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Have you ever snapped at your child over something small — a spilled drink, a whiny tone, a moment of defiance — and immediately felt confused by the intensity of your own reaction? Or burst into tears when a certain smell filled the room, or tensed up at the sound of raised voices, even when you were completely safe? If so, you are not dramatic. You are not broken. And you are most certainly not overreacting.
What is actually happening in those moments is something far more fascinating — and far more compassionate — than “losing it.” Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect you. It is just doing so based on a blueprint written a very long time ago.
Your Body Is Not Living in the Present
Here is something remarkable about the human brain: it does not file memories the way we file documents — neatly labelled and stored in a drawer marked “the past.” Research confirms that the brain, particularly the limbic system, encodes experiences as interwoven networks of sensation, emotion, and physiological response. The amygdala — the brain’s threat-detection centre — does not simply remember what happened. It encodes how it felt to survive it.
This means a scent, a facial expression, a particular tone of voice, or even the quality of light in a room can silently send your nervous system a message: This is familiar. This is dangerous. React.
The result? You respond not from your adult self in the present moment, but from the part of you that first learned what safety — and the absence of it — felt like. As Dr. Gabor Maté has articulated, when trauma is activated, a person does not act from their current age; they act from the age at which the original wound was created.
The Science Behind the “Time Warp”
Neuroception: Your Nervous System’s Invisible Radar
Dr. Stephen Porges, the neuroscientist behind Polyvagal Theory, introduced the concept of neuroception — the nervous system’s ability to continuously scan the environment for cues of safety or danger, entirely below the level of conscious awareness. Unlike ordinary perception, neuroception does not require you to think about whether something is threatening. It simply detects, assesses, and responds — often before your rational mind has even registered what happened.
When your neuroception has been shaped by past experiences of unpredictability, danger, or emotional overwhelm, it becomes calibrated to detect threat more broadly and more quickly. The system does not register familiar patterns as “old news.” Instead, when something activates a stored pattern, the body responds as though that threat is happening right now. This is why seemingly minor situations — a partner’s silence, a child’s cry, a harsh word — can produce reactions that feel wildly disproportionate to the moment.
Implicit Memory: The Body Remembers What the Mind May Forget
Unlike explicit (conscious) memory, implicit memory — the kind stored in the amygdala and broader limbic system — is sensory, emotional, and non-verbal. Research on fear conditioning confirms that the amygdala encodes threat responses as patterns rather than timelines. This means the body can and does react to a perceived threat before the thinking brain catches up, because the alarm system bypasses the rational cortex entirely.
This has profound implications. It explains why telling yourself “calm down, it’s not a big deal” often fails in the moment — you are essentially asking your cortex to override a subcortical survival response that evolved over millions of years. Neuroscience research confirms that traumatised individuals show increased amygdala activation and reduced medial prefrontal cortex function, meaning the “braking system” of the brain is literally less accessible under threat.
Triggers Are Not the Problem — They Are a Signal
A trigger is not evidence of weakness or instability. It is a present-moment cue activating a past survival response. Think of it less as “overreacting” and more as your nervous system sending an urgent, well-intentioned message: Something about this feels like what hurt us before.
The reaction feels “too much” because it is not entirely about now. It is the body’s attempt to process what was never fully resolved then. Bessel van der Kolk, whose decades of trauma research transformed clinical psychology, describes how traumatised individuals continue to react to mild stressors as though facing the original threat — because neurologically, the two have become linked.
A Real-Life Example: Sarah’s Story
Sarah is a mother of two. She had a childhood marked by a parent who frequently used a cold, dismissive tone when angry — never shouting, just going quiet and hard.
One afternoon, her seven-year-old ignores her repeated requests to pack up their toys. Sarah asks again — calmly at first. When her child glances up with a flat expression and says nothing, something shifts in Sarah’s chest. Her heart rate climbs. A wave of panic and helplessness moves through her, followed quickly by sharp, disproportionate anger. She snaps. She immediately feels shame — Why did I react like that? It was just toys.
What Sarah experienced was not a parenting failure. Her child’s flat, silent look was neurologically interpreted by her amygdala as a pattern match to her parent’s cold withdrawal — a cue that once signalled emotional danger. Her neuroception had already fired an alarm before her thinking brain registered what was happening. Her body was not responding to her child in that moment. It was responding to the seven-year-old version of Sarah, in a house where silence meant something much more threatening.
This is what “time travelling” looks like in everyday life. It is not dramatic or rare. For many mothers, it is Tuesday.
Why Mothers Are Particularly Vulnerable
Research consistently shows that motherhood can be a powerful activator of unresolved trauma. The intimacy, unpredictability, and sensory intensity of caring for young children creates rich conditions for nervous system activation. A 2024 systematic review of trauma-informed interventions for mothers found that women with trauma histories frequently face significant relational challenges with their children — not because they love them any less, but because the mother-child dynamic can mirror early attachment patterns in ways that are neurobiologically destabilising.
A 2025 review published in Brain Sciences further highlighted parenting as a key pathway through which caregiver trauma can shape child neurodevelopment — underscoring that healing a mother’s nervous system is not only an act of self-care, but a genuinely protective force for her children.
What Actually Helps: Moving From Survival to Safety
The good news is that nervous systems are not fixed. They are adaptive — and they can learn new patterns. But this shift rarely happens through willpower or “thinking differently.” It happens through experiences that teach the body, not just the mind, that this moment is different from then.
1. Slow Down and Orient
Before reaching for a coping strategy, simply pause and look around the room. This is called orienting — a natural reflex described by Somatic Experiencing developer Peter Levine, in which slowly scanning your environment for non-threatening sensory details (the colour of a wall, the texture of a surface, the sound of birds outside) activates the ventral vagal system and signals safety to the nervous system. It is a gentle way of saying to your body: We are here. Not there.
2. Co-Regulation: You Don’t Have to Calm Yourself Alone
Humans are social mammals. Our nervous systems were never designed to regulate in isolation. Co-regulation — the process by which one calm, attuned nervous system helps settle another — is a cornerstone of healing. This can look like calling a safe friend, sitting near a calm animal, or even seeking a therapist whose regulated presence helps your body learn what safety feels like. Research shows that repeated experiences of co-regulation literally reshape the nervous system toward greater capacity for calm and connection.
3. Name It to Tame It
Naming an emotional state — especially anger — shifts activation from the subcortical amygdala toward the prefrontal cortex. Anger, in particular, is not dangerous. It is directional. It is telling you that a boundary has been crossed, that something matters, that a past wound has been activated. Approaching it with curiosity rather than judgment reduces its charge and opens space for understanding what it is pointing toward.
4. Befriend Your Adaptations
The survival strategies you developed — hypervigilance, people-pleasing, shutting down, over-explaining — were intelligent responses to environments that required them. They kept you safe. The work is not to shame those adaptations out of existence, but to gently recognise that many of them are no longer necessary in the life you are building now. As Gabor Maté articulates, trauma is not what happened to you — it is what happened inside you as a result. Healing begins not with fixing yourself, but with understanding yourself.
5. Somatic Therapy and Trauma-Informed Support
Body-based therapeutic approaches are increasingly supported by research for trauma and nervous system dysregulation. Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, works by gradually completing interrupted survival responses stored in the body — allowing the nervous system to finally discharge what it never had the safety to process. A 2021 scoping review found preliminary evidence for positive effects on PTSD-related symptoms, as well as improved measures of well-being. Trauma-informed therapy that combines psychotherapy, psychoeducation, and body-based skills has been identified as particularly effective for mothers navigating complex trauma histories.
The Most Important Thing to Know
You do not need to be fixed — because you are not broken. What your nervous system learned, it learned in order to keep you alive and safe. The triggers, the reactions, the moments of “too much” — they are not failures of character. They are the echoes of a nervous system that did its job, and now simply needs the experience of safety to write a new ending.
Healing is not about erasing the past. It is about giving your body enough evidence — slowly, gently, repeatedly — that it no longer needs to live there.
The Impact of Caregiver Trauma on Parenting and Child Brain Development. Brain Sciences, 15(7), 726. 2025.
Porges, S.W. (2022). Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.
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Bremner, J.D. (2006). Traumatic stress: effects on the brain. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 8(4), 445–461.
Damis, L.F. (2022). The Role of Implicit Memory in the Development and Recovery from Trauma-Related Disorders. NeuroSci, 3(1), 63–88.
Knight, D.C. et al. (2008). Neural substrates of explicit and implicit fear memory. NeuroImage, 45(1), 208–214.
van Ee, E. & Meuleman, E.M. (2024). Mothers with a history of trauma and their children: a systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1293005.
Porges, S.W. (2003). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24. Referenced in:
Kuhfuß, M. et al. (2021). Somatic experiencing – effectiveness and key factors. European Journal of Psychotraumatology.
Maté, G. & Maté, D. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Avery/Penguin Random House.
Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.
