What Is Nervous System Regulation—and Why It Matters in Trauma Healing
If you’ve ever felt stuck in fight, flight, freeze, or collapse, you’ve experienced your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you. The nervous system is the body’s natural detection system constantly scanning for signs of danger, and signs of safety both inside the body and in our environment. But when you’ve lived through trauma—especially complex trauma, ongoing stress, or identity-based harm—your nervous system can stay in survival mode long after the danger has passed. That’s where nervous system regulation comes in.
Put simply, nervous system regulation is the process of helping your body shift out of survival responses and into a state of calm, connection, and safety. It’s not about forcing yourself to “calm down” or “get over it.” It’s about gently creating the conditions where your body can feel safe enough to rest, relate, and heal.
Why It’s So Hard to “Just Relax” After Trauma
For many women and LGBTQIA+ folks, the nervous system has been trained to stay hypervigilant. This may come from early experiences of emotional neglect or abuse, discrimination, medical trauma, unsafe relationships, or growing up in environments where it wasn’t safe to be your full self.
You might find that you’re constantly bracing for something to go wrong, numbing out, or cycling between feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. You might be thinking “I need a break,” or googling “how to let go of the past?” This is not a personality flaw. It’s your nervous system doing its best to help you survive. But you deserve more than survival—you deserve a sense of inner safety in your body.
What Nervous System Regulation Looks Like (and What It Doesn’t)
Regulation doesn’t necessarily look like sitting still or meditating in silence. Sometimes it looks like:
Shaking out your body after a tense conversation
Wrapping yourself in a cozy blanket while drinking a cup of tea and focusing on the texture and temperature of the blanket and mug on your skin
Moving your body in ways that feel good
Singing, humming, or gargling to activate the vagus nerve. Future blog post to come about the vagus nerve which is the longest cranial nerve in our body!
Pausing to notice your body through the senses in this moment What can I hear right now? What can I touch? What can I smell?
Regulation is deeply individual. What soothes one person may feeling overwhelming to another. The goal of nervous system regulation isn’t to feel calm all the time—it’s to feel empowered in navigating your emotional states, without shame or shutdown.
Why Nervous System Work Is Foundational in online EMDR and Trauma Therapy
In online EMDR therapy and other trauma-informed approaches, nervous system regulation is not a bonus—it’s the foundation. EMDR therapy has 8 stages, and step 2 is preparation. Before we can work on the past, we make sure you have tools to stay connected and regulated in the present.
This might mean in the preparation stage, learning how to notice the signs of dysregulation in your body, building somatic or body-based tools, or creating rituals that bring you back to yourself. Regulation creates the inner scaffolding that helps your system feel safe enough to do the deeper healing work of EMDR counseling.
You Deserve to Feel Safe in Your Body Again
If you’ve learned to live in a state of constant alertness, numbness, or emotional distress, regulation can feel unfamiliar at first—even scary. That’s okay. Your nervous system may not be used to safety yet. But with time, compassion, and support, your body can learn that it’s safe to come out of survival mode.
You don’t have to figure this out alone. Trauma-informed therapy can help you reconnect with your body’s wisdom, gently expand your capacity to feel, and move toward a life that doesn’t feel like one long emergency.
Want to Learn More About Nervous System Healing?
If you’re a woman or LGBTQIA+ person interested in online EMDR therapy and somatic approaches to trauma healing, I’d love to connect with you. Together, we can create a space where your body and your story are honored—without pressure, without judgment.
Click here to schedule a free consultation and take the next step towards healing from the inside out.
