The impact of the nervous system on your relationships
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Polyvagal theory, or why your ability to relate to others is defined in your nervous system
Polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges, explains that our autonomous nervous system constantly scans our interactions with the environment and others to ensure our survival. This scan happens automatically without the intervention of the rational brain, based on our perceptions of the environment.
Stephen Porges also explains in this theory that attachment is so essential to our survival that the quality of this attachment will influence our capacity for social engagement by directly influencing the development of the myelinated branch of our vagus nerve—namely, the ventral vagal branch that allows for this social engagement.
How is this possible?
When a baby is born, the sympathetic branch and the dorsal vagal branch already exist so the baby can cry if they need to eat or freeze in case of great danger. The ventral vagal branch of their vagus nerve, which allows for social engagement, is not yet developed. This will develop through interaction with their environment, particularly in interaction with parents or primary attachment figures7 (through co-regulation). It is based on the perceptions of these interactions (people’s facial expressions, their tone of voice, their behaviors…) that a database of perceptions will be created in the child to help them identify what represents safety or insecurity. Because as human beings, and especially for a child, our survival depends on others.
This survival database will then help them qualify the perceptions felt through new life experiences to ensure, if necessary, a survival response.
This survival mechanism happens in automatic mode without the intervention of the rational brain. This mechanism is useful and healthy when there is a real danger. Who would want to take the time to think about how best to act if a bear were charging at you?
A regulated autonomic nervous system is a system that easily moves through the different states of the nervous system to deal with life’s stresses and then naturally returns to the ventral vagal state (vagal brake). The ventral vagal state is not a permanent refuge; the goal is to return there often enough for the body to regenerate and be able to face the next stresses. In other words, it’s normal and useful to change states throughout the day.
When your nervous system becomes a hindrance to your relationships
Your nervous system can become a hindrance in your social interactions if this survival database has recorded past experiences that overwhelmed your nervous system and dysregulated it. This explains all the times you overreact, where you feel insecure even though rationally there is no reason, and also all the times you have that feeling of not being able to break out of a pattern you repeat despite yourself.
The nervous system can become dysregulated in 3 ways:
- You may have a dominant state that is a state of insecurity (dorsal vagal or sympathetic). There are often 2 possible causes:
- At birth, you inherit the influence of the nervous system of your attachment figures (often your parents), transmitting to you either a dominant state of security if co-regulation took place, or insecurity if it was lacking. This has 2 consequences for the child-turned-adult: they will have a dominant state that represents insecurity, and they will naturally enter into relationships with people who also have a dominant insecure state because this state represents “the reference they know.” The known, even if insecure, is always better than the unknown.
- A person can also experience significant shocks or chronic stress (physical or psychological) that can modify their dominant state: a traumatic birth, exposure to death, war, an accident, abuse, parental neglect, a prolonged phase of stress, burnout, depression. Thus, even if the threat has disappeared, defenses remain engaged and the body still perceives danger. In adulthood, you may feel this through a constant state of mistrust, hypervigilance, or an exacerbated need for control. This category also includes all people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder9 whose main symptoms are flashbacks of their traumatic experiences, avoidance strategies, alterations in mood, cognition, arousal, and reactivity.
- You may feel insecure more quickly because the experience you are going through is felt as similar to certain experiences from your past and automatically reactivates protection responses recorded in your survival database. In adulthood, this explains all the times you have overreactions or insecurities when rationally there is no reason. An illustration of this situation would be my personal example.
- You may have trouble returning to a state where you feel safe. If the child experienced a lot of emotional stress and did not receive co-regulation from their parents in the face of these stresses (a young child is not capable of doing it on their own), their nervous system may have great difficulty returning to its state of security. In adulthood, you may feel this through difficulty recovering from a breakup, difficulty forgiving after an argument, ruminating for a long time after an event, or feeling like you struggle to recover from hardships (“it takes a toll on you”).
To conclude, I hope these explanations help you understand that if you feel insecure in relationships:
- It’s not a lack of willpower or your fault; it’s a survival mechanism of your nervous system.
- There is a real logic to your reaction. The perception of your past experiences meant that you developed certain survival mechanisms, and these experiences had enough influence to dysregulate your nervous system and impact your current sense of security in relationships.
- Trying to resolve your insecurity with your head is useless because in those moments it’s your nervous system that takes over, and therefore you need to go through your body to get out of this survival state.
How is a relationship pattern created from a nervous system perspective?
It is simply all your past experiences that overwhelmed you emotionally (because it was too much, too soon, too strong, too little, or for too long) AND where you didn’t have the possibility to regulate yourself or get external help (notably via co-regulation). These events thus dysregulated your nervous system.
What this definition implies:
- That we all potentially have “traumas” in the sense of the nervous system.
- That trauma is not the event itself but the imprint it left in your nervous system which explains your reaction mechanisms and also the “lenses” through which you interpret your current relationships12.
- That just because you experienced a difficult event doesn’t mean you necessarily have a relationship pattern. For example, if you were the victim of an assault but you received support quickly or you managed to defend yourself, it’s possible that this event didn’t leave an imprint in your nervous system and therefore has no impact on the way you relate.
- That it is mainly events where you felt vulnerable and helpless without support from others that created a relationship pattern for you. For example, you are more likely to develop a relationship pattern if, in childhood, your emotions were often denied (“stop crying,” “no, it doesn’t hurt,” “stop being a baby, it’s not that bad”) than if you experienced many emotionally challenging events but felt that your parents welcomed your emotions and were there for you.
- That not all events will have the same impact on you. Your nervous system’s role is to ensure your survival, so the more an event potentially puts you in danger, the greater its impact will be. While this may seem obvious for serious cases like war, accidents, shocks you’ve experienced, or the bond with your parents, it may be harder to understand for more benign events involving your body, such as if you wore braces or were forced to eat certain foods.
- That your emotional reaction depends on your perception of the event. A child does not have a mature rational brain (it reaches a first stage around age 5 and this process finishes in adulthood13) to be able to step back from what is happening, which explains why through your adult eyes you may feel you had a happy childhood and yet still have relationship patterns that negatively impact your love life. It’s also possible that you idealized your childhood to survive it. I talk about this in more detail in episode 147 Our body never lies.
- That it’s not just your relationship experiences that can create a relationship pattern. Other experiences like a difficult birth, an accident, grueling medical interventions, or prolonged stress (physical or psychological) can also impact your love life.
- For relationship patterns created within a bond, it’s the repetition of these experiences that creates a pattern. It’s not because your parents failed to support you a few times that a relationship pattern will form. It’s the repetition that will cause you to develop certain mechanisms because these repetitions made you understand that it was the only way to maintain the bond with your parents.
What is also important to understand is that you can’t just make a list of things that marked you, where you felt vulnerable and helpless, to identify your relationship patterns. Your memories are stored in explicit memory, whereas what traumatized you is stored in implicit memory and the body, which explains why just being aware of your patterns isn’t enough; you have to work on the automatisms of your nervous system saved in implicit memory and in the body.
It’s not just learning to support your nervous system in its regulation, but a work of deprogramming the imprint of your past events. I talk about this in more detail in episode 121 Deprogramming versus regulating your nervous system.
To go further
If you want to dive deeper into the subject and identify your own relationship patterns, my book S’ouvrir à l’amour is available in all bookstores.
Opening Up to Love
The book that will allow you to identify your relationship patterns and learn the keys to building a healthy relationship
Going further
And if you wish to work on your relationship patterns through the body and transform your love life, there is the S’ouvrir à l’amour program, which includes the Past Day option, a day of Somatic Deprogramming: psycho-body approach to deprogram your relationship automatisms.
Sandy Kaufmann
is a somatic therapist and coach, based in Switzerland. She is the author of two books published by Éditions Eyrolles and has accompanied more than 600 people. She is the creator of the Somatic Deprogramming method and hosts the podcast ” S’ouvrir à l’amour“, ranked in the French top 50 in the relationships category.
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