Our autonomic nervous system is a primitive system that communicates differently than the
logic and language-driven parts of our brain. Our nervous system interprets our environment as either safe or threatening and it doesn’t use complex language to differentiate the two. It unconsciously senses and responds with instinct. This is why it can be difficult to think our way out of our stress/survival responses. We have to get on its level; learn its language.
Dysregulation in the nervous system is characterized by disconnection and misattunement.
When the system operates this way we find safety by staying in our heads and out of our
bodies, unconsciously fearing and avoiding them. Our internal environment becomes divided. The reality of our physiology ( a lack of stability and safety ) is met with denial, hostility, and an intolerance of how our nervous system attempts to communicate with us. We must bridge this gap and learn to connect by becoming more understanding of the system’s intention and less critical of its responses.
For a long time, we have relied on a therapeutic approach that attempts to reason with thought and emotion. Reason doesn’t stand much of a chance against the wild and ancient biology of life or death. Especially if your system has learned, from a very young age, to stay hyper-vigilant. Trying to override our stress and trauma biology with contradictory logic will only reinforce dysregulation. When we ignore, deny, and push away our physical and emotional experiences, the nervous system perceives this disconnect as more threat. It will interpret this as though we cannot hear it, that we do not care, or that it is invisible. Each of these responses making our defense mechanisms double down, our nervous system’s responses more extreme, and our symptoms of anxiety, depression, chronic pain, chronic illness, etc., worse over time.
We will begin to heal by taking gradual steps towards acknowledging our physical sensations and our body’s boundaries—what it is saying no to and what it is telling us it needs. We must start to embody and understand what is happening at this instinctual level and then work our way into more complex emotional and cognitive patterns as we build more capacity and connection within our nervous system.
We now know that just talking about stressful experiences from our past can activate our
survival responses and make the nervous system defensive. This is why the most effective
approach to healing chronic stress and trauma is to start by building our capacity for stress and sensations that we have learned to fear. First we start to find more connection by attuning to and feeling sensation and movement, by slowing down to connect to our external and internal environment in the here and now. Our nervous system needs to feel known, heard, and real. To become more resilient to stress, we have to first meet the body where it’s at and connect to its reality without pressuring it to change. Eventually, We can go inside the stress and fear and pain to help the nervous system out of it.
Regulation is a natural process that the body needs and wants. Our biology was designed to
heal. As we restore safety and trust within our bodies, as we mend the disconnection, it will get easier to face what you had to avoid and tuck away. As we become more confident in making space for discomfort, we will begin to embrace stress and uncomfortable emotions with more and more curiosity and empowerment. Right now, your system might be disempowered, afraid, confused, and in pain, but when you start to explore those feelings, you will discover that is certainly not all that it is. It will support you, and you can support it through things you never would have thought possible. You were literally made for this.
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