How to Heal Trauma & Grief Through the Nervous System
This post is adapted from a conversation I had with Susan Regan, MFT on her podcast, #sorelatable.
When people come to me in the middle of a challenging time, a loss, or what feels like life falling apart, one of the first things I want to offer them is this: what you are going through is not a problem to solve.
That might sound strange coming from a therapist, but I mean it.
So much of what we do when we're in pain is try to think our way through it. We analyze. We strategize. We make lists. We research. We look for the action that will make the feeling stop and when nothing can, we get anxious that we’re doing it wrong.
And while the mind is important - we absolutely want it online - life transitions and losses are not cognitive processes. They live somewhere deeper. In the body. In the nervous system. And that is where healing actually happens.
It's Bigger Than Grief
Before I go further, I want to widen this conversation a little.
When I talk about healing from endings or traumatic changes, I'm also talking about something that doesn't always get named that way - identity loss. The collapse of a life structure you thought was solid. A divorce. A diagnosis. A career that ends. A relationship that changes you. A version of yourself you no longer recognize.
These experiences shatter us in ways that often go beyond what we expect to feel and yet in order to heal, they need care, patience, and depth of attention.
The Body Already Knows How to Heal
Here's a way of thinking about it that I come back to again and again with clients.
When you get a cut, you don't have to instruct your body to heal. You might support it with a bandage, some rest, maybe antibiotic cream — but the cellular intelligence that does the actual healing is already there. It already has the map.
Emotional healing works the same way.
That doesn't mean it's easy. It's a wild ride. It can take us over in ways we're not used to. It consumes psychic energy. It frightens people. But the system, your system, already knows how to move through this. The healing is organic. Your job is less about doing and more about attending - creating the conditions that let the process happen.
That requires contact. Not with your thoughts about the pain, but with the place where the pain actually lives: the nervous system, the body, held in some form of relational safety. Whether that's with a therapist, a guide, a community, nature, or Spirit you don't have to do this alone, and you were never meant to.
Understanding the Nervous System: The Polyvagal Ladder
One of the frameworks I use most in my work is the polyvagal ladder, a way of understanding the three main states our nervous system moves through, depending on how safe or threatened we feel.
Ventral vagal - the top of the ladder. This is where we like to be. Regulated, calm, connected, present. Our social self, our logical self, is online. We can respond rather than react. You might know this as "rest and digest."
Sympathetic - the middle. This is fight or flight. Here we might feel anger, agitation, urgency, anxiety, the urge to flee, or what often shows up as overfunctioning - keeping busy, doing more, unable to stop. It's the body's attempt to mobilize against a perceived threat.
Dorsal vagal - the bottom. When the nervous system determines the threat is too great, it drops us here: frozen, withdrawn, defeated, sometimes dissociated. Many people come to me saying they're depressed and sometimes what's actually happening is a dorsal vagal response. It can feel similar.
What's so important to understand and what I find so helpful for people to learn is that our thoughts follow our state. We are much more practiced at tracking our thoughts than we are at tracking our nervous system. But the thoughts are downstream.
In a dorsal vagal state, you might think:
There's no hope.
I'm too old, no one will want me.
I made a terrible mistake.
Nothing good is possible for me anymore.
These thoughts feel true. They feel like facts. But they are responses to a nervous system state and when the state shifts, the thoughts shift too.
This is why I work directly with the nervous system rather than getting caught in trying to untangle the thoughts themselves.
What Actually Reaches the Places That Need Healing
Talk therapy is valuable. Insight matters. Self-awareness matters. But awareness and change are not the same thing.
There are patterns like people-pleasing, codependency, overfunctioning, or impostor syndrome that become default paths in the nervous system.
For many people, there comes a point where the frustration is real:
I see the pattern.
I know it doesn't serve me.
I want to respond differently. And when the moment comes, I just can't.
That's what it looks like when something is wired deeply enough that insight alone can't reach it.
One of the most powerful things I've seen in my work is what becomes possible in an expanded state. Personal retreat work that incorporates tools like (legal) psychedelics, breathwork, nature, and ceremony. In these states, defenses soften. Protectors relax. The nervous system can be accessed at a level that's simply not available in an ordinary waking state.
People get to experience themselves differently. They get to meet the parts of themselves that have been managing and protecting, often at great cost, and approach them with curiosity rather than judgment.
I worked recently with someone who, in this kind of expanded state, had the experience of feeling, I'm held by life itself. I'm actually okay as I am.
She kept asking me to say it back to her. And what shifted wasn't just a thought, it was her nervous system expanding and her mind arriving at the same place. That's a different kind of knowing. And it changes how someone is able to live.
Why the Relational Container Matters
I want to say something important here: that the relational aspect of this work is essential.
When healing happens in the presence of another person, a therapist, a guide, someone who can stay with you, something becomes possible that can't happen on your own.
You get to be seen. Not managed. Not fixed.
Seen. Held. Without having to use your usual strategies of disappearing, collapsing, going along, or performing okayness.
The patterns we carry developed in relationship, in moments that were too overwhelming for our nervous system to tolerate, so we adapted by leaving ourselves to stay safe. Not surprisingly, the healing of those patterns also happens in relationship, but one which creates a new experience of internal safety, or co-regulation.
This is true in individual therapy. It's true in group work. And it's especially true in the expanded state container, where working at depth and having someone with you changes what's possible.
Healing Opens to Spirit
The last thing I want to share, because it feels important and often goes unsaid, is where this work eventually leads.
When we've done a certain amount of healing, our being tends to open naturally to a force greater than ourselves.
Healing stops being primarily about avoiding pain or feeling better. And it starts becoming something else - contact with your actual life. With your wholeness. With something greater, whatever that means to you.
You may call it the divine, Spirit, love, nature, God, oneness. It's not a system or a belief. It's a felt experience.
That's the territory this work lives in. And I've come to think it's not separate from healing. It's where healing, when it goes deep enough, wants to take us.
Watch the full conversation with Susan Regan on the #sorelateable Podcast by clicking the link below.
If something in this conversation resonates with where you are right now, I'd love to connect. I work with individuals navigating challenging times, relationship ambivalence, dating struggles, and life changes through individual therapy, personal retreats, and support groups in San Francisco, Petaluma, and online throughout California.
Learn more about Individual Therapy, Personal Retreats, and Breakup & Divorce Support Groups, or reach out directly.