Some people live in a body that never quite relaxes. There’s always a low-level current running underneath — tightness in the muscles, tension in the jaw, shallow breathing, the sense of being “on” even when nothing’s happening. Others live on the opposite end of the spectrum — heavy, tired, detached, moving through life as if underwater.
Both of these are forms of regulation disruption — the body’s survival system stuck in the patterns it learned long ago. For many adults with histories of childhood complex trauma, this is one of the most persistent and confusing effects: your body doesn’t seem to know how to rest, yet it also doesn’t know how to fully engage. It’s as if the gas and the brakes are pressed at the same time.
What Regulation Is — and Why It Matters
Regulation is your body’s ability to shift smoothly between different states of arousal — from alert to calm, active to resting, focused to relaxed. It’s what lets you handle stress and then return to baseline once the stress has passed.
For a child growing up in a stable, attuned environment, regulation develops naturally through co-regulation — the parent or caregiver’s nervous system helps the child’s system learn what safety feels like. Over time, the child internalizes that rhythm. They learn that they can move through fear, excitement, frustration, and come back to calm.
But when a child grows up in an environment of chronic stress, inconsistency, or fear — where safety isn’t predictable — that process gets disrupted. The child’s body stays on alert or shuts down to cope. Regulation never fully develops because there was never enough safety to learn what “settled” feels like.
How Regulation Disruptions Begin
A child’s nervous system learns by imitation and experience. When a caregiver is calm, present, and emotionally available, the child’s body picks up those cues and mirrors them. When the caregiver is anxious, angry, unpredictable, or withdrawn, the child’s body learns to stay braced.
If love is mixed with fear, or connection is unpredictable, the child’s system becomes confused. It prepares for threat even in moments of safety. This creates a survival pattern — better to stay ready than be caught off guard.
Over time, those patterns wire themselves into the body. What began as a brilliant survival strategy becomes a baseline state.
What It Looks Like in Adulthood
Adults with regulation disruptions often describe feeling “on edge” for no clear reason — always scanning, waiting for something to go wrong. Others feel the opposite: flat, empty, foggy, disconnected. Many swing between these two poles — hyperarousal and collapse.
Common experiences include:
- Chronic muscle tension or restlessness
- Fatigue that doesn’t improve with rest
- Feeling detached from the body or emotions
- Sleep difficulties, especially trouble relaxing at night
- Sudden emotional overwhelm
- Feeling unsafe or unanchored even in calm situations
- A constant sense of needing control, or conversely, giving up completely
It’s important to understand that these are not personality traits or character flaws. They’re adaptive responses that began early, before language — the body’s way of surviving when safety was uncertain.
The Hidden Cost of a System That Never Resets
Living in a chronically dysregulated state takes a toll. The body’s stress chemistry — adrenaline, cortisol, inflammatory responses — stays active longer than it should. Over years, this can lead to fatigue, anxiety, depression, chronic pain, digestive issues, autoimmune problems, and more.
Emotionally, regulation disruptions make it hard to feel grounded in relationships or in oneself. Calm can feel foreign. Stillness can feel unsafe. The moment things quiet down, the body unconsciously looks for the next hit of chaos, because that’s what feels familiar.
It’s not sabotage. It’s conditioning.
Why Awareness Is the First Step
You can’t change what you can’t see. Many survivors spend years fighting their bodies — trying to relax, trying to push through exhaustion, trying to “be normal.” But regulation doesn’t return through force. It returns through recognition.
When you begin to notice your own patterns — when you can say, “My body’s in fight mode,” or “I’m starting to shut down” — that’s the beginning of change. Awareness is what loosens the automatic loop.
The goal isn’t to always be calm. It’s to develop flexibility — the capacity to move between states without getting stuck. That’s what real regulation is.
A Few Things to Remember
- You’re not broken. The way your body responds makes perfect sense in light of what it went through.
- Safety takes repetition. The nervous system learns through experience, not ideas. It takes time to trust new patterns.
- Calm can feel unfamiliar. At first, peace may feel like emptiness or boredom. That’s not failure — it’s your body learning a new baseline.
- It’s okay to start small. Awareness is practice. Pausing to notice what state you’re in, even for a moment, is a form of healing.
Looking Ahead
This post introduces one of the most fundamental impacts of childhood complex trauma — the way it reshapes the body’s sense of safety and rhythm. In time, we’ll explore this topic more deeply: how hyperarousal, collapse, and mixed states develop; how early attachment plays into regulation; and how specific practices can help the body relearn balance.
For now, it’s enough to recognize that if your body feels like it can’t settle, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong. It’s because it learned to protect you — and it hasn’t yet learned that the danger is over.
The work ahead isn’t to force your body into calm. It’s to give it new experiences of safety, again and again, until calm no longer feels like a threat.
