Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Minimizes
You tell yourself it's not a big deal. A partner goes quiet for a few minutes. Someone's text sounds a little short. A tone shifts slightly in a conversation that was otherwise fine. Your mind runs through it and says there's nothing wrong here.
Your body disagrees, and it disagrees loudly.
Heart racing. Chest tight. Stomach in knots. A sudden urge to fix whatever just happened, even though you can't quite name what that is. This is one of the more common and most misunderstood experiences I see in my practice, and it deserves a real explanation instead of the usual response people get, which is being told they're overreacting.
Why the Nervous System Gets Wired This Way
Part of why our bodies respond the way that they do, in a way that can seem like overreacting in the moment, is because there is implicit or learned memory built over the lifespan of the experiences we've had. Based on family of origin, we were conditioned to predict and expect certain responses in certain contexts. If you had to monitor another person's behaviors or moods in order to stay safer or avoid conflict, your nervous system becomes much more sensitive to stimulation and changes in stimulation.
This isn't something that happens from one bad moment. Because this is the case over time, it's an accumulation of experiences, and the nervous system continues to become more sensitive. Eventually, something small, like somebody's affect or their verbal tone, can actually push you into fight, flight, freeze, or shut down.
A lot of this traces back to unpredictability, which is often the homework of dysfunctional relationships. You don't really know when certain things are coming. Will it be criticism, anger, unpredictability, withdrawal. Those things you've seen before, and that other people can create, become very swift triggers for feeling dysregulated.
At the same time, there's a push and pull that happens in close relationships, where you get conflicting information. I love and care for this person, or this person is my caregiver, and it should be okay. However, your nervous system could be saying that something is not okay, that you're not safe, and this conflict between what you know and what you feel can be very confusing.
The Two Pillars of Anxiety
The unpredictability itself is what causes anxiety. The two pillars of anxiety are discomfort and uncertainty. When you're in a chronic context of being uncertain how others will respond to you, it naturally sends off a threat response, one that has you monitoring the situation and the other person's affective behavior in order to ensure your own safety.
Because of previous unsafe, unpredictable, and uncertain contexts you may have grown up in, you develop what I like to call antennae. These antennae are constantly scanning the environment for threat. That could be somebody's tone, how they text, their mood, their facial expression. This creates anxiety, and that anxiety has a number of outcomes and fallouts worth naming directly.
Reassurance seeking is one of them, needing someone's affirmation that everything is okay. A fear of being abandoned is another. If somebody doesn't respond to a text, you may perceive that you're being rejected or abandoned. You might overthink and repeatedly go over conversations and their details, trying to get certainty about what really happened.
There's also the somatic sense, which is all of your physical senses responding at once. This could be a heart racing, a chest being tight, a stomach hurting, sweating, an inability to relax. There's often a felt sense of urgency, a feeling like the conflict has to be resolved right now. There's a difficulty tolerating uncertainty, where not knowing what someone is thinking or feeling can feel unbearable and can push you to pursue them just to get reassurance that everything is okay. That can look like appeasing quickly, apologizing, explaining yourself, or changing your behavior to prevent someone from being upset. It can even show up as an overall intolerance for when things feel calm and settled, where you feel uncomfortable when there's no distress in the relationship, simply because you're not used to it.
The Mismatch Between Your Brain and Your Body
There can often be a mismatch between what is really happening in a situation, which you'd use your cognitive brain to appraise, and what your body may be telling you, which comes from memories of the past, or implicit memory. Your nervous system has changed to have a heightened arousal in order to detect threat, and so there's a disparity between what's really happening and how your cognitive brain perceives what's happening versus what your body perceives is happening.
Here's what that actually looks like in a real moment. Say you have a conflict, and your partner, or somebody you're in a relationship with, gets quiet. You detect a threat within your nervous system. Adrenaline rises. Your cognitive brain searches for an explanation. Did I do something wrong? And then you have an urge to fix it.
Your brain may tell you that there is nothing wrong with the situation, but your body is telling you a completely different story. Because of that felt sense of unsafety, you will respond, and you will often overreact from the outside looking in, even though nothing about what you're doing is really about overreacting on purpose.
Why This Isn't a Character Flaw
Most often, people need education on what is actually happening in this disparity between the brain and the body, because they come back at themselves feeling crazy, feeling like there's something wrong with them. They've also often been told previously that they're overreacting, that they're being dramatic, that they're being too much. This is actually not the case. What happens instead is that people sever themselves from their internal sense, from their gut, and they start listening to the voices of others who hand them these negative messages, when really, they are remembering things that have happened in the past that were unsafe.
You should listen to that. And you can also ask yourself, is this like back then, or is this happening now? There is not always a correlation between a strong reaction, which happens automatically, and whether the current situation is actually unsafe. That doesn't mean you're overreacting purposefully. It just means your nervous system is hardwired based on the past, in order to give you information to protect yourself from any future threat.
What Actually Helps
When people are educated and validated on what is actually happening in their bodies, it makes a lot more sense, and they feel like there isn't something wrong with them. This is simply a byproduct of your nervous system adapting and adjusting to things that have gone on over time.
With practice, you can help make the distinction between then and now. You can learn regulation techniques in order to keep from over-responding. You can create a gap between the urge to respond and the behavior you actually execute. And you can learn to care for yourself, despite the fact that you may continue to struggle with this from time to time.
Your body isn't malfunctioning when it remembers. It's protecting you the only way it learned how. The goal isn't to silence that response or talk yourself out of it entirely. It's to build enough of a gap, and enough self-trust, that you can tell the difference between an old threat your body remembers and what's actually happening in front of you right now.
If you’re ready to better understand your body’s responses and build more trust in yourself, I’d love to sit down with you and explore where to start.
