The Body Was Here Before Psychology

Your nervous system is much older than our language for understanding it.

Before there was therapy, people cried.

Before there was breathwork, breathing changed in response to fear, relief, connection and rest.

Before there were somatic practices, bodies trembled.

Before psychology gave us attachment theory, human beings reached for one another.

Before anyone used phrases like nervous system regulation, nervous systems were already attempting to regulate.

We have become remarkably sophisticated at describing the human experience.

We have names for our patterns.

Models for our behaviour.

Therapies for our wounds.

Techniques for helping ourselves return to safety.

And many of those things are extraordinarily valuable.

But sometimes I wonder whether all this language has quietly created an illusion:

that healing begins with the moment we learn how to do it.

Perhaps it doesn't.

Perhaps sometimes learning about healing is actually learning to recognize capacities that were already here.

The map came later.

The territory was already here.

What the Body Does After Danger

There is an observation often shared in conversations about trauma.

Watch some animals following an intense threat and you may see them tremble or shake.

Humans can tremble too.

Think about hands shaking after narrowly avoiding a car accident.

Knees trembling after an enormous fright.

The shivering that sometimes arrives after an intensely stressful experience.

It's tempting to tell a wonderfully simple story about this:

The body shakes, the trauma leaves, and the nervous system resets.

But human trauma is considerably more complicated than that.

Trembling isn't a magical eraser for traumatic experience, and we don't have good reason to reduce trauma to a quantity of physical energy trapped somewhere in the muscles waiting to be discharged.

But perhaps we don't need that story for the observation to matter.

Because there is still something worth noticing:

the body responds.

And sometimes its response looks like shaking.

Which raises a question I find much more interesting than whether trembling can "cure" trauma.

Why are we so quick to assume that every uncomfortable thing the body does needs to be stopped?

Stop Crying. Stop Shaking. You're Fine.

Many of us learn remarkably early what regulation is supposed to look like.

Quiet.

Still.

Controlled.

A child falls and begins sobbing.

You're okay. Stop crying.

Someone becomes overwhelmed.

Calm down.

A frightened person begins shaking.

Take control of yourself.

Someone experiences something devastating.

Be strong.

Sometimes these words are offered with enormous love.

We want another person's distress to end because we care about them.

Sometimes we are frightened by emotions we don't know how to hold.

Sometimes we're simply repeating what was taught to us.

But gradually, many of us absorb a subtle lesson:

distress itself is evidence that something has gone wrong.

So we become very good at overriding it.

Hold the tears.

Tighten the muscles.

Control the breath.

Suppress the shaking.

Straighten the posture.

Get through the meeting.

Finish the shift.

Answer the email.

Keep moving.

And eventually we may become so skilled at appearing regulated that nobody—including us—asks whether we actually are.

Calm Doesn't Always Look Calm

This is the part that fascinates me.

We tend to imagine regulation as stillness.

A calm body.

A quiet voice.

A slow breath.

And sometimes regulation absolutely does look like that.

But the body's attempt to return toward equilibrium doesn't necessarily look peaceful every moment it is happening.

Sometimes humans cry.

Sometimes we tremble.

Sometimes we need movement.

Sometimes we need stillness.

Sometimes we sigh.

Sometimes we want to curl inward.

Sometimes we need sleep.

Sometimes we desperately want another human being nearby.

Sometimes we need to tell the same story more than once because something about being heard helps an overwhelming experience become something we can hold.

Not every spontaneous response is automatically helpful.

Not every instinct should be followed.

And none of these responses alone should be mistaken for evidence that trauma has been resolved.

But perhaps we could become a little more curious before automatically suppressing them.

Because:

the body's attempt to return to safety may not always look peaceful.

The Shaking That Made Me Wonder

I became particularly interested in this through an experience with TRE—Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises.

TRE uses a sequence of exercises intended to encourage involuntary muscular tremoring.

And I have experienced that trembling myself.

It is a strange sensation to describe.

You're not consciously deciding to shake.

At a certain point, the body simply begins doing it.

And for me, the experience could produce an extraordinary sense of physical release in a body that had been carrying tension.

That experience doesn't prove that trauma was being "released from my tissue."

It doesn't prove that shaking is the answer to trauma.

Research into TRE remains limited, and claims about what these practices accomplish should remain proportional to the evidence we actually have.

But the experience left me with a question that became far more interesting than the technique itself:

What else might the human organism already know how to do that we've learned to interrupt?

We May Not Be Starting From Nothing

Human beings did not wait for psychology to begin responding to adversity.

Our species existed for an unimaginably long time before anyone understood the nervous system.

And during all that time, humans survived.

Adapted.

Attached.

Protected one another.

Grieved.

Rested.

Moved.

Cried.

Played.

Slept.

Sought safety.

Reached for connection.

Our modern understanding of these processes can help us enormously.

Therapy can help us develop capacities that were never safely learned.

Medication can be transformative or lifesaving.

Trauma-informed care can help people understand responses that once seemed inexplicable.

Somatic approaches can help some people reconnect with sensations they've spent years avoiding.

Relationships can provide experiences of safety that were previously absent.

Healing sometimes involves learning something genuinely new.

But perhaps that's not the entire story.

Maybe sometimes healing involves rediscovering something old.

When Science Names What Life Was Already Doing

There is something beautiful about this to me.

Science often doesn't invent the phenomenon it studies.

It notices it.

Names it.

Measures it.

Tests our explanations for it.

Separates what appears true from what we merely assumed was true.

Gravity existed before Newton.

Memory existed before neuroscience.

Children attached to caregivers before attachment theory.

Humans experienced fear before anyone described the fight-flight-freeze response.

Bodies changed their breathing long before breathwork became a practice.

People found comfort in safe relationships long before we had language for co-regulation.

And bodies trembled long before anyone developed a therapeutic exercise around trembling.

Sometimes knowledge gives us something new.

And sometimes knowledge allows us to finally recognize what has been happening all along.

The Body Is Not Infallible

There is an important caution here.

Listening to the body does not mean assuming the body is always right.

Our protective systems can learn patterns that no longer fit our present circumstances.

A nervous system can detect danger where there is none.

Avoidance can feel protective while making life smaller.

A familiar relationship can feel safe simply because it is familiar.

Chronic stress can change how we respond to ordinary experiences.

Instinct and wisdom are not synonyms.

This is why healing cannot simply mean:

Do whatever your body tells you.

Sometimes healing is precisely the process of helping the nervous system discover that something it once needed to fear is no longer dangerous.

But even there, notice the relationship.

We aren't fighting the body.

We're giving it new information.

New experiences.

New evidence.

We're helping an old protective system update its map.

Healing as Conversation

Maybe this is where the metaphor needs to change.

We often approach healing as though we are mechanics standing over a broken machine.

Find the defective component.

Repair it.

Eliminate the symptom.

Restore function.

There are situations where that metaphor is useful.

But human beings aren't machines.

We are living organisms with histories, adaptations, relationships and extraordinary capacities for change.

Perhaps sometimes healing looks less like repairing a machine...

and more like tending a garden.

You cannot command a seed to grow.

You create conditions.

Water.

Light.

Nutrients.

Protection.

Space.

And then the living thing participates.

Maybe some healing works like that too.

We create conditions of safety.

We develop supportive relationships.

We learn new skills.

We move.

We rest.

We speak.

We listen.

We allow.

We become curious about responses we once immediately tried to eliminate.

And somewhere inside those conditions, capacities we thought were missing may begin to appear.

Not because the body secretly knew how to solve everything.

But because we were never beginning with nothing.

The Territory Was Already Here

Perhaps this is one of the gentler ways we can think about healing.

We don't always have to approach ourselves as unfinished creatures waiting for someone to install the missing instructions.

Some instructions genuinely were missing.

Some capacities need to be learned.

Some wounds require skilled support.

Some patterns need to change.

And sometimes we need help our instincts alone cannot provide.

But underneath all of that is an organism with an evolutionary history far older than any therapy manual.

An organism capable of adapting.

Connecting.

Learning.

Responding.

Regulating.

Recovering.

Maybe healing isn't always something we have to teach the body from scratch.

Maybe sometimes we're learning how to stop interrupting capacities it already has.

To let movement move.

To let tears come.

To let rest be necessary.

To let connection matter.

To become curious about the body's language before immediately demanding that it become quiet.

Because perhaps healing isn't always an instruction we give the body.

Sometimes it's a conversation in which we finally let the body speak too.

The body is not merely the place where suffering happens.

It may also be one of the places recovery begins.