30/09/2025
Our bodies remember our childhood nervous system experiences!
Research shows our bodies remember the shape of our childhood nervous systems. Far beyond our conscious memories, the nervous system holds many patterns; safety, fear, and the connections we felt (or not) from our formative years, and these echoes remain imprinted into our adult lives.
One study that demonstrates this comes from the Dunedin Birth Cohort in New Zealand (Gehred et al., 2021). This fascinating research followed various people from birth into midlife and found that childhood adversity leaves long lasting imprints in the brain. Adults who had experienced stress or trauma in childhood showed measurable differences across various parts of the brain, differences that were not explained away by the adult’s current life experiences. In other words, the nervous system itself holds memories from early life.
Similarly studies by Berens et al. (2017, BMC Medicine) describes this process as the biological embedding of childhood adversity. They outline how early experiences shape stress hormones, immune responses, and even epigenetic expression, meaning the body literally calibrates itself to what it encountered in those formative years. Later research has also pointed to the extracellular matrix, the web of connective tissue around our cells, as part of this memory system. It stabilises circuits, holds biochemical cues, and can even lock in patterns of regulation or dysregulation.
What does this mean for us? It means our anxiety, our digestion, our heart rhythms, even our immune responses may still be echoing the childhood environment we grew up in. And it also means healing is not only about the present moment, it is about compassionately tending to the places in us that were shaped long ago.
This is where Regression Therapy, particularly Inner Child Regression Therapy, can help, instead of only calming present day stress, it allows us to revisit those younger parts of ourselves, what Karl Dawson called “ECHOs” (Energetic Consciousness Holograms), and gently reimprint the nervous system with new emotional resources.
With Regression Therapy, we are working directly with that subconscious memory system, to a new story of wellness, regulation and health.
