regulation: How the body learns to feel safe enough

What Somatic Experiencing is teaching me about being alone, being safe, and being held—from the inside out.

There’s a twisted comfort in staying up too late, like punishing my body feels safer than facing what I’m avoiding.
Maybe if I stay awake long enough, I won’t have to feel what’s creeping in.

If I just keep my brain occupied with something—social media, online shopping, finding a date on Hinge—maybe my kids won’t actually go on their big trip to Alaska with their dad. Maybe I won’t be left here, alone.
I know that’s not how this works, but tell that to my nervous system.

Right now, it’s pouring down rain. And it feels like the perfect weather for the grief I’m experiencing. A small death. A mother’s death.

Who am I when I’m not mothering?
Who am I when I’m not loving and caring for my children the way I know best?

That version of me—the nurturer, the steady one, the one who knows how to comfort others—is the part of myself I trust the most. I have known her since I was young. I loved her when I became a stepmom. I loved her when I was a student teacher. I loved her when I made up dances for my little sister. I love her still, when I hold space for breathwork clients and celebrate their soft landings or hard truths.

She is my anchor.

But right now, she feels untethered.

This isn’t just a feeling. This is a nervous system moment.

As I sat with this familiar ache—the one I used to numb with late nights and cocktails and cigarettes (ok that was a long time ago but still)—I realized: I don’t need to dig through my trauma history to understand why this is so hard.

Because it’s happening right now.

This is one of the most powerful things I’ve learned in my training as a Somatic Experiencing (SE) practitioner-in-training:

You don’t have to relive your trauma to heal. You can begin right where you are.

What is Somatic Experiencing?

For those of you who aren’t familiar, Somatic Experiencing is a body-based healing modality developed by Dr. Peter Levine. It’s designed to help people process unresolved trauma and chronic stress through the body, not just the mind.

Rather than focusing only on emotions or retelling painful memories, SE helps us work with our felt sense—which includes physical sensations, images, impulses, movements, and inner experiences that arise before we assign language or meaning.

Through this process, we begin to:

• Access resources (internal, external, and even imagined) that help us feel supported and safe

• Expand our capacity to stay with bodily sensations without becoming overwhelmed

• Uncouple past trauma from current experience so that we’re not constantly reacting as if we’re still in danger

One of the most healing shifts SE offers is the realization that symptoms like anxiety, shutdown, or hypervigilance are not signs of brokenness—they are the body’s intelligent survival responses.

My old resources weren’t wrong. They were just incomplete.

In the past, when I was alone, I would "have fun."
And by fun, I mean drinking. Going out. Finding people to be with so I didn’t have to be with myself.

And truthfully? That worked.

That was a resource. That was my body seeking co-regulation—being near other nervous systems to feel safer, soothed, and alive. I was doing what I knew. And it’s important to name that not with shame, but with compassion.

Because co-regulation is a real and powerful human need. It’s one of the earliest ways we learn to feel safe.

I was held a lot as a child. I co-slept into early adolescence. I had hugs on demand and people around me often. When I left home, I simply replaced those bodies with new ones. Bodies to sleep next to. To feel next to. To regulate with.

And now that I’m divorced, now that my kids are leaving for trips without me, now that I’m in a home with only the heartbeat of my dog nearby—
I am learning to rely less on others to soothe me and instead build the capacity to soothe myself.

Auto-regulation isn’t about doing it all alone.

This doesn’t mean I no longer need people. Or that co-regulation isn’t valid. I still reach out. I still lean on my support system (thank Goddess for the people who reminded me it would be okay when all I wanted was to scream that it wouldn’t be).

But I’m also learning to hold myself in the moments when no one else is there.

This is auto-regulation.
It’s not bypassing. It’s not stuffing things down. It’s the slow, embodied practice of feeling just enough to allow the body to come back into a state of safety and flow.

SE doesn’t push for emotional catharsis or force you to confront painful memories. It invites your body to show what it’s ready to show—and to stop when it’s had enough.

That’s what I’m doing right now.
Letting the tears rise, and fall.
Noticing my racing heart, and staying with it until it slows.
Letting the rain fall with me.
Letting my body teach me that I am not alone. I am with myself.

And to be clear- this isn’t some perfect, unshakable sense of safety. That doesn’t exist—not for most nervous systems, especially not after trauma. What we’re really aiming for is safe enough. Safe enough to breathe, to feel a little more, to not bolt or shut down. Safe enough to let the body start to trust, little by little, that it doesn’t have to be in survival mode anymore.

this is what happens when you stop running.

You stop numbing. You stop distracting. You pause just long enough to feel what’s been waiting underneath.

Your nervous system is trying to love you the best way it knows how. Even if that means Netflix binges and scrolling through old photos and standing in the rain whispering, “What the hell do I do now?”

I’m learning that I don’t always need to do anything. I can just be.
Be with the sensations.
Be with the grief.
Be with the truth that being a mother is not the only way I am allowed to feel fulfilled.

There’s a new version of me growing in this space.
And she’s learning to stay.

If you’re curious about Somatic Experiencing…

This is only one window into it—through my own lived experience as a mother, woman, coach, and human learning to love herself.

If you’ve been holding your breath, bracing through life, or wondering why being alone feels so activating—I invite you to explore this work with me.

I offer free 60-minute initial conversations to talk about how we can work with your nervous system gently, slowly, and powerfully—without re-traumatizing or digging through your deepest wounds.

Because healing doesn’t have to be heavy.
It can start with the smallest sensation in the body… and end with you knowing, “I’m safe now. I’m here.”