Permission to Exist: Disrupting Survival Adaptations
As an adult, it can be difficult to look back at childhood or longstanding traumatic situations and understand all that transpired - not just what happened, but how your nervous system adapted in order to survive. It can be startling to be flung into flashbacks later in life that feel less like memories and more like being dropped into “a confusing mosaic of multi-layered events, scattered along our timeline from the nonverbal stage of life to the adult now.” When that happens, time collapses. The body doesn’t register what happened as history - it registers it as real, now.
For many trauma survivors, one of the strongest adaptations made in those early environments was learning that existence itself required permission. Being seen, heard, or taking up space often came with consequences. So, the nervous system learned to monitor, minimize, scan, and stay quiet. Safety wasn’t found in presence, but in disappearing. That adaptation made sense at the time. It worked, and it often remains in place and on automatic, long after the danger has passed.
That distinction is important to note because when dysregulation shows up, it is not a failure of insight or understanding - it is a signpost showing where the nervous system is still on duty. Survival mode takes over and everything becomes something to be understood, explained, fixed, figured out, anticipated, and controlled. The mind moves forward in time because that strategy once increased safety. But the body is not living in the future as something to survive - the body is living now.
Trauma is not stored as a story, but as an experience in the body.
_Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
