Unlock why your nervous system attracts toxic partners while rejecting safe ones—due to hidden attachment wounds and faulty neuroception. Discover polyvagal insights to reprogram it for true safety, co-regulation, and earned security in relationships.
Your new partner is kind, stable, and clearly invested in you. On paper, they’re everything you’ve been looking for. Yet when you’re together, you feel restless, bored, or vaguely uncomfortable. Meanwhile, that person who’s emotionally unavailable, inconsistent, and clearly wrong for you? Your whole body comes alive when they text. Your heart races. You can’t think about anything else. What’s happening isn’t a character flaw—it’s your nervous system making decisions about safety based on information you’re not consciously processing.
In SAFE, psychotherapist Jessica Baum explains how our autonomic nervous system (ANS) runs a continuous background assessment of every person and situation we encounter, deciding within milliseconds whether we’re safe, in danger, or facing a life-threatening situation. This assessment, called neuroception, operates entirely below conscious awareness and often contradicts what we rationally know to be true. Understanding how your nervous system makes these split-second judgments—and why it sometimes gets them catastrophically wrong—is essential to healing attachment wounds and building genuinely safe relationships.
The Three States of Your Nervous System
Drawing on the groundbreaking work of psychiatrist Stephen Porges and his polyvagal theory, Baum explains that your autonomic nervous system has three distinct states, each designed for different circumstances:
Ventral Vagal (Safe and Social): This is your system’s preferred state. When you’re in ventral, you can connect easily with others, listen deeply, feel empathy, and stay present. Your face becomes more animated, the muscles around your eyes relax in a way others unconsciously register as safe, and your voice takes on a quality that invites connection. Small muscles near your inner ear tighten so you can focus on what others are saying. Your whole system broadcasts “I’m safe and you’re safe with me.”
Sympathetic (Mobilized for Action): When your nervous system detects danger, it shifts into sympathetic arousal to give you the best chance of survival through fighting or fleeing. Your focus narrows to the threat. Your voice becomes urgent. The muscles around your eyes tense. That small muscle near your inner ear relaxes so you can hear a broader range of sounds—adaptive for detecting danger, but it means you can no longer focus closely on what another person is saying. Your body telegraphs “I’m not safe” to everyone around you, often triggering their sympathetic systems in response.
Dorsal Vagal (Shutdown): When danger feels overwhelming and escape seems impossible, your nervous system shifts into dorsal shutdown to conserve energy and reduce pain. Everything slows—heart rate, breathing, blood flow. Your face pales, your eyes become vacant, and you withdraw into an inner world where the external danger can’t reach you. This is the state of collapse, dissociation, and extreme shutdown.
“Our autonomic nervous system is made up of long, wandering neural pathways that touch many of our internal organs,” Baum writes. “It responds to our neuroception of being safe, not-safe-but-I-can-do-something-to-protect-myself, or helpless.”
The crucial insight: these shifts happen automatically, faster than conscious thought, based on your nervous system’s assessment of three factors.
The Three Questions Your Nervous System Asks
Every moment, your ANS is scanning three domains to determine your current state:
1. What implicit memories are awake inside me right now?
If you had a fight with your partner this morning, implicit memories of conflict from childhood might be alive in your system. Even if you’re now at work in an objectively safe environment, your neuroception might register danger because those old wounds are active. The memory feels like it’s happening now, so your nervous system responds as if it is.
Baum shares her own experience: “Sometimes when someone turns their back on me now, my stomach tightens and my heart beats fast as my whole body relives the panic I felt as a child when I was ignored.”
2. What’s coming toward me from the environment?
Your nervous system is constantly reading facial expressions, voice tones, body language, and even the energy in a room. It’s looking for signs of safety or threat in everyone around you. A frown, a sharp tone, someone moving too quickly toward you—any of these can trigger a neuroception of danger, even if the person means no harm.
3. Who is with me right now?
This is perhaps most important: Is there a trustworthy person accompanying you, or are you alone? Your nervous system is profoundly affected by the presence or absence of safe others. The same stressful situation feels manageable when you have support and overwhelming when you’re isolated.
These three assessments happen simultaneously and continuously, generating your current neuroception of safe/not safe/helpless. The problem is that your nervous system is using outdated information from your childhood to interpret present circumstances.
Why Your Nervous System Gets It Wrong
If you experienced significant attachment wounds, your nervous system developed what amounts to a faulty threat detector. It learned that the world is dangerous when it might not be, or that certain patterns signal safety when they actually signal danger.
Here’s how this plays out: As a child, maybe you had an unpredictable, anxious parent. Your nervous system learned that people who need you are “safe” because trying to regulate your parent was your only path to connection. Now as an adult, when you meet someone emotionally stable who doesn’t need you to take care of them, your nervous system registers “unfamiliar = dangerous” and you feel uncomfortable, even though this person is actually safe.
Conversely, when you meet someone who’s anxious and needs emotional regulation, your nervous system recognizes this as familiar and signals “safe.” Your heart opens, you feel alive, you want to help. But familiar isn’t the same as genuinely safe—it’s just what your body knows.
“If my earliest times included a sense that my closest people turned their backs on me, I will feel both agitated by and drawn toward people who ignore me,” Baum writes. “Both the pattern and the pain are familiar, and what’s even more powerful is that this is all my system knows to expect.”
This is why people with attachment wounds often feel uncomfortable around securely attached people and intensely drawn to those who will recreate childhood pain. It’s not self-sabotage—it’s a nervous system operating on decades-old programming.
The Power of Co-Regulation
The good news buried in all this: neuroception is contagious. When you’re with someone whose nervous system is in a ventral state of safety, their ANS actually helps regulate yours. Your nervous systems become beautifully entangled, with the safer person’s system pulling yours in the direction of safety.
This is called co-regulation, and it’s one of the most powerful healing mechanisms available. Baum describes working with Dan, a client who initially reported feeling nothing in his body: “The growing safety between us began to make way for the big feelings that had brought him to see me. As my system was opening to receive the attentive care I was offering, I was both in great pain and healing.”
Here’s what’s remarkable: you don’t have to do anything special for co-regulation to work. Simply being present with someone in a ventral state while your implicit wounds surface provides the neurobiological conditions for healing. Their settled nervous system offers yours a template for safety.
But co-regulation can work in reverse, too. If you’re in sympathetic arousal (anxious, activated, scared) and someone else’s nervous system isn’t well-resourced, your state can activate theirs. This is how couples get stuck in mutual activation, each person’s dysregulated state triggering the other’s until neither can find their way back to calm.
Reading Your Own Nervous System State
One of the first practices Baum teaches is recognizing which state your nervous system is in at any given moment. This awareness alone begins to create space between the automatic response and your ability to choose differently.
Signs you’re in ventral (safe and social):
- Your breathing is easy and full
- Your belly feels relaxed
- Muscles are at ease
- You can make eye contact comfortably
- You feel curious about others
- Your voice has a warm, inviting quality
- Time feels expansive
Signs you’re in sympathetic (fight/flight):
- Your breathing becomes rapid and shallow
- Your belly or chest feels tight
- Muscles are tense, ready for action
- Your focus narrows to perceived threats
- You feel irritable, anxious, or aggressive
- Your voice becomes sharp or urgent
- Time feels rushed
Signs you’re in dorsal (shutdown):
- Your breathing is shallow and barely noticeable
- You feel numb or disconnected from your body
- Energy is depleted
- Eye contact feels impossible
- You want to disappear or sleep
- Your voice becomes flat and quiet
- Time feels meaningless
“As we listen to the sensations happening all the time in our bodies,” Baum writes, “we start to welcome and be with our whole selves.” This interoceptive awareness—the ability to sense your internal state—is the foundation for working with your nervous system rather than being controlled by it.
Why “Just Calm Down” Doesn’t Work
Understanding nervous system states explains why you can’t simply decide to feel safe when you don’t. Your neuroception of danger isn’t a thought you can change through reasoning—it’s a bodily state generated by multiple systems operating below consciousness.
When someone tells you to “just relax” or “stop being so anxious,” they’re asking you to override a survival response your nervous system believes is keeping you alive. It’s not just unhelpful—it’s physiologically impossible without addressing the underlying neuroception.
What does work is changing the conditions that generate your neuroception. This means:
Addressing the implicit memories that are active. If old wounds are awake, they need to be felt and met with safe accompaniment. You can’t think them away.
Changing your environment. Sometimes removing yourself from an actually unsafe situation is the only answer. Your nervous system might be reading the situation accurately.
Finding safe companionship. The presence of someone whose nervous system is in ventral can help pull yours into that state through co-regulation.
The Role of Anchors in Nervous System Healing
Baum introduces the concept of “anchors”—people whose presence reliably helps your nervous system settle into ventral. These are the friends, therapists, or partners who can remain calm and connected even when you’re activated or shutting down.
“When we are able to truly be with one another, our nervous systems engage in what is referred to as co-regulation,” Baum explains. “As Dan was embraced by the members of our group, our autonomic nervous systems came together to provide a net of safety that allowed Dan’s painful and fearful experiences to emerge.”
Finding and cultivating relationships with these anchoring people is essential for healing because you can’t do it alone. The wound itself is often the absence of safe accompaniment, so healing requires experiencing accompaniment in the present.
The more time you spend with people whose nervous systems are well-regulated, the more your own system begins to develop a baseline of safety. Over months and years, you internalize these safe people. Their calming presence becomes part of your internal landscape, available even when they’re not physically present.
Changing Your Nervous System’s Programming
The central question becomes: How do you reprogram a nervous system that learned the wrong lessons about safety?
The answer lies in what neuroscientist Bruce Ecker calls “memory reconsolidation.” When an old implicit memory is active in your body (you’re feeling the sensations) and you simultaneously receive what you needed at the time but didn’t get (a disconfirming experience), the neural network holding that memory literally opens and changes.
For example: You’re with a trusted friend and suddenly feel a wave of shame about something minor. That’s an implicit memory awakening. Instead of your friend turning away (what happened in childhood), they move closer and say, “I’m right here with you.” Their nervous system stays in ventral, offering co-regulation. Your nervous system takes in this new information: “When I feel shame, I’m not alone. Someone safe stays with me.”
Approximately five hours later, that neural network closes, incorporating the disconfirming experience. The next time shame arises, it carries slightly less charge because the network now holds not just “I’m alone in my shame” but also “someone safe stayed with me.”
This doesn’t happen once and you’re healed. It requires hundreds or thousands of these small moments over months and years. But gradually, unmistakably, your nervous system’s baseline shifts from danger to safety.
Building Response Flexibility
One of the most transformative outcomes of nervous system healing is what Baum calls “response flexibility”—the ability to pause between stimulus and response rather than reacting automatically from a dysregulated state.
When your nervous system is chronically in sympathetic or dorsal, you react approximately 100 times faster than you can think. Something happens, and before you know it, you’ve lashed out in anger, withdrawn in hurt, or shut down completely. Later, you can’t explain why you reacted so intensely to something relatively minor.
But as you heal, neural connections grow between your emotional centers (amygdala) and your prefrontal cortex (the part that can reflect and choose). These new pathways create a pause—just a few seconds—where you can notice what’s happening and make a conscious choice.
“The more our amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex work in partnership, the more we can pause when something happens that wakes up a traumatic implicit memory in us,” Baum writes. “Instead of immediately responding with feelings and behaviors coming from the wound and from the way we have learned to protect ourselves from this kind of pain, we develop inner space to reflect.”
This pause is everything in relationships. It’s the difference between unconsciously repeating painful patterns and consciously building something different.
Living with a Regulated Nervous System
What does life look like when your nervous system has developed a genuine baseline of safety?
You still feel the full range of emotions, including fear and sadness. But these feelings no longer overwhelm you or dictate your behavior. You can be with them without immediately trying to escape or suppress them.
You can tolerate more complexity in relationships. When your partner is upset, you don’t automatically assume you’re in danger or need to fix them. You can stay present and curious.
You’re drawn to different people and situations. What used to feel “boring” (stable, consistent people) now feels genuinely appealing. What used to feel “exciting” (chaotic, unpredictable people) now registers as exhausting or unsafe.
You can access ventral state more easily and return to it more quickly after upset. Stress still affects you, but you have the resources to find your way back to calm.
Perhaps most importantly, you develop what Baum calls “earned security”—a felt sense of safety not because nothing bad will happen, but because you trust yourself and your anchoring relationships to move through whatever does happen.
The Long View
Baum is honest about the timeline: shifting your nervous system’s programming takes years, not weeks. This isn’t because the process is unnecessarily slow, but because you’re literally changing neural pathways carved deeply since infancy.
“If our parents weren’t able to be present with us, we are left with the equivalent of raw wounds inside,” she writes. “We find ways to keep these hurting places from making our lives completely impossible, but the protective strategies we develop ultimately change the way we see the world.”
Healing means slowly, patiently offering your nervous system thousands of disconfirming experiences through safe relationships. Each time you feel an old wound surface and are met with genuine accompaniment rather than abandonment, your neuroception shifts incrementally toward safety.
The promise isn’t that life becomes easy or that you never feel threatened. The promise is that your nervous system learns to distinguish actual danger from echoes of the past, and develops the flexibility to return to ventral even after dysregulation.
Your nervous system has been making decisions about safety for you your entire life, based on the best information it had from your earliest experiences. Now, with understanding and the right support, you can give it new information—embodied proof that safety is possible, that accompaniment is real, and that the world can hold you. Your body can learn what your mind has been trying to teach it: not all that feels familiar is safe, and not all that feels unfamiliar is dangerous.