When Survival Mode Is Over, but Your Body Hasn’t Gotten the Memo

You understand what happened. You know your life is different now. So why does your body still react like it isn’t?

You have done a lot of understanding.

You know where some of your patterns came from. You can recognize your triggers. You’ve read about trauma, attachment, anxiety, and nervous system regulation. You can probably explain why you react the way you do with an impressive amount of accuracy.

Your head knows.

And still, your body does something else.

Someone’s tone changes and you immediately start wondering what’s wrong. Someone you love is disappointed and you feel an almost irresistible pull to make it better. You finally have a quiet afternoon and instead of relaxing, you start thinking about everything you should be doing. There is no emergency, but some part of you remains prepared for one.

You know you’re safe.

So why are you still reacting like this?

I hear versions of that question often in therapy.

And underneath it, I sometimes hear another question:

After everything I’ve learned and all the work I’ve done, shouldn’t I be past this by now?

Not necessarily.

Your head and your body can be in different places.

Your brain knows the story has changed

There are things you know now that you didn’t know then.

You know you have choices.

You know you aren’t responsible for keeping everyone happy.

You know conflict doesn’t automatically mean a relationship is ending.

You know you’re allowed to rest.

You know someone else can be upset and you don’t have to fix it.

You know you are no longer living in whatever circumstances taught you to stay so prepared in the first place.

And you mean it.

This isn’t a problem of not understanding enough.

Sometimes your brain has taken in information that your body hasn’t fully experienced yet.

I sometimes describe this as the body being stuck in the past.

I don’t mean that literally, and I certainly don’t mean that every physical response is connected to trauma. Bodies are complicated. Anxiety and physical symptoms can have many causes, and sometimes medical evaluation matters too.

What I mean is that our brains and bodies learn from experience.

And some of those lessons are very good at keeping us alive, connected, prepared, and functioning.

Your body learned what to expect

You didn’t wake up one morning and decide to become hypervigilant.

You didn’t make a conscious plan to monitor everyone else’s mood, have difficulty resting, anticipate what might go wrong, or take responsibility for things before anyone asks.

Your system learned.

Conflict may have meant danger. Disappointment may have meant disconnection. Rest may not have felt safe. Unpredictability may have required vigilance. Being closely attuned to someone else may have helped you anticipate what was coming next.

So your brain and body adapted.

They learned: Pay attention.

Be ready.

Handle it.

Don’t miss anything.

Those responses may have served you remarkably well.

They may be part of the reason you became so capable.

But bodies don’t necessarily stop using an old strategy simply because we understand that we don’t need it anymore.

When something has helped keep us safe, our systems tend to keep doing it until they have enough new information to learn something different.

That is why insight can be both incredibly important and, sometimes, not enough.

Safety isn’t only something you know

This is one of the reasons I’m so interested in body-based trauma work.

Your head can know this person isn’t angry with me.

Your body may need the experience of someone being disappointed and discovering that the relationship remains intact.

Your head can know I’m allowed to rest.

Your body may need to experience resting and discovering that nothing terrible happens.

Your head can know I am not responsible for everyone else’s feelings.

Your body may need the experience of letting someone have a feeling without immediately stepping in to manage it.

Your head can know I have choices now.

Your body may need opportunities to actually make one.

Safety isn’t only understood. It is experienced.

And that takes time.

Not because your body is stubborn.

Not because you’re doing healing wrong.

And not because you need to find the perfect technique that will finally make you calm down.

Your body is responding to what it has learned.

The work is helping it learn something new.

Your system gets to update

This is part of what I appreciate about EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic, body-based approaches to therapy.

We aren’t simply trying to convince your body that its response is irrational.

We can become curious about what the response expects.

What has my system learned to expect?

And then:

What might help my body begin to experience what my brain already knows?

That is a different kind of question.

Instead of fighting the reaction, we get curious about it.

Instead of Why am I still doing this?, we can begin with Of course my body learned this. Does it still need to?

Over time, the brain and body can take in new information.

I can say no and remain connected.

I can disappoint someone and survive their disappointment.

I can ask for help.

I can stop scanning for a moment.

I can rest.

I have choices now.

The goal isn’t to force your body to calm down.

It’s to give your system enough experiences of the present that it no longer has to organize everything around the past.

Progress may look quieter than you expected

You may have imagined healing would eventually mean that your nervous system simply stopped reacting.

I’m not sure that’s a particularly useful standard.

Your body is supposed to react. It’s supposed to notice things. It’s supposed to protect you.

The question is whether every old alarm still gets to determine what happens next.

Progress can look like noticing sooner.

There I am scanning the room again.

It can look like recovering faster after something activates you. Recognizing an old response without immediately believing it. Feeling the urge to fix someone else’s disappointment and deciding to let them have it.

The old response may still show up.

It just doesn’t always have to decide what happens next.

And for a woman who has already done a lot of thinking, understanding, researching, and trying, I think that matters.

You may not need another explanation for why you are the way you are.

You may need enough safety for your brain and body to discover that you don’t have to live the same way anymore.

Maybe that’s a more realistic way of thinking about healing:

the ongoing process of bringing what we know in our brains and what we experience in our bodies into greater alignment.

Not perfectly. Not all at once.

Little by little, so that we can be more present to the life we’re actually living.

You’ve probably already done a lot of understanding. If your head knows your life is different but your body still seems to be responding to the past, therapy can offer something different from simply giving you more information.

I work with women in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado using EMDR, Brainspotting, and somatic, body-based approaches to trauma therapy. You can you can learn more about how I work or schedule a consultation.