Womb memories & body-based healing: Releasing what you couldn’t control.

What’s hiding in the body you call home?

You’re triggered by small things; loud noises, rejection, even unexpected kindness.

You crave control but fear change. You long to feel safe in your body, yet you keep floating in your mind, disconnected.

Here’s a truth many overlook:

Much of what you’re holding didn’t start with you.

Before you had language, before you even took your first breath, your body began recording everything: stress hormones, emotional atmospheres, survival patterns.

And that’s where the concept of womb memories begins. 

What are womb memories?

Womb memories are not conscious memories in the traditional sense. Instead, they’re somatic memories, recorded in the body’s tissue, fascia, and nervous system.

From around 8 weeks gestation, the nervous system begins forming. And while the fetus may not consciously remember events the way an adult does, it absorbs and stores emotional energy, hormonal states, and environmental cues.

So if your mother was afraid, depressed, or under pressure during pregnancy, your system may have encoded that state as the status quo or what is in fact ‘normal’. Or if the birth was traumatic, fast, or heavily medicalized, your body may associate transitions with threat, rather than positive expansion.

These experiences form your earliest energetic imprints much before you had choice or voice.

When powerlessness becomes a pattern

One of the core imprints we inherit from early life (especially the womb and birth) is our relationship to control and safety.

For many of us, our first experience of life came with a sense of helplessness - being born into chaos, or even feeling our mother’s anxiety but not being able to escape it.

These patterns can evolve into behaviours that present themselves through life and into adulthood - chronic tension in the body, overwhelm and difficulty of letting go and finding it hard to receive support. 

But it’s not just who you are. It’s what your body remembers.

Why body-based healing is essential

Talk therapy, mindset work, and journaling are powerful, but they don’t always reach the pre-verbal imprints that live in your tissues and nervous system.

To truly heal womb and birth trauma, we must go deeper - fully into the body, where these memories are stored.

This is where body-based healing modalities come in.

Of course breathwork is a great way to support your healing. We know it can help you access the subconscious and your nervous system. By practicing breathwork you can help your body release stored trauma without having to relive it. And of course breathwork will bring you into presence and safety within yourself, which is what we want!

Bringing your physical self into your healing journey is so important as well, somatic practices are a great way to encourage movement which moves stuck energy. Working in your body like this can help build body trust and awareness. 

To release stored trauma in your pelvis is especially powerful for birth trauma, by doing this you can restore a sense of safety within your own body.

You don’t have to understand the story to let it go. The body will guide the way - if we let it.

The role of the nervous system: your internal alarm system

Imagine your nervous system like a smoke detector.

If it was programmed in the womb to constantly expect fire, chaos, fear, disconnection then it will continue to beep, even when the fire’s long gone.

This is why so many trauma survivors can feel easily triggered - they can freeze or shut down in situations which bring up the past or subconscious memories and often feel like they are stuck in loops of anxiety with a desire for control. 

Body-based healing helps reset the alarm, bringing your system back to a place of safety, rest, and regulation. You can find out more about that here. 

How do you know if you’re carrying womb-based trauma?

Not everyone does, and if this is the first time you’ve heard of it you might never have even connected to dots. You might resonate with womb or birth trauma if you find yourself often feeling anxious without knowing why, or if you find yourself feeling unsafe in your own body. If you’re the kind of person who really fears being out of control, who needs to have all the answers or you find yourself dissociating during conflict, or even during intimacy then you might be holding on to womb-based trauma. 

Even if consciously you don’t recall these things they live within you. 

You may not remember the story; but your body does.

What does it mean to release the ‘invisible weight’?

A client came to me struggling with low-level anxiety she couldn’t explain. ‘My life is fine, but I constantly feel like I’m bracing for impact.’

Through somatic breathwork, we uncovered a deep fear of ‘being too much’ and ‘causing trouble.’

Later, she learned her mother was hospitalized with severe anxiety during pregnancy. The client had absorbed the fear and shame before she was even born.

Through sessions, she began to feel safe in her body…probably for the first time in her life.

She started sleeping better. Speaking up more. And smiling, not out of politeness, but joy.

This is what releasing womb memories can do.

You couldn’t control the start, but you can rewrite the story

You didn’t choose the energy you were born into.
You didn’t control the womb you grew in or the hands that birthed you.

But you can choose how you respond now.

Body-based healing isn’t about blame, it’s about empowerment.
It’s about giving your nervous system the safety it never got.
It’s about releasing what was never yours to carry.

And it’s about reclaiming your wholeness; not just in your mind, but deep in your bones.

Start healing your imprints 

Whether you’re just beginning to explore your birth story or already deep in your healing journey, I offer grounded, trauma-informed tools to help you come home to your body.

I’d invite you to join ELEVATE, my signature birth energy healing program
Pregnant? Learn more about EXHALE, my support offering for conscious pregnancy and womb work

You’re not broken, you’re remembering

When you feel dysregulated, disconnected, or overwhelmed, it doesn’t mean you’re broken.

It means your body is asking for something it never got:

Safety. Support. Space to release.

Womb memories are very real - but they aren’t permanent, they can be rewritten.

You don’t have to carry the weight of a story that started before you could speak.

You get to heal. You get to feel. You get to begin again.