The ones trapped in our throats, tight muscles, and shallow breaths, waiting for the right moment to surface.

These next chapters are about letting the body join the storytelling process as a co-author.

When the body becomes the storyteller, we bridge the gap between conscious and subconscious memory—and reclaim the pieces of ourselves that got buried, fragmented, or forgotten.

We’ll start by reconnecting with our senses: what we saw, heard, touched, tasted, smelled, and physically felt during intense moments. Putting these details into words helps the brain make sense of what the body went through. 

This can be challenging, because most of us were never taught how to describe physical sensations in words. But it's a skill we can learn. And we will.

Why We Veterans Struggle with Sensory Awareness

Living fully in our senses, rather than stuck in our heads, is our birthright. It’s how we move through the world in a healthy childhood.

Our ancestors lived this way too, navigating life through sensory awareness. It's a way of living we’ve slowly lost.

As hunter-gatherers, life demanded that we stay present, tuned into the compass of our senses, fully engaged with the environment:

• What tracks am I seeing? Disturbed branches? Empty berry bushes? Piles of droppings?

• What sounds do I hear? Leaves rustling? Birds squawking, alerting me to the movements of larger animals?

• What do I smell? Ripe fruit? Animal hide? Am I downwind—can others smell me coming?

• How are my people doing? Can I track what my spouse, kids, or tribe are feeling—without them saying a word? Am I tuned into their facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language?

The life of a hunter-gatherer was rooted in connection with its surroundings, using sensory input as the primary survival tool.

We may never live like hunter-gatherers again, but each of us was trained as a warrior. And what is a warrior, if not a hunter trained to track and confront human threats?

That’s why storytelling is a lost skill we Veterans need to reclaim. A warrior’s survival often depended on their ability to tell the story.

Historically, the best hunters and warriors were also the best storytellers—and the most likely to survive.

Why? Because no other creature could say: 'That tiger shows up every day before sundown, don’t drink from that watering hole alone.'

Telling the story was a warrior’s way of staying alive—and helping their people stay alive too.

The best storytellers could cooperate, pass down knowledge, and share information that lived outside the present moment—in ways no other creature could.

Our ancestors used storytelling tactically. Their tales carried patterns, warnings, guidance, and other practical knowledge. Storytelling became essential to survival.

We are the children of that long line of hunters–gatherers–warriors–storytellers.

That’s the lineage we carry, but modern life has pulled us in a different direction. As technology advanced, we no longer needed our senses to survive. Instead of tracking today’s kill, we started tracking appointments. Bills. Deadlines.

Modern warriors aren’t trained to use sensory awareness as a survival tool. In civilian life, we don't scan for threats, berry bushes, or game. That primal part of us has been dulled by the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolutions.

Over time, we lost touch with our bodies—and the world around us. We started living from the neck up.

Our stories now come from screens instead of each other.

Trauma Overloads the System

Trauma adds another layer. It overwhelms the nervous system. Our senses get hit with too much, too fast.

Those of us who’ve faced intense moments in the military know what it’s like to have our system hijacked by a threat. Time freezes. Our brain locks in on survival mode. Thinking goes offline. We don’t usually fully register what our body was feeling in that moment.

The nervous system has built-in ways to digest these moments: deep breathing, touch, movement, connection and storytelling. (Remember being a kid and seeing something intense, rushing out of breath to go tell someone, and maybe needing to be held after?)

But when those outlets aren’t available, the energy stays trapped.

As hunter-gatherers, we’d return to the fire, tell our stories, and release that intensity together.

Today, that completion process rarely happens. Many of us lack communities that ask for our stories, or know how to hold them.

Even when we do tell our stories, it’s often not the full version. We leave out the physical details—the raw signals our body never stopped carrying.

Why?

Because most of us were never taught how to describe what we were feeling in our bodies.

Some of us also see ourselves as protectors, which means we often want to shield others from the gritty, painful truths of what we’ve been through. Or we hold back out of shame, fear of rejection, or worry we'll get in trouble with our command.

Or maybe deep down, we sense that our stories haven’t had a safe place to land.

Whatever the reason, the full truth of our experiences often remains stuck, held tightly within our bodies, waiting for someone to listen.

Naming Emotions vs. Feeling Physical Sensations

In today’s culture, when emotions come up, we’re sometimes encouraged to name them (if we’re lucky). That’s useful—but it’s not the same as actually feeling them.

For example, we don’t feel “anger” in the body. We feel a clenched jaw, tense shoulders, a burning face. “Anger” is just the label we give that combination of sensations.

Every emotion has a matching sensation somewhere in the body. But most of us were never taught how to feel those sensations, stay with them, let them move through us, and actually complete the cycle.

Knowing we’re angry isn’t the same as feeling the anger.

Both naming and feeling matter. But only one brings the body into the conversation.

Why is this important?

Because in my experience, processing trauma meant I had to not just remember what happened, but what my body felt while it was happening.

Endlessly thinking and talking about trauma kept me stuck. Sometimes it even re-traumatized me. Some emotions were buried so deep, I couldn’t reach them with thoughts alone.

But when I found the physical sensations tied to those emotions, it felt like finding a back door into what was stuck. That’s when the trapped energy finally started to move.

This is why writing with sensory detail is so helpful. Many of our stories have only been told from the neck up. They’ve grown stale.

Sensations are the pulsing reality beneath the dried-out stories we've told from the neck up. When we put words to those big (and little) sensations, we put flesh back on the bones of our story.

Those bones are the facts of what happened. That’s the first-person draft we finished in the last chapter.

In the next chapter, we’ll use that draft like a virtual reality portal—not to relive the pain, but to re-feel what was happening in our bodies. To give that pain the attention it never got—so it can finally loosen its grip on our body.

We’ll ask ourselves:

• What was I smelling?

• What was I hearing?

• What was I tasting?

• What was I touching?

• What was I feeling inside?

• What thoughts were running through my head?

Each detail helps reconnect what the body remembers with what the brain can now finally understand.

For warriors of the past, survival meant turning raw sensations into stories their people could live by.

We’ve inherited that same power: to tell stories that heal, that keep our communities whole, and that help guide the next generation away from the same mistakes.

Now it’s time to reclaim that power.

Let’s get to it in Chapter 9: Warriors Returning to Our Senses.