My mother’s stomach felt funny whenever I left to go back to California. She would describe the physical sensations without connecting them to anything emotional — that was never her language. I felt it too, but knew exactly what it was: the sadness of possibly never seeing each other again.
I had been the emotional vessel in our relationship for as long as I could remember. Her anxiety had somewhere to go. It went into me.
She grew up in rural Telemark, Norway, raised by a father who treated silence as virtue and shame as scripture. The church was the center of social life; deviation was not discussed, only managed. Women were expected to be obedient, practical, and invisible.
She was later diagnosed with unexplainable COPD. I carried decades of GI issues — IBS, bloating, dysbiosis, food sensitivities, jaw tension, TMJ. Her emotional world dissociated until it surfaced as chronic illness. Mine was hyperaware — anxiety, vigilance, a nervous system that detected everything and forgot nothing. Neither of us connected it to anything emotional at the time. But the body had been keeping its own record the entire time.
Trauma Isn’t Just Psychological — It’s Physiological
Older thinking framed trauma as a memory problem — something stored in the mind that could be talked through and resolved. Newer research tells a different story. Trauma changes how the body regulates itself. It imprints on the nervous system, the stress response, the gut, and the immune system — creating a new biological baseline that persists long after the original threat is gone.
The body essentially learns a new normal for safety, threat detection, and regulation. When trauma isn’t fully processed, the body continues to behave as if the threat is still present — not as a psychological distortion, but as a physiological reality.
This is why decades of talk therapy didn’t move the needle much. I gained insight but I was still braced, restless, anxious. Understanding what happened and regulating the body’s response are two different things entirely.
The conversation happens in the mind. But the trauma lives in the system.
The Stress System: Dysregulation, Not Just Activation
Early trauma research assumed chronic trauma produced chronically elevated cortisol. The picture is more complex. What researchers now consistently observe is stress system dysregulation — a loss of flexibility rather than simple overactivation.
The cortisol rhythm becomes irregular. Stress responses may be blunted rather than elevated. Inflammatory signaling can remain active even when cortisol output is low. The system becomes poorly calibrated — reacting strongly, recovering slowly, sending mismatched signals between hormones, inflammation, and nervous system activity.
For someone who grew up in an unpredictable or emotionally unsafe environment — always scanning, always bracing — this recalibration begins in childhood. The system that was designed to activate and recover keeps activating without fully recovering. Decades of that pattern leave a physiological imprint that doesn’t resolve on its own.
Polyvagal Theory: Understanding Your Nervous System States
One of the most useful frameworks for understanding trauma physiology comes from Polyvagal Theory, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges. It describes three distinct states of the autonomic nervous system — each with its own biology, behavior, and felt sense.
Ventral Vagal — Calm, Safe, Connected
This is the body’s optimal state. The nervous system is regulated, social engagement is possible, and the body can rest, digest, and repair. Breathing is easy. Thinking is clear. Connection feels safe. This is where healing happens.
Sympathetic Activation — Stress, Mobilization, Adrenaline
When the nervous system detects threat — real or perceived — it shifts into sympathetic activation. Adrenaline and cortisol rise. Heart rate increases. Muscles brace. The body mobilizes for fight or flight. This state is designed to be temporary. In chronic stress or trauma, it becomes the default.
Dorsal Vagal — Freeze, Shutdown, Collapse
When the threat feels inescapable or overwhelming, the nervous system shifts into its oldest survival response — dorsal vagal shutdown. The body freezes. Energy drops. Dissociation, numbness, emotional flatness, and extreme fatigue are common. This is the collapse state — the body protecting itself by going offline.
Functional Freeze — The Hidden State
This is the state most relevant to high-functioning trauma survivors — and the least discussed. Functional freeze is dorsal vagal shutdown underneath, with sympathetic activation layered on top. The body is in freeze, but adrenaline keeps it moving.
It can look like waking up exhausted but immediately reaching for coffee, manufacturing urgency to create forward motion, relying on sugar, caffeine, or stimulation to stay functional, chronic busyness that feels productive but is actually driven by the inability to stop. Tired but wired. Functioning through depletion.
This is not stress. This is a nervous system using stress chemistry to escape overwhelm — and it is far more common than most people realize.
The Adrenaline Problem
For many people with trauma histories, calm does not feel safe. The body has spent so long in activation that stillness registers as threat. When the nervous system begins to relax, it may respond with discomfort, anxiety, or an impulse to reactivate — to return to the familiar chemistry of stress.
This creates what researchers increasingly describe as adrenaline dependency. The internal chemistry of activation — high cortisol, high adrenaline, sympathetic dominance — becomes the body’s known state. Anything that disrupts it feels wrong, even when it’s healthy.
I know this pattern from the inside. I was drawn to high-intensity careers, unavailable partners, constant relocation — always moving, always activated, always just ahead of whatever stillness might have caught up with me. After a high-stakes project ended, I’d feel flat, restless, purposeless — not relieved. The activation wasn’t incidental to my life. It was the architecture of it. I didn’t know then that I was using stress chemistry the way others use substances. I just knew that calm felt wrong.
It shows up as an addiction to intensity — chronic overworking, rushing, creating urgency where none exists. For others it’s relational — a persistent pull toward unavailable, unpredictable, or high-drama partners whose emotional chemistry mirrors the activation state the nervous system already knows. For others still it’s external — alcohol, cannabis, nicotine, caffeine, or other substances that either amplify or dull the activation cycle. The numbing agents, the stimulants, and the intensity-seeking are doing the same job from different directions: managing a nervous system that doesn’t know how to be at rest.
Removing the numbing agent — whatever form it took — doesn’t resolve the underlying state. It makes it audible. The functional freeze that the alcohol was masking becomes visible. That’s not failure. That’s the first accurate signal the nervous system has been able to send in years.
The Vagus Nerve and the Body’s Braking System
The vagus nerve connects the brain with the heart, lungs, gut, and immune system. It acts as the body’s primary brake on the stress response and is the main pathway through which the nervous system returns to ventral vagal — calm, safe, regulated.
When vagal tone is strong, the body can calm itself after stress, regulate heart rate and breathing, maintain digestive function, and shift fluidly between alertness and relaxation. When vagal tone is weaker — which studies frequently show in trauma populations — the body struggles to return to baseline. It stays closer to a state of vigilance, even in objectively safe environments.
Researchers measure this through heart rate variability — the variation in time between heartbeats. Lower HRV is consistently associated with anxiety, depression, trauma exposure, chronic stress, and inflammation. It is one of the clearest biological markers of a nervous system that has lost its flexibility.
This is also why practices like slow breathing, movement, and genuine social connection aren’t just wellness habits. They stimulate the vagus nerve directly. They rebuild the braking system.
The Gut–Brain Axis
The gut is now recognized as one of the major regulators of emotional and stress physiology. It contains hundreds of millions of neurons, extensive immune tissue, and microbes that produce neurotransmitters — including serotonin, dopamine, and GABA — all of which affect mood and nervous system regulation.
Stress and trauma alter gut function through multiple pathways: changes in motility, increased intestinal permeability, shifts in microbiome composition, and altered immune signaling. This is why people under chronic stress so often experience IBS, bloating, reflux, dysbiosis, and food sensitivities. It isn’t coincidental. It’s the gut-brain axis responding to a system under sustained pressure.
The communication runs in both directions. Gut inflammation can increase anxiety and depression. Improving gut health — through nutrition, reduced alcohol or whatever the numbing agent has been, consistent eating patterns — can improve mood and stress tolerance. The gut isn’t separate from the emotional system. It’s part of it.
My own GI history — the IBS, the dysbiosis, the food sensitivities that took years to resolve — makes more sense through this lens than it ever did as a standalone digestive problem. The gut was downstream of everything the nervous system was carrying.
Interoception: When the Body’s Signals Get Distorted
Interoception is the brain’s ability to sense internal bodily signals — heartbeat, breathing, gut activity, muscle tension, temperature. Trauma can disrupt this system in two distinct ways.
I developed hyper-interoception — extremely aware of bodily sensations, prone to panic, sensitive to small physiological shifts. My mother was the opposite — hypo-interoception — numb to bodily signals, difficulty identifying emotions, prone to dissociation. Both reflect disrupted communication between brain and body.
The sensory hyperawareness I’ve lived with — to noise, crowds, the energy in a room — is consistent with hyper-interoception. So is the exaggerated startle response, the difficulty relaxing in objectively safe environments, the way the body stays braced even when the threat is gone. These aren’t personality quirks. They’re the nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do.
There’s also growing recognition in trauma research that many people with trauma histories were highly perceptive or sensitive individuals to begin with. Those traits — heightened sensory processing, stronger emotional awareness, stronger pattern recognition — can be significant strengths. But in chaotic or invalidating environments, they also lead to greater stress system activation. What looks like overreacting is often a nervous system that detects more information.
Emotional Suppression and Physical Disease
Emotional suppression isn’t just psychological — it produces measurable physiological effects. Research shows habitual suppression leads to greater activation of stress responses, higher cortisol across the day, and increased sympathetic nervous system activity. The nervous system remains engaged even when emotions aren’t consciously expressed. The body carries the load.
Over time this manifests as muscle tension, digestive disruption, sleep problems, and increased cardiovascular stress. Chronic suppression is also associated with higher baseline inflammation, altered immune signaling, and greater vulnerability to chronic disease.
My mother’s COPD is an instructive example. While research doesn’t support a simple causal model between emotional suppression and COPD, the associations are consistent and documented. Alexithymia — the difficulty identifying or describing emotions — is common in COPD populations and correlates with worse breathlessness perception, greater anxiety and depression, and higher disease burden. COPD patients frequently experience shame, stigma, and a reluctance to seek help — emotional dynamics that affect symptom reporting, stress levels, and treatment engagement.
She had never smoked. Her pulmonologist asked whether she had worked in a factory, had exposure to coal dust or other environmental hazards. There was none. The causes were likely layered in ways medicine wasn’t asking about: a wartime childhood in occupied Norway, chronic food scarcity, a shame-based religious culture that treated silence as virtue, and decades of emotional containment. Research on the long-term health effects of childhood stress during the Norwegian occupation is limited, but consistent with broader findings that malnutrition and chronic stress during critical developmental windows leave lasting imprints on immune function, inflammatory signaling, and respiratory health. Her body may have been carrying the accumulation of it all. The COPD may have been its final accounting.
My mother had no language for emotion. She managed everything — including breathlessness — with the same tight containment she brought to everything else. The dyspnea-anxiety loop is well documented in obstructive lung disease: breathlessness triggers anxiety, anxiety increases physiological arousal, arousal worsens breathing perception. The emotional and the physical amplify each other in a cycle that is very difficult to interrupt without addressing both.
She didn’t have the tools or the language to do it. I inherited the body that was shaped by living inside that silence.
Rebuilding Regulation
The science points consistently toward the same conclusion: trauma shows up as a system-wide shift in regulation. The stress system loses flexibility. Vagal tone drops. The gut-brain axis is disrupted. Interoception becomes distorted. Inflammation increases. The body becomes less able to activate and recover from stress appropriately.
Restoration follows the same logic in reverse — but it cannot happen through force. The nervous system doesn’t respond to urgency. It responds to repetition, consistency, pacing, and manageable doses of change. This is the opposite of the push-through model. Healing cannot happen in overwhelm. Too much too fast — even if the intervention is genuinely helpful — is still too much.
The goal is titration. Introducing the body slowly to the experience of ventral vagal — calm, regulated, not braced — until that state begins to feel familiar rather than threatening. The body has to learn: I will not push you too hard. I will listen when you’ve had enough. I will not override your limits again. That internal trust is what lowers the background insecurity driving the adrenaline.
Soft structure is where the science becomes daily life. Consistent sleep — the nervous system’s most basic repair mechanism. Nourishing food at regular intervals. Movement that builds rather than depletes. Reduced or eliminated numbing agents that were masking the underlying state. Boundaries that protect the system from chronic reactivation. Writing as a way of processing what the body has been carrying without requiring the body to perform.
These are nervous system inputs — signals that slowly, cumulatively, teach the body that it is no longer in danger.
And something else shifts as regulation returns. The tolerance for living out of alignment drops. The desire for authenticity gets stronger — honesty over politeness, meaningful connection over social performance, slower living, deeper work. The performance stops feeling worth the cost.
Becoming an expert in your own nervous system — learning to identify whether you’re in stress, overwhelm, freeze, or functional freeze before you exceed capacity — is the practice. It’s recognition, earlier and earlier, until the body’s signals become information rather than noise.
Hence Life’ing Unscripted.
“What looks like overreacting is often a nervous system that detects more information.”
Read:
→ Breaking the Cycle: Healing From Emotional Trauma
→ The Wired Brain
→ Emotional Inheritance
→ The Highly Sensitive Extrovert
→ Feel to Heal
