NERVOUS SYSTEM & TRAUMA

The nervous system carries its own history. Long after an experience is over, the body may continue to respond as if it’s still happening — through activation, shutdown, vigilance, or a sense of drifting out of presence. These reactions are evidence of how hard the system has worked, and how much it has been holding. This kind of therapy looks closely at what your body has been trying to communicate.

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Rather than focusing on symptoms in isolation, we pay attention to patterns: the ways you come toward and recede, how your system opens and closes, the shifts in pace or presence when something feels too close or not close enough.

Within this, we often see recognizable nervous system signatures, such as:

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• Heightened activation — a sense of being “on,” tracking everything, even in ordinary moments.

• Collapse or dimming — losing access to feeling or clarity, as if the system pulls the lights down.

• Vigilance — attuning to tone, timing, or subtleties that others might overlook.

• Loss of presence — drifting, going blank, or feeling far away from yourself.

• Push–pull — part of you leaning in, another part reflexively pulling back.

• Emotional bottlenecking — feelings arriving all at once or not at all.

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These are the nervous system’s adaptations to overwhelm, and each one tells us something about what you’ve lived through and what your system protects.

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Therapists at Atrium approach this territory differently. Some work more somatically, some through talk therapy, some through parts work or an attachment-oriented lens. What unites us is an attunement to your rhythms: how your system opens, how it closes, and what those movements reveal about past overwhelm and present capacity.

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The aim isn’t to push your nervous system toward calm or force it to behave differently. It’s to create a relationship in which the body gradually senses it does not have to work so hard to stay safe. As that safety increases, familiar strategies—hypervigilance, collapse, emotional constriction, checking out—often begin to shift on their own. Not because you are trying to change them, but because the system is no longer bracing against an old reality.

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This is trauma work held within a depth-oriented frame: relational, careful, and attentive to the whole organism. The story matters, but so does the felt sense beneath it. Over time, you begin to recognize the landscape of your own nervous system—what tightens, what softens, what needs protection, what wants contact—and therapy becomes a place where new responses can take shape.