Several years ago, a woman in her seventies came to see me.

She was small and very thin.

Her smile seemed gentle, yet somehow apologetic, as though she had spent much of her life trying not to take up too much space.

I placed a few acupuncture needles in her back.

She lay quietly on the treatment table.

As I often did, I started a piece of soft, gentle music.

When the music became too much

Less than two minutes later, she became restless.

Suddenly she sat up and began pulling out the needles herself.

I hurried over, worried that something had gone wrong.

“Are the needles painful?” I asked.

“No,” she replied.

“It’s the music.”

I was surprised.

“The music?”

She nodded.

“It reminds me of something I never had.”

The story that became a certainty

She told me that during years of psychotherapy, a memory had gradually become central to her life.

She believed that when she was a baby, her parents had never held her.

That absence of affection, she explained, had become the source of all the suffering that followed.

She had spent decades searching for healing.

Decades searching for the missing embrace.

Listening quietly, I asked only one question.

How do you know they never held you?

She answered honestly.

“It was an image that emerged during therapy.”

Over the years, the story had been explored, repeated, and confirmed until it no longer felt like a possibility.

It had become a certainty.

When life becomes organised around one explanation

What moved me was something else.

A whole life had become organised around a single explanation.

Perhaps childhood shapes us more deeply than we realise.

Perhaps it leaves traces in the nervous system that deserve great care and compassion.

But I have also wondered something during years of clinical practice.

The nervous system is still learning

Every day, I see people experience something they had forgotten was possible.

These moments do not erase the past.

They do not argue with memory.

They simply offer the nervous system another experience.

Another possibility.

Healing is not always a better explanation

Healing may not always begin with a better explanation.

Sometimes it begins with a new experience.

An experience that gently tells the body,

Perhaps the past deserves to be understood.

But perhaps the present also deserves the chance to teach the body something new.

The past is not the body’s only teacher

We often speak of the body as though it were a permanent archive.

As though every earlier wound had already determined the future.

But the body is not only remembering.

It is sensing.

Comparing.

Adapting.

Learning from each new breath, each new relationship, and each moment in which danger does not arrive.

The past may explain why protection began.

The present may teach the body that protection no longer has to continue.