10/17/2025
You Can’t Manage Your Way to Regulation
(Why Management Strategies Aren’t the Same as Regulation — and Sometimes Get in the Way)
You know that feeling when you’ve nailed your “regulation technique” — slowing down the breath, tapping, grounding — and in seconds you’re back to baseline? Gold star, right?
Except… maybe not.
Lately I’ve been noticing this cultural obsession with “nervous system regulation” — as if that’s the Holy Grail of healing.
We treat it like emotional Windex: just wipe down the messy stuff until it’s shiny again.
Or like emotional CrossFit — training ourselves to bounce back faster, look calm, and stay “in control” so we can keep on keeping on.
Back to our fast-paced, disconnected, yet “productive” lives, doing all the things.
We’ve turned “nervous system regulation” into a modern self-help sport.
Everyone’s breathing, plunging, and buzzing their vagus nerve like it’s the Olympics.
But here’s the thing: most of what’s being sold as “regulation” isn’t regulation at all.
It’s management.
It’s a quick fix — a nervous-system version of scrolling TikTok or reorganizing your spice drawer when life feels too big.
Management is a skill, a strategy — something we do to get through the moment, to contain, calm, redirect, soothe, or override discomfort.
And sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed.
It can help build confidence in our capacity to handle distress, and give our nervous system a glimpse of something other than chaos.
But management isn’t regulation — and it’s often used as a bypass, not a bridge.*
It might soothe things temporarily, but it’s not integrative or sustainable.
It certainly doesn’t renegotiate trauma or restructure your sense of self.
And it might just be masking underlying dysregulation.
When we rush to “calm down,” we often interrupt the body’s natural healing or emotional-completion process.
We skip the part where we actually feel what’s happening — the vulnerability, the contact, the messy middle where transformation and integration occur.
It’s like hitting the mute button on your body just when it starts to say something important.
If we were in relationship with someone who said “shhh” every time we had a big feeling, we’d call that dismissal or avoidance, not attunement.
But when we do it to ourselves, we call it “self-care.”
In shock trauma or PTSD, this can also interrupt the full expression of self-protective responses — fight, flight, protest, orient, or boundary-setting — and the energy mobilized to enact them.
Over time, this keeps us from standing up for ourselves, saying no, or living authentically with ease.
All that untapped energy doesn’t disappear — it gets trapped.
Pent up in the superhuman effort to hold back our own life force.
We end up stuck in a perpetual loop of mobilization and collapse — never fully returning to regulation.
And here’s the kicker: the idea of “reaching regulation” has become the new fountain of youth.
It’s an easy sell — who doesn’t want peace, balance, and ease?
But the snake oil isn’t regulation itself — it’s the promise that a few quick techniques can get you there.
These tools are being marketed as shortcuts to healing, as if you can breathe, buzz, or plunge your way into wholeness.
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
(And honestly, if it were true, they’d be selling it at Target by now.)
There is no quick fix for trauma.
Quick and chronic is what caused it —
so slow and steady is what heals it.
And for people with complex trauma, this false promise can sting even more.
When “regulation” doesn’t work the way it’s advertised, it’s easy to assume you’re the problem.
You start believing you must be doing it wrong — or that your system is broken, too damaged, too much.
When really, it’s just doing what it’s had to do to survive — and the skills you’re using were never designed to do what was promised.
It’s not your failure; it’s faulty marketing.
Not all trauma is the same, and not all trauma is treated the same.
There is no one-size-fits-all.
Don’t get me wrong — management has its place and it’s valuable.
It’s essential when you’re driving, parenting, in a meeting, or just don’t have the bandwidth to go deeper.
It’s also fantastic for reducing stress and lowering the temperature, so to speak.
But if management (marketed as regulation) is the only muscle we work, we never build the capacity to relate — to stay present long enough for true regulation to emerge.
Here’s the deeper truth: regulation isn’t something you do.
It’s an emergent biological process.
Your body finds its own rhythm and balance when it finally feels safe enough, seen enough, and not under pressure to fix itself.
You can’t force it — you can only create the conditions for it.
We’ve confused managing our feelings with relating to them.
We calm down before we ever get curious.
We abandon the parts of ourselves screaming for recognition and repair.
We “ground” before we ever touch the ground of what’s real.
So these days, I’m less interested in how quickly someone can “regulate,” and more curious about how gently they can stay.
Management helps us survive.
Relating helps us heal.
And regulation? That’s what finally happens when the body feels safe enough to stop performing, complete what it started, and start trusting again.
www.embodiedtherapyandhealingarts.com
