
31/05/2025
THE PLACE WHERE HEALING BEGINS
Your nervous system doesn’t need fixing, it needs safety.
When someone rushes in to “take away” your pain, your doubts, even with love, your body often hears something else:
“There’s something wrong with me.”
And so you tense. You shrink. You feel small, broken, incapable, unseen.
Unloved.
Because healing isn’t about being rescued or repaired… it’s about being felt. Validated. Valued.
Neuroscience calls this co-regulation. Your nervous system doesn’t rest and regulate through advice or emotional band-aids, but through presence.
A grounded person can say without saying a word, “You’re not alone. You can survive this.”
When others stop trying to fix you, paradoxically, you may start to feel whole again.
Your breath softens. You begin to trust your own deepest knowing. Their quiet steadiness becomes an emboldening message:
“You’re safe. I’m here. You’ve got this.”
And in that safety, something shifts. You are no longer powerless. You don’t need someone else’s second-hand answers. Answers emerge from your own original presence.
So don’t rush in with solutions!
Offer your presence to a friend in crisis. Your listening. Your steadiness. Your open heart.
This is what heals. This is what brings us home to ourselves:
Not quick fixes, not judgment, not the shaming of vulnerability, but the kind of presence that doesn’t shrink from pain.
It quietly stays, and it changes the world.
- Jeff Foster