You may have read books about the vagus nerve or nervous system regulation and done all the “hacks” online.
Maybe you’ve tried various different types of therapy and can describe your trauma history, know what your triggers are and explain your unhelpful patterns.
You may even know and understand WHY you are dysregulated, yet you still find yourself stuck in the same cycles of anxiety or shutdown.
Knowledge alone cannot change the nervous system, because trauma is mostly physiological and sensory.
The missing piece of the puzzle is interoception.
What is interoception?
Interoception is the eighth sensory system: your ability to notice and trust the bodily signals your own body is sending you.
It’s your internal sensing system that sends signals from your organs, tissues and physiological state up to your brain.
Signals such as:
- Heart beat and heart rate changes
- Breathing rhythm and depth
- Gut sensations
- Hunger, thirst, or fullness
- Temperature, pain, or fatigue
- Homoeostasis or balancing your systems
- Emotional sensations in the body: the felt sense of/noticing fear, calm or excitement
When your nervous system is dysregulated, your interoceptive accuracy decreases significantly.
So your brain may turn the ‘volume’ UP on those signals and you end up feeling everything at once which leads to overwhelm.
Or your brain may turn the ‘volume’ DOWN on those signals to reduce distress, so you can’t hear your bodily signals clearly enough to take action or you misread the signals.
Without receiving a clear signal, you won’t know what is actually happening in your body. You are not able to self-regulate – the ability to respond helpfully to your biological and emotional needs.
Those cues are your body’s way of communicating what it needs and this includes boundary awareness.
If you do not recognise the signals for an emotion, you are not able to respond to it. This can result in anger turning into rage, or sadness turning into distress and so on.
Missing the early warning signs of dysregulation means that you struggle to meet your physical and emotional needs. This can cause you to feel reactive, lost and out of control.
Interoception helps you to notice those signals before they build. It’s an early warning system that helps you to stop getting stuck in high states of anxiety or ending up in shutdown.
It isn’t just body awareness, it is the neurobiological foundation of emotional regulation, self-regulation, and trauma recovery.
Effective interoceptive work is specialised and nuanced. It’s so much more than just doing a vagal toning technique.
Effective interoceptive work requires:
- working specifically with the sensory system hierarchy
- introducing bodily sensations gently and skilfully for people with trauma histories
- using biofeedback to fine-tune the volume of sensations
- and letting trauma-sensitive sequencing inform clinical decisions.
When you develop healthy interoception, the changes ripple out through every area of your life.
✅ You can make better decisions because you can access both logic and your emotions to make decisions.
✅ Your relationships improve because you can sense your own needs and boundaries more clearly.
✅ Most importantly, you can develop genuine self-trust.
If you’re ready to take the next step in healing trauma and be safely guided with expert care and skill, please feel free to contact me to arrange a call back: https://caroline-king.co.uk/get-in-touch/