When the Glass Breaks: Somatic Therapy and the Stories We Tell Ourselves
When you drop a glass and it shatters, you can try to put it back together. You can find most of the pieces. You can arrange them carefully, hold them in place. But you will never have the same glass. There will always be missing pieces — tiny fragments you couldn't find, hairline cracks where the breaks were, the shape subtly wrong. And even if you reconstruct something that looks like the original, you know it isn't. It can't hold water the way it used to.
This is what trauma does to the story we were living.
Before something breaks us open — a loss, a violation, a relationship that rewired our sense of reality, a childhood that asked too much — we have a story about who we are and how the world works. It may not have been a perfect story, but it was ours. It held. After trauma, that story is on the floor in pieces. And the question that brings most people to therapy, underneath all the other questions, is this: how do I go on from here?
The answer is not to put the old glass back together. That glass is gone. The answer is to build something new — a story that is actually true.
So much of what I do as a therapist is about story. Not invented story, not positive thinking, not talking yourself into feeling better than you do. But the story that is real — the one that accounts for what actually happened, what it actually cost, who you actually are now on the other side of it.
The problem, in my experience, is almost always this: the story we are telling ourselves after trauma is a false one. Not deliberately false. Not consciously chosen. But false in the ways that matter — rooted in fear rather than truth, organised around shame rather than reality, built from the conclusions a frightened person drew in the middle of something unbearable. I am too much. I am not enough. I am the reason this happened. I will never be safe. People cannot be trusted. I don't deserve more than this.
These stories feel true. They feel like facts. They have often been reinforced for years. And they are organising your entire life from the inside — your relationships, your choices, your sense of what is possible — without your consent or awareness.
Changing that story is the deep work of trauma healing. Not erasing what happened — that is not possible and not the goal. But finding the story that is actually true: I survived something real. It changed me. I am not the same person I was, and that is not a failure. I get to decide what I carry forward and what I lay down.
That is narrative therapy, in its essence. And I will write a full post on it another time, because it deserves that space.
But here is what I want to say today: changing the story in your mind is only half of the work.
Because the body keeps its own record.
While the mind is building a new narrative, the body is still living in the old one. The nervous system does not update automatically when you arrive at a new understanding. You can know, intellectually, that you are safe — and still find yourself bracing for impact in ordinary moments. You can understand, clearly, that the relationship is over — and still feel the familiar freeze when someone raises their voice. You can have done years of talk therapy, reached genuine insight, built a life that looks nothing like what hurt you — and still find the old contractions living in your shoulders, your chest, your breath.
This is not a failure of insight. This is how trauma works in the body. It is a physiological reality, not a psychological weakness.
Somatic therapy is the work of listening to what the body is communicating — and helping it complete what it couldn't complete at the time. The breath that got cut off. The movement that got stopped. The feeling that had nowhere to go and so went inward, into the tissues, into the nervous system's threat response, into the chronic patterns that show up as anxiety, numbness, hypervigilance, disconnection.
When we work somatically, we slow down enough to notice what is actually happening in the body — not what we think should be happening, not what we wish were happening, but what is. The subtle tightening. The held breath. The place where sensation goes blank. The impulse that arises and then gets suppressed before it fully forms. These are not symptoms to be managed. They are information. They are the body's attempt to communicate what the story hasn't yet been able to hold.
The two — narrative and somatic — are not separate approaches. They are two aspects of the same work. The story needs the body to be true. The body needs the story to make sense of what it's been carrying. Together, they create the conditions for something that is genuinely different from management or coping: actual healing. The kind that changes how you move through the world, not just how you think about it.
You cannot put the old glass back together. But you can build something new — something that holds, something true, something that is actually yours.
That is the work. And it is entirely possible.
If you're ready to begin, I'd be glad to walk alongside you.
Megan Shea is a trauma-informed psychotherapist and holistic counsellor integrating somatic therapy, narrative approaches, nervous system awareness, and depth psychology. She works with adults online across Australia and worldwide.
