Learning to Stay: Love After Trauma

Written by: Liz Cerven

Dear Reader,

Some wounds echo.

Not as thunderclaps, but as soft murmurs—whispers that stir in the chest when connection brushes too close. These echoes don’t always speak in language. Sometimes they arrive as tension in the shoulders, a sudden stillness in the breath, a flicker of doubt in the presence of care. The body remembers what the mind might try to forget.

As somatic pioneer Pat Ogden writes, “The body always leads us home… if we can simply learn to trust sensation and stay with it long enough for it to unfold, it will tell us everything we need to know.” For many of us, that unfolding is slow, nuanced. It lives in gestures and instincts: a glance away when affection comes near, a quiet retreat when someone steps in. Healing becomes a practice of reminding the body that it is safe now. That not all softness will turn sharp.

Sometimes, the echoes feel like ghosts. They move quietly—through rooms we thought we’d sealed off. Through relationships we trust. Through mornings we thought were free of memory. They tap us on the shoulder when we’re resting. They stand between touch and tenderness. And yet: they are not all of who we are. They are not the end of the story.

For those of us shaped by complex trauma, especially in relationship, healing can feel like learning a new dialect of intimacy—one that does not rely on vigilance to survive. We begin to notice the small ways our bodies guard, the subtle hesitations between love offered and love received. And we honor that. Gently. Without shame.

There is no map for this, only practice. The slow process of becoming.

Becoming is not a destination. It is a rhythm. A weaving. A remembering of what was forgotten, and an imagining of what could be. We find our way not by forcing forward, but by listening—again and again—to the body’s quiet invitations. To the places that pulse with grief. To the places that reach toward joy.

As bell hooks wrote, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.” And so, we learn to love ourselves through presence. Through boundaries. Through allowing others in with discernment—not because we are guarded, but because we are learning to trust our own rhythms. The act of loving becomes both an opening and a containing. We hold ourselves tenderly, even when old echoes ripple through the nervous system.

There is an art to learning how to stay. Not with pain—but with possibility. With the heart’s quiet reawakening. With the murmur of something beautiful beginning to take shape inside.

Gloria Anzaldúa speaks to this beautifully when she writes: “The struggle is inner... and is played out in the outer terrains.” What lives in the body is often mirrored in our relationships—with lovers, friends, community, and self. There are borderlands within all of us. Learning to dwell there, rather than fight our way out, is one of the most sacred practices of healing.

In these liminal places—between what was and what is becoming—we begin again.

Healing, after all, is not about never flinching again. It’s about noticing when we do, and offering ourselves compassion instead of critique. It’s about building relationships—within and beyond us—that can hold complexity. That can witness our trembling and stay.

As adrienne maree brown writes, “We are realizing that we must become the systems we need.” Love, in this light, is communal. Collective. Patient. It is not something we earn through perfection or performance. It is something we practice—in slowness, in reverence, in repair.

This is not just an emotional process—it is an embodied one. Tami Lynn Kent writes, “Your body holds the story of your life—but it also holds the seeds for how to heal.” And so, we come home to the body not just to feel, but to reclaim. We move with curiosity. We listen. We root into the possibility that healing is not a return, but a reimagining.

We are always in the process of becoming.

There will be days when you open with ease. Days when closeness feels like sunlight. And there will be days when you need to retreat, to re-gather, to soothe the echo before it rises. Both are part of the journey. Both are holy.

If you find yourself flinching in moments that should feel soft—if your nervous system responds to care with caution—you are not alone. You are not broken. You are in the process of becoming.

May we all find relationships—within and around us—that honor this becoming. That offer spaciousness instead of urgency. That allow the echoes to fade without needing to be erased.

May we remember: the body, too, longs for tenderness.

with breath,
with slowness,
With care.