Bo Hylen
What a Resilient Nervous System
Actually Does
Many people in our society still associate being strong with being able to “hold it together” and push through without breaking down.
Even though this societal script is slowly changing, we might sometimes still see people living according to this narrative or find ourselves drawn to it.
This happens especially when this belief was part of our societal or family conditioning.
According to neuroscience, a truly resilient nervous system is something different.
Rather than being rigid and stuck in one mode of responding, it is flexible and able to move through different stages of processing difficult life events as well as through different emotions.
It can move into distress and, when the conditions are right, return to a state of regulation.
Of course, after a difficult event, when life does not allow us to process emotions because we need to handle survival logistics, care for our children, or keep things running, “holding it together” can be momentarily helpful.
The issue arises when people remain in these states for prolonged periods, from months to years, or when these survival strategies become a fixed part of their personality.
Neuroscience of resilience
A resilient nervous system is one that can mobilize in response to challenge, settle when safety is restored, and transition flexibly between these states without becoming chronically stuck in survival responses.
Resilience, neurobiologically speaking, is not about how much you can endure without reacting.
It is about how well your system can complete the cycle of moving through activation and returning to regulation, again and again.
The capacity to feel deeply, including painful emotions, is not the opposite of resilience. It is its foundation.
The cost of being “the strong one”
There is a cost to remaining trapped in the role of "the strong one."
Over time, we build an armour.
We learn to distance ourselves from our bodies and override our emotional responses to perform strength. People learn to rely on us and treat us as the “stable” one, the one who has it all under control.
When a stress response is interrupted before it has been fully processed and integrated, the brain does not receive the signal that the threat has passed. It keeps scanning. It keeps predicting danger, because as far as it knows, the danger was never resolved.
What we experience as chronic anxiety, hypervigilance, or a persistent sense that something is wrong is often not about the present moment at all.
It is the nervous system still waiting for a completion that never came.
How to complete the cycle?
Completing the cycle
Our nervous system follows a natural rhythm.
Like every healthy living system, it was never designed to remain in one state indefinitely.
Healing depends not on constant strength or endless growth but on allowing ourselves the natural rhythm of activation and rest, contraction and expansion, challenge and recovery.
Completing the cycle does not always look dramatic.
Sometimes it is allowing yourself to cry after holding it together for a long time.
Sometimes it is moving your body, or sitting with someone who does not try to fix you but simply stays with you.
The nervous system often waits for a felt sense of safety before it will finish what it started.
This is why we so often fall apart after the crisis is over rather than during it.
Capacity, not performance
Something unexpected can happen after even terrible life events, when we allow ourselves to move through them with adequate support.
The goal is not to become a different person.
It is to become a more integrated one.
Research on post-traumatic growth suggests that people who are able to process and integrate difficult experiences, rather than avoid them, often emerge with a greater capacity for positive emotion, closer relationships, and a clearer sense of what truly matters.
Not despite what happened, but because of having lived through it.
The inner strength that emerges from this process is quieter than the kind we were taught to admire.
It no longer depends on keeping life at a distance.
Rather, it is the capacity to experience life more fully, across its full spectrum, because we are no longer spending our energy keeping parts of it out.
Magda Agatha
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário