I remember a few years ago, a friend persuaded me to attend a meditation class with her. I couldn’t concentrate or focus, it was boring, and I was just desperate to get down the pub after.
This is just one example of how I typically lived for most of my life. If I did ever sit still, it was with a cigarette in one hand, and a large glass of wine in the other.
I drove at high speed, with loud music always blaring. I never slept, and had tried hypnotherapy, light therapy, Tibetan Bowls, everything over the years, eventually becoming addicted to sleeping pills, to add to my other addictions.
I had been told I ‘came out arguing’ for most of my life, and always found small talk boring. I was always the party animal, the entertainer, a self-confessed drama addict, flitting from one abusive relationship to the next, unable to maintain friendships for very long, and eventually developing an expensive cocaine habit, to ‘stay happy’ on a daily basis.
Finally, after yet another abusive relationship, when even the cocaine wasn’t making me happy anymore, I hit rock bottom. After a failed suicide attempt, my body and mind had had enough, and I went to bed, where I stayed for weeks.
Thanks to a wonderful supportive family and a few long-suffering, masochist friends, I eventually found myself sitting opposite a psychotherapist, who explained that I had been living with CPTSD, and a highly dysregulated nervous system for my entire life, and had had a massive nervous breakdown.
I had visited a therapist a few years before, having escaped a highly abusive relationship. She had informed me then that I was suffering from CPTSD, and was a codependent. I was in shock, reeling from the past few months, terrified of everything, unable to eat. But after a few weeks, as I started to feel better, I stopped going to therapy, thinking I was ‘healed’. In reality, all I had done was replace the relationship with alcohol, cocaine, toxic friends, and partying. Anything to escape the pain, subconsciously.
So now, almost a decade later, here I was being told that I had actually always had CPTSD, and been living in survival mode. I remember sobbing how could I not have known? And the therapist explaining it’s all I knew. It’s like telling a deaf person how to hear.
And now, my nervous system had had enough and broken down. It was time to heal. But what exactly is a dysregulated nervous system?
A dysregulated nervous system can cause mental health symptoms such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, poor attention and poor memory, but can also lead to destructive behaviour such as difficult relationships and communication; poor life choices; indulging in addictive substances to numb the pain of our dysregulated nervous system and mental health symptoms; hurting others, as our thoughts and behaviours are ruled by our limbic system ( our emotional brain), rather than the prefrontal cortex (our logical brain).
A dysregulated nervous system is usually caused by unresolved trauma responses from our past, and can manifest as mental health symptoms (such as depression, anxiety and panic, sleep issues, poor memory, poor concentration and attention, irritability, exhaustion), and inappropriate behaviour (such as rage outbursts, passive aggression, being shut down, lying, being vindictive or particularly argumentative), which can further exacerbate problems with relationships and mental health.
Trauma changes the nervous system. CPTSD can alter the nervous system to remain in a constant state of being prepared for danger (survival mode).
Trauma survivors may live feeling constantly on-edge, hypervigilant, or hyperaroused — or the complete opposite — numb, disconnected, or shut down (hypoaroused). Some may feel a combination of the two.
Because of the trauma that happened to you, changing your ability to feel steady and stable, your nervous system has a harder time regulating itself long after the traumatic events of the past. You might find yourself living in a constant state of activation or imbalance, struggling to ever feel regulated or calm. Why I had no hope at the meditation class, or escaping a speeding ticket every few months.
There are two main parts of the nervous system that are involved in trauma responses.
The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) protects you by activating the fight, flight, freeze or fawn trauma response. This is what gets activated immediately in a trauma response. For trauma survivors who now live in a state of hyperarousal, this part of the nervous system can stay activated and be in overdrive long term.
The parasympathetic nervous system helps you to regulate and rest. This restores your body to a state of calm. It controls the body’s ability to relax and regulates things like rest, digestion, and energy conservation.
These two systems usually work together, automatically, without a person’s conscious effort, as part of the autonomic nervous system. But when the sympathetic nervous system is activated, it’s harder for the parasympathetic system to do its job.
When the sympathetic nervous system is constantly activated, this chronic stress can affect your immune system and your health.
After trauma, the nervous system can remain prepared for danger.
Nervous system reactions are exaggerated and extended for complex trauma survivors because they needed those responses so often when experiencing trauma.
If a person experienced prolonged trauma or childhood trauma, those activated nervous system responses become part of their everyday lives. To protect them, their bodies started to live in hyperarousal (to notice danger early), or hypo-arousal (to ignore or numb out from what was happening). These nervous system responses stay— even when the person becomes an adult who is currently safe, and these responses are no longer necessary.
People who had a secure attachment during childhood, can regulate faster than trauma survivors. This is one reason EMDR works faster for single trauma event survivors. When your sympathetic nervous system is activated, your body thinks a tiger is chasing you – almost all of the time, and your mind cannot realise that you are safe.
So how can we help calm our nervous system, and learn to self-regulate?
• Grounding exercises
• Somatic therapy
• Breathing exercises or breathwork
• Meditation and mindfulness
• Yoga
• EFT
If you find it impossible to relax enough for these to work, as I did, you may need to heal the trauma within. See a trauma-informed therapist.
Andrea x
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