How do you work with something that's unconscious, like the nervous system?

 

By being curious about it! Have you ever tried to hold still when you're fidgety? "Fidgeting" is what you know your body wants to do--you're consciously aware of the movements and physical sensations. If you continue trying not to move, what happens? You might become very aware of all kinds of urges, impulses, and sensations.
This is the mind-body connection, yielding up information that was previously outside of conscious awareness.
It's not an actual location, it's awareness of what is happening within one's own body in the present moment.

Bodies are incredibly amazing. Among other things, they can prevent us from harm and they can heal us. Let's say you just tripped over a curb. Instantly and automatically, your body moved. Perhaps your arms flew out in front of you, palms turned downward, your spine twisted, and your legs shifted position to try and regain balance. This is so you would experience the least amount of harm possible. It is only after the fact that thought enters the mind and we realize what has just happened. The physical operation of the body precedes thought.

When awareness is gently brought to what is physically happening during a therapy session, and kept there with my help (see Sensorimotor Psychotherapy ), the body will spontaneously begin to self-correct, just like it does in the animal kingdom . If humans didn't have so much cortical mass in our brains (which distinguishes us from animals, gives us awareness, and allows language), we wouldn't get traumatized. But being human, thought immediately kicks in after a traumatic event as we realize what just happened and begin moving around. This overrides the physiological experience that was in process rather than letting it run its course naturally, like it does in animals. The nervous system doesn't get to do what nature intended, which is to deactivate, let down, repair, and restore itself to where it was before the trauma.

Survival instincts will always trump the mind.

The above information is incredibly important to know about if you've been traumatized. Not understanding why something still bothers them when it doesn't make sense logically can drive a person nuts. There again, it's the unconscious survival instincts hijacking things and taking away the person's sense of control over what happened.

Anything even remotely similar to the original event will be noticed by your "radar" (your five-sense perception and the amygdala area of the brain ), which activates the autonomic nervous system to prepare you to fight or run. BUT, and this is a big "but," when a person has been traumatized, the nervous system knows only how to "amp up," not how to complete the defending process and unwind from it afterwards . This is because the original trauma broke through your defenses, cutting them short before they had a chance to work (i.e. defend you). So the nervous system continually does what it knows how to do when exposed to even a teensy reminder of the original event, which is to amp up, get stuck, amp up, get stuck, and so on. (See also ANS dysregulation .)

During sensorimotor psychotherapy, we closely track this process and I help you physically get past the point where your nervous system gets stuck and starts repeating like a broken record. This allows it to complete the defensive response it's been desperately trying to complete all along. The result is modulation of ANS arousal, a satisfying sense of having defended oneself against overwhelming odds, calming and settling of the nervous system, reorganization of the defenses, and a restored sense of safety. Not bad when someone has been feeling victimized and out of control!