What is the Story of Your Nervous System?
Working in trauma, grief, and attachment requires a framework of understanding people through the story of their nervous system. You see, it is our nervous system that has been collecting data our whole lives that determines our emotional, behavioral, and cognitive experiences. Our nervous system holds the story of our life experiences-including the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Have you ever thought about yourself in this way? What is the story of your nervous system? How does your body respond in times of stress, love, excitement, fear, or rejection (to name a few)? How do you respond to being needed by another person? In contrast, how do you respond when someone doesn’t need you? What do you do when someone expresses emotion in front of you? What about when you show emotion in front of others? These are all questions that our nervous system answers.
Learning the story of our nervous system is an overwhelming process. Acknowledging relationships and experiences that were significant in our lives is often heavy and emotionally intense. I find we often want so badly to tell ourselves that things didn’t matter “that much,” or that we’ve “moved on,” or that “it all happened so long ago I was a kid.” We have the same nervous system our whole lives. It’s always taking in data and that data gets encoded into our emotional, behavioral, and cognitive functioning, at any age. As much as I wish this was true, age is not relevant. Even experiences that occur before we can even talk are influential to our nervous system.
Today I invite you to go through the questions I’ve posed throughout today’s message. Take some time and think about the story of your nervous system. Consider what life events and relationships make up the chapters to the story. And, as an added challenge-I invite you to start perceiving the people in your lives through a similar lens. While you may not know the story of their nervous system and the intimate details involved, it can do a wonder for our relationships if we simply practice being curious, rather than being immediately judgmental. When a person in your life has a reaction that stands out to you, I invited you to remind yourself, they too have a story.
Be mindful, lead with love, and don’t forget to listen.
Dr. C
