The nervous system is having a moment online. Scroll long enough on your chosen platform and you will find exercises and workbooks promising to regulate your nervous system sitting beside posts about vagal tone. As a psychotherapist who works daily with the unconscious and the body, I am glad people are getting curious about what lies underneath. Yet I am also uneasy, as much of nervous-system wellness culture seems to serve the very aspect of us that authentic inner work is meant to humble: the ego.
You have likely heard the language;
“That’s just my trauma response, and you’re dysregulating me.”
“My body is keeping the score, and that person is a trigger for me.”
Comments like these are something Jung would have recognized immediately: shadow wearing the costume of self-care.
So, let me be clear: this is not a total takedown of somatic psychology. I love the body; for years, I deliberately sought out somatic clinical supervision because the body is where so much of the work comes alive.
Nervous-system language has given many people their first words for experiences that once felt shameful or unnamed, and that matters. The point is not to call anyone out, but to call all of us in, and to get curious about what our wellness habits might be protecting us from.
What shadow is, and what it isn't
For Jung, shadow was never simply a synonym for evil. This psychological construct names the aspects of personality we refuse to deal with; the qualities that contradict our predominant (egoic) self-image, and the unlived lives that remain always present in us.1 This is also why shadow is so hard to work with, as it challenges who we believe we are, and it exists within the deepest places in the unconscious.
We all have ways of keeping shadow and other unconscious contents at a distance; psychodynamic therapists call these defenses.2 Most operate outside our awareness and protect us from knowing what feels too painful to know. We may consistently blame others or push difficult feelings out of mind through repression. Other times, we can project what we cannot own onto the people around us, and sometimes onto the most thoughtful people in our lives. In doing so, we protect ourselves at the cost of accountability.
Over two thousand years ago, the Roman playwright Terence wrote, “I am human; nothing human is alien to me”.3 I encountered this line through Dr. James Hollis, who calls it perhaps the wisest thing ever said about the shadow.4 Hollis invites us to recognize that we carry the same capacities as the people we judge, whether literally or symbolically. He discusses how the murderer in us, for instance, may never harm another person; instead, it may be quietly murdering our own creative life.
When shadow goes unexamined, people can become possessed by it. One of its most common forms is being caught up in our own sense of rightness. Jung himself believed that tending to our own shadow is a gift not only to ourselves but to the whole world.5 So, the shadow shows up in tangible ways in our relationships and communities, and attempting to integrate one’s shadow is a real form of social responsibility.
The shadow of nervous-system culture
Every framework creates stories, and a story that is never reflected upon will eventually run the person who tells it. Wellness language can serve the same protective function as any other defenses. "I’m just dysregulated" can be an honest observation, but it can also work as a kind of intellectualization; naming a state in borrowed clinical terms so that we never have to feel, or wonder about, what set it off.
"Protecting my peace" can be a genuine healthy boundary, or it can be avoidance dressed up as self-care, a way of steering around a hard conversation that is ours to have. The Jungian question is not only how do I calm this… but what in me is trying to stay unconscious? What is psyche actually asking of me here?
Neuroscience Essential Reads
It is worth asking, honestly:
- Whose needs does my wellness practice serve: my authentic growth, or my need to feel in control?
- If I let go of this framework, who would I be, and which community would stop recognizing me?
- When I reach for regulation, what feeling am I refusing to let finish its sentence?
- Am I answerable to my soul, or only to my nervous system?
- What in me needs this nervous-system approach to be the right framework?
These questions point toward something the ego would rather not see: its own quiet self-absorption, which lives in all of us. That is what makes them shadow questions.
When the ego wants to run the nervous system
The ego is useful, and I love that it helps us tie our shoes or tend to daily responsibilities. Yet, the ego is also a conservative agent, often intimidated by change. Listen to how it speaks: I wish to manage this, or I wish to control this.
As you can likely now see, nervous-system language hands the ego a sophisticated new vocabulary. Even breathwork, mindfulness, or other transcendental practices can be recruited as one more thing to master, so that the practice meant to soften control becomes its most refined instrument.
Regulation is not the goal of life, and neither is happiness, which is transient and contextual. A body that is ALWAYS being calmed is a body that is rarely allowed to speak. Sometimes the tremor, collapse, or a sensation of heat in the chest is not a state to be shifted, but psyche asking to be inner-stood.
At the end of the day, we are built to change, grow old, and die. The more sovereign and controlling we try to be over our nervous systems, the more we will likely suffer neurotically.
Shadow work, in the body or anywhere else, does not ask us to become calmer all the time. Instead, shadow asks us to become more whole; to meet what we have refused, take back what we have projected, and live a life of meaning that can hold suffering honestly rather than flee it.
You are not separate from nature; you are nature, and nature asks to be lived.