The Myth of Nervous System Regulation (And What It’s Costing Us)

I’ve been sitting with a growing discomfort around the word regulation as it’s used in relation to the nervous system and somatic work. It’s often framed as something we should be able to achieve—something we can use practice to control within ourselves, or even, at times, something that can be shaped in others. The language we use reflects the deeper currents of our culture, and the frequency with which we speak about the body in terms of being “regulated” points, to me, to something larger at play.

As a neurodivergent person, I am acutely aware of how approaches like applied behavioural therapy have been used not to support the individual, but to make their behaviour more acceptable or comfortable for those around them. It raises an important question: are we, in some ways, reproducing this dynamic within somatic spaces when we position regulation as the goal? Because for me, the idea of controlling the body stands in direct opposition to the lived experience of embodiment. It becomes a form of domination—one that rewards compliance and makes us more manageable within existing systems.

The more deeply I engage in my own process of decolonization and the ongoing deconstruction of my own relationship to whiteness, the more I see how much power lives in the subtleties of language. What we say, and how we say it, shapes the direction we move in. And perhaps it is here, in these small but meaningful shifts, that we begin to influence the spirit of this moment—moving away from fragmentation, and toward something more whole.

Somatic work did not begin as a technique. It emerged across cultures in response to what it means to be human in a body. In Western psychology, figures like Wilhelm Reich and Elsa Gindler began observing how the body holds experience—how breath, tension, and movement reflect emotional life. Their work developed during a time of immense collective stress in Nazi-occupied Europe. These contributions matter, but they are not the origin.

At the same time, somatic work was not developing only within psychology. It was also emerging through movement, dance, and performance. Early innovators in dance and physical culture were exploring the body not as something to perfect, but as something to experience from within—through sensation, expression, and awareness. Many of these approaches were born out of injury, limitation, or a desire to understand the body more directly, rather than control it.

What we now call “somatics” was later named and organized into a field, most notably by Thomas Hanna in the 1970s. But even this naming was an attempt to bring together practices that had already been developing across cultures, disciplines, and generations. (It’s important to acknowledge that this kind of naming—gathering diverse, embodied traditions under a single, Western-defined framework—can also reflect a broader historical pattern. One where knowledge is consolidated, rebranded, and shared without fully recognizing the Indigenous and cultural lineages that carried it long before it was formalized.)

Somatic work has never belonged to one origin, one method, or one system. It has always been an intersection.

Long before somatic work was named, structured, or studied in Western frameworks, body-based healing existed within Indigenous and traditional cultures across the world. In yogic traditions, the body has always been understood as multidimensional—physical, energetic, emotional, mental, and spiritual. In many Indigenous cultures, healing was never individual. It was relational, communal, rhythmic, and land-based. The body was not something to fix, but something to listen to within a web of relationships.

To understand how somatic work has changed, we need to acknowledge the role of whiteness as a cultural framework. Whiteness is not just about skin colour; it is a social construct that became the dominant cultural norm, shaping how knowledge, health, and the body are understood. Historically, this framework separated people from each other through systems of hierarchy and segregation, and it separated people from their bodies by prioritizing rationality, control, and individualism over relationship and interdependence. It also shaped how bodies were categorized and controlled—along lines of race, gender, and social role—further distancing people from their natural, lived experience of the body.

The idea of “whiteness” itself is relatively recent, emerging in the modern era to organize power and privilege in society, and within that system, knowledge was reorganized. Healing became individualized instead of communal, clinical instead of relational, and something you do to yourself rather than something that happens between us. Even the body became segmented—mind separate from body, body separate from environment, individual separate from community. (In the yoga traditions, healing is supported through sukkha (connection) and suffering (dukkha) is what we experience when we become disconnected.)

The problem is that when somatic work is reduced to “do this one exercise to regulate your nervous system,” it reflects the same fragmentation that somatic work is meant to repair.

The idea that we should be able to quickly regulate ourselves—through a single tool, a breath, a practice—has become normalized and, while these practices can be supportive, they often carry an unspoken expectation that regulation is an individual responsibility and that it should be efficient. In other words, our healing should be productive. In a fragmented culture, healing is something that we should achieve.

From a physiological perspective, this isn’t how regulation develops.

Regulation is not something we learn alone; it begins in relationship. Co-regulation—being soothed and stabilized through connection with others—is the foundation for developing self-regulation over time, and even in adulthood, the nervous system continues to respond to cues of safety or threat in the environment, not just internal techniques. You cannot “hack” your way into safety if your environment does not feel safe.

This is where the conversation becomes cultural, and political. The pressure to self-regulate quickly, quietly, and independently is not neutral. It mirrors systems that have long required certain bodies to suppress emotional expression, remain composed under stress, and adapt to environments that are not actually safe. For women, this often shows up as the expectation to be calm, accommodating, and emotionally regulated for the comfort of others. For marginalized communities, the stakes are even higher. Regulation is not just about wellbeing—it can be about survival within systems that are unpredictable or unsafe.

When we promote regulation as a quick fix without acknowledging context, we risk placing the burden of adaptation on the individual rather than questioning the conditions they are navigating.

This framing of regulation is misleading. Regulation is not about being calm all the time, suppressing emotional response, or returning to baseline on demand. True regulation is flexibility—the ability to move through activation and return over time. It is shaped by environment, history, relationship, and access to safety, not just technique.

When somatic work is reduced in this way, it can unintentionally reinforce the very systems it was meant to heal. It can suggest that if you are still dysregulated, you are doing something wrong, that if the practice isn’t working you need to try harder, or that if you can’t calm yourself, the problem is you. A nervous system that cannot settle is often responding accurately to its conditions.

A more honest approach to somatic work recognizes that while practices can support you, regulation is not meant to happen in isolation. It is supported by safe relationships, consistent environments, community, and time. The nervous system is not just personal; it is shaped through relationship, environment, history, and culture. Regulation doesn’t come from a single technique, but from repeated experiences of safety, co-regulation with others, continuity, and the slow rebuilding of trust in the body.

There is another pattern that begins to emerge when we look at fragmentation more closely. Fragmentation doesn’t just separate us—it changes how we relate to ourselves. When we are no longer in relationship with the body, we often move into control. Instead of listening to sensation, we try to suppress it (dvesha) or chase after it (ragas). Instead of understanding emotion, we override it. Instead of allowing the healing process to unfold, we attempt to direct it.

I see this language showing up in spaces that are genuinely trying to support healing. Phrases like “sit in it,” “push through,” and “mind over matter” may come from a place that is well meaning, but this is the language of control which stems from fragmentation culture. Without choice that honours agency, without relationship that supports self-inquiry, without a felt sense of safety, these words become another form of force. Another way of asking the body to comply. And in doing so, they can deepen the very disconnection we are hoping to repair. In the case of individuals who have experienced trauma, this same language can trigger re-traumatization and dissociation.

This is where I most acutely observe misalignment. Somatic work is not about dominating the body. It is about developing relationship with it.

When we widen the lens, we can see this same pattern reflected more broadly in wellness culture. There is a growing return to control-based ideals, particularly around the body. The resurgence of extreme thinness, often framed as discipline or health, carries a familiar message—that the body should be shaped, managed, and refined into something more acceptable. Even within spaces that speak about healing, the underlying pattern can remain intact: fragmentation leading to control, and control being mistaken for care. This stands in direct contradiction to the language of embodiment - A body that is being controlled is not a body that is being listened to. A body that is being dominated is not a body that feels safe.

When we take somatic practices out of their full context and sell them as quick, individual solutions, we risk something deeper than simplification. We risk appropriation through fragmentation—not because we are using these practices, but because we are removing them from the cultures that held them, the philosophies that shaped them, and the communal structures that made them effective.

This brings me back to a deeper question: where did this fragmentation come from and how do we restore wholeness?

Humans have always held multiple roles and identities, but historically these roles were held within a more continuous fabric of family, land, community, and spirituality. However, a major turning point occurred during European industrialization when fragmentation became structural and normalized. As people moved from land-based, relational ways of living into urban, wage-based systems, time became segmented into productivity cycles, and the body became valued for output. Life began to divide into roles rather than being lived as a whole.

Fragmentation is not only something we experience individually; it is deeply embedded within the family, reshaping what was once an intergenerational system of relationship, support, and belonging into something more separate and contained. For most of human history, families were not separate from daily life; they were the fabric of it. People lived together across generations, sharing space, labour, care, and knowledge. Children grew up in the presence of many adults, and elders remained embedded within the rhythm of family life. What we now think of as “extended family” was not extended at all—it was simply how life was organized. This began to shift with industrialization, when work moved out of the home and into factories. In that transition, something subtle but profound changed. The family was no longer a place of shared production and interdependence, but increasingly a private unit shaped around the demands of an external system. Over time, households became smaller, generations more separated, and what had once been woven together began to thin and spread apart.

With that shift, something else changed as well. When families are no longer held as intergenerational systems, the individual is asked to carry more alone. Emotional support, caregiving, identity, and stability begin to concentrate into fewer relationships—often into just one or two people, or into the individual themselves. What was once distributed becomes internalized. This is where the pattern begins to mirror what we see in the body: a growing emphasis on self-reliance, an increased pressure to manage alone, and an expectation to regulate independently, with less access to the relational environments where regulation happens naturally through presence, continuity, and shared experience. So when we speak about fragmentation, we are not only speaking about the individual nervous system—we are speaking about a much larger shift, one that has unfolded slowly across generations, reshaping not only how we live, but how we experience ourselves in relationship to others.

Colonization further intensifies fragmentation, both externally and internally. It does not just fragment land, but identity, culture, relationship to the body, and ways of knowing. It introduces a worldview where the body is objectified, knowledge is categorized and controlled, and humans are ranked and separated. This creates fragmentation both between people and within the self.

The systems of late-stage modernity continue this pattern. We see it in the separation between professional and personal identity, in the medicalization that separates mind from body, in hyper-individualism that separates people from community, and in the divide between digital and physical life. Fragmentation now operates at individual, social, and global levels simultaneously. These systems shape people, and people reproduce these same systems. A fragmented culture produces fragmented identities, and fragmented identities reinforce fragmented culture. It is a cycle that feeds a disembodied way of life.

When we practice somatic work, we are drawing from Indigenous knowledge systems that never separated the body from land or community, from yogic traditions that hold the body as an integrated whole, and from early somatic pioneers who were responding to collective, not individual, trauma.

A more honest way forward is not to stop sharing somatic work, but to recontextualize it—to remember that a technique is not the work, that "regulation" is not a quick fix, and that healing was never meant to happen entirely alone. Somatic practices can support the individual, but they are meant to return us to something much older: relationship.

We are often asked to be one person at work and another at home, to override the body in order to be productive, to prioritize thinking over feeling, and to present a version of ourselves that fits our perceived societal expectations. This is framed as maturity, as professionalism, as just the way things are. But it’s worth questioning, because what we are really being asked to do is fragment—to separate parts of ourselves in order to belong, to leave aspects of our humanity at the door in exchange for acceptance, credibility, or success. (Research on female medical students, for example, shows that training environments often require women to adapt or suppress aspects of themselves in order to be taken seriously—shaping how they speak, behave, and present themselves within a culture still influenced by gendered expectations, with many experiencing impacts on both their wellbeing and professional development MDPI.)

We even have language that normalizes it: keep your personal life separate, it’s just business. But the body does not experience life this way. It does not divide itself into roles or turn off emotion when you enter a professional space. It does not compartmentalize your history, your stress, or your sensitivity. It carries everything. When we are repeatedly asked to show up as partial versions of ourselves, something has to be held back, managed, or pushed underground. Over time, that separation becomes internalized.

I often think about the only negative review I’ve ever received. A student shared that they felt I couldn’t separate my personal and professional life. It was clearly written as a criticism, and at the time I understood what they were trying to name. But I also sensed that they had missed the essence of what I was actually teaching.

If I were to respond now, I would do so differently.

I would say that somatic work is not about perfect composure or performing a role. And I would be honest in saying that I am not interested in being “professional” if that requires me to fragment myself in order to share this work. What I am committed to is something more demanding than performance—something more personal.

Somatic work asks for authentic relationship. Not boundless expression, but relationship that is clear, attuned, and respectful of boundaries. It requires presence, not perfection. More than that, it is a practice of deconstructing the very systems that asked us to fragment in the first place—systems that separate personal from professional, body from mind, self from community. These separations may create the appearance of composure, of being put together, of fitting within expectations. But beneath that, they often come at the cost of wholeness.

So, what may be perceived as a lack of separation is, in my work, something else entirely. It is an intentional refusal to divide what was never meant to be separate.  

For me, this work is not about learning how to better maintain the prescribed cultural divisions. It is about gently dismantling them in a way that allows for integrity. Where who you are is not divided depending on the room you are in, where your presence remains consistent even as your roles shift, and where the body is not something you override to meet expectations, but something you remain in relationship with.

If somatic work is about restoring relationship, then it is also a form of decolonization. Colonization did not just happen to land or culture; it shaped how we understand the body. It reinforced separation, hierarchy, and control, and normalized fragmentation as a way of functioning. When we begin to come back into relationship with ourselves—allowing sensation, emotion, and presence to coexist—we are not just healing individually. We are participating in the dismantling the patterns that lead us to believe we are separate, that our suffering is done in isolation.

This matters beyond the individual. When we stop asking people to fragment in order to belong and begin creating spaces where wholeness is possible, something shifts collectively. People no longer have to work so hard to hold themselves together. The body does not have to carry as much alone. There is more room for honesty, for connection, and for real presence.

This is the work. Not becoming a better version of yourself for different spaces but becoming more integrated across them.

References

• Ibrahim, D., & Riley, R. (2023). Female Medical Students’ Experiences of Sexism during Clinical Placements: A Qualitative Study. Healthcare, 11(7), 1002.