Healing the Nervous System: What Vestibular Therapy Taught Me About Trauma, Recovery, and Resilience
Healing isn’t about pushing through pain. It’s about teaching the nervous system that safety is possible.
Vestibular dysfunction is a perfect allegory for how trauma is stored in the body. Both involve miscommunication between the brain and the autonomic nervous system (ANS)—a glitch in perception that tells the body it isn’t safe, even when it is. And both require the same counterintuitive approach for a meathead like me: not forcing, but listening. Not pushing, but pacing.
This realization changed everything—not just for my physical recovery, but for my understanding of healing itself. For a long time, I thought healing required forcing my way through. But the more I pushed, the more my symptoms pushed back. Trauma, whether from an injury, chronic stress, or abuse, lives in the nervous system, the sensory pathways, the brain’s fear circuits, and the stress-response systems that shape how we move through the world. True healing isn’t about erasing the past or purging emotion—it’s about retraining these systems to recognize safety in the present. This process requires patience, presence, and a willingness to listen deeply.
A Business on the Brink: Understanding Vestibular Dysfunction
It’s no secret I loathe vestibular training, but that’s becuase did it wrong for a long time.
A traumatic brain injury (TBI) is invisible—structurally, everything looks fine, but functionally, nothing works as it should. The concussed brain is like a struggling business. The employees are at their desks, the lights are on, but nothing is running smoothly. Messages are lost in transmission, the software keeps crashing, and key decisions are delayed because no one has the right information.
The vestibular system is how your brain determines its location in space. If that system is misfiring, your brain struggles to coordinate movement, depth perception, and balance. Suddenly, actions you’ve done effortlessly your whole life—walking across a room, turning your head—become unpredictable. Your brain sends a command, but the body doesn’t respond correctly. Instead of stability, you get dizziness, nausea, or a terrifying sense of floating, untethered from reality.
Vestibular therapy retrains your brain to orient you properly to your actual position in space, but there’s a catch: the parabrachial nucleus, which processes vestibular input, is also responsible for anxiety, avoidance, and conditioned fear. This means dizziness doesn’t just feel disorienting—it feels dangerous. Each time it happens, the brain registers threat, reinforcing a fear of movement itself.
If you push through that threat response, your nervous system doesn’t learn to adapt. It learns to fear and avoid movement even more.
Why "Pushing Through" Makes Symptoms Worse
For years, I thought that if I felt worse after a vestibular therapy session, that meant it was working. If I puked, I assumed it was a sign of progress. But this “no pain, no gain” mentality doesn’t apply to the nervous system. In fact, the biggest barrier to vestibular recovery isn’t just the dysfunction itself—it’s anxiety and dysregulation preventing full participation in the process.
This is because the nervous system operates on neuroception—a subconscious process where the brain constantly scans for cues of safety or danger. When the vestibular system is compromised, small movements feel like falling, triggering an automatic stress response. If that response isn’t managed correctly, the brain starts to associate normal movement with threat, reinforcing the fear and making symptoms worse so that you avoid movement all together.
The breakthrough for me came when I stopped measuring progress by enduring symptoms—it was about staying within a range my nervous system could handle. If I felt symptoms rising, I didn’t force myself to push through. I paused. I let my nervous system reset. Then I tried again.
This principle—working at the edge of discomfort without overwhelming the system—is exactly how we heal from trauma.
The Nervous System’s Role in Trauma
Trauma isn’t just a memory. It’s a physiological response stored in the nervous system. Even when the conscious mind forgets, the body remembers.
The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is always running in the background, regulating heart rate, digestion, muscle tension, and breath. When we experience overwhelming stress, the ANS doesn’t just react in the moment—it learns. It encodes the experience not as a story, but as a pattern of bodily responses.
This is why trauma survivors often feel anxious or triggered without knowing why. Our nervous system isn’t malfunctioning—it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, protect us. But in doing so, it can keep us stuck in a chronic stress response cycle:
Fight-or-flight (hyperarousal) – The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) stays activated, leading to restlessness, anxiety, and hypervigilance.
Freeze or shutdown (hypoarousal) – The parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) overcompensates, causing fatigue, numbness, or disconnection.
Functional freeze – A blend of both states, where the body appears calm but remains internally braced for danger. It’s like pressing the gas and the brake at the same time—stuck between action and collapse, unable to move forward yet unable to fully rest. I spent a year primarily in this state, first enduring and then healing from an abusive relationship, as I applied these principles to retrain my nervous system.
The key to healing is not to eliminate these responses, but to retrain the nervous system—building the capacity to stay present, listen deeply, and integrate what arises.
Somatic Healing: Why the Body Holds the Key to Recovery
Many traditional trauma therapies focus on cognitive processing—reframing thoughts, analyzing memories, or making sense of the past. But trauma isn’t just stored as a narrative. It’s stored in implicit memory, sensory pathways, and autonomic reflexes.
This is why somatic (body-based) approaches are so effective. Instead of working with explicit memory (thoughts), they work with the stored sensations, muscle tension, and breathing patterns that shape how we move, react, and feel.
Somatic experiencing, for example, helps complete the interrupted stress responses of the nervous system, allowing trapped energy to safely release. Signs of nervous system regulation include:
Deep sighs or spontaneous exhalations, signaling a shift out of fight-or-flight.
Subtle shaking or trembling, a natural discharge of stored stress.
Feelings of warmth, openness, or relaxation, as blood flow returns to the digestive and immune systems.
Shifts in posture, as muscles let go of bracing patterns.
These are not random bodily reactions. They are the nervous system’s way of unwinding survival energy. But release isn’t the end of healing—it’s just the beginning. If we stop at the moment of discharge, we miss the deeper work of integration. True healing requires cultivating the capacity to stay present with what arises, to listen deeply, integrate, and honor the body’s wisdom. Only then can we reshape our patterns, not just react to them.
Healing Is Rebuilding Trust in Your Body and Nervous System
Many people believe healing means never feeling anxious, never getting triggered, never experiencing discomfort. But healing isn’t about erasing pain—it’s about building trust in your ability to handle it.
Healing doesn’t mean you’ll never feel overwhelmed. It means you know how to return to balance.
Healing doesn’t mean you’ll never feel anxious. It means anxiety no longer controls your life.
Healing doesn’t mean avoiding all triggers. It means your nervous system learns that they aren’t life-threatening.
Just like in vestibular therapy, where gradual exposure allows the brain to recalibrate without panic, trauma healing is about retraining the nervous system to interpret stress and discomfort in a new way—not as imminent danger, but as something temporary and navigable.
The nervous system holds the story. But it also holds the key to healing. And just like vestibular dysfunction, recovery isn’t about pushing through—it’s about rebuilding trust—it’s about listening.