nervous system care/ relational care

The ethics of care must be cultivated, nurtured, shaped. Care is both value and practice.​

-Virginia Held

My approach to Nervous System Care emerges from an ecological stance and from the need to move beyond individual wellness, self-regulation, and self-management.

This approach pragmatically works through mutual techniques of embodiment, flexibility (regulation) and prevention, inviting us to explore practices for reclaiming diverse dimensions of care, putting the interdependent nature of our neurobiology, and our natural rhythms at the center.

Within a decontextualized and ableist framework of nervous system healing, emphasis is frequently placed on self-regulation, performance, rapid recovery, and corrective strategies. Such an approach often marginalizes or invalidates the broader spectrum of human needs, emotions, and capacities that extend beyond normative notions of health and productivity. By integrating principles of interdependence, attunement to life rhythms, and cultural contextualization, it becomes possible to engage with the nervous system in a more nuanced, responsive, and relational manner.

Interdependent Nature

Nourishing close relationships, awareness of our attachment presentations and strategies, and having collective support are key aspects for trauma prevention. From a relational-cultural therapy perspective (which is a gender perspective in itself), they are crucial to our sense of vitality and expansion.

Being cared for has a profound impact on our physiology, beginning with our earliest sensory experiences of touch, nourishment, and the models of regulation we receive. These experiences shape our brain, our survival and emotional responses, and our capacities to adapt.

The work of Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana (1928–2021) comes to mind, particularly his concept of legitimate otherness, which emerged from his exploration of the biology of love — understood as the biology of human bonding. Maturana reflected on how our mutual caring actions and ethical concerns as humans are inherently connected. He proposed that harmonious coexistence is a form of intelligence present in all living beings, expressed biologically and, in humans, manifested as the emotion of love. This emotion enables us to recognize and accept others as distinct and valid beings, worthy of care.

It is through this interdependence that we have thrived as a species — within a continuous dynamic of differentiation and integration.

The sense of belonging arises from a consistent perception of safety, from experiences of connection with others who offer us touch, presence, and regulation throughout our development. When we experience enough safety and co-regulation, the brain functions in a dynamic balance of differentiation and integration within its internal networks and predictive processes. This balance also involves communication with the body proper(1), which informs the brain through afferent sensory-somatic signals known as neuroception and interoception.

Our brain and entire nervous system are shaped by experience, and experience always occurs within context. Therefore, our biology is influenced by cultural tendencies toward division and atomization, particularly where notions of individuality and the outdated ideal of emotional self-sufficiency prevail. Internally, the brain requires the same conditions we do at the social level: differentiation and integration. This has become increasingly evident through advances in the neurosciences of attachment (the biologically based human strategy for survival), social neuroscience, and interpersonal neurobiology over the past half-century.

The brain functions and develops like an orchestra, with networks of harmonized wiring that simultaneously coordinate survival processes, sensory-somatic responses, and learning through higher regulatory (inhibitory) functions. All of this unfolds as we feel, live, grow, and relate — to others, to ourselves, and to the wider world — through sensing, acting, and connecting.

Natural Rhythms

I see and I feel life patterns as a tendency toward greater homeostasis. The dynamism of life, the constant changes in time and space, are responsive to a whole ongoing phenomenon of expanding and contracting. Think about breathing, pulsing, polarisation and depolarisation of a cell membrane... or about the seasons of the year and their impact on culture. Societies have relied on ecological and cyclic activity for their existence (and energy resourcing) and the ability to recognise patterns creating a relationship between the social dynamics of subsistence. This is still accessible at the core of indigenous peoples wisdom. Inwards, in the internal ecosystem of our body, the recognition of rhythmic pulsations could be a wellbeing compass.

The stress response has a rhythm of expanding and contracting, building-up and releasing.

The concepts of allostasis and allostatic load center around the brain as interpreter and responder to environmental challenges and as a target of those challenges(2). Glucocorticoids and catecholamines, the main hormonal mediators of the stress response, have both protective and damaging effects on the body. In short term, they are responsible for allostasis: adaptation, survival and maintenance homeostasis. If the stress response does not follow its cycle, the allostatic load affects brain and body accelerating disease processes.

Throughout our lives, the autonomic nervous system shifts from a predominantly parasympathetic tone to a more sympathetic one, making it increasingly difficult to recover from and adapt to stress. Therefore, it is crucial to recognise the chronicity and downstream effects of post-traumatic responses on both the immune and endocrine systems.

There is a prevailing resistance to embracing the body’s intrinsic cyclical nature, which stands in contrast to the culturally reinforced paradigm of constant linear growth. The menstrual-ovulatory cycle represents a fundamental biological rhythm with significant implications for autonomic nervous system regulation. Fluctuations in behavior, mood, and cognition across the cycle are mediated by hormonal variations—particularly in estrogen and progesterone—and their interactions with stress-related hormones such as cortisol. Developing awareness of these hormonal dynamics throughout the reproductive cycle is essential for advancing self-knowledge and fostering a more accurate understanding of one's neuroendocrine, emotional, relational, and executive functioning capacities.

Taking care of our nervous systems needs to be rhythmic, active, and responsive, relational and reciprocal. We cannot remain in a constant state of growth, healing, or performance, whether through our internal cycles or the outer seasonal ones. Nothing alive can sustain such constancy without harm.

Nervous System Care involves embodiment, co-regulation, restoration, and preventive practices that support us both somatically and relationally. This perspective extends into ecological awareness, recognizing the inseparable relationship between mind and body, our minds as meaning-makers and our bodies as ever-present, connected, and continuously co-regulating with the human and more-than-human world.

This approach is envisioned as collaborative and evolving, shaped by the contributions of diverse practitioners and disciplines. It embraces the biodiversity of perspectives from which situated knowledge emerges, nourishing collective actions that center care and community well-being.

By sensing the mutual influence between human and non-human fields, within our interactions and within our bodies, we can begin to recognize our inherent need to receive and offer care, and to experience enjoyment, ease, and connection as natural and lifelong dimensions of being alive.

1. In therms of Antonio Damasio at The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness.Antonio Damasio - 1999 - Harcourt Brace and Co., and Feeling & knowing: making minds conscious.Antonio R. Damasio - 2021 - New York: Edited by Hanna Damasio.

2. McEwen, B. Allostasis and Allostatic Load: Implications for Neuropsychopharmacology. Neuropsychopharmacol 22, 108–124 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1016/S0893-133X(99)00129-3