What Childhood Trauma Does to Your Ability to Feel

Aug 4, 2019
6 min read

Updated: 17 hours ago

There's a particular kind of pain that doesn't announce itself loudly.

It doesn't arrive as rage or collapse. It arrives as distance. As a persistent sense of being slightly removed from your own life. Present in the room — but not quite in the body. Able to think about feelings with extraordinary clarity. Unable to actually feel them.

This is one of the most common presentations I see in people who've experienced profound childhood trauma, neglect, and abuse.

The heart doesn't break. It locks.

Why the Heart Closes

When a child is hurt — repeatedly, by the people who are supposed to keep them safe — the nervous system makes a decision. Not consciously. Not with language. In the body, beneath the level of thought.

Feeling is dangerous. Opening leads to pain. The safest thing to do is build a wall.

And so it does.

The energetic architecture of the heart begins to close.

The emotional body learns to suppress, to flatten, to protect.

What was once a wide open field of feeling becomes — over years, over decades — something dense and defended.

This isn't weakness. It was survival.

But the protection that kept you safe as a child becomes the prison that keeps you from living as an adult.

The love you want feels out of reach.

The connections you crave stay surface level. The aliveness you sense is possible — that pulse of something more — keeps pressing against a wall you can't find the door through.

Because the heart locked itself.

And forgot it had the key.

Fred's Twenty Padlocks

Fred was training to be a therapist. He'd done many years of personal development. He understood his patterns with extraordinary precision — could articulate his childhood wounds and was developing more capacity to feel emotions.

But whenever he dropped into his body, he'd get stuck in the same place. His heart.

We were working together in a long-term healing programme. The therapeutic relationship was established — there was trust, safety, enough ground between us to go somewhere real.

"It feels like there's a cage around my heart," he said one session. "Twenty giant padlocks. And I just can't get in."

"Looks like we might need a trip to Homebase," I said. For the Americans reading this, that's a DIY store here in the UK.

He laughed. His eyes widened. And then something shifted — because suddenly he could see his own heart field.

Twenty padlocks. Heavy. Bolted shut around the very centre of him.

This is the power of working somatically and energetically — in the vibrational landscape of the body rather than just the narrative of the mind.

The image that emerged wasn't metaphor. Nor was it his imagination.

It was an important field imprint.

The body was showing us, precisely, what protection had been built and where.

"What do you want to do?" I asked. I never assume, after all, the client's protective mechanisms are there for a reason, intelligent and in many cases, has saved their life and psyche from total destruction.

"I want to take them off." He said. Then he paused. "I think I'll need some power tools."

So that's what he did.

He began working in the field — methodically sawing through each lock, picking them, one by one. Determined. Exerting every bit of will he had. It was taking alot of his energy.

This matters. The effort was part of it. The body needed to experience the intention to open before it could discover something more elegant was available.

Then, about halfway through, he stopped.

"Actually, I can dissolve them," he said quietly.

"Through my own awareness. Through intention. The power is already in my heart."

He didn't need the tools. He never had.

What Was Actually Happening in The Session

What Fred discovered in that moment is something I've witnessed again and again in this work. The locks aren't external. They were never external. They are imprints — vibrational structures laid down by the nervous system in response to overwhelming experience. Dense, contracted energy that has hardened over time into something that feels fixed.

But they're not.

They're not permanent. They're held — and what is held can be released.

This is what healing alchemy makes possible.

Not the slow, cognitive unpicking of why you are the way you are — but the direct meeting and transmutation of what has been locked in the body's field.

Fred's mind had been working on his story for years.

Understanding it, contextualising it, making meaning of it. And that had value. But the locks remained — because the locks were never in his story. They were in his field. In the energetic architecture beneath the narrative.

The humour that day had also mattered. It created just enough lightness — just enough safety — for the real work to happen without the system going into overwhelm. Playful on the surface. Serious underneath. That's often how the deepest transmutation moves. Not through intensity and forcing — through spaciousness and willingness.

Why Understanding Your Trauma Isn't Enough

You can understand your wounding completely. You can map it, name it, narrate it with clinical precision. You can know, intellectually, that your parents couldn't love you the way you needed, that what happened was not your fault, that you deserved better.

And the body can remain entirely unchanged.

Because trauma doesn't live in the story.

It lives in the soma — in the tissues, the nervous system, the energetic field. In the places language doesn't reach.

Talk therapy works at the level of meaning. I work at the fundamental level of frequency as consciousness. And these are not the same thing.

What Fred had done with years of therapy was build a profound, accurate, articulate map of his inner world. What we did together was walk into the territory the map was describing — and actually change it.

Not with the story. With the body. Not with understanding. With field work. Not with insight. With trauma transmutation.

The padlocks didn't dissolve because Fred finally understood why they were there. They dissolved because, for the first time, he met them directly — in his field, in his body, with his own conscious intention — and discovered that the power to open his heart had always been his.

What Happened Next

Over the weeks that followed, Fred began to understand what the locks had actually been for. He'd built them himself. Out of fear of rejection. Out of a history that had taught him, over and over, that opening meant getting hurt. That vulnerability was a risk with no return. The locks weren't a prison. They were a protection that had long outlived its purpose.

As that understanding moved from his mind into his body — as it landed not just as knowledge but as felt sense — the padlocks began to dissolve. One by one. Not through effort. Through nervous system rewiring. Through the slow, courageous work of learning, in the body, that his heart was safe to open.

His relationships began to change. The connections he'd always craved but kept at arm's length became available to him. His capacity to feel — his emotions, his aliveness, his passion for the work he was training to do — began to come online.

He didn't become a different person. He became more fully himself. He remembered the parts of himself that had been locked away for decades.

That's what this work makes possible. Not just insight. Not just relief. The actual opening.

The Heart Always Wants to Open

This is what I've learned after years of working in people's fields.

The heart doesn't want to stay locked. The closing was never the truth of the person — it was the adaptation. The brilliant, necessary, life-preserving adaptation of a system under threat.

But when safety is established. When the nervous system has enough ground. When someone is met — not with analysis, but with presence, with skill, with the willingness to enter the field and do real work there —

The heart opens.

Every time.

Not because it was forced. Because it was finally, fully safe to.

If you recognise yourself in Fred's story — if you've spent years understanding your wounding but still feel locked out of your own heart — this is exactly what I work with in my 1-1 healing programme.

You don't need more insight. You need someone to go into the field with you.

[Enquire about working with me 1-1 here]