🌗 Duality as the Doorway: Healing The Nervous System
Once we accept that energy moves in waves, we can finally face what those waves reveal — the raw, real spaces where chaos and calm coexist.
**This piece is part of my October series exploring energy, duality, and the nervous system — a journey through attunement, unlearning, embodiment, and integration.
There’s a moment in every deep healing journey where the ground beneath you seems to split into two.
One side feels like chaos — raw, exposed, confronting.
The other side feels like home — warm, safe, achingly familiar.
And somehow, both are true.
Lately, I’ve been living inside that duality.
A friendship has held up a mirror to the tender, unhealed places inside me — places I thought I’d already conquered. And yet, there they were: the small, wounded parts of me, whispering old stories of abandonment and fear.
At the same time, this very connection offered a kind of safety that calmed me to my core. The acceptance, the laughter, the sense of being seen without flinching — so regulating to my nervous system it almost feels addictive.
For a while, this duality confused me. I thought it had to be one or the other: either chaos or calm, healing or harm.
But now I see it differently.
This duality is the doorway.
🪞The Mirror That Both Unravels and Anchors
When someone has the power to shine light into your darkest corners, it’s disorienting. It’s also sacred.
These are the mirrors we don’t stumble upon often. They reveal us to ourselves — the shadow and the light.
At first, that mirror felt like exposure. My dismissive avoidant tendencies wanted to retreat, to shut the door, to protect the softest parts of me. But as I stayed with it, something began to shift.
A door opened.
And for once, I didn’t rush through it. I simply stood in the threshold, breathing, feeling and trusting the timing of it all.
🧠The Nervous System Doesn’t Lie
Here’s the thing most of us forget: our nervous systems are storytellers too.
When we experience deep acceptance, support, and unconditional love, our bodies release oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin — the chemistry of safety. (Also the top of the hormonal hierarchy)
Our brain codes this person, this dynamic, as home.
That’s why the tether to a regulating relationship can feel so strong. It’s not just emotional; it’s physiological. Your body remembers.
On the flip side, when our attachment wounds are triggered, our nervous system can swing into survival mode — fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. The same person who calms us can also awaken old fear pathways. And this is where the duality lives: safety and fear, comfort and growth, all entwined.
🌿 Healing Through Regulation
The difference isn’t in controlling the relationship — it’s in learning to regulate ourselves within it.
When our nervous system finds balance, the doorway that once felt chaotic becomes a path toward integration.
Here are a few practices that have anchored me:
Grounding through breath. Slow, deep exhales signal safety to the vagus nerve, helping shift from stress response to calm.
Cold water or nature exposure. A cool splash on the face or stepping barefoot onto the earth brings me back to the present moment. Cold plunging is also on my radar. God help me!
Movement. Gentle walks, stretching, or dancing help discharge stored tension and reset my state. This is a daily thing! Multiple times, in multiple forms.
Co-regulation with safe people. Texting a trusted friend, praying together, and especially sharing a laugh all re-anchor my system.
These practices don’t erase the duality — they give me the capacity to hold it.
✨Standing in the Threshold
Whatever this connection becomes, I know this much: something in me has shifted.
A door has opened.
And instead of sprinting through or slamming it shut, I’m standing in the threshold, breathing, hand-in-hand with my younger self ready to re write old stories of silence, abandonment and fear.
This is the work of healing — not to eliminate the duality, but to walk through it with presence.
Because sometimes, duality isn’t a trap.
It’s an invitation.
A doorway to deeper wholeness, if we’re brave enough to step through.
Your nervous system is always guiding you — not away from the threshold, but toward it.
Listen closely.
The doorway might just be where your next chapter begins.
Standing in the threshold, we begin to see that duality isn’t meant to divide us — it’s meant to reveal what’s ready to be rewritten.
