The power we hold, p.13
The Power We Hold, page 13
The Nervous System: the Alarm
Our nervous system constantly scans for danger – physical, emotional, or relational. When it’s well regulated, it only sounds the alarm in true emergencies. But if it’s been shaped by early trauma or chronic stress, it becomes oversensitive, setting off high-alert responses over minor cues such as facial expression, a change in tone, or a gut feeling.
The Subconscious Mind: the Alarm’s Control Panel
Governing 90 percent of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, the subconscious determines what qualifies as danger based on past experiences and begins programming before you’re even born, absorbing cues from your environment in utero.
As we discussed in Chapter 11, this programming deepens in your early childhood, especially during the first seven years, when your brain operates primarily in theta waves. If, during this time, you learned that anger leads to rejection or that love must be earned through perfection or compliance, your subconscious codes those experiences as threats. From then on, anything that even vaguely resembles those dynamics can trigger a survival response – because to your control panel, the past is always present.
Trauma: Shapes the Control Panel’s Settings
Whether it’s a big T trauma or a series of smaller, cumulative experiences that made you feel unseen, unsafe, or not enough (little t trauma), the subconscious stores them the same way, as evidence of danger. These moments don’t have to be dramatic to leave an imprint – chronic invalidation, inconsistent caregiving, emotional neglect, or pressure to perform can all silently shape the control panel’s settings.
Over time, your inner alarm begins to run on high-alert, interpreting everyday stressors – like a tone of voice, a delayed reply, or someone setting a boundary – as potential threats. This is why you might react intensely to situations that seem minor on the surface. Unless those subconscious beliefs are addressed and rewired, the alarm continues responding to the past, even when the present is safe.
The Conscious Mind: the Homeowner
As we discussed in Chapter 11, we don’t fully move into our ‘house’ until our mid-twenties – when our brain finishes maturing. By that point, the nervous system (alarm) and the subconscious mind (control panel) have been running on autopilot for years, shaping our reactions without our awareness. We might logically understand that we’re safe now, but our body doesn’t get the memo. It’s still responding based on outdated programming.
Of course, the rewiring of our subconscious can begin long before our twenties (and at any age) – but without the level of conscious awareness that typically develops in our mid-twenties, we’re more likely to keep living out patterns we never consciously chose.
The Survival Loop
I hope this analogy enables you to see why so many of the emotional, behavioral, and relational patterns addressed by the Root Restoration Framework (see Chapter 8) can feel so automatic, sticky, and difficult to shift.
You may have noticed the way one unexpected text can send your heart racing, or a subtle shift in someone’s tone makes you instantly backtrack on your boundaries. These aren’t overreactions. They’re survival strategies. And when those strategies have been reinforced for years, it can feel like you’re going round in circles rather than forward. This trauma response cycle is what I call the survival loop.
You may already feel like you’re caught in the survival loop – triggered by the same kind of stressor, reaching for the same coping strategy, and then wondering why you can’t seem to change. That’s because until you work at the level of the nervous system and the subconscious mind – the level where the original programming lives – your system will keep looping back to what it knows.
As James Hollis, a Jungian psychoanalyst explains in his book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, ‘No one awakens in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, “I think I will repeat my mistakes today.” But, frequently, this replication of history is precisely what we do, because we are unaware of the silent presence of those programmed energies, the core ideas we’ve acquired, internalized, and surrendered to.
Let’s look more closely at how the survival loop is activated, and then I’ll explain how we can interrupt it.
The survival loop
Here’s an overview of the stages of the loop.
Stressor (Trigger)
The loop begins when something in your environment – a tone, a facial expression, a delay or reaction – triggers a response that your subconscious has previously associated with danger. It doesn’t matter whether the current event is big or small. What matters is what it reminds your nervous system of.
This is where trauma lives: in the stored association, not the situation itself. Trauma isn’t just the memory of what happened – it’s how your body learned to protect you in response. So, when a present-day event resembles something painful or unsafe from your past, your system responds as if it’s happening all over again. Here are some examples:
A friend cancels plans at the last minute – triggers the subconscious belief: ‘Something about me must be too much or not enough.’
A partner expresses mild frustration with us – triggers the subconscious belief: ‘If someone is upset with me, I’m at risk of being abandoned.’
In both cases, the current experience lights up an old wound. The stressor is real, but it’s the meaning beneath it, stored in your subconscious and nervous system, that activates the survival loop.
Nervous System Reactivated
At this stage, your body responds as if the original trauma is happening again; not to the situation itself, but to what it reminds you of.
Instinctive Reaction(s)
The nervous system then chooses the reaction(s) that once helped you survive (fight-flight/freeze or fawn). This can look like people-pleasing to avoid conflict, shutting down to prevent escalation, or over-controlling to feel safe. Even if it no longer serves you, your body repeats what it knows.
Coping and Avoidance Strategies
When your nervous system is activated, you instinctively reach for something to regulate it. Most of us were never taught how to return to the parasympathetic nervous system in healthy ways, so we turn to numbing strategies we’ve seen modelled such as scrolling on our phone, drinking, binge eating, overexercising, or overworking. In contrast, healthy regulating strategies look like breathwork, movement, journaling, music, laughter, hugs with a safe person or grounding in nature.
The Illusion of Safety
These coping and avoidance strategies create the illusion of safety and control, but because they don’t address the underlying beliefs in the subconscious, the nervous system will continue perceiving the stressor you’ve reacted to as a threat in the future.
For example, if a difficult conversation made your body feel unsafe, doing 10 minutes of breathwork might soothe the activation this time, but if the deeper belief is ‘It’s not safe for me to share my needs,’ the same trigger will activate you once more, moving you back through the survival loop all over again.
Pause for Self-Reflection
Think about or journal on the following questions:
Is there a pattern or reaction you keep finding yourself in, even when you ‘know better’?
What might this loop be protecting you from feeling, remembering, or risking?
What would safety look like in that moment instead?
Let’s look at two examples of how the survival loop can play out in real-life situations:
Olivia and Samantha’s Stories
* * *
Olivia was reading a passage from a textbook out loud to the class in elementary school biology when she accidentally pronounced the word ‘organism’ as ‘orgasm.’ (The kind of verbal slip that so many of us have made.) Her classmates erupted with laughter, and for years afterward, they continued to tease her, calling her ‘Orgasm Olivia’ and making up songs and sounds to mock her.
Even as the joke’s origin was lost to time, the nickname lingered among Olivia’s male peers, embedding itself into her sense of self in ways they never saw. This experience lodged two key beliefs in her subconscious mind: ‘My voice leads to humiliation’ and ‘I need to express myself perfectly or I’ll experience shame.’
Decades later, these thought loops were holding her back as she took on more responsibility as a director in a marketing firm. She struggled to sleep before big client presentations and found herself getting extremely anxious, sweating and angrily snapping at her team. Her nervous system was interpreting the upcoming presentation as a threat based on her childhood experience, and to cope, she’d mindlessly snack on potato chips until she returned to a state of calm.
Meanwhile, Samantha grew up in a household where love was only verbally or physically expressed when she achieved something – being a straight-A student, excelling in sports, or winning an essay competition. If she failed, she felt invisible. Her subconscious learned: ‘You’re only lovable when you’re perfect.’
Today, as a small-business owner also juggling motherhood, she finds it nearly impossible to rest without feeling guilty. Whenever she tries to slow down, a familiar sense of panic creeps in. To feel in control, she overworks, over-delivers, and takes on more than she can handle. Her body is exhausted, but rest feels unsafe. When she does attempt to relax, she numbs out by binge-watching TV shows or making endless to-do lists for the following day.
Interrupting the Survival Loop
My therapeutic method ThetaSomatics™ is designed to interrupt the survival loop at its source. It cultivates safety and resilience in mind (theta) and body (somatics) by rewiring the nervous system and the subconscious adaptive beliefs we’ve picked up throughout our lives. Rather than trying to think your way out of old behaviors or simply talk through your pain, this approach works at the level where the beliefs that drive them were first wired in.
In Chapter 21, I’ll guide you through a ThetaSomatics™ Rewiring Practice. But right now, let’s see why this and other somatic healing techniques are such powerful tools for rewiring trauma and subconscious wounds.
The Subconscious Mind (Theta State)
The subconscious mind operates 90 percent of the time, storing the beliefs, fears, and patterns that guide your daily life. The most direct way to access and rewire it is through theta, a naturally occurring brainwave state that we enter as we fall asleep, wake up, meditate, engage in breathwork, or drop into a trance or hypnosis.
In the theta state, the subconscious becomes highly suggestible. This is where old neural pathways such as ‘I’m not lovable’ can be gently replaced with new neural pathways such as ‘I’m lovable just as I am’ or ‘I’m worthy of unconditional love.’ This process is made possible by neuroplasticity – the brain’s remarkable ability to change its structure and function.
These neural pathways then shape the way your nervous system responds to future stressors. Instead of defaulting to stress, anxiety, or panic (fight-or-flight activation), you begin to access perspective, calm, and clarity because your system has learned a new way to interpret, relate, and respond to the event (stressor), as shown in this diagram:
The process of neuroplasticity
Through nervous system regulation, guided visualization, inner dialogue, intentional affirmations, and neuroplasticity-enhancing activities such as dance, the ThetaSomatics™ Rewiring Practice helps you form new neural pathways in the brain – rewiring your felt experience of the world over time.
The Nervous System (Somatic Healing)
The nervous system is responsible for 80 percent of your body’s signals. By discharging stored tension or emotions and restoring a sense of internal safety, somatic healing work moves you from reactivity to regulation.
Practices such as rocking, tremoring, shaking, dance, and character work recalibrate the body’s baseline, so that what once felt overwhelming becomes tolerable; you’ll learn how to use these tools in Chapters 20 and 21. Over time, you’ll not just react differently, you’ll cultivate an inner sense of safety which signals to your body that it’s time to shift its focus and resources to healing and self-repair.
This process is made possible by bioplasticity, the body’s innate ability to reshape itself based on input, environment, and experience. It’s happening inside you all the time. For example, your skin renews itself every 28 days, your stomach lining regenerates every few days, and your bones, though solid, remodel continuously.
Your Triggers Are Clues
Your nervous system will always choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. This is why a chaotic relationship may unconsciously feel more ‘normal’ to you than a calm one – not because it’s better but because your body knows how to survive it. Left unhealed, the nervous system will always guide you back to what it knows, even if what it knows is pain.
We’ve been taught to fear discomfort, to interpret our triggers as signs that something’s wrong with us. But in fact, those triggers are proof that something’s unfinished. They highlight the areas where outdated survival patterns are quietly dictating our reactions. Instead of running from these moments, ThetaSomatics invites you to treat your patterns (whether they are people-pleasing, overworking, or numbing) as clues.
As the relationship therapist Vienna Pharaon so wisely puts it in her book The Origins of You: ‘Avoiding your triggers isn’t healing. Healing happens when you’re triggered and you’re able to move through the pain, the pattern, and the story and walk your way to a different ending.’
Each reaction and behavioral pattern is a doorway to deeper understanding, an invitation to reclaim the parts of you that have been sidelined for the sake of safety. The more we rewrite our beliefs on a subconscious and nervous system level, the more we embody our full, unapologetic selves. Here’s a story that shows what becomes possible when you stop reacting from your wound and begin responding from your worth.
Amelia’s Story
* * *
Amelia, a 28-year-old from the Netherlands, had been trying to conceive for three years. She and her partner had tracked ovulation with military precision, overhauled their diets, taken supplements, and endured the monthly roller-coaster of hope and heartbreak. All tests came back normal, and the doctors called it unexplained infertility. But deep down, Amelia knew there was more to it.
When she arrived in my world, she was exhausted – physically, emotionally, and spiritually. In our first session, I asked her gently, ‘If your body was protecting you from something by not falling pregnant, what might that be?’ She blinked at me, confused. Then her eyes filled with tears.
Amelia had grown up in a household where motherhood looked like martyrdom. Her own mother had suffered deeply – sacrificing her dreams, losing her sense of self in endless caregiving, and slowly becoming bitter and withdrawn. As a child, Amelia absorbed the subconscious belief that to be a good mother, she had to put herself last. That being a mother meant being exhausted, selfless to the point of invisibility, and always running on empty.
She’d spent her adult life living the opposite way – traveling, building a career, cultivating freedom and self-expression. And although she longed for a child, her subconscious was running on a program of fear, repeating Pregnancy equals sacrifice. Motherhood equals loss of self.
So, together, we began to gently rewrite the story. We used somatic work to regulate her nervous system, hypnosis in the theta state to meet the inner child still bracing against becoming her mother, and ThetaSomatics to install new beliefs:‘I can be a mother and still be myself. I can create new life without losing mine.’ Amelia created a new normal for herself by only consuming social media posts from women who embodied these beliefs – consistently giving her subconscious proof that living this way was possible.
Amelia also started reconnecting to joy, pleasure, and creativity to reclaim safety in her body. She let go of timelines. She softened. And three months later, she conceived naturally. It wasn’t magic: It was biology, energy, and belief, finally aligned. When the body no longer perceived motherhood as a threat, it allowed it in.
At the core of this work is an unshakable truth: It’s safe to be who you are and live life on your own terms. In fact, the world needs you to be who you are. Because real solutions to today’s crises – whether personal, social, or global – won’t come from conformity or compliance. They’ll come from the diverse, vibrant voices of those who have reclaimed their power from the forces that sought to suppress them.
•••
Now that you understand how survival gets wired into your body, it’s time to explore a force that keeps you playing small: shame. In the next chapter, we’ll break down how shame shapes what’s known as the adaptive self, why it’s been used to control women for centuries, and how reclaiming your authenticity is the first act of true rebellion.
Chapter 13
THE ADAPTIVE SELF VS. THE AUTHENTIC SELF
‘Illness not only has a history, but it tells a history. It is a culmination of a lifelong history of struggle for self.’
GABOR MATÉ
Shame. Shame. Shame. If you’ve watched the TV show Game of Thrones, you’ll likely remember the infamous Walk of Shame scene from Season 5. Cersei Lannister – regal, ruthless, and once the most powerful woman in the land of Westeros – is dragged from her gilded castle and forced to walk naked through the filthy streets of King’s Landing. Her long, golden hair is hacked short, her body exposed to the sneers and jeers of a merciless crowd, who spit on her, pelt her with rotten food, and scream insults. And a Septa (female clergy of the dominant religion) rings a bell with cruel precision, chanting shame with each clang.
