Wired Young: What Your Nervous System Never Forgot

Why do you sometimes react in ways that surprise you, even when nothing is wrong? Jim explains how the nervous system learns in childhood what is safe or dangerous, and how it can keep running those old settings in adult life. He describes how it moves between feeling safe and connected, fight or flight, and shutting down, and introduces the window of tolerance, the range in which we cope well. He says this is about understanding yourself with compassion, not blaming your parents. This content is educational and is not a substitute for one-to-one professional care.

Transcript

I'm a licensed psychotherapist here in Toronto, Canada. And the title of this episode is Wired Young, What Your Nervous System Never Forgot. Today we're going to talk about something that I think is one of the most important, Perhaps maybe most overlooked, Pieces of understanding of ourselves as adults. We're going to talk about the nervous system. Not in a textbook way, But in a real human way, Because once you understand what your nervous system actually learned in childhood, A lot of things about yourself start to make a lot more sense. So let's get into it. Have you ever been in a meeting, Everything's fine, Nothing dramatic is happening, And you feel this creeping sense of dread? Or you're with someone you love, Someone who's never hurt you, And out of nowhere you feel yourself pull back, Go quiet, Go somewhere else. Maybe you feel like you're under attack. Or maybe you snap at your partner and look back at it later and you generally don't understand where that came from. Most of us, When that happens, Assume there's something wrong with us. We're too sensitive, Too reactive, Broken in some way. And I want to offer a different explanation. Completely different way of looking at it. Because what I've come to understand both in my own life and my life experience and through years of sitting with people in my psychotherapy practice is that those moments almost always have roots, Deep roots, Roots that go back further than you might think. Here's what I want you to sit with for a moment. Your nervous system, The whole system that governs how you feel, How you respond, How safe you feel in the world, It didn't arrive fully formed. It was built. It was shaped. The most critical period of that shaping happened in the earliest years of your life, Before you even had language, Before you had any real memory of what was happening. What was your nervous system doing during these years? It was learning. It was trying to answer a very basic question. Is the world safe or dangerous? Are other people a source of comfort or a source of threat? These aren't questions your nervous system was asking in words, It was asking them in experience. Moment by moment, Interaction by interaction. What it learned became its default, Its programming, Its operating system, The settings that run quietly in the background of everything you do as an adult. The nervous system doesn't know the year. It only knows what it learns. I think about it like this. Imagine you grew up in a house where things are unpredictable. Maybe a parent's mood shifted without warning. Maybe there was tension that was never spoken about, But was always there. Your nervous system, Being the brilliant, Adaptive system that it is, Started tracking everything. It got very good at reading the room. It stayed alert, Ready, Scanning, Because that was the smart, Safe thing to do in that environment. Fast forward 30 years, You're in a healthy relationship, Stable job, A life that by every measure is safe. But your nervous system is still running that same program. Still scanning, Still bracing, Still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not because something is actually wrong with you. Because your nervous system is doing what it was designed to do, Protecting you based on everything it learned. There's a framework I find very helpful here, And I want to walk you through it in plain language. A researcher named Stephen Porges developed what's called the polyvagal theory. What it essentially describes is that our nervous system has a hierarchy of responses and it moves through them automatically based on how safe it perceives the situation to be. At the top of the hierarchy is what we call social engagement. This is where your nervous system feels generally safe. You present, Connected, Open. You can think clearly. You can be warm with people. Your voice sounds relaxed. Your face is expressive. You're fully there. You are in your authentic self. This is where we do our best living, Our best relating, Our best work, And our most honest conversations. When the nervous system detects threat, And remember, It doesn't need an actual threat, Just something that resembles one, It drops down to the next level, Fight or flight. The system mobilizes, Heart rate goes up, Muscles tense, The tension narrows, You get sharply active, Maybe irritable, You're ready to act in a genuine emergency. This is life-saving. In a Tuesday afternoon meeting that just reminds you of your nervous system of something that happened 20 years ago. It's a little harder to explain to your colleagues. And then there's a third response, One that gets talked about less. When the threat feels overwhelming, When fight or fleeing doesn't seem possible, The nervous system can do something almost the opposite. It shuts down. It goes flat. You feel numb, Disconnected, Foggy. Like you're watching yourself from the outside. Some people call this checking out. Some people call it going somewhere else. In trauma work, We sometimes call this the freeze response or collapse. It's not weakness. It's actually one of the most ancient protective responses we have. What happens for today's conversation is this. Which of these responses your nervous system defaults to is largely a product of what it learned early on. And for most of us, That learning happened so long ago and so quietly that we've just accepted our default as personality, As who we are. I want to bring something else that I think is really essential to this picture, And that's the role of attachment. Because the nervous system doesn't develop in isolation, Develops in relationship. Specifically in the earliest relationship we have, Which is with our primary caregivers. There's a concept in developmental psychology called co-regulation. And what it describes is this, A baby doesn't know how to calm itself and needs to borrow the calm of an attuned adult. When a baby is distressed and a parent comes and holds them, Speaks gently, The baby's nervous system literally syncs with the parent's. It learns over thousands of these moments that distress can be tolerated, That safety comes back, That connection is reliable. From those thousands of moments, The nervous system starts to build its own capacity to self-regulate. Now here's what really is significant. What happens when that's consistent attuned presence? Isn't there? What happens when the caregiver is the one who's unpredictable or frightening or simply emotionally unavailable? This child still needs to attach. Attachment is a survival droid. It's not optional. But you have to adapt the way they do it. Some children learn to become anxious, Hypervigilant about the relationship, Always monitoring, Always need reassurance. Others learn to shut down emotionally, To be self-sufficient, To not need too much. Others develop more chaotic patterns. When they want closeness but are also terrified of it. These are what we call attachment styles. And while I don't want to get too deep into the labels today, What I want you to hear is this. The way you relate to other people as an adult, How much you trust, How close you let people get, How you respond when you feel abandoned or smothered or misunderstood, That is in large part the nervous system doing what it learned to do in those earliest relationships. It's not who you are, It's what you learned. And those are very different things. I'll share something personal here for a moment. I didn't grow up understanding any of this. I think a lot of the people in my generation didn't. You just kind of absorbed the environment you were in and then you carried it into adult life and assumed that whatever pattern showed up, The way you responded to conflict, The way you shut down, The way you worked incredibly hard, But still never felt like enough, You assume those were just you. That was your personality. That's the way you were. One of the most genuinely liberating things for me that I learned many years ago in my personal work. And through the work in my practice. Has been to understand that these patterns have a history, That they were adaptive at some point, They made sense, Because when something makes sense, You can actually start to work with it. You can have a little more compassion to yourself. And compassion, I've found, Is where real change tends to begin. I want to leave you with one more concept before we wrap up today, Because I think it's really important in everyday life. It's called the window of tolerance. The term was first coined by a psychiatrist named Dan Siegel. The basic idea is this, That there's a range of emotional and physiological activation within which we function well. We're present, We can think, Feel at the same time, We can respond rather than just react. That's the window. Some people have a wide window. They can handle a lot of stress, A lot of emotion, A lot of uncertainty before they become overwhelmed. Others have a narrow window, Smaller. Things can send them into overwhelm or shutdown. That's not a character flaw. It's often a direct result of what the nervous system had to navigate early in life. When you go above the window, You're flooded, You're anxious, You're reactive, You're overwhelmed, You're rageful. When you go below it, You're shut down, Numb, Flat, Checked out, Disconnected. Neither of those states is a great place to make decisions, Have important conversations, Or show up the way you want to for the people you love. The good news is, And there is good news here, Is that the window can widen. One of the basic premises of psychotherapy is to widen the window of tolerance. The nervous system is not fixed. This is one of the most important things to understand about trauma recovery and about growth more broadly. The nervous system can learn new things. It can with the right experiences and the right support. Updated sense of what's safe. It can build new defaults. It's not a small thing, That's actually everything. So what I'd love for you to take away from. . . This episode. Is the way your nervous system responds in relationships under stress in moments of conflict or closeness. This isn't random. This isn't just your personality. A set of rules your body and brain developed based on what they had to navigate when you were young and had very little choice in the matter. Understanding that this is not about blaming your childhood or your parents Most parents did their best, They could with what they had. It's about understanding yourself. Honestly, Compassionately, So that you can start to make different choices.