There is a kind of knowing that exists before memory.
It shows up as a tightened jaw when someone raises their voice. A shallow breath in moments that should feel calm. A body that stays alert even when nothing appears wrong. Many people live this way without knowing why, sensing danger without a story to justify it.
This knowing does not come from imagination. It comes from a nervous system that learned early what the world required in order to survive.
The First Language Is the Body
Before children understand words, they understand tone. Before they form beliefs, their bodies register patterns.
A nervous system is constantly asking:
Is it safe to relax?
Is it dangerous to be seen?
Do my needs matter here?
The answers are written into the body through heart rate, muscle tension, breath, digestion, and posture. This is not conscious learning. It is biological adaptation.
When the environment is safe enough, the nervous system learns flexibility — how to engage and how to rest. When the environment is emotionally threatening, especially in subtle or inconsistent ways, the nervous system learns vigilance.
When Home Is Not Safe
In many families, harm does not look dramatic. There may be structure, routines, and outward normalcy. But emotionally, the ground is unstable.
Love is conditional.
Truth is negotiable.
Emotions are inconvenient.
In narcissistic family systems, one child often becomes the scapegoat, the one who absorbs what the family cannot face.
This child is blamed for tension they did not create. Their perceptions are questioned. Their emotions are minimized or mocked. Over time, the message becomes clear: your role is to carry what others refuse to hold.
For a developing nervous system, this creates a constant state of internal conflict. The same figures who provide food, shelter, and attachment are also the source of threat. There is no safe resolution, only adaptation.
The Shape of Survival
The body begins to organize itself around protection.
Some children become hyper-aware, tracking shifts in mood, anticipating reactions, staying one step ahead of emotional storms.
Some learn to disappear, become quiet, compliant, unseen.
Some learn to appease, confusing safety with pleasing, connection with self-erasure.
These responses are often mislabeled later in life as personality traits: anxiety, people-pleasing, avoidance, emotional numbness.
But they are not traits. They are nervous system strategies.
Trauma Without a Story
Early trauma is often wordless. There is no clear event to point to, no single memory that explains everything. So the body becomes the archive.
It remembers through:
The body keeps the score not because it is broken, but because it was never given the conditions to release what it carried.
Why This Was Missed for So Long
For much of modern medicine, the mind and body were treated as separate systems. Emotional abuse, especially when it left no visible marks, was minimized or dismissed.
Medical training rarely addressed:
As a result, many survivors were diagnosed without context. Symptoms were treated in isolation. The question “what happened to your nervous system?” was rarely asked.
Only recently have neuroscience, trauma research, and epigenetics begun to validate what survivors have long felt: the body adapts to what it endures.
Healing as Relearning Safety
Healing from early trauma is not about fixing something that is wrong. It is about teaching the nervous system that the conditions have changed.
That it is possible to rest.
That boundaries do not equal abandonment.
That the present is not the past.
This learning happens slowly and often without words, through regulation, through consistency, through experiences that contradict old expectations.
The Quiet Truth
A nervous system shaped by early emotional harm is not defective. It is precise. It learned exactly what it needed to learn in order to survive.
Understanding this changes the story.
The question shifts from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What did my body learn when it had no other choice?”
And in that shift, something begins to soften.
What happened was not a failure of character.
It was a response to an environment that demanded survival over safety.
The body has been telling the truth all along.
-Clio Harlow
Peace in Progress
References & Further Reading
The ideas in this essay are grounded in trauma-informed neuroscience, attachment theory, and clinical observation. Rather than an exhaustive academic list, the following works capture the core threads informing this perspective:
Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
The Body Keeps the Score
On how trauma is stored in the body and nervous system, particularly when trauma occurs early and without language.
Gabor Maté, M.D.
The Myth of Normal
On the impact of chronic stress, developmental trauma, and emotionally unsafe environments on both mental and physical health — and why much of this has been normalized in modern culture.
Stephen Porges, Ph.D.
The Polyvagal Theory
On how the autonomic nervous system detects safety and threat, shaping survival responses long before conscious thought.
Judith Herman, M.D.
Trauma and Recovery
On complex and relational trauma, especially when harm occurs within caregiving relationships.
Together, these works support a simple but often overlooked truth: when a child adapts to survive an unsafe emotional environment, the nervous system remembers — even when the mind does not.