The Click Back: When Your Nervous System Finally Knows It's Safe

Part Two of the Root Cause Series

The Click

There is a moment — if you are lucky enough, or brave enough, to do the work — when something inside you simply settles. Not dramatically. Not with fanfare. Like a door finding its frame. A joint returning to its socket. A click.

If you have never experienced dissociation from your own inner life, this may sound abstract. But for those who have lived for years or decades in a low-grade state of survival, operating on adrenaline and habit and learned numbness, the click is unmistakable when it finally comes. It is the moment you feel your nervous system believe, at a cellular level, that it is safe.

That is what I felt. And I want to talk about why it matters — not just personally, but biologically, philosophically, and spiritually.

What Trauma Actually Does to the Body

Trauma is not simply a bad memory. It is a physiological event that reorganizes the nervous system around the principle of survival (Bremner, 2006). Let that sink in.

When we experience something that overwhelms our capacity to cope — whether that is a single catastrophic event or the slow accumulation of years of relational wounding, neglect, or chronic stress — the body does not forget, it encodes (Payne et al., 2015).

The polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, describes how the autonomic nervous system operates in a hierarchy of survival responses: social engagement, fight-or-flight, and shutdown (Porges, 2022). Most of us who carry unresolved trauma spend our lives cycling between the latter two, even when the original threat is long gone. The body stays locked in a posture of defense because it has not yet received the signal that the danger has passed.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, whose decades of work culminated in The Body Keeps the Score, describes this plainly: trauma is not stored as a narrative in the mind, but as sensation in the body. It lives in the tightened shoulders, the shallow breath, the hypervigilance in a quiet room. Healing, then, cannot happen only through cognition. It must happen through the body itself.

This is why talk therapy alone is often insufficient for those with deep trauma histories. The body must be included in the conversation (Payne et al., 2015). The nervous system must learn, experientially, that safety is real.

The Philosophers Knew

What neuroscience is now quantifying, the great thinkers of history intuited through observation and inquiry. The connection between body, psyche, and soul has been a central question across philosophical traditions for millennia.

"To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear." — The Buddha

Aristotle understood the body and soul not as separate entities but as an integrated whole. To be disordered in body was, for Aristotle, to be disordered in function, in purpose, in the very expression of one's nature. His concept of eudaimonia — flourishing or well-being — was not a purely mental state but a condition of the whole person living in alignment with their deepest nature.

Centuries later, Baruch Spinoza made perhaps the boldest claim of any philosopher on this subject: the mind and body are not two substances, but one. What affects the body affects the mind; what heals one, heals both. He called this psychophysical parallelism, and it anticipates modern somatic psychology by nearly 350 years.

"The mind's power to understand things can be defined solely by the power of the body." — Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677)

William James, the father of American psychology, was among the first to formally argue that emotion is not a mental event followed by a physical response — the physical response is the emotion. We do not tremble because we are afraid; we are afraid because we tremble. This framing is quietly revolutionary: it means the path back to regulation runs through the body, not around it.

And then there is Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenologist who argued in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) that the body is not merely a vessel for the mind — it is the site of perception, of memory, of consciousness itself. We do not have bodies. We are bodies. Every lived experience is, at its root, a bodily experience. Trauma, by this lens, is not something that happened to you. It is something that happened through you — and that you, quite literally, carry.

"The body is our general medium for having a world." — Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The Loop We Don't Know We're In

In my journal this morning I asked a question I believe is one of the most important any person can sit with: Was it trauma that cast you into darkness, or were you already there — how does one escape a loop they never knew they entered?

This is not a rhetorical question. It is a clinical and a spiritual one.

What we call destructive behavior — substance use, overworking, compulsive eating, codependency, isolation — is rarely, at its root, a moral failing. It is, in most cases, a nervous system in search of regulation (Khantzian, 1997). The body, locked in a survival state does not know how to exit, reaches for whatever provides temporary relief. Another person's presence. A drink. A rush of productivity. A meal. These are not random choices. They are bids for nervous system regulation, however imperfect or ultimately harmful.

The philosopher Albert Camus wrote about the fundamental question of whether life is worth living. But beneath that existential crisis, I would argue, is a nervous system that has not yet found its ground. Despair is often not a philosophical conclusion. It is a physiological state that has been lived in long enough to become a belief.

"In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer." — Albert Camus

The loop that Camus and others describe — the sense of being trapped in a recurring pattern of suffering — maps almost perfectly onto what neuroscience calls trauma reenactment: the unconscious tendency to recreate the conditions of early wounding, not out of desire, but out of familiarity (van der Kolk, 1989). The nervous system moves toward what it knows, even when what it knows is pain.

This is not weakness. This is biology in service of survival. And it can change.

What False Peace Looks Like

In my journal I named the places we reach for peace that cannot actually provide it: another person, drugs or alcohol, work, money, food. The naming of it matters.

These are not simply vices. They are substitutes for nervous system safety. And the reason they never fully satisfy is that they do not address the root. They manage the symptom while the underlying dysregulation continues.

This is the essence of root cause wellness. Not: what behavior do we need to stop? But: what state of the nervous system is driving that behavior, and how do we heal that?

The mystic and philosopher Simone Weil wrote that affliction, or, deep suffering, has the power to uproot the soul from its center. She was writing theologically, but her observation is biologically precise. Trauma does exactly this: it uproots. It displaces the person from their own interior. And the search that follows — for love, for numbing, for achievement, for belonging — is the search to return home to oneself.

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity." — Simone Weil

What Weil called attention — genuine, unhurried, receptive presence to what is real — is perhaps the closest philosophical parallel to what trauma-informed healing actually requires. The nervous system heals not in distraction, but in the quality of presence we bring to our own interior life (Gotink et al., 2016).

The Conscious Return

What I experienced was not luck. It was the result of sustained, intentional inner work — work I was doing without fully knowing what I was doing. The psyche work, the contemplation, the willingness to sit with what was emotionally uncomfortable rather than flee it.

And this is the part I want you to hear: you do not always know you are healing while you are healing. The click, when it comes, arrives as a surprise. But it is not random. It is the culmination of every brave, quiet choice you made to stay present to yourself rather than escape.

The existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich wrote about the courage to be — the act of affirming one's existence in the face of anxiety and meaninglessness. I understand this now not as an abstract philosophical stance, but as a somatic one. The courage to return to yourself, even when you have been exiled from yourself for so long that return feels foreign, is perhaps the most profound act of healing available to us.

"The courage to be is the ethical act in which man affirms his own being in spite of those elements of his existence which conflict with his essential self-affirmation." — Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952)

This, I believe, is what happened in the jungle. I have stated before that the ceremony was not the healing itself — it was an opening. A forced confrontation with what I had been carrying. The healing is in the return. The daily choosing to remain present to the new interior landscape that the opening revealed.

A Note on Root Cause and End-of-Life

I have spent time sitting with both ends of the wellness spectrum: people just beginning their healing journey, and people at the threshold of life's end. And what I have observed is that the work is not so different.

At the end of life, what people most often grapple with is not the physical dying. It is the unlived life. The unresolved. The unspoken. The weight of a nervous system that never fully found its peace (Wentzel et al., 2024).

Root cause wellness, at its deepest, is not about preventing illness — though it often does that too. It is about ensuring that when we arrive at the end, we arrive having actually lived.

Having returned to ourselves.

Having felt the click.

The goal is not a long life.

The goal is a whole one.

Next in the series: We go deeper into the specific modalities — somatic, contemplative, and integrative — that support nervous system healing from the root. Including what else happened before the jungle, and why I believe plant medicine is only one thread in a much larger fabric.

References:

Bremner, J. D. (2006). Traumatic stress: effects on the brain. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 8(4), 445–461. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3182008/

Payne, P., Levine, P. A., & Crane-Godreau, M. A. (2015). Somatic experiencing: Using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 93. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4316402/

Porges, S. W. (2022). Polyvagal theory: A science of safety. Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, 16, 871227. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/integrative-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnint.2022.871227/full

Khantzian, E. J. (1997). The self-medication hypothesis of substance use disorders: A reconsideration and recent applications. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 4(5), 231–244.

Van der Kolk, B. A. (1989). The compulsion to repeat the trauma: Re-enactment, revictimization, and masochism. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 12(2), 389–411. https://www.cirp.org/library/psych/vanderkolk/

Gotink, R. A., et al. (2016). Mindfulness and emotion regulation: Insights from neurobiological, psychological, and clinical studies. Frontiers in Psychology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5337506/

Wentzel, C., et al. (2024). Re-living trauma near death: An integrative review. PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11439169/

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