09/01/2026
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There is a certain kind of relief that comes when someone finally realizes they are not strange or broken for the way their body responds to the world. I see it often in my work, usually in quiet moments, when a client begins to notice patterns they have carried for years and wonders why calm can feel so unfamiliar, or why intensity feels oddly grounding. These questions are not signs of failure. They are the nervous system asking to be understood.
One of the most profound things I have learned through trauma-informed bodywork is this: the nervous system is not misbehaving; it is remembering.
Every time I place my hands on a body, I am touching a history. Not just events, but patterns. Ways the body learned to brace, to stay alert, to stay connected, to survive. And so often, when I begin to explain this to someone, I see their eyes soften and their shoulders drop as they say, almost in relief, “Oh… that makes sense.”
In the earliest years of life, the nervous system is still being shaped. Research in attachment and neurodevelopment shows that for roughly the first seven years, children do not yet regulate themselves from the inside. They borrow regulation. Their breath, their heart rate, their emotional tone sync to a primary caregiver. The body learns what safety feels like not through logic, but through rhythm, tone, and presence. We learn the feeling of “home” long before we understand the word.
So if home was calm, the body learns to settle there. If home was unpredictable, loud, emotionally charged, or constantly shifting, the body adapts just as wisely.
Stress chemistry moves through the system more often. The brain’s reward pathways begin to associate intensity with connection, and alertness with belonging. Over time, the nervous system may come to rely on urgency, confrontation, or emotional charge to feel anchored in the world, the way someone raised on a ship learns to balance on moving ground.
I see this again and again in my work. People who feel most like themselves when life is intense, or who feel restless when things are going well. The ones who get uncomfortable in quiet moments, even when they long for peace. If this is you, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not broken and you are definitely not dramatic. Your nervous system learned what it needed to get you through different moments and keep you alive.
The nervous system does not ask whether something is healthy in the long term; it asks whether something is familiar. What we grew up swimming in becomes the water our body learns to move through, even if it keeps us tense, vigilant, or exhausted for years on end.
Polyvagal research helps us understand why calm can feel so strange in these bodies. When safety has been inconsistent, the nervous system may live between mobilization and shutdown, rarely resting in a place of connection and ease. In those systems, peace does not register as relief; it registers as unfamiliar territory. And unfamiliar territory is approached with caution.
This is where bodywork becomes more than technique, it becomes translation.
On the table, I am offering the nervous system a different experience. Slow hands, a predictable rhythm, and touch that does not demand or rush. Over time, the body begins to test the edges. It starts to ask, “Can I stay here without bracing? Can I be connected without intensity?”
The first signs are often subtle. A restless leg. A held breath. A sudden wave of emotion or a quiet numbness. These are not setbacks, but communication. The nervous system is having to learn a new language and it needs patience and presence. Neuroscience reminds us that change does not happen through force, but through repeated, felt experiences of safety.
We must remember that healing is not about erasing what shaped you; it is about widening the river so the water has more than one way to flow. It is about teaching the body that it no longer has to live only where the current once ran fast and loud.
And if you recognized yourself in these words, I hope you know this.
Nothing about you is wrong. Your nervous system did its job beautifully. Now, with support, and care, it can learn that survival is no longer the only option.
Sometimes the most profound healing doesn’t come from changing who we are; it comes from finally understanding why we became this way, and meeting ourselves there with kindness.
