Why Trauma and Nervous System Got Worse After I Started Doing Inner Work

This is one of the most disorienting experiences in healing work: beginning a practice intended to improve the nervous system’s functioning, and finding that things feel worse — more activation, more sensitivity, more visible distress — than before the work began.

There are specific, understandable reasons for this. This article addresses them directly. Take your time with this.

What “Getting Worse” Usually Is

The increase in awareness produces a perceived increase in intensity. Before the patterns were named and studied, the activation occurred and was handled automatically — the pricing conversation ended in a discount without the practitioner consciously registering the worth trigger’s operation. After beginning the work, the same activation is consciously registered, the pattern is recognized as a pattern, and the experience includes both the original activation and the awareness of the pattern’s operation.

This feels like more. It is not more activation — it is the same activation, now visible.

The window of tolerance is expanding. As genuine regulatory capacity develops, the nervous system becomes more capable of tolerating contact with material that was previously defended against. The defenses loosen — the numbness, the avoidance, the compartmentalization — and the underlying activation becomes more accessible.

This phase can feel like things are getting worse because the previously defended-against material is now felt. In fact, the capacity to feel it is the beginning of the capacity to integrate it.

New behaviors are encountering new resistances. If the inner work is producing any behavioral changes — attempting to hold pricing, increasing content visibility, maintaining scope — these new behaviors are encountering the patterns’ resistances in real triggering situations. The patterns activate more visibly because they are being encountered more directly.

What Is Not Happening

The inner work is not making the underlying patterns worse. The nervous system’s stored predictions are not deepening because of the work. The patterns are becoming more visible, more encountered, and more actively engaged — which is the work proceeding as it should.

The Guidance for This Phase

This phase — increased awareness, expanded window of tolerance, new behavioral encounters with the patterns — is a phase of the work, not evidence that the work is contraindicated. It is navigated by:

Strengthening the somatic regulation practice. The increased activation of this phase requires more regulatory support, not less practice. Morning and evening regulation practices become more important, not optional.

Maintaining the behavioral pre-commitments even when the increased activation makes them harder to hold. This is where the pre-commitment’s function is most visible: holding the behavioral output steady while the activation is at its highest.

Accessing co-regulatory support. This phase is particularly suited to community work — the co-regulatory support of others doing the same work reduces the isolation of the increased activation and provides the relational nervous system regulation that individual practice cannot.

The phase passes. The window of tolerance stabilizes at a new, expanded level. The activation becomes more navigable. The work continues.

If you want community for this work — the Abundance GPS community on Skool offers a free trial. Come as you are.