You keep going from one relationship to another one, longing for a strong sense of connection, but at the end they never last long, your needs are apparently never met, you tend to develop relationship anxiety and at  certain point, you push your partner away with no apparent reason.

Our need for connection and social engagement is inherent to our human experience.

Since the day we are born, our inability to regulate our emotions effectively as infants  makes us crave our parents and caregiver’s attention to soothe us, make us feel safe, make us feel loved and secured, on a Nervous System Level this is what we call Corregulation.

However, when this dynamic of Corregulation does not come to completion or in some cases just takes too long, either because our parents were emotionally or physically unavailable, they were not present or simply because they just  got caught up in the busyness of life. We put ourselves in a survival mode, developing different behaviors that protect us when our needs are not being fully met.

The real problem is, that the more unsafe we feel in our childhood, the more overprotective behaviors we keep adopting, and the more our Nervous System keeps entering into a state of dysregulation, which at the end will still have an impact in our adulthood.

In a place of dysregulation, we will not be able to build healthy, loving and supportive relationships, simply because the energy we have at our disposal the same as all of our efforts will be directed to one single goal: “to Keep Us Alive”. There is enough evidence supporting the idea that, by behaving in this specific way, we can accomplish this goal. Our behaviors will keep following those unconscious templates, that were built in the past, based on “Fear and Survival” and  are usually triggered in the present, as a trauma response to some of the events that remind us of our childhood.

This is what I have called Nervous System shortcuts, when we experience any familiarity or similarity in certain events, we go back to the same behaviors we used in the past, as there are no other options to choose from.

No wonder why, from a rational point of view,  we all  want to attract a loving and nourishing relationship into our lives, but as soon as we go through certain events, our  actions are not aligned and  we turn out to be usually aggressive, anxious or avoidant.

Wanting a healthy relationship is not enough, until we learn about Self Regulation!

I started this article highlighting, how as children we were unable to regulate our emotions by ourselves, in our Adulthood the story is completely different, as our consciousness is fully developed, we have the ability to do it by ourselves, we just need to learn the practical tools that connect body and mind, and take our Nervous System into a place of safety.

Clarifying the need to work on both aspects, the physical and the mental side, since working only with the cognitive approach that is used in talk therapy will not allow us to feel it, and to develop a greater sense of connection to what our body feels.

To sum up, self regulation is the process to show our protective parts we are safe, because just telling  them is not enough.

That’s because your  Nervous System and the parts of your brain designed to protect you, do not understand cognition or language, when they are activated
.

Words are incomprehensible to these aspects of ourselves.

Processing past trauma somatically  and assisting our nervous systems in regaining control are both important components of our journey into connection.