Jake White Healing LLC

05/08/2026

One of the things that I worked to heal in my nervous system is the feeling of overwhelm. I often feel this overwhelm as a feeling of panic, my heart rate elevates, I feel fear through my throat and chest, and anxiety through my stomach.

This overwhelm often surfaces as a feeling that I won’t be able to take care of my family or provide for them. Life feels extremely big and my nervous system puts me in a position of smallness and contraction. It’s like I am a satellite dish that is taking in all of the bad and negative signals.

I know that these feelings are linked to my childhood. It’s linked to a Karate instructor who made a gesture of choking when I made a mistake in class. He brought negative attention to me that felt so shameful, exposing, and overwhelming.

Through somatic experiencing I learned how to be with the sensation of feeling overwhelmed. Feeling the tightening of the throat, flushed feeling through my body, and the twisting of my stomach. Feeling this next to a therapist and having there presence with me gave me an anchor to connect to. I could feel my body settle as I was witnessed and supported to connect with my physical response. I could notice that the stress moved toward more ease and settling. I felt safer being with my overwhelm knowing that it would pass and settle through support and guidance.

I often still feel overwhelmed and life can get big fast. In the moment where I was exposed in karate the reaction in my nervous was really quick and sudden. Now I know how to slow things down enough to connect with my body. This is something the little boy was not capable of.

As a somatic experiencing practitioner I am still working with my nervous system around overwhelm. I will continue to feel and process this overwhelm through out my life. There will never be a finish line and I will be walking through this healing path along with clients who are also working with their nervous system.

I wanted to share a little bit of what I am working on in my journey with Somatic Experiencing.

05/07/2026

Movement through shame is essential for repair. Shame creates a permanence to our present experience of fight, flight, and freeze. When I feel wrong or unlovable it cuts off possibilities. I have no other experience to resource or reach for to offer a counter to my current feelings and emotions.

To work through shame we have to have other possibilities outside of shame. I can lift up my posture to feel more stable and grounded, I can open my eyes to see the color around me, I can look toward someone who feels safe and supportive. By doing this I am opening up my heart to connect. I am moving out of the collapsing and threatening experience that causes me to turn away.

When I connect I may then notice a breath, more space and expansion through my posture, and more slowness and settling in my physical body. Through opening up, my body starts to receive more possibilities for safe connection.

Maybe in the past there were situations that caused me to pull away and separate. New experiences offer a present relationship with my body and with my environment. A present experience that brings more safety and stability to the nervous system.

Shame needs to move toward present connection to settle old cycles of fight, flight, and freeze.

05/06/2026

05/05/2026

During traumatic experiences the fight, flight, and freeze response is dominant. In our present life the nervous system will move back to this experience where the fight, flight, and freeze response takes over our body, mind, and emotions.

In order to reduce this dominance we can resource contrasting sensations. We may feel activated in the chest but notice neutrality in the legs and feet. We may place our feet on the ground and lift up through our posture.

This creates a blended state where the parasympathetic experience of grounding and neutrality creates contrast to the sensation of tension and stress in the chest and throat. The parasympathetic is reducing the dominance of fight, flight, and freeze and diluting the memory of trauma.

Try to find bodily sensations of neutrality. Let them coexist with tension and stress and move your attention between both. Healing comes through this blended state of both stress and tension and ease and softening.

05/01/2026

We have all experienced a lot of cerebral fixing and planning as a replacement for emotional love and connection. A lot of times our support systems rely on their executive functioning to help us regulate. This tends to reinforce a feeling of abandonment and shame in the nervous system. Our emotions search for presence and attuned listening but we receive the mechanical and cold nature of problem solving and fixing. We search for a hug and we get solutions.

No wonder so many of us feel unseen, alone, depressed, and anxious even when we are surrounded by people. In order for regulation of the nervous system we need space to feel and process emotions. When we have someone present, curious, and engaged with our felt sense it creates space for emotional processing and safety.

This space encourages our own regulation. The cerebral part of our brain that is aware and conscious can begin to connect with emotions. We can start to feel vulnerability while also experiencing support from a person that stays curious and present with us.

This begins to calm the limbic system which is responsible for emotional processing, memory, and emotional patterning of behavior. We may feel calmer, more settled, a deeper breath, and an openness through our chest and abdomen.

This occurs based on emotional attunement rather than fixing, judging, or problem solving.

Next time you feel stress notice the sensation. Lean into awareness and processing rather than fixing and problem solving. Emotions are life energy and need your attention and curiosity to regulate. So much healing and resolution can come through your own attention, awareness, and noticing of the felt sense of emotions. Try to connect in order to regulate your nervous system.

04/28/2026

In somatic experiencing, we help support people through and away from trauma. We look at the response of the body and how the nervous system mobilizes energy to protect itself from traumatic stress.

For example, a client may talk about an event, turn to the side, and feel alone and numb. The client may describe an environment where there was a lot of unpredictability and threat. We may then work on the client being able to protect themselves by establishing a boundary—being able to push outward with their arms and feel the strength of their body and the expansion of their posture. Instead of being consumed by overwhelm and anxiety, they can create a protective boundary.

This protective boundary is an example of the nervous system being able to mobilize energy to protect us from harm. This helps the nervous system move out of traumatic stress and into a sense of protection, agency, and space from external factors.

This may result in bodily sensations such as feeling relaxed, connected to the breath, or experiencing more ease throughout the body. In the session, we did not have the client tell the story of what happened or push them into feelings of overwhelm where they feel small and powerless. Instead, we worked with the protective energy of the nervous system that needed to push away threat in order to feel safe. In a sense, the client moved through the trauma and found a way out of what historically caused powerlessness.

The nervous system can then organize around safety rather than threat and overwhelm. In somatic experiencing, we take you through and out, rather than into, trauma.

04/27/2026

Fear and anxiety is actually a response that needs connection to regulate. Trauma is often the absence of connection and safety. We had to rely on the patterns of fight, flight, and freeze to survive trauma.

We often recreate this pattern through restricting and pulling away from connection. We look away, pull our hands in, we restrict the breath, and mentally focus on worry and threat. These are all the manifestations of the fight, flight, and freeze response.

We can work toward the opposite of restriction and isolation. We can reach out our hands, open up our eyes to connect, raise up our posture to breathe, and find bodily sensations that feel more settled or at ease.

Through these approaches we move toward connection to soothe the nervous system.

Next time you feel anxious try this approach.

04/24/2026

Here are three reasons why you may not create space for your emotions with some helpful things to consider to reconnect.

The tips revolve around tracking sensation, focusing on your autonomy, and staying present. All of these tips give you space to feel and stop recreating the conditions where emotions are suppressed or avoided.

04/23/2026

The anxious feelings of the nervous system are searching for connection. Searching for a secure hand on the chest, the ground underneath us, a space to breathe out of tightness and tension, or a settled chest and stomach.

The secure patterns of the nervous system let us know that through stress we arrive at safety. That the fight, flight, and freeze response is connected to the parasympathetic nervous system.

We can become afraid to be in our body because it holds such difficult feelings and emotions. When our stress response can become connected to safety and security the body becomes a safe place to be and resource. We are all trying to find our way back to a safe and secure connection with self.

04/21/2026

When we work through the implicit patterns of the body we are addressing the deeper roots of healing in the nervous system.

An example of this could be a moment in session where we feel our legs moving and our arms feeling unsettled. We may notice this movement and move with it. We may feel a sense of freedom and a surge of energy and we move. We may then slow our movements down and feel the body settle. We may notice the ease that comes from getting away and having freedom to run.

We may also explore how we felt trapped in our home and could not escape the loud noises and fighting. The implicit response was to run and escape and find more freedom and agency with ourselves.

This change toward freedom in the nervous system came from following the quick movements that spontaneously showed up in the session and being curious enough to follow this reaction of the nervous system.

This noticing and pausing with implicit reactions allows for the unconscious patterns to be noticed with present awareness. This connection can help to regulate our stress response and can lead to more settling, grounding, resilience, and aliveness.

I would love to know if you can notice some of these responses in your own body. Can you take time to notice and observe this implicit pattern. Let us know what you observe in the comments. I will share something I noticed in my body today in the comments as well. Let’s create a community of noticing and sharing in the thread.

04/20/2026

The reciprocation of connection reinforces a baseline experience of belonging and mattering. We naturally expand into connection looking to be seen, held, and supported. This reinforces a feeling that this expansion is safe.

Emotional wounds are a break in this reciprocation of love. We feel that expansion will lead to loss, rejection, or threat. This is because of the experiences of the past that are still held within the nervous system.

In healing emotional wounds we are repairing these beaks or wounds that occurred in the movement toward connection. We may observe how we contract, tense, turn away, or become vigilant as we speak about a relationship. We may feel the isolation and dysregulation that occurs as we protect. We may then observe a new pattern of opening up, looking toward a supportive person, or resourcing our own body and feelings to regulate.

Reciprocation may not have been present in our past but we can notice the felt sense of connection in the present. We may notice that we settle, our heart becomes warm, and our awareness drops toward our body. We are feeling the baseline sense of belonging and mattering.

Healing occurs when we are able to settle the protective response and live through the felt sense of connection with self and others.