“I know it’s irrational. So why can’t I stop feeling this way?”
I hear so many of my clients say this in exasperation. They’ve tried to change their thoughts and their beliefs, they’ve tried all the strategies, they’ve read lots of books, they’ve tried to stay grounded, they may have even tried therapy for years.
But the anxiety, panic, shame, depression, still shows up, again and again.
The reason that none of it has worked is that you can’t think your way out of trauma. It’s not your fault.
The limits of cognitive approaches
Cognitive therapies like CBT teach you to identify unhelpful thoughts, challenge distortions, and replace them with more balanced thinking. There are many situations where these approaches can be helpful, like everyday stress or learned patterns of thinking that developed later in life. But when it comes to trauma, especially trauma that developed in early childhood, cognitive approaches don’t penetrate to the depths needed.
Because trauma gets stuck in the right brain and the body—while thoughts, beliefs, and reasoning are tasks of the left brain. Your left brain—your logic—knows you’re safe now, that the trauma is over, that you don’t need to panic, feel anxious, ashamed, or depressed. But your right brain and your body, where the trauma lives, don’t know that. They have no concept of time. As far as your right brain and body are concerned, the trauma is still happening. You’re still in danger.
Why trauma lives in the right brain and the body
Trauma isn’t stored as memories or facts, it’s stored as things like:
- Tightness in your chest
- A racing heart
- Shallow breath
- Emotional shutdown
- Waves of panic
- Disconnection or dissociation
- Overwhelming shame
Even when you know you’re safe, your body might still respond as if you’re in danger. It can feel irrational—but to your body and right brain, it makes perfect sense. That’s how trauma works: it holds onto the past as if it’s still happening, because in some ways, your nervous system hasn’t caught up to the present. It’s still trying to protect you.
Trauma isn’t logical and it doesn’t involve thinking—It’s sensory, emotional, and relational
Trauma memories are not stored as events, but as sensory impressions, emotions, body states and patterns of relating. They live in the right hemisphere of the brain—which processes emotion, image, and sensation—and in the nervous system, which is always scanning for danger.
That’s why subtle reminders of the original trauma -whether you consciously remember it or not- can trigger intense reactions, like panic, overwhelm, shut down or sudden mood spirals, even though nothing bad is happening.
Your right brain is primed to protect you. It. It senses something familiar and signals: “Here we go again. It’s happening. Get ready.
Why cognitive approaches and strategies aren’t enough
Changing your thinking, grounding and breathing strategies can be incredibly helpful in the moment. They can help calm your system and get through. But they don’t heal the wound. They help manage the symptoms but they don’t penetrate to the stuck body based survival responses underneath.
What’s needed is trauma therapy that helps bring the right brain’s sensations, images, and emotions—along with your body’s responses—into connection with the left brain, so they can be made sense of, put into words, and gently integrated. This is what allows trauma to move from something you relive, to something you remember without re-experiencing.
Trauma therapy allows your brain to realise this happened to me in the past, it’s over, I’m safe now.
So if you’ve used all the strategies and changed your thinking and you still feel stuck, you’re not failing—you’re just trying to heal something that lives deeper than thoughts. And that healing begins with safety, not strategy.