The trauma research was built on men. The healing protocols and tools were tested on men. Then they were handed to women without asking if our disconnection or disembodiment looked the same.

It doesn't.

Van der Kolk began his career studying combat veterans returning from Vietnam. Levine developed Somatic Experiencing by watching animals escape predators. Porges built the polyvagal theory from mammalian biology. Their work expanded over decades. Brilliant work. Important work. But the foundational frameworks, metaphors, and assumptions emerged from bodies in acute crisis. Men at war. Animals fleeing predators. Mammals under threat.

Here's what I perceive their work has missed.

They missed that women's disembodiment often has no origin story. No single event. It is often the slow accumulation of learning that your body belonged to others before it belonged to you. The research assumed a before. Some of us were shaped from the beginning.

They missed that we were never allowed to learn the fight or flight responses. "Don't be aggressive." "Be nice." "Smile." Girls who fight back get labelled difficult. Girls who flee get called dramatic. So the nervous system learned a different way: please. Appease. Disappear into accommodation. Fight, flight, freeze came from watching animals. Fawn came from watching women.

They missed that you can't ‘discharge’ or ‘release’ what was never a single event. Shaking. Tremoring. Completing the interrupted fight-or-flight sequence. These tools assume a charge that built up and needs release. A tiger you couldn't escape. An accident you couldn't process. But how do you shake off twenty years of sucking in your stomach? How do you tremor out a lifetime of making yourself easy to be around?

They missed the impact on the nervous system of being constantly assessed. Research now shows self-objectification impairs interoception, the ability to sense your own body from the inside. Women who learn to monitor their reflection lose accuracy in detecting their own heartbeat. Their own hunger. Their own fatigue. This isn't trauma with a capital T. It's ordinary girlhood.

They missed emotional labour as chronic activation. The constant low-level scanning. Anticipating needs. Managing moods. Smoothing tensions before they surface. This isn't hypervigilance in response to a single threat. It's hypervigilance as a way of life. The research saw dysregulation. It didn't see the impossible demands creating it.

They missed how women's capacity for connection becomes the very thing used against us. We have been trained to be so focused on co-regulation that we abandon our own emotions and body signals to keep the peace. We learned to feel for everyone but ourselves. Then what kept us safe becomes our pathology. The same behaviour that gets called "selfless" at home gets diagnosed as "codependent" in therapy.

They missed that women's bodies are cyclical. The research treated the nervous system as static. A baseline you deviate from and return to. But women's bodies shift, hourly, weekly, monthly, across decades. Hormones rise and fall. Capacity changes. What feels manageable on day 10 feels impossible on day 24. Dysregulation isn't always dysregulation. Sometimes it's a body moving through its own rhythm.

They missed what gets passed down. Trauma doesn't just live in your body. It lived in your mother's body. Your grandmother's. The women who came before you and never had words for what they carried. The nervous system patterns you inherited aren't just yours. They're echoes. Survival strategies passed down through generations of women who did what they had to do to endure.

You're not just healing your own story. You're holding theirs, too.

They missed that the beauty industry is a nervous system assault. Constant assessment. Endless correction. The message that your body, as it is, is a problem to solve. This isn't vanity. It's chronic activation. A nervous system that never rests because it's always being evaluated.

They missed that the beauty and wellness industries are the same system.

One keeps you assessing while the other sells you the solution. The nervous system never rests, because first it's being evaluated, then optimized. But neither invites women to be in their bodies, just as they are. Because neither system does, these women’s nervous systems never rest; it's first evaluated, then optimized... constantly.

This is why "the body keeps the score" doesn't fit.

Score implies tally marks. Countable events.

Women's bodies don't keep score. They keep the story.

The story of being shaped by forces that started before memory. Of learning to hold a form that prioritized everyone else's comfort. Of abandoning yourself so slowly you didn't notice it happening.

The difference between score and story.

Score asks: What broke you?

Story asks: What were you shaped to hold?

Score implies: Damage to repair.

Story implies: A narrative to understand.

Score treats symptoms as malfunction.

Story treats symptoms as testimony.

I'm not discrediting their research, work or legacies. I'm naming what I see got missed. Van der Kolk, Levine, and Porges ' work changed the field. But frameworks built on combat veterans and fleeing animals were never going to fully capture what happens to a girl who learns that how her body looks is more important than how it feels to live inside her one and only body.

Your body keeps the story. And a woman who finally hears her body becomes dangerous to everything in the world that has tried to silence her body.