Healing Relational Trauma with Nervous System Awareness

If you grew up in an environment where love was unpredictable or absent, boundaries were blurry, or emotional safety was missing, then your nervous system may have learned to stay on high alert to protect you from further harm.

And when your safety is repeatedly and chronically disrupted within close relationships, the result is often relational trauma — the psychological harm and emotional wounds caused by the chronic disruption of one’s emotional, physical, and/or sexual safety in close relationships. Relational trauma doesn’t just shape how we think, it impacts how we feel and function in our daily lives.

When you experience relational trauma, and any form of trauma, it is not just what happens to you, it’s what happens inside of you. It shows up as a lived experience within the body. This can result in your nervous system becoming dysregulated as in shut down, overstimulated, flooded, numb, stuck, stressed, heightened, or in a state of constant vigilance.

This highlights how important it is to include the body in your healing process, and why nervous system awareness is a foundational pillar to healing relational trauma.

Nervous system awareness, also referred to as interoceptive awareness, is the ability to notice, understand, and respond to the way your body reacts to stress. It’s the practice of intentionally choosing ways to disperse that stress so the full stress cycle may take its course rather than getting stuck in the body.

And with relational trauma, you may experience that stuck-ness more often in interpersonal relationships. A look, a tone, or a pause in conversation might stir anxiety, fear, or anger. Even more, perceived or real abandonment, rejection, conflict, disconnection, or misunderstandings can certainly feel like a familiar threat to your nervous system.

Noticing how your body responds in these moments can illuminate underlying feelings, thoughts, and fears, guiding you to remind the body that the trauma is over and it is safe to access the present moment with clarity rather than automatic reactions.

Learning how to recognize and regulate through nervous system awareness allows you to identify your body’s cues, witness with compassion instead of judgement, tune in to what your cues are communicating, and respond with intention. This practice overtime helps you to cultivate a felt sense of safety within your body — a powerful and necessary part to healing relational trauma.