You’re Not Lazy or Unable to change. You’re body is protecting you.
Your Nervous System Is Acting From What It Knows:
When you find yourself stuck, unmotivated, overwhelmed, or shutting down, it’s not because you're lazy, uncommitted, or broken. It's often your nervous system responding the way it was wired to — from past experiences, trauma, chronic stress,or emotional neglect. These responses come from an automatic part of your brain, the limbic system. Your body has automatic ways of responding to keep you safe. Some of these automatic responses look like avoidance, shut down, numbing, over-performing, withdrawing…it’s those “fight, flight, freeze” responses you hear about. These aren't character flaws but rather survival strategies.
Change Often Happens Through the Body — Not Just the Mind:
You usually can’t “think” your way out of nervous system responses. That’s why traditional talk therapy can be limited in healing developmental trauma or long term, stuckness maladaptive patterns. Healing from stuck patterns, traumas, hard transitions and changes, etc., often requires working with the body and brain — where the trauma and protective responses live.
Modalities like:
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
Brainspotting
Somatic Psychotherapy
…can help process stuck trauma, rewire old patterns, and restore a felt sense of safety in your system. These approaches go beyond talking — they reach the root by integrating the central nervous system in the healing process.
You're Not Failing — You're Learning to Feel Safe:
If making a change feels hard, it's not because you're doing it wrong — it's because you're doing something your system isn’t used to: feeling safe enough to show up differently.
Each time you try and do something different: pause, breathe, get curious about your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the present moment. Acknowledge that you're helping your nervous system learn a new way of being, this takes time. Change isn’t about forcing yourself to “do better” — it’s about gently showing your system it’s safe to try something new.
