There is Nothing Wrong with You: Navigating the Negative Recursive Patterns of Chronic Stress, Distress and Trauma
Hi Everyone,
Have you ever noticed a rumbling in your body that suddenly flares up with anxiety or dread, triggering a cascade of thought products that quickly predict worst-case scenarios or catastrophic events? Accompanying these flare-ups is a persistent trifecta of emotions: fear, shame, and guilt. The entire trauma response network activates even before we become fully aware of what triggered it, paradoxically feeding the very fire we were unconsciously anticipating and desperately hoping would not occur.
Beyond Individual Pathology: The Cultural Context
This does not reflect something wrong with you, nor merely a therapy solution. This is an artifact of culture that needs to be addressed culturally, which by the way, can include therapy, especially with higher levels of need. Remember, this is not an either/or solution. This is a dialogue we all need to have.
Trauma isn't a separate entity on the spectrum of human experience. Most people on this spectrum are attempting to function with high levels of chronic stress and distress, without the authentic structures of relational literacy and community that could support nervous system regulation, connection, and genuine healing. Chronic stress and distress are themselves artifacts of a culture that suffers from negative recursion - systems that perpetually reproduce the very conditions that generate suffering.
The Functional Medicine Axis: DMN Meets Nervous System
In previous posts, I explored what I call the functional medicine axis of transformation - how our brain's Default Mode Network (DMN) interacts with our Relational Nervous System to shape our experience of ourselves and others. This intersection provides profound insight into the symptoms I just described.
The DMN - our "Primary Internal Integrator" - maintains your sense of who you are and continuously generates emotionally-loaded predictions based on past experiences. Meanwhile, our nervous system responds to these predictions through what neuroscientist Gregory Friccione describes as a "separation challenge-attachment solution process." When we perceive threats of separation (loss, isolation, rejection), our bodies and minds instinctively seek connection as a fundamental survival mechanism.
This explains why that rumbling anxiety and catastrophic thinking isn't a malfunction. It's your DMN activating predictions based on your attachment history, while your nervous system responds through specific vagal pathways: perhaps disengaging your social connection system (flat affect, reduced eye contact), triggering fight/flight responses (criticism, defensiveness), or in cases of profound threat, activating immobilization responses (dissociation, emotional numbing).
As I've written previously, "When the DMN predicts pain or abandonment based on past attachment experiences, it triggers specific autonomic nervous system responses... These vagal responses happen beneath conscious awareness and before cognitive processing." It truly isn't you - it's your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to protect you.
The Intelligence Within Protection
Imagine this scenario as a spectrum of neurophysiological prediction, ranging from mild discomfort to full-fledged panic. The underlying mechanisms remain consistent, with intensity as the primary variable. This is not a malfunction, but a sophisticated survival communication system developed through years of adaptive experience.
The body's wisdom reveals itself precisely through these protective mechanisms. What appears as hypervigilance is actually a complex neural network carrying the intelligence of survival. Each predictive pattern, each moment of anticipatory anxiety, contains a deeper message about resilience and the profound capacity to navigate challenging relational landscapes.
Consider this constellation of interconnected events not as a fire alarm signaling something wrong with you, but as your body's intelligence communicating in the most compassionate and authentic way. It is reaching out, seeking support, guidance, and ultimately, connection.
Creating Conditions for Transformation
Transformation happens not by eliminating these protective patterns, but by creating containers of authentic recognition - what I call "conditions for attachment solutions." These include helping you recognize when separation anxiety is activating protective patterns, creating safety that allows rigid DMN patterns to temporarily loosen, and providing consistent, attuned responses that contradict negative predictions, creating opportunities for updating these models.
Relational literacy becomes the pathway - developing the capacity to witness protective mechanisms without judgment, recognize the intelligence within survival strategies, create spaciousness around traumatic adaptations, and develop nuanced awareness of systemic patterns.
This perspective aligns with what I've discovered about the DMN-nervous system connection - that change requires emotionally real contradictions rather than just new information. When we create relational contexts that honor the body's protective wisdom, we generate the kind of "prediction errors" that allow deep emotional patterns to update.
Therapeutic approaches that honor this complexity move beyond symptom reduction. They create conditions where the nervous system can recognize its own protective intelligence, metabolizing trauma patterns through genuine relational presence.
The Power of Authentic Community
This most vulnerable experience is an opportunity to find, be, and create your true self. This perspective is profound because it aligns with how human beings actually function - as adaptive, intelligent systems living in an embodied process of seeking balance and connection.
Authentic community becomes the most powerful intervention. More than individual healing, it serves as a sophisticated container that allows systemic patterns to be recognized, metabolized, and transformed. The community becomes a living system that holds the complexity of traumatic adaptation, creating conditions for a different kind of relational possibility.
A transmission of possibility, emerging through each moment of genuine presence.
With Gratitude,
Paul
https://www.integrativerelationalhealth.com
One more response, as a deeper reflection. If it is true that conversation-- this is a conversation-- is the very infrastructure of healthy relationship, AND felt conversation--as process-- is the antidote and remedy for false core beliefs like "there is something wrong with me," don't wait for therapy to have these conversations. Bring these conversations into your lives. Create community around these conversations. Integrate these conversations into your daily lives. Stay curious. Wonder. Ask. Share. There is nothing wrong with you. Suffering is an integration challenge, not a problem. Integration is simply "making sense" of what may not have made sense to you in a very long time. And when you find yourselves repeating old patterns of pain in your body and mind, don't judge. Look for your body's intelligence and wisdom. As we say in soccer, simply "reset." And reach out. Just like this. None of us can do this alone.
Hi Aley and Tochi!
Thank you for your reflections. Truly Madly Deeply. Many people have been reaching out with similar responses, which tells me something important is being recognized collectively.
Aley, your insight about "making the process itself visible, relational, and sacred" and understanding that transformation emerges from "recursive journeying" rather than accumulation captures exactly what IRH methodology seeks to embody. Your question about distinguishing between expansion and looping touches the very heart of recursive integration.
Tochi, your recognition that anxiety and "spirals of dread" represent the body's protective intelligence rather than malfunction reflects the profound shift in perspective that's essential for healing. That moment of validation—"I'm not broken"—creates a neurobiological state where the DMN patterns maintaining separation can momentarily loosen.
In our summer research program focusing on authenticity, relational literacy, and fostering authentic communities, two things are becoming increasingly clear:
First, the initial step in this work is clearing out the pervasive cultural shame that blocks authentic relating. This shame isn't personal—it's an artifact of cultural patterns that pathologize normal human responses to adversity. When Aley describes the "reparative act of gluing, binding, and assembling things into a new unity," she's touching on how integration happens not through restoration of some imagined original wholeness, but through meaning-making that honors what has been rearranged.
Second, we must help people reframe what they've been taught—and worse, conditioned—to believe about the body and mind's adaptations to adversity. When Tochi recognizes that "real healing happens in spaces of authentic connection," she's identifying exactly what neuroscience, attachment research, and clinical practice are all confirming: the nervous system that developed protective patterns in relationship can only update those patterns through relationship.
My own life experience of significant childhood trauma in the face of war, racism, ignorance, alcoholism, miseducation, neglect, and absence taught me the extent to which collective cultural trauma was more the "root cause" of my suffering than merely my parents' inability to properly parent. Those spirals of dread, the anxiety patterns, the hypervigilance—these weren't personal failures but sophisticated adaptations to cultural conditions that made survival precarious.
All of these factors—and amplify them with climate change—are as intensely present as ever. AND we now have the knowledge, the tools, the philosophical understanding, the language, capacity, and ability to begin "tripping" the cultural wire of individual suffering. This is where your insights become so powerful.
Aley's question about "how we honor the iterative without becoming stuck in repetition" speaks directly to this possibility. The rituals that help us recognize expansion include precisely what you both demonstrated in your responses: witnessing the process itself, making the implicit explicit, creating relational feedback loops, tracking embodied responses, and creating clear fields where new patterns can emerge.
Tochi's recognition that we're "not broken but just doing what we've learned to survive" creates exactly the kind of space where DMN patterns can reorganize. When enough of us hold this perspective together, we create the conditions for cultural patterns to shift as well.
This is why I believe so deeply in IRH's mission. The healing we seek isn't just individual—it's cultural transformation through relational consciousness. Your willingness to engage with these ideas with such openness and depth itself contributes to this transformation.
What gives me profound hope is seeing how readily you both recognized these patterns when they were made visible. This suggests that the capacity for integration is already present, waiting to be revealed through relationship rather than needing to be constructed from scratch.
Warmly,
Paul