07/19/2026
If you're anything like me, you have a history of preferring when things are clear - black and white, obvious, something that you can point to and say "there, that's the moment it changed". Big vs. small, intense vs. gentle.
There's safety in that binary. Ambiguity requires tolerance. A capacity to sit in the not knowing. To trust in a process you can't quite verify.
So, as you can imagine, when I arrived to nervous system healing many moons ago and realized it looked nothing like that, a part of me hated it and struggled to trust it.
I wanted the before and after, the clear line, the proof. Instead I got something more gentle, slower, quieter and something much more difficult to point to.
But I continued to listen to the pull to this work and through my training to become a somatic experiencing practitioner, I watched myself grow, evolve and shift patterns that I had been stuck looping in for years. And I realized something...
Sustainable embodied change isn't dramatic. It can actually look and feel like slow, sometimes easily overlooked, progress. But that slowness, the discreteness - it's not evidence of it not working, in fact it's evidence that the change is real, authentic and grounded in safety.
Behaviour can change quickly. You can decide to respond differently and often execute it, through sheer effort, force and will power. But usually that only lasts for so long before you burn out.
Because it's not the same as shifting what your system does automatically under stress when you aren't managing it. That's a new default - something that shifts from repeated experience, not decision. Our nervous system needs to experience that the new way is in fact safe, or it will keep defaulting to the old pattern.
Slow isn't a setback, even though it can sometimes feel like that. Slow is often what is required for integration.
So if you're in your healing journey and its looking less dramatic and obvious than you'd like it, that's not a sign it isn't working.
And maybe that's the real work for a vigilant system which prefers intensity - not just tolerating the slow and gentle, but learning that it can be trusted too.
With heart,
Hayley
