When Feeling Disconnected Is More Than a Metaphor

When Your Gut Goes Silent: How Trauma Blocks the Brain–Body Connection

Many trauma survivors describe feeling “disconnected from my body” or “cut off from myself.” Often, people assume this is just a metaphor for feeling numb or distant. But neuroscience shows us it is far more literal. Trauma disrupts the wiring that links the survival brain, where sensations and instincts arise, with the reflective brain, where we interpret and understand those signals.

This means the loss of connection you feel is not just emotional, but neurological.

Why Every Interaction Feels Like Work

Imagine walking into a room and being unable to sense, on a gut level, whether it’s safe or not. Instead, your brain is forced into overdrive. You scan the people around you: What do her eyes mean? What does his body posture say? You try to calculate whether you are safe, not because you are paranoid, but because you’re no longer able to access an instinctive sense of safety and danger.

And it does not stop with safety. The same disconnect can touch nearly every aspect of daily life. Without access to instinctive cues, you may find yourself wondering: Am I hungry or should I eat because the clock says so? Am I tired enough to sleep or should I push through a little longer? What do I actually want right now?

When instinct goes quiet, the mind steps in to fill the gap. Thinking replaces sensing. Life becomes a constant puzzle of figuring out rather than knowing. Instead of moving fluidly through the world, you are left compensating with analysis, calculation, and second-guessing.

This process is exhausting. Rather than an inner compass quietly guiding your choices, your brain becomes a full-time detective, working overtime just to navigate ordinary life. Over time, that relentless effort is one of the reasons so many trauma survivors feel depleted, anxious, and weary.

The real tragedy is that, in trauma, the brain that used to know safety implicitly now demands it be reasoned through.

When instincts go quiet, thinking takes over. Trauma turns life into a puzzle of figuring out rather than knowing. This is part of why so many survivors feel exhausted.

Why This Happens: The Disconnection Between Survival Brain and Reflective Brain

To understand why trauma forces the brain to “think safety through,” we need to look at the two systems that usually work in tandem.

• • • The Survival Brain (brainstem, midbrain, cerebellum, vestibular systems) is where raw sensations, instincts, and arousal are first registered. It is the part of us that knows, before words, whether we are hungry, tired, safe, or connected.
    • The Reflective Brain (cortex) is where those signals are interpreted. It creates meaning, reasons, and integrates the information into our conscious sense of self.

When these systems are connected, things flows easily and naturally. Hunger rises and you know it is time to eat. Your body feels heavy and you know it is time to rest. A conversation feels warm and you sense you are safe. The survival brain provides the felt signal, and the reflective brain organizes it into awareness and action.

But trauma disrupts this communication. This means that:

• • • The survival brain keeps generating signals, but the reflective brain does not receive them clearly.
    • Felt senses that would normally guide everyday decisions (like when to eat, sleep, stop, approach or withdraw), go silent or become unreliable.
    • The reflective brain, cut off from instinct, is forced to analyze instead. Should I be hungry by now? Is this the right time to rest? What does that person’s face mean?
    • Meanwhile, the survival brain still hijacks attention networks with raw activation, coloring everything through a trauma lens.

The result is a life of disconnection and overthinking. The “gut knowing” that should guide you is muted, so the mind must carry the entire burden of decision-making. This not only disrupts safety signals, it fragments daily living into constant micro-calculations about what you need and how to respond.

Trauma disrupts the brain’s vertical integration. The survival brain keeps generating signals, but the reflective brain cannot integrate them, leaving instincts muted and life fragmented.

Research supports this picture. A 2025 study in Nature Mental Health found that people with PTSD show reduced connectivity between deeper survival structures of the brain (like the cerebellum and thalamus) and the higher reflective regions (like the cortex). The researchers called this a breakdown of vertical integration, essentially the brain’s internal conversation between sensation and reflection (Nature Mental Health, 2025).

The lived experience of disconnection, such as not feeling connected to your body, not being able to trust your gut, or not feeling really “here,” is rooted in this neurological divide.

This disconnection even extends to the vestibular system, which governs balance, orientation, and our felt sense of being held by gravity. When trauma disrupts this system, people often feel off balance, clumsy, or without a center of gravity. This has been called a loss of gravitational security: the basic, primal trust that you are anchored to the earth and have a safe place to stand. Without it, the world feels unsteady (both literally and metaphorically), and so do you.

This loss of gravitational security explains why trauma can make people feel not only emotionally unsteady but sometimes physically off balance in their movements and posture.

Trauma can literally knock you off balance. Losing gravitational security makes the world feel unsteady both physically and emotionally.

What Helps: Restoring Connection From The Bottom Up

If the root problem is disconnection, then healing is about reconnection. The goal is to re-establish the conversation between survival and reflective brain so that instincts, sensations, and felt senses can once again guide daily life.

1. Finding Solid Ground

Before trauma processing can happen, survivors need a felt sense of balance and orientation. Because trauma often disrupts the vestibular system and gravitational security, restoring these capacities is essential. Practices that bring the balance system back online, such as grounding through the feet, noticing posture, or gentle movement, help restore a center of gravity and a sense of being held by the earth. With this, people begin to feel steadier not only in space but also in themselves.

2. Bottom-Up Approaches

Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) and similar therapies work directly with survival-level processes. Instead of starting with words or stories, they focus on the instinctive responses of the brainstem, allowing the survival brain and cortex to reconnect gradually and safely.

3. Embodiment Practices

Simple exercises that reintroduce a sense of self in space, such as connecting with proprioceptive awareness, noticing where your body is located, how your feet meet the ground, or how your spine is aligned, help rebuild orientation without overwhelming the system. As this felt sense strengthens, other instincts often re-emerge naturally. Hunger and fullness, tiredness and energy, desire and comfort become easier to notice and trust.

4. Relational Attunement

Healing cannot happen in isolation. External connection with an attuned therapist promotes internal connection with the survival brain. Over time, clients internalize this connection, allowing them to feel guided from within rather than endlessly analyzing from without.

Healing means restoring the brain’s inner conversation, so instincts and felt senses can guide life again — instead of constant overthinking.

Hope In Reconnection

The exhaustion, hypervigilance, and disconnection of trauma are not signs of weakness. They are symptoms of a brain doing its best with a broken communication line. Research and clinical experience show that with the right approaches, those lines can be restored.

When survival and reflective brain reconnect, life no longer has to be lived as a constant mental calculation. Safety can be felt again, and so can desire, joy, and that deep sense of being at home in yourself. Decisions can flow from an inner compass instead of endless analysis.

As one trauma survivor put it after treatment: “I feel present. I feel like an adult. My body is trusting me. It feels like home.”

Trauma may shut down our native safety systems and silence our instincts, but those systems can be reawakened. The path is not about pushing harder. It is about honoring the body, restoring connection, and letting the brain remember how to feel and trust once again.