The claim that psychiatric medications correct a “chemical imbalance” in the brain has long been disproven.
These drugs don’t fix an underlying defect. Instead, they alter brain function to numb our distress, often bringing unwanted negative effects like emotional blunting, exhaustion, weight gain, sexual dysfunction, akathesia, tardive dyskinesia, intense suicidal ideations, physical dependency, and life-threatening reactions, as well as death. Yet, medications remain the primary profit driver of the mental industry, which favors long-term symptom management over treating the root causes of suffering.
In reality, most mental distress stems from a dysregulated nervous system as a natural response to trauma, neglect, or the chronic stress of living in a culture that fails to prioritize human well-being.
When safety is missing, the nervous system shifts into survival mode. Hypervigilance, overthinking, burnout, insomnia, and appetite changes aren’t signs of a defective brain, but adaptations to overwhelming experiences.
Real healing requires environments that restore safety, co-regulation, and genuine human connection. While medication may quiet symptoms temporarily, it cannot heal relational wounds. People need to be heard and supported, not just chemically managed.
Individual kindness helps, but real solutions require addressing why so many are struggling. Healing requires building a society where human nervous systems aren’t constantly pushed to the limit.
When an emergency hits, everything shifts. People feel overwhelmed, information is patchy, and suddenly you have to rely on folks you might not know well—or might not even get along with. If trust is already shaky in your neighborhood, that strain will show up right away during a crisis.
Most people lean on the neighbors they already know and trust. Others might hesitate to ask for help, doubt the news they hear, or argue over who’s in charge. When nobody is sure which information is real or who is responsible for what, confusion quickly turns into conflict.
You don’t need everyone to see eye-to-eye.During a crisis we need predictable, basic cooperation to keep everyone safe and get essentials taken care of.
Before an emergency, figure out:
Where you’ll get reliable updates.
How neighbors plan to stay in touch with each other.
Who around you might need extra support or assistance.
Where to find food, clean water, shelter, rides, or medical care.
Which local or county agencies are officially handling emergency response.
Who is stepping up to coordinate volunteers and community aid.
During an emergency:
Share facts you know are true. If you aren’t sure about something, say so rather than filling in the blanks with guesses.
Check in before taking over. People have their own needs and valid reasons for how they handle things.
Focus on the task right in front of you instead of bringing up past disagreements.
Make space for people who communicate differently, need extra time, or require accessible information.
If you disagree with a choice, speak to the specific concern without making the argument the focus of the emergency response.
Find practical, realistic ways to work alongside people you might not fully trust.
After the immediate danger:
Expect that people will remember what happened differently.
Give everyone time to catch their breath before jumping into heavy community debates.
Create room to reflect on what worked, what fell flat, and what needs to change next time.
Separate honest disagreements about decisions from personal attacks.
Remember: how you handle things together now will shape how well your community copes with the next crisis.
Perfect agreement isn’t the goal.
The real goal is building a community that can pull together and get things done, even when opinions differ.
Reliable information • Practical help • Clear roles • Respect • Communication • Cooperation
A crisis won’t magically fix or erase existing community dynamics—it puts them under a microscope. Planning for that reality is a crucial part of preparing for any emergency.
For More on Emergency Preparedness and Response, see the Trauma Aware America Emergency Preparedness page.
“I haven’t had a shower since Monday so that’s my goal today. Have a shower. Also go for a walk would be good. if I can. I’ll see how my pain levels are and my energy. I can ignore pain and I can push through but it takes energy. And my energy goes into holding myself upright, making myself do the basic things that keep me from going under. the rest of it just has to be flotsam,” I wrote in my journal on October 22, 2020
Hypercritical allostatic load spiraled me nearer to death each day and my two prime providers dismissed my concern.” My body says I might not make it,” I told them. I knew this was afferent information from the nervous system, telling me I was in grave danger.
“You’re just hungry,” my PCP proclaimed, having asked no question about my lived experience. She heard the word “shaky” and made a quick assumption and diagnosis during a telehealth visit.
“That’s just one of your parts,” my then therapist asserted, without allowing exploration of the supposed part. When I brought it up again, she broke down crying, “I guess I just don’t have the bandwidth!”
Fortunately, I had long studied the neurobiology of trauma and had found “The Distortions of Life Force” chart. This helped me understand my predicament. I was stuck in the top left corner. Unfortunately, even this beautiful diagram could not resolve my providers’ certainty and lack of curiosity, a very bad combination.
Abandoned by my supposed caregivers, I was on my own and near death again, as I often was in childhood. I knew from experience and Relational Neuroscience that, “focused attention is our superpower,” so I focused my attention on not dying, a skill I developed early.
I barely made it through, and spent months focused on recovery, hardly able to function. Again, my providers would not believe my lived experience. Denial of the lived experience makes trauma worse. And it has been the number one impediment to my recovery.
I ditched the psychologist for a NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) therapist, which was far more in line with my needs. A year after the primary physician abandoned me I finally had the energy to find a new PCP. Practitioners who can’t believe what a person says about their lived experience in their bodies are terrible for people with trauma. They cannot help, only cause more harm. NEXT!
A guide for volunteers and neighbors exposed to other people’s suffering
When an emergency affects a community, people step forward to help. You may listen to someone’s story, witness injuries or destruction, provide food or transportation, search for belongings, or stay with someone who is frightened. Exposure to another person’s suffering can affect you too.
Notice your own responses. After helping, you may notice changes in sleep, concentration, appetite, mood, patience, or your ability to settle. You may keep thinking about what you saw or heard. You may feel exhausted, restless, detached, irritable, tearful, or unusually alert. Some reactions appear immediately. Others may show up later.
Stay connected. Helping does not mean handling everything by yourself. Talk with people you trust. Spend time with people who know you outside the emergency. Let someone know what you have been seeing and doing. Ordinary human connection can be an important source of support.
Take breaks. You need food, water, rest, and time away from disturbing situations too. When possible, rotate responsibilities and step away from scenes that are becoming too much. You can say, “I need a break,” or “Someone else needs to take this one.”
Remember your limits. You can care deeply about another person’s suffering without being responsible for fixing it. You can listen, provide practical help, and connect someone with additional resources without taking responsibility for everything that happens to them.
Pay attention to cumulative exposure. Repeated encounters with suffering can affect you differently than one difficult encounter. Your response may also be shaped by your own losses, previous experiences, health, responsibilities, or lack of support. Notice changes that persist or begin interfering with sleep, relationships, daily activities, or your ability to function safely.
Return to ordinary human life. After exposure to suffering, familiar people, places, routines, food, rest, and ordinary conversation can help provide continuity. Remember that It is okay to laugh, rest, make art, watch something familiar, walk with someone, or do something completely unrelated to what happened.
Know when to seek additional help. Reach out for professional or emergency assistance if your distress becomes severe or persistent, you cannot function safely, you are using substances in ways that are becoming unsafe, or you are having thoughts of harming yourself or someone else.
Remember
You are part of the community too.
Your wellbeing matters while you are helping someone else’s.
October 2020, when I was bedridden, barely able to function, and alone. IPNB saved me!
Six years ago, I was so close to death that my recovery goals were to drink a little water, eat a piece of toast, and walk to the end of the driveway. That was all I could manage. My hair stopped growing, thinned, and turned brittle. My body was screaming that something was terribly wrong. My doctors didn’t believe me. My “specially trained” therapist couldn’t handle my reality and abandoned me. I was completely alone and terrified.
The healthcare system couldn’t save me; its standard treatments had heavily contributed to my distress, and continued exposure to medical environments kept the traumatic stress ongoing. So, I learned, one tiny step at a time, how to give my nervous system the safety and regulation it needed to keep going.
I’ve spent over a decade studying and practicing Relational Neuroscience/Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) for stress reduction and trauma recovery. And I’ve distilled the most essential, life-saving pieces into the Foundations of Regulation course, so you don’t have to go through what I did.
If you’ve been let down by the system and need a path back to safety, this course is for you. 💙
Regulation requires the sense of safety in the self and the environment. Without it our systems cannot regulate. They must focus on threat detection and protection. Our course will help you recognize safety when you experience it, and understand what you need for it to grow so you can make choices in that direction.
This six-week online group focused on safety, nervous system understanding, and shared presence is not just a class. It’s practice in co-regulation with a predictable field and real people. A small, closed online class focused on connection gives people a lived experience of safety in relationship, perhaps for the first time.
Participants learn what safety and connection feel like, and how to recognize overload before it becomes collapse or explosion. From there, building safety inside themselves and around others becomes possible, because they are no longer guessing.
I share the Interpersonal Neurobiology and Imogen teaches the BodyIntelligence practices she developed over two decades as an Alexander Technique Instructor. These are neuroscience-backed, portable, discreet, and powerfully effective.
Our 15th Foundations of Regulation course will give you tools you can use anytime, anywhere, to help you navigate stressful situations with more ease. These lead to empowerment rather than dependence. Whatever your challenges, you can improve your quality of life.
The class fills up fast because we limit participants as part of creating a safe community space.
Six Tuesdays, October 20 – November 24, 2026
2:30 – 4:00 PM US Eastern Time Click here to find your time zone
Delivered Live on Zoom
Scholarships available
I was triggered in class, which happens periodically. It happened at my nervous system’s speed. I chose to make the potentially triggering movement. Maybe I chose it because some part of me knew I needed to do this work.
The movement activated the terror and grief in my abdomen. I teared up. For a second I felt like I might fall apart. But, because everyone else around me–all the other nervous systems–were in sync with each other, making the beautiful slow flowy movements that invite safe embodiment, I was able to come back to a similar state without much effort. I just needed to attune to the other nervous systems and bodies in the room so mine could come back to the present.
In that sequence, my system touched into a bit of unresolved traumatic material, integrated it, and was able to come back toward balance with the support of the balanced nervous systems of those around me. Four people. Four other nervous systems can have a powerful influence on a nervous system that has been overwhelmed.
This experience also reminded me of the relationship between empathy, safety, and a balanced nervous system.
When people respond with empathy after we have been overwhelmed, they are communicating that they believe something happened to us that we did not deserve and that we deserve care. That kind of response can provide relational safety.
When people respond without empathy, the response may be experienced as judgmental. Even what someone considers a neutral response can have a very different neurophysiological meaning for the person receiving it. If the person understands that they are not believed, not cared for, or not taken seriously, their nervous system has less information that the environment is safe.
The body does not need the source of threat to be a lion for the experience of unsafety to matter. It can be a dismissive healthcare practitioner, an overwhelmed parent, or another person who does not recognize what is happening.
The relational environment matters because our nervous systems continually respond to the nervous systems around us.
That is what I experienced in that Qigong class. I was overwhelmed, and four other people were there, moving slowly and steadily together. I attuned to them. Their presence gave my nervous system something to join in collective safety. It feels like magic, but it’s Interpersonal Neurobiology.
People react to emergencies in all kinds of ways. Someone might break down crying, shut down completely, get restless or angry, or even seem surprisingly fine. Some of these reactions hit right away, while others show up hours or days later. Every response is valid; there’s no single “normal” way to feel.
1. Focus on immediate safety
First things first: get them away from any immediate danger.
Then, help take care of basic needs: food, water, warmth, medicine, shelter, medical care, phone access, or a way to get home.
If you can, pull them back from noisy crowds, bright lights, upsetting news updates, or watching scary scenes over and over.
2. Offer a calm, steady presence
Just staying grounded alongside someone is usually far more comforting than trying to force them to “calm down.”
Simple phrases help:
“I’m right here with you.”
“What do you need most right now?”
“We can take this step by step.”
“You don’t have to figure it all out this minute.”
You don’t need to say anything perfect. Showing up and staying present is what matters.
3. Give back control through choices
Crises strip away a person’s sense of agency. Help them reclaim it by offering small options.
Ask before taking action:
“Would you like to sit here, or move somewhere quieter?”
“Do you want me to stick around with you?”
“Can I get you a glass of water?”
“What would feel most helpful right now?”
Unless safety is at risk, don’t take over for them.
4. Don’t push them to talk or calm down
Never pressure someone to recount what happened or force them to vent, breathe deeply, or meditate.
Some people want to talk right away; others need silence.
Either way is completely fine.
If they do open up, just listen without grilling them for details.
5. Keep their bigger picture in mind
Nobody experiences a trauma in a vacuum—their background and environment shape how they react.
Past trauma, health conditions, neurodivergence or sensory needs, losing belongings, family obligations, money worries, language barriers, or lack of social support all play a huge role.
Always ask what they need rather than guessing.
6. Help with practical next steps
Right after a crisis, zero in on immediate practical needs:
Who should we call?
Where is a safe place to go?
Do you need medical care or medication right now?
What information do you need to figure things out?
What decision needs to happen right this second?
What can wait until later?
Concrete help goes much further than analyzing or explaining their emotions.
7. Know when to call professional help
Get emergency medical care or crisis responders right away if they have a serious physical injury, face ongoing danger, can’t take care of basic safety, are deeply disoriented, or might harm themselves or someone else.
When in doubt, reach out to professional emergency resources for advice.
Key takeaways
Safety • Connection • Clear Info • Practical Support • Choice • Respect • Patience
You don’t have to fix their feelings or erase their pain. Your role is simply to build a space where they feel safer, less alone, informed, and in control of their next move.
Trauma-informed care isn’t a formula. It starts with seeing the person, honoring their relationships, and understanding their unique situation.
One of the most important connections in my history is between the torture and trafficking I survived as a teenager and what happened years later when I was sent to a psychiatric hospital after developing intensifying suicidal ideations from Lexapro. Those experiences were not identical, but they are connected by conditions of power, bodily autonomy, confinement, and inability to escape.
When I was 15, a man abducted me into sex and domestic slavery. He trafficked me and subjected me to systematic suffocation torture every few days for almost 10 months. I could not leave. I had no control over when the torture happened. I could not control what happened to my body. I was physically restrained, degraded, and dependent on the person who was harming me for the most basic conditions of my survival. My nervous system was developing inside an environment in which another person had almost total control over my access to safety.
Forty-three years later, a doctor prescribed Lexapro, commonly offered to those who suffer from PTSD. I asked for a pharmacogenomic test and was told “we don’t do that here.” The prescriber declined to warn me about potential Suicidal Ideations (SI) from the Black Box medication. She also failed to follow the FDA safety protocol of checking in with the patient and asking specifically about SI. Then the hospital’s “embedded” psychologist dismissed my complaints about intensifying SI. By week 5, I was so distressed by these crazy and intrusive SI, that I typed my complaint into an email through the ChristianaCare patient portal. The hospital could no longer ignore the issue. It was in writing.
The prescriber responded by telling me I needed to go to the ER and ask for a psychiatric evaluation. From there, the whole “mental health” system treated the ideations as evidence of a psychiatric illness requiring my being locked up, rather than accounting for the drug’s contribution. I was placed in an environment where other people had control over whether I could leave.
The psychiatric hospital was not the house where I was held captive. There was no trafficker, nor systematic suffocation torture. But from an Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB) perspective, the nervous system responds to relational conditions rather than stated institutional intentions. Confinement, loss of movement, and external control over one’s body are consequential for anyone, but especially for someone whose development included prolonged captivity.
Months later—after it was too late for me—I finally had the pharmacogenomic test and learned I have two copies of the gene involved in SSRI metabolization, making me an ultra-rapid metabolizer with a paradoxical response. There was a biological, chemical, genetic, and scientific reason for the suicidal ideation I reported, but could they listen to my complaint? NO! Ethical literature on involuntary commitment recognizes this directly. SAMHSA identifies involuntary commitment as a significant limitation of liberty. Its trauma-informed guidance highlights safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, voice, and choice as central principles, explicitly recognizing seclusion and restraint as potentially retraumatizing.
That creates a profound problem when someone with a history of captivity enters psychiatric “care” because they are experiencing suicidal thoughts. The person may need immediate support, but the intervention too often removes some of the conditions that help a human nervous system experience safety: choice, bodily autonomy, predictability, meaningful consent, and the ability to leave.
In my case, the suicidal ideation emerged after starting a medication, yet the resulting “crisis” was interpreted purely through a psychiatric framework instead of examining what had changed immediately prior. Suicidal ideation describes what someone is experiencing, not why it is happening. All I needed was to get off the damn pills for a few days. That’s all! But that’s not how the system operates.
Before Lexapro, I lived with serious trauma-related issues; after starting Lexapro, severe suicidal ideation led to hospitalization and restricted autonomy. Viewing that sequence as a relational and biological event is fundamentally different from labeling the experience as “mental illness.”
I object to the assumption that psychiatric hospitalization is automatically “care” because it occurs in a medical facility. Care depends on what happens in the relationship. If a person is terrified, losing physical control, unable to leave, and subjected to decisions by those with greater power, their experience of increased distress cannot be dismissed simply because the setting is called “treatment.”
Confinement is destabilizing for anyone. For someone who spent ten months learning that another person controlled whether they could breathe, move, or escape, loss of bodily autonomy carries a distinct developmental context. While psychiatric confinement did not produce identical responses to original torture, its impact was affected by I experienced before.
There is a fundamental difference between protection and control. Protection preserves agency wherever possible, while control removes it. A person in crisis may need protection from acting on suicidal thoughts, but that does not eliminate the need for clear communication, consent, choice, and coercion minimization. And I had no intention of acting on the thoughts. I was not interested in dying, not after everything I had endured and how hard I had fought to survive most of my life. But the system still treated me like I was the problem.
Decades after surviving an environment where escape was impossible and my body was controlled by another, I entered an institution during a medically-induced crisis where I again faced restricted autonomy. The circumstances were different from abduction, but the loss of control was central.
Psychiatric hospitalization was not merely where I was sent for suicidal thoughts. It was part of a sequence: a medication produced severe suicidal ideation followed by dismissal of my complaints, followed by institutional confinement and loss of control, despite my developmental history of trafficking, torture, and physical restraint.
When care providers take complete control of the environment, they deny the elements required for genuine healing: safety, agency, predictability, and attunement. For someone with my history, these are not optional details or secondary considerations; they are essential to authentic care and harm reduction. It’s been eight years since that psychiatric abuse, and I’m still trying to recover, because the entire disease management industry is practically built against what I biologically need for wellness. Until the mental illness industry confronts the traumatic weight of institutional control, it will continue to harm the people it claims to help.
“Secondary” traumatic stress is a misnomer used to describe emotional and physiological distress that develops from indirect exposure to another person’s traumatic experiences. Trauma is trauma. Your body doesn’t care whether something scary happened directly to you or if you watched it happen to someone else. When life becomes overwhelming—especially when you feel helpless, terrified, or betrayed—your body reacts in the exact same way to try to keep you safe.
Causes
Indirect exposure: Hearing graphic details, re-experiencing narratives, or viewing disturbing images of another person’s trauma.
Caring roles: Supporting or treating trauma survivors, such as family members with PTSD, healthcare providers, therapists, and first responders.
Common Symptoms
Symptoms closely mirror post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and span three core areas:
Intrusion: Re-experiencing narratives, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts about the trauma.
Avoidance: Emotional numbing, social withdrawal, or avoiding talking about triggering events.
Arousal: Hypervigilance, chronic exhaustion, sleep difficulties, and irritability.
Management and Support for Recovery
Self-awareness: Paying attention to changes in your physical, emotional, and relational well-being, and recognizing when the ongoing demands of witnessing or responding to another person’s suffering are exceeding what you can sustain.
Connection and support: Staying connected with trusted people who can listen, share perspective, and help carry the experience. This may include colleagues, peers, supervisors, friends, or other supportive relationships.
Organizational support: Creating conditions where people are not expected to continually absorb others’ suffering without adequate time, resources, boundaries, rest, and meaningful support.
Professional support: When needed, seeking a practitioner who understands secondary trauma and can provide a place to process what you have been exposed to without treating your responses as personal weakness or individual failure.
Understanding our nervous system states, what influences them, and how we can shift them is essential for trauma recovery and self-regulation. However, Polyvagal Theory (PVT), developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, introduces a heavy layer of complex clinical jargon, such as ventral vagal, dorsal vagal, neuroception, and sympathetic activation. For clinicians, this language may be useful, but for individuals navigating chronic stress or unresolved trauma, the extra cognitive load can be overwhelming.
In contrast, Relational Neuroscience offers universal, intuitive concepts that align directly with how humans naturally experience connection and safety. Instead of forcing us to memorize physiological terms, it translates brain and body states into language that makes immediate sense to your nervous system. This accessible, relationally focused framework is a key reason many practitioners and individuals prefer Relational Neuroscience over traditional polyvagal frameworks.
The Shakiness of Polyvagal Theory
While Polyvagal Theory has been widely influential in therapy and trauma research, its scientific foundation is complex and increasingly debated. It offers a compelling narrative for understanding the autonomic nervous system’s role in safety, connection, and defense. However, while some of its core concepts align with broad neurobiological principles, specific anatomical and physiological claims remain contentious within the scientific community.
Strengths of PVT:
Highlights the role of the vagus nerve in social engagement and stress regulation, which aligns with research on the parasympathetic nervous system.
Integrates evolutionary perspectives on autonomic function, helping explain why different states (e.g., shutdown vs. fight-or-flight) emerge in response to stress and trauma.
Has practical applications in trauma therapy, guiding approaches that prioritize co-regulation, safety, and relational healing.
Criticisms and Limitations:
Some claims, such as the idea that the vagus nerve has distinct “pathways” corresponding to social engagement, mobilization, and shutdown, are not fully supported by anatomical research.
The role of the “dorsal vagal shutdown” response in trauma is often overstated or oversimplified, as immobilization involves multiple neural and hormonal systems beyond the vagus nerve.
Limited empirical testing of some of PVT’s predictions, and alternative models of autonomic regulation (e.g., the traditional sympathetic-parasympathetic balance) still hold strong explanatory power.
PVT provides useful insights, particularly in therapeutic and interpersonal contexts, but it shouldn’t be treated as a settled or comprehensive scientific model. It’s best viewed as a conceptual framework that helps guide understanding and intervention, rather than a definitive map of autonomic physiology.
This is why I choose to stick with Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB). Rather than relying on rigid or scientifically contentious anatomical models, IPNB provides a grounded, integrative, and accessible framework for understanding how mind, brain, and relationships shape our well-being. Relational Neuroscience/IPNB honors the lived experience of trauma recovery through the transformative power of co-regulation, safety, and human connection, offering intuitive, practical pathways to healing without forcing us to learn layers of overwhelming clinical jargon.
