Know what your Nervous System DOES NOT Care About when carrying Trauma

In today's video, I'm going to try and give you a way to understand your nervous system and it can be very, very helpful in terms of learning to meet the needs of your nervous system, to calm it down, to help it reset and feel safe again. I recently spoke with somebody and of course they're having the issue so many of us are having, which is our nervous system just doesn't feel safe. It gets triggered by many, many things. It feels aggravated. The baseline for calmness that it sets is still agitated. So there's always this kind of hypersensitivity or vigilance. It's in a defensive posture kind of all the time, a low level anxiety. And they're talking about, they're trying to understand, well, why is this happening? And then it sends this fight, flight or freeze response. So understanding the nervous system can be a big, big help in this. I'm going to give you a slightly, maybe a different way to think about the nervous system. First of all, what is the nervous system? I think most of us probably have heard of people talking about the nervous system when it comes to trauma, work and other things. The nervous system is effectively just a system that is designed to keep you safe, keep you away from danger. The nervous system sends signals. It sends all sorts of signals to you. So if you're hungry right now, your nervous system is speaking to you. If you're sleepy right now, your nervous system is speaking to you. If you're afraid or if you have anxiety, it's the nervous system is sending some kind of a threat signal to us. So this is what the nervous system does. It sends signals. Now, effectively, again, all the nervous system wants is to keep you safe or to keep you away from danger. You could also say that the nervous system is not a big fan of you expending a lot of energy on anything. Because as far as it's concerned, its main, its sole function is safety. And if you're spending a lot of energy somewhere else, it's thinking, well, I could use that energy to run away from a predator or something. Should that need be needed at some point. So the nervous system sends these messages to us and its sole function, its sole interest is safety. Now, here's the interesting thing. We need to consider for a moment what that means. If its sole interest is in safety, what is the nervous system not interested in? That's an interesting way to think about this. What it really means is that the nervous system is very important. It's a good thing. We all need a nervous system, right? And we need the messages that it sends us. But it also means because of its preoccupation with safety, the nervous system is not interested in your relationship status. The nervous system is not interested in creativity. The nervous system is not interested in whether or not you express yourself fully. It's not interested in your intellectual development. It's not interested in your spiritual development, your friendships, any of these things. Which is why we can kind of feel an adversarial kind of relationship with our nervous system. It feels like it's getting in our way a lot of the time. But the thing to remember here about the nervous system is, yes, its job is very, very clear cut. It's to feel safe. And if it feels threatened in the past, it never really forgets any past dangers. Everything is stored that was dangerous in the past. And it can make us get quite defensive in future scenarios. It's like a pattern seeking piece of software. So the more danger it has experienced, the more abuse, trauma, whatever it is in the past, it hangs on to that in preparation for, will we face this again? Now, rationally, you may know I have escaped that danger and my life is stable and safe now. So why is my nervous system still doing this? The nervous system is not rational. The rational mind is rational, but the nervous system is much slower to change than that. It sees its job as just being so, so important to safety that it says, I'm not going to be bound by rationality. I'm going to determine whether or not safety has been arrived at here. So while the nervous system is interested in safety, and it's not interested in all these other lovely parts of our life. The thing is, we need to come to terms with that, because the nervous system is never going to change what it's interested in. It will never really be interested in creativity, relationships, all these other things. But the good news is we don't need it to be. The nervous system isn't interested in these things, but it's also not vindictive towards them. It doesn't want to ruin them for us. It's just that it's not interested in it and it won't feel safe enough. In other words, it has to feel safe before it can allow us to really start to explore or meet our needs in these other areas. So we don't ask the nervous system to change what it's interested in. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to convince the nervous system to meet its own means, safety, just in a new way, a different way. We're not trying to convince it to stop caring about safety. It will always be interested in safety. That's what it does, just in a different way. Now, it is important that we set up an environment of safety. We try to have boundaries with toxic relationships, and we move away and get more support in our life. We move away from negative influences. For sure we do. That's kind of step one in a lot of this. But once that is in place, it can take some time before the nervous system realizes it's safe. It never fully forgets what happened in the past. But ultimately, as we heal and we start to establish stability and safety, it will relinquish its defensive posture very, very gradually. And it learns that, well, okay, maybe I'll permit some of this creativity. Maybe I'll permit some of this self-expression. Because the equation it runs is that in blocking these things or not giving some energy to these things, this person is actually not becoming safer at all. We actually need some of these things in life. There needs to be a balance restored. I just think it's important that we actually don't try and change what the nervous system's primary function is. Because I think a lot of us have this adversarial relationship. We're so fed up with the nervous system and the signals it sends us. And it's so understandable because it really does kind of feel like it's limiting us or it's been vindictive towards us in terms of what these messages it sends, which can be so limiting and overpowering. But the nervous system doesn't change its primary function, and it doesn't have to. So we want to focus primarily before we can really become more creative and expressive and everything else. And really the takeaway from this video is we become safe. Safety is essential. We have to feel safe in ourselves and secure in ourselves. That doesn't mean we never take a risk in life. It means we become stable and secure so that we can take risks again. It doesn't make a lot of sense to be taking risks in life if we're already on the edge and the nervous system is already agitated all the time. That is not the time to take risks in life. It's a time to establish an environment of safety. The fight, flight, or freeze response that it sends us all the time is just the language that it uses. But we can get a little bit more skilled at listening to it and understanding it and helping it to feel safer. There's a lot of things we can do in that. As I mentioned, the basic stuff of getting away from negative influences, but then there's also therapeutic things we can do like EFT and just basic talk therapy, self-care, prioritizing our own well-being, being a little more selfish, God forbid. But the point is that there's so many things that we can do ultimately. So I hope that's a new way. Maybe if you think about the nervous system, thinking about it in terms of what it isn't interested in, and it'll never be interested in, but it's not vindictive towards these other areas of life. It's just indifferent towards them until it feels safe again. So the emphasis in today's video is really we have to feel safe within ourselves. And that's not a crime. It's not a sign of weakness that we need to feel safe. Everybody needs to feel safe so that we can take risks in life and become more expressive and open. But guys, I'll leave it there for today. And I hope that's a useful concept. And as always, thanks a million for joining me here. And I'll see you again in the next video.