My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
How I Learned to Feel Safe in My Body Again After Trauma
By Lena, 30 — Denver, CO
Learning to feel safe in your body after trauma is not one big moment. It is not a speech you give yourself in the mirror or a breakthrough that arrives fully formed during a therapy session. For me, it was sleeping with the windows open on a Thursday night in April, two years after the assault, and not waking up once.
I want to tell you about that night. But to get there, I have to tell you about the nights before it — the hundreds of them — when every creak in the hallway was a threat, when my own heartbeat felt like something happening to me rather than something coming from me. When my body was a place I no longer wanted to live.
When Your Body Stops Feeling Like Yours
I was twenty-seven when it happened. I will not give you the details because they belong to me, and because you do not need them to understand what came after. What I will tell you is that in the weeks and months following the assault, I became a stranger to my own skin.
I stopped wearing shorts. I showered with the lights off. I flinched when friends hugged me, even the ones I had known for a decade. My body had become evidence of something I wanted to forget, and so I tried to forget my body entirely.
I moved through my days the way you move through an airport — efficiently, impersonally, always looking for the exit. I went to work. I posted content for brands that sold sunscreen and running shoes, and I smiled at the camera when I needed to, and I went home and triple-locked the door and lay in the dark with the windows sealed shut, the blinds drawn, the air thick and still.
My apartment was on the third floor. There was no rational reason someone would come through the window. But trauma does not negotiate with reason. Trauma just locks the windows and tells you it is keeping you alive.
Starting Therapy and Learning to Feel Again
I started seeing a therapist named Dr. Reyes eight months after the assault. I did not want to go. I went because my best friend Mariana sat on my couch one Sunday and said, very quietly, that she missed me. Not the version of me who showed up to dinner and laughed at the right moments. The real one. The one who used to dance in the kitchen while making eggs.
Dr. Reyes was patient in a way that made me suspicious at first. She did not push. She did not ask me to relive anything. Instead, she started with something I did not expect. She asked me about sensation.
Not the kind you are thinking of. She asked me if I could feel my feet on the floor. She asked me to hold an ice cube and describe what happened in my body. She asked me to put my hand on my own stomach and just breathe.
I could not do it. The hand-on-stomach thing. The first time I tried, I pulled my hand away like I had touched a hot stove. Dr. Reyes just nodded and said, “That is information. That is your body telling us where the work is.”
We spent months on this. Months of learning to be in my body without leaving it. She called it somatic work. I called it the hardest thing I had ever done, harder even than the thing that brought me to her office, because at least during the assault I had been able to disappear. Now she was asking me to stay.
The Homework That Changed Everything
About a year into therapy, Dr. Reyes gave me what she called body homework. She said I needed to explore physical sensation on my own terms — not with a partner, not with expectation, not with any goal other than noticing. She told me to start with things that felt manageable. A warm bath. Lotion on my arms. The texture of a soft blanket against my legs.
I did those things. Slowly. Some nights, the bath was enough and I got out and put on my heaviest pajamas and that was fine. Other nights, I stayed a little longer. I let the warm water be warm without bracing against it.
One evening, alone in my apartment with the door locked and the lights low, I tried a small wellness device I had ordered weeks earlier and left unopened in my nightstand. I will not pretend it was cinematic. My hands were shaking. I almost put it back. But something Dr. Reyes had said kept circling in my head: “You are allowed to feel good in your body. Feeling good does not erase what happened. It just means your body is still yours.”
So I stayed. I stayed present for maybe ten minutes. And when I was done, I did not feel triumphant or healed or any of the words people use when they want trauma recovery to be a movie. I felt tired. And I felt like myself. Those two things had not gone together in a long time.
It was a Tuesday night. I was alone with a quiet apartment and a racing heart that slowed, eventually, into something steady. Healing, I was learning, sometimes looks exactly like that. Ordinary and private and nothing you would post about.
Reclaiming Safety One Small Act at a Time
After that night, things did not change all at once. That is the other thing nobody tells you about trauma recovery — it does not have a montage. There is no scene where you cut your hair and suddenly you are free. There are just small things, accumulating, like snow that does not look like much until one morning you realize the whole yard is covered.
I started sleeping without socks. That sounds absurd, but I had been sleeping fully clothed for two years — leggings, long sleeves, socks — because bare skin felt like vulnerability, and vulnerability felt like danger. The first night I took my socks off and let my bare feet touch the sheets, I lay there for twenty minutes just feeling the cotton. Cool and smooth and mine.
I started leaving the bathroom door unlocked when I showered. I started wearing a tank top to the grocery store. I started hugging Mariana back — really hugging her, not the stiff-armed approximation I had been offering.
Each of these sounds tiny. Each of them cost me something enormous. Each of them taught me that safety is not a place you arrive at. It is something you build, brick by brick, with your own bruised hands.
The Night I Opened the Windows
It was April. Denver in April is unpredictable — it can snow or it can be sixty-five degrees, sometimes in the same afternoon. That Thursday was one of the warm ones. I had come home from work, made pasta, watched half a documentary about octopuses. Normal things.
I was getting ready for bed when I noticed the air in my apartment was stale. Heavy. I had been running the heat all winter with every window painted shut, and the apartment smelled like recycled air and old candles.
I walked to the bedroom window. I stood there for a long time. My hand was on the latch and my heart was doing the thing it does when my body remembers something my mind has agreed to let go of.
I opened it.
The air that came in was cool and smelled like wet grass and someone grilling on a balcony nearby. I could hear a dog barking a few blocks away. I could hear music — something with a bass line, probably from the apartment below mine.
I stood there and breathed. In and out. My feet bare on the floor. My hand still on the latch, but loosely now. The breeze moved the curtain and it brushed my arm, and I did not flinch.
I got into bed with the window open. I pulled the blanket up to my chest and lay there listening to Denver being alive outside my room. And I thought about all the small, deliberate things that had led me here. The ice cubes in Dr. Reyes’s office. The bath with the lights on. The ten minutes on a Tuesday night when I let myself feel something that was not fear. The socks I took off. The door I unlocked.
I fell asleep with the window open and the spring air on my face and I did not wake up until morning. Seven hours. Uninterrupted. The longest I had slept in two years.
What Feeling Safe in Your Body Actually Looks Like
I am thirty now. I still see Dr. Reyes, though less often. I still have nights when I check the locks twice. I still sometimes flinch at sounds I cannot explain. Trauma recovery is not a straight line. Some weeks I move forward. Some weeks I stand still. Occasionally I take a step back, and I have learned that the step back does not erase everything before it.
But I sleep with the windows open now. Most nights, anyway. And I dance in the kitchen again — not always, but sometimes, when a song catches me right and no one is watching and the morning light is coming through the glass I used to keep sealed.
If you are reading this and you are in the sealed-windows phase, I want you to know something. You are not broken. You are protecting yourself, and that is intelligent and brave, and the fact that it does not feel brave does not make it less so. But one day — maybe not soon, maybe not the way you expect — you will open a window. And the air will come in. And you will still be here.
That is the moment. Not a big one. Not a loud one. Just a window, open, on a Thursday night in April, and a woman breathing.
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