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Video · Watch · 14 min

Trauma in the body: an introduction

How old experiences live in posture, breath and reactions.

CH
Chris Hemmings
3 May 2026

How old experiences live in posture, breath and reactions.

This short film sits with trauma the way men actually experience it — not as a diagnosis, but as something that shows up in the everyday. Give it a few minutes of your attention; you may recognise more than you expect.

Why trauma is worth taking seriously

It's easy to treat trauma as background noise — the cost of being busy, of getting older, of just being a bloke. But the things we ignore rarely stay quiet. They leak into sleep, into patience, into the people we care about. Naming what's going on is the first move, and it's a bigger one than it looks.

You don't have to have the words for it yet. You just have to be willing to start.

A few things that actually hold

Steady beats dramatic. You don't need a perfect system — you need a couple of reliable anchors your week can lean on:

  • Pick one small thing you can repeat, and do it whether or not you feel like it.
  • Notice the moment it starts — the tightening, the shortening fuse, the pull to check out — and name it.
  • Tell one person the honest version. Not everyone. One.

When to talk to someone

If trauma has been hanging around for weeks rather than days, that's worth taking seriously — and worth saying out loud to someone who gets it. Therapy isn't a last resort; it's somewhere to think clearly with another person in the room. When you're ready, the therapists here work with exactly this.

CH
Written by
Chris Hemmings
Therapist & founder of Men's Therapy Hub
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