Your nervous system is wired to keep you alive. After trauma, it can get stuck in survival mode, making you feel like danger is everywhere even when you're safe. This isn't weakness or failure , it's biology protecting you from what it perceives as ongoing threats.
How Trauma Rewires Your Nervous System for Survival
When you experience trauma, your nervous system doesn't just file away the memory and move on. When a traumatic event occurs and the shock or trauma is left untreated, there is a possibility that the nervous system will not heal, and this can be life-threatening for the individual. PTSD symptoms may be viewed as the product of a reconditioned autonomic nervous system that developed during extreme and/or repeated exposures to threat.
Think of your nervous system as having three main operating modes. According to the theory, our nervous system has three main response states, or "branches." The newest and most evolved part, called the ventral vagal system, handles social connection and feelings of safety. The first one is the ventral vagal state (relaxed state), which is associated with safety and connection; the second is the sympathetic state (mobilized state) related to the fight or flight response; and the last is the dorsal vagal state (immobilized state) associated with freeze mode when facing a threat.
When trauma happens, this system gets reorganized. The nervous system of the trauma survivor is stuck in the sympathetic (mobilized state) or dorsal vagal states (immobilized state), without returning to the ventral state. Your body becomes hypervigilant, constantly scanning for threats that may not actually exist.
The Hidden Threat Detection System That Never Stops
Your nervous system has a built-in security system called neuroception that operates below your conscious awareness. The term "Neuroception" describes how neural circuits distinguish whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life threatening. Independent of conscious awareness, the nervous system evaluates risk in the environment and regulates the expression of adaptive behavior to match the neuroception of an environment that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening.
After trauma, this system becomes hypersensitive. Dysregulated Neuroception: Exposure to trauma leads neuroception to become dysregulated. Neuroception focuses more on identifying danger cues and further assesses neutral or safety cues as threatening. Your nervous system starts seeing threats where none exist, interpreting neutral faces as angry, safe environments as dangerous, and normal sounds as warning signals.
This natural responsiveness goes awry in what is known as faulty neuroception, where a person struggles to respond appropriately to internal or outer stimuli, becoming involuntarily locked in defensive states or unable to mobilize in response to stressors. You might feel on edge at family gatherings, jumpy in crowded spaces, or unable to relax even in your own home.
Why Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Forgets
Trauma creates lasting changes in how your nervous system processes safety and danger. Even when your conscious mind knows you're safe, your body may still be responding to past threats. This is why healing trauma requires working with the body, not just the mind.
When Fight or Flight Becomes Your Default Setting
In survival mode, your nervous system prioritizes immediate safety over everything else. Stress is triggering a bodily state of threat and reorganizing the autonomic nervous system to promote survival. This means your body diverts energy away from healing, growth, and social connection to fuel hypervigilance and defensive responses.
If you're stuck in the sympathetic state (fight or flight), you might experience constant anxiety, difficulty sleeping, racing thoughts, or feeling like you need to control everything around you. Stuck in the sympathetic state, individuals with unhealed trauma may carry a story of fear, distrust, dysregulation, and anxiety, while those stuck in the dorsal vagal state may carry one of loneliness, disconnection, and numbness.
Some people get trapped in the dorsal vagal state instead , the freeze response. Their nervous systems switch from a fight-or-flight sympathetic response to a dorsal vagal reaction, such as numbing or immobilization, for survival. This might show up as depression, emotional numbness, chronic fatigue, or feeling disconnected from yourself and others.
Why Traditional Approaches Often Fall Short
Many trauma treatments focus on changing thoughts and behaviors, but many symptoms that bring clients to treatment , hypervigilance, numbing, dissociation, intrusive memories , originate in persistent defensive autonomic states, maintained by disrupted neuroception. You can't think your way out of a nervous system that's stuck in survival mode.
The Polyvagal theory teaches us that post traumatic stress symptoms are biologically based and somatically experienced. Once you understand the physiology behind C-PTSD symptoms you realize why you cannot simply think your way out of your trauma reactions.
"Trauma is not stored in the narrative part of the brain. It's stored in the survival part of the brain, in the body, in the nervous system."
This is why trauma survivors often feel frustrated when well-meaning friends suggest they just "think positive" or "let it go." Your nervous system needs to experience safety, not just understand it intellectually.
The Path Back to Safety and Connection
Recovery involves helping your nervous system learn that it's safe to come out of survival mode. When humans feel safe, their nervous systems support the homeostatic functions of health, growth, and restoration, while they simultaneously become accessible to others without feeling or expressing threat and vulnerability.
The goal isn't to eliminate your body's protective responses , they serve an important purpose. Healing from trauma is not about being calm all the time; it's about having a flexible and resilient nervous system that can accurately assess safety and danger, and fluidly move from one state to another as needed.
True healing happens when you can access what researchers call the ventral vagal state , the zone of social engagement and connection. The Polyvagal Theory proposes that discovering the ventral vagal state through the ventral branch can foster calm, a sense of safety, and allow personal growth and freedom from triggers.
Building Your Recovery Foundation
Recovery starts with understanding that your nervous system's responses aren't personal failings , they're protective adaptations. Dysregulation is understood not as a failure of effort or insight, but as a survival adaptation , a physiological legacy of past threat.
Small, consistent practices can help retrain your nervous system over time. This might include breathwork, gentle movement, spending time in nature, or cultivating safe relationships. The good news is this research has led to incredible insights into the body's natural ability to regain balance when given the right resources. By reverse engineering findings about the parasympathetic nervous system, researchers have identified a wide array of tools we can use to communicate safety to our bodies on a physiological level. Over time, these practices can help us rewire patterns of reactivity so we become more resilient to stress.
The journey from survival mode to thriving isn't linear, and it's not about perfection. It's about gradually expanding your window of tolerance and helping your nervous system remember what safety feels like in your body.
Understanding why your nervous system gets stuck doesn't minimize your experience , it validates it. Your body is doing exactly what it was designed to do to keep you alive. Now it's time to help it learn that you're safe to live, not just survive.
If you're ready to understand your unique trauma patterns and begin healing your nervous system, our Freedom Triggers Assessment can help identify the specific triggers keeping you stuck in survival mode.