Healing the Nervous System: A Mission of Kindness & Peace

Tatiana has made it her life's mission to heal as many nervous systems as she possibly can. She is unbelievably passionate about spreading awareness about the nervous system and helping people understand how important the nervous system is and the role that it plays in our everyday lives. She truly believes that if more people healed their nervous systems, the world would be a kinder and safer place.

Tatiana is a complex trauma survivor. She struggled significantly with mental health growing up, including dealing with PTSD symptoms, anxiety, dissociation, and depression. She even struggled with suicide ideation. After going to school and double majoring in human development, family studies, and psychology, Tatiana knew that she wanted to become a therapist. She got her master's degree in mental health counseling. Throughout this entire time, she was living in survival mode with a dysregulated nervous system.

When 2020 came, she had no choice but to slow down. She no longer had that stimulation of going to work, an environment that created much of her stress. She didn't know what to do with herself, and now that she was working from home, she struggled. She felt burnt out and unfulfilled and her dissociation was getting bad. After speaking with her supervisor about her experience, her supervisor encouraged her to find some inspiration. With this guidance, Tatiana found somatic experiencing.

Tatiana ended up applying to a three-year program, and after her first training, it completely changed her life. It changed the way that she saw herself, her body, and her nervous system. She finally understood why she was continuing to function in this chronic state of anxiety. As she continued to heal her nervous system, Tatiana realized that she was living her life in this tunnel vision- she felt like she was in this box, and she couldn't see herself outside of the box. She felt trapped and was very rigid with the way that she lived her life. As she continued this journey to heal her nervous system, she realized that this was the path to truly living your most fulfilling life.

Tatiana explains that the nervous system is responsible for all of our internal organs. It's also responsible for our involuntary movements, sensations, and emotions. All the unconscious thoughts and behaviors are all your nervous system at play. Tatiana likes to say that every thought, every emotion, every sensation, and every behavior is a reflection of the state of your nervous system. When we think about it, your nervous system is responsible for a lot, and when your nervous system is dysregulated and is in a constant state of fight, flight, or freeze, then it's going to impact your entire body.

On a day-to-day basis, everything in your life is either supporting your nervous system or dysregulating your nervous system. From the food you eat and your daily habits to the people that you spend time with, your work environment, and your home environment, everything in your life is either contributing to a state of survival or supporting your nervous system and creating that safety in your body.

When you're in a state of fight, that shows up as resistance, defensiveness, irritability, frustration, anger, and road rage. If anyone has some road rage out there, that's your fight response. Or even muscle tension in the body. When you feel like you want to punch something or kick something- even if you don't actually do it- that's your fight state. The flight state is avoidance. It's racing thoughts, excessive worrying, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, overthinking everything, or having self-doubt or fear of judgment. All of those live in the flight state. Lastly, the freeze is when your nervous system is feeling stuck, trapped, burnt out, depressed, and low self-esteem. When you know what you must do, but you just can't seem to do it, you can't get yourself to do it, that is the freeze state. Dissociation also lives in the freeze state.

When we talk about a constant state of fight or flight, your nervous system's number one job is to keep you alive, and it will do everything and anything to help you survive. Even if you're not an actual threat, if your nervous system perceives danger, it will immediately go into a state of fight or flight. If your nervous system can't fight the threat or flee from the threat, then your nervous system will immediately fall into a state of freeze, and your nervous system becomes immobilized. When your nervous system can't complete those survival responses, fight, flight, and freeze, that survival energy gets stored in the body, and that survival energy is the trauma.

When we think about trauma, trauma isn't an event. Trauma is not what happened to you. Trauma is the response in your nervous system not being able to complete the survival responses. When we understand trauma in that way, we can understand why so many people have dysregulated nervous systems.

Tatiana has worked with women who have been in therapy for over 25 years, and they come to her as a last resort feeling hopeless and skeptical. They've said they've tried everything in the book and nothing has helped them. And once they try somatic experiencing, it's mind-blowing. So, what is somatic experiencing?

Somatic experiencing gets to the root of the symptoms. This modality focuses on a deep level of healing- long-term healing. It doesn’t focus on coping methods, but instead quite literally focuses on changing the physiology. Because somatic experiencing works directly with the nervous system, you can see results a little bit faster than spending years and years in therapy. With the women that Tatiana works with, she doesn't see anyone for longer than a year, and that's why she believes in the power of somatic experiencing.

When we get to the root of your symptoms, when we work directly with the nervous system, you don't have to spend years and years in survival mode. Tatiana does not believe that you need to live years and years in survival mode. She always likes to tell people, that while healing is lifelong, living in survival mode does not have to be lifelong.

As a somatic experiencing therapist, Tatiana helps her clients to track their nervous system and creates that safety in their bodies, moving them through survival states. She does this by observing body language, tone of voice, eye contact, skin color, and more. Based on what she’s observing, she knows which state of survival mode a client is in, or if maybe they are in a parasympathetic state- feeling calm, grounded, and connected. Tatiana is ultimately just working with the body's natural rhythm.

The objective of somatic experiencing is this: The more present you can be and the more connected you can be, the more flexibility your nervous system can have. That's the ultimate goal- to build more flexibility and flow in the nervous system. Tatiana always likes to remind people that regulating your nervous system does not mean that you're going to be calm all of the time. Regulating your nervous system just means that you have more flexibility in the nervous system, and you can feel anxious and say “Okay, I feel anxious. How can I support my body in this moment?” And then we come back down to a parasympathetic state and your nervous system does it naturally without thinking so hard.

A nervous system that's dysregulated has to think hard to get out of those states. It doesn't go back down to a parasympathetic state. It goes into freeze, fight or flight, freeze, fight or flight, freeze. It doesn't have flexibility and flow. A regulated nervous system can create that capacity and flexibility to feel all of the sensations and emotions without going into panic or overwhelm.

Tatiana believes that if everyone can heal their nervous system, the world would be a kinder, safer, and more peaceful place. She believes that a lot can be resolved when we heal our nervous systems. Tatiana’s story is just one example of what a healed nervous system can look like. Once she started to heal her nervous system, she left her nonprofit job started her own business, and created her podcast, She is Resilient.

Her life has completely transformed not because of somatic experiencing, but primarily because she was able to heal my nervous system. So it's not about the modality, while somatic experiencing is the modality that she uses, it's truly about healing the nervous system. When you heal your nervous system, the possibilities are endless in life. All the things that you want to do in your life become possible. The world is quite literally your oyster when you heal your nervous system.