Understanding the Nervous System and Its Impact on Trauma

We live in a fast-paced environment that prefers speed, efficiency, and profit. In understanding the nervous system and how it responds to past trauma, we can take back the pace of our lives by valuing and remembering to seek out, look for, and orient toward ease.

What follows is writing on how to move from dysregulation to ease and also why it can feel so difficult.

Moving from Dysregulation to Ease: Why It’s So Challenging

Everyone’s nervous system is either in service of supporting engagement or creating disconnection. It is our personal surveillance system: pursuing safety while remaining alert, undergoing a natural flow of state shifts all the time. This autonomic nervous system (ANS) of ours senses ease or danger and either savors it or tries to protect us.

How to Track and Map Your Nervous System Responses

The varying states of our nervous system can be tracked. Why is this helpful or useful? Because we often don’t even know what we are sensing within us, what circumstance preceded it, why we responded as we did, or what to do about it.

Tracking our own nervous system provides the landscape to be able to notice patterns. When we know the language of our internal response (feelings, needs), we can begin to “map” our inner environment. The process of tracking our nervous system is self-compassion—becoming “friendly” with ourselves.

The Role of Therapy in Rewriting Old Beliefs and Shifting Patterns

Our ANS has a goal to keep us alive. However, over time it “learns” from our environment and builds patterns of avoidance according to its perceptions. There is a difference between what is “actually occurring” and our “perception” of what was/is occurring. Often there is a discrepancy between the two, outside of our awareness.

The role of therapy is to rewrite old beliefs that were crafted from a very small and undeveloped brain perspective by adding in a wider lens or view. This re-crafting doesn’t just happen on its own.

Creating New Neural Pathways Through Gentle Change and Rest

What the nervous system needs is new information to learn from, or else it will go back to the only information it has. It needs new exposure, novel encounters. If it is operating from the old system, then it only has the old material to draw from. The nervous system requires evidence to be convinced of new possibilities.

Growth does not happen through always feeling comfortable.

Building Resilience by Integrating New Information and Experiences

To the threat centers of the brain, this new information provides more evidence of the ability to withstand challenges that work out okay (resilience). This new re-patterning grows in small increments. Since the cycles fluctuate continuously on a daily basis, we move between different states of disconnection to activation to safety within the awareness of our patterns.

Shifting from Fear to Safety: How to Repattern the Nervous System

When the parts of us that needed to “take us out” feel heard and noticed, they don’t need to sound such alarms anymore because they see evidence of our needs being met. This doesn’t signal the danger threat inside in quite the same way that it once did.

In this shift, there is a greater fluidity in moving between states without preferring any one particular state, because trust grows in knowing that through the wisdom of the body’s awareness, change is coming.