Why Nervous System Regulation Feels Impossible With CPTSD

Hi, I'm Sarah Herstich and welcome to the Complex Trauma podcast. I'm an EMDR and Sematic Trauma therapist and I'm passionate about helping people reclaim their lives from the impact of trauma. If you're working on healing and still wondering why your body won't get on board or why you can't just move past all of this already, you're in the right place. We talk about what's actually happening in your nervous system, the trauma responses you've been living with, and why none of this feels as easy as people make it sound. No quick fixes, no pretending any of this is easy. Just honest conversations about what complex trauma does and what it actually takes to feel like yourself again. Let's get into it. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Complex Trauma podcast. So today, I wanted to just start off by telling you something that, honestly, it took me a really long time to kind of figure out. And I mean that both as a therapist, as a clinician and just as a person who's done a lot of their own work for a long time, I thought that people who were regulated, like people who seemed calm and grounded and present and able to handle things, I thought that they just had better coping skills than me. Like somewhere along the way, they found some breathing technique that actually worked or they had the absolute right therapist who gave them the right thing and I just hadn't found my own kind of version of that. So what I did was I kept looking, I did the work, I learned the tools. I mean, I literally taught the tools, right, early in my career, but there was still this part of me that just couldn't figure out why, why being calm, why being present, why it all felt so weird. Not like scary exactly, just really unfamiliar. An example that I can think of is like when someone is genuinely being kind to you and something in your body is just like holding its breath. Like, okay, when is it going to turn on its head? And the thing is, I objectively wasn't falling apart. I was functioning. I was really functioning really well actually from the outside. I was showing up. I was getting things done. I was taking care of people, but underneath all of that, I was simultaneously numb and in overdrive and I didn't have the language for that because it felt like some sort of contradiction. Like, how are you exhausted and wired all at the same time? So I kept thinking I just needed to try harder. I needed to sleep more. I needed to meditate more or better or something. I had to figure out why I kept hitting these walls that I couldn't see coming. And it wasn't until I started doing somatic work, somatic therapy, like actually learning to be in my body instead of just thinking about my body, that things started to actually make sense. Because here's the thing about talk therapy. And I say this as someone who deeply values talk therapy. You've heard me talk about this on the podcast. You can have every insight in the world and your body might be completely unbothered about your insight and your cognitive breakthrough. Like where it cracks something open for me in a way that thinking about things never, ever did. And what that did, it sent me cognitive. It sent me down a deep dive into into developmental trauma research that really truly changed how I understand myself and how I work with clients. Because what I finally got was this, some of us, many of us aren't failing at returning to a place of calm or regulation. We're returning to the only baseline we ever had, which has never come in the first place. And that's what I really want to talk about today. Because that is a completely different problem than not having found the right coping skill yet. And I want you to know that the answer isn't to try harder. I'm going to take a shot in the dark to say that you've been trying hard, harder than most people for a really, really long time. So today I'm going to give you some heavy understanding of where all this comes from. This is all based in nervous system stuff and somatic therapy. And sometimes I think understanding the why and giving yourself a little bit of grace of like, wait, I didn't create this. I can go a really long way and I can kind of propel you into your next step. Okay, so let's start with what I think is one of the missing pieces for people in this community, folks who identify as complex trauma survivors as having developmental trauma. When we talk about nervous system regulation, like most of the conversation out there, it assumes a certain starting point. It assumes that somewhere underneath all of the activation and the triggers and the chaos, there's this calm, lovely baseline. A resting state that's accessible, a place where your nervous system knows how to get back to. And for some people, that is very true. They do have a baseline, but it might have gotten disrupted over the years and the work is finding out their way back to it. But when no one talks about enough is this, what if the baseline never formed in the first place? This is what researchers who work in developmental trauma call foundational dysregulation. It's a mouthful. I'll say it again. It's a mental dysregulation and it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. When a child grows up without consistent access to safety, without a caregiver who could reliably help them regulate when things got overwhelming, the nervous system doesn't develop on top of a stable foundation. It develops on top of the dysregulation itself. So the instability becomes the architecture. So the baseline is definitely not calm. The baseline is bracing or scanning or that kind of type of numb that looks totally fine from the outside and feels like nothing and everything all at the same time on the inside. And guys, this matters so much because a lot of what we see about the nervous system on the internet, again, assumes that you have this complex to return to, the breathing exercises, the grounding techniques, the window of tolerance work. All of it is designed to help you come back down. But if there's no calm to come back to, if your system never actually learned what settled feels like in the body, those tools, they're going to hit a wall. No, not because you're doing them wrong because they're trying to return you somewhere your nervous system has really never been consistently. And here's what I don't want you to walk away from this with. And that's thinking that regulation isn't possible for you because that's absolutely not what I'm saying at all. Because this is the thing about the nervous system that I think is actually pretty beautiful. It's always trying to find some version of equilibrium. That's exactly what it's designed to do. That's its whole job. And here's what this means for you specifically. Given the defensive accommodations that we're going to talk about in a few minutes here, even the blended states of feeling, even the hypervigilance and the shutdown, all of that is your nervous system trying to regulate in the only way it had available to it. It never stopped trying. It just had really limited options to work with. So regulation is absolutely possible. The drive towards equilibrium never goes away. It just gets expressed in ways that don't always look like what we'd expect regulation to look like. What's different for people with foundational dysregulation is that the path there looks different. You're not returning to somewhere familiar. You're building something new maybe for the first time and that takes longer. It needs more support. It needs a different kind of approach than just a handful of grounding techniques. What I want you to hold on to is that it genuinely is possible. So here's what we see in our offices quite a bit. Someone comes in and then been doing the work. They know their triggers. They have a regulation plan and they still feel like they're white knuckleing through every single day. And underneath that there's this intense layer of shame. This belief that everyone else figure something out that they just can't seem to get, that there's something wrong with them. And again, you're not failing at any tools. You're working with a nervous system that was built under completely different conditions than those tools were actually designed for. That's it. That's the whole thing. In CPTSD and Trauma Communities Online, this shows up in really specific language that I see over and over again. If you look on Reddit, you're going to see this. People say things and I want you to know this is actually from Reddit. I don't know what comp feels like in my body. Or my therapist keeps asking me to find a safe memory and I genuinely can't find one. Or I thought everyone felt this way. I didn't know this wasn't just how being alive felt. Ugh, that one. I just stopped at me when I read it on my screen. Because that really is foundational dysregulation in one sentence. When chronic survival physiology has been your normal sense before you had language for any of it, you don't experience it as dysregulation necessarily. You experience it as just reality. You don't know you're running hot because you never run any other way. Peter Levine, who develops somatic experiencing and has spent decades and decades studying how trauma lives in the body, talks about how survival physiology is supposed to be time limited. It activates, it does its job, and then it completes. It's like a wave. It comes up and it comes down. The threat passes, the body settles. You come back to baseline. But when early development happens inside chronic stress or chronic unpredictability, that completion cycle never actually happens. The survival response never gets the signal that it's okay to stop. And over time, that activated state stops feeling like an emergency and starts to just feel like a regular Wednesday afternoon. And here's a part that I think really matters. The nervous system that develops inside that kind of chronic activation is not the same as a nervous system that got dysregulated later on in life. It's not a well-resourced system that just got rattled. It's a system that organized itself around the dysregulation from the very beginning. So the scanning for danger, the hypervigilance, the always waiting for something to go wrong, that's not a symptom that you can just decide to turn off. It's baked into the architecture of how that nervous system learned to function. It's not a habit. It's a foundation. Which means that calm, present, chill, when it does show up, it doesn't necessarily feel like relief. It feels suspicious. It's like the quiet before the storm, the quiet before something is going to go wrong, waiting for that other shoot to drop. And I think that's true for a lot of people with this history. The sense of calm actually was the quiet before something went wrong. So the nervous system learned that peace was temporary and probably some sort of setup and it stays braced, even in objectively safe environments. Even with people who are genuinely trustworthy and yes, even years into therapy. I see this question a lot on my Instagram and on my TikTok. People wondering, how do I build a sense of safety? Nothing feels safe. I don't know what safe feels like. I don't know what trust feels like. And this can be one of the reasons why. So the next thing with this that I want kind of when I've talked about is a question that I've heard a lot. Again, another question on TikTok, another question on Instagram. Also in our therapy offices, it came up in the triggers episode that was released a handful of weeks ago. And it was, why do I feel completely opposite things at the same exact time? Examples of this. Why am I exhausted, but I can't sleep? Why am I so desperate to connect with someone also pushing everyone away in the same breath? Why do I feel like this frantic urgency to do something and also have absolutely no ability to actually move? Why am I completely numb and completely overwhelmed at the same time? Why does my body feel like it's running a marathon while I'm just sitting still in the couch? And if you've experienced this, I know you know that when you try to explain that to someone, you watch their face go kind of like, what? And then you might start back paddling like, never mind, it's just really hard to explain, I'm probably tired, I'm probably overreacting, I'm probably overthinking, and then you're sitting alone with all of that stuff all over again. So I want you to know that we do see this a lot in our offices. Someone's got to cross from us and they're trying to describe what's happening inside of them. And they just keep stopping themselves because it sounds so contradictory. And then they apologize, and they actually apologize for how confusing they sound. And every single time I say something like, you are not confusing. What's happening in your nervous system is a lot more complicated than the language we've been given to describe it. So let's dive a little bit into why this actually happens. Because there's this real physiological explanation for this and has nothing to do with you being too much or making things up or being too confused or overthinking things. Most basic nervous system education, like I talked about earlier, gives you the simplified picture of how your autonomic nervous system works. You have the sympathetic system, which is your gas pedal, activation, fight flight mobilization, heart rate up, muscles ready, system on high alert. And then you have your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your break. Rest digest, slow down, and settle. And the model that most people learn to talk about on the internet is that these two systems they take turns. Gas pedal up, break released, breaking gauged, gas pedal down, clean, reciprocal, goes back and forth. And again, we come back to a nervous system that develops inside consistent safety and reliable co-regulation. That can be how it works. But here's what that model leaves out. Research on accumulated traumatic stress shows us that these two systems don't always take turns. Under chronic stress, under the kind of survival load that comes from developmental and complex trauma, it can actually activate simultaneously. Both systems, on at the same time, are both systems dampened at the same time, working against each other instead of cooperating. Peter LeBeen, again, the OG of somatic experience saying describes this as one of the most challenging presentations of traumatic stress physiology. Because when both systems are firing at once, your body is genuinely trying to accomplish two opposing things at the very same time. It's like hitting the gas and break at the same time. And the result isn't stillness, it's grinding. It's that internal chaos that you just can't find words for no matter how you try. This is what happens when you feel wired and exhausted at the same time. Your sympathetic system is activated, keeping you alert and scanning and on edge, and your parasympathetic system is also activated, trying to shut things down, numb things out, conserve energy. They're working against each other. And you're caught in the middle, wondering why you can't just land on one feeling and hang out there for a hot second. This explains frozen panic. The shutdown that still feels frantic underneath, the dissociation that comes with the heart that won't stop racing, and the emotional flatness that somehow co-exist with a body that's completely braced in holding everything together all at once. This kind of looks like a picture of me years ago. Go into a therapy office, seeming really calm, really contained, really together. But my jaw is locked. My shoulders are up to my ears. My breath is barely moving. And my therapist would name it and say something like, OK, your body looks a little bit tense and braced right now. I'd be like, what are you talking about? I'm cool, because I had no idea. Because my top layer, my brain, was reporting fine when my body underneath was working incredibly hard the entire time. That's the disconnect between what the mind is saying and what the body is actually doing. And that's one of the hallmarks of a blended state. The systems are so busy fighting each other that the signal stopped making a lot of sense. So people learn to just override them, to trust what their brain says, rather than what their body feels, which makes complete sense as an adaptation, right? But what it also means is that people lose access to this really important source of information about their internal experience. In trauma communities online, what we see a lot is the word chaotic. I feel chaotic inside. My emotions feel chaotic. I can't explain what I'm feeling because it contradicts itself. And again, that's the language of blended states. This is exactly how it shows up. That's someone trying to describe a physiological experience that our emotional vocabulary just wasn't built for. Because we have words like anxious. We have words like depressed. And we even have the word numb. But what we don't really have a word for is anxious and depressed and numb, all fighting for dominance at the very same time when none of them really win. So people default to, I'm a hot mess. Something's wrong with me. I don't even know what I feel anymore. And I come back to this. Your nervous system learned to respond this way because it was living in conditions that demanded it to. The blending happened because the threats were chronic and unpredictable and often came from people who were supposed to be safe. Your system didn't have a luxury of clean, organized responses. It had to improvise constantly over years of time. And this is what years of improvised survival physiology looks like when it becomes your default. Okay, so more on this, I know. We're really heading in this episode, but hang in there because I think this is really important to help you understand pieces of why you feel like you can't just use coping tools and everything is fine. Blended states make regulation significantly harder. That's not to discourage you. I'm saying it because I think a lot of people who have been trying to regulate a blended nervous system with tools that were designed for much cleaner presentations. And when those tools don't work, but like they're supposed to, people conclude that they're the problem and layers of shame get built and built and built. You are absolutely not the problem. Again, like I talked about with foundational dysregulation, most regulation techniques assume a pretty straightforward presentation, but when you're both activated and shut down at the very same time, those techniques can actually work against each other. Like you try to slow your breath and the activated part of your system fights it. You try to add movement and the shut down part of your system resists. If that happened to you in therapy or in a yoga class, in a breath work or a raky session, and any well-intentioned healing space, this might be exactly why. It's not necessarily that the modality was wrong for you. If that the pace or the intensity didn't match where your nervous system actually was. And that is really why slow is not just a preference and trauma work for blended states. Slow is actually a clinical necessity. Tiny careful doses of regulation are the name of the game. Micro shifts rather than big dramatic releases. A nervous system that simultaneously hitting the gas and the brake pedal does not need more intensity. It needs patience. It needs someone who understands that settling is going to look really different here. And that's not a sign of failure or not doing it right. That's just what doing the actual work looks like. Okay, so foundational dysregulation. Lended states, we've been talking about what happens to a nervous system that never got a stable foundation. If you're here, if you're living with complex trauma, I know you know. And now I wanna talk about what a person actually does when they're living inside of all of that. Because you don't sit there. I don't just sit here. Nobody just sits there. When your nervous system can't access genuine regulation and when co-regulation wasn't reliably available growing up and self-regulation never got properly built, you have to find other ways to manage. This is the adaptation talk that we do in trauma therapy. You just have to. The alternate is complete overwhelm and your system is not gonna let that happen if it can help it. So you get creative. And I would say in a remarkably brilliant and really creative way, in ways that you probably had no conscious awareness of it all. Researchers and clinicians who work with complex trauma and developmental trauma call these defensive accommodations. And what these are, or just what the name is, defense it. Built by a very young nervous system that was doing everything it possibly could to survive an environment that wasn't safe. The managed feelings that were just too big to create some sense of control in a situation where control wasn't available. They were intelligent, brilliant. They were adaptive. They probably kept you going in ways that maybe you'll never fully understand. And then like they do, they fall you into adulthood where they stopped being emergency survival tools and became just the default way you move through the world. And that's where things get really complicated. So I wanna walk you through what these actually look like. I really want you to try to recognize yourself in this. No, not to pile on shame, never to pile on more shame. But because recognition can be, we're being resilient to the shame actually starts. First one, perfectionism. If I can do everything right, nothing bad can happen. If I'm beyond reproach, nobody can come for me. If I never make a mistake, I am safe. This one runs so deep for people with complex trauma because it was often literally true at some point. Being perfect or being as close to it as you could get actually did reduce the threat level in the room. It actually did keep apparent from escalating. It actually did make you more invisible or more approved of or more protected. And your nervous system clocked it. Perfectionism equals safety. Now you're an adult working or running a business or raising kids or trying to exist in relationships. And you can't turn it off because your system genuinely still believes your safety depends on it. The next one, hyperindependence. I've written tons of blogs and done a couple episodes on hyperindependence and I'll link to them in the show notes because this goes really deep. But the short version is, if I never need anyone, I can never be let down. If I handle everything myself, I remove the variable of other people being unreliable or unsafe or just not there. And this one is sneaky because our culture celebrates it so dang much. We call it being a go-getter, being low maintenance, being strong and self-sufficient. But underneath it is really a nervous system that might have learned needing things from people was dangerous. That asking was met with shame or absence or anger. So you stop asking. And then over time, it's really easy to forget that you ever needed anything at all. Next one, my old friend, people pleasing. This one is about managing the threat level in the room by managing the emotional states of the people in it. If I can keep everyone around me okay, if I can anticipate what they need before they even know they need it, if I can smooth every edge and fill every silence and make sure nobody's upset, then I'll be safe. Something about people pleasing to remember is that it's not originated in just kindness. At its root, it's more like surveillance. What it is is a really sophisticated threat detection and management system under the guys of being a really good person. And you may be a really good person. I'm a good person. And people pleasing has been an issue in my life. And if you don't have words for it or a name for it, often people pleasing don't have any idea that they're doing it. They just feel this kind of low grade anxiety. When someone around them seems a little bit off, this compulsive need to fix it, this inability to let someone else just be in a bad mood without making it their responsibility to solve. That really is a system that learned that other people's emotional states were directly connected to their physical or emotional safety. Next one, intellectualizing. Another one that I love. This one is really common in high achievers. And in people who found that being smart was the thing that gave them value or protection in their family. If I say in my head, if I don't have to be in my body, if I can analyze and understand and explain everything, I have the illusion of control. If I make everything into a concept, it can't actually hurt me. In trauma work, we see this all the time. Someone comes into the office and they can talk about their trauma with this remarkable amount of precision. They know the theories, they've read all the books, they can explain exactly what happened to them and what the neurological implications are. And their body is completely flat the entire time they're talking. They're totally disconnected from what they're saying. Because the intellect became the escape for the felt experience. And if that escape is primed and used enough, it has an easy way of becoming the go-to way of being. All right, dissociation. We've talked about this for a couple of episodes, but like I said, I could talk about this probably for the next five years. So dissociation exists on a spectrum. And that's important to name because dissociation often gets talked about in pretty extreme terms and a lot of people miss the more subtle versions in themselves. At the far end, yes, some things that we've talked about losing time, feeling completely outside of your body, distinct identity states. But dissociation also looks like spacing out in the middle of a conversation, driving somewhere and having no memory of the root, watching yourself from a slight distance like you're observing your life rather than actually living in it. And to be honest, dissociation really is one of the most merciful things that a nervous system can do. When what's happening is too much to be present for or when there's no escape or no one's coming to help, leaving is really the only option available. So the system has to figure out a way to leave and it gets really good at it. And then it starts doing it any time things get a little bit too intense. Even when intense just means a hard conversation with your partner or a therapy session that's getting a little too close to something real. Next one, emotional shutdown. If I feel nothing, nothing can hurt me. This one often gets read as depression and sometimes it really does overlap with depression, but they're not always the same thing. Emotional shutdown as a defensive accommodation is specifically about the nervous system learning that feeling things led to bad outcomes. Maybe expressing emotion was met with ridicule or punishment or just complete absence of a response. Maybe big feelings made an already unstable environment even more dangerous. Oh, your system had to find a dimmer switch and turned it all the way down. So now as an adult, when emotions try to come up, they get caught somewhere between the body and awareness and they just kind of linger there, unprocessed and taking up space. Another really common one over functioning. This one of course overlaps with perfectionism and hyperindependence, but it has its own flavor. Over functioning is about staying so busy, so needed, so productive, so useful that you never have time to stop to feel what's underneath. If I'm always doing, always helping, always solving, always moving, I never have to sit in the silence where the hard stuff lives. The calendar is too full, the to-do list never ends. There's always one more thing and that one more thing is not really about being productive, it's about being alone with yourself. Okay, so perfectionism, hyperindependence, people pleasing, intellectualizing, dissociation, emotional shutdown over functioning. Maybe you're recognizing yourself in one of these, maybe you're recognizing yourself in all of them. And maybe what's coming up feels like something between relief and grief and maybe you just feel a little bit uncomfortable, kind of like you're relieved that you're not just making this up but also grieving. I think grief is a really normal part of trauma recovery because you're starting to realize how long you've been working this hard just to feel okay-ish, maybe not even okay-ish. That grief is really real and it's worth honoring. Here's what I really want you to know. You're anxiety, you're control issues, you're trust issues, you're inability to ask for help, you need to keep everyone around you happy, you're tendency to go numb when things get really hard. A lot of that is not who you are, it's what you, your system, built to survive who and what you are with. And that distinction, it really, really matters because you can't shame yourself out of survival strategy. It just doesn't work. You can push it down for a while, maybe you already have, but it will always find another way out. Like we've talked about today, it's a nervous system response that's older than your capacity for conscious choice and it's trying in the only way it knows how to keep you safe. The path forward really isn't disciplining yourself harder, it's not trying harder or having even more self-awareness to just stop doing the thing. It's slowly, carefully with real support, building something safer to replace it with, creating enough genuine regulation that the defensive accommodation stop feeling necessary. Here's what I want you to actually walk away with today, not just to file away intellectually and forget about tomorrow morning. The first thing is this, there is a real reason behind all of it, not a reason that means you're damaged, be on repair, not a reason that lets anyone who hurts you off the hook. A real physiological research back reason why you are the way you are. Your nervous system builds itself inside conditions that most people will never fully understand and it adapted. It found a way to keep you functioning when functioning genuinely was really, really difficult. So baseline of dysregulation, the blended states, the survival strategies you've been calling your personality flaws that you feel so much shame about. None of that is evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with you. It's evidence that something happened to you and your system responded the only way it knew how. So no, you're not crazy, you're not too much, you are absolutely not broken. You're someone who's system learned to survive inside conditions that require an extraordinary amount of adaptation and you're still here, that's no small thing. The second thing, the tools they're not failing you. The starting point is just different. If you've ever tried a regulation technique out there, maybe from my episode about triggers and you still feel like you're whitenuckling through your days, you're probably not doing it wrong. You're likely working with a nervous system that needs a different approach than the standard model assumes. One that goes slower. One that builds micro-experiences of safety rather than trying to make big, dramatic shifts. One that understands that for some nervous systems, calm and present is not a return to something that's familiar. It's almost like a completely different destination that has to be rebuilt from scratch. And no, that's not a life sentence. It's just a more accurate map. And an accurate map, even when the terrain is harder than you would hope for, is always better than wandering around with the wrong map. And here's the third thing, this isn't about blame. Not theirs, and maybe more importantly, not yours. I know some of what I went over today might bring up some complicated feelings about the people who are supposed to keep you safe and didn't. And I'm not going to tell you what to do with that because it really is deeply personal and it deserves a real support, not a podcast kind of sound bite. But what I do want to say is this. Understanding why you are the way you are is about finally having an accurate picture of what actually happened in your system so that you can stop fighting yourself and start working with yourself instead. Because if you're anything like the people that I work with, if you're anything like me, you've been blaming yourself for responses that were never in your conscious control. You've been calling this survival intelligence a character flaw. And you've been trying to shame yourself out of strategies that your system built before you were even old enough to have any type of say in it. And when you're ready, understanding what got built and why it got built and slowly and carefully with real support, building something that actually serves you better, that truly is what you deserve, not because you've earned it or because you've suffered enough or because you've magically found the right techniques just because you're a person and people deserve to feel safe in their own bodies. Full stop. Okay, so that's what I have for you today. I'm so curious what you think about today's episode because it was a lot more talking than I usually do by myself. I feel like I had a lot of ideas after the last few episodes and I wanted to give you solid information to help you understand what's happening in your system so that you can take some of the shame away from your experience. So I'd really love to hear any of your thoughts. Come find me on Instagram, send me a DM, send me an email, and if you feel like you know somebody who needs to hear an episode like this, go ahead and share it with them. Okay, everyone, we will be back next week for another episode and until then, take really good care. Thanks for listening to the Complex Trauma podcast. If this episode helped, the best thing you can do is share it with someone who needs to hear it. If you have a minute, leaving a review really does help other people find the podcast. You can follow along on Instagram at Sarah Herstich, LCSW, for more in-between episodes. If you're looking for an EMDR or Trauma therapist and want to work with us at ReClaim Therapy in Pennsylvania, you can find us at www.ReClaimtheraB.org. And a quick reminder, I am a therapist but I'm not your therapist. Nothing in this podcast is meant to replace actual therapy or treatment. If you're in crisis or things feel really unsafe right now, please reach out to someone. You can call 911, call our text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or head to your nearest ER. Thanks so much for being here and we'll see you next week.