Why our Nervous System is a fundamental part of healing, and a good place to begin.

When it comes to healing from a Traumatic experience, knowing where to start healing can be overwhelming in itself.

Usually what comes to mind to help us heal is Therapy, talking about what happened and trying to make sense of the 'why' behind the unfolding events that took place.

It's a painful place to be and a very vulnerable and couragious journey to meet the parts of ourselves that hold the deepest wounds we carry within us.

So why then, is the nervous system a fundamental part of healing? Especially when quite often what we want to find out is 'why did this happen to me?'.

Our nervous system is our bodies central command centre which processes every thought, movement or response we are either consciously or unconsiously aware of. When we experience life, we store memories of the events not only to recall on in our minds, but to help us learn and to keep us safe. We store sensory input during the event; sights, sounds, movements we experienced and connections we encountered.

If we think of a memory that was uplifting to us, our body reacts to that memory, recalling scents, sounds, movement of emotion in our body and even attached memories of connection & behaviours of others. This is our Somatic responses that remain in our body, or rather our nervous system.

So when we experience an event or continuous events that were traumatic, our nervous system holds onto these memories a little differently. This happens in the limbic part of our brain, a part of the brain known as the amygdala.

I like to call it our pendrive of the brain. It's where we store memories (through all of our sensory input) that we're fearful, traumatic or gave us a sense of danger.

Our nervous system (or rather the Brain Stem) then scans every sensory input it receives from our body to see if any of those inputs relate to the same danger. This is why triggers can come from a certain scent or hearing a tone of voice for example.

If our nervous system then reacts to protect itself from the perceived threat, or reminder of a threat, it begins a cascade of survival mechanisms in our body. It can lead us into a fear based loop of immobilisation. Thus keeping us in a state of survival.

Because our nervous system doesn't recognise the concept of time, when we're talking about traumatic events, it can often bring our body back into the event in the body, igniting the fear response all over again.

Until we address the survival energy and loop within our nervous system, our bodies will continue to react in this way, keeping us feeling stuck in our trauma responses and symptoms such as depression, anxiety & chronic pain to name a few.

This doesn't mean we're without hope though.

The nervous system also regulates nearly every process that contributes to recovery, repair, and resilience as well as protecting us in moments of danger through automatic responses.

So; if we are wired to protect ourselves, we are also wired to heal ourselves.

By putting the body first, we begin to create space around the fear response so that we can stabilise the nervous systems overactive responses and begin to create change in the loop. Overtime, we can then begin to process the survival energy, giving it an outlet of release. This also widens our capacity to handle the survival responses so when we do explore the narrative and cognitive understanding of 'why', we're not pulled back into the fear response cycle. Leading to lasting healing and moving into post-traumatic growth.

In short, our body is what experiences life first-hand and our mind is what makes sense of life after the event. It therefore makes sense to work directly with our nervous system and not against it when we feel ready to begin the healing process.

The nervous system is the bridge between mind and body. When it’s in balance, the body’s natural healing mechanisms—immune function, hormonal balance, emotional processing—can function properly. That’s why healing often begins most effectively by working with, rather than against, the nervous system.