On and On About the Nervous System

A client recently said to me only half-jokingly, “You really go on about the nervous system, don’t you?” Fair enough. I do. I suspected she meant “let’s move on,” so we did. Now with her permission/relief I’ve taken to my blog to passively “defend” my love of the nervous system and all associated conversations.

When new clients come to therapy, they come with words. Words about childhood, words about partners, words about fears. We are trained to believe that if we can just find the right story, the right cognitive insight, things can start to change. But the sub-story to the told story is in the body’s nervous system is responsible for how safe or unsafe we feel in the world, and if we feel unsafe very little can take place in therapy that will be of value. The nervous system is not simply a background operating system; it’s the first responder to everything that has happened and happens in our lives, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

Its job is serious: stay alive. As much as we want to feel better, our nervous system will de-prioritize everything that isn’t central to the task of staying alive when we feel unsafe. How wonderfully adaptive. The downside is sometimes it all misfires, doesn’t know when to stop, or it “over-reads” potential cues about safety as is common among people with trauma impacted brains.

Here are just three incredible things about your nervous system:

Fascinating Fact #1: Your nervous system “remembers”

One of the most startling truths is that your nervous system keeps a kind of implicit score. Even if you can’t recall a traumatic event clearly—or if you’ve rationalized it away—your body continues to respond as though it is still happening. This is why someone who insists, “I’m fine, I’ve moved on,” may still have a stomach that clenches when they hear a raised voice, or a heart that races when their phone buzzes late at night. I struggled with occupational burn-out and still get an instant feeling of dread from the ding sound of a new e-mail landing in my inbox.

This memory is not stored in the same way as conscious recall. It lives in physiological patterns: heart rate, breath, muscle tone. In therapy, this means that telling the story of what happened may not resolve anything unless we also work with the body’s nonverbal memory.

Fascinating Fact #2: Safety is not logical, it’s biological

Another fact that surprises people: you cannot think yourself into safety. The nervous system doesn’t take orders from the prefrontal cortex. You might know, rationally, that your partner is not going to abandon you or that your boss’s criticism won’t ruin your life. But if your nervous system detects threat, your body will flood with cortisol and prepare for fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

This mismatch explains why affirmations or “positive thinking” so often fail. If your nervous system is in survival mode, no amount of telling yourself “I’m safe” will override the chemistry of alarm. Therapy that starts with the body allows us to re-establish safety at the physiological level. Only then can the mind genuinely catch up.

Fascinating Fact #3: Regulation is contagious

Here’s the one I love most: nervous systems sync up. Research shows that when two people are together, their heart rates, breathing patterns, and even brain waves can align. This means regulation is not a solo act. It’s profoundly relational.

Think about how you feel calmer around someone steady, grounded, and slow to react. Or, conversely, how your anxiety spikes when someone near you is panicked. Therapy works, in part, because the therapist’s regulated presence gives the client’s nervous system something to attune to. Regulation, then, is less about rugged individual mastery and more about shared resonance.

Why this matters in therapy

Starting with the nervous system changes the frame of therapy entirely. Instead of beginning with what do you think about this? we begin with what is your body doing right now? This shift honors the fact that no story can be told clearly from a body in fight-or-flight.

For example, a client in a highly activated state—inattentive, heart pounding, hands shaking—will not benefit from an exploration of childhood dynamics in that moment. They need grounding first: slower breath, orienting to the room, maybe feeling their feet on the floor. Once the nervous system is calmer, the mind can reflect instead of react.

On the other end of the spectrum, clients in a shutdown or dissociated state may need gentle stimulation—movement, sound, even humor—to bring them back into engagement before deeper work is possible.

This isn’t about choosing body over mind; it’s about sequencing. If the body is not on board, the insights won’t stick.

The nervous system is not just a set of wires and reflexes; it is the living record of our past and the gateway to our future. It remembers when we cannot, it calls the shots on safety, and it draws us into resonance with one another. Paying attention to it isn’t an optional add-on to therapy. It’s the ground floor, the first step, the place from which every meaningful change begins.

If you read this whole thing, I suspect your reasonably regulated nervous system allowed you to do so without undue distraction or concern for your safety. Maybe it took 10 minutes. For many people, developing the capacity to do so would represent a major therapeutic milestone.

No wonder they have little patience for my nervous-system spiel. It’s just words.