To understand why our earliest relationships impact us so greatly, let’s dive into the science behind our body’s autonomic nervous system (ANS). Our ANS is responsible for regulating involuntary physical functions like our heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, and digestion. Its main role is to store, conserve, and release energy, which helps manage how we react to perceived stress. It does this by speeding up or slowing down physiological functions that take place outside our conscious awareness, impacting our breath, shifting our energy, and even dilating the pupils of our eyes.
If most of your needs were consistently met in childhood, your nervous system likely tends toward a state of consistent regulation. This means that even when your ANS activates a stress response, it is able to quickly return to homeostasis. Homeostasis is our body’s preferred state; it is a balance in our internal functioning where we are able to feel safe allowing us to calmly and intentionally navigate the world around us. When our nervous system is regulated, we can adapt quickly and accurately to perceived threats while being responsive to our emotions and remaining intentional in our actions, even when we experience upsetting feelings or situations. To put it simply, we are able to remain in control of how we respond to the life around us and consciously choose what we want to do next.
Most of us don’t have a regulated nervous system, struggling instead with nervous system dysregulation. Our body struggles to turn off its stress response, keeping us stuck in survival mode, or a state of heightened threat, instead of homeostasis. As a result, we can’t accurately determine what is a threat and what isn’t, causing us to feel unsafe, easily activated, and unable to soothe our often overwhelming emotions. Overstressed and unable to return our body to peaceful balance, we can end up feeling irritable, with a limited tolerance for frustration, causing us to fly off the handle or overreact to events. Because our body will always prioritize our physical survival when dysregulated, our thoughts can easily become self-focused and we easily struggle to consider anyone’s interests other than our own. When we are stuck in survival mode or are in a relationship with others who are, we end up feeling alone because emotionally we are alone. Seeing most others as a possible threat, we don’t feel safe enough to open ourselves to receive connection or support from another person.
These patterns of nervous system dysregulation usually begin in early childhood, when our brain is still developing. As children, we learn how to self-regulate, or cope with stress and other uncomfortable emotions, through our experiences and moments of co-regulation with others. If our ANS didn’t have the chance to develop the neural circuitry needed to toggle easily back and forth between a stressed state and homeostasis, it can get stuck in a stress response. As a result, we physiologically don’t have the ability to calm down quickly or easily.
You’ve likely seen infants or young children stuck in a stress response. Unable to calm or wind down, some will kick, scream, or yell, all behaviors typical of children in a fight response. Others will dissociate and stare off into space, all characteristics of a freeze or shutdown response. Some become hypervigilant to their environment and display symptoms of chronic anxiety, especially when around others socially, which is common in a fawn response.
No matter which stress response(s) our bodies habituate to as young children, we’ll return to the same response(s) as adults because our nervous system has become wired to do so. If we kicked and screamed as children, we’ll likely kick and scream with others as adults. If we stared off into space and dissociated when we were young, we’ll likely do the same today, disconnecting or detaching from others. If our safety or connection was dependent on tending to others around us, we’ll likely do the same today, remaining anxious and more attuned to them than to ourselves.
Nervous system dysregulation can cause even the most conscientious people to act in ways that will sabotage the “best” relationships. When our nervous system is dysregulated, we don’t have as much control over how stressful emotions impact us, so we’re often easily upset or reactive around others. Our ANS becomes biologically wired to overreact to stress, and it’s often only a matter of time before we find or re-create stress, even when there is nothing stressful or threatening around us.
Though chronic stress isn’t physically or emotionally healthy for anyone, stress responses feel physiologically familiar to our body and, on some level, comfortable. Our subconscious mind will always prefer the familiar over the unknown, which poses the possibility of threat. Our nervous system relives the familiar because it offers a highly predictable outcome, which our brain craves in the game of survival.
When our body is in a stress response, our brain’s hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) is activated. Known as the body’s “stress circuit,” our HPA axis floods our bloodstream with stress chemicals such as cortisol, dopamine, endorphins, and adrenaline. Though this spike of stress hormones can feel very intense, we can become “addicted” or habituated to the rush and feel physically uncomfortable, bored, or agitated when we’re not experiencing our familiar cocktail of stress chemicals.
If our body grows accustomed to a stress response, it can drive our subconscious to find or re-create situations that will activate the same biochemical rush so we can go back to feeling “ourselves” again. Those of us raised in homes with a lot of chaos, unpredictability, or unsafe relationships can easily become stuck in a cycle of emotional addiction, physiologically craving the same chaos, unpredictability, and lack of safety with others as adults.
As our stressed body continues to send threat signals to our mind, it begins to race with upsetting thoughts to create the same underlying biochemistry we’re used to. This addictive cycle causes many of us to feel inexplicably drawn to gossip, drama, unpredictable relationship dynamics, or situations with others that give us adrenaline rushes. Even though the drama or stress may not feel good, at least it allows us to feel something—which, for many of us, may be the only time we do so. If this stress causes us to act passive-aggressively, emotionally detach from others, or violate their boundaries, we may later feel regretful of the way we acted when we were dysregulated. Neurobiologically wired to prefer the familiar, we end up trapped in cycles and seeking the same kind of people or situations over and over again, only to end up feeling frequently ashamed of ourselves and our actions.
FEELING YOUR WAY TO SAFETY
Our ANS consists of two branches: our sympathetic nervous system and our parasympathetic nervous system. Our sympathetic nervous system activates our body’s fight-or-flight responses by increasing our heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and muscle tension, giving us the energy to face a perceived threat or run away from it. Once we overcome or escape the perceived threat, our body calms down again by activating our parasympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as a “rest and digest” or “safe and social” state, slowing our heart rate, deepening our breathing, and helping us feel emotionally safe again. Our parasympathetic nervous system controls our body’s ability to relax.
Though spending the majority of our time in a parasympathetic state is ideal, we can become stuck in a parasympathetic response, known as a freeze or shutdown state. Freeze occurs when neither fight nor flight is an option because the perceived threat we’re facing is too imminent, overwhelming, or constant. Our sympathetic nervous system is still somewhat active as our body begins to brace or guard itself against the perceived threat. When we go into a shutdown response, our parasympathetic nervous system slows our heart rate and breathing to the point where we’re physically but not mentally or emotionally present, often with flaccid and weak-feeling muscles. From an evolutionary perspective, this response helped our ancient ancestors stay still or “play dead” when they couldn’t realistically escape a threat. Today, many of us stay stuck in this chronic state of dissociation, disconnection, or numbing of our reality to cope with consistently perceived threats in our environment.
The body’s most recently evolved fourth stress response, fawn, occurs when we attempt to avoid or deescalate a perceived threat by tending to the needs or caring for the feelings of those around us. We’ve learned that if we can keep someone calm, we can avoid the stress their upset would cause us. A fawn response is known as a social state because it’s possible only when we’re around others; it is often referred to as “please and appease” or, more commonly, as “people pleasing.”
Learning how to shift intentionally between sympathetic and parasympathetic states can help regulate our nervous system. Over time, this flexibility will increase the amount of time we spend in a “safe and social” state when we are better able to calmly and responsively navigate both our emotions and the world around us. Accessing this state within our relationships allows us to both provide and receive emotional support and to create deep, lasting love.
YOUR FAULTY PERCEPTUAL SYSTEM
Though safety is our body’s ideal state, few of us actually feel peaceful, grounded, or connected to ourselves, others, or our experiences on a regular basis, if at all. To understand why, it’s important to know something about polyvagal theory. Polyvagal theory explains how we sense, interpret, and react to cues of safety and danger in our environment. Most importantly, it helps explain why we often unconsciously misinterpret others’ behavior and end up not feeling safe enough socially to truly connect with them, even if we desperately want to.
The theory, introduced in 1994 by Dr. Stephen Porges, centers around the vagus nerve, which is one of our nervous system’s main pathways of communication between our brain and body. The vagus is the primary nerve of our parasympathetic nervous system and our longest cranial nerve, connecting our brain to our heart and the rest of our body.
The vagus nerve has two branches, ventral and dorsal. The ventral branch controls our bodily functions above the diaphragm, including heart rate, breathing, vocal tone, hearing, and facial expressions. The dorsal branch controls our bodily functions below the diaphragm, including digestion.
The ventral vagal branch helps us to feel safe and social and is part of what Dr. Porges calls our social engagement system. When our social engagement system is activated, our heart rate is regulated, our breathing is deep and nourishing, we speak to others in soothing tones, we interpret others’ verbal and nonverbal cues more accurately, and our face is relaxed and expressive. When we’re in this ventral vagal state, we’re able to be ourselves while extending that opportunity to others. As a result, we are able to feel engaged with and to explore the world around us, accessing feelings of curiosity, pleasure, and even playfulness and humor.
Most of us don’t spend much time in a ventral vagal state. Rather, overwhelming stress activates our dorsal vagal response, causing a freeze or shutdown state. The response shuts down our digestion (we may be become constipated), slows or stops our muscle activity (we may feel weak or constantly fatigued), slows and dulls our voice, and curbs other physiological functions often making us feel immobile and detach or dissociate ourselves from reality (our mind goes blank and we feel mentally far away or somewhere else).
While we’re in a dorsal vagal state, our ventral vagal branch can stay somewhat “online,” allowing us to remain active and engaged enough to attune to others’ perceived needs. At the same time, our dorsal vagal response keeps us “offline,” or disconnected from our own needs. This happens when we’re in a fawn state, trying to keep ourselves safe by prioritizing the needs or wants of others. We may feel hyperaroused and hypervigilant, always alert to the needs of those around us, or hypersensitive, always thinking or worrying about another person (which may lead us to think that we’re being “empathetic” with others). By being attentive and receptive to changes in the emotional states of others, we try to anticipate and avoid stressful, upsetting, or otherwise threatening experiences. Take a look at the following image for a visual perspective of these nervous system states.
The overall state of our nervous system depends on various cues that we constantly perceive and receive in the environment around us. Our subconscious is always scanning our surroundings for signs that we’re safe or in danger; this is known as neuroception. Given our evolutionary success as humans in social groups, our subconscious is primed to look for cues from other people, including their facial expressions, gestures, and vocal tones. If their behavior appears to indicate they feel safe, we’ll feel safe, too. But if no one else is around or the cues we receive appear threatening, we won’t feel safe and our nervous system will shift into a fight, flight, freeze or shutdown, or fawn response.
If you’ve ever experienced turbulence on an airplane, you can understand how neuroception works. When the plane starts to bump and shake, the first thing most of us do is look at other passengers to see if they look scared. If the people around us appear calm—their posture is open and relaxed, their facial expression is soft or kind, their breathing is regular—we’ll likely feel calm, too. But if they give off cues that they feel nervous and are visibly reacting to the same threat, we may not feel safe, and we’ll shift into fight-or-flight. If something is really wrong—the turbulence persists or worsens—our ANS may activate our body’s freeze or shutdown response, slowing our physical functions and causing us to detach or dissociate from what’s happening around us.
Though from an evolutionary standpoint the process of neuroception was designed to keep us safe from active threats in our environment, our subconscious doesn’t always accurately perceive or interpret the behavior of others. Instead, our past conditioning and childhood trauma influence how our subconscious receives cues of safety and danger from those around us. We often see and sense what our subconscious “wants” us to see and sense, not necessarily what’s actually happening in our environment.
In the instance of turbulence on a plane if we’re afraid of flying, have heard stories of plane crashes, or have experienced traumatic turbulence in the past, our subconscious is more likely to interpret signals of danger from those around us, even if no danger exists. When this occurs, we won’t feel safe, and our body will activate a stress response. If, on the other hand, we fly often enough to feel more comfortable or are familiar with turbulence, we may find ourselves able to remain calm in the cabin and even possibly help calm the fears of scared passengers around us.
Perhaps not surprisingly, our earliest relationships and environments have the biggest impact on how accurately our subconscious interprets social behavior. If we were bullied or shamed in childhood for the way we looked or dressed by our parent-figures or peers, we may filter glances our way as indicating the same disdain, or we may assume that others are always talking about our appearance behind our back. If our parent-figures continually demanded high achievement or perfection from us as children, we may filter our actions or the actions of others through our own imaginary, often unattainable expectations or feel as though we never really measure up.
If you, like me, were abandoned (emotionally or physically) as a young child, you may interpret any moment of distance or disconnection with a partner or close friend as an indication of similar abandonment. In those of us with this core abandonment wound, we easily perceive moments of distance as a sign of conflict or upset within our relationships. I used to panic when a partner didn’t respond to my text in what I thought was a timely manner, offered a clipped or shortened answer in response to one of my questions, or remained quiet when we were spending time together. In those moments, I would often obsessively ask if anything was wrong, convinced that they were upset with me. That all stemmed from my own childhood, when my mom would give me the silent treatment and stop speaking to me or ignore my existence altogether, sometimes for weeks at a time, when she was deeply hurt by or disapproving of my actions or choices. Fearful of upsetting my mom, my dad enabled that treatment, sometimes even playing messenger between us, ultimately leaving me feeling abandoned by the two people I needed most.
Early in my relationship with Lolly, I regularly found myself upset with her consistent desire and requests for time alone, which hurt my feelings and activated my deeper wounds. Lolly, though, was not abandoning me. Instead, she had been raised by parents who modeled hyperindependence, and she had learned to be self-reliant. While her distance wasn’t an actual threat to our relationship, I inaccurately perceived it to be, even though there was no actual threat present.
Research actually shows that all childhood trauma, even bullying by our peers, can cause structural change in our amygdala,15 the part of our brain that detects threats in our environment, as well as in our prefrontal cortex,16 the region responsible for our “executive functions,” like our ability to plan, make decisions, and manage our social behavior. These structural changes as a result of childhood trauma create a state of hypervigilance whenever our nervous system is on alert. When this state becomes chronic or consistent over time it can manifest itself as social anxiety or complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), with related difficulties managing emotions, exercising inhibition, and, ultimately, having relationships.17 When our nervous system remains on high alert, we constantly scan our environment, engage in worst-case scenario thinking, and often become overwhelmed with racing thoughts while we anxiously wait for the other shoe to drop. Within our relationships, structural changes in our brain can cause us to mistakenly perceive aggression in both neutral facial expressions and calm tones of voice.18 When our amygdala is on high alert, we are more likely to see indicators of aggressive behaviors when none are present. The reality is when we experience overwhelming stress or have suffered past trauma, it continues to impact what we think and believe as well as how we perceive ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us.
If our neuroception is primed to misinterpret signs and perceive everything as possible danger, we can easily stay locked in a vicious cycle of conflict with others, that is mostly self-created. Our faulty neuroception won’t allow us to feel safe enough to open ourselves up to connecting with others on a deeper, more vulnerable level. Feeling constantly at risk of rejection, we’ll feel too exposed being vulnerable and allowing ourselves to be seen as we are. Though we may look to others and even expect them to help us feel “better” or more connected, we won’t be open to receiving their comfort or connection because we don’t feel safe enough to do so. Instead of being comforted by the physical presence, closeness, or touch of someone who is calm and grounded, some of us may even retract in fear.
Neuroception is an unconscious process that we don’t have conscious control over, though we can learn to shift how we instinctively interpret and respond to social cues from others. The first step is to become aware of those situations when we subconsciously assign old meanings to what we believe is happening around us. If someone we love sends us signals or tells us they want to be alone, we can break our habit of immediately assuming that we’re being abandoned, reconfirming our deepest fear that we’re unworthy of love. Instead, we can accept and respect their need for space or solitude as something we all need from time to time.
Similarly, we can become conscious of our tendency to be consumed by worries or concerns about how we look so we can begin to accept different versions of beauty. Or we can notice our endless quest for perfection and our tendency to be consumed by critical or diminishing self-thoughts, and choose instead to honor our individual strengths and quirks, regardless of how they “measure up” to others. I continue to practice these habits to help myself feel safe enough to just be me while remaining open and receptive to others and the world around me.
The more conscious we can all become of our subconscious perceptions and beliefs, the better able we’ll be to remove the conditioned filters that prevent us from accurately interpreting the behaviors of others around us. In chapter 6, we’ll talk more about how to expand our practice of mind consciousness and develop a new habit of conscious self-witnessing to become aware of our conditioned beliefs, feelings, and reactions that don’t serve our authentic Self.
YOUR DYSREGULATED NERVOUS SYSTEM
Each of the four stress responses is associated with behaviors, no matter who we are or where or how we grew up. Becoming familiar with these common indicators can help you identify when you or a loved one is in a stressed state, enabling you to better determine when you or they may need time or support to regulate or calm down.
Eruptor Mode (Fight Response)
Those who are in Eruptor mode feel most comfortable when they’re in a fight, seeking out or creating conflict any chance they get. Their nervous system is wired to be hyperactive, keeping them always looking for something—anything!—that could be an affront. When they find something offensive or the proverbial shoe hits the ground, they kick, scream, throw a tantrum, or explode on others. They’re often defensive, can’t see their own part in current circumstances, and don’t calm down easily, often holding a grudge or considering revenge. They often transition from nitpicking to throwing a tantrum to waiting and watching for the next issue. Their neuroception has been conditioned to perceive most social behavior as an insult, slight, hurt, or provocation.
