When life gets tough, we often think the best way through it is to figure everything out in our heads. We tend to analyse and rationalise, hoping that understanding will bring relief, but when we are overwhelmed, our nervous system takes control over any rational thinking. The body makes decisions about safety long before the mind can make sense of them.
The Nervous System: The Foundation of Our Emotional Life
The nervous system is the foundation of our emotional life. It constantly scans for danger and safety, influencing our moods, relationships, and capacity to connect with the people in our lives. In moments of trauma or prolonged stress, this delicate system becomes dysregulated. It learns to stay on high alert, unable to ever fully return to rest.
We can find ourselves anxious, numb, or seemingly over-reactive, even when life appears calm. This is not weakness or failure but a survival response that has outlived its usefulness.
Understanding How the Body Responds to Safety and Threat
Healing begins with recognising that our nervous system shapes our inner world. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory offers a profound map of how this happens (Porges, 2011). He describes how the vagus nerve regulates shifts between mobilisation, shutdown, and safety.
When we feel secure, we can connect with others, making eye contact, listening, and staying open. When we sense threat, we move into defence mode. Our bodies tighten, our breath shallows, and our social engagement system switches off. If we are traumatised, this protective function can become normal for us.
We cannot “think” our way out of this. The nervous system doesn’t speak in words but in sensations, impulses, and rhythms. Therefore, the work of healing is not only about analysis or insight but requires a focus on restoring the body’s capacity to move safely between moments of stress and calm.
Co-Regulation: Healing Through Connection
One of the most powerful ways we can do this is through co-regulation, which is the biological process by which one nervous system helps another to find balance. This is an unspoken conversation between bodies.
When a parent holds a distressed child and breathes steadily, the child’s heart rate slows to match the parent’s. The same process happens between adults. Our nervous systems are designed to connect, and therefore regulation is a shared experience.
Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing, describes trauma as “a loss of connection, to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us” (Levine, 2010). Connection is therefore both the means and the measure of recovery.
When we have been hurt, our systems may equate closeness with danger. We may shut down when others reach for us, or feel suffocated by intimacy. These reactions are not choices but protective reflexes. Recognising this allows us to meet our own reactions with compassion and curiosity instead of frustration.
The Power of Presence
The art of regulating together begins with presence. When we can stay grounded in our own bodies, we offer stability to another. This doesn’t mean rescuing, fixing, or talking someone out of their pain. It means being there by breathing, sensing, and staying in the moment. A calm nervous system invites another into safety without needing to say a word.
Self-Regulation: Grounding Ourselves First
But this is rarely easy. When someone we love is in distress, our own system may become activated in response. We might feel the urge to withdraw or to manage the other person’s feelings so that we can settle ours.
True co-regulation asks us to notice our own reaction and soften into it and to breathe instead of recoil. Sometimes that means taking a moment alone to regulate ourselves before entering into connection with another. This is self-regulation, which is the ability to soothe our own body so that we can meet another’s.
Bessel van der Kolk reminds us that “we can only be fully present with others when we feel safe in our own bodies” (van der Kolk, 2014). Safety is not an idea but a sensation. It is felt in the body, in the breath, in the steadiness of another person’s gaze. When our nervous system learns that closeness no longer equals danger, something profound shifts. We begin to trust connection again.
The Nervous System’s Version of Hope
Over time, repeated experiences of co-regulation rebuild our nervous system’s flexibility. The body starts to remember that activation can be followed by calm, that distance can be followed by closeness, that pain can coexist with safety. This is the nervous system’s version of hope.
In practice, this might look like sitting quietly with a friend who is struggling, feeling your own breath while allowing theirs to find rhythm alongside yours. It might mean noticing when you start to harden or retreat, and gently returning your attention to your body by focusing on your feet, your breath, or the ground beneath you.
It might be as simple as staying, softly, when every instinct says to pull away.
Healing in Relationship
Judith Herman wrote that “recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation” (Herman, 1992). Healing from trauma requires not just understanding but connection and the slow re-learning of safety in the presence of another human being.
When two people remain present through difficulty, something remarkable happens. Their nervous systems begin to synchronise. Research shows that heart rates, breathing patterns, and even brain activity can align during moments of deep attunement (Feldman, 2017). This is the biology of empathy and shows the ways in which our bodies can communicate beyond language.
The Practice of Staying Close
Staying close when it’s hard is a practice. It asks us to tolerate discomfort, to hold space for emotions that may feel unbearable. But every time we manage to stay, to breathe, to remain embodied, we are teaching the nervous system that it can survive connection, and it is possible to feel deeply and still be safe.
This is how trauma heals, not through sudden insight or dramatic revelation, but through countless small experiences of safety, repeated over time. Through another person’s calm gaze, through a steady hand, through the quiet confidence that we no longer have to face our pain alone.
Coming Home to Ourselves and Each Other
The nervous system is not a machine to be fixed but a living system to be understood, respected, and met with compassion. When we learn to listen to it, we begin to rediscover what it means to be human.
To stay close when it’s hard is both the challenge and the gift of our biology. It is the art of regulating together, and through it, we find our way home to connection, safety, love and vitality.
References
Feldman, R. (2017) ‘The neurobiology of human attachments’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(2), pp. 80–99. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364661316301991
Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.psychotherapy.2015.69.4.455
Levine, P. (2010) In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. https://archive.org/details/inunspokenvoiceh0000levi
Porges, S. (2011) The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3490536/
van der Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking. https://ia601604.us.archive.org/35/items/the-body-keeps-the-score-pdf/The-Body-Keeps-the-Score-PDF.pdf
