Chapter 8: The Body Becomes the Storyteller

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

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

I think of it this way: my nervous system functions like a black box recorder on an airplane. Long before I could put words to my experiences, my body had already recorded them.

Here are some of the ways past trauma has made itself known in my body over the years:

• Jaw clenching and shoulder tension

• Chronic fatigue and pain

• Gut issues

• Shallow breathing habits

• Heart rate irregularities

• Sensory-triggered flashbacks (set off by sound, smell, etc.—like cars backfiring, the feel of gravel 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, breathing logbook of untold stories.

A key point here is this: the first draft of every traumatic story gets recorded in our body—and many of those stories have never been heard.

When they aren’t heard, the pain doesn’t just disappear. It settles in. Waits. Builds pressure.

Letting the Body Tell Its Story

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

Where my mind tells stories in language, my body tells them through physical sensation:

• 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 story of something too overwhelming to fully feel.

“No Story Left Behind” doesn’t just mean the stories we remember.

It includes the ones that have lived inside us—in pre-language form—until now.

This chapter is about bringing the body into 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 experiences that got buried, fragmented, or forgotten.

We’ll begin by reconnecting with our senses: what we saw, heard, touched, tasted, smelled, and physically felt during intense moments. Writing these details 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 this can be learned. And we will.

Why We Veterans Struggle with Sensory Awareness

Living fully in our senses—rather than getting lost in our heads—is our birthright as human beings. It’s how each day is spent in a healthy childhood.

Navigating life moment-by-moment through sensory awareness was also the natural daily state of our ancestors—one we’ve drifted far away from.

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

• What tracks am I reading? 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? Is my own scent being carried downwind?

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

The life of a hunter-gatherer was alive and interconnected with its surroundings—with sensory input as the primary survival tool.

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

That’s why storytelling is a lost skill we Veterans need to reclaim. To survive and thrive, a warrior had to be able to tell the story.

Historically, the best hunters and warriors were also the best storytellers—and had the highest survival rates.

Why? Because no other creature could say: "That tiger shows up every day at dusk—so don’t drink from that watering hole alone in the evening".

The best storytellers could cooperate, pass down knowledge, and share information that lived beyond the present moment—in ways no other living thing was capable of.

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

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

As technology has advanced however, it's reduced the need to be in tune with our senses to survive. Our focus has shifted from tracking today's kill, to making the next appointment. Paying the next bill.

Modern warriors aren’t trained to use sensory awareness as a survival tool. Similarly, in civilian life, we don’t need to scan the land for threats, berry bushes, or game. That sensory-reliant hunter-gatherer part of us has been dulled by the agricultural, industrial, and digital revolutions.

Over time, we've lost our close connection to the body and the world around us. We started living from the neck up.

Our stories now come from screens—not from each other.

Trauma Overloads the System

Trauma adds another layer. Traumatic events overwhelm the nervous system. Our senses are hit with too much, too fast.

Those of us who’ve gone through intense moments in the military know what it’s like to face a threat and be taken over by it. Time freezes. Our brain locks in on survival. There’s no time to think. We don’t always process what our body was going through.

The nervous system has built-in pathways for digesting these moments—things like deep breathing, touch, movement, connection and story. (Remember being a kid, seeing something extreme, and rushing out of breath to go tell someone, and sometimes needing to be held?)

But when those things don't happen, when those outlets aren’t available, the energy stays trapped.

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

Today, that completion process rarely happens. We often 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 story. We often leave out the physical details, the sensations our body still remembers.

Why?

Because for many of us, we were never taught how to describe our experiences in detail, especially when those details involve what we physically felt in our bodies.

Many of us also see ourselves first and foremost as protectors, which means we often want to ‘protect’ others from the gritty, painful truths of our experiences. Or maybe we believe others couldn’t handle it—or that our stories simply don’t want to be heard.

Sometimes, we hold back out of a deep sense of shame, or a fear of rejection by our community, or even a worry about getting in trouble with our command or peers.

Whatever the reason, the full truth of our experiences often remains stuck—held tightly within our bodies, waiting for a safe space to finally be known.

Naming Emotions vs. Feeling Physical Sensations

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

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

Every emotion has a corresponding sensation somewhere in the body. But most of us were never taught how to feel those sensations—how to 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 are important. And they are not the same thing.

Why does this matter?

Because in my experience, to process trauma and live free of its residue, I had to remember not just what happened—but what my body felt while it was happening.

Endlessly thinking and talking about traumatic experiences 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 that were connected with those emotions, it felt like finding a back door to what was stuck. And that’s when that trapped energy started to move.

This is why writing in sensory detail is so helpful. Many of our stories have only been told from the neck up, and they’ve become dried out and stale.

Sensations are the concrete reality living beneath the stagnant mental narrative. When we put words to those big (and little) sensations, we put flesh on the bones of our story. Those “bones” are the facts of what happened. That was our first-person draft that 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 and just recycle it, but to re-feel what was happening in our bodies. To give the pain the attention it never got when things first happened. So it can finally loosen the grip it’s had on our nervous system.

We’ll ask:

• 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?

Bit by bit, we’ll fill in the missing details. Each one helping to reconnect what the body remembers with what the brain understands.

For warriors of the past, survival meant turning what they sensed into stories their people could live by. We’ve inherited that same power—to tell stories that heal, stories that help keep our community whole, and 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.