The Body Remembers What the Mind Forgets

At twenty-four, I was not doing well.

On the outside, my life looked like it was moving forward. On the inside, I felt disconnected from myself. My friendships were shifting, and I found myself surrounded by voices that told me who I was instead of allowing me the space to discover it on my own. I started to question everything, especially the way my mind worked.

That curiosity led me to seek professional evaluation. What I thought would be simple turned into weeks of testing with my therapist. Long sessions, hours at a time, answering questions about how I think, feel, and respond to the world. At the same time, my life was unraveling in other ways. I was in a relationship that was not healthy, graduating from college, and I was preparing to leave my home. Everything felt unstable.

When the results came back, I did not fully receive them. I skimmed, acknowledged, and kept moving. Because life kept moving-FAST. We never take into account the amount of experiences we witness on top of processing things we've already felt in our bodies for a long time. That became a pattern. I spent much of my twenties cycling through growth, burnout, confusion, and return. Learning something about myself, then losing it, then finding it again. It was just as intense as the environment I made. Have you ever outgrown a version of yourself and felt embarrassed for how you showed up? Yeah, all of that. I was not showing up as my best in community, friendship, and with myself.

Five years later, during the stillness of 2020, I came across that same packet. It had been sitting in a box I carried from place to place, untouched. I had forgotten about it completely. When I opened the envelope, I felt something shift. I read it slowly this time. Line by line. I cried, not from judgment, but from recognition. Pages of labels that I never once thought would relate to my life so clearly.

There it was. ADHD, which I already sensed and was the reason for beginning this journey. But there was something else written throughout those pages that I had not allowed myself to fully see before. CPTSD. I remembered it being mentioned once, but I never let it land. At the time, I believed naming it would somehow take away from others who had experienced visible and intense trauma. I thought my experience did not qualify. So I dismissed it and moved on.

CPTSD stands for complex post-traumatic stress disorder. It develops from repeated or long-term experiences of stress, harm, or instability, especially when there is little or no sense of safety or control. Unlike Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is often linked to a single event or moment, CPTSD is shaped over time. It can come from environments where the body learns to stay alert for long periods, where emotional needs are not consistently met, or where survival becomes a pattern instead of a temporary state.

It does not always look the way people expect trauma to look. It can show up as overthinking, emotional shutdown, people pleasing, difficulty trusting yourself, or feeling like your body is always on edge, even when nothing is happening. It can look like being highly intuitive but also deeply overwhelmed. It can look like knowing something is off, but not feeling grounded enough to respond to it.

For many Black women and Black people, this experience is layered. It is not only personal. It is also cultural, generational, and systemic. There are inherited survival patterns that do not begin with us. There are environments where strength is expected, but emotional processing is not always supported. There are moments where you learn to keep going instead of slowing down, to hold everything instead of being held.

So CPTSD is not just about what happened. It is about what the body had to do to keep going.

And for a long time, I did not realize how much my body had been carrying.

By the end of reading my packet, I felt, "Who could ever love someone who has this much going on?" I felt unlovable.

But that moment in 2020 changed something. I began to learn. Not just the definition, but the lived experience of it. How it shows up in the body. How it shapes reactions, relationships, and the nervous system.

Years later, after another major ending, I returned to therapy. This time, I worked with a black woman who created a space where I could actually understand myself. I shared my old results with her. She reviewed them carefully and helped me separate what truly resonated from what did not-this was SO helpful. Not everything written about me felt accurate, and she affirmed that I did not have to carry labels that did not fit in the present moment. She could tell and witness the change in me. But my mind still remembered how horribly I showed up in spaces or wasn't there for myself in setting boundaries. So it was not easy to process on some days, but I showed up anyway.

But one thing remained clear in my sessions.

CPTSD.

It took time to fully accept it. Not as a label, but as a framework that helped me understand my experiences. Session by session, we unpacked my past. Patterns in relationships. Early emotional wounds. Moments I had minimized or pushed aside. She helped me see how my body had been responding long before I had the language to explain it. The funny thing about growing up in therapy, life is still happening. I've been in therapy on and off since I was 16 years old. So though I'm in my sessions sorting out family dynamics, I was going through toxic relationships that I didn't get to process as much. Once I came back to therapy in my 30's, I was able to give space to the things I needed to process in my 20's that still lived in my nervous system.

That was the turning point.

I realized I had spent much of my life disconnected from my own body. Before I had the chance to feel safe in it, I experienced disruption. My nervous system learned to stay alert, to anticipate, to protect. Some of that was mine, and some of it was inherited. And understanding that changed everything.

As I began to regulate, something else opened. My intuition became clearer. My dreams felt stronger. It was not that these things were new; it was that I could finally access them without so much interference.

But healing required more than awareness. It required change.

Once I became aware, something else happened that I did not expect. I started to meet myself in others.

Not in a surface way, but in a way that felt confronting and extremely uncomfortable. I could see my patterns reflected in the people I was connected to, in different ways. The way I loved, the way I avoided, the way I stayed too long, the way I tried to make things work that I already knew were not right. It became harder to ignore. Because the truth is, my mental health shaped how I showed up more than I realized.

I was so intense! I was reactive. I had an attitude at times that came from being overwhelmed, not understood, and not grounded in my body. I was choosing partners that I knew were not safe for me and convincing myself that I could love them into being better. I neglected myself in ways that were quiet and easy to hide. Ya'll, I was not practicing what I believed in. And the wild part is, most people did not really know me. They knew versions of me. They knew how I showed up for them. They knew what I gave. But they did not know what it took for me to be that person. They did not know how much I was holding, how much I was navigating internally, how much I was trying to make sense of at once.

Especially as someone who is intuitive.

There is a conversation missing when it comes to people who are both spiritually open and navigating things like ADHD & CPTSD. Social media shows the clarity, the gifts, the confidence. It does not always show the confusion. The moments when you cannot tell if something is your intuition or your fear. If what you are feeling belongs to you or to someone else. If your body is signaling truth or reacting to past experiences. Leaving me to constantly wonder, whose wound was it anyway?

Learning that difference has been one of the hardest parts of my journey. There were times I did not trust myself at all. Times I over-trusted others. Times I ignored what I felt because I did not know how to hold or name it. And I know I am not the only one. That is why telling stories like this matters. Not to label. Not to stay in the past. Not to make excuses. But to create language for experiences that people are already having. To remind someone that confusion does not mean you are broken. It might mean you are learning how to listen to yourself for the first time.

There is something powerful about seeing yourself in someone else’s honesty. Because it gives you permission to look at your own life without shame.

It gives you space to ask better questions.

What am I actually feeling? What is mine and what is not? Where did I learn this pattern? What would it look like to choose differently?

For those of us who are sensitive, intuitive, and also carrying complex experiences in our nervous system, the work is not just about healing. It is about learning how to LIVE in our bodies in a way that feels safe enough to trust what we receive.

Sometimes I wish there were more spaces for that. Spaces where people like us could sit together and sort through what we feel without judgment. Spaces where we could rebuild trust with ourselves and learn how to regulate before we try to interpret everything. Because when your nervous system is supported, your gifts become grounded.

And while this is a lifelong process, I do believe the blocks we carry are not permanent. Some of them are physical. Some of them are mental. And some of them can begin to shift the moment we become aware of them.

That awareness changed my life.