^{A's to your Q's}

This work touches deep, foundational wiring in your nervous system - especially early developmental patterns. Feeling emotional, heavy, or even numb is a normal response. Go slowly, pause often, and know your system is processing.

Not at all. It means your system adapted to early experiences in brilliant, protective ways. This course is here to help you understand and gently shift those patterns. Your system is not broken - it’s been doing its best to keep you safe.

No. Memory gaps are common, especially in developmental trauma. You don’t need perfect recall to heal. The body remembers through sensation, and that’s what we’re working with here.

• Developmental trauma happens over time, often from misattunement, neglect, or lack of safety in early life.

• Shock trauma is sudden - like an accident, surgery, or loss - and can overwhelm the system in a single moment.

• Chronic stress is ongoing pressure that accumulates over time and often mimics trauma in the body.

  
  We work with all three here, but developmental trauma is often the deepest and most complex to unwind.

When your system is stuck in survival mode, energy that should go toward healing and repair is rerouted toward basic survival. Over time, this can lead to fatigue, burnout, low immunity, chronic conditions, hormonal imbalance (like PCOS), and emotional dysregulation. This “cost” builds slowly - but it can be reversed with consistent regulation work.

There are often big events that are traumatic, even though they have been normalised and may not seem big by society’s standards. Things like circumcision, early surgeries or severe illness, choking on food – these are all pretty big events to a young system. 

But more often in our society it is the things that don’t seem ‘big’ at all, that have a serious impact on the nervous system – parents who are chronically stressed (that’s just ‘normal’, right?), parents with unresolved trauma, or who don’t like each other, who fight a lot in the presence of their kids, who are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol, or who are separated and uncommunicative – all of these things are quite common and not usually considered traumatic, but they almost always are.

Yes, totally normal and a good thing. It may not feel like a good thing, because of the discomfort, but there is simply no way to heal this stuff if we are numb. As we say – if you can feel it, then you can heal it!

This is also why it is SO important to go slow and really titrate this work. When we do that, our system will generally not offer up more than we have the capacity to deal with. If we’ve been living in freeze, functional or otherwise, as we connect and attune to our system, and the freeze starts to lift, we can have periods of actually feeling MORE stressed than before we started this work, as the underlying Sympathetic energy starts to move. We may feel angry, afraid, and new, uncomfortable sensations.

Being afraid of this is understandable, but there simply is no other way out but through, so we really need to work on accepting this, knowing that it is our life energy returning to us, and that the discomfort wont last forever.

We also may need to work more proactively with engaging the Sympathetic system in healthy ways, like with increased movement, and/or things like the Healthy Aggression work in module 4 such as the 'Be The Animal You "AHH"’ practice. 

Contrarily, we may also need to support our Parasympathetic down-regulation with some of the slower practices (bearing in mind that everyone is unique, and that exercises that are soothing for some people may be stimulating for others). Example 'Finding The Safety' & 'Feeling the Now'

On the bright side, being able to feel more uncomfortable things means we also will get to feel more wonderful things, like joy and pleasure, though that may not be apparent right away.

The nervous system is designed to normalise what’s familiar, even if it’s stressful or harmful. Many of us grow up in environments where dysregulation is the baseline. Realising it now is not too late - it’s the beginning of something powerful.

There are many ways freeze becomes a normal part of how we react to stress.

Usually it is rooted in early/developmental trauma, where the little one could not fight or flee a hostile, neglectful, chronically stressful, or misattuned environment, and so the system perceived freeze as the only option left, and then eventually just starts to default to freeze when stress enters the picture.

It can also happen because of traumatic births or surgical procedures early on, but it’s not a guarantee; if the caregivers are healthy and attuned then the little one’s system will be able to bounce back from pretty much anything. It can also happen later in life through physical abuse that can’t be escaped or defended against; an older child’s system may still learn to numb out as a way to defend.

There is no one timeline or sequence to coming out of freeze, it will be different for everybody. One thing is the same though, in that it does take time. This isn’t something that happens in a session, or a week, or a month.

Generally we are looking at months or years, with improvements and gradual changes in physiological function that happen slowly. Some may start to notice they simply feel more alive or feel more sensation, or have more energy or better boundaries. They may start to speak up for themselves. Sleep may improve and start to be more restful, or immune problems may start to clear up. Digestion, reproduction may get better. Basically, physiological function will slowly improve over time, and we see this in improvements in the systems that have been compromised, and in the behaviours that have their roots in the unresolved freeze response.

The Vagus nerve plays a huge part in Parasympathetic function, which is to down-regulate the Sympathetic Nervous System. In other words, it helps to calm us down. The Ventral Vagus is the part we really want to do this. It is the part that governs safety and connection, and lets us, by engaging with safe people, or by making sound, or hearing soothing sounds, gently take the foot off of the ‘gas,’ which is the Sympathetic.

The Dorsal Vagus, on the other hand, is more like the emergency brake. When a lot of energy goes into it (we call this High Scale Dorsal), it activates the Freeze, or shutdown response. This will also bring us out of Sympathetic, but it is a survival response and not very good for us when it has become the go-to option.

On the other hand, ‘Low Scale Dorsal,’ when a lesser amount of energy is in this system, is VERY good for us. The Low Scale Dorsal state lets us rest, digest, reproduce and repair our cells. It supports immune function and barrier-keeping in the gut. When we have more access to the Ventral Vagal part of this system, we will also have more access to this healthy ‘Low Scale’ state. This is optimal.

With unresolved trauma in the picture though, it is much more common to flip between high Sympathetic activation (Fight/Flight), and High Scale Dorsal (Freeze). When this is the case our gut is impacted because we don’t have nearly as much access to healthy digestion, healthy reproductive flow/cycles and barrier keeping in the gut.

When I say ‘scale’ we simply mean the amount of energy of the dorsal state in the system. The technical word is 'tone' but I like the word 'scale' as I feel it can be understood better. High scale is a lot of energy, low scale is a little bit of energy.

In the context of the dorsal vagus, this is the difference between getting ready to die, and successfully living!

The high scale dorsal vagal response is the Freeze response, the last ditch effort of the organism to survive, or at least to be more numb to the experience of dying. The low scale dorsal vagal response is what governs digestion, reproduction, immune function, cell repair, barrier-keeping in the gut, proper sleep, and growth. In other words, all the good stuff.

That’s a common response to early trauma - especially developmental or chronic. Numbing is the body’s way of managing too much, for too long. As you gently come into regulation, sensation and emotion will return in tolerable doses within capacity. 

Yes. Neuroplasticity is real. Your system wants to heal - it just needs safety, consistency, and time. The nervous system can rewire at any stage of life.

Look for subtle shifts: a moment of pause, orienting to your environment, noticing your breath, a clearer boundary, a flicker of presence. Healing isn't linear - but each small sign is evidence of change.

When your system begins to slow down and come out of survival mode, exhaustion is common. It’s a sign that your body is finally getting the message that it’s safe enough to rest. Honour the need to go slow.

This is normal. Please pause the content, orient to your environment, and use a regulation practice that feels supportive. Pacing is a strength - not a setback.

Yes. When done consistently and gently, this work supports deep and lasting healing. The nervous system is changeable. With the right tools and the right pace, regulation and restoration are absolutely possible.