(Trauma, Survival Mode, Nervous System Healing & the Simple Wisdom of Our Dogs)
The Invisible Conversation That’s Happening All the Time
Take a moment to imagine watching two dogs meet at the beach.
Don’t look at them through the lens of training or what breed they are. Just watch them in your mind’s eye.
One dog arrives loose and fluid with its tail wagging and another arrives rigid with its tail clamped between its legs. Before a single sound is made, an invisible conversation has already happened. Their nervous systems have spoken. They’ve assessed one another and reacted.
Most of us spot this instantly in our animals.
We don’t judge the nervous dog. We don’t think it’s a bad dog. We instinctively understand that something in its past, or something in its environment, has triggered its survival instinct and that response.
What we often miss is that humans are doing exactly the same thing every day. We just hide it behind language, and intellect, job titles, and these carefully constructed identities.
How Your Nervous System Learned to Survive
But long before you learned to speak, to count or form opinions, your nervous system was already learning how to survive.
Between the ages of one and ten, your young nervous system was constantly reading the emotional and relational world around you.
When you felt safe, cherished, and met with consistent kindness, your body learned that the world was generally a welcoming place.
But if you grew up around unpredictable tempers, emotional manipulation, neglect, criticism, lies, or simply never quite knowing where you stood, then, your nervous system made a highly intelligent decision.
Like the nervous dog at the beach, your nervous system raised its hackles. It learned to stay alert. It learned to protect itself.
Why Our Body Carries Survival Mode Into Adult Life
The difficulty is that we often leave the original environment behind but we continue to carry that same survival setting into our adult life. We walk into a boardroom, a first date, a family dinner, or even answer a text message and we’ve already got our energetic hackles up.
And over time we begin to mistake this survival strategy for who we are. We say things like:
“I’m just defensive.” “I’m just a defensive person.” “I’ve got trust issues.” “I’m always anxious.”
But maybe these aren’t fixed truths about who we are. Maybe they’re simply old survival patterns that are still running in the body’s nervous system.
Are You Reacting to Life or a Memory of Life?
The present moment arrives and the past ends up rushing in and ready to interpret it through the mind. So, you’re no longer reacting only to what’s happening now. Part of you is reacting to your whole history. And some call this conditioning. Some call it trauma. Some call it a dysregulated nervous system. Whatever words we use, most of us know the feeling.
We walk into the room with our hackles already up. The moment we become conscious of this feeling and we actually see what our system is doing, something can begin to loosen up.
Because you start to see and feel that your defensiveness is not an absolute truth about the reality that’s playing out in this moment. It’s simply protection doing what protection was designed to do.
And when that’s seen clearly, a little more space becomes available from it. So, instead of the immediate defence and attack, you’ll find a bit more kindness. A little more understanding. Not just for yourself. But for everyone.
The Clouds and the Sky of the Mind
When the nervous system finally starts to feel safe, something else becomes easier to notice. Most of us spend our lives completely absorbed in the clouds. The clouds are the thoughts, stories, opinions, worries, old hurts and the future fears and memories. The clouds that are moving endlessly across the sky of our mind.
We become so fascinated by these clouds that we forget to notice the sky itself. But the sky was there before every cloud formed. And it will still be there long after every cloud has passed by.
What Is Noticing All of This?
If you stay quiet and curious long enough, something extraordinary begins to reveal itself. You see that your thoughts are happening. Your emotions, they’re happening too. Your conditioning is playing itself out.
But what is noticing all of that?
Before you were given a name, a nationality, a profession, a success story, or a struggle, there was already a simple sense of just being here. A quiet awareness. That simple aliveness.
That same awareness that was here when you were five years old. The same awareness that’s here right now.
Thoughts have come and gone. Feelings have risen up and dissipated. Relationships and entire identities have come and gone through your life. But you are still here. Aware of all of it.
The Same Life Moving Through Everything
If you stay with this long enough, something else begins to reveal itself. Beneath all our different stories, there’s the same life moving through everything.
The same life that opens a pōhutukawa flower. The same life racing across the sand in a puppy. The same life that’s looking out through your eyes. And mine. Maybe we’ve become so fascinated by the clouds that we’ve forgotten to notice the sky that we all share.
But when you begin to notice that, something really starts to relax.
The constant comparison loses some of its grip. The need to prove yourself eases off just that little bit. And you stop carrying quite so much of the world on your shoulders. Because you begin to incrementally realise that life is simply being life, and somehow you find yourself included in the dance of it all.
This doesn’t make you passive or some kind of a victim, and it doesn’t erase your individuality as such. The Labrador is still a Labrador. The pōhutukawa tree is still a pōhutukawa tree. You are still uniquely and beautifully you.
But you stop arguing with life quite so much. You stop resisting it and you become curious. You look at what’s happening within and you look at what’s happening around you and you start to see the beauty and the ease in all of it.
Why Our Dogs Seem to Understand This So Naturally
Our dogs and our animals seem to understand this naturally. They just meet the moment exactly as it is. They feel an emotion, they shake it off and move on. They don’t spend years defending an identity. They don’t compare their life to the dog next door. Or carry a moment from three years ago into today’s walk on the beach. They don’t spend hours wondering whether they’re enough or if they deserve to play yet.
They simply allow life to move through them. And if play is here, then they embrace it with their whole being.
So, when we look at life like this, maybe it was never asking us to become somebody special. Maybe it was simply asking us to be here for it.
Seeing Through the Hall of Smoke and Mirrors at Life Living Itself
The patterns you learned along the way are important for the moment they were in and to take a moment to reflect back through your life to see the hall of smoke and mirrors a little more clearly.
They matter for that. For that moment and then we can let them go. Because they’re not the whole story of who you are.
So take a moment and close your eyes and step onto the beach within. Look up and notice the clouds and the sky that’s holding them.
Notice what’s been here all along. And that maybe that’s all life has ever been doing.
Life living itself. Through you, through me, through the dogs racing across the beach and having heaps of fun. Through the trees and the clouds.
And through every ordinary moment that we are lucky enough to be here for.