The Meaning of Healing Your Nervous System (Even in Stressful or Traumatic Environments)
**You can also listen to this in audio format only on The Regulated Mother Podcast on Apple or Spotify.
**Below is the blog article for easy reading.
A new perspective on healing when daily life still feels traumatic
Can I really heal while living in an environment that feels traumatic?
Can I really heal when I’m being triggered daily, when I feel like I’m drowning in stress, and when life with my child feels overwhelming and chaotic?
This is the question I hear over and over again from parents—and honestly, it’s the question I’ve asked myself countless times too. Because when you’re in the thick of constant meltdowns, refusals, rages, and chaos, healing can feel like an impossible dream.
So today, I want to unpack this question with you. I’ll share a very real story from my own life, and together we’ll look at what healing your nervous system really means. You’ll learn why healing isn’t about never getting triggered, why your past experiences shape how you feel in the present, and what it actually looks like to grow and change—even in the middle of the mess.
My hope is that by the end, you’ll walk away with a definition of healing that feels compassionate, realistic, and possible…so that you can see that healing is already happening for you, right here, right now.
When My Healing Felt Impossible
We were back here again. My son was in a panic and started banging the kitchen cupboard doors.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
I flinched. My body was bracing. I tried to remain calm and started walking away a little to give him space while still staying close. I noticed my activation building inside of me. I tried to ground myself, feeling my feet on the floor, putting my hand on my chest, sensing the warmth of my hand. I was containing the activation, trying to stay steady.
But all of a sudden, he pulled back the fridge door and slammed it against the counter, leaving dents in the door. Then he banged the fridge door shut so hard that bottles clashed together and glass shattered.
In that moment, my activation shot way up. I looked at the broken glass and the mess spilling onto the floor that I would have to clean up, and I felt myself drop into despair, followed by a sudden surge of rage. I could no longer contain myself.
I yelled at my son. I told him I didn’t want to live like this. I threatened to send him to a hospital if he kept doing this.
And then I stopped. I realized what I had just done, and shame flooded me. I collapsed into despair, crying while trying to clean up the mess.
After things had calmed down, I sat in a pile of shame and hopelessness. My thoughts spiraled:
- “When am I ever going to change?”
- “Why can’t I change?”
- “Why did I have to threaten him?”
- “Why can’t I feel safe when he bangs and breaks glass?”
- “Why…why…why?”
I was deep in a shame spiral, feeling like a failure yet again. “What’s the point of all this?” I thought. “I’m never going to heal, and this situation is never going to change.” I dropped into dorsal shutdown. I wanted to disappear, to exit this life.
This was my reality, over and over again. Trying so hard to heal and contain my reactions, but then, when something extreme happened, not being able to hold it in any longer. Unleashing anger, rage, and threats onto my child as a last-ditch effort to get him to stop. I couldn’t shake this pattern, no matter how hard I tried.
What I wanted more than anything was to stay calm when my son was activated. I wanted to not care if he broke things, to just be okay with it all. But when the intensity escalated, I couldn’t seem to hold steady.
And it wasn’t until I began to deeply examine what I thought “healing” meant that I realized I had been setting myself up for failure all along. No wonder I was always feeling like I was failing.
The Question I Hear All the Time
The big question I hear from parents again and again is this:
“Can you actually heal while living in an environment or situation that feels traumatic?”
The short answer: Yes. You can heal.
But there’s also a longer answer, because many of us—myself included—hold a definition of healing that keeps us feeling like failures.
So many of us imagine that healing means arriving at a destination where we are no longer triggered, where we can remain calm and relaxed no matter what challenges arise with our children. We imagine that our regulated presence will immediately and automatically regulate our child, helping them to function better, comply, and meet expectations.
This is the dream. The perfect scenario. The vision so many mothers hold.
But when we step onto the path of becoming more regulated, we discover how impossibly hard it is to stay calm in the face of extreme behavior.
Our survival systems are what often bring us to this path—so desperate for relief, so desperate to stop feeling the constant pain and suffering. Desperate for change in our children. Many of us arrive here after realizing we cannot control our children. We research endlessly, learning about accommodations and new approaches to create safety for our child’s nervous system.
But even then, our own nervous system is often still stuck in survival mode. We are still trying to control, just from a different angle now. Quietly desperate: If I can only change myself, then my child will get better, and I can finally feel like a good enough mom.
But that dream rarely comes to fruition. Why? Because it’s built on a false notion of what a “good parent” looks like. It’s based on perfectionism, on survival, and on the desperate need to finally feel enough.
Isn’t Healing About Being Calm?
At this point, you might be asking: But isn’t healing actually about being calm and in control?
The answer is both yes and no.
Yes, being regulated often does look like calm. But no, healing does not mean staying calm all the time.
There is nuance here. Healing is not a final destination where you stop getting triggered. Healing is a process of learning to respond differently when you are triggered. It is about gradually changing your patterns.
Understanding Trauma
The first step in redefining healing is understanding why your environment may feel traumatic.
When you live with a child who refuses many demands—even ones tied to their basic needs like eating, sleeping, toileting, and hygiene—your nervous system is constantly stretched beyond its capacity. When meltdowns, rages, or refusals are chronic, the situation can begin to feel inescapable. And trauma encodes when life feels inescapable.
Trauma gets encoded when:
- We feel trapped, powerless, or helpless.
- We feel we have no choices—we cannot fight or flee, so we drop into freeze or shutdown.
- We feel unsupported, isolated, and alone.
- We don’t have the energy or capacity to cope. (Energy reserves matter. When they run low, the body shifts into shutdown to conserve energy, and trauma encodes or deepens.)
- Life feels like “too much, too fast” (sudden rages or meltdowns happening over and over).
- Or it feels like “too little, for too long” (ongoing lack of support, lack of basic needs being met).
For those of you parenting PDA children who no longer attend school and who cycle in and out of burnout—you know this reality. You may feel all of the above.
And yet, the most important thing to understand about trauma is that the feelings you experience now don’t originate only in the present. When you are triggered, the patterns that come alive are rooted in the past.
As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio showed, 90% of what gets triggered in the present actually comes from the past, while only 10% has to do with what’s happening right now.
Feeling trapped, helpless, unsupported, hopeless—all of those feelings existed before your child. Your child just compounds and intensifies them.
This means that the ultimate work of healing is not about changing your child or stopping their behaviors. The work is about bringing awareness to what’s being triggered inside of you, tracing it back to its origins, and giving yourself a new experience of safety in the present.
When you do this, the present becomes far more bearable, because you are no longer carrying the entire weight of the past into it.
This isn’t easy work. But it is what creates the difference between feeling traumatized and simply feeling stressed. Stress is inevitable—it’s part of life. But if you can prevent yourself from being retraumatized over and over again, you are already making profound progress.
What Therapists Told Me
When I sought therapy, I heard the same message repeatedly:
- Healing requires time, space, and support.
- Healing requires safety.
- It can be very hard to heal if you are still living in chaos.
This was discouraging to hear.
In an IFS (Internal Family Systems Therapy) training, I remember being told that it was not advisable to do the deeper trauma healing work with children still living in abusive homes because it would be too hard for them to open up their vulnerability. Their protective systems needed to stay in place until the threat (their abusive parents) were no longer abusing them. This was disheartening to hear because I often wondered if this meant I could not heal while living with a violent child who threatened my nervous system so much.
I sought out many therapists, trying to find someone who would give me a different answer. I would receive a lot of validation for my situation—but rarely confidence that I could heal while still living in the thick of it.
I often felt like giving up.
But something in me—my soul—didn’t let me.
Why Healing Is Still Possible
There are two things I want to name here.
First, this is not the same as being a child who is still being traumatized. As parents, we are the adults now. Even when our protective parts are triggered, we still hold more choice and power than we realize. Recognizing this helps us reclaim some sense of agency.
Second, from a soul perspective, I believe we choose our life challenges, knowing we can grow through them. This belief gave me perseverance even when it felt impossible.
It took me four years to reach the trauma from my abuse and near-death experience at age one. For a long time, I didn’t know it was even there - no one in my family knew either. But the intensity of my survival reactions with my son told me there had to be something. I used somatic tools for years to calm my system until that trauma felt safe enough to surface.
So yes—it takes longer when you’re under chronic daily stress. It’s like trying to turn the Titanic around. But it is possible. With patience, tools, and compassion, you can learn to create safety even in the hardest environment.
What Healing Really Means
Here are all the meanings and signs of what healing really means when living with a child who may continue to have challenges for many years to come:
- Healing is not a destination.
Healing does not mean you will one day arrive at a place where you are calm all the time, where everything gets better for your child, and where life suddenly becomes easy. Holding onto this dream will always leave you feeling like you’re failing. The path forward is not about reaching a final “healed” state — it is about walking the journey. - Healing is not about not getting triggered.
As long as you are human, you will get triggered. Healing is about how you show up when you are triggered, and how you respond differently than you did in the past. Yes, over time, you will likely be triggered less often, especially by the smaller things. But it’s unrealistic to expect that you won’t be triggered at all — especially if your child is physically attacking you, threatening a sibling, or destroying your home. Those are real survival-level events, and it’s natural that your nervous system will react. - Healing is awareness.
Simply becoming aware of how your brain and body react is already a huge part of healing. Even if you can’t stop the extreme survival reaction yet, the fact that you can observe it with some curiosity instead of being completely lost in it is healing in itself. - Healing is not about staying calm all the time.
Your nervous system will automatically activate or shut down at times, often without your conscious control. Healing doesn’t mean eliminating these states; it means becoming aware of them and learning to help your system feel safe and contained enough to take the action that’s most needed. Sometimes that action is to pause and do nothing. Other times it’s to intervene more strongly to create safety. What matters is that your action becomes more contained, with more of your ventral vagal energy available. And as you continue healing old trauma, your activation will gradually become less extreme and easier to manage. - Healing is about not staying stuck in survival for long.
You will still have ups and downs, moments of fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown. The difference is that you don’t stay stuck “on” for days at a time, and you don’t remain collapsed “off” for long stretches either. Healing means learning how to ride the waves and come back to yourself, again and again. - Healing is about being okay with the messiness of it all.
Life will still be hard and messy. Healing means developing more capacity to handle the challenges and becoming more accepting of the fact that your life may never look neat or conventional. It is about allowing what is, even when it’s not what you wanted. - Healing is about holding onto or regaining your aliveness.
Dr. Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing therapy, teaches that trauma buries our vitality and aliveness. Healing is about releasing bound-up survival energy so we can come back into contact with our authentic sense of vitality, creativity, and life force. - Healing is about becoming more authentic.
Instead of automatically moving into fawn or appease modes to gain approval, you begin expressing more of who you truly are. You stop living for others’ expectations and feel more comfortable being yourself. - Healing is being able to have boundaries.
Healing means being able to say no to people who don’t support you, who drain you, or who add more stress to your life. It also sometimes means setting firmer boundaries with your own child and choosing your needs first when you’re at capacity. - Healing feels like having more choices.
Trauma encodes when we feel choiceless. Healing empowers us with choices in moments that used to feel trapped and hopeless. You start to see more clearly, to find perspective, and to feel like you can choose how to help yourself in the hardest moments. Even choosing to walk away or take a breath can be an act of healing because it shifts you out of helplessness and into agency. - Healing feels like becoming kinder and more compassionate with yourself.
Trauma often encodes when we are left alone with no support. When those parts of you get triggered in the present, healing means bringing compassion and support to yourself instead of repeating the survival patterns of self-criticism and harshness. - Healing means being able to stay in the present moment.
Instead of being hijacked by the past or worrying about the future, you learn to bring yourself back to what is happening right now. Presence itself is a form of healing. - Healing means being able to notice the good things — even the small ones.
The little “glimmers” — a moment of laughter, a kind gesture, a small piece of beauty — begin to register more fully. You let them land in your nervous system instead of brushing them off. - Healing means being able to forgive and repair.
When you yell, when you collapse, when you react in ways you don’t like, healing means you can forgive yourself and repair with your child. You no longer live in endless shame spirals. - Healing is surrendering and letting go of resistance.
You stop fighting reality so much. You begin to allow what is, trusting more and more that you can handle this life with all its challenges, even if you don’t like them. - Healing means when we get triggered yet again, and it feels like we are repeating the same pattern, that it is really about the next layer coming up to be learned from this experience.
If we can reframe the experience from “Why is this happening again?” to “What do I need to learn from this now — what is the next piece of learning that is coming forward?” then we are healing. Instead of judging yourself for repeating the same pattern, you can see each cycle as another chance to grow into the next layer of awareness. - Healing feels like you’re learning and growing from hard experiences.
You begin to sense that your pain is not meaningless, but rather, it is shaping you, deepening you, and teaching you something valuable. - Healing feels like you don’t take things quite as seriously.
You find yourself laughing sometimes at the absurdity of it all. This lightness is a sign of nervous system flexibility and resilience. - Healing feels like your reactions are becoming less extreme.
You may notice that things which used to set you off into panic, rage, or collapse no longer hit as hard. This is a sign that your system is feeling safer overall.
And I want to be clear: I am not saying you need to feel all of these things to be healed. I am not saying you need to feel them all the time. Healing is a journey, not a destination. You may experience some of these sometimes, and not others. You may experience a few, and not all. All of it is okay. This is your path. You are here to learn your own lessons and to walk your own unique journey.
From a Soul Perspective
From the soul’s perspective, the ultimate healing is Self Realization—knowing deeply who you are beyond your conditioning.
It is experiencing the felt sense that you are already whole, complete, love, and peace.
This doesn’t mean you’ll be calm all the time—especially when something dangerous is literally being thrown at your head. But it does mean that you can stay present to it all, allow what is, and hold the deep knowing that your circumstances do not define who you are.
You are not broken. You are not someone who needs to be fixed. You are someone who is learning to release the constraints of programming so that your true self can shine through.
That self is unconditional love, wholeness, and peace.
The Invitation
My invitation to you is to take a deeper look at what healing means to you.
How does your survival system define it? Does it look like perfection, constant calm, or finally being “good enough”?
What if healing could mean something else — something more compassionate, realistic, and human?
Carl Rogers once said: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
Healing is not about becoming perfect — it is about meeting yourself with acceptance and compassion so that real change can unfold.
And as Pema Chödrön reminds us: “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”
Healing is not about erasing your patterns — it is about learning from them, layer by layer, until your nervous system and soul feel more free.
So my invitation is this:
To redefine healing not as a destination, but as a living process. A process of awareness, returning, forgiving, choosing, and allowing. A process of remembering your aliveness and your wholeness — even in the middle of the mess.
Because the truth is: you are already healing. Right here. Right now.
