The Body Remembers, But It’s Never Too Late to Heal

I’m a 39-year-old neuroscience and psychology graduate, freshly finished with my MSc at King’s College London. My story begins in 2020, during the height of COVID, when I quit my dream job as a Metropolitan Police officer. I’m writing this piece for anyone who feels stuck and, held back by negative self-beliefs and, for those who know what it’s like when the mind or body refuses to let you move forward, no matter how much you want to.

Source: Kelsey Farish on Unsplash

Walking away

The day I quit the police, I wasn’t sure if I was running away or waking up. All I knew was that my chest felt tight, my jaw was locked, and the tension in my body was finally louder than the rules in my head. I walked into my sergeant’s office with all my courage and shame: “I can’t do this. I’m sorry.” The next morning, I handed my uniform and my ID card back to the Met, which as it turns out, was harder than making the decision to quit. I left the office behind for the last time. I felt both relief and despair.

Dreams and dead ends

Becoming a police officer had been my dream since I was a little girl playing with her toy sheriff bikers, and ever since police officers walked into my classroom at 16, saving me from a long childhood of trauma, neglect and abuse. As an adult, it was my turn to save and protect as many lives as I could. But my nervous system refused. It was stuck in the trauma, afraid of the world. It refused to follow my lead. Instead, it made me freeze, panic, and retreat. And I knew, on that day when I left the Met, that if I didn’t get help, I might stay stuck there forever.

Healing

So, I returned to therapy. It wasn’t my first time, nor would it be my last. Over the years, I’ve moved in and out of it, following the meandering flow of healing.

The next year was tough. I unpacked a lot of forgotten memories and reconnected with my body and my inner child. I began to see the hidden beliefs that held me back. With the help of EMDR, Internal Family Systems therapy, and a lot of coaching, I began to see the world in a new light. But most importantly, I began to dream bigger.

As a little girl, I always wondered how the mind works. My safe space was my imagination. Inside my head was a world I could create that no one could ever access. It was a place I could be anyone, anywhere. But I also knew that even here, in my own head, my freewill was not entirely mine.

Our lives are like a book that we get given, with the first chapter already written by our parents. The rest is filled with blank pages that are up to us to fill with whatever story we like. I remember thinking, My parents aren’t giving me a great start, I wonder how I will fix the story later?

Learning in safety

After leaving the Met, my husband and I moved our family from London to the quiet British countryside of Suffolk. The slower pace and open space offered a much-needed reset. It was there that it became clear. My passion, that I should have chased all along, was the study of the mind, not the enforcement of the law. I wanted to heal people, I wanted to be seated across from a person in a brown leather couch and to just listen.

With university enrolment deadlines on the horizon, I quickly made an application. But even though I was ready to face the world, my nervous system was not. Thankfully, there are universities, l such as The Open University, that offer online programmes. It felt like a safe way to ease back into the world. So, I enrolled in their bachelor's degree in Psychology and Counselling at the age of 35.

Healing is fragile, one step too fast and you might fall, tumble and have to start all over again. But studying psychology felt easy. I devoured the books and the assignments and, before I knew it three years had passed.

Source: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

When the body holds on

Yet something was nagging at me. I had done all the work, I understood my thought patterns. I had shifted my inner voice into something kinder and more compassionate. I was able to take up space in the world and not shrink from it, yet my nervous system hadn’t caught up.

The hypervigilance never went away, the tightness and tension remained. I still had to fight against the urge to flee. I was ready to face the world, and embody all I had learned, but only if I switched off my parasympathetic nervous system.

Reconnecting

The first time I was prescribed a beta blocker (a type of medication that reduces the effect of adrenaline in the body) was when I really understood: it’s not always the mind, it’s also the body. One cannot be healed without the other. And yet, they cannot always be healed in synchrony.  The mind can respond to words. It can be calmed by insights, by logic, by naming and understanding. But my body didn’t care about stories. It needed only to feel. To sit through the discomfort, without judgment of the mind. To experience it with all the senses until, like a wave, it passes through. Only then, can it begin to learn that uncomfortable feelings are just that: feelings. Not warnings, not lions, just waves. There’s no need to run, to push them away, to escape them, or distract from them.

Bridging the gap

I began to wonder what psychologists had to say about this connection, as it was nothing we had discussed during my bachelor’s. Much of psychology is concerned with healing the mind, while medicine rarely addresses how the body affects the mind or vice-versa. My own experiences already convinced me they were deeply connected, but it wasn’t until I stumbled across Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal that I saw those ideas reflected so clearly in someone else’s work. I read them cover to cover, and my curiosity quickly turned into direction. When I learned that King’s College London was offering a first-time course titled Neuroscience and Psychology of the Mind-Body Interface starting in September 2024, I applied immediately. I did not apply to another university or another masters. This was it.

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Looking forward

It's now August 5^Th 2025. The last day of this MSc. I am about to submit my dissertation on exploring choroid plexus (the brain’s fluid-producing filter system) volume and systemic inflammation as mediators between childhood trauma and depression. A topic that, in my opinion, perfectly bridged the gap between the mind-body connection, early life experiences and their long-lasting biological traces.

And now, once again, I’m wondering what comes next. Five years ago, I left the Met not knowing where I would end up. I’m still figuring that out, but now I trust that I’ll get there. Because it’s never too late to change course, to heal, or to imagine a different future for yourself. I’ve done it once, and I’d do it again.