Outrunning Monsters

Somatic Healing in Cheryl Strayed's 'Wild'

The weight of her pack nearly flattened her. So heavy she had to sit on the ground to strap it on, then clamber to her feet with everything she had. It towered over her five-foot-eight frame, stuffed with items she wasn't strong enough to carry but couldn’t yet bear to leave behind.

She named it Monster.

At the beginning of her memoir, Wild, Cheryl Strayed was twenty-six and undone by her mother’s sudden death from cancer four years earlier. With her mother went Cheryl’s deepest source of safety and love. Monster, then, was both literal and metaphorical, a physical manifestation of grief.

In the midst of this anchorless grief, the Pacific Crest Trail called to her. She wasn’t a seasoned hiker. She packed too much, knew too little, and started too late in the season. But what she did, mile after blistered mile, was endure. And somewhere in that endurance, something began to shift.

When Strayed strapped on that pack, her body was already carrying an invisible weight. Modern neuroscience helps us understand what her biology already knew: trauma lives not only in memory, but in muscle, breath, blood. In The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk reveals that healing must begin where the wound resides—in the body itself. The brain, he explains, develops in layers from the inside out. At its core lies the brainstem, often called the reptilian brain, which regulates basic survival: breath, heartbeat, arousal. Wrapped around it is the limbic system, the emotional brain, home to fear, memory, and attachment. Only at the surface sits the neocortex, the rational brain, where we reason, reflect, and speak.

When we experience trauma, it transforms us far below the layers of rational thought. The brainstem shifts into survival mode, keeping the body on high alert. The amygdala, our threat detector, becomes hypervigilant, while the prefrontal cortex, our center for regulation and reflection, goes quiet. What would normally be processed and released instead loops through the body like an unresolved alarm. This constant state of alertness becomes agonizing over time. In self-defense, we sever our relationship with our physical selves—the very bodies that won’t stop signaling danger.

Trauma, therefore, is not just a story we tell ourselves. It is a lived, cellular state.

This is precisely what happened in Strayed’s nervous system after her mother’s death. Our mothers are typically our first attachment figures, the ones who teach our bodies what safety feels like. When Strayed lost this foundation, her neurological architecture itself was compromised. The consequences manifested gradually. First emotional numbness, then increasingly destructive behaviors. Before she set foot on the Pacific Crest Trail, she had unraveled—dissolving her marriage with reckless sex, drifting into heroin use, chasing danger in a body she could no longer fully inhabit.

These behaviors weren't conscious choices but survival mechanisms. Her risk-taking and substance use were attempts to either dampen overwhelming sensation or feel something, anything besides grief. As van der Kolk explains, trauma fragments the self. We become cognitively aware of our pain while physiologically unable to integrate it. We retreat into our heads because living in our skin becomes unbearable. We are not so much living in our bodies as fleeing them.

And so, almost without knowing why, Strayed answered a small, insistent voice that pulled her toward the Pacific Crest Trail, a physical test for which she was utterly unprepared. “It was an idea, vague and outlandish, full of promise and mystery,” she wrote. “Something bloomed inside me as I traced its jagged line with my finger on a map.” Her primal instincts, long silenced by grief, responded to an intuitive path toward healing: a return to the body.

The night before she departed, she packed her bag as tightly as her grieving heart. “I worked my way through the mountain of things, wedging and cramming and forcing them into every available space of my pack until nothing more could possibly fit.”

Its weight nearly crushed her.

“It was exactly like trying to lift a Volkswagen Beetle… I could barely lift it an inch.” And yet, she strapped it to her back and began walking toward something she couldn't yet name.

The trail offered no escape from the body. Every step blistered her feet, every mile taxed her lungs and legs. Her suffering did not live in her mind—it burned, throbbed, and ached. But in this relentless physicality lay the beginning of repair.

This is what van der Kolk calls bottom-up regulation, a healing process that begins not with insight, but with physical sensation. “As long as you keep cycling through the same neural loops,” he writes, “you will continue to feel stuck, disconnected, and overwhelmed.” But movement interrupts the cycle. Physical rhythm and deep sensory engagement calm the limbic system and regulate stress hormones. Pain becomes presence. Repetition becomes forward momentum.

With each step, Strayed’s focus was pulled from the looping thoughts in her head into her immediate, embodied experience: breath, hunger, thirst, pain. As she reflected, “Every part of my body hurt. Except my heart. I saw no one, but, as strange as it was, I missed no one. I longed for nothing but food and water and to be able to put my backpack down.”

On the trail, Strayed began to reinhabit herself. Each painful step sent new sensory data to her limbic system, gradually interrupting the frozen trauma response. She was relearning interoception, the ability to sense and respond to her own internal state. At a cellular level, she discovered she could survive pain. That she was strong. That she could carry what once seemed unliftable.

As Strayed’s legs grew steadier, her relationship with Monster began to shift. “Monster was my world, my inanimate extra limb. Though its weight and size still confounded me, I’d come to accept that it was my burden to bear. I didn’t feel myself in contradiction to it the way I had a month before. It wasn’t me against it. We two were one.” This reintegration of self with our pain reflects an essential step of trauma healing.

But healing isn’t only about growing stronger. It’s also about learning what can be laid down and left behind. When we originally experience trauma, we lose our ability to properly time-stamp our experiences. Everything feels urgent, present, and overwhelming. Through embodied healing, we can reprocess these memories and orient them properly in time.

With the guidance of a fellow hiker, Strayed re-examined the content of her pack, shedding unnecessary weight she had once thought essential. “He went through my pack item by item, shaking his head and making astonished comments when he extracted things like the foldable saw... ‘You won't need this,’ he said, holding it up.”

This physical act of letting go became more than practical. With each item she discarded, she released something deeper: the shame she carried, the grief she couldn’t name, the past she no longer needed to haul forward.

And as her steps grew lighter, the past stopped dictating every movement. In van der Kolk’s terms, she was regaining agency, an essential capacity trauma steals. “I had to change,” she wrote. “Not into a different person, but back to the person I used to be—strong and responsible, clear-eyed and driven, ethical and good.” That return was a slow re-membering of herself, piece by piece, mile by mile.

As Strayed walked, her emotions, once scattered by trauma and dulled by grief, began to surface. She cried. She remembered. She felt. The numbness lifted not through insight, but through rhythm, through wind and dirt and blistered feet. This, van der Kolk writes, is the true arc of trauma healing. When the body feels safe again, the fragmented pieces of self begin to speak to one another. Movement allows memory to metabolize from overwhelming sensation into a contextualized narrative. Strayed didn’t need to tell herself a new story. She needed to feel the old one all the way through.

By the time she reached the Bridge of the Gods, she was not triumphant. But she was whole. She had carried her Monster for hundreds of miles, and walked herself back into her body, her grief, her voice.

As she concluded: “I didn’t know where I was going until I got there…It was my life–like all lives, mysterious and irrevocable and sacred. So very close, so very present, so very belonging to me. How wild it was, to let it be.”

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Thank you

Rob Tourtelot

,

Marie Friberger

,

Mark Connolley-Mendoza

and

Brigitte Kratz

for your generous help with this piece!