22/02/2026
Right on point Angela. When I talk to any patient, I always ask: "When did this start? What was happening in your life at that time?"
The patient is often filled with memories of that time, and something clicks, they get it - they inately understand the connection between their pain, injury, illness and the events that preceded or coincided with it.
www.dancingcrane.com.au
For most of my career as a psychotherapist, I believed what we were taught to believe.
That regulation was something people learned.
That calm was something you trained.
That if a client wasn’t settling, we just hadn’t found the right tool yet.
Breathing.
Grounding.
Cognitive reframes.
Somatic tracking.
Mindfulness.
Insight.
And then — after thousands of clinical hours, and just as importantly, after living inside a woman’s body for over five decades — I saw the gap.
Not in the people.
In the framework.
Because many of the women I worked with weren’t failing at regulation.
They were responding accurately to the conditions they were living in.
And no amount of nervous system “skills” could override that truth.
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Nervous System Regulation vs. Sensory System Regulation
A distinction therapy culture often misses
Let’s start with something foundational.
Nervous system regulation is about state.
Through the lens of Polyvagal Theory (Stephen Porges), our autonomic nervous system continuously shifts between:
• Ventral vagal (safety, connection, social engagement)
• Sympathetic (mobilization: fight or flight)
• Dorsal vagal (immobilization: shutdown, collapse)
Regulation, in this sense, means the capacity to move flexibly between these states and return to safety when threat passes.
But here’s what’s often overlooked:
Sensory system regulation is about conditions.
It’s about:
• light
• sound
• pace
• proximity
• emotional intensity
• cognitive load
• bodily surveillance
• constant evaluation
And here’s the hard truth I learned clinically:
You cannot regulate a nervous system that is living in ongoing sensory and relational threat.
You can train compliance.
You can increase tolerance.
You can teach override.
But that isn’t regulation.
That’s adaptation.
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When “Dysregulation” Is Actually Precision
Working with neurodivergent clients — autistic women, ADHD women, highly sensitive women, deeply intuitive women — changed my clinical lens permanently.
What I saw again and again was not fragility.
It was precision.
These nervous systems detected subtleties others missed.
They responded quickly to incongruence.
They reacted honestly to overwhelm.
Research supports this.
♥️ Autistic and highly sensitive individuals often show heightened sensory processing and altered autonomic patterns, including differences in vagal tone and stress reactivity.
♥️ Sensory overwhelm reliably triggers sympathetic activation or shutdown — not because the system is broken, but because the system is doing its job.
♥️ Studies on sensory modulation show lower parasympathetic activity at baseline, meaning the body is already working harder to maintain safety before additional stress even arrives.
In other words:
The body isn’t overreacting.
It’s reacting accurately to conditions it was never designed to endure continuously.
⭐️And women — neurodivergent or not — are living inside some of the most dysregulating conditions imaginable.⭐️
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The Conditions Women Are Regulating Inside Of
We cannot talk about regulation without naming context.
Women are asked to regulate inside:
• constant body surveillance
• weight stigma and moralized appetite
• productivity culture that punishes rest
• emotional labour that goes unacknowledged
• relational expectations to remain pleasant, available, and agreeable
• spiritual spaces that bypass anger, grief, and boundaries
• wellness cultures that commodify self-care while ignoring systemic harm
Of course the nervous system is vigilant.
Of course the body braces.
Of course rest feels unsafe.
Of course pleasure carries guilt.
Of course slowing down feels like failure.
And yet we keep teaching women techniques to calm themselves instead of asking:
What is their body being asked to tolerate in order to stay “regulated”?
This is where therapy — and spirituality — often collude with harm.
Because when we ask women to regulate without changing conditions, we are teaching self-abandonment with better language.
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Weight, Body, and the Nervous System
Let’s name something directly.
A body that is constantly evaluated is not a safe body.
Weight stigma alone has been shown to:
• increase cortisol
• elevate sympathetic arousal
• worsen health outcomes independent of weight itself
• increase dissociation from bodily cues like hunger, fullness, and pleasure
So when women say:
“I don’t feel at home in my body”
“I don’t trust my hunger”
“I can’t relax”
“I don’t feel safe being seen”
That is not pathology.
That is contextual nervous system wisdom.
You cannot teach embodiment in a body that is under surveillance.
You cannot teach regulation while reinforcing shame.
You cannot heal what is continually being violated.
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Pleasure Is Not a Reward — It’s a Regulatory Function
One of the most damaging myths women internalize is that pleasure is indulgent.
Earned.
Conditional.
But from a nervous system perspective, pleasure is regulatory.
Pleasure:
• activates ventral vagal pathways
• supports parasympathetic dominance
• increases safety signaling
• restores social engagement
• reorients the body toward life
When pleasure is moralized or delayed,
the nervous system stays in effort.
When pleasure is reclaimed — slowly, without performance —the body remembers how to soften without collapse.
This is why so many women feel disoriented when they stop striving.
Why boredom, grief, tenderness, and spaciousness arrive together.
The system is reorganizing.
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Remembering Is Not Healing More
This is where my work has fundamentally shifted.
What many women need is not more healing.
They need remembering.
Not remembering as nostalgia.
Not remembering as transcendence.
Not remembering as spiritual bypass.
Remembering as orientation.
Remembering:
• that the body is not an object to manage
• that regulation arises from safety, not discipline
• that rest is not laziness — it’s the nervous system exhaling
• that pleasure is information
• that sensitivity is not weakness
• that pacing is wisdom
• that sovereignty is relational, not performative
Remembering is what happens when survival urgency loosens its grip
and the body begins to lead again.
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What I Know Now — Clinically and Personally
Here is what decades of psychotherapy — and living — have taught me:
♥️You cannot regulate your way out of misaligned conditions.
♥️Nervous systems organize around truth, not technique.
♥️Many women are not dysregulated — they are exhausted from adaptation.
♥️Sensory mismatch masquerades as anxiety.
♥️Suppressed grief masquerades as depression.
♥️Chronic self-monitoring masquerades as “high functioning.”
♥️Rest often arrives before clarity.
♥️Loss of motivation often precedes reorientation.
♥️Slowing down is not collapse — it’s information.
And perhaps most importantly:
When the conditions change, regulation follows.
Not because the woman tried harder.
But because her body was finally listened to.
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My heartfelt wisdom for you.
If you are less interested in striving.
Less motivated by approval.
More protective of your time.
More honest about capacity.
More sensitive to noise, pace, and pressure.
Less willing to override yourself…
Nothing is wrong.
Your system is remembering.
And remembering is how we stop asking women to adapt to what harms them —
and start reorganizing life around what allows them to stay.
With love,
Angela xo
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(This piece blends peer-reviewed research, clinical observation, and lived experience. It is not medical advice, but an invitation to reconsider what we call regulation — and who it has been serving.)
