Abdominal Guarding: When the Body Says No More
For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.
I used to think my stomach was just my stomach. A little bloating, some nausea, cramping, digestive issues, and the occasional feeling that I had swallowed a bowling ball or a bag of rocks and somehow both had lodged themselves beneath my ribs. I blamed food, hormones, stress, aging, the latest supplement, or the lack of the latest supplement. I experimented endlessly because when you live in a body that hurts, you become a reluctant but necessary detective.
What I did not understand was that my stomach was not simply digesting food. It was digesting my life. It was digesting decades of vigilance. It was digesting a childhood spent in a nervous system that never knew safety. It was digesting the emotional labor of carrying myself through a world where the people responsible for protecting me instead became the very people I needed protection from.
And now, after all these years, it appears my body has finally reached the point where it is no longer willing to do that work quietly. It refuses to be bulldozed by me and my wants and desires.
Stomach guarding, sometimes called abdominal guarding, is a chronic protective tightening of the abdominal muscles, diaphragm, psoas, pelvic floor, and surrounding tissues. In acute medicine, doctors often look for guarding when someone is experiencing severe abdominal pain because the body instinctively contracts to protect an injured area. Trauma survivors can develop a different kind of guarding, one that becomes chronic rather than temporary. The body learns to brace against emotional, psychological, and physical threat until the contraction becomes so familiar it disappears into the background. Over time, this can affect breathing, digestion, elimination, sleep, circulation, posture, weight regulation, hormone balance, lymph, cortisol, and fluid retention contributing to cramping, and the ability of the nervous system to shift into rest-and-digest states. What begins as protection can eventually become a prison.
