When Your Nervous System Doesn’t Trust the Good Yet
There’s a strange ache that comes with healing — the way good things can feel unsettling, suspicious, or even dangerous. We talk so much about trauma as fear, pain, and survival, but we rarely talk about the quiet, bewildering truth that safety can be just as triggering as threat when you’ve never known it consistently.
You finally find calm, love, softness, or stability… and instead of relaxing, your body flinches.
Your brain whispers, “This is too good to be true.”
But the truth you were never told:
“Too Good to Be True” Isn’t Intuition — It’s Injury
So many trauma survivors confuse their hypervigilance with intuition. We think the tightening in our chest is a warning. We think the urge to pull away is wisdom. We think the part of us that scans for danger is the same part that “just knows.”
But hypervigilance is not intuition — it’s your nervous system replaying old wounds, trying to protect you from pain that already passed.
Your body learned that good things were temporary, conditional, or secretly unsafe.
Your nervous system learned that relief was always followed by impact.
Your younger self learned to prepare for the drop instead of trust the moment.
So now, when kindness shows up… you wait for the cost.
When someone is consistent… you look for the flaw.
When life feels steady… you start bracing for the break.
This isn’t your gut speaking.
This is your history.
And still — there is hope in noticing it.
Awareness is the first doorway to choosing differently.
The Soft Grief of Realizing You’ve Never Felt Safe Enough to Receive
Healing isn’t just receiving good things.
It’s grieving the version of you who never got to.
The version who clenched through love.
Who apologized for needing softness.
Who swallowed joy before it could take root.
Who learned to earn everything, trust nothing, and carry the weight alone.
There is a gentle, delicate grief in realizing:
I didn’t know how to relax before. My body didn’t understand safe touch or consistent care. I never learned how to let good things land, because I never believed I could keep them.
This grief is tender — not dramatic.
It shows up like a sigh you didn’t know you were holding.
Like tears that fall when someone holds your hand too gently.
Like the surprising ache of finally being met where you always deserved to be met.
It isn’t weakness.
It’s the emotional residue of a life lived armored.
Let yourself feel the loss of what you didn’t receive.
It makes space for what you can receive now.
Reprogramming Your Body to Believe in Calm
Safety isn’t just a mindset — it’s a physiological experience your body has to learn over time.
Here are gentle, practical somatic ways to begin teaching your nervous system that calm isn’t a setup for harm, but a place you’re allowed to live:
1. Grounding: “I am here. I am now.”
Feel your feet on the floor.
Press your palms together.
Notice the weight of your body supported by a chair or bed.
This tells your system: We are in the present. We are not back there anymore.
2. Breath that signals safety, not survival
Slow exhales activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
Try:
Inhale for 4 Exhale for 6 Repeat 6–10 cycles
Longer exhales whisper to the body, We are not in danger.
3. Orienting: Look at your environment
Let your gaze move slowly around the room.
Name what you see.
Let your eyes land on something comforting.
This is how your brain rewires threat perception: through real-time reminders that nothing bad is happening.
4. Co-regulation: Borrowing calm from safe people
If you have someone you trust — a partner, friend, therapist, pet — allow your nervous system to settle in their presence.
Steady breathing.
A warm hug.
Shared silence.
You don’t have to calm yourself by yourself every time. Humans are wired to regulate together.
You Aren’t Wrong for Struggling to Trust the Good
You’re not sabotaging.
You’re not broken.
You’re not incapable of receiving.
Your nervous system is simply doing what it was trained to do — protect you at all costs, even at the expense of joy.
But with awareness, gentleness, and practice, the body can relearn.
It can soften.
It can trust again.
It can rest.
And one day, you’ll notice that the good no longer feels dangerous.
It feels familiar.
It feels possible.
It feels like home.
Crow and Flame 