The Whispering of Your Nervous System

Fourteen Alexander teachers, centuries of experience between us — and Betsy Polatin still had to teach us: your nervous system doesn't care about your story, but it still whispers to you all the time about it.

Your life story can be told from the daily whispers of your nervous system.

This is my takeaway after completing four days with Betsy Polatin in her HUMANUAL Trauma Resolution training. We were all Alexander teachers with a combined teaching experience totalling centuries. I alone add 50 years, and there were 14 of us. Mostly old-timers.

I wondered: is a Trauma-Informed Alexander (TIA) session equivalent to psychological therapy?

During my time with Betsy, the answer was evident: NO.

Because the history wasn't so important - we often didn't mention that at all.

Your story lives within sensations whispering out of your nervous system. Your nervous system doesn't know your story - and it doesn't care. It does not live in cognition - the complex biological defence mechanisms that carry your trauma into the future are non-verbal and mostly ancient.

However, those 'ancients' send whisperings to you without pause. Sometimes they even shout.

But we don't listen.

We certainly don't feel. Because we don't know how to feel these whisperings. Betsy's HUMANUAL trauma resolution work trained us to feel differently, to listen differently and to look differently. Because our autonomic nervous system is so intertwined with our somatic nervous system, Alexander teachers are sensitive practitioners in this domain. Because they are so proprioceptively familiar with their Postural Movement System (PMS), this gives them sensitivity to an alternative universe of subtle interoception signalling arising from the autonomic defence systems.

An Alexander teacher's touch can also convey our PMS default state - how you function when there is no defensive reaction underway, when life is chugging along happily, when there's no stress lighting you up.

Then something happens. Stressful.

A gunshot, a fall of a bicycle, an unexpected insult. You go into defence; you move differently now. You crouch, you startle, you twist, push or pull your Self down. You trigger your fight/flight/freeze defences. In Nature, once this defensive response begins, you have no option but to continue to its end.

But you don't let it. You interrupt it...

"Too often," Betsy commented, "AT people direct away from what is happening. In this work, we stay with it."

***

Trauma can arise when you interrupt the completion of a defensive reaction: anxiety and nervousness, gastrointestinal difficulties, restless legs, autoimmune failures, a whole laundry list of modern ills.

There are three simple ideas that lie at the heart of TIA work:

1. Your body doesn't lie - your story is forever whispering back to you.*
2. Trauma arises when your defensive reactions remain incomplete.✳
3. Your work is to discover and complete those defensive reactions.

Who cares what the story is?

Not your nervous system.

Why you were defensive - what happened, who did it, why it happened - none of those things much matter. The issue is really - where are you stuck now? How are you stuck? What are the symptoms? How is your nervous system letting you know...

Your nervous system is whispering to you, whispering all the time.

Can you listen to your story in this new way?

NEXT: The Neuroscience of Awareness & Attention

Stay tuned.

NOTE
This is the 7th in a series of 12 emails as a prelude to my Trauma-Informed Alexander workshop in London (August 23rd) and New York (October 25th). You can book at the link below. Email me for a discount if you are an AT trainee or financially challenged:

https://www.atsuccess.com/workshops-2026

* Miller, Alice. The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting. Translated by Andrew Jenkins. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. Alice Miller's controversial thesis is that almost all children are emotionally abused - often in the name of love - and that the symptoms of this abuse live on in our bodies until we can recognise and resolve it.

✳ "Animals in the wild instinctively discharge all their compressed energy and seldom develop adverse symptoms. We humans are not as adept in this arena." Levine, Peter A., with Ann Frederick. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1997), 32.