Step 1. Nest: Create safety in the body

Learning how to regulate your nervous system is the beginning and the foundation for deeper healing. 

So, what is nervous system regulation?

When your nervous system is regulated, you respond to life from a place of calm, presence, and choice. When it’s dysregulated, your body reacts from old survival strategies — fight, flight, or freeze — even when there’s no real danger.

This is where your vagus nerve comes in.

What is the vagus nerve — and why does it matter?

The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body, connecting your brain to your heart, lungs, gut, and more. This is why anxiety shows up in the body: racing heart, shallow breath, stomach tension. It’s all connected through this nerve. The vagus nerve is a key part of your parasympathetic system (the “rest and repair” side of your nervous system). It acts like a brake, helping you slow down after stress and return to a grounded, calm state.

When your vagal tone is strong, you can meet challenges with energy and clarity — without tipping into anxiety or overwhelm. But chronic stress and traumatic events can weaken this brake, leaving you stuck in high alert or total shutdown. 

The vagus nerve has two main branches:

• The ventral vagal branch supports calm, connection, and regulation

• The dorsal vagal branch can trigger shutdown or numbness when stress overwhelms

When the ventral vagal system is active, your body signals safety: your breath slows, your heart rate drops, and your muscles relax. This helps your thinking brain (the prefrontal cortex) stay online instead of getting hijacked by fear.

Why vagal tone matters

Vagal tone refers to how well your vagus nerve works — how quickly and easily you return to a state of calm after stress. Higher tone = more resilience. Lower vagal tone will make you easily triggered and reactive. 

How do I know if I’m triggered/dysregulated? 

You’re likely dysregulated if you recognise this:

• Your mind spins with worst-case scenarios

• You feel burning in your belly, tightness in your chest, shakiness

• You send multiple texts in panic, or scroll obsessively for reassurance

• You over-apologise, fix, withdraw, blame — or try to control

• You lose appetite, focus, or sleep

• You feel angry or raged

Triggers often come with a sense of urgency and certainty — until the storm passes and you wonder: “Did I overreact?” 

The good news? Vagal tone isn’t fixed. You can train and strengthen your nervous system’s capacity to regulate — and it starts with simple, daily practices. This is what builds true resilience: the ability to come back to safety, again and again. It's not about never being triggered, or not becoming upset when someone treats us wrong - it's about creating space to act with intention instead of reacting from a place of survival mode. This is why nervous system regulation is the first step.  

Step 2. Shadow: explore core wounds and beliefs

Once you know how to regulate hard emotions, it's time to look deeper. The nervous system regulation work we did in the first step helps put out the fires — the shadow work we do here will help stop lighting them all the time. 

Together we will explore your attachment style, identify core wounds and rewire core beliefs. 

What is attachment theory?

Attachment theory helps us understand how we relate to others — especially in close relationships.

The way we attach is shaped in early childhood, through our bond with primary caregivers. When our emotional needs were consistently met, we learned that love is safe — and developed a secure attachment style. But if love felt unpredictable, overwhelming, or conditional, we adapted in different ways to protect ourselves.

These adaptations become attachment styles:

• Secure: You feel safe with intimacy, can express needs, and trust others.

• Anxious/Preoccupied: You fear abandonment, seek reassurance, overthink, and may feel “too much.”

• Dismissive/Avoidant: You pull away when things get close, value independence, and may struggle to express emotions.

• Fearful-Avoidant/Disorganised: You crave closeness but fear it at the same time — often caught in a push-pull dynamic.

Insecure attachment styles get activated in adult relationships, triggering old wounds that show up as anxiety, withdrawal, people-pleasing, jealousy or controlling behaviours. 

Exploring your attachment isn’t about blaming your parents. It’s about understanding your patterns and unmet needs — so you can start meeting them now, and relate from a place of safety rather than survival.

What are core wounds and beliefs?

Core wounds are deep emotional imprints, often formed in early childhood. They shape how we see ourselves, others, and the world — and form belief systems that influence our behaviour, choices, and relationships, often without us realising.

Core beliefs can sound like:
I’m too sensitive
No one will care about my needs
I have to be perfect to be loved
It’s not safe for me to speak up
It’s my fault if they leave me
People can’t be trusted
I’m never good enough
Feelings are bad

How this shows up in your relationships

When your inner foundation is built on these beliefs, even the best tools can be nearly impossible to apply.

• Boundaries can feel like empty threats or ultimatums. You might say, “I can’t do this anymore,” but when they don’t respond the way you hoped, you panic and make a threat to leave — one you desperately don’t want to follow through on — then feel like you’ve run out of options.

• Communication may come out more like control: checking in constantly, asking for reassurances they can’t realistically give, or needing them to guess your feelings to prove they care.
  

• Expressing needs might feel unsafe, so they come out as demands or anxiety — which then turns into a cycle of second-guessing whether your needs are even valid.
  

• You initiate conversations from fear, not clarity — which leads to spirals that aren’t really about the relationship, but about needing to feel secure inside yourself.

You weren’t born with these beliefs — you internalised them somewhere along the way. That’s good news, because it means they can be unlearned.