The Body Remembers What the Family Forgets

"But nothing really happened to me."

If I had to pick the single sentence I hear most often from adults who come to me with lifelong anxiety, a harsh inner voice, and relationships that never feel safe — it is that one. Usually said apologetically. Usually followed by comparison: others had it much worse. My parents fed us, educated us. I have no right to feel like this.

This post is for the people who say that sentence.

Trauma is not always an event

Most of us picture trauma as a single terrible day — an accident, an assault, a disaster. That picture fits classic PTSD, and it is real. But the ICD-11, the diagnostic system we use in India, now recognises a second condition alongside it: complex PTSD. Not "worse PTSD" — a different shape of it. It tends to follow experiences that were prolonged or repeated, and difficult to escape — and childhood is, by definition, difficult to escape.

Complex PTSD adds three signatures to the usual ones, and clinicians call them disturbances in self-organisation. In plain language:

• Emotions that overwhelm or vanish. Feelings arrive at flood strength — or the opposite: a flat, grey numbness where feelings should be.
• A settled belief of being worthless. Not low mood, but an identity: I am defective. I am too much. I am not enough.
• Closeness that never feels safe. Wanting connection and bracing against it at the same time; leaving before you can be left.

Notice what is missing from that list: a dramatic event. Research on complex trauma has arrived at an uncomfortable finding — in recent studies, emotional neglect, the sustained absence of comfort, is among the strongest predictors of these symptoms. Not what was done to a child, but what was reliably never there. This is why, at intake, I have learned to stop asking Indian clients "were you abused?" — the answer, calibrated against the whole neighbourhood, is almost always no. I ask instead: when you were upset as a child, who could you go to? What happened in your house when someone cried? Those questions open different doors.

Ghar ki baat ghar mein

Every family has a vault, and in India the vault has a name: ghar ki baat ghar mein rehni chahiye — what happens in the house stays in the house.

I am not interested in vilifying Indian families; the same house that hurt often also fed, sacrificed, and loved in the ways it knew. But we should be honest about how normal harshness has been. In the last National Family Health Survey, roughly 45% of Indian adults — women slightly more than men — agreed that a husband is justified in beating his wife in at least one circumstance; the scenario endorsed most often was "disrespect for in-laws." Most Indian adults of my generation grew up seeing physical punishment treated as parenting. When harshness is that ordinary, a child learns not that it is wrong, but that it is deserved — and carries that lesson into adulthood as self-concept.

This is also why so many of my clients doubt their own histories. Psychology has a name for the pattern — betrayal trauma: when the person hurting you is the person you depend on for survival, not fully knowing is protective. A child cannot afford to see clearly. The not-knowing preserves the attachment — and decades later it resurfaces in sessions as "maybe I'm exaggerating, maybe it wasn't like that." If that is you: the doubt is not evidence that nothing happened. It is often the signature of where it happened — inside a relationship you needed.

A caveat I owe you as a psychologist: the body does not hand us reliable factual recall. Distress in the present is not proof of any specific forgotten event, and good therapy never goes hunting for memories. We work with what is remembered and with what is happening now.

What "the body keeps the score" really means

The famous phrase gets misread in both directions. It does not mean memories are physically stored in muscles waiting to be massaged out — that is metaphor, not mechanism. What it defensibly means is that prolonged threat teaches the nervous system to stay braced: the startle that never fully settles, the sleep that stays shallow, the stomach that clenches at a raised voice decades later, the exhaustion of being permanently on duty. The body is not remembering facts. It is continuing a posture.

(That is also why physical symptoms always deserve a proper medical workup first. "It must be trauma" is a conclusion for the end of an evaluation, never the beginning.)

What healing asks — and what it doesn't

If you carry any of this, three things are worth knowing. Each contradicts something the internet may have told you.

You are not too broken for treatment. The trauma-focused therapies with the strongest evidence work for people with long, repeated histories — a 2024 analysis pooling over a hundred trials found they help multiple-event trauma essentially as well as single-event trauma. "Too complex to treat" is not an evidence-based sentence.

Stabilisation is a runway, not a residence. Good complex-trauma work often begins with steadying skills — regulating emotion, grounding, safety. That sequencing exists mainly to make the deeper work tolerable. If therapy has been months of breathing exercises with no plan beyond them, it is fair — and healthy — to ask your therapist where the road leads.

Recovery does not require confrontation. This matters especially in India, where most adults will keep living with, caring for, and loving the very parents therapy is discussing. The goal of this work — as Judith Herman, who first described complex trauma, put it — ends in reconnection: a person who can regulate their emotions, hold a self-concept that is not defeated, and choose the terms of their relationships. All of that is achievable without a single dramatic showdown. Understanding your parents' own unhealed histories and setting quiet, liveable boundaries is not weakness; it may be the most grown-up, self-possessed act in the family's history.

Not every painful childhood is trauma — inflation helps no one, and most people who grew up with harshness are living full lives. The better question than "was it bad enough?" is "is it still organising me?" If your emotions, your self-worth, and your closeness to people still move to rules written in a house you left years ago — that is worth an assessment, whatever anyone else's childhood looked like.

The family may have forgotten. The body hasn't. But bodies can learn a new posture — I watch it happen, slowly and without drama, all the time.

Client voices in this piece are composites, with details changed.