The case presented in this paper demonstrates how the patient's use of po etry and body enactments illustrates the gestalt of her early trauma in which words alone are insufficient. A clinical example is used to exemplify both the patient's and the analyst's conscious and unconscious subjectivity that re sides in embodied states. The case also conveys a paradox between the pa tient feeling understood and known via the articulation of her experience, which was often through her poetry, and simultaneously feeling the spoken word can never fully express what she feels and who she is.