Trauma healing isn’t about learning to self-regulate harder.
It’s about being allowed to co-regulate first.
So many of us are told:
“Just calm yourself.”
“Use your tools.”
“Breathe through it.”
But trauma is often formed in isolation, danger, or relational rupture.
Asking a dysregulated nervous system to self-regulate on its own can feel impossible — and that’s not a failure. It’s biology.
Before we can self-regulate, we need co-regulation.
Co-regulation is:
being with someone who feels steady
being seen without being fixed
having your emotions met, not managed
feeling safe enough for your nervous system to borrow calm
This is how regulation is learned — especially when it wasn’t available early on.
Self-regulation is not the starting point.
It’s the outcome.
With love,
Chris ❤️