The Journal

We live in a world where stress has quietly become a background state.

And yet our nervous system holds a remarkable capacity to return to balance, when the right conditions are met. Polyvagal theory, developed by the neuroscientist Stephen Porges, helps us understand how the body perceives safety, handles stress, and shapes our emotions.

It also sheds a precious light on the role of breath, touch and movement in creating new bodily experiences — ones capable of changing our inner state for good.

Three states, not two

Our autonomic nervous system is not a simple switch between stress and relaxation. It moves between several states that shape our thoughts, our feelings and our behaviour.

Safety and connection

When we feel safe, the nervous system supports social connection, curiosity, creativity and the capacity to be in relationship. The body is relaxed — and still available, still alive.

Mobilisation

Faced with a perceived threat, survival mechanisms switch on. The heart quickens, breathing shortens, muscles prepare for action. This can show up as anxiety, agitation or hypervigilance.

Immobilisation

When the threat feels insurmountable, the nervous system can drop into a deeper form of protection: fatigue, lack of energy, a sense of disconnection, withdrawal.

None of these are conscious choices. They are biological strategies, designed to keep us alive.

Stress is a question of perceived safety

Our nervous system is constantly scanning the environment to work out whether we are safe or in danger. This automatic process — neuroception — happens entirely outside our awareness.

So even when no real danger is present, certain situations, memories or bodily tensions can be read as threatening. The body responds as though it had to protect itself.

Emotional regulation, then, is not about controlling or suppressing emotion. It is about helping the nervous system find enough safety to come out of survival mode.

Breath: a bridge to calm

Breathing is the most accessible way we have to influence the nervous system.

When we deliberately slow the breath — and particularly the exhale — we stimulate the vagus nerve, which sits at the centre of polyvagal theory. That stimulation sends the brain a simple, powerful message:

Conscious breathing can lower stress activation, support a return to calm, sharpen bodily awareness and underpin emotional regulation. The breath becomes a language we use to speak with our own nervous system.

Touch: a message of safety

Kind touch is one of the very first forms of communication we ever experience.

When it is respectful, safe and attuned to the person, touch sends reassuring information to the nervous system. It helps release muscular tension, slow the heart rate, and support the hormones associated with wellbeing and attachment.

The body receives a concrete experience of safety — one that can reach what words alone cannot soothe.

Movement: completing the survival response

Stress and difficult experiences leave traces in the body. Responses of flight, fight or protection can remain unfinished, keeping the nervous system on alert.

Gentle, conscious movement offers the body new possibilities of expression. Walking, stretching, mobilising the pelvis, moving fluidly — all of it can restore a sense of vitality and safety.

Movement does not only act on muscles. It tells the brain that the body now has more resources to meet what life brings.

Writing new messages

For a long time we believed the brain mostly directed the body. Neuroscience now shows the conversation runs both ways.

When we breathe consciously, receive safe touch or move in an attuned way, we create new sensory experiences. Those experiences become new nervous messages that enrich the system's sense of safety.

Little by little, the body learns there are other options than tension, hypervigilance or withdrawal. New pathways can form — supporting more calm, more presence, more resilience.

There is a kind of lack that many adults carry without quite being able to name it.

It can take the shape of an insatiable need to be seen, a fear of abandonment, a chronic feeling of emptiness, or a deep waiting for unconditional love. However much a person achieves, however loved they are — something always seems to be missing.

This experience has a name: mother hunger.

At the heart of this wound lies an unmet developmental need: attunement — the experience of being deeply seen, emotionally understood, and welcomed with love by one's mother or the person who stood in that place.

When attunement is present, a child develops a stable sense of self and the capacity to trust. When it is missing, the child may grow up feeling unseen, unsafe, and fundamentally alone.

What attunement actually is

In developmental psychology, attunement is the caregiver's capacity to accurately perceive a child's emotional and physical states — and to respond to them.

It goes far beyond meeting basic needs. It involves:

• a gaze that says I see you
• facial expressions that mirror the child's emotion
• a soothing voice that regulates distress
• touch that offers safety and comfort
• emotional presence and genuine interest
• protection through overwhelming experiences

Through thousands of small interactions, a child learns: my emotions make sense; I matter; I am safe; I can rely on others; I am worthy of love.

The power of the mother's gaze

One of the most powerful forms of attunement is simply being looked at.

When a mother looks at her child with warmth and recognition, she transmits something foundational:

Through that gaze, the child begins to build an inner image of themselves as lovable and important.

If those eyes are absent, distracted, critical or emotionally empty, a child may draw a painful conclusion instead: I am invisible. There is something wrong with me. I am not worth noticing.

Why this still matters, decades later

This is not about blaming mothers. Most were doing what they could, often with their own unmet needs, their own exhaustion, their own untended wounds.

It is about naming something honestly, so it can finally be tended to — because what goes unnamed tends to repeat.

The repair does not come from finally receiving, as an adult, what was missing then. It comes from becoming, slowly, the presence you needed: learning to see yourself, to take your own emotions seriously, to stay with yourself when it is hard.

Hypnosis has a bad reputation.

We picture the swinging pendulum, the loss of control, the practitioner steering someone else's will. That is not what it is. It never was.

Hypnosis is in fact a natural state of consciousness we all experience every single day — reading a book and losing track of time, driving somewhere familiar and arriving with no memory of the journey, drifting at the edge of sleep. It is a state of attention turned inward.

What changes in a session

In therapeutic hypnosis, what changes is that we enter that state intentionally — and with a guide.

The brain shifts towards theta waves: the frequencies of childhood, of half-sleep, of deep creativity. In that state, access to the unconscious becomes easier. The limiting patterns that quietly run our behaviour become reachable — not to be forced, but to be met with gentleness and curiosity.

Jung put it with a clarity that still lands:

Hypnosis is not magic. It is a tool for bringing light to what acts silently inside us — inherited fears, absorbed beliefs, decisions made in childhood and never revisited since.

What it actually feels like

In practice, a hypnosis session is most often described as deeply calming. You are conscious. You are present. You are simply more available to yourself.

You can speak, move, stop, or open your eyes at any moment. Nothing happens without your consent — and nobody can make you do anything that conflicts with your values.

It is in that spaciousness that change becomes possible: not imposed from outside, but emerging from within, where it had been waiting all along.

Some emotional wounds seem to run through an entire life.

The fear of being rejected. The sense of never quite being enough. The feeling of having to earn love, attention, or your place in a group.

Very often, these reactions did not begin in adult life. They took root in early experiences where certain fundamental needs went unmet: safety, recognition, belonging, protection, unconditional love.

This is where inner-child work comes in — and with it one of the most striking tools to come out of NLP: future pacing. An approach that is not only about revisiting the past, but about rewriting how the nervous system prepares for what is ahead.

Why the past keeps arriving in the present

Our brain and nervous system work from internal maps built through experience.

If, as a child, we lived through rejection, abandonment or humiliation, the brain developed protective strategies to avoid feeling that again. The difficulty is that those strategies keep firing in adulthood — long after the danger has gone.

Revisiting, then changing the scene

The work usually begins by identifying a formative experience. It need not be a major trauma. Sometimes an accumulation of small moments is enough: not feeling heard, being left alone with your feelings, receiving little recognition, feeling different or left out.

You revisit that scene — not to relive the suffering, but to observe the emotions, beliefs and bodily sensations that settled there.

Then something changes. Through a positive anchor and the imagination, the child is no longer alone. They can receive what they needed: understanding, support, protection, encouragement, love. Sometimes the adult you are today comes to meet them. Sometimes another resourceful figure appears.

From repair to future pacing

Here is where it becomes genuinely interesting.

Once a new emotional imprint exists around the past, you imagine a future situation likely to reactivate the same wound — an evening out, a meeting, a new group, a first date.

You activate your anchor, and you picture the scene differently. You feel connected. You sense your own worth. You notice the kind faces. You feel safety and belonging in your body.

In other words, you train your nervous system to live a new possible reality.

Why it works

The brain does not always draw a sharp line between an experience truly lived and one vividly imagined. That is exactly what makes this practice so powerful.

Repeated alongside positive emotional states, new neural pathways develop, old automatic responses lose intensity, and the sense of inner safety grows. Little by little, a person stops anticipating rejection — and starts anticipating connection.

There are wounds we carry that did not begin with us.

Sometimes a woman feels an unexplained shame when she speaks her truth. Guilt when she sets a boundary. Fear when she takes up space. A deep tension in the body when she tries to live authentically. These reactions often feel out of proportion to her own history — as though they belonged to a much older story.

Very often, that is exactly what they are.

What gets passed down

Across generations, we inherit more than eye colour and family traditions. We inherit patterns of silence, of survival, of emotional conditioning.

Modern science is beginning to confirm what healing traditions have long said. Epigenetics shows that stress and trauma can alter gene expression — and may affect descendants. Beyond biology, family systems transmit emotional patterns, beliefs and relational strategies.

A grandmother who lived through war, poverty or abuse may have learned to suppress her emotions. Her daughter may have inherited anxiety, hypervigilance, or a pattern of self-sacrifice. Her granddaughter may carry chronic tension, or an unexplained guilt.

The original event may be forgotten — but the emotional imprint remains.

The body remembers

Even when the mind does not know the story, the body holds its echoes. Stored tension can appear:

• in the jaw and throat, where words were held back
• in the shoulders, overloaded with responsibility
• in the chest, keeper of grief
• in the pelvis — associated with creation, sexuality, identity

What can be transformed

The aim of this work is not to reject your lineage — but to transform what moves through it.

When someone heals inherited shame and silence, they regain access to qualities that may have been suppressed for generations: their voice, their intuition, their creativity, their capacity to set limits, their freedom to live in truth.

And in choosing to heal, a person changes the emotional inheritance they pass on.

Have you ever noticed that when you're stressed, you clench your jaw?

Or that during moments of fear, shame, or tension, your pelvis also seems to tighten?

This isn't a coincidence. Our bodies are deeply interconnected.

A physical connection

The jaw and the pelvic floor are part of a larger network of muscles, fascia and connective tissue that helps organise posture, breathing and movement throughout the body.

Many body-oriented approaches describe a functional relationship between these two areas. When the jaw remains chronically tense, the rest of the body often follows. Likewise, learning to soften the jaw can invite release through the neck, diaphragm, abdomen — and sometimes the pelvic floor.

Breathing plays an important role too. As the diaphragm moves with each breath, it coordinates with the pelvic floor in a subtle, rhythmic dance. When the breath becomes freer, the body often follows.

This is why humming, singing, gentle vocalisation or conscious breathing can create a greater sense of ease — not only in the throat, but throughout the whole body.

The symbolic connection

Beyond anatomy, many somatic and spiritual traditions see a symbolic relationship between the throat and the pelvis.

The throat is often associated with expression. Speaking our truth. Giving voice to our needs. Allowing ourselves to be heard.

The pelvis represents something equally essential. Our vitality. Our creativity. Our capacity to receive, to feel, to move, and to create life — in all its forms.

When expression has been restricted for a long time, the body may hold that story. Sometimes the jaw becomes guarded. Sometimes the pelvic floor becomes protective.

Listening to the body

Healing is rarely about forcing the body to relax. It is about creating enough safety for the body to discover that it no longer has to stay in protection.

Sometimes that begins with a deeper breath. Sometimes with a softened jaw. Sometimes with a sound that was never allowed to be expressed.