Certain rooms still make my body younger than I am

Dear Delyara, There are situations where I can feel my body becoming younger than my actual age. Not literally, of course. But in the way I react — more careful, more alert, less free, more tuned to threat than to possibility. It happens in certain tones, certain atmospheres, certain arrangements of emotion in a room. That’s what trauma means for me sometimes. Not a memory replaying. A body changing its behavior before the mind has given permission. It’s difficult to explain because from the outside it can look like nothing at all.