Then and now
Your nervous system isn’t stuck in the past because it’s broken.
It’s stuck because it hasn’t been shown enough evidence that NOW is different from THEN.
When your nervous system is activated, it’s not reacting to reality, it’s reacting to patterns
The nervous system is constantly scanning for familiarity. Not truth. Not accuracy. Familiarity.
It asks one question over and over:
“Does this feel like something I’ve experienced before?”
If the answer is yes, even slightly, it pulls from an old template.
That’s why:
A tone of voice can feel threatening
Silence can feel like rejection
Closeness can feel overwhelming
Even when nothing dangerous or bad is happening.
This is normal. You are normal. Your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do, to protect you based on past experience.
Last week, I was driving on a beautiful day…calm, content, fully present. The weather was beautiful and the sun was shining brightly. Then I got a text from a family member that felt tense, a little unpleasant.
Almost instantly, my mind began pulling up memories of past conversations that felt similar. One thought led to the next, and before I knew it, my entire body had shifted. The calm was gone.
My chest tightened. I noticed I was holding my breath. Anxiety had taken over.
Nothing in my environment had actually changed.
But my nervous system had.
Because the nervous system doesn’t respond to what’s true in the moment.
It responds to what’s familiar.
That text wasn’t just a text….it matched a pattern my body had experienced before. And once that pattern was recognized, my system filled in the rest.
It didn’t wait to see what this moment actually was.
It assumed it already knew.
So my body reacted not to what was happening…
but to what it had learned that this kind of moment means.
That’s how quickly the past can take over the present.
Not because it’s still happening….
but because the nervous system is wired to recognize patterns and protect based on them.
And in that moment, I could feel it clearly:
My thoughts weren’t just thoughts.
They were cues that communicated to my body,
“I know what this is…we’ve been here before” and my body responded to what happened in the past.
The sun was still shining (in my present) but my tight, anxious body, was now living in the past.
After noticing what had happened (shift from present to past in my nervous system) my work in that moment was to bring my body back into the present and show it something different.
Here’s what that looked like in that exact moment:
I shifted my attention out of my head and into my environment
I caught my body where it was (tight, holding its breath) and corrected with slow deep breaths to relax and release tension
I named that my body is remembering something, that this isn’t happening right now (this creates space from the trigger and the reaction)
I named how this moment is different from those past conversations (This is how you teach your body “this is not the same.”
I gave my body a new experience. This time I delayed responding to the text until I was grounded. I didn’t engage in the activation.
I let the activation PASS
My body didn’t calm down immediately, and that’s okay.
What matters is:
I stayed present
I didn’t fully fuse with the past
I introduced something new
That’s how patterns change over time. Showing the body something new.
Even a small shift = new data for the nervous system.
This is the work. This is taking responsibility for “our part”.
“How do I stop reacting like this” (blame and shame) then becomes “How do I stay with myself while my body reacts, and show it something different?” (responsibility and maturity)
Can you see the love and grace for yourself in that?
