Your Body Is Not Broken

By Ann Sullivan, RTC, SEP, ASAT Registered Therapeutic Counsellor | Somatic Experiencing Practitioner | Vancouver Island, BC

Your nervous system is not broken. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

I say this to almost every person who sits across from me for the first time. They arrive carrying something heavy. A pattern they cannot stop. A feeling they cannot name. A sense that something is fundamentally wrong with them. And one of the most important things I can offer, before we do anything else, is this: what you are experiencing has a biological explanation. Your body is not betraying you. It is responding.

I have sat with hundreds of people over fifteen years of practice. People who have survived things that should not have happened to them. People who cannot understand why they keep returning to the same relationships, the same states, the same sense of being unreachable to themselves. And again and again, what I have watched happen when someone begins to understand their own nervous system is not dramatic. It is quiet. Something in them settles. The story they have been telling about themselves, the one where they are the problem, begins to loosen.

Understanding the biology of how you feel does not fix anything on its own. But it changes the relationship you have with your own experience. When you understand why your body does what it does, you stop fighting it. And that is where the real work begins.

Before You Even Notice

Before you are consciously aware of anything, your nervous system is already assessing the environment around you. This process is called neuroception. It describes the way your autonomic nervous system scans for safety, danger, and life threat below the level of conscious thought. The term was developed by researcher Stephen Porges, whose work has shaped how I think about almost everything I do in the room with clients.

Neuroception is not thinking. It is not a decision you make. It happens in the body, in the brainstem, faster than any cognitive process can follow. By the time you notice that something feels wrong in a room, your nervous system has already been tracking it for several seconds. The slight tension in someone's voice. The quality of light. A smell that does not quite register consciously but is there nonetheless.

This system evolved to keep us alive. In environments where real threats were common, the ability to detect danger before the thinking mind caught up was the difference between survival and death. The problem is that this same system is operating in us now, in modern lives that look nothing like the environments it was designed for. A difficult email can trigger the same neuroceptive response as a physical threat. A tone of voice can activate a survival response that takes hours to settle.

I see this in my office regularly. Someone will describe a moment that seems small from the outside. A look from a colleague. A particular silence from a partner. And their body responded as though something catastrophic was happening. They often feel embarrassed by this. They should not. This is not weakness. This is biology.

Three Ways Your Body Responds

Your autonomic nervous system operates through three distinct pathways, each associated with a different set of behaviours and a different quality of experience.

The first is the ventral vagal system. What we might think of as the social engagement system. When this system is online, you feel connected, regulated, present. You can think clearly. You can read faces. You can listen and be heard. This is the state we are aiming for in therapy, and in life. It is not a state of bliss or the absence of difficulty. It is a state of capacity. You can meet what comes.

The second is the sympathetic system. The activation system. When neuroception detects danger, the sympathetic system mobilises. Heart rate increases. Breath quickens. Muscles prepare for action. This is the fight or flight response most people are familiar with. In appropriate doses, activation is healthy. It gives you the energy to respond to genuine challenges. The difficulty comes when the system stays activated long after the threat has passed, or when it activates in response to things that are not actually threatening but that the nervous system has learned to treat as if they were.

The third is the dorsal vagal system. The oldest pathway, associated with shutdown and collapse. When neuroception detects a threat that feels inescapable, this system can pull the brakes entirely. Numbness. Dissociation. Profound fatigue. A sense of not being quite present in your own body. This is the freeze response. It is not passivity or weakness. It is the most ancient survival mechanism we have. The body, faced with something overwhelming, goes still.

In my practice I work with people across all three of these states. Some arrive in chronic activation. Wired, anxious, unable to settle, convinced that if they just think about it hard enough they will find a way out. Others arrive in shutdown. Flat, disconnected, wondering why they cannot feel anything, why the things that used to matter no longer seem to reach them. Many move between the two, sometimes within a single session.

What I want people to understand is that neither state is a character flaw. Activation is not anxiety disorder. Shutdown is not depression, though it can look like it. These are nervous system states. And nervous system states can change.

The goal is not to eliminate activation or prevent shutdown. The goal is to build more flexibility. More capacity to move through the states without getting stuck. In my work, we move slowly and carefully, building the system's tolerance gradually, teaching it that it is safe to feel, and safe to settle.

Sometimes that settling happens through conversation alone. Sometimes the body needs something more direct. I follow what the person in front of me needs.

What's Happening Inside You

Each autonomic state comes with its own neurochemical signature. Your nervous system does not just change your behaviour. It changes your internal chemistry.

In the ventral vagal state, the chemistry of connection is online. Oxytocin makes you available for social connection. Vasopressin supports pair bonding and trust. These chemicals are not manufactured by willpower or positive thinking. They emerge naturally when the nervous system feels safe enough to allow them. This is why connection itself is medicine. Not metaphorically. Literally. Safe relationship changes the chemistry of the body.

In activation, the chemistry shifts. Adrenaline and cortisol flood the system, preparing the body for action. These are not harmful chemicals in themselves. They are appropriate responses to genuine threat. The problem is chronicity. A nervous system that lives in low-grade activation produces cortisol continuously. Over time this has real consequences for sleep, for immune function, for the ability to feel safe in connection with others.

In shutdown, the chemistry shifts again. Endogenous opioids, the body's own pain-numbing compounds, are released. This explains why people in shutdown sometimes describe feeling nothing, or feeling as though they are watching their life from a distance. The body is trying to make an unbearable experience bearable. It is an act of self-protection, even when it does not feel that way.

I find that this is often the most relieving thing for people to hear. Not that their numbness will go away immediately. But that it made sense. That their body was doing something intelligent, even in the midst of something terrible. Understanding this does not change the chemistry immediately. But it changes the story. And changing the story is part of the work.

Where You Are Right Now

Your autonomic state is not fixed. It is a spectrum, and you move along it continuously throughout each day, each hour, sometimes each minute.

What determines where you are on that spectrum? Neuroception. The ongoing, unconscious assessment of safety and threat. The relationships you are in. The environments you inhabit. Your history, particularly your early history, which shapes the calibration of the system long before you have any conscious memory of it.

This last point matters enormously in my work. The nervous system learns. It is shaped by experience, especially early experience, especially relational experience. A child who grows up in an environment where safety was unpredictable develops a nervous system calibrated for unpredictability. It is not a malfunction. It was the right adaptation for that environment. The difficulty is that the system does not automatically recalibrate when the environment changes. It needs help. It needs new experiences. Repeated, embodied, relational experiences of safety.

This is why trauma work is body work, even when it happens through conversation. You cannot think your way to a regulated nervous system. Insight is valuable. Understanding helps. But the system that was shaped by experience must be reshaped by experience. New experiences of safety. New experiences of connection. Slowly, over time, the system learns that it is allowed to settle.

In my office, that settling can look like a long exhale. A loosening in the shoulders. A moment of quiet where there was agitation before. Small things. The body finding its way back to itself.

This is what we do together.

If any of this resonates, if you recognise yourself in the activation, or the shutdown, or the longing for the ventral vagal state you can remember but cannot seem to find, you are not alone, and you are not broken. You are a nervous system that learned to survive. And survival is something to be honoured, even as we make room for something more.

This is where the work begins.