When your body won't stop talking: neuroception, interoception, developmental trauma, and why psychosomatic work is about feeling differently.

Right now, without you thinking about it, your nervous system is scanning your environment. Reading the room, reading the people around you, reading what's happening inside your own body, and deciding whether it all adds up to safety or to threat. This process has a name: neuroception. Dr. Stephen Porges developed the term as part of his Polyvagal Theory.

One important thing: neuroception doesn't come from consciousness. It comes from a deep conditioning of the nervous system, one that develops over time in response to our early experiences, to what happened to us in childhood, to put it simply.

The amygdala and the hippocampus are the parts of the brain that help us evaluate new experiences based on our past memories. And in someone with a history of developmental trauma, these systems become not very "accurate". Biased toward detecting danger. This creates what Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell, in their book Nurturing Resilience, call "danger maps," instead of a clear perception of what's safe versus what's a threat.

So that's what happens on the outside, in the environment, and what our nervous system picks up on. And there's a very similar phenomenon that happens on the inside, if you're reading this and you're someone who's hypervigilant to your own sensations and environment, this is going to speak to you.

When interoception gets disrupted

Interoception is the capacity to perceive and interpret the internal signals of the body. And this is often disrupted in people who carry developmental trauma in their history.

Studies show that people with a trauma history and people who struggle with anxiety, tend to have this heightened interoceptive sensitivity, meaning they're hyper-aware of even their smallest bodily sensations.

But here's the thing, and this is the important part, because you might think: "well, it's a good thing to be so aware of my sensations, I'm connected to my body, right?" but instead of bringing clarity, this hypersensitivity seems to amplify every bodily signal, and it creates internal noise. A kind of static. And the person's perceptions become inaccurate, their perception of their own internal states is inaccurate. So what happens? The brain works, and works, and works some more, working in a void, in a way, trying to make sense of these sensations.

And that leads to overanalysing, to misinterpretation. It leads to a cycle that feeds itself, where the bodily sensations and the anxious thoughts they generate feed off each other. Sensation, anxious thought, sensation, anxious thought. And you're stuck in that cycle.

What "healthy" interoception actually looks like

A simple example of balanced interoception: the feeling of getting tired around bedtime, and understanding that it's time to go to sleep soon. I feel something in my body, in my behaviour, I go to bed, and I stay regulated through the experience. Or I feel my bladder is full, I decide to go to the toilet, and again I'm regulated through the experience. This is a completely natural interaction between physiology, behavior, and emotional regulation.

When, on the other hand, the processing of this information (interoception) is disrupted, bodily sensations become unreliable. That's the idea. And this leads to difficulties with regulation, with emotions, with our behavior, with our social interactions, because the signals are scrambled.

So why would feeling my body differently help?

Here I want to talk about something really important, especially if you're someone who's considering doing psychosomatic work. Because people who are in this situation and are hypervigilant to their sensations, often express real worry about this work. They tell me: "I already feel my sensations too much, I have no desire to bring even more attention to them." And that worry, that resistance, is legitimate.

But what's important to understand here is that in psychosomatic work, what we're doing is recovering a healthy differentiation that isn't there anymore, or isn't active anymore, in the system of someone who's lived through developmental trauma, which is exactly what created this hypervigilance to sensation in the first place.

So what we do is start from a base of sensations that aren't threatening at all. Something as simple as: I'm sitting by a window and I feel the sun warming my arm. That's it. Just the warmth, just the sun on my skin.

Or: I'm folding laundry and I notice the feeling of a wool sweater under my fingers. A bit soft, a bit scratchy. Just that. Just the contact, just the texture.

We go really slowly, so that this differentiation can rebuild itself little by little, so the person can keep having access to their sensations, but without the noise, the anxiety, and the overanalysing that used to come with it.

That's what psychosomatic work is for.