When the Body Remembers What Language Cannot Say
Sexual Abuse, Bodily Memory, and Professional Responsibility
Sexual abuse of children affects not only the child’s conscious experiences, language, and self-understanding. It may also become inscribed in the body. The body may later react before words appear, before causal connections are clear, and before the person subjected to abuse understands why a situation is experienced as threatening. This makes the body a central, but also demanding, theme in the understanding of long-term consequences after sexual abuse. The body may carry experiences that cannot easily be formulated as a coherent narrative.
To say that the body remembers is not, however, to say that the body functions as a precise archive. Bodily memory must not be understood as a simple storage of the past, in which particular symptoms can be directly translated into particular events. Such an understanding would be both professionally and ethically problematic. Bodily reactions are complex. They may have biological, psychological, social, and historical causes. At the same time, within the field of trauma, it is necessary to acknowledge that experiences are not processed only cognitively. They may also be expressed as pain, restlessness, sleep disturbances, numbness, nausea, tension, dissociation, body shame, sexual difficulties, and persistent states of alarm.
This creates a challenge for professional understanding. Helpers often meet people who do not initially present a clear account of abuse, but rather a complex pattern of bodily and psychological difficulties. The person may present with pain, sleep problems, anxiety, depression, self-contempt, concentration difficulties, or problems with intimacy. If such expressions are understood only as isolated symptoms, the historical and relational context may disappear. At the same time, professionals must avoid drawing conclusions too quickly. Not all bodily symptoms are caused by trauma. Yet sometimes the body may be the first place where the unbearable continues to make itself known.
This is particularly relevant in cases of abuse for which the child had no language at the time it occurred. Children may lack concepts for sexuality, power, coercion, and violation. They may know that something is wrong without being able to explain what is wrong. They may feel fear, nausea, or discomfort without understanding the moral meaning of the situation. When an experience cannot be integrated into language and understanding, it may instead remain as fragments: bodily reactions, sensory impressions, moods, images, smells, or sudden emotional ruptures. Traumatic experiences may therefore later be activated without the person immediately understanding why.
In classical trauma theory, this is described in terms of re-experiencing, avoidance, numbing, and hyperarousal. Re-experiencing may involve intrusive memories, images, dreams, or flashbacks. Avoidance may involve attempts to keep particular thoughts, places, people, or bodily experiences at a distance. Numbing may involve a narrowing of emotional life, distance from one’s own body, or a feeling of not being fully present. Hyperarousal may involve restlessness, irritability, sleep problems, exaggerated startle responses, and persistent vigilance. These reactions are not merely mental. They are bodily ways of being in the world.
The body is therefore not only an object that has been harmed. It is also a subjective field of experience. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2012) shows that the human being does not primarily have a body as an external instrument, but exists in the world through the body. The body is our fundamental way of sensing, acting, orienting ourselves, and encountering others. When the body has been subjected to violation, the person’s entire relation to the world may be altered. Space, touch, gaze, voices, smell, closeness, and distance may acquire new meaning. What appears neutral to others may, for the traumatised person, be charged with danger.
This makes abuse more than an event in the past. It may leave behind an altered bodily orientation in the present. The body may be on guard. It may withdraw. It may freeze. It may react with nausea, pain, or absence. It may seek control, avoidance, or invisibility. Such reactions should not immediately be understood as irrational. They may be remnants of formerly necessary forms of protection. The body is trying to prevent something similar from happening again. The problem is that what once functioned as protection may later become a limitation.
Dissociation is a particularly clear example of this. Under overwhelming strain, dissociation may function as protection against experiences that cannot be endured in the moment. The person may experience distance from the body, from the situation, or from the self. Sensory impressions may be split apart. Connections may disappear. Later, such reactions may return as fragments, time loss, feelings of estrangement, or an experience that the world is not real. This may make life unpredictable and frightening, both for the person concerned and for those around them.
It is crucial to understand the double character of such reactions. They are not only symptoms of harm. They may also be traces of survival. The child who could not flee physically may perhaps have fled mentally. The child who could not stop the abuse may perhaps have become numb. The child who could not understand may perhaps have split the experience apart. This does not mean that dissociation is unproblematic. On the contrary, dissociative reactions may later make everyday life, relationships, learning, and work difficult. But the original function must be understood before the later burden can be treated wisely.
The same applies to bodily pain and psychosomatic reactions. Pain after abuse cannot be reduced to either physical or psychological pain. Such distinctions may be insufficient. Psychological pain may be experienced bodily. Bodily pain may intensify psychological distress. A person may experience the body as foreign, impure, dangerous, or inaccessible. The body may become something one must control, punish, hide, or ignore. In such cases, the body is not only the place where symptoms appear, but also the place where the relationship to oneself has been damaged.
Elaine Scarry (1985) has shown how severe pain can destroy language. Pain may make it difficult to explain, share, and give form to experience. This is significant in encounters with people who have been subjected to abuse. What cannot be said may nevertheless remain active. Silence does not mean the absence of experience. Lack of coherence in a narrative does not mean that nothing has happened. Contradictory reactions do not mean that the person is unreliable. Traumatic experiences may precisely be characterised by the fact that they cannot immediately be organised into a coherent narrative.
Here lies an important professional challenge. Many helping and legal systems prefer clear accounts: What happened? When did it happen? Who did what? How did you react? Why did you not say anything? Such questions may be necessary, particularly in legal contexts. But they may also collide with the form of trauma. The person subjected to abuse may remember fragments, bodily states, or particular details, while lacking coherence. A sober and professional approach must therefore distinguish between the requirements of documentation within specific systems and a clinical understanding of how traumatic experiences may actually appear.
This does not mean that every bodily reaction should be understood as evidence. That would be irresponsible. It does mean, however, that professionals must remain open to the possibility that the body may carry meaning before language does. Trauma-informed practice must therefore contain both caution and seriousness: caution against overinterpretation, and seriousness in the face of bodily expressions of suffering. It must neither dismiss the body as irrelevant nor turn the body into a simple witness to truth. Both may cause harm.
The practical-philosophical point is that the human being cannot be understood apart from bodily experience. Dignity is violated not only when a person’s thoughts, choices, or rights are ignored. It is also violated when the body is treated as though it does not belong to a subject. Sexual abuse entails precisely such a reduction. The child’s body is made available for another person’s purposes. The body is separated from the child’s will, boundaries, and dignity. The long-term consequences may therefore also concern the restoration of the body as one’s own: as my body, not as someone else’s territory.
This is a slow process. It cannot be forced through demands to tell more, feel more, or be finished. For some, the path will involve psychotherapy. For others, bodily and sensory approaches may be important: regulation, safety, movement, breathing, rest, stabilisation, and work with boundaries. The point is not that the body should replace language, but that language and body must be brought into a more bearable relationship with each other. Experience must be able to approach expression without the person being overwhelmed again.
Professional work with bodily long-term consequences therefore requires respect for pace. The person subjected to abuse must not be pushed to move faster than the body can tolerate. What may look from the outside like resistance may, from within, be self-protection. What may look like lack of motivation may be fear of losing control. What may look like silence may be the absence of a language that is not yet possible. Good help does not consist in forcing the narrative forward, but in creating conditions in which the narrative may gradually become possible if it needs to be told.
This places demands on the helper’s attitude. The professional must be able to meet bodily expressions without sensationalism, suspicion, or simplification. The question should not only be: What symptom is this? It should also be: What function might this reaction once have had? What is the body trying to protect? What becomes unbearable? What is needed for the person to experience safety here and now? Such questions move attention from pathologisation to understanding, without removing the need for professional precision.
At the same time, professionals must be aware that the body may also become a place of restoration. When a person gradually comes to experience safety in their own body, respect for their own boundaries, regulation of arousal, and the possibility of being close to others without losing themselves, something more than symptom reduction occurs. There is a restoration of subjectivity. The body becomes not only a place where violation is remembered, but also a place where new experience can arise.
This points toward a more comprehensive understanding of help after sexual abuse. It is not sufficient to ask what the person remembers cognitively. Nor is it sufficient to ask which symptoms can be registered. It is also necessary to ask how the person lives in their body, how the body reacts in encounters with the world, and how safety can become possible at a bodily level. In this way, the body is not an addition to trauma understanding, but a necessary part of it.
When the body remembers what language cannot say, the professional task is to listen on several levels. This does not imply a mystification of the body, but an acknowledgement that human experience is always bodily grounded. Sexual abuse can damage this grounding. Help, treatment, and care must therefore contribute to making the body once again a place where the person can dwell, not merely a place where the past continues to make itself known. This is at once a clinical, ethical, and practical-philosophical task.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.). American Psychiatric Association Publishing.
Fuchs, T. (2012). The phenomenology of body memory. In S. C. Koch, T. Fuchs, M. Summa, & C. Müller (Eds.), Body memory, metaphor and movement (pp. 9–22). John Benjamins.
Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—from domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton.
Pettersen, K. T. Konsekvenser av seksuelle overgrep [Consequences of sexual abuse] [PowerPoint lectures between 2002 - 2024].
Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking of the world. Oxford University Press.
van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
World Health Organization. (2022). ICD-11: International classification of diseases (11th rev.). https://icd.who.int/
This essay was developed from my own professional practice as a social worker and my many lectures on sexual abuse over a periode of more than 40 years (1981-2024). The text was written in a conversation with OpenAU/ChatGPT.
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