Your Body Knows Before You Do

There is a moment most of us have had. You walk into a room and something feels off. You cannot explain it. You just know. Or you meet someone new and feel a pull of distrust before they have said anything worth distrusting. Or you hear a song from your childhood and feel something in your chest long before your mind catches up to what that feeling is.

This is not a glitch. It is how you were built.

Our bodies process the world before our brains have a chance to think about it. Researchers like Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms have spent decades studying how this works, and what they found is striking. Feeling comes first. Thinking comes second. By the time you have words for an experience, your nervous system has already run the numbers.

This matters a lot in therapy.

Morality Lives in the Body Too

Here is something even more surprising. It is not just emotions that work this way. Your sense of right and wrong does too.

A researcher named Jonathan Haidt showed that when people make moral judgments, they usually feel their conclusion first and then explain it second. The explanation comes after the fact. It is the brain's way of making sense of a reaction that already happened below the surface.

One of the emotions most tied to this is disgust. Disgust started as a survival tool. It kept our ancestors away from spoiled food or disease. But over time, culture and religion borrowed that same feeling and used it to mark boundaries around behavior and identity. Things that cross those lines do not just seem wrong. They feel wrong. In the gut. In the body. Right now.

This is why moral and religious formation is so powerful. And so hard to change through conversation alone.

What This Means in the Counseling Room

If your deepest beliefs and reactions live in your body, then working only with your thoughts will only get you so far. Talking about a problem is useful. But some things need more than talk.

Think about a person raised in a community with very strict rules about sex, purity, or belonging. The rules were taught in words. But they were absorbed through experiences, through community, through what got praised and what got shamed. The body learned what was safe and what was dangerous. That learning sits beneath language. You cannot just think your way out of it.

This is why body-aware therapy can help people in ways that talk therapy alone sometimes cannot. When a therapist pays attention to what is happening in your body, not just what you are saying, they are working closer to where the original learning happened. That is where change is possible.

The goal is not to get rid of your formation. It is to understand it well enough that you can choose how to carry it going forward.

Nothing Is Wrong With You

If you have ever felt stuck, or noticed that you understand something in your head but still cannot seem to shift it in your gut, you are not broken. You are not weak. You are human.

Your body learned what it learned because it was trying to keep you safe. The nervous system does not forget easily because forgetting would be dangerous. That is a feature, not a bug.

But it does mean that healing often requires going somewhere deeper than insight. It means feeling things in the body, slowly and safely, with someone who knows how to guide that process.

At Analog Counseling, we take the body seriously in our work. Not because it is trendy, but because the research says it matters and because, honestly, your gut knew that long before you read this post.

Interested in working with a therapist who integrates body-aware approaches like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing? We would love to connect. Reach out to learn more about our team.

The Empathic Machine: What Your AI Therapist Can and Can't Do

There is a good chance you have already done it. Typed something painful into an AI LLM at midnight. Described a hard conversation with your partner, a spiral of anxiety, a grief you couldn't quite name. And received something back that felt surprisingly helpful. Insightful. Validating while also softly challenging. Organized. Warm, even. And it was free or relatively low cost.

You are not wrong that something real happened there. The question worth asking is what, exactly.

AI tools are genuinely good at certain things that matter. They don't judge. They don't get tired. They don't bring their own bad day into the conversation. They can reflect your experience back to you in a way that helps you feel less alone with it and informed, and for many people that is meaningful, sometimes even revelatory. If you have spent your life feeling like your emotional experience was too much, too confusing, or too shameful to say out loud, finding something that receives it without flinching has real value.

But here is what is worth understanding about the limits, not to discourage you from using these tools, but to help you use them honestly.

Your nervous system is a social organ. It was not designed to regulate itself in isolation. It was designed to regulate in relationship with other nervous systems. When you feel genuinely safe with another person, something biological is happening: your heart rate shifts, your breathing changes, something in the quality of their voice and presence signals to your body that the threat is over. This is not a metaphor. It is physiology. And it happens between bodies, not between a body and a server.

The AI can say calming things. It cannot send the signal your nervous system is actually waiting for, because it has no nervous system of its own.

There is something deeper here too. The therapists and thinkers who have studied what actually changes people suggest that transformation tends to happen not when we feel perfectly understood, but when we encounter someone who is genuinely other than us. Someone who can be surprised by us, moved by us, occasionally wrong about us in ways that have to be repaired. Someone who is, in a word, real. Who has their own limitations, their own interior life, their own skin in the game.

The AI has no skin in the game. It cannot be changed by you. It cannot be hurt or delighted or caught off guard. Its patience is not patience in the human sense. It is architecture. And a relationship with no stakes on one side is a particular kind of companionship, useful in its own way, but not quite what the deepest part of you is looking for.

What the AI does well is help you find language for experience, organize your thinking, and lower the threshold for getting care. Think of it as a place to start. The work that changes the nervous system, the self, the patterns that have run longest and hardest, that work happens in the presence of another person who is also, in some meaningful sense, on the line.

If something in you already knew that, you were right.

What’s the first session with michael like???

Starting therapy can feel like a big step. In this short video, Michael walks through what a first session with him is actually like. If you’ve ever wondered what to expect, this is a helpful place to start.

The Emotion You've Been Afraid to Feel (And Why That's Making Everything Harder)

There's an emotion most of us were never taught to trust — one that gets dismissed as impolite, dramatic, or just about bad smells. That emotion is disgust. And it turns out, it may be one of the most important signals your body has been trying to send you.

Disgust Lives in Your Body First

Researchers now understand disgust not as a social nicety or a quirk of personality, but as a primary emotional system — as fundamental to your nervous system as fear, rage, or the drive to seek connection. Published in Frontiers in Psychology, recent work by Tolchinsky and colleagues argues that disgust operates through dedicated neural circuitry, including the anterior insula and the amygdala, and functions as what they call a protection system for your internal milieu — your body's sense of what belongs inside and what doesn't.

This system doesn't begin in your thoughts. It begins in your cells.

From Cells to Self: Disgust as a Boundary Maker

Here's something remarkable: the same logic that drives disgust in humans can be traced all the way down to your immune system — and even to the earliest moments of embryonic development. Before you had a nervous system, your cells were already doing the work of distinguishing self from non-self. What belongs here? What is a threat? What needs to be rejected?

Disgust, understood this way, is the emotional expression of that ancient biological intelligence. It operates across every level of your being — from the immune response that fights infection, to the gut feeling that something is wrong, to the moral intuition that a boundary has been crossed. When someone violates your trust, and you feel something visceral and hard to name? That's the system working. Disgust marks the line between you and not you.

What Happens When the Signal Gets Muted

For people with anxious attachment — those who grew up learning that their needs were too much, that conflict meant abandonment, that keeping the peace was the price of love — disgust becomes one of the most dangerous emotions to feel.

Why? Because disgust, by its very nature, creates distinction. It says: this is not okay with me. This does not belong in my life. I am separate from this. That sense of separateness is exactly what the anxiously attached nervous system has learned to fear. If I push back, you'll leave. If I have standards, I'll be alone. If I say no, I lose you.

So the signal gets suppressed. Not consciously, but somatically — in the body, before words. Over time, people with anxious attachment can lose access to disgust entirely, confusing violations with love, tolerating what harms them, staying in dynamics their body was already trying to reject.

Reclaiming Disgust as a Healing Practice

Here's the irony: for someone healing from anxious attachment, learning to feel disgust is an act of profound self-recovery. It means your nervous system is beginning to trust that you can have a self — a bounded, distinct, protected self — and still be loved.

Disgust isn't aggression. It isn't rejection of the other person. It's information: this crossed a line in me. Learning to tolerate that signal, to stay with it rather than immediately soothing it away, is how the anxious nervous system begins to develop what it never had — a sense of where you end and someone else begins.

The body has always known. The work is learning to listen.
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At Analog Counseling, we work with the full emotional life of the body — not just the thoughts and behaviors, but the nervous system beneath them. If this resonated with you, we'd love to connect.

Jealousy, Envy, and What Lent Has to Do With Your Inner Life

I'll never forget the object lesson my six-year-old son taught me years ago — without meaning to.

It was Ash Wednesday. We'd just finished the church service in midtown Kansas City. His cross had smudged into an unrecognizable blur. His four-year-old sister's cross? Perfect. The moment he noticed, he reached over and smudged hers too.

That's the difference between jealousy and envy in a single gesture.

Jealousy says, "I wish I had what you have."

Envy says, "I can't stand that you have something good when I don't — so I want to destroy it."

They feel similar, but they're not. Jealousy is longing. Envy is destruction. Psychologists and researchers have explored this distinction for decades, noting that envy in particular is linked to feelings of shame and inferiority — the painful sense that someone else's good fortune somehow makes us less (Parrott & Smith, 1993).

What Does This Have to Do With Lent and good therapy?

The season of Lent is, at its core, about slowing down and taking inventory. It's a time to let go of distractions, notice what's driving you, and reorient toward what matters. Historically it's a preparation for Easter — but the inner work it calls for is remarkably similar to what happens in good therapy.

In therapy, we slow down too. We get curious about what we're actually feeling, what we're thinking, and why we do what we do. That kind of honest self-reflection builds what researchers call emotional awareness — the ability to recognize and name emotional experiences as they happen (Lane & Schwartz, 1987). And awareness, it turns out, is where change begins.

When we can name what we're feeling — whether that's envy, shame, longing, or something else — we create a moment of choice. We don't have to act automatically. We can interrupt the old pattern and come back to something steadier.

My son didn't have that awareness yet. He just acted. Most of us, at one point or another, have done the same — reached out and smudged someone else's cross because we couldn't tolerate the difference.

The good news? That's exactly what therapy (and Lent) is for.

If you're curious about how therapy in Kansas City and Overland Park can help you develop greater self-awareness and emotional regulation, Analog Counseling is here to help.

References

Lane, R. D., & Schwartz, G. E. (1987). Levels of emotional awareness: A cognitive-developmental theory and its application to psychopathology. American Journal of Psychiatry, 144(2), 133–143. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.144.2.133

Parrott, W. G., & Smith, R. H. (1993). Distinguishing the experiences of envy and jealousy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(6), 906–920. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.64.6.906

Aaron Reads the Blog: Feb 9th, 2026

Ever leave therapy thinking "we got deep but nothing changed"? You're not alone. In this video, I read from my latest blog post exploring why insight alone doesn't create transformation—and what neuroscience tells us actually does. I break down the work of two leading researchers in neuropsychoanalysis—Richard Lane and Mark Solms—who've revolutionized our understanding of how change happens. Lane's research on memory reconsolidation shows that memories aren't set in stone: they can be updated through new emotional experiences. Solms reminds us that feelings aren't obstacles to overcome—they're the foundation of consciousness itself and the messengers we've been ignoring. The bottom line? Your brain is a prediction engine, not just a recording device. Change happens when you feel something new, not just when you think something new. Understanding your patterns is the beginning, but transformation lives in emotional experience that updates what your nervous system believes is possible. If you've ever wondered why therapy sometimes feels intellectually interesting but emotionally stagnant, this episode offers both explanation and hope.

Why Knowing Yourself Isn't Enough: What Neuroscience Teaches Us About Real Change

Ever leave a therapy session thinking, "we got deep but nothing feels changed"? You're not alone. A common pitfall in therapy is finding thoughts that are interesting, even illuminating, but never making that leap from idea to actual change.

Here's why: change requires experience, and the hallmark of experience is emotion. You can know everything about yourself—your patterns, your triggers, your history—but if that knowledge isn't accompanied by lived emotional experiences that update your brain, change remains unlikely. Insight without emotion is like having a map but never taking the journey.

I've been deeply influenced by the field of neuropsychoanalysis, a newer branch of psychoanalysis that takes science seriously without making it a new religion. It seeks to understand how we work so it can leverage those mechanisms clinically, all while keeping space for the art and practice of therapy and relationship. Within that field, two voices often overlap and sometimes disagree: Richard Lane and Mark Solms. Understanding their work offers real hope for anyone struggling to turn insight into transformation.

Richard Lane: Your Brain Can Rewrite Its Own Story

Richard Lane is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies what he calls "memory reconsolidation." Here's the revolutionary part: your painful memories aren't set in stone. When you recall a memory, it briefly becomes changeable—like opening a file to edit it. If you have a new emotional experience during that window, the memory gets re-saved with new information attached to it.

This is why therapy isn't about endlessly rehashing the past. It's about bringing up old patterns in a context where something different can happen. When your therapist responds with empathy to something that once brought shame, or you feel safe where you once felt terrified, your brain literally updates the file. The old memory doesn't disappear, but it loses its chokehold on you.

Lane also studies emotional awareness—the ability to distinguish between "I feel bad" and "I feel disappointed that my effort wasn't recognized." Think of it like developing your palate for wine. At first, you might just know "red" or "white." But with attention and practice, you start noticing complexity, nuance, layers. The same is true for feelings. And here's why it matters: people who can't differentiate their emotions tend to have more physical health problems. Your body keeps the score when your mind can't read it.

The practical takeaway? Therapy should help you not just understand your patterns but feel something new about them. And developing your emotional vocabulary isn't navel-gazing—it's a health intervention.

Mark Solms: You Are Your Feelings (And That's Good News)

Mark Solms comes at this from a different angle, but arrives at a complementary truth. He argues that consciousness doesn't start with thinking—it starts with feeling. Your emotions aren't reactions to your thoughts; they're the foundation of your entire conscious experience.

This might sound abstract, but it has profound clinical implications. If feelings are primary, then the goal of therapy isn't to think your way out of emotions—it's to learn what your emotions are trying to tell you. Solms describes emotions as an "extended form of homeostasis," meaning they're your system's way of signaling what needs attention to maintain balance. Anxiety isn't irrational—it's information. Depression isn't weakness—it's a signal that something in your system needs addressing.

Solms also illuminates why you can't remember your early childhood but still feel its effects everywhere. Those early experiences create patterns that show up in your relationships, including with your therapist. You might not remember being dismissed by a caregiver, but you'll feel a familiar anxiety when you sense your therapist is distracted. This isn't a problem—it's the mechanism of healing. The pattern shows up so it can be worked with in real time.

The practical takeaway? Your feelings aren't obstacles to overcome—they're the messengers you've been waiting for. And the patterns you can't remember are still accessible because they play out in present relationships, where they can finally be updated.

Where They Agree: Memory Is About the Future, Not the Past

Here's where Lane and Solms converge beautifully: memory isn't primarily a record-keeping system. It's a prediction engine. Your brain stores the past to help you navigate the future.

This reframes everything about therapy. You're not doing archaeology, digging up artifacts to examine. You're doing architecture, using old materials to build something new. When you update a painful memory through a corrective emotional experience, you're not erasing history—you're teaching your brain new possibilities for what comes next.

This is why insight alone doesn't create change. Understanding why you have trust issues is interesting, but it doesn't update your prediction system. What updates it? Having an experience of being vulnerable with your therapist and discovering it's safe. Feeling the edges of panic and learning you can tolerate it. Expecting rejection and receiving attunement instead.

What This Means for Your Therapy

If you've been in therapy that feels intellectually stimulating but emotionally stagnant, these frameworks suggest why: change happens through felt experience, not just conceptual understanding.

Good therapy should include moments when you feel something new—not just think something new. That might look like:

• Finally saying something you've been ashamed of and feeling accepted instead of judged

• Staying present with a difficult emotion instead of reflexively avoiding it

• Experiencing your therapist's genuine care even when you're convinced you're unlovable

• Noticing you can tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into anxiety

These aren't dramatic breakthroughs. They're quiet updates to your prediction system, teaching your nervous system: this time, it can be different.

Lane would say you're reconsolidating memories through corrective emotional experiences. Solms would say you're learning to read and respond to your affective signals more effectively. Both would agree: your feelings aren't the problem—they're the path forward.

The Hope in All This

Both Lane and Solms are working to rescue psychoanalysis from its reputation as interminable navel-gazing by grounding it in neuroscience. But they're doing so without reducing human beings to brain scans. They're holding space for both the measurable and the meaningful, the empirical and the experiential.

For you, the person sitting in the therapy chair wondering if change is possible, their work offers this: Yes. Your brain can change. Your patterns aren't permanent. But the vehicle of that change isn't willpower or positive thinking—it's emotional experience that updates your predictions about what's possible.

You don't need to understand the neuroscience. You just need to find a therapist who gets this: that knowing yourself is the beginning, but feeling something new about yourself in relationship—that's where transformation lives.

The Part of Therapy No One Explains—and Why You Keep Baking a Cake When You Need a Sandwich

Therapy has two parts - but our culture usually only talks about one of them.

The Consumer Part

The first is the consumer part. A person has a problem, seeks help, and wants relief. This part fits easily into medical and business models - diagnose, treat, improve. It’s familiar, structured, and culturally comfortable. This is the one we hear about.

The Relational Part

The second part is relational. And this is where therapy becomes harder to define—and harder to market. This is the one we don’t hear about.

Why Therapy Is Hard to Simplify

One reason therapy resists simple explanations is the sheer range of what shows up in the room. Therapy isn’t working with just one kind of problem. Even when someone feels a single symptom - like anxiety - that doesn’t mean the cause is singular or simple.

Good therapy is personalized. It works with personality patterns, attachment histories, developmental interruptions, single overwhelming events, repeated traumatizing experiences, and acute crises. Often, it’s working with several of these at once.

And they don’t exist in isolation.

Layered Problems, Not Either/Or

For example, developmental trauma can create a nervous system that is more vulnerable to being rocked by later events. This means a person can be impacted - or even traumatized - by experiences that might be merely stressful for someone else. Those later events often deepen the original coping patterns, creating a vicious cycle.

The work isn’t either/or. It’s layered.

Second-Hand vs First-Hand Knowledge

Most people are comfortable talking to their therapist about what happened between them and someone else outside the therapy room. That matters and is valuable - but it’s also second-hand knowledge. It’s memory filtered through time, interpretation, and self-protection.

Something different happens when people talk about what’s happening between them and the therapist. That’s first-hand knowledge. The reactions are live. The body responds. Old patterns don’t need to be reconstructed - they show up on their own.

This is why it can be valuable to name how the therapist is being experienced in the moment. Whether they seem bored, interested, distant, irritated, calming, perfect, or completely incompetent, those impressions often tell us less about accuracy and more about which old patterns are coming online. When they’re spoken out loud, they become something we can actually work with.

This isn’t being rude or oversharing. It’s allowing material that might feel culturally awkward to surface - material that, psychologically, is often where unconscious emotions and memories are trying to be seen and heard.

Why Old Patterns Feel So Real

Our brains are designed to keep us alive while using as little energy as possible. When we survive emotionally overwhelming moments - especially ones where fear, shame, anger, or grief couldn’t be fully expressed - the brain records what worked.

Not as a list of details from the event, but as a total recipe.

That recipe includes coping strategies, body responses, and beliefs about the self and others. Because it helped us survive, it gets coded as accurate and efficient. Later, when enough familiar ingredients show up in the present - tone of voice, closeness, authority, disappointment—the brain automatically pulls that recipe back online.

The problem is that memory doesn’t feel like memory.
It feels like now.

So we don’t realize we’re trying to bake a cake in a moment that actually calls for a sandwich. Both situations may include similar ingredients - salt and flour - but they require entirely different outcomes. The cake recipe once made sense. It kept us alive. But it was never meant to become permanent.

It was a survival solution that got stuck, leaving us less flexible when familiar ingredients appear again in the future.

Where Clinical Judgment Comes In

This is where therapy becomes more than technique.

Some incomplete self-protective responses are best worked through intrapersonally—with the therapist coaching from the outside as sensations, emotions, and impulses are noticed and allowed to complete.

Other patterns work best interpersonally—with a therapist who is both coaching and participating, a kind of player-coach.

The Therapist Is Part of the System

The therapist is not outside this process.

Imagine gently dipping your hand into the water along a riverbank. You’re not just observing the river—you’re interacting with it. The water is impacted by your hand and may react to that impact; it may get warmer or colder, or move faster or slower around your hand. That reaction holds information.

In therapy, the therapist’s internal responses matter in the same way. Feeling a sudden chill or warmth can signal a coded moment emerging. At the same time, a skilled therapist knows their own hands. They work to recognize what belongs to them and what belongs to the shared moment. This part, by human nature, is a little inefficient and messy.

However, this unavoidable interplay isn’t a flaw in therapy. It’s part of how therapy works.

Why Analog Holds Both Parts

There is no simple model that captures all of this. Medical, expert, and influencer models are easy to communicate - but they ignore the relational part. When that part is missing, disappointing outcomes collapse into blame: the clinician failed, or the client failed.

At Analog, we refuse to separate the two parts of therapy, even though holding them together is difficult and messy. We aim to be both player and coach - guiding the work while knowing we are part of it.

This is why integrating psychoanalytic therapy with Somatic Experiencing matters so much to us. One helps us understand patterns and meaning. The other helps the nervous system complete what was once interrupted—so old survival code can loosen and something more flexible can take its place.

It’s harder to explain.

And it’s why it works.

Trauma Isn’t Intensity — It’s What the Nervous System Learns

When people hear the word trauma, they often picture something overwhelming: extreme fear, intense emotion, or a catastrophic event. And while trauma can involve intense experiences, defining it primarily by emotional intensity actually misses the heart of the matter. Trauma is not best understood as how big something felt — but as what the nervous system learned when survival was at stake.

From a nervous-system perspective, trauma begins with threat. When we perceive danger, the body mobilizes automatically to protect us through fight, flight, or freeze. This mobilization requires a rapid surge of energy — heart rate increases, muscles tense, attention narrows. This temporary dysregulation is not a problem; it is the body doing exactly what it is designed to do.

Under normal circumstances, that survival energy is spent. We run, resist, escape, or orient toward safety. Once the threat passes and the energy is discharged, the nervous system returns to its baseline rhythm of regulation and flexibility.

Trauma occurs when that process is interrupted.

When a threat cannot be escaped, fought, or fully responded to — because of powerlessness, overwhelm, developmental immaturity, or relational constraints — the nervous system is forced to cope rather than complete the survival cycle. The energy meant for action remains trapped in the body. This unresolved dysregulation is profoundly uncomfortable, and the system adapts in whatever way it can to endure.

Over time, this unfinished survival response becomes encoded as learning.

As Mark Solms explains in The Feeling Brain, affect is fundamentally tied to homeostasis — the body’s drive to regulate internal states. Trauma represents a disruption in this regulatory process. The system does not simply remember what happened; it remembers how it survived.

Similarly, Stephen Porges shows through Polyvagal Theory that our nervous systems continuously assess safety and danger beneath conscious awareness. When safety cannot be restored, the system defaults to defensive strategies — hyperarousal, collapse, shutdown — not as pathology, but as protection.

Crucially, the coping strategies used during the original threat often replace instinctive responses in the future. Instead of fluid fight or flight, the body replays learned patterns. This is why trauma can show up in two seemingly opposite ways: explosive emotional reactions that feel disproportionate to the present moment, or a puzzling absence of response when action would be appropriate. In both cases, the nervous system is responding to past threat in the present.

As Allan Schore emphasizes, trauma is ultimately a disorder of affect regulation. It is not the event itself that defines trauma, but whether the nervous system could return to regulated flow afterward — especially in the presence of attuned support.

Understanding trauma this way reframes healing. The work is not primarily about revisiting intense emotions or retelling the story in greater detail. It is about helping the nervous system complete what was once impossible: restoring regulation, releasing trapped survival energy, and relearning that safety and responsiveness are possible now.

Trauma is not intensity. It is unfinished survival — and the body remembering how it had to cope when there was no other choice.

Implicit Memory, Attachment Trauma, and the “Overreaction” That Isn’t

Sometimes a small piece of news hits your nervous system like a freight train. An unexpected post. A colleague changes plans. A friend forgets to respond. A partner sounds distracted. Suddenly your stomach knots, your breath shortens, your throat tightens, and tears hover. A part of you knows the situation doesn’t warrant this level of distress — but it still arrives in full force.

This isn’t irrationality or emotional fragility. For many people in Kansas City seeking therapy for relational patterns, it’s often implicit memory and attachment trauma showing up in the nervous system.

Implicit Memory and Attachment Trauma in Adulthood

Implicit memory is a body-based memory system that develops before language (Schore, 2003). It stores early attachment experiences as sensations, emotions, and autonomic states rather than stories. When early needs were unseen or inconsistently met, the nervous system learned to predict disconnection and prepare for loss.

In adult relationships, small signals can activate these predictions quickly. Shame often arrives in the body before the mind can explain it. Shame’s physical signatures — collapse, tightness, downward gaze, heat in the face, inhibited breath — are part of a freeze/appease response aimed at preserving connection (Porges, 2011; Gilbert, 2007).

Internal Working Models and Insecure Attachment

John Bowlby called the mental templates formed through early patterns Internal Working Models. These models guide expectations such as:

• Are people available when I need them?

• Am I safe in relationships?

• Am I worthy of care and belonging?

For people with insecure attachment, minor relational cues today can activate the working models of yesterday. What looks like an “overreaction” is often a proportionate response to an old threat stored in the nervous system.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn in Kansas City Therapy Clients

The nervous system organizes survival responses through fight, flight, freeze, and fawn (Levine, 2010). A snub may evoke fight (“How could you?”), flight (“I should just leave”), freeze (“I don’t know what to say”), or fawn (“I’ll fix it so they don’t get upset”). These strategies once protected attachment bonds.

Recognizing Implicit Memory in Real Time

A helpful marker is mismatch: your internal reaction feels much bigger (or smaller) than the situation. That’s often implicit memory activating.

Many Kansas City trauma-informed therapists use bottom-up approaches to help the nervous system update old attachment predictions, including Somatic Experiencing, nervous system tracking, and shame awareness work.

These approaches involve:

• orienting to the environment

• tracking body sensation

• allowing affect (tears, yawns, trembling)

• completing autonomic cycles

This helps the body metabolize what once had no support (Levine, 2010; Siegel, 2020).

The goal isn’t to erase early models, but to update them. When implicit memory becomes explicit — when one can say, “my body thinks I’m alone again” — new relational options emerge.

For Kansas City Readers

If you grew up with emotional neglect, inconsistent caregiving, or insecure attachment dynamics, these patterns are common and treatable. Trauma-informed counseling in Kansas City, Overland Park, and Johnson County can help update attachment predictions, reduce shame-driven responses, and build secure relational capacity.

Click here to schedule a free consult or your first appointment today.

References

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss.
Gilbert, P. (2007). The Compassionate Mind.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice.
Porges, S. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory.
Schore, A. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self.
Siegel, D. (2020). The Developing Mind.