The author of The Body Keeps the Checklist, Ericka M. McCarty, is a survivor, interdisciplinary thinker, and lifelong student of human behavior under stress.
Their work sits at the intersection of trauma psychology, aviation human factors, and embodied practice—exploring what happens when cognition degrades and what allows a person to continue functioning when insight, narrative, and identity are no longer reliably accessible.
After years of therapy beginning in childhood and exposure to a wide range of modalities, a critical turning point came in 2025 during a severe dissociative fugue state triggered by the resurgence of early trauma. In that state, traditional tools based on insight and meaning were no longer accessible.
What remained was procedure.
Drawing on training in the Incident Command System (ICS), as well as concepts from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), and somatic approaches such as the Alexander Technique, they began applying operational frameworks to internal experience. Principles like “aviate, navigate, communicate,” checklist discipline, and mental rehearsal (chair flying) became tools for maintaining function under extreme psychological stress.
The Body Keeps the Checklist is a work in progress emerging from that lived experience.
While the book is being developed, the author is actively writing, publishing, and sharing components of this framework—translating what was used in crisis into practical tools for others navigating overwhelm, dysregulation, or cognitive degradation.
This site serves as a resource hub for those ideas.
It is not a replacement for therapy, but an extension—particularly for those who find themselves in states where insight-based approaches are temporarily inaccessible.
In addition to this work, the author has a background as an improvising organist, drawing connections between musical improvisation and decision-making under pressure. Their thinking is shaped by influences across disciplines, including trauma science, aviation safety, philosophy, theology, and historical figures who operated under conditions of extreme constraint.
At its core, this work is guided by a simple question:
What holds when everything else fails?
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