You're Not Resistant — Your Nervous System Is Overloaded
- Katie Helldoerfer
- Feb 21
- 5 min read
A certain kind of person shows up to therapy and does everything right. They've read the books. They understand their patterns. They can articulate exactly where their anxiety comes from, exactly how their avoidant attachment formed, exactly which part is running the show. They feel genuine compassion toward their protectors. And yet — the behavior continues. The panic returns. The same relationship dynamic plays out again.
When this happens, most people draw the same conclusion: I must be resistant. I must be self-sabotaging. Something in me doesn't actually want to change.
In my clinical experience, this is almost never the truth. What's actually happening is often something more precise and more compassionate: the nervous system is overloaded, and insight alone cannot resolve physiological charge.
The Gap Between Understanding and Completion
Insight is a cortical process. It lives in the prefrontal networks - in language, narrative, reflection, meaning-making. And insight is genuinely valuable. Bessel van der Kolk's foundational work established that traumatic memory is not processed through ordinary narrative pathways; it is encoded in the body, in sensation, in implicit procedural patterns that don't update through talking alone (van der Kolk, 2014). Understanding why we are the way we are is important - and it's not sufficient on its own.
Survival responses live in a different neighborhood. The locus coeruleus fires noradrenaline shock before a thought forms. The superior colliculi organize orienting - where your eyes and head want to move in the presence of threat - below the level of conscious awareness. The periaqueductal gray organizes the affective defense states: freeze, collapse, fight, flight. As Corrigan and Christie-Sands describe, these systems activate in a predictable sequence, in milliseconds, and they don't update through understanding alone (Corrigan & Christie-Sands, 2020).
If shock circuits remain sensitized - if the brainstem-level sequence of orienting, shock, and affect never fully completed during the original experience - they will re-fire when triggered. Not because you lack insight. Not because a part is sabotaging healing. Because physiology still holds charge.
How Looping Actually Works
When a pattern repeats despite real clarity, it's often because the sequence never fully resolved. An activating cue - something the body recognizes as resembling the original threat - triggers a subtle orienting tension. Noradrenaline spikes. Affect rises. A protective strategy activates to manage that rising activation. The charge doesn't fully discharge. The system returns to baseline with residual activation still stored. The next similar cue finds the system already primed.
This is incomplete sequencing, not sabotage. The loop isn't evidence of a broken person — it's evidence of a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is protect against what it learned to expect.
The first randomized controlled trial of Deep Brain Reorienting - a neurobiologically-informed approach developed by psychiatrist Frank Corrigan - found that targeting this subcortical sequence directly produced large, sustained reductions in PTSD symptoms, with 52% of participants no longer meeting PTSD criteria at three-month follow-up (Kearney et al., 2023). The implication is significant: when the physiological sequence is addressed at the level where it actually lives, the system can reorganize in ways that cortical approaches alone often cannot produce.
Signs That Physiology Is Leading
There are patterns that suggest a nervous system working from physiological load rather than psychological resistance. You might notice electric or buzzing sensations in the limbs during stress — what Corrigan describes as the somatic signature of preaffective shock (Corrigan & Young, 2025). There may be pressure behind the eyes or temples when approaching painful material, sudden collapse or emotional coldness when things get close, or a subtle but consistent tendency to look away from certain topics - not metaphorically, but with the eyes or head. You might feel cognitively clear but physically unchanged. Or you may have had many productive conversations about a protective part, and yet that part never quite softens - because the activation it's guarding against is still running underneath.
These aren't signs of bad therapy or insufficient effort. They're signs that the work may need to go deeper - below the level of parts dialogue, into the subcortical layers where the original sequence began.
When the Sequence Needs to Invert
Many therapy models follow a sequence something like: insight leads to compassion, compassion leads to release. And for many presentations, that sequence works. But one of the more significant clinical insights from Corrigan's work is that what we observe on the surface - how activated or calm a client appears - may not reflect what's actually happening internally. A client who looks shut down or collapsed may in fact be carrying a highly activated, negatively valenced internal state, particularly in the mesolimbic system (Corrigan & Christie-Sands, 2020). Pacing based only on visible arousal cues can miss this entirely.
For overloaded systems - particularly those with early attachment disruption or shock trauma - the sequence often needs to invert. The orienting response needs room to stabilize first. Shock needs space to discharge gradually. Survival waves need to cycle rather than be contained or bypassed. When that happens, parts work often begins to move more fluidly — not because the client finally tried hard enough, but because the floor of activation has lowered. There's more room. The system isn't working so hard to keep everything managed.
This is why pacing in trauma therapy isn't a nicety. It's sequencing - matching the work to what the nervous system can actually metabolize rather than what the cognitive mind can comprehend.
Healing Is Bandwidth Expansion
The most compassionate reframe I can offer to people who feel stuck is this: you are not failing. You may not be resistant. You may simply need slower pacing, more bottom-up work, and more repeated experiences of non-hijacked processing. As van der Kolk writes, real trauma healing involves the body learning, at a visceral level, that the danger has passed - and that cannot happen through narrative alone (van der Kolk, 2014).
Healing, at this level, is not demonstrating that you understand your parts. It's gradually widening the system's capacity to hold activation without reflexively defending against it. Schore describes this as expanding the regulatory bandwidth of the right brain - a slow, relational, physiological process that happens through repeated experiences of co-regulation and safety (Schore, 2019).
Overloaded doesn't mean broken. It means the nervous system learned, from real experience, that it needed to be protective. And protection is not the enemy of healing — it's the starting point. When given enough safety, enough time, and enough sequencing that honors how the nervous system actually works, overloaded systems do reorganize. The loops can close. The charge can discharge. And Self energy - that quality of calm, clear presence - becomes not just accessible in a therapy office, but sustainable in ordinary life.
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References
Corrigan, F. M., & Christie-Sands, J. (2020). An innate brainstem self-other system involving orienting, affective responding, and polyvalent relational seeking: Some clinical implications for a 'Deep Brain Reorienting' trauma psychotherapy approach. Medical Hypotheses, 136, 109502. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mehy.2019.109502
Corrigan, F. M., & Young, H. (2025). The psychopathological domains of attachment trauma: A commentary. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 22(5), 387–391.
Kearney, B. E., Corrigan, F. M., Frewen, P. A., Nevill, S., Harricharan, S., Andrews, K., Jetly, R., McKinnon, M. C., & Lanius, R. A. (2023). A randomized controlled trial of Deep Brain Reorienting: A neuroscientifically guided treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 14(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2023.2238690
Schore, A. N. (2019). Right brain psychotherapy. W. W. Norton.
Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No bad parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the Internal Family Systems model. Sounds True.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
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About the Author: Katie is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC-S) and board-certified art therapist (ATR-BC) at Lacuna Counseling in Columbus, Ohio. She is IFS Level 2 Certified. Katie specializes in neurodivergent-affirming therapy, integrating Internal Family Systems, art therapy, and somatic approaches, including Deep Brain Reorienting.
