# Alexandra Ragalie > Somatic and trauma-informed work for adults. IFS, Somatic Experiencing, and therapeutic yoga. Based in Zurich. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### my story ... URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-06-11T17:09:27.000Z ## ... begins with loss At fourteen, I lost my best friend - my father. In the years that followed, I watched my mother struggle with alcohol addiction, powerless to help. By eighteen, she was gone too. I was an orphan. With no one to guide me through the anger and pain, I did what was naturally and evolutionarily available: I buried it. When things could have actually gone much worse, there was some internal compass and survival instinct that shaped the years to come. I finished university and focused on work, built a career in corporate finance, startups and venture capital across Vienna, Dubai, and Zurich. I spent 15+ years succeeding on the outside while something inside waited - paused, intact, for the conditions it needed to move forward, to maybe even complete. 2017 brought a confluence of things: another move to a new country, two small children, a social world that needed to be rebuilt from scratch, and the shift in a career that had structured my sense of self for more than one decade. The ground shifted in every direction at once. And in that disorientation, something else surfaced - a quiet but persistent knowing that had always been there: that the body was holding more than I had ever allowed myself to approach, that there were deeper layers I hadn't yet found, that there was wisdom there. I had long been drawn to the philosophical and psychological dimensions of yoga, curious in the way you are curious about something that feels important before you can explain why. So I enrolled in a yoga teacher training - part leap into the unknown, part first step toward something I already sensed was waiting. Uncertainty. *"What am I doing?"* Recognition. *"This is what I'm supposed to do... but how?"* Both true. Neither canceling the other out. ## coming home to the body What happened on the yoga mat was something no business strategy had ever given me: I started to *feel* and really pay attention inside. To sense flow and not fragmentation. To breathe deeper and learn how to listen to my nervous system. Slowly, carefully, I began a journey inward - through yoga, breathwork, meditation, and eventually through trauma-specific work with some of the most respected teachers in the field. While still continuing to work in the financial industry, I started training. I did a 6-months intensive with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's Trauma Research Foundation. I studied Somatic Attachment Therapy and did a 2 year program focused on developmental trauma with Stephen Terrell. I went back to school, earning a Master's degree in Neuroscience and Psychology of Mental Health from King's College London, because I wanted to understand not just *that* healing happens through the body, but *why* and how (spoiler alert - we mostly don't know, or we know pieces but it's a huge puzzle still not put together entirely). Somewhere along the way I also built enough internal resources and clarity to leave the financial industry path. Driven by curiosity and a trust that I was meant to do something in mental health, even if for a long time it wasn't clear what. And gradually, something *did* become clear: the struggles we carry are not disorders to be managed or pushed down. They are intelligent adaptations to overwhelming circumstances - our nervous system's best attempt at keeping us safe. And when we create the right conditions, the body knows how to heal. Not heal in the way of fixing, reverting, unbreaking something back to how it was before, but as the unlocking of vital energy that was never lost, only held in place. ## from my own path, rippling effects Today, my work lives at the intersection of science and lived experience. I am training in Somatic Experiencing (SEP in training), a body-based approach to trauma resolution developed by Dr. Peter Levine, and in Internal Family Systems (IFS practitioner in training), a non-pathologizing psychotherapy method used in clinical settings developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz. I also work in a leadership role at a mental health NGO. My approach in 1-1 work is built on a yoga therapy foundation, weaving in Somatic Experiencing, Internal Family Systems, breathwork, and somatic attachment work. But underneath all the training and the science, what I really bring is this: I know what it feels like to carry something heavy for a long time, and to slowly build the resources to turn toward it rather than away. And I know what it feels like when the body finally gets to put parts of it down and let them move through. And perhaps the greatest gift has been this: the sense of finally acting from somewhere true, at peace. Something underneath the adapting and the striving - closer to what I actually am. ## what remains I believe that healing is not about fixing what's broken - it's about completing what was interrupted. I believe the body keeps the score, and it also knows the way forward. I believe mental health struggles should not be automatically pathologized – but I also believe the medical system has an essential role. Some of what people carry is pathology, and needs appropriate clinical care. I am grateful that system exists. What I wish for is better integration: that psychiatric and medical support could work alongside trauma-informed, somatic, and body-based approaches more often, rather than in worlds that don't always meet. *My story might have begun with loss. But it continues with openness and trust in what wants to move.* If you've read this far, pay attention to what part(s) in you resonated or not. And always welcome all with openness and curiosity. --- ### different ways, depending on where you are URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/work-with-me/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T20:30:23.000Z Most of what you've been told about healing has been organised around language: what happened, what it means, how to think about it differently. This is different. This is where body-based work begins. It begins with what you sense, not what you understand. You may have done therapy. Perhaps even a lot of it. Talking helped, until it didn't, or helped with the understanding and left something else untouched. Something that still surfaces at the wrong moment, in your body, in your words, patterns, behaviours. A familiar tightening, a reaction that doesn't match the present. This work is for people who have begun to suspect that what they're carrying is stored somewhere words don't reach. In a way only lived experience can give you, I'm familiar with early loss, parental neglect, and the difficulty of growing up inside a family influenced by a parent's addiction. These experiences shape the nervous system early. They don't always resolve through cognitive work alone. If you've been through something similar, it can help to know you're not alone. --- ## how I work Yoga, with emphasis on its therapeutic aspect, is where my practice finds its roots. Breath, gentle movement, body awareness – not as exercise, but as a way back into the body's own language. A way of learning to listen to what is already there. Alongside this, I work with Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, a modality in which I am currently training. It works with what the body held when there was no room to complete what was activated. Not the story of what happened, but the sensation that arrived and never fully moved through. The container around working with the body and the nervous system is Internal Family Systems, in which I am Level 1 trained. An evidence-based psychotherapy model developed by Richard Schwartz, IFS works with the internal landscape: the parts that protected, the parts that withdrew, the parts that are still waiting for something they needed long ago. When we’re caught in fear, uncertainty, or shock, something shifts inside us. Different parts of us react differently - one part wants to flee, another freezes, another keeps pushing through as if nothing is happening. These reactions are not weakness. They are intelligence. And they deserve attention. The orientation across all of it is toward sensation first, not narrative. Not what happened - but what you notice happening now, in the body, in this moment. That shift is quieter than it sounds. Sometimes more disorienting, because we are so trained to think our way through. Sessions are unhurried. There is no pushing. The nervous system needs to sense it can stop before it can fully move. Creating that safety is not preliminary to the work - it is the work. Completing what was interrupted, not fixing what is broken. ## sessions 60 minutes, held over video call. After an introductory call we'll set the pace together. In person, in Zürich old city also possible if desired. Time zone – Central European Time. --- *Disclaimer: I am not a licensed psychotherapist. This work complements existing mental health support; it does not replace clinical care, and I don't diagnose or treat clinical conditions.* My academic background includes a 2 year MSc in Psychology & Neuroscience of Mental Health at King's College London – Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (2025). My practical and trauma-informed background includes Yoga Teacher Training, RYT® 200 (2017), Yin Yoga training (2023), International Yoga Alliance · Somatic Attachment Therapy, The Embody Lab (2023) · Transforming Touch, regulation-focused approach to trauma, Stephen Terrell (2023–24) · Trauma Research Foundation Certificate in Traumatic Stress Studies, Bessel van der Kolk (2024) · Breath and Movement for Trauma Healing, The Embody Lab (2025). Internal Family Systems and Somatic Experiencing - both in training. --- ## get in touch If you are navigating a difficult time in your life, loss of vital energy, or a nervous system that has been shaped by overwhelming experience — individual sessions offer a space to do this work with depth and care, grounded in your body's wisdom. A free discovery call is the first step — no commitment. Just a conversation to see whether this feels right. [free discovery call →](https://calendly.com/alexandraragalie/free-discovery-call?ref=alexandraragalie.com) --- If you prefer to reach out in writing, please use the form below and I will get back to you soon. First name \* Last name Email \* Your message \* send message → ### thanks for reaching out, ! I'll get back to you soon. --- If you want to stay in touch, I regularly post articles on the nervous system, trauma, and the energy underneath. [stay updated →](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/#/portal/signup) ### landing page - title hidden URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/the-hummingbird/ Last updated: 2026-06-17T16:30:57.000Z *the Hummingbird - on the nervous system, trauma, and the energy underneath.* # healing is not a destination - it's a homecoming. Somatic and trauma-informed work — met with curiosity, compassion, and no assumptions about where you are or are supposed to be. The mind is strong. It loops, it catches, it holds patterns in place - not to trap us, but because at some point, it had to. Under all of it, something quieter. Something that was always there, waiting for the conditions it needed. I write about that: what the body carries, what the mind was protecting, and what becomes possible when we can finally hear both. If you've ever felt like your reactions don't quite belong to the present moment — maybe some of this is for you. ![The Hummingbird](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3e/dd/3eddbedd-0870-4d3f-b5a0-7c5737033f0b/content/images/2026/05/hummingbird_smaller-4.png) ![Alexandra Ragalie](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3e/dd/3eddbedd-0870-4d3f-b5a0-7c5737033f0b/content/images/2026/05/Alexandra_website-2.png) ## hi, I'm *Alexandra* Shaped by early life challanges, lived across 4 countries and 2 continents, two decades experience in the business world, mother of two and a long, deliberate path back to the body. I hold a Master's in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Mental Health, and I work where nervous system science meets somatic healing. I integrate Internal Family systems with Somatic Experiencing and therapeutic yoga. This is a piece of my world. You are welcome here. [More about me →](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/about) why I write " > Writing does something thinking alone can't. I do it as much for myself as for anyone reading. There's something that happens when thoughts become words on a page - the mind forms them, **the body sets them down.** That crossing-over is its own form of integration. And writing has a way of being honest that thinking alone doesn't. When I see the words in front of me, something in me responds. Agrees, or doesn't. It's my truth, or not quite. ## what you'll find here Some threads run through the body's basic architecture: how we read the world before we're conscious of reading it, how the nervous system learns what's safe and what isn't, what happens when that learning gets stuck. Some threads go deeper: trauma, regulation, the slow work of resolution. What the therapeutic relationship makes possible. What co-regulation actually means in practice. All of it is rooted in my own path - in learning, in experiencing, and sometimes in things that arrived more as a whisper than as a cognitive or embodied insight. The hummingbird. What I've learned from sitting with what was difficult, and what eventually moved. ## why the Hummingbird That's a story for its own post - and it's coming. For now: small wings, fast heart, hovering between stillness and movement. --- Still here. ![The Hummingbird](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3e/dd/3eddbedd-0870-4d3f-b5a0-7c5737033f0b/content/images/2026/05/hummingbird_smaller-4.png) ## Posts ### IFS - why I work with parts URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/ifs-why-i-work-with-parts/ Last updated: 2026-08-19T20:38:32.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/3e/dd/3eddbedd-0870-4d3f-b5a0-7c5737033f0b/content/images/2026/08/IMG_2535-2.jpeg) a little intro into IFS (Internal Family Systems), a highly effective and innovative therapeutic model for working with complex trauma and related psychological struggles We were in London a few weeks ago. After living in a much quieter place for the last decade, big city life activated so many parts in me. The extreme planner that wants to make sure we're organized and optimal, the hypervigilant one that looks out for dangers, be them cars or people that might in some way do us harm, the explorer that gets a kick from traveling and being in places she loves. They are all familiar parts, all belonging to my system, parts that are useful and great, and have skills and gifts and that help me lead a good life. They manage, they plan, they enjoy, but if life gets too much for too long they get forced into more intense states that are less self-aware and lead to overreaction. The planner gets into overdrive and wants to plan every single minute at the expense of consuming too much of my energy. The hypervigilant one instead of just being aware of the environment and keeping me and the family safe, starts imagining all sorts of potential scenarios that edge towards catastrophic. The explorer wants to basically head out into the world or feels sorry that she's not more free to explore 100% of her time. All these parts in their extreme roles recruit others, elsewhere in the system. Those, too, usually carry real skills and gifts - but in this state, they don't help. They add to what's already too much. ## you are not one thing I am large, I contain multitudes. \- Walt Whitman, *Leaves of Grass* Most of us were raised on the idea that a healthy person is a unified one - a single, seamless self - and that if we have conflicting voices inside that's a problem to solve. **IFS** starts somewhere else. It takes the ordinary experience of being of many minds, or many parts - the part of us that wants to rest and the part that won't let us, the part that reaches for closeness and the part that pulls back - and treats it as the actual structure of the mind, not as a flaw. **You are not one thing. You are a system of parts.** If you've seen the film *Inside Out*, you might even get a visual of it: a set of inner characters, each with its own agenda, taking turns at the controls. IFS says something similar - that inside each of us is a kind of internal family, and like any family it has its histories, its alliances, its members who have been carrying too much for too long, its younger parts and its more grownup parts. The model was developed in the 1980s by Richard Schwartz, a family therapist who kept noticing that when he asked clients about the opposing voices inside them, the voices answered - each with a role, a fear, a reason for doing what it did. ## protectors and exiles IFS sorts parts into a few kinds, and the sorting is governed by the jobs a part has assumed throughout your life. Some parts are called protectors, and they are of two types - managers and firefighters. The managers work ahead of time, proactively, trying to keep you safe by keeping you in control: the inner critic, the perfectionist, the one that plans and anticipates and never quite rests. The firefighters come in after the fact, reactively, once something painful has already broken through, or once there is overwhelm in the overall system - the part that numbs, that reaches for a drink or the screen or the food, that dissociates, that flares into anger. From the outside these can look like the problem, and are often the ones that bring a person to therapy. Inside the logic of the system however, they are the emergency response. Our first aiders, extremely important. What they're ALL protecting is a third kind of part: the exiles. These are the young, wounded parts that carry what IFS calls burdens - the beliefs and feelings laid down at the moments when things in our lives were *too much - I'm not safe. I'm too much. I'm alone. Something is wrong with me.* The protectors' whole purpose is to keep these parts, and the pain they hold, out of reach. Very important for me working with IFS, in my own therapy but also as an overall basic premise of the model, was that NO part is bad, NO part has ill intentions. Very importantly this model does not pathologise any of our parts (i.e., assuming the parts are a dysfunction) but welcomes all and is inviting curiosity towards the adaptive functions our parts have taken and why they had to do that. ## Self, and the one move that changes everything Underneath all of it, IFS says, is something that isn't a part: the Self. Not a role, not a voice with an agenda, but the steady presence that can turn toward any part with curiosity rather than fear. Schwartz describes it through qualities that tend to arrive together when it's present - curiosity, compassion, calm, clarity, courage, and a few more. You've felt it: the moments you can be with your own difficulty without being swallowed by it. And even be compassionate towards it. For me this changed everything. The NO bad parts. Not the critic, not the addict, not the part that goes cold and leaves the room. Every one of them, however destructive it looks from the outside, is trying to protect you with the only tool it ever learned. You don't heal or fix anything by defeating them. You heal or reclaim wholeness by getting to know them - by asking what they're afraid would happen if they stopped. Usually the answer is a beautiful one, if we've got the space inside to really receive it. ## why I use it I've used IFS as a client for more than 7 years by now. Because my way of trusting something has always been through reading and research, I've probably read all the books out there on it, read all the scientific articles I could get my hands on as well. The experiential part was supported by my curious, in-need-of-proof mind. I needed to know not only that it works - which I could feel in my sessions, but also how it works. At one point my system relaxed into the experiencing of IFS, and it felt almost like magic - I could integrate my parts easier, I could sit with them longer, I felt that I could be like a self-led CEO at the roundtable of my inner system with everyone present. It felt like there was more space and more trust inside. I found myself more often in a place from where I was over-reacting less, was getting less tired in periods of intense work, and was able to hold a calmer and kinder space for my family at the end of the day. I'd tried other modalities before it, and none of them got me this far. That's what made it clear for me a few years back - that I wanted to train in it. I use it because it's gentle, non-pathologizing, open and welcomes what is present. And it works on a huge spectrum, from unlocking more freedom and joy in one's life to supporting trauma and mental health struggles, even ones deeper than depression. Since I also started using it with clients I've been in awe of how efficient it can be for anyone's system. It's a delight to work in this way - curious and compassionate towards everyone's inner worlds. It's an honor to witness parts presenting themselves and opening up and trusting their system's Self leadership. Lastly, it also sits, for me, right alongside the nervous-system work I'm trained in and working with. A firefighter part - the one that numbs, or flares, or disappears - is almost always a nervous system in protection: a dorsal shutdown or a sympathetic surge with a story attached. Somatic Experiencing, which is my other modality, works with the charge in the body; IFS builds a relationship with the part that's carrying it. Two lenses, one system. Everything I've written before - [the impala that freezes](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/what-the-impala-knows-that-we-dont/), the body that dissociates to survive, [the nervous system that once needed an exit](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/a-nervous-system-built-for-a-different-world/) \- says at the level of the body what IFS says at the level of the psyche: this was never a defect. It was protection. And this cracks open a little door into what can seem like a dark room - understanding ourselves better. ## what IFS isn't It isn't positive thinking, and it isn't getting rid of the parts you don't like. It isn't a five-minute technique. It's slower and more relational than that - closer to learning to sit down with everyone at the table than to clearing the table. And usually, at least at first, it's done with someone else, because the protectors don't relax on command. Oh no, they are strong and stubborn and almost by default trust no one, not even you. They relax when they come to trust that the pain they're guarding can actually be met. IFS is also not Family Constellations work. People often confuse the two, but they're different worlds - even though both, in their own way, draw on the dynamics of a family. I'll definitely be writing much more on IFS and will do my best to make it as pragmatic and applicable as possible, but for now, just wanted to draw its outline. Until next time, Alexandra ### reach out Whether you're navigating a difficult time - loss of vital energy, or a nervous system shaped by overwhelming experience - or simply longing for more aliveness, more movement where things have felt stuck, and a clearer sense of the patterns you carry, individual sessions offer a space to do this work with depth and care, grounded in your body's wisdom. A free discovery call is the first step. [free discovery call →](https://calendly.com/alexandraragalie/free-discovery-call?ref=alexandraragalie.com) --- If you want to stay in touch, I write regularly about the nervous system, stress, and trauma. [stay updated →](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/#/portal/signup) ### a mini trip through our brain URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/a-mini-trip-through-our-brain-2/ Last updated: 2026-07-22T07:35:11.000Z and debunking a few brain myths along the way You skip lunch to power through a deadline. By 3pm you're snapping at people over nothing and you can't quite explain why. That's not just a mood swing. That's your brain running out of budget. That idea comes from a small book by neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, *Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain*. It's short, research-backed, and it changed a few things in my understanding of the brain. Here's what stuck with me - and what it actually means day to day. ## Your brain's real job isn't thinking, it's running your body's budget We like to think the brain's main job is reasoning - the thing that makes us different from animals. It isn't. Underneath all the thinking, the brain has one core task: keep the body alive. That means managing the raw materials it runs on - water, salt, glucose, and the rest - and spending or saving energy at the right moments - like a budgeting app that adjusts your spending before the paycheck lands, instead of waiting for you to overdraft and dealing with the fees after. Scientists call this allostasis - predicting what your body will need before it needs it, rather than scrambling to react once you're already depleted. Your brain's most important job is to control your body - to manage allostasis - by predicting energy needs before they arise so you can efficiently make worthwhile movements and survive. Of course, your brain does think, feel, imagine, and create hundreds of other experiences, but all of these mental capacities are consequences of a central mission to keep you alive and well by managing your body budget. Lisa Feldman Barrett, *Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain* That single idea reframes something I see a lot in my work and training. There's a popular story that says the brain has three layers stacked on top of each other: a "lizard brain" for instinct, a mammal brain for emotion, and a human brain for reason - with the reason part standing guard over the other two, like a manager keeping the animal side in check (if you wanna geek out on the term - it's called the triune brain model). If you're a parent, you've probably met a version of this in parenting books too - the idea that a meltdown means your child is 'stuck in their lizard brain' until their 'thinking brain' comes back online. It's a tidy story. It's also not accurate. The idea got started when the physician Paul MacLean compared brain slices under a microscope and saw that human brains had structures mammal brains didn't, and mammal brains had structures reptile brains didn't. Later research at the genetic level told a different story: the same neurons and genetic material show up across species. No new kind of part was bolted on top of an older one. What changed was how much of what was already there got built out. Your brain isn't three brains stacked up. It's one system, scaled differently. That distinction is important to know. If someone in front of you is shaking with anxiety, they're not fighting off an inner animal with a thin layer of logic. Their brain - all of it, together - is making an economic call based on what it's learned and what it currently expects to happen. And it changes what you'd say to them and how you hold the space around the conversation. Next time a colleague snaps at you in a meeting, or a friend overreacts to something that seems minor, that's not their rational brain losing a fight to an animal one. *It's their whole brain making an economic call based on what it's learned to expect.* Next time your kid melts down over the wrong-colored cup, the same thing is happening - just with far less data to work from, *and a body budget that runs out a lot faster than yours.* Metaphors like this stick because they're useful - they give you a fast way to talk about something real. But they're also simplifications, and simplifications stop working once you push past the context they were built for. The three-layer story is a useful shorthand for something you've actually felt: reacting before you've had a chance to think. What's not accurate is the explanation underneath it - there's no separate animal brain overriding a rational one. It's one brain, running the same prediction-based math you just read about, just faster than conscious thought can keep up with. ## Perception is prediction Your brain never gets clean information. It gets fragments - light, sound, pressure - and has to guess what they mean, using memory of the past to fill in the rest. Most of the time the guess is close enough. Sometimes it's badly wrong. Barrett tells the story of a soldier in a forest who saw a line of armed fighters closing in and raised his rifle - until a hand on his shoulder stopped him. What was actually there: a boy, a herding stick, and a line of cattle. His brain hadn't malfunctioned. It had done exactly what brains do: searched memory, built the most survival-relevant guess it could, and nearly acted on it as fact. Quoting Barrett in an article she published - neuroscientists have a phrase for this. "Your day-to-day experience is a carefully controlled hallucination, constrained by the world and your body, but ultimately constructed by your brain." This is the same mechanism behind a lot of what shows up in therapy, just quieter. A nervous system that reads danger into a raised voice because a raised voice once meant danger. A body that tenses before anything has actually happened. None of that is a malfunction. It's a prediction, still running on old data. Here's the practical part: you can't always talk yourself out of a prediction in the moment it's firing. But you can change what it's based on, by giving yourself new experiences on purpose, so next time there's better data to draw from. ## You're not wired alone - other people help build your wiring The brain likes to think of itself as sovereign - one skull, one mind, working out its own survival. It isn't. The same body budget it's managing gets managed by other people too, whether you asked them to or not. There's a growing body of research on physiological synchrony between people - heart rate and breathing shifting in response to another person, stress hormones too seemingly react to their words. The methods vary and the effect sizes are still being argued over, but the direction is consistent enough to take seriously: other people are not neutral to your body's budget. It starts before anyone can ask for it. A newborn's brain doesn't arrive with a spotlight of attention - it starts with a lantern, lighting up everything at once, with no sense of what matters yet. A caregiver builds that spotlight by hand: pointing at something, naming it, looking from the object to the baby's face and back again, over and over, until the baby's brain learns what's worth narrowing in on. Where that input is missing - children who were fed and changed but rarely held or spoken to - the wiring that lets a child focus, learn to speak, and settle themselves often doesn't form the way it should. You don't outgrow this need. You have the kind of nature that requires nurture throughout your life span. Lisa Feldman Barrett, *Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain* ## What this means for you Barrett's book ends on something close to an irony: the brain that built civilizations still consistently misunderstands itself. It mistakes its own wiring for fixed, unchangeable nature. The book doesn't dwell on this, but it's the part I keep coming back to: the wiring isn't actually fixed, even in adults. For most of the twentieth century, the assumption in neuroscience was that the adult brain was basically finished - whatever wiring you had, you kept. That assumption didn't hold up. Studies going back to the 1960s show synapses strengthening or weakening with use across an entire lifetime. That's encouraging because it changes how we think about difficult situations. When something feels overwhelmingly hard, your brain isn't necessarily telling you an objective truth. It's making a prediction based on previous experience. If past experiences taught your nervous system that a certain situation was costly, painful, or dangerous, your brain may automatically estimate that it's not worth the effort - even if today's circumstances are different. "It's metabolically costly for a brain to deal with things that are hard to predict" - and that's true of a hard conversation, a new relationship, an unfamiliar person, or even an unfamiliar version of yourself. That feeling of "I don't want to" can sometimes be less about conscious choice and more about your brain trying to conserve resources. The important question becomes: Is this prediction still accurate? One practical approach is to notice those moments when something immediately feels too difficult, pause before accepting that feeling as fact, and gently test it in a small, manageable way. By creating new experiences, you give your brain updated information that can gradually reshape future predictions. If you're a high achiever, this isn't encouragement to push harder or be more productive. It's the opposite - listen for where "too hard" is actually showing up, in the gaps, not the tasks. More often than not, it's not about doing more. It's about a person, a conversation, or a relationship you're having challenges with. The wiring moves slower than we'd like, and rarely without trade-offs. But it moves. ### if you only remember four things - Your brain's main job isn't thinking - it's running your body's energy budget (allostasis). - The "lizard brain vs. rational brain" story (the triune brain model) is a popular myth - it's one brain, not three. - You don't perceive reality directly - your brain predicts it from past experience, then checks. Many times it also acts *before it checks.* - The brain keeps rewiring through adulthood - "too hard" is often an old prediction, not a fact. And if this is the kind of work you'd rather not do alone - that's the point. It usually goes better with company. Until next time, Alexandra ### reach out Whether you're going through a hard stretch - burnout, a persistent low, or the after-effects of something overwhelming - or you simply want more energy, more room to move, and a clearer view of your own patterns, one-on-one sessions are a place to work on it, at your own pace and with real support. A free discovery call is a no-pressure first step. [free discovery call →](https://calendly.com/alexandraragalie/free-discovery-call?ref=alexandraragalie.com) --- If you want to stay in touch, I write regularly about the nervous system, stress, and trauma. [stay updated →](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/#/portal/signup) ### when the reaction doesn't fit the moment URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/when-the-reaction-doesnt-fit-the-moment/ Last updated: 2026-08-19T21:13:27.000Z present musings --- I was working on a series of posts on the vagus nerve and the polyvagal theory, and I kept going in circles. Not good enough, too short, too long, not academic enough (3 years of academic writing still showing its teeth), too scientific, not enough scientific… I decided to take a pause. And to sit with something that is present today. --- Monday, husband at work, kids at school. The house finally goes still, the kind of stillness I've been longing after for weeks - and instead of rest, something rises. We've all experienced it. Someone doesn't reply to a message, and within an hour you're somewhere much larger than a delayed text. A certainty arrives and settles… *this is over, I've ruined it, they're gone,* and no amount of reasoning quite reaches it. Or an email lands with a particular coolness in it, and your whole day quietly reorganizes around the dread of it. The reactions to those around you are permeated by this reorganization. From the outside, and often from your own thinking mind, it looks like an overreaction. Too much, for what actually happened. It isn't too much. It's just old. ## what the body learned first Long before you had words, your nervous system was already doing its most important work: learning what was safe and what wasn't. It read the room before you could read at all. Who could be relied on. What a silence meant. Whether the ground under the family was steady, or whether it could give way without warning. Those early readings don't get stored as memories you can recite. They get stored lower down - as reflexes, as a tightening, as a body that knows what to brace for before the mind has caught up. The science is still humble about exactly how this happens. But that it happens, anyone who has lived it can feel. So when something in the present rhymes with something old - a silence, a coolness, a question of whether there will be enough - the body doesn't check the date. It responds to the rhyme. Fully. As if the first time were happening again. That reaction you judge yourself for is not a flaw in the system. It's the system working exactly as it was built to, protecting you the way it once had to. ## I know this one from the inside I learned early - earlier than a child should have to - that the ground can shift without asking, and that the people you need can become unavailable. Some of what I carry was laid down then. For a long time I mistook it for simply *who I am*, rather than what I had adapted to. Understanding it helped. Naming it helped. And then, at some point, naming it stopped being enough because **the part of me that braced had never been reached by words in the first place…** ## why talking only goes so far This is the thing about insight: it's real, and it has a ceiling. You can understand precisely where a pattern comes from and still feel it grip you at the wrong moment. Because the pattern doesn't live in the part of you that understands. It lives in the body that learned to brace - and that part doesn't speak in arguments. It speaks in sensation. It updates through experience, not explanation. For me, for a long time, when the old reaction came, it didn't stay contained. It snowballed - and it shaped how I met the people around me, usually my closest. The space between what happened and how I responded had gone too short to stand in. There was no real choice in it, because something faster than choosing had already decided for me. And here is the part that used to confuse me most: for years, even when I knew exactly what would help, I still didn't reach for it in the moments that mattered. Intelligence and willpower stopped working, and it was not for lack of knowing. A nervous system in overdrive listens to no one. It has a single priority - relieve the discomfort, now - and no space left to choose regulation over reaction. Which is why this work begins lower than language. Not in the story of what happened, but in what you notice happening now - the tightening, the held breath, the bracing - met slowly, with enough safety that the body can finally sense that the danger is not in the room and can let go. The aim isn't more understanding. It's to widen that space again, until in the moment that matters there is finally room to choose. ## the other day The other day it caught me. Something landed - a piece of news that pulled the floor out from under a plan I'd been standing on - and within minutes I was somewhere old. The familiar tightening in the chest. The certainty, far bigger than the facts, that I wouldn't be able to manage, that the ground was gone for good. A few years ago, that would have taken me out for days in circles of rumination and panic. This time I could recognize it for what it was: not a verdict about the present, but an old reaction passing through. And slowly, I reached for the small things that bring me back. I didn't try to sit still and calm down, because stillness, for me, only lets the worry rise. Instead I let my eyes move - I looked around the room, let my gaze settle on something ordinary and unthreatening, and let it rest there - we call this *orienting*, and it's what mammals do when they sense a threat. I pressed my feet into the floor and felt it push back, which carries its own quiet message: you are here, the ground is holding you. I breathed a few times with the out-breath longer than the in, which is not some influencer trick but real signaling to a nervous system that has gone on alert. Then, instead of arguing with the feeling, I named who was carrying it. **Ah - it's the part of me that has always believed it has to hold everything alone. I see you. You can have a little room.** I used what I work with, [IFS](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/ifs-why-i-work-with-parts/), to do this little check-in with my system, to signal that I am able to hold this. And I made some small movements, a few steps, some stretches and spine twists, not a yoga routine and not a fix, just moving energy through, **because a body that has frozen around news like that needs to feel it can move before it can feel much of anything else.** None of this made the situation go away, nor the underlying fear. That was never the point. The point was that I came back to the present sooner, and from the present I could actually think and act. ## what becomes possible Those small returns are real - and they are also recent. I can reach for them now because of years of slower work underneath. A nervous system that learned to brace can also learn that it's allowed to stop. Not by force, and not by deciding to feel differently, but by being given - gently, and more than once - the experience it didn't get the first time: that it's safe now. That it can set some of this down. It took years to rescript what my body had learned, and I couldn't do it on my own. It needed me working with different people and with my environment to rescript my early blueprint, until slowly there was enough steadiness to hold what I had no way of holding by myself. I still get hijacked. The difference now is that I have better tools, and a self that comes back faster - and these days, often, I can do that part on my own. But I needed others to get there first. That isn't a weakness in the design. We're wired to regulate *with* one another before we can do it alone - that's not failure, it's the actual order of things. Nothing here is broken, so nothing needs fixing. Healing isn't reverting to who you were before - that person doesn't exist anymore, and doesn't need to. It's completing what was interrupted, letting the energy that's been held in a brace for years finally move, and become available for your actual life. And maybe "healing" isn't the word that reaches you. Maybe what you notice first is the cost - the patience that runs out too fast with the people closest to you, the choices made from depletion, the recovery that takes longer than it used to, the steadiness you keep spending faster than you can replace it. That's reason enough. You don't have to call it healing to want that capacity back. --- If you read this and recognize yourself - the reaction that arrives too big, the certainty that doesn't match the facts, the old weather moving through a clear day - you're not alone in it. You're carrying something that once kept you safe. It's ready, when you are, to be met. Until next time, Alexandra ### reach out Whether you're navigating a difficult time - loss of vital energy, or a nervous system shaped by overwhelming experience - or simply longing for more aliveness, more movement where things have felt stuck, and a clearer sense of the patterns you carry, individual sessions offer a space to do this work with depth and care, grounded in your body's wisdom. A free discovery call is the first step. [free discovery call →](https://calendly.com/alexandraragalie/free-discovery-call?ref=alexandraragalie.com) --- If you want to stay in touch, I write regularly about the nervous system, stress, and trauma. [stay updated →](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/#/portal/signup) ### what the impala knows that we don't URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/what-the-impala-knows-that-we-dont/ Last updated: 2026-08-19T21:49:53.000Z The impala [goes down](https://youtu.be/HywDNAgqDzw?ref=alexandraragalie.com). It doesn't fight anymore, doesn't run. It lies there, completely still, while the cheetah catches its breath. Then the hyena shows up. The cheetah and the hyena start their own altercation - and in that window, something shifts in the impala. Not a decision, exactly. A recognition. The threat is no longer on it. And in one clean motion, it's up and gone. No debrief. No processing. No five minutes of shaking while telling its herd what just happened. It just... resumes. Eating, orienting, staying in contact with its environment. The whole thing - predator, freeze, escape - metabolized and released in the time it took to read this paragraph. We don't do that. Animals in the wild have something we don't: the absence of a very specific human capability, the ability to hold an event in place after it's over. This is not better neurology, superior resilience, or a simpler life, though the life is simpler. The autonomic nervous system runs the same script in an impala as it does in us. Threat enters. The orienting response kicks in - a pause, a looking, an evaluation of is this real? If the threat holds, the sympathetic system charges up. Adrenaline moves into the bloodstream. Blood shifts to the limbs. The heart pumps harder. The system prepares. And if that still isn't enough - if there's no way out, no way through - the system does something older than fight or flight. It shuts down. The dorsal vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system takes over. Heart rate drops. Metabolism slows. Blood pulls away from the periphery, draws inward. The animal collapses into immobility. This is not giving up. It is the oldest protection mechanism we have available. The freeze state looks like calm from the outside. It isn't. The fight/flight charge is still there, stored in the body at peak arousal, even as the system has gone quiet on the surface. Both things are true at once - the brake fully on, the gas still pressed. This is sometimes called shock. It is the deer-in-the-headlights moment before the shutdown completes. In the impala's case, the window opens, the shutdown lifts, and all that stored fight/flight energy is exactly what it needs to run. The system completes its arc. Then it comes back to baseline. *We mostly don't complete the arc.* The human brain is why. The cortex - that large, extraordinary, expensive structure - can hold a past event in the nervous system's present tense. The impala doesn't ruminate over its near-death. It doesn't replay the moment the cheetah's jaws closed. It doesn't wake up three days later in a low-grade activation it can't explain. We do. And over time, that rumination keeps the system charged. The sympathetic response that was never fully discharged stays available, primed, looking for confirmation that the threat is still real. Or the system stops looking entirely - overwhelmed, it collapses into what is called a functional freeze. Still moving through the day. Still capable, functional, getting things done. But internally running in conservation mode: low metabolism, low oxygen delivery to organs and tissue, a kind of going-through-the-motions that the outside world rarely sees. Functional freeze isn't one thing. Some people in it are startled by everything; the charge is high beneath the surface, always primed. Others have lost the startle response entirely - not because they're calm, but because they've stopped expecting anything to be safe. And most of us switch between the two as well. I know this through my own experience. Because some of us learned very early to freeze instead of feel. Looking back, I recognize periods in my life when I was in a functional freeze. It still grabs me from time to time but now I catch it earlier and shift it faster. The clearest way I know to show what this looks like is through two moments of my own. One where the arc held frozen longer than I realized and another where it released - but in doing so, found something else waiting underneath. Last year I fell on the sharp edge of my own ski. The cut went deep - through skin, tissue, through the patellar ligament, destroying most of it. I felt nothing. No pain. I genuinely thought I would be back on the slopes the next day. What I didn't know yet was that I wouldn't bend that knee freely for more than five months. The arc completed months later, in an osteopathy session. My practitioner moved my leg very gently - completing the motion the body had held in place since the fall. What happened next I couldn't have predicted. My body began to tremble. Tears came, without grief attached to them. Just release. The discharge, textbook reaction, moving through me the way I had read about it and watched in others. It was something else to feel it from the inside. That discharge was clean. The next one wasn't. Our plane had a bird strike. The engine sound changed, the aircraft lurched, and something in me went completely still. No fight, no flight - there was nowhere to go. Pure freeze, in a sealed space at altitude. When we landed back safely, my body did exactly what the biology predicts: a full, classical discharge. Shaking, trembling, the stored charge finally moving through. The arc of the nervous system completed. And yet. The fear of flying stayed. It's still here. That fear is not the physiology of that moment - it's the cortex doing what the cortex does, reaching back through its archives, pulling up older fears, older threats, older incomplete arcs, and stitching them to this one (in trauma work we call this over-coupling). The nervous system discharged. The mind grafted meaning onto what was left. Both things can be true. The body can complete its response and still carry the residue of everything that came before it. This is the difference between an acute event and accumulated history. The impala has one arc to complete. We often have many, layered on top of each other, each one pressing on the next. This matters beyond the physical. When the autonomic nervous system is chronically stuck - either at high sympathetic charge, or in that paradoxical combination of freeze and fight/flight running simultaneously - the organs that depend on it suffer quietly. Digestion, immune function, hormonal regulation, sleep. These systems work. They just don't work as well as they could. The research on untreated early trauma and chronic illness is pointing here, slowly: the body that never completed its stress arc carries the cost in tissue. And then there's what we lose at the higher end. Creativity, curiosity. Genuine engagement. The capacity to learn something new and let it settle. The social engagement nervous system - the one that allows us to be in real contact with another person, or an idea, or the world - goes offline when the survival systems are running the show. We lose access to ourselves, slowly, in ways we often can't name. *The impala, back with its herd, is grazing. Present. Available.* That is what we're moving toward - not an animal life, not the absence of thought or memory or reflection. Something more specific: the capacity to complete the arc. To let the stress response do its work and then allow the system to come back to itself, back to that easy ebb and flow, activated by threat and returned, over time, to rest. That return is learnable. It requires more from us than the animals need, because we have more cortex and more history to work with. But the underlying biology is the same: the nervous system knows how to complete its arc. It is waiting for the conditions that allow it to do so. So I started paying attention to where in my life the arc hasn't completed. Not to analyze it. Just to notice what's there. You can start there too. Notice what's present in your body right now. Name it if you can - not to fix it, just to make contact. And if you want somewhere concrete to begin, orienting is one of the most direct ways back. (I wrote about orienting [here](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/a-nervous-system-built-for-a-different-world/).) Until next time, Alexandra ### reach out Whether you're navigating a difficult time - loss of vital energy, or a nervous system shaped by overwhelming experience - or simply longing for more aliveness, more movement where things have felt stuck, and a clearer sense of the patterns you carry, individual sessions offer a space to do this work with depth and care, grounded in your body's wisdom. A free discovery call is the first step. [free discovery call →](https://calendly.com/alexandraragalie/free-discovery-call?ref=alexandraragalie.com) --- If you want to stay in touch, I write regularly about the nervous system, stress, and trauma. [stay updated →](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/#/portal/signup) ### a nervous system built for a different world URL: https://www.alexandraragalie.com/blog/a-nervous-system-built-for-a-different-world/ Last updated: 2026-08-19T21:40:19.000Z We are carrying ancient wiring into a modern world it was never designed for. This is worth sitting with. The autonomic nervous system - the ANS - developed across hundreds of millions of years of evolution. It predates us by a long stretch. Parts of it were already present in primitive animals, in reptiles and amphibians, long before mammals arrived. We carry all of that history. Right now, in the body that's been carrying us all these years. The system was built for a world where threats were real, immediate, and mostly physical. Something comes at you: you fight, you flee, or you collapse. The danger passes. You recover. The cycle completes. Back to base. That last part - the return - is the key. The stress response was never designed to be a permanent state. It was designed to move: to rise when survival demands it and to complete when the threat has passed. The completion is THE point. Most modern lives don't look like that. The threats aren't predators. They're deadlines, conflict, financial pressure, noise, loneliness - and they don't pass cleanly. They accumulate. And because the nervous system can't always distinguish between a tiger and an inbox, it responds the same way it always has: with mobilization, with a shift in heart rate and breathing and blood flow, with cortisol and adrenaline from the adrenal glands sitting quietly above the kidneys. The sympathetic nervous system, responsible for our fight or flight responses - is not the problem. We need it. It gets blood to the limbs, increases oxygen to the cells, sharpens focus. It is exactly what it's supposed to be. It's also excitement, joy, vitality. It's life force, movement, expression. The problem begins when our fight/flight response stays on, when there's no recovery on the other side. Part of why recovery is slower than activation is physiology. The sympathetic nervous system can surge in seconds. So can shutdown. Fight, flight, freeze can be abrupt - a cascade of cortisol and adrenaline flooding the bloodstream before we've registered what triggered it. But discharge doesn't move at that speed. The hormones that surged through the system need to be metabolized, moved through the body, released. The activation was built to be fast. The recovery is built to be thorough. This isn't dysfunction. The body is still working. It needs the conditions and the time to complete. The parasympathetic nervous system is the counterweight and its primary nerve is the vagus nerve. Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory identifies two distinct pathways within it, each with a different function and a different evolutionary age. The ventral vagal branch, the social engagement system, brings activation back down gradually, through contact with people and places and things that feel safe. It slows the heart rate in a way that feels like exhaling. The dorsal vagal branch is older and more abrupt: it shuts the system down fast, moving into conservation mode when the load becomes too much. Collapse. Stillness. This is freeze, not calm. The body doing what it has to do to survive. Three states. One system. Between them, there is meant to be movement - not the absence of activation, but the capacity to move through it and return. Dan Siegel named the zone where that return is possible the window of tolerance. I've come to think of that phrase as one of the more useful pieces of language I've encountered in this work - not because it explains something, but because it names something I had already felt without knowing what to call it. Inside the window, the nervous system can move. Process what's happening. Stay in contact - with others, with itself. Arousal is present; this isn't flatness or the absence of feeling. The body is neither bracing nor shutting down. It's moving through. Outside the window, in either direction, that capacity breaks down. Too far up - hyperarousal - and the system is flooded. Heart rate climbs, breath shortens, the thinking brain goes offline. Anxiety, panic, rage, hypervigilance. The body still trying to survive something, even when the threat is long past or nowhere to be found. Too far down - hypoarousal - and the system collapses inward. Numbness, disconnection, the heavy stillness of a freeze response that doesn't know it's safe to complete. Both states are the nervous system doing exactly what it evolved to do. Neither is sustainable. Neither allows the healing and learning and connection that happen only inside the window. The goal is not to stay permanently calm. It's to keep the window wide enough to return. When that rhythm breaks - when stressors accumulate faster than the system can recover, when the window narrows from years of incomplete cycles - the effects don't stay contained. Dysregulation in the ANS means dysregulation everywhere the ANS reaches. Which is everywhere. Learning the physiology of stress mattered to me because it closed a gap I hadn't named. I operated mostly through behavior and conscious thought - what I did, what I decided about what I did. But the physiological stress response, as [Hans Selye](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5915631/?ref=alexandraragalie.com) observed, is often a more accurate gauge of what the body is actually experiencing. It picks up what the thinking mind misses. I couldn't work with what I couldn't see. But what becomes possible is a felt sense of when the system is activated, what brought it there, and what might help it complete. That capacity - to notice, to name, to move through - is not a small thing. One of the entry points Peter Levine identified in Somatic Experiencing - his body-based approach to resolving trauma, drawn from decades of observing how animals in the wild complete their stress cycles - is something called orienting. I first heard about it years ago from Irene Lyon, a student of Levine's. I'm picking it up again now, during my Somatic Experiencing training. What I keep noticing: how often I'm scanning for threat without knowing that's what I'm doing. Animals don't interrupt the cycle the way we do. After a chase, after a freeze, they shake - moving the hormonal charge through the body, completing what the activation began. They breathe. And then they orient: turning the head slowly, scanning the environment with the senses, gathering information about what is actually present. Not searching for the next threat. Not deciding to feel safe. Running a sensory comparison: do the inputs arriving now match the ones that came during the threat? Different sounds, different light, different air. They don't. The body runs the check through the senses and gets a different answer. So they move on. Orienting is a physiological event, not a cognitive one. When I slow my gaze and let my eyes actually land on things - color, texture, light, the distance of a wall - I'm feeding the brainstem sensory evidence about the present environment. The brainstem receives this before the thinking mind does. It is older than thought. And what it needs to begin releasing a stress response is not reassurance or understanding. It is information: I am here. This is now. The threat has passed. That input activates the ventral vagal pathway. The social engagement system. The nervous system's signal to exhale. I practice this anywhere I remember to. Slow the gaze. Let the eyes move without purpose. Let them land. Notice what arrives at the edges of the room. Feel the surface underneath. Not trying to relax. Giving the nervous system evidence of where and when I actually am. That's a starting place. Not the whole practice - but a real one. We weren't built for constant survival. We were built for surges we could recover from. Understanding the difference is where this work begins. ## future references These concepts surface in this piece - some named directly, some working underneath it. Each carries more than a paragraph can hold. I'll return to them in separate pieces. Until then: a brief orientation. **Neuroception.** I encountered this early and it explained a lot - the persistent unease in certain rooms, the unexpected softening in others. The body had already decided. Coined by Stephen Porges as a central piece of Polyvagal Theory: where perception is conscious - you notice a sound, you recognize a face - neuroception happens below awareness. The body scans the environment, the people around it, and its own internal state for cues of safety and danger before the thinking mind is involved. The body made the call first. **Co-regulation.** I understood this concept before I felt it, and part of my path has been the lack of it as a child. Then I felt it and understood it differently - what it actually means to have another nervous system slow yours down. Not through effort. Through contact, witnessing, safe spaces. Attachment theory named it and attachment-based therapists built practice around it. The core clinical observation, decades before the neuroscience proved it: the nervous system regulates through relationship. Bowlby and Ainsworth mapped it in the caregiver-infant bond. Porges' Polyvagal Theory gave it a neurophysiological explanation, identifying the ventral vagal pathway as the mechanism through which one settled nervous system communicates safety to another. It is why relational safety is not a luxury in healing work. It is the mechanism. **Interoception.** A capacity I had largely lost and have been slowly rebuilding. The body has a language. It took me years to realize I had stopped hearing it and the way into it for me was through yoga. First mapped systematically by neurologist A.D. Craig in the early 2000s, with earlier roots in William James' work on emotion and bodily feeling, interoception is the body's capacity to sense its own internal state: temperature, hunger, the tension in the throat before speech, the tightening in the chest before anxiety fully arrives. It is what makes it possible to notice activation before it peaks. Without it, the communications arrive as noise, or don't arrive at all. **The felt sense.** I came to this through Gendlin's practice called Focusing. The moment in a session when the words haven't arrived yet but something has - a shift in the body, a loosening, a knowing that is not yet language. A term coined by philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, who observed that meaningful psychological change was consistently preceded by a specific kind of body-level knowing - something more than sensation, less than thought. A meaning the body holds before the words arrive. Peter Levine drew on Gendlin's work in developing Somatic Experiencing, making the felt sense a central instrument of the practice. Until next time, Alexandra ### reach out Whether you're navigating a difficult time - loss of vital energy, or a nervous system shaped by overwhelming experience - or simply longing for more aliveness, more movement where things have felt stuck, and a clearer sense of the patterns you carry, individual sessions offer a space to do this work with depth and care, grounded in your body's wisdom. A free discovery call is the first step. [free discovery call →](https://calendly.com/alexandraragalie/free-discovery-call?ref=alexandraragalie.com) --- If you want to stay in touch, I write regularly about the nervous system, stress, and trauma. [stay updated →](https://www.alexandraragalie.com/#/portal/signup)