The Nervous System as a Map of This American Moment
An embodied reflection on collapse, connection, and what comes next
There are times that unravel slowly.
And then there are moments—like this one—that churn like a maelstrom: fierce, chaotic, sucking everything into its orbit and tearing it apart.
Something in the atmosphere feels tight. Charged. Unrelenting.
Many of us are moving through the world with bodies braced, hearts guarded, and a constant hum of dread just beneath the surface.
We are living through a moment of nervous system overwhelm—not just within individual bodies, but in the relational tissues that bind families, friends, communities, institutions, and nations. The pulse of fear and urgency echoes across households and the scaffolding of public life.
And perhaps the most disorganizing energy—the one flooding everything beneath it—is coming from the top:
the State’s nervous system—erratic, volatile, performatively aggressive.
Its signals are clear: stay alert, stay reactive, stay afraid—because when norms are shattered, control isn’t debated, it’s imposed: written into law, drilled into policy, and seared across the intimate terrain of the body.
This is what it feels like to live beneath a storm of power that feeds on arousal and domination—scorching what it touches, devouring attention, and denying even the possibility of refuge.
Its stability is built on our instability.
When the highest-order system in a society runs on fear and dominance, it hijacks the nervous systems beneath it. It sends danger signals down the chain—from nation to neighborhood to household to body.
And over time, those signals get internalized. The state doesn’t need to be everywhere if it’s already inside us—if we’ve learned to monitor our own aliveness, to brace against our own instincts, to question the safety of being fully ourselves.
This is the nervous system under occupation—not only by external force, but by the residue of domination that lingers within. A system that doesn’t need to lock us up to keep us from moving.
The result isn’t clarity or cohesion.
It’s chaos.
Some of us are stuck in fight—angry, brittle, burning through our reserves.
Some of us are frozen—immobilized, shut down, quietly collapsing under the weight of it all.
When threat overwhelms us, something inside us locks down—and with it, our capacity to respond. The survival energy has nowhere to go—it stays caught in the body like a loop. We’re frozen, but full of charge. Still, but burning.
This is how trauma lives in the nervous system: not just as memory, but as momentum without movement, a straitjacket around our ability to unfold. It separates us from ourselves, from others, from the rhythms of nature and the sense of spirit that makes us whole.
A healthy nervous system isn’t always calm—it’s fluid. It surges, settles, contracts, expands. It knows how to move between activation and rest, between alertness and ease. It cycles through. It returns.
But systems of power don’t thrive on regulated bodies. They feed on confusion and chaos. They like the energy of fight—especially when it leaves us fragmented, unintegrated, and turned against ourselves.
Freeze isn’t rest. It’s the body in conflict with itself—one foot slammed on the gas, the other on the brake.
And this, too, maps onto our collective moment: simultaneous acceleration and shutdown. Everything moving faster, while more and more of us feel unable to move at all.
We are flooded—not just with feeling, but with feeling that has nowhere to land.
The nervous system, when overloaded, loses its ability to organize. And that’s what this moment can feel like: scattered signals, unresolved grief, fear without a container.
But there’s another nervous system state—often silenced in moments like these, but not extinguished: social engagement. It’s where connection lives. Where regulation is shared. Where we come back into relationship—with ourselves, each other, and the world.
It doesn’t always feel available—not when systems are wired for division, speed, and control. Not when trust has been eroded or belonging denied. But it never disappears. Social engagement lives in us still—quiet, persistent, waiting to rise.
Social engagement is not a given—it’s a practice. A rhythm. A choice we make again and again to move toward, not away. To build together what the system tries to extinguish.
To reach that state, we don’t need to shout louder.
We need to listen differently.
To place our attention deliberately.
To root ourselves in the kind of presence that allows us to respond—not just react.
When we enter social engagement, something shifts—not just in behavior, but in biology. Playfulness and curiosity signal that threat is no longer running the show.
Presence, real presence, has a profound simplicity to it.
It softens the charge.
It invites movement again.
It allows us to extend ourselves into others, and to let others move through us.
This isn’t about merging—it’s about resonance.
And resonance is what makes healing possible.
But that kind of connection isn’t always easy—especially when the nervous system across from ours tells a different story.
It’s one thing to regulate with those who reflect our values.
It’s another to stay in the room with someone who challenges them.
Social engagement doesn't mean agreement.
It means presence.
The willingness to stay with discomfort.
To listen—truly listen—to people whose nervous systems may be signaling a very different threat, or a different kind of safety.
This doesn’t mean we accept harm. But it does mean we stay aware of the nervous system divides underlying our ideological ones. It means we practice engagement not just where it’s comfortable—but where it’s needed most.
Our nervous systems are not separate from the systems we live inside.
The way we orient in a moment of overwhelm—where we place our attention, how we respond to disconnection, whether we harden or soften—shapes the field around us.
Kae Tempest says it plainly:
“We are only as strong as the connection between us.”
David Abram reminds us: attention is not just awareness—it’s relationship.
To place our attention with intention is an act of repair.
So maybe the question is not just how do we respond to the chaos?
But where do we choose to place our energy?
Not all reaction is resistance.
Not all movement is transformation.
The system would prefer we stay reactive—disoriented, divided, disembodied.
But we can choose something else.
To remember, as adrienne maree brown writes, “what we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system.” And as Annie Dillard reminds us, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
It starts with presence.
Not in grand strategies, but in how we stay.
How we speak.
How we allow ourselves to be changed in the presence of another.
This isn’t about shrinking our ambition.
It’s about expanding our capacity.
Practicing the world we long for—in gestures that seem small, but shape everything.
Practice becomes pattern.
Pattern becomes structure.
The system begins to shift because we’ve already begun.
Like a mycelial network, the work of tending happens underground—through invisible threads of care, trust, and attention.
It doesn’t need permission.
It doesn’t rely on hierarchy.
There is no head to sever, no single point to attack.
And that is its strength.
This way of being spreads in quiet moments of attunement—in a shared breath, in co-regulated nervous systems, in groups small enough to stay connected and strong enough to grow.
What begins as care becomes coherence.
What begins as listening becomes momentum.
It cannot be destroyed.
Because it was never centralized.
It lives in the space between us.
And that space—when tended—is unstoppable.
So we begin there.
With breath.
With touch.
With attention that nourishes instead of fragments.
With nervous systems that learn to hold themselves—and each other—through the dissonance.
This is how we find our way forward.
Not frozen.
Not frenzied.
But awake.
Connected.
Alive.
Note on Influences
This piece is shaped by an ongoing attempt to make sense of this moment—historically, politically, relationally—through the lens of the nervous system.
The nervous system offers a map—not only for how we experience this moment, but for how we might move through it. Fight, flight, freeze, and social engagement aren’t just biological responses; they’re relational and political patterns. Understanding these states—activation, collapse, and connection—helps us name what we’re feeling, track what’s being asked of us, and recognize how systems shape our internal states.
It’s the body that decides—long before the mind can make sense of anything. Most of what we come to know travels upward, from body to brain, not the other way around. Which means our felt sense—our physical, emotional, and energetic state—sets the agenda, often beyond our conscious awareness: what we notice, how we relate, what we imagine, and what we’re able to hold.
I’ve come to see the nervous system as one of the most generative and honest lenses available to us. It helps us move beyond abstraction and into the felt experience of what’s happening—not just in our own bodies, but in our relationships, communities, and systems. It helps us track how power moves, how regulation is disrupted or withheld, and how our responses are shaped not only by trauma, but by policy, culture, and history.
The nervous system doesn’t stop at the skin; it reflects and responds to the world we live in. And in many ways, it is the world we live in.
This piece offers one nervous system reading of the American moment. Different bodies, different histories, and different belief systems encounter this time differently. For some, it’s a long-overdue reckoning. For others, it feels like collapse. That difference lives in the body—and naming it matters.
Somatic Experiencing helps me understand how trauma takes root in the body—and how healing begins through relationship. Polyvagal theory offers a map to the social nervous system, showing how safety enables connection, and connection enables change.
adrienne maree brown reminds me that the smallest interactions shape the largest systems. Kae Tempest speaks to our longing for connection in a world that pushes us apart. David Abram re-enchants attention, rooting it in ecology, reciprocity, and relationship. Microsolidarity, developed by Rich Bartlett and collaborators, sharpens my awareness of scale—how small, well-held groups can shift systems. And David Whyte continues to remind me that language, like the body, is a place of presence and return.
Like all my writing, this piece is in motion.
It’s not a fixed path, but a gesture.
An offering of presence.
A thread extended toward others also feeling their way through.
This is so well stated. As a psychotherapist and spiritual director, presence is my job and my honor. And I am always on the bandwagon of living in community where we can connect and heal. I will be sharing this. Thank you.
Wow. This is the first thing that has made sense to me in a while. Thank you.