Your nervous system learns regulation the way it learns anything: through experience and embodiment, rather than instruction.
You cannot tell someone how to feel safe. You cannot explain your way into a ventral vagal state—the physiological state where your social engagement system is active and connection feels possible.
The part of your brain that registers safety or threat operates beneath language, beneath conscious thought. It responds to what it senses in the bodies around it through nervous system neuroception.
This is why the most regulating thing you can offer someone is not advice, not solutions, not even reassurance. It's your own regulated presence, which they can entrain to and internalize once their nervous system settles down.
When your nervous system is steady and flexible, when your breath is slow, when your body communicates that you are safe and trustworthy, the person near you begins to feel that steadiness and regulated state in their own system. Their heart rate may slow to match yours. Their breath may deepen. Their hypervigilance may soften, even if only slightly.
This is co-regulation. One nervous system lending its state of safety to another, allowing them to increase their window of tolerance and capacity for life circumstances.
Co-regulation happens without words, without effort, without needing to know exactly what to do. You simply be with someone in a way that says: you do not have to be different right now. I can hold this space while you find your ground.
One of the challenges that is often not evident about co-regulation is that it's also how we learned dysregulation. If the people around you were chronically anxious, if their nervous systems were always in threat mode, your body learned to match that state. You became hypervigilant because hypervigilance was the baseline. You learned to brace because the people who were supposed to regulate you were themselves dysregulated.
This is not about blaming anyone for their shortcomings. It's about understanding that your nervous system absorbed the states of the people who raised you, taught you, lived alongside you, and modeled and embodied certain nervous system states that you are also practicing.
And now, as an adult, you have the opportunity to offer yourself something different and more beneficial and supportive. You can seek out people whose nervous systems are more regulated than yours. You can practice being in the presence of calm, even if it feels unfamiliar at first. You can let your body learn, through repeated experience, that safety is possible.
And if you are someone who has done your own healing work, if you have learned to regulate your nervous system through therapy, somatic practices, or years of patient attention to your own body, then you carry something invaluable. Your regulated presence becomes a gift. Not because you are trying to fix anyone, but because your steadiness creates a field where others can begin to find their own.
This is how regulation spreads and how healing happens in relationship through co-regulation skills being practiced and shared, taking turns supporting one another into regulation. One nervous system at a time, learning safety through the lived experience of being near someone who embodies it.
If there is someone in your life who you would like to practice presence with, someone whose nervous system could benefit from your calm, or someone whose steadiness you need right now, share this post with them. Let it be an invitation to co-regulate together.
Dexter and Alessandrina
Your nervous system learns regulation the way it learns anything: through experience and embodiment, rather than instruction.
You cannot tell someone how to feel safe. You cannot explain your way into a ventral vagal state—the physiological state where your social engagement system is active and connection feels possible.
The part of your brain that registers safety or threat operates beneath language, beneath conscious thought. It responds to what it senses in the bodies around it through nervous system neuroception.
This is why the most regulating thing you can offer someone is not advice, not solutions, not even reassurance. It's your own regulated presence, which they can entrain to and internalize once their nervous system settles down.
When your nervous system is steady and flexible, when your breath is slow, when your body communicates that you are safe and trustworthy, the person near you begins to feel that steadiness and regulated state in their own system. Their heart rate may slow to match yours. Their breath may deepen. Their hypervigilance may soften, even if only slightly.
This is co-regulation. One nervous system lending its state of safety to another, allowing them to increase their window of tolerance and capacity for life circumstances.
Co-regulation happens without words, without effort, without needing to know exactly what to do. You simply be with someone in a way that says: you do not have to be different right now. I can hold this space while you find your ground.
One of the challenges that is often not evident about co-regulation is that it's also how we learned dysregulation. If the people around you were chronically anxious, if their nervous systems were always in threat mode, your body learned to match that state. You became hypervigilant because hypervigilance was the baseline. You learned to brace because the people who were supposed to regulate you were themselves dysregulated.
This is not about blaming anyone for their shortcomings. It's about understanding that your nervous system absorbed the states of the people who raised you, taught you, lived alongside you, and modeled and embodied certain nervous system states that you are also practicing.
And now, as an adult, you have the opportunity to offer yourself something different and more beneficial and supportive. You can seek out people whose nervous systems are more regulated than yours. You can practice being in the presence of calm, even if it feels unfamiliar at first. You can let your body learn, through repeated experience, that safety is possible.
And if you are someone who has done your own healing work, if you have learned to regulate your nervous system through therapy, somatic practices, or years of patient attention to your own body, then you carry something invaluable. Your regulated presence becomes a gift. Not because you are trying to fix anyone, but because your steadiness creates a field where others can begin to find their own.
This is how regulation spreads and how healing happens in relationship through co-regulation skills being practiced and shared, taking turns supporting one another into regulation. One nervous system at a time, learning safety through the lived experience of being near someone who embodies it.
If there is someone in your life who you would like to practice presence with, someone whose nervous system could benefit from your calm, or someone whose steadiness you need right now, share this post with them. Let it be an invitation to co-regulate together.
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4 weeks ago | [YT] | 11