Functional Neurological Disorder: Could Undiagnosed Trauma Be the Hidden Driver?

Matt

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Woman reaching into the space in front of her as a glowing thread links her to scattered fragments, illustrating an Emotional Memory Image held in peripersonal space

“Your symptoms are messages, not life sentences.”

Matt Hudson

Have you ever been told, “Good news, your scans are clear”… and felt anything but relieved?

If you’re living with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), you’ll know that moment. The seizures are real. The tremor is real. The leg that simply won’t hold you is real. And yet the MRI is clean, the EEG is normal, and somewhere in the conversation, spoken or unspoken, is the suggestion that it’s “just stress”. Or worse, that it’s all in your head.

Let me say this plainly, right at the start: it is not all in your head. Your symptoms are real, physical and often exhausting. What I’d like to explore with you is a different question. Not “what’s wrong with me?” but “what happened to me?” Because in my work, and increasingly in the research, the answer to that second question keeps pointing to something that very often never gets a diagnosis at all: trauma.

Key takeaways

  • FND is a genuine neurological condition. It’s a problem with how the brain and body communicate, not with the brain’s structure, and it deserves compassionate, blame-free care.
  • Trauma and childhood adversity are well-established risk factors for FND. They are not present in every case, and a risk factor is never a verdict.
  • Many people with FND report “no trauma at all”, which may be exactly what we’d expect if the imprint sits below conscious, where no amount of trying to remember will reach it.
  • Recovery is possible. The brain’s wiring is changeable, and the right support (medical, physical and emotional) can help your nervous system stand down.

What is Functional Neurological Disorder?

FND is a condition in which people experience genuine neurological symptoms such as functional seizures (sometimes called dissociative or non-epileptic seizures), tremor, limb weakness, numbness, speech changes or walking difficulties, while standard tests show no structural damage.

It’s far from rare. FND is one of the most common reasons people are referred to a neurologist in the UK, second only to headache by some estimates. So if you’ve been made to feel like an oddity, you’re not. You’re in very large company.

Here’s the distinction that changes everything. Think of your nervous system as a computer. In conditions like MS, stroke or Parkinson’s, there’s damage to the hardware. In FND the hardware is intact; it’s the software that’s running a program nobody asked it to run. The wiring is fine. The messages travelling along it have gone awry.

And neurologists don’t diagnose FND just because everything else came back negative. They look for positive signs: a tremor that changes rhythm when you’re asked to tap along with your other hand, or Hoover’s sign, where a “weak” leg pushes down perfectly well when your attention is on the other one. What do those signs tell us? That the ability to move is still there, underneath. It’s being overridden. And that is a hopeful thing to know.

Why “conversion disorder” had to go

For more than a century, this condition carried Freud’s label: conversion disorder, the idea that psychological distress is “converted” into physical symptoms. For years, a diagnosis more or less required a psychological cause to be found, which left many people feeling accused of something they couldn’t identify.

In 2013 the DSM-5 dropped that requirement, and the term Functional Neurological Disorder has now largely taken its place. It keeps the focus on how the brain is functioning rather than on blame. Words shape how doctors treat patients, and they shape how patients treat themselves. I think the change matters.

But I’d gently add this. Getting rid of the requirement to find a trauma doesn’t mean trauma stopped mattering. It means we stopped insisting people must be able to name it. Those are two very different things, and the second one, as you’ll see, is close to the heart of my work.

What the neuroscience is telling us

Brain imaging over the last fifteen years has shown that FND comes with measurable changes in how brain networks connect. A few patterns keep turning up: stronger links between the emotion-processing centres (such as the amygdala) and the motor areas that plan movement, and changes in the regions that give us our sense of agency, that felt knowledge of “I’m doing this”.

The most elegant model right now is predictive processing. Your brain doesn’t wait for reality; it guesses first and checks afterwards. It constantly predicts what your body is about to feel and do. Most of the time the guesses are good. But when the brain holds a strong, fixed prediction (“this leg is going to give way”, “danger is coming, shut down”), that prediction can override the actual signals coming up from the body. The expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it happens entirely below conscious control.

So what shapes those powerful, stubborn predictions? Why would a brain expect danger when the room is safe?

Because at some point, it learned to.

Is trauma the hidden driver?

Let’s be careful and honest here, because you deserve both.

In 2018 a systematic review and meta-analysis in The Lancet Psychiatry brought together the case-control studies on stressful life events and childhood maltreatment in FND. People with FND were significantly more likely than comparison groups to report childhood adversity (emotional neglect stood out especially) and stressful events in the run-up to their symptoms. And, crucially, a substantial proportion of people with FND reported none of these things at all.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) research tells the same story from another angle. Abuse, neglect, a parent struggling with addiction or mental illness, a household full of conflict: these early experiences are strongly linked to a wide range of physical health problems in adulthood. Stress in childhood gets written into the body.

So trauma is a risk factor, not a certainty. It’s one ingredient among several, alongside genetics, temperament, an injury or illness that acts as a trigger, and ordinary life stress. I would never want you to go hunting for a single catastrophic event to explain everything. That’s a trap, and it can do real harm.

But what about all those people who say, hand on heart, “Nothing bad ever happened to me”?

That’s where I’d like to take you next.

When the body remembers what the mind cannot

Here’s the thing about trauma that I’ve come to understand, both in my clinic and in my research; much of it is never stored as a story in the first place.

A baby who spent weeks in an incubator. A toddler separated from their mother during a hospital stay. A child who learned, long before they had words for it, that crying brought no one. A household where love depended on being quiet, being good, being invisible. None of these produce a memory you can sit and recall. They produce something else: an imprint.

I call this an Emotional Memory Image (EMI). An EMI is a below-conscious image, an emotional snapshot taken at a moment when the nervous system felt overwhelmed, that your Unconscious Mind keeps on file for one reason only: to protect you. It is not consciously accessible. That’s why “think of a time when…” doesn’t reach it, and why someone can honestly report no trauma while their body is responding to one every single day.

Let me give you a picture. Imagine a smoke alarm that, many years ago, got wired not to smoke, but to a photograph of a fire. The house is perfectly safe now. There’s no fire anywhere. But every time something in your life resembles that old photograph (a tone of voice, a smell, a feeling of being trapped, being unheard), the alarm screams. The alarm isn’t faulty. It’s doing exactly what it was wired to do. It’s just responding to a picture, not to the present.

What’s more, emotional neglect (the absence of something that should have happened) is one of the most overlooked forms of all. Nothing dramatic occurs, so nothing is remembered. I’ve written more about that here: Neglect: A Moment Missed, a Lifetime Imprinted.

Where is memory actually kept?

This is where my own work departs a little from the mainstream, and I’d like to be open with you about it.

We tend to assume memory lives neatly inside the skull. But the biologist Donald Forsdyke made a serious case, back in 2009, that long-term memory may be stored extracorporeally, beyond the brain itself. Bruce Lipton, for his part, turned our attention to the cell membrane as the place where the body “reads” its environment. In my own papers in Frontiers in Psychology (2021 and 2022), I extend that thinking outward: into the field of energy surrounding the body, and specifically into the peripersonal space, the space just in front of you, within arm’s reach.

Why does that matter for FND? Because when I ask clients where a feeling is, they rarely point inside. They point out there, in front of them. Up and to the left. Close to the chest. Far away on the floor. The EMI has a location. And that gives us a door that doesn’t require digging through the past at all.

This is my theoretical model, and I’ll always present it as that. But the clinical results it has pointed me towards are why I keep talking about it.

The nervous system as protector, not enemy

Here’s the reframe I’d love you to take away, even if you forget everything else.

Your symptoms aren’t your body betraying you. They’re your nervous system trying to protect you, using the oldest tools it has. When threat feels inescapable, the brain has three options: fight, flight or freeze. Functional seizures, collapse, sudden weakness and dissociation look very much like the freeze response: the body shutting down, the mind stepping out of the room, because in some long-ago moment that was the safest thing to do.

Think of your Unconscious Mind as a loyal guard dog. Years ago it saw a burglar, and it has barked at a picture of that burglar ever since. It isn’t bad. It isn’t broken. It’s been faithful to a job nobody told it had finished.

That’s why the symptoms can seem random from the outside while following their own inner logic. It’s why someone can be steady one moment and unable to walk the next. The trigger isn’t always visible, because the thing being responded to isn’t here. It’s an image.

A story from my clinic

(Names and identifying details have been changed.)

Claire came to see me after nearly two years of functional seizures. She’d had the full neurological work-up, a diagnosis of FND, a stretch of physiotherapy that helped her walking, and a long wait for anything else. She sat down, folded her arms, and said, “I’ll be honest, I don’t believe in any of this. I’ve been told it’s trauma, but I had a lovely childhood. Nothing happened.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Neither did I, once. And you don’t need to tell me anything that happened.”

She looked surprised. So I asked her one question. “When you feel a seizure coming, that first flicker of it, if that feeling were out there, in front of you, rather than in here, where would it be?”

She didn’t think about it. Her hand came up and pointed low, to the right, about an arm’s length away. “There.”

“And what’s there?”

A long pause. “It’s… dark. Small. Like something in the corner of a room.”

We didn’t dig. We didn’t ask whose room or what age or why. We worked with the location and the qualities of that image, where it sat, how close, how dark, until something shifted. Her shoulders dropped. She took a breath that seemed to go all the way down to her feet.

“It’s gone,” she said. “It’s just… not there.”

At the end of the session she laughed and said, “I never told you anything.”

“You didn’t have to,” I said. “Your body did the talking.”

When she called me some weeks later, the seizures had stopped. I’ll always be careful here: not every journey is that quick, and Claire had already done important work with her medical team. But her story shows something I see again and again. The body can answer the where question long before the mind can answer the why. This is what I mean by remembering to forget: memory reconsolidation, where the old emotional charge is updated so the alarm no longer needs to sound.

So where do you start?

If any of this resonates, here’s what I’d gently suggest.

Keep your medical team close. FND needs a proper neurological diagnosis, and specialist physiotherapy and psychological therapy both have a real evidence base. Nothing I’ve written here replaces that; it sits alongside it. Please don’t stop any treatment or medication without talking to your doctor.

Swap the question. Every time you catch yourself asking “what’s wrong with me?”, try “what happened to me, and what is my body trying to protect me from?” It’s a small change. It turns blame into curiosity.

Try a little experiment right now. Next time a symptom begins to stir, don’t fight it. Just ask yourself: if this feeling were out there rather than in here, where would it be? Up? Down? Close? Far away? Don’t do anything with it yet. Just look. Notice that you can observe it, which means some part of you is not it.

Work with someone trauma-informed. If you’re exploring the emotional side of FND, please do it alongside a qualified, trauma-informed practitioner who understands functional symptoms. Gentle and safe beats fast and forceful every time.

Find your people. FND Hope UK offers peer support and a real sense of not being alone, and neurosymptoms.org, written by neurologists, is one of the clearest free resources on FND anywhere. Your GP is your route to NHS neurology and neuropsychiatry services, and it helps to go in with a symptom diary and a printed leaflet.

And if you’d like to begin exploring this in your own time, at your own pace, that’s exactly why I created MindReset, available on Apple and Google. It’s designed to help you start noticing where your feelings live, and to begin the process of remembering to forget, safely, one small step at a time.

A final word

FND has spent a long time in the shadows: misnamed, misunderstood, and too often dismissed. The science has moved on, and it keeps confirming what so many of you have felt all along. Your symptoms are real. Your brain is not damaged. And your body may be carrying something your mind was never given the chance to put into words.

That isn’t a life sentence. It’s a message. And messages, once they’re finally heard, no longer need to be shouted.

You’ve been listening to your body for a long time. Perhaps now it’s time it felt heard.

Frequently asked questions

Is FND caused by trauma?

Not always. Trauma and childhood adversity are well-established risk factors, and people with FND are more likely than average to report them, but FND develops from a mix of factors, and some people have no identifiable trauma at all. A risk factor is not a verdict.

Why do many people with FND say they’ve had no trauma?

Some genuinely haven’t. For others, the relevant experience may be pre-verbal, implicit, or simply never recognised as trauma: emotional neglect, early hospital stays, chronic stress. In my model, these are held as Emotional Memory Images below conscious awareness, which is why trying hard to remember them doesn’t work.

Does this mean FND is “psychological”?

No. FND is a disorder of how the brain and nervous system function. Mind and body aren’t two separate systems; emotional experience changes physiology. The symptoms are physical and real.

What treatments help FND in the UK?

Typically a combination of specialist physiotherapy (movement retraining), psychological therapy, and education about the diagnosis, accessed via your GP and NHS neurology or neuropsychiatry services. FND Hope UK and neurosymptoms.org are excellent starting points.

Where can I read your research?

This article is for information only and isn’t a substitute for medical advice. If you have new or changing neurological symptoms, please see your GP or neurologist.

The main principles of my work are based around these models:

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