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The word vertigo comes to mind. Like there is a peculiar vertigo that comes from understanding your own dysregulation and experiencing it simultaneously. I learned that knowing the architecture of your nervous system doesn't protect you from it. If anything, I think it makes the experience stranger.
I remember sitting in the classroom the day my professor started discussing the Window of Tolerance theory to us in real time. We had read about it and now he was giving us day-to-day examples in his lecture of what this looks like when someone steps into his office. He explained what it looked like when someone shot past their window of tolerance into hyperarousal or slipped beneath it to the hypoarousal. I studied this and loved it because it was one of the easiest frameworks to wrap my head around in graduate school. I knew at this point what happens in the body during a trauma response. I can name the sequence and typically spot it just by being in the same space as someone if I am close to them. I can explain the neurobiology like I am describing someone else entirely, this fascinated me.
Fast forward 5 years later, I was sitting on a couch at a friend's house and my husband admitted to the infidelity. I remember sitting there grappling all day with this internal fight to stay present, I knew I wouldn't believe it until it came out of his mouth, and then it did. I sat there in that living room thinking to myself "stay here Lisa, stay here, it's important that you stay" and I just couldn't; I felt my body stay put, but everything that I knew I could feel had left the building. There were no tears, no emotion, just knowing exactly what "I had to say" to ensure that I was being a dutiful wife, the people pleasing and boundaries left the room entirely. It wasn't anyone's fault; it was just my body protecting myself.
And just like that I took up a passenger seat of my own life, flooded with cortisol, watching my window of tolerance collapse like a building in time-lapse, and the knowledge doesn't save me. Knowing all the right things to say and do was no help here. I experienced the collapse while narrating it internally. Both at once.
It's like being a passenger and a tour guide simultaneously. There's my amygdala fully hijacking me. There's the prefrontal cortex going offline. There's the body preparing for a threat that isn't actually here. Meanwhile I'm breathless, and on the outside people are impressed by me.
The knowledge is a strange companion in these moments. It doesn't make the dysregulation disappear and I think I've spent years expecting it to, wishing that understanding the mechanism would be equivalent to having control over it. It's not. Understanding that your nervous system is flooded doesn't regulate your nervous system. It just means you're aware while you're drowning.
But there's something else, too, something quieter. The knowing has its own kind of mercy. When I'm in it, I don't spiral into Why is this happening? What's wrong with me? I get to skip that part. I know exactly what's happening, and I know that in due time I will learn these triggers, but my body needs time to catch up. As time passed, I knew I needed to give my body time to find its way back. Finding the ways to help my body find its way back to some level of regulation would happen. I knew that, but I needed to give it time. My body was doing its job, even if the job isn't warranted right now. That's not a failure of my healing. That's just what nervous systems do.
So I sat with both, and sometimes I still do. The clinician who understands the map and the person lost inside the territory. They don't reconcile neatly. They just coexist like how you can know the explanation for a beautiful thing and still be moved by it. The explanation doesn't diminish the experience. It just changes where you stand while you're having it.
I knew then and I know now that gentleness, mercy, and kindness with my nervous system was the only way to approach this. Not because it fixed anything faster. But because it changed what I was willing to feel while I was waiting.
Your friend,
Lisa
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