Fleet MaullThe Entrepreneur’s Zen Master

Trauma is a frozen experience in the nervous system @thomashuebl

25 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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A short excerpt from a YouTube video in which Thomas Huebl states that trauma is a "frozen experience" in the nervous system. He frames the trauma response as initially intelligent and protective, then describes how the traumatic event becomes "frozen"—like a numb file stored in the unconscious—and how observable symptoms arise from that hidden trauma.

Chapters

What I've learned over the years is that trauma is a frozen experience in our nervous system. So in the traumatic moment, the trauma response protects us. So first of all, it's an intelligent function. Secondly, when it gets shut down, it gets frozen in time when the trauma happened. There is like a file being created on our hard disk in our nervous system that has a lot of data now inside, but the data is numb. It's like an anesthesia. It's not. And it's pushed into the unconscious. So from that unconscious, all kinds of symptoms come out. So when people say I feel my trauma, I think that's not really the right articulation. What they feel are the symptoms that their trauma creates because the trauma is here, but something comes out of here all the time. But this is not visible and it's not palpable. So we can't feel the actual trauma. We feel the symptom.