The Nervous System You ‘Inherited’ — And How to Retrain It
You didn't choose your first stress response. You ‘inherited’ it. By inherited, I don’t mean solely through your genes. It’s also about the influences from your family of origin, your environment and your schooling, educationally and practically (ex: habits, focus, curiosity to learn).
Long before you ever had a job to be anxious about, a relationship to overthink, or a to-do list to spiral over, your nervous system was already being shaped: by the people who raised you and by what they survived before you were born. Nervous systems don't just respond to what happens to us. They carry forward what happened to the people who came before us.
I think about this a lot, because I lived it. For decades, I was the person who looked like she had it together: successful dental practice, full schedule, warm smile, while privately feeling stuck, conflicted, and quite anxious underneath it all. It took me years to understand that the gap between how I looked and how I felt wasn't a character flaw. I wasn’t broken. It was a nervous system doing exactly what it had been trained to do, going back generations.
Your Body doesn't know What Year it is
Here's the part most people miss: your nervous system isn't reading the calendar. It isn't distinguishing between a genuine emergency or threat and a passive-aggressive email. It's running a much older, much cruder program, one built for physical survival, not necessarily for modern life and it has exactly four moves. These are nervous system responses or coping and protecting strategies:
- Fight: get sharp, get defensive, push back
- Flight: get busy, get out, get ahead of it
- Freeze: go blank, shut down, disappear inside yourself
- Fawn: smooth it over, people- please, over-apologize, over-explain
None of these are flaws. They're protective strategies that worked once, maybe even worked for the people who taught them to you, in circumstances far more dangerous than a tense meeting or a hard conversation. The problem isn't that you have a threat response. It’s just trying to protect you. The problem is that it's firing at things that aren't actually threats, using a script that was written for a different life than the one you're living now.
‘Inherited’ doesn't mean Permanent
This is the piece I want you to sit with: the pattern you're running may not have originated with you, but the retraining absolutely can. This is where and why I built my 3R's Method™: Regulate, Rewire, Reset, because awareness alone doesn't change a nervous system. You have to work with it, in order:
-Regulate: before anything else, the body needs to feel safe enough to stop bracing. This is nervous-system-first work, not mindset-first work.
-Rewire: once the body is out of high alert or ‘survival mode’, you can actually go in and shift the old beliefs and programs running underneath the pattern, many of which were never yours to begin with.
-Reset: you consolidate a ‘new’ or your ‘authentic’ identity, one that doesn't need the old armor to feel safe.
Where to Start Today
You don't need to overhaul your life this week. You need to begin with three things and then move forward, step by step.
-Learn your pattern. Which of the four shows up first for you: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn? Most of us have a default, often two. It’s a spectrum.
-Name it in the moment. "This is my nervous system, not the truth of this situation" is a full sentence. Say it to yourself.
-Take one small action toward safety, not avoidance: a breath, a pause, a boundary, a grounding cue, anything that tells your body: ‘we're not in danger anymore.’ ‘I’m safe.’
You're not broken. You never were. You're dysregulated, and nervous system dysregulation, unlike a flaw, is something you can actually work with….. and it’s the start to transformation, joy, peace and freedom. What could be better?
Go to: gigiarnaud.com and take Your Nervous System Response quiz. It will teach you about yourself and how you react or respond to stress and triggers.
This is how you start taking action!