Root Work: Healing That Starts Below the Surface

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Content note: Childhood trauma, shame, and self-blame. Honest about what it feels like when healing doesn't work. Strong language. May be difficult if you're in an early or fragile place in your own healing.
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Before I Ever Had Words for What Happened to Me

My body already knew how to listen for danger.

It was in the way the air changed before they arrived. The way doors closed too softly, the silence that pressed in like the weather turning. The house had its own vocabulary: a shift in footsteps, a voice that carried too far, the particular kind of hush where everyone pretended nothing was wrong.

Being noticed wasn't neutral. Sometimes a glance slid past me like I didn't exist; other times it landed with crushing weight, lighting up every nerve in my body. I learned to move in the margins: quiet feet, careful breath, scanning every ripple in the room before it reached me.

Before I understood violence or abandonment or emotional harm, my nervous system had already shaped itself around them. The blueprint was written in the atmosphere.

Some wounds live so deep in the body they're not even wounds anymore. They're the architecture. Early violence. Abandonment. Emotional volatility. The kind of harm that teaches you how to survive before you ever learn how to speak.

This isn't trauma you "work through." It's trauma you survived by becoming, and this changes everything.

There's healing work, and then there's root work: the kind you can't journal your way into, the kind meant for the people the usual paths didn't reach. This goes deeper than most of what I've shared elsewhere. It's not softened. Not metaphor. It's the raw truth of what it means to carry trauma that lives in the bone, the kind that rewires the nervous system before memory even begins.

If you're new to my work, most of my writing is grounded in nature, motion, and slow healing. The messy kind. There are gentler entries. Softer ones. Ones with more sunlight.

But I'm sharing this because too many of us have tried the usual paths and felt like failures when they didn't work.

This is for those people.

For the ones the work didn't reach.

For the ones still here.

Why the Work Doesn't Reach

The nervous system doesn't forget. The body doesn't care about your plans or your optimism or your intention. It remembers everything: through flashes, silence, tension held in the jaw, the way your shoulders rise before you notice.

This is the part wellness spaces don't say out loud: some of us don't get to "heal and move on." The journaling, the releasing, the manifesting, and most of the usual modalities... Rarely touches the places shaped before memory.

We try. God, we try.

But most of that work wasn't built for bodies like ours. Bodies that flinch at touch. Bodies that brace at calm. Bodies that learned to disappear to stay safe. So when someone says, "Just visualize the life you want," I want to fucking scream. What if I've never known safety long enough to imagine it? What if my brain can't picture a life it wasn't wired for?

This isn't resistance to healing. Some of us start at the bottom of the well.

If the usual "work" doesn't work for you, it's not because you're doing it wrong. It's because your survival required a different kind of strength. Strength that looks like hyper-vigilance, dissociation, compliance, explosive anger, emotional shutdown, overachieving, under-reacting. Not choices, but adaptations.

Here's what most people misunderstand: trauma doesn't start with a bad memory. It starts with a body forced to adapt to danger at the expense of everything else. A body that had to learn to be invisible, or pleasing, or silent, or obedient. A body that learned the cost of needing anything at all.

So when you shame yourself for freezing, withdrawing, overthinking, spinning out, shutting down, you're punishing a child who learned exactly what they needed to survive.

Your triggers aren't flaws. Your dissociation isn't failure. Your hyper-vigilance isn't a glitch. They're maps of exits you once needed to know.

It's not fair that you have to work this hard just to feel okay doing nothing. That rest feels threatening. That calm feels like the first quiet seconds before chaos. But none of that is brokenness. It's simply what's true.

Wiring built in danger doesn't recognize peace. It recognizes patterns. Which means healing at this level isn't about understanding what happened. It's about teaching the body something new.

What Healing Actually Requires

This isn't about feeling safe. Some of us will never feel safe.

It's about learning to be present anyway.

Not fixing the tension. Not calming the brace. Just noticing: here's the tension. Here's the brace. Here's what my body does. And staying with it.

Your body doesn't speak in thoughts. It speaks in patterns. If the pattern it's always known is tension, volatility, unpredictability, dismissal, or harm, then anything outside that—especially peace—will feel suspicious.

Stillness after decades of chaos won't feel soothing. It will feel like the moment before impact.

Rest might trigger guilt. A boundary might feel like betrayal. A "no" might sound like danger.

Your body isn't sabotaging you. It's protecting you the only way it knows how.

Rewiring doesn't happen through belief. It happens through proof. Tiny, repeated proof:

You can pause and still be okay. You can speak and still be safe. You can rest and nothing falls apart. You can be seen and not be punished.

Safety isn't a moment. It's a language. And you're relearning it.

So when everything feels shaky, start low. Start with contact: feet on the floor, back against a wall, hands in cold water, dirt under nails, something solid enough to remind your body where it is.

These aren't wellness tips. They're repairs. They're what a nervous system built in danger needs in order to relearn the present.

For years, many of us treated our bodies like traitors. Every shutdown, every flare-up, every panic spiral interpreted as failure. But the body was never the enemy. It was the only one who stayed up all night. The only one who endured what we never named. The only one who absorbed what would've shattered us otherwise.

None of the pain is betrayal. It's history.

We were taught to override ourselves. Push through. Be good. Be quiet. Be grateful. Be fine.

Healing asks something different: I hear you. I know why you braced. I won't abandon you now.

This is root work. Not glamorous. Not fast. Not linear. Just the slow accumulation of moments where you show your body that today is different.

But even here, there's something the wellness world won't say out loud.

What We're Actually Building Toward

Wholeness is a myth. A beautiful one. A destructive one.

We don't get to go back. We don't get to become the version of ourselves untouched by trauma, illness, or the survival-mode childhood we lived through. That version never got to exist.

If we spend our entire healing journey chasing them, we miss the person who's actually here.

There is no final form where I shed the past and emerge radiant and new. That idea isn’t healing; it’s pretending. Healing is learning how to carry what happened without letting it control every step.

I used to believe in a finish line, a day I'd wake up free.

Now I know: there is only today. Some days are jagged. Some are quiet. All of them are mine.

Healing doesn't care about schedules. There is no timeline for self-trust. No deadline for grief. No expiration date for learning how to inhabit your own skin.

But the world treats healing like a race: milestones, progress, goals. And when we don't "improve" fast enough, we think we're failing.

We're not failing. We're healing. And healing moves like water through rock. Slow. Steady. Invisible until suddenly it's not.

You're not behind. You're not late. You're still here. That counts.

This is what root work actually is:

Not the pursuit of wholeness, but the practice of presence. Not the race toward "healed," but the patient return to yourself again and again. Not the fantasy of who you might have been, but the reality of who you are and what you survived and how you're still here anyway.

There's no tidy ending. No bow to tie on this.

Just this:

If you made it through, you're doing the work. If something in you recognized itself here, you're not alone. If this cracked you open or called you in or gave you language you didn't have before, good. It means it found the right depth.

This isn't about fixing what happened. It's about walking forward with the truth of it. Still in your body. Still in your story.

Root work is never done. But you're not doing it blind anymore.

For me, the work happens on trails. In wind and dirt and solitude. Where my nervous system remembers it can rest. Where breath becomes regulation instead of survival.

We go slow here. But we go deep.

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Still Rolling Outdoors is a blog of peer reflections on healing and recovery, not to be confused with medical or therapy advice. Your path is uniquely yours. → More on this approach