Why You Can’t Regulate Your Nervous System
The biological definition of “regulated” means, “Controlled or maintained, well-managed.” While I definitely still have a lot to learn in my life, one thing I have discovered for certain is that when you try to control or manage the female body, it triggers a primal rebellion. Yet we as women have been conditioned since infancy to be educated, to view the world, to perform, to be productive, and to think in a masculine, controlled, patriarchal way.
So it makes sense that the overwhelming pattern I see when working with women is that they’re stuck in a very masculine, rigid, left brain approach to nervous system healing, or healing in general. Here, they find safety by manipulating the outside world to fit their inside experience. In contrast, the feminine approach is to become so connected to their internal world and aware of how the outside world is interacting with where they are inside. One is about protecting territory, while the other is about relationship and connectivity.
Yet women have disowned this feminine approach, casting it aside for the promise of masculine “success.” This is the reason they are currently finding it so difficult to be at ease and find peace within their body. It’s the reason they don’t have a “regulated” nervous system.
Why a Masculine Approach to Nervous System Regulation Doesn’t Work for Women
Only some people can acknowledge that there are biological differences between men and women, down to the cellular level. Yet it’s interesting how even the people that acknowledge this still expect women to act, behave, and express themselves like men. They expect us to have linear productivity be the goal, which is what a man’s nervous system and physiology are wired for.
Testosterone, the primary male hormone, does not only create physiological differences in men. It also changes how the brain functions, lighting up and developing different areas than that of the female brain. Testosterone acts on the amygdala, the hypothalamus, the pituitary, the striatum, the prefrontal cortex, and the temporal regions. Its effect on these regions of the brain changes how males regulate emotion, process fear, assess threats, engage in competitive behavior, are motivated by effort-based reward, think, and make decisions. This makes how men see the world and function within it vastly different from how women do.
In uncontrollable environments or situations, men will see failure as a lack of effort whereas women will internalize it and see it as innate lack. Men are able to respond to fear logically by disconnecting from their emotional centers. Yet women are so driven by our emotional centers, we cannot analyze a situation from a place of pure logic when in a heightened state like fear, even if we think we can. Men also have different risk assessment and can look at a situation for what it is, versus women who look at it from what it feels to be. Men are also more effort-based, as their effort lights up their dopamine centers and rewards them based on exertion and competition. Yet competition is not rewarding to women in the same way. Our emotional centers become activated in competition, causing us to take it personally and treat it as a threat to our well-being.
So to acknowledge that men and women are different, but then require women to continue to function within masculine rigidity is… incongruent. It is the disease of our society. It destroys women’s hormones and burns out our bodies, because we do not have the hormonal or physical infrastructure to behave this way and thrive. It forces us to light up and strengthen certain areas of our brain that are typically more active in males. And since hormones follow the flow of energy, our body will use its internal resources to make more adrenal hormones and androgens to maintain these mental patterns. We then become hormonally masculine, struggling with things like high ovarian androgens (testosterone), high adrenal androgens (DHEA), and high stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline), with downstream effects on metabolism through glucose-regulating hormones like insulin and glucagon and appetite-regulating peptides like leptin and ghrelin.
Being in a hormonally masculine state like this depletes us of resources and is very damaging to our body and brain, affecting us not just physically, but mentally. This then impacts our ability to communicate how we are feeling, how we verbally process, how we regulate and respond to our emotions, how we process fear, and how we respond to threats.
Does this sound like nervous system dysregulation to you?
A Dysregulated Nervous System is a Disconnected Nervous System
“Dysregulated” does not paint an accurate picture of what’s really going on here. Women who have a dysregulated nervous system actually have a disconnected nervous system. They are disconnected from their own nature, which fuels a disconnection from their true selves. This impacts how they relate to all parts of themselves and fragments these parts. They can no longer accept certain parts of themselves or flow through all parts (represented by the survival archetypes) freely, but get stuck or stagnant in the places that “fit” into the predetermined, masculine pattern. This creates constant conflict, resistance, urgency, scarcity, helplessness, exhaustion, and dissociation (CRUSHED).
Being stuck here causes a type of crippling perfection and inability to flow with the rhythm of life and our body. The mental rigidity (seeing everything as black or white or very linear) affects our perception of information and becomes paralyzing. We get stuck in a constant loop of why?, focusing on the cognitive, intellectual, logical, practical, rigid, and structured. We are in an unwavering state of self-analysis, self-assessment, and self-judgement.
We will force our way to an outcome because we do not know how to modulate our effort based on logic. This causes us to achieve a goal at all costs, even at the expense of our well-being. Yet that outcome does not feel good, because we are not hormonally rewarded for the effort like a man is and instead need external validation and connection to complete the dopamine loop.
We become unable to receive, to be still, to carve space, or to just exist without constant refinement and optimization. There’s no space for softness or perception. Our relationship with femininity becomes skewed, and we may even unconsciously hate our feminine because her vulnerability looks like weakness to us. Being a woman then becomes serious, focused on productivity and proving, and lacking any joy.
Because we are so disconnected and stuck in this rigidity, we will descend into chaos every time we flow and shift. Yet this is the one constant as a woman: we must flow, we must shift in a continuous cyclical pattern. And it’s only exhausting to us when we approach it from mental rigidity and a hormonally masculine state. It’s only exhausting when we are stuck in the doing versus the being.
So as long as there is hierarchy between the masculine and feminine within your worldview, as long as a masculine way of being is superior in any way, it will be a fight for your life. This hierarchy leaves no room for you to be who and what you are without being less than. You will spend your whole life trying to be something you are not, and it will feel like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
When men do good, they feel good. When women feel good, they do good. Being in your masculine makes you think that if you do good, then you will feel good. Yet it’s actually the complete opposite for women. We have to be in a state of feeling good in order to do good.
The Only Way to Heal Your Nervous System
The only way to heal, not just your body or your family or your relationship, but the world, is for you to claim and own all parts of yourself. The only way to heal is to finally let yourself hear the truth by listening to what your body has been telling you all this time.
But to do this, you need to start utilizing and learning the navigation tools and instruments that you already have. What are these tools? Your feminine nature, female physiology, menstrual cycle (or lunar cycle), female nervous system, and your special way of being. These are all things that are unique to women, and thus are not celebrated or even taught to us in our masculine society. They will require us to become familiar with the parts of ourselves that are foreign to us. They will require us to feel our way through instead of thinking our way through, cognitively assessing ourselves like an outsider looking in.
So the only way to really get connected to yourself and heal your nervous system is to get familiar with what it feels like in your body to experience the energy that ebbs and flows through you. It’s to show up for all parts of yourself, not just the parts that are currently socially acceptable or societally celebrated. It’s to start to understand that there is literally nothing wrong with your nature. In fact, your body is showing up exactly how it’s supposed to under the circumstances. This is why archetypes are so helpful, because they allow us to put a name and a face to the parts of our nature that have been completely disowned by us.
The Archetypal Path to Nervous System Healing
You can see now why I created survival archetypes for every phase of the cycle. Each archetype (each part of us) survives differently, and this survival is also expressed differently. The beauty of the menstrual cycle (or the lunar cycle if you are no longer menstruating) is that it acts like a spiritual practice. It draws each part of us to the surface so we can give those parts the attention, focus, and healing that they need and deserve.
This is our biological birthright. To be Fully Nourished means to know how to nourish every part of ourself by seeing ourself clearly and understanding our nature.
But you will never find healing as long as you keep acting like what you feel, what you experience, and what your body is trying to communicate to you are all things that need to be fixed. Instead, you will be forever stuck on a merry-go-round of fighting and resisting and controlling and regulating and chasing and escaping and suppressing and pretending and performing and rabbitholing and bypassing, around and around and around.
No wonder you have a dysregulated nervous system. Structure is a tool for women, but it cannot become the rule.
Stay nourished,
Jess
