The Nervous System, Heartbreak, and Learning to Love Again

I sit here writing and I think of all the anxiety I have experienced through the challenges I have faced in life. The pain, the hurt, the injuries. It feels like a life of pain, but we keep going, and I want to say you should too. Separation can hurt. It can break you. Family court and the people we once loved can cause the most pain we will ever experience. But I want to tell you that you can get through it and still not hold hatred for another, despite what they have done.

My biggest lessons were that all the survival strategies I carried from childhood and learnt through conflict separation arose in the new relationships that followed. By protecting myself so much, I often lost people I truly cared for. Not because I did something inherently wrong after my divorce, but because I was protecting myself so much that I couldn’t even let a relationship breathe. Fear of loss, fear of financial burden again, fear of losing love.

There had to be a better way to heal these patterns than the simple models of trauma. Something more than endless childhood patterns, attachment styles, and endless relationship coaching videos. What I found was that regardless of knowledge of the past, I could still trigger my own survival strategies in the moments where love started to grow. I became aware because I could feel it in my nervous system, but rewiring the nervous system so it didn’t create the spark that ignited the old strategies in the first place… that was where the incompatibility sat between what I knew and who I wanted to be.

I found that the only way to feel at peace in new relationships was to actually start new strategies inside the relationship I feared losing. Strategies based on who I wanted to be for myself and for a potential partner. Let’s be honest… I didn’t get it right straight away. That anxiety of strong feelings and risking a new strategy is absolutely excruciating.

I worked out that my patterns were that of a fearful avoidant. At the start, I used to be calm and relaxed, did my thing, followed my mission. That was fine with people I didn’t have much invested interest in. But when someone came along that I actually desired to build a life with, that feeling of protecting a person, building a home for them, working through difficulties, that was something I hadn’t felt since 2011 when I met my ex-wife.

That ending was horrible to say the least.

But none the less, the calm demeanour I had at the start of my post-divorce relationships turned into nervousness once I started to gain feelings. I could sense myself watching my words. I lost my grounded centre. Not because I didn’t know what was going on, but because my nervous system was doing its own thing.

And when someone pulled away, even just to do their own thing, I felt that loss of something good. Mind you, I'd had a lot taken away and I didn’t want to lose what felt so good.

But here is the thing:that feeling I wanted came from inside me. It was always there. The person I was seeing simply ignited what I thought had been lost.

Yet despite all the knowledge I had, it didn’t calm my nervous system down. My body dictated my mind, and then my actions. The body really does influence our behaviour.

William James described this as:“Action and feeling go together; by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling.”

What I realised was that becoming used to uncertainty, acknowledging that I did not know the outcome, allowed me to release control over what I thought I had to do to keep a relationship. This meant doing the opposite of what my mind and nervous system believed to be true.

I didn’t need to chase.

I didn’t need to show more interest.

Because interest was gained before even talking. They are complete opposites. So why did I think chasing would work when it wasn’t used at the start?

Curiosity was the mindset that allowed the experiment of starting to relax and not perform the old strategies. This meant sitting in the silence between messages, saying what I wanted while allowing another person to think and feel how they wanted.

New strategies must be actioned and then waited on for validation so the nervous system can settle into a new trusted response. We used the old strategies as children, so simply becoming aware of them was never going to change the nervous system driving them. We have to sit in the discomfort of actioning a new strategy, repeatedly.

We are not where we are because one person is better or worse. We each have our own set of strategies we learned to either keep us safe or get what we need. And this often comes down to emotional states, we chase peace, calm, joy.

This doesn’t mean going quiet when someone wants to talk or dismissing a hurt feeling. It doesn’t mean allowing mistreatment. It means stopping the old strategies that place another person in a position where they have to manage our emotional state.

One of the biggest things I noticed was the hypervigilance from past relational trauma to any variation in mood. But becoming settled and calm with the natural tide of human emotions, the day, the time, the environment, circumstances — helped me become calmer. Variation in mood or affection no longer equalled threat.

And this brings Polyvagal Theory into view.

It’s not that the thoughts are the problem.

It’s that the nervous system sends out the energy of our internal state.

Connection is not built through words. It is built through nervous systems reading nervous systems.

Your body broadcasts signals of safety or danger before your mind even forms a thought. This is neuroception, the unconscious detection of another person’s emotional state.

Even if you don’t speak your anxiety, fear, or urge to run… your body sends the signal. Your partner feels it. If you don’t communicate, they react not to the present moment but to your internal state. Their mind shifts into:“You don’t feel safe, so I don’t feel safe.”

This is why the start of relationships feels so magnetic. Both people are regulated. Both are open to future possibilities.

Once genuine feelings arise, the fear of losing someone or getting too close triggers old survival patterns. Suddenly you’re not two individuals connecting, you’re two nervous systems reacting.

The relationship didn’t end because you had a fearful thought.You had a fearful thought because your nervous system was triggered by something similar to a past pain.

Two people who could have been in love end up reacting to hallucinations of what could go wrong, based entirely on past triggers.

What we want is a calm nervous system in the environments that trigger us, inside the new relationship where it is actually safe.

This is where we rewire the nervous system to feel safe where it once didn’t.