What it Means to heal on purpose
Despite our best efforts and intentions, we may experience difficulty managing our emotions, engaging in mutually-supportive relationships or feeling “safe-enough” in an inherently unsafe world. It turns out that, without our conscious awareness, each of these difficulties might be traced back to an underlying pattern of dysregulation of our autonomic nervous system.
Healing on Purpose is an invitation to learn to exercise more agency over your neurophysiology, shaping your nervous system to be more resilient and more accurately attuned to signs of external safety or danger.
When this happens, your thoughts and emotions are more likely to steer you away from relationships and situations that are inherently dangerous, invalidating or neglectful, and instead lead you toward more supportive, nurturing relationships and situations that engage your sense of play and purpose.
What is Trauma?
Human beings are born with nervous systems that are designed to seek safety in connection with each other. When a felt sense of safe connection is consistent enough during our formative years, we develop an internally-regulated social engagement system that allows us to experience the world as “safe enough” and “fair enough”, even though – by any objective measure – the world is inherently unsafe and unfair. Later, as adults, this internal sense of relative safety and fairness allows us to develop mutually respectful, nurturing relationships, and we organically grow psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually in a way that successfully meets life’s external challenges.
At Nest Behavioral Health, we define trauma as any threatening situation which we cannot effectively fight off and from which we cannot escape, that destroys the felt sense of safety and fairness that our nervous systems rely on to remain emotionally regulated, interpersonally connected, playful, and purposeful.
These situations include violence and sexual abuse, as well as other relational threats to our emotional safety, such as divorce, emotional neglect, childhood bullying, or a pattern of unrepaired disruptions to loving connection with our primary caregivers. Even events that happened before we were born, which may have shaped how our families relate to each other and the world, can cause trauma to be passed down intergenerationally, nervous system to nervous system.
When this impact lasts a long time, our neurophysiology becomes burdened with a dysregulated pattern of “fight, flight, and freeze”. As a result, we may habitually overreact or underreact to current physical or emotional threats, because our thoughts and our actions follow the lead of our autonomic nervous system that has been shaped by the historical trauma. Not knowing how to restore ourselves to a sense of well-being, we develop behavioral patterns to avoid these unwanted feelings. Diagnostically, the collection of resulting symptoms is called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD.
Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) is similar, but due to the young age at which the events occurred, our nervous systems may not have developed an internalized experience of sufficient safety or fairness in the first place.
Through the lens of polyvagal theory as it has been developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, the foundational theory on which Nest’s treatment approach is based, effective treatment of PTSD is aimed at restoring - or in the case of C-PTSD perhaps creating for the first time - greater neurological and cognitive capacity to regulate our emotional response to external stressors and to experience an enduring sense of safety and playfulness in connection with others.