The Boundaries Debate Is Missing Something

Last night I was at a concert, and the artist mentioned offhand that the fashionable thing to do these days is cut all toxic relationships out of your life. He said he tried that and ended up with no one left. Then he made a dismissive comment suggesting that most people who cut someone off are doing it for trivial reasons, not legitimate ones. I sat there thinking, I think it's a wee bit more complex than that, my dude.

There are two loud voices in the culture right now about family and boundaries. One says cut off anyone who hurts you, toxic is toxic, protect your peace, good vibes only. The other says walking away from family is a mistake, that estrangement is a modern epidemic and people just need to try harder. Neither one holds the nuance of real relational health. The first ignores that some ruptures carry real weight and need real repair, not just distance. The second ignores that repair takes something from both people, not just effort from whoever's still trying. I tried writing about this in an earlier post but didn't get my thinking clear enough, so I want to try again to say what I actually think.

Community is hard, and that's not a flaw, it’s a feature. Being around people who disagree with you, who challenge you, who aren't easy, isn't a version of toxic. It's a version of real life, and it's where growth happens. Feeling humbled, confronted, or pushed past your comfort isn't immediately evidence someone is bad for you. Often it's the opposite: it's what respect between two honest people feels like, and it's an opportunity to get less prejudiced, more humble, and wiser. Community also gives people practice at healthy conflict that doesn't turn violent, at having a voice, including a voice of dissent, and staying in the room while it's used. That's a skill, and you don't build it by leaving every time it's called for. Discomfort and harm get flattened into the same word constantly. They aren't the same thing. That said, distance is sometimes the right call, and here's the framework I use to tell when.

We need to start with the goal. Connection is a survival need, not a preference. The healthiest life isn't the most protected one, it's the one with the deepest sense of community available. Boundaries don't build that. They don't create closeness or repair a relationship. What they do is protect the nervous system when connection isn't safe yet, or isn't safe at all, and they're about the needs of the person setting them. Having no boundaries is its own problem, a way of abandoning your own need for safety to keep a relationship intact. But a boundary doesn't create a healed relationship or better feelings on its own. Connection is what heals a rupture, but only if and when that becomes possible.

The emphasis belongs on that "if," and this is where power and attachment come in. Ruptures don't always look serious from the outside, it's easy to judge a moment without knowing what it meant to the person who lived it. A comment, a slight, a silence, a moment a child needed a parent to show up and didn't, a child's own feelings pushed aside in the name of religious teaching, these can create attachment injuries that never get named as such, especially once they become a pattern. Parents, elders, and leaders hold more power in a relationship, which means they also hold more responsibility for what happens in it.

I regularly see parents and grandparents in my office grieving a child who's gone no contact. Almost always, that grief sits alongside real trouble grasping the pain their own behavior caused, so the cutoff feels extreme and confusing to them. That pattern usually traces back further: people who hurt their kids' attachment were often hurt the same way themselves and never processed it. They're trying to hold onto the only way of relating they know, and a child's request for something different can land as an accusation instead of an invitation. Without realizing it, they're protecting themselves from feeling their own attachment pain by staying unaware of how they impacted their kids.

To be fair, the adult child's request often comes out harsh, because it's coming from a hurt place too. That makes it harder for the parent to stay regulated, curious, and motivated to look at themselves. But a harsh delivery doesn't erase the power dynamic underneath it.

So what does repair actually need? It usually starts with being able to say what happened and what it meant, and having that experience validated instead of minimized or argued with. It means being able to talk about not just the event but how it happened, whether this was one rupture or a lifetime pattern of them, and getting curious together about what kept it going. And often it means wanting the other person to do their own work: to show a deeper understanding of their own story and how it shaped the way they showed up in the relationship, not just offer an apology for a single incident.

None of that happens on a schedule. Even when both people are capable of repair and willing to do it, time and space are sometimes needed before repair is a good idea, to calm the nervous system down enough that the conversation can actually go somewhere instead of reopening the wound. A boundary held for that reason isn't a wall going up for good. It's someone buying the room they need to come back to the table able to listen.

Where does abuse fit in? Abuse is a pattern of behavior used to gain or maintain power and control over another person, causing harm through physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, verbal, or financial means. When abuse has happened, that same list of repair needs still applies, but the bar for proof gets higher: sustained change over time, real ownership, an actual apology, a demonstrated understanding of their own history and how it played out in yours, and a different way of relating going forward. That kind of change is possible, but rare. So when someone cuts off an abusive parent, the boundary is usually the right call, not a failure of nerve.

And when someone keeps showing they can't or won't do that work, no matter how many chances they get, it gets hard to know when to stop trying or checking in. Jesus told Peter to forgive seventy times seven, which is really a way of saying forgiveness shouldn't run out. But forgiveness and reconciliation aren't the same thing. With someone who stays unable or unwilling to change, forgiveness probably looks like letting go of the anger and resentment you're carrying, while still keeping the boundary up. You can release the weight of what happened without reopening the door.

None of this fits neatly into either camp. Cutting people off isn't automatically strength, and staying in contact isn't automatically love. The work is figuring out, case by case, whether connection is possible yet, what you need to recover, and how power dynamics and responsibility play into it too.

attachment Fireworks: Why holiday Gatherings can Turn Into Anger You Didn't See Coming

Holidays carry memories of both togetherness and loss. Today's holiday, the Fourth of July, can bring up either side of that. Family visits, cookouts, long weekends with the same handful of people from morning to night. Or the absence of those gatherings: kids grown and gone, family members who've passed, living somewhere else now, a fallout that never got resolved. Either one can stir up old attachment wounds. Old roles come back. Old sore spots get touched. Someone brings up something from years ago, or nobody brings it up and the silence says just as much. And often what shows up first isn't sadness or fear. Alongside the fireworks outside, there's a different kind of combustion happening inside. It's anger.

It's easy to misread aggression. By design, it triggers fight, flight, or freeze in whoever is on the receiving end. Those are self-preserving modes, and in them it's nearly impossible to stay mindful or to do what Peter Fonagy calls mentalizing: accurately tracking what you think and feel, and what the other person thinks and feels, at the same time. Whether the anger is coming from someone else or from us, it's hard to tell in the moment whether the anger is really about anger, or whether it's covering something more vulnerable underneath.

This is especially true when anger is standing in for panic, and underneath that, grief.

The system underneath the anger

Attachment distress and attachment security are rooted in a brain system Jaak Panksepp called PANIC/GRIEF, working alongside two other systems called CARE and SEEKING. When disconnection happens and you need connection back, the automatic reaction is panic. That panic exists to alert you, and the people around you, that you need connection for survival. It teams up with SEEKING to point you toward the person you need. When that person notices your panic, it's their own CARE and SEEKING systems that pull them back toward you. These are old, fast circuits, and they run well beneath conscious thought.

When panic doesn't succeed in getting reconnection (through neglect or through attack) it risks tipping into the pain of isolation and grief. That's a state where you feel helpless, alone, and often like you don't matter. It can feel close enough to a threat to survival that the FEAR system recruits its counterpart, RAGE, to pull the system out of that collapse. RAGE brings a stronger, more mobilized feeling than panic or grief, and for a nervous system that's starting to feel it might not survive disconnection, that mobilization can feel like relief.

Why anger works, until it doesn't

Anger is empowering. Its original job, as Paul Ekman and Silvan Tomkins both described, is to clear whatever stands between you and something you're after. It comes with a sense of rightness and a jolt of confidence. Paired with SEEKING, it can help a person get real things done.

The problem is that in relationships, when anger is being called up in service of PANIC/GRIEF rather than in service of an actual obstacle, it tends to produce the opposite of what's needed. It pushes the other person away and adds to the misunderstanding instead of resolving it. The person on the receiving end usually focuses on the anger itself and misses the panic, grief, and fear driving it. That deepens the isolation, the helplessness, and the hit to self-worth that started the whole cycle.

From response to pattern

This pattern doesn't come from nowhere. It builds out of repeated experiences where attachment cues weren't met well, and over time the response becomes automatic. At the automatic, repeated level, we start calling it personality.

This particular pattern (anger that is really panic and grief in disguise) shows up more often in certain personality profiles: Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and in Enneagram terms, the one-to-one (sexual) subtypes of Eights, Ones, and Fours in particular. In each case, the anger looks like the presenting problem, but the attachment system underneath it is what actually needs attention.

What changes it

Change comes from three places: awareness, tools, and new experience.

Awareness means being able to mindfully notice when you're about to tip into this state, when you're in it, and what happened as a result once it's passed. That includes recognizing your own patterns: how you think, what you feel, where your eyes go, what happens in your body, how you move, and what you tend to say. A simple way to check yourself, or to notice it in someone else, is to ask what you tend to:

• Think

• Say

• Feel

• Do

Tools, from a Somatic Experiencing lens, give the nervous system a way to move through activation instead of getting stuck at the top of it or freezing under it.

Titration means taking the activation in small pieces instead of all at once. Rather than diving straight into the memory or the argument that set off the rage, you touch it briefly, notice what happens in the body, and back off before it overwhelms you. Small doses are easier for the nervous system to process and complete.

Pendulation is the rhythm of moving between that activation and a place of relative ease or resource, back and forth. You might notice the heat rising in your chest, then shift attention to your feet on the floor or a steady breath, then check back in with the heat. That back and forth is what teaches the body it can go into activation and come back out, instead of getting flooded.

Shifting attention in and out works alongside both. Attention in means noticing sensation, tension, temperature, and impulses to move. Attention out means noticing the room, another person's face, or something neutral and steady nearby. Moving between the two keeps you from getting swallowed by the internal experience or dissociating away from it entirely.

Tracking waves of activation and deactivation means watching the rise and fall as it happens rather than judging it. Rage has a shape: it builds, it peaks, and if you don't feed it or fight it, it comes back down. Learning to watch that curve, rather than either suppressing it or getting swept into it, is what turns rage from something that happens to you into something you can move through.

None of this is about stopping the anger before it starts. It's about staying present enough in your body to ride the wave instead of being ridden by it.

New experience comes from two places at once: growing confidence in your own capacity for self-regulation, and being met by people whose own nervous systems can stay regulated while yours isn't, people who can understand you and stay close to you through the storm instead of matching it or retreating from it.

Bringing it back to the holiday

If this weekend brings up a flash of irritation at a family member that threatens to turn into a blow up or painful drama, or you watch someone you love go from calm to furious over something small, try not to jump straight to conclusions about "bad behavior." Underneath a lot of holiday tempers is an old, fast circuit doing exactly what it was built to do: trying to get connection back before the isolation underneath becomes unbearable.

That doesn't excuse harm done in the heat of it. But it does point to where the real work is. Not in suppressing the anger and not in venting it, but in learning to recognize the panic and grief driving it, and building the capacity, in yourself and in your relationships, to stay close through the storm instead of being scattered by it.

Why Panic Can Feel Like It Comes From Nowhere

One of the strangest things about panic is how often it arrives without a story attached. There's no clear reason, nothing you can point to, just the alarm going off in the middle of an ordinary moment.

In an earlier piece, I wrote about panic as an attachment alarm rather than a fear response. Panic isn't your brain asking "am I in danger?" It's an old, loud signal built to maintain connection, telling you that you're disconnected right now, or convinced that disconnection is about to happen. That system, which researchers call PANIC/GRIEF, runs on different chemistry than fear does and directly affects your breathing, heart rate, and pain sensitivity, which is why the alarm shows up as a full-body event rather than just a thought.

What I want to get into here is a different question. Why does the alarm so often go off with no obvious trigger? Why does it feel like it's coming from nowhere?

Two kinds of attention

I think part of the answer has to do with how the two halves of the brain handle information differently, an idea the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has spent much of his career working out.

His argument isn't the old, oversimplified version you may have heard, that the left brain does logic and the right brain does creativity. McGilchrist's case is that the two hemispheres aren't divided by subject matter at all. They're divided by the kind of attention each one pays to the world. Both hemispheres are involved in most of what the brain does. They just interact with experience in different ways.

The right hemisphere takes in the whole picture at once: context, relationship, body state, the things that are true but haven't been put into words yet. It's comfortable holding something ambiguous without rushing to resolve it. The left hemisphere works differently. It wants the explicit, the categorized, the already-known. It's fast and confident, and according to McGilchrist, it doesn't know what it doesn't know. If something doesn't fit a category it already has, the left hemisphere tends to filter it out rather than sit with the uncertainty.

McGilchrist also argues that the right hemisphere is more closely tied to the body, to reading relational and emotional cues, and to intense emotional states in general, especially the harder ones like fear and distress.

A signal with nowhere to go

Put those two pieces together and it starts to make sense how you can know something and not know it at the same time.

It's entirely possible for your right hemisphere to pick up on something real: a shift in someone's tone, a withdrawal, a relationship that's fraying, a sense that you're more alone in a room full of people than you should be. All of that can register well before it can be put into words or sorted into a category the left hemisphere will accept. If the left hemisphere can't find a clean, explicit story for what's being sensed, it may not integrate the signal at all. The information doesn't vanish. It just doesn't make it into the version of events you're consciously telling yourself.

So the body notices something and signals it, but the signal has no way into the ordinary channel of thought and language. This might be part of why Freud paid such close attention to slips of the tongue, words that come out unintended and seem out of place, and to dream interpretation, even though he wouldn't have described it in these terms. Both were attempts to reach content that was present but blocked from conscious, verbal access. The PANIC/GRIEF system doesn't need permission from your conscious narrative to act. If the felt sense of disconnection is strong enough and the explicit story isn't catching up to it, the alarm keeps escalating until it's loud enough that you can't ignore it. That's one way to understand why panic so often hits with no obvious trigger. The trigger was there. It just didn't pass through the part of the brain that explains things to you in words.

Why this matters for treatment

This is a contested area of neuroscience. McGilchrist's broader claims about the hemispheres have real critics, and some argue he overstates how cleanly these functions divide. So know that this isn't settled fact.

But the narrower point, that something can be accurately sensed in the body and in relationship before it's consciously articulated, fits well with what's already known about how the PANIC/GRIEF system works. It doesn't wait for you to have a sentence ready. It acts on what's felt, not on what's been said yet.

That has a practical implication. If the original signal never passed through the part of you built to name, define, and explain things in words, then reassuring yourself in that same verbal mode is less likely to help than something that can reach the signal where it actually lives. You can tell someone, accurately, that there's no danger in the room, and it can still miss the point, because the alarm was never about the room. This is a big part of why somatic and body-based approaches tend to reach panic in a way that talking alone doesn't. The work isn't just building a better explanation. It's helping the part of you that senses things before it can name them learn, slowly, that it's not as alone as it fears, and that it now has more capacity to handle grief and aloneness than it did back when it first learned to be afraid of them.

Reference notes: McGilchrist's claims about hemispheric attention styles, the right hemisphere's role in holding ambiguity and context, the left hemisphere's tendency toward premature categorization and closure, and the right hemisphere's closer relationship to bodily and relational awareness, come from his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World and his 2021 follow-up The Matter with Things. These claims are influential but not uncontested. Michael Spezio, a psychologist at Scripps College, published a critical assessment in 2019, "McGilchrist and hemisphere lateralization: a neuroscientific and metaanalytic assessment," in the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior, arguing that recent meta-analyses do not support the sweeping, oppositional picture of hemispheric difference McGilchrist describes. The connection between this framework and panic attacks specifically is my own synthesis, drawn from putting McGilchrist's model of attention alongside the PANIC/GRIEF research of Jaak Panksepp covered in the companion piece, not a claim McGilchrist has made himself.

Panic Attacks Aren't About Fear. They're About Being Left.

Most people describe a panic attack the same way. It felt like dying. Like the room was closing in. Like something terrible was about to happen. So we treat panic like a fear problem. We teach breathing exercises, we challenge catastrophic thoughts, we tell the nervous system "you are safe right now," and sometimes that helps.

But it doesn't always help. I think that's because we're answering the wrong question. Panic isn't your brain asking "am I in danger?" It's an alert. An old, loud signal whose entire job is to maintain connection, by telling you, urgently, that you are disconnected right now or convinced that disconnection is about to happen.

Two different alarm systems

Your brain has more than one way to sound an alarm, and they're not the same circuit doing the same job at different volumes.

FEAR is the system that responds to a predator, a car swerving into your lane, a hand on a hot stove (by the way when something is all caps it means it’s a label for a brain system, when it’s not it means it is labeling an emotional feeling). It runs through the amygdala, it's fast, and it's built for immediate physical threat. This is the system most anxiety treatment is designed to address.

PANIC is different, and researchers actually call it PANIC/GRIEF, because it's one system with two faces. It runs a separate route from FEAR, through deep midbrain structures up to the anterior cingulate cortex, and it isn't regulated by the same threat chemistry. It runs largely on your body's own opioid system, the same chemistry involved in bonding and the comfort of closeness. When that opioid supply drops, the alarm goes off.

PANIC/GRIEF is unusual among the seven basic emotion systems in that its name captures two distinct phases of feeling. When panic does not result in feeling secure in connection or attachment again, or we have given up hope of that happening, our system collapses into the other side of that coin: an experience of grief. Grief is what it feels like when connection is already lost. It's the helplessness, the pain of isolation, the collapse that comes when there's nothing left to do about it. The feelings of panic come before that. PANIC's job isn't to cause us to brace for danger. It's to sound the alarm loudly enough, and urgently enough, that connection gets restored before it's lost for good. A panic attack is your system raising every biological and emotional signal it has, fast, because as far as it's concerned, the only thing standing between you and that collapse is whether the alarm works.

This is the same pattern researchers have long described in young mammals separated from a caregiver. First an active, distressed protest: calling out, searching, trying to restore contact. Only later, if reconnection doesn't come, a collapse into something quieter and more despairing. Panic is the protest call. It exists to bring someone back, or to bring you back to yourself, before the despair sets in.

This is also why a panic attack so often doesn't match the size of whatever triggered it. You're not overreacting to a small thing or having symptoms out of nowhere. A fast, old part of your brain has registered that the helplessness of isolation might be coming, and it's throwing everything it has at preventing that outcome, before you've even had time to name what's happening.

What "disconnection" actually means here

Surprisingly, the PANIC/GRIEF system doesn't only fire when someone physically leaves the room. It fires on a prediction (remember, the brain is a prediction machine, as neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms has argued), and what it's predicting is whether GRIEF is about to arrive.

Underneath every panic attack is a fast, mostly unconscious assessment running on three things at once. A memory of what that helpless, isolated collapse has felt like before. A prediction about whether it's about to happen again right now. And a read on both yourself and the other person: whether you can survive being without them, whether they're still actually with you, whether this is the moment you finally fall into that state you already know.

That's why panic can show up in places that have nothing to do with relationships on the surface. A work presentation. A crowded store. A plane. What's actually being evaluated underneath isn't your presenting skills, the room, or the plane. It's closer to: "if this goes badly, will I end up alone with no way to fix it, and has that helplessness happened to me before?" If your history has taught your nervous system what that collapse feels like, your brain doesn't wait for it to arrive. It panics early, trying to head it off, because heading it off is the whole point of the system.

What's happening in your body

This system has a different chemical signature than fear does, and that's part of why fear-based treatment doesn't always land.

Where the FEAR system runs largely on CRF, norepinephrine, and the threat-detection chemistry of the amygdala, the PANIC/GRIEF system runs primarily on the brain's own opioids, along with oxytocin and prolactin, the same chemicals involved in bonding and the comfort of closeness. In animal studies, giving opioids is the single most effective way to quiet a separated infant's distress calls. That tells you what the alarm is actually built to respond to. Not threat reduction. Reconnection. It goes off when that opioid-driven sense of closeness drops, and it shuts off when closeness is restored, not when danger passes.

Here's the piece that explains what a panic attack actually feels like in the body. This circuit doesn't stop at producing an emotional signal. It directly regulates breathing, heart rate, and pain sensitivity as part of its basic function, and its territory overlaps with structures that also drive the body's fear and arousal chemistry, including norepinephrine. So when this alarm fires, it doesn't stay contained to "I feel disconnected." It recruits your sympathetic nervous system, the same system responsible for fight-or-flight, and that's where the racing heart, the shallow breathing, the sweating, and the trembling come from. The alert has to be loud enough, physically, to actually move you or someone else to act. A quiet signal doesn't restore connection. A racing heart and a flood of adrenaline-like chemistry does, because it's built to be impossible to ignore.

This is also why a panic attack can feel indistinguishable from a heart attack or a respiratory emergency. It isn't your imagination and it isn't "just anxiety." Your sympathetic nervous system has activated for real, your heart rate has climbed for real, your breathing has changed for real. The alarm is bodily because it has to be. A signal whose entire purpose is to summon connection back doesn't work if it's subtle.

The old proof: two problems, two drugs

Long before anyone had mapped this circuitry, clinicians stumbled onto evidence that panic and anxiety are actually two different problems, by accident, through a drug that only fixed one of them.

In 1960, a psychiatrist named Donald Klein was working at Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York, treating patients with severe anxiety attacks and agoraphobia. He was testing imipramine, one of the first antidepressants, which had only been introduced a few years earlier. What he found surprised him. Imipramine stopped the panic attacks themselves, often within weeks. But it didn't touch something else these patients were still carrying: the fear of having another attack. That anticipatory dread, and the avoidance behavior built around it, the not going to the store, the not getting on the plane, stuck around long after the attacks had stopped. It took a different kind of medication, an anti-anxiety drug, to work on that part.

Klein published this finding in 1962, and he called his method "pharmacological dissection." The logic was simple. If one drug stops the attacks and a different drug is needed for the fear of the attacks, you're probably not looking at one problem with two symptoms. You're looking at two different mechanisms that happen to sit next to each other. That observation eventually helped separate panic disorder from generalized anxiety disorder in psychiatric diagnosis, decades before anyone could point to the separate neurochemistry behind it.

It's a striking piece of history to sit next to everything above. Clinicians noticed, just from watching patients respond to medication, that panic and anxiety about panic were not the same thing and did not resolve through the same channel. That's the same split this whole piece has been describing, just discovered from the outside in, one prescription at a time, instead of from the inside out through brain circuitry.

Why this changes what helps

If panic is fundamentally a fear response, the treatment is exposure and reassurance. Prove to your nervous system that the room is not, in fact, dangerous.

If panic is fundamentally an attempt to maintain connection, the treatment has to focus on that. It's not enough to convince your nervous system that the plane won't crash, and it's not enough to slow the breathing once the sympathetic nervous system has already taken over, although that can help in the moment. The deeper work has two parts. One is with the prediction itself: what your body believes will happen, and what memory that belief is built on. The other is with your capacity to actually tolerate the thing panic is working so hard to avoid. As long as grief feels unsurvivable, the system has every reason to keep sounding the alarm rather than risk falling into it. Part of the work is building enough safety and support that helplessness and isolation, if they do show up, are no longer the catastrophe your body believes them to be.

This is part of why somatic and trauma informed approaches often reach panic in a way that pure cognitive reassurance doesn't. You can't think your way out of a prediction your body learned before you had words for it, and you can't think your way into trusting that grief, if it comes, is survivable. That trust tends to get built through relationship, through the body, through slowly proving to your nervous system, in small doses, that the helplessness it's so afraid of isn't the end of you.

The question underneath the question

If you've had a panic attack and wondered why "you're safe" never really helped, this might be why. Your nervous system wasn't asking about safety from harm. It was trying, urgently, to keep you from falling into a helplessness it’s known before.

That's not a flaw in your wiring. It's an old, well-intentioned system working as hard as it can to keep you from a pain it has every reason to believe is coming, sometimes in situations where that pain was never actually on the way. Understanding that doesn't make the panic disappear. But it changes what you're treating. You're not just talking your body out of a false alarm. You're slowly teaching it that even if grief came, you wouldn't be as alone in it as it fears.

An important note: most current clinical guidelines still treat panic attacks as an exaggerated fear response centered on the amygdala. The separation based view laid out here is a real, published alternative within affective neuroscience, but not something every researcher or clinician would sign off on. I find it more clinically useful for a lot of what shows up in the room, but it is a minority position within panic disorder research specifically, even though the PANIC/GRIEF system itself is well established as distinct from FEAR in the broader affective neuroscience literature.

References Used for this: The distinction between the FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF systems, including their separate neuroanatomy (amygdala and dorsal periaqueductal gray for FEAR; anterior cingulate, bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, and periaqueductal gray for PANIC/GRIEF) and their different core chemistry (CRF and norepinephrine for FEAR; endogenous opioids, oxytocin, and prolactin for PANIC/GRIEF), comes from the affective neuroscience research tradition built by Jaak Panksepp. It's summarized well in a 2020 paper by Gianni Francesetti, Antonio Alcaro, and Michele Settanni, "Panic disorder: attack of fear or acute attack of solitude? Convergences between affective neuroscience and phenomenological-Gestalt perspective," published in Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process and Outcome. The protest and despair pattern in separated young mammals draws on John Bowlby's attachment research. The role of the PANIC/GRIEF circuit in directly regulating breathing, heart rate, and pain sensitivity, and the finding that opioids are the most effective known way to quiet separation distress calls in animal studies, are also drawn from that same research tradition. The sympathetic nervous system's role in producing panic attack symptoms such as rapid heart rate, shallow breathing, and sweating is well established in the clinical panic disorder literature more broadly. The imipramine finding comes from Klein DF, Fink M, "Psychiatric reaction patterns to imipramine," American Journal of Psychiatry, 1962;119:432-438, with later work on benzodiazepines and anticipatory anxiety summarized in Zitrin, Woerner, and Klein, 1981. Mark Solms's work on the brain as a predictive system draws on his 2021 book The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness.

Your Eyes Are Talking to Your Nervous System

Most people think about their eyes as the tools they use to see. What they don’t usually think about is that their eyes are part of their brain. Literally. In utero, the eyes separate from the same brain tissue that becomes everything else. The connection never goes away.

My friend and colleague, Lillian Giocondo, turned me on to following the Biology of Trauma podcast, and a recent episode with neuro-optometrist Dr. Bryce Appelbaum grabbed my attention. Not because the information was fringe or surprising exactly, but because it put language to something we work with in Somatic Experiencing all the time.

In SE, we pay a lot of attention to the eyes.

We’ll sometimes ask a client to let their gaze soften. To notice what’s in their peripheral field without turning their head. To slowly move their eyes in different directions and notice what happens in the body. Or even to track our fingers and notice when the eye sight glitches. These aren’t quirky add-ons to the work. They’re rooted in the same biology Dr. Appelbaum describes.

Two-thirds of the neurons entering the brain come through the eyes. That’s not a small number. Your nervous system is constantly reading visual input to decide whether you’re safe or in danger. And one of the clearest signals it looks for is whether your peripheral vision is open.

When the nervous system shifts into fight or flight, peripheral vision collapses. The world narrows. You stop seeing what’s beside you and start locking onto what’s in front of you. This is your threat response working exactly as designed. The problem is that for many people who carry stored trauma or chronic stress, that narrowing becomes the default. The tunnel becomes baseline.

Dr. Appelbaum describes this as the body adapting to a tunneled state. The brain stops expecting wide vision. It reorganizes. And over time, people describe feeling like they’re looking through paper towel rolls. Which is just their eyes staying in a survival state.

In SE, one type of eye work we do is called, “orienting.” When a client can slowly, voluntarily move their eyes around the room and allow their eyes stop and focus on what they see, that’s the nervous system checking in with reality and finding it safe. The body follows. Shoulders often drop. Breath often comes in a little more easily.

Dr. Appelbaum introduces three simple exercises in the episode: peripheral pointing, eye push-ups, and eye stretches. Peripheral pointing involves fixing your gaze on a point in the room and then noticing, without moving your eyes, what else is out there. Pointing to it. Then checking. It rebuilds the body’s sense of being in space rather than locked into a single threat point.

These exercises build the same capacity we’re reaching for in SE. The ability to be in a body that can take in more of the world, to have more capacity not just tolerance. A nervous system that isn’t white-knuckling.

If you’ve ever wondered why we slow things down in trauma therapy, why we ask what you notice in your body or what catches your eye in the room, or to stop and feel into your eyes, this episode offers one clear answer. The eyes are not passive recorders. They’re active participants in whether you feel okay right now.

Worth a listen.

Why Virtues Are a Symptom, Not a Goal

Nobody argues with virtues. Call someone joyful, generous, or hardworking and they'll be admired. Call someone envious or manipulative and they'll get side-eyed and avoided. Virtues are the kind of thing everyone agrees on, which is why we rarely stop to ask what actually produces them.

The temptation is to treat virtue as the goal itself. Just be more patient. Just be more grateful. It's a little like trying to keep a plant looking healthy without knowing anything about soil, water, roots, or light. The leaves might look fine for a while. They won't stay that way.

So what actually causes a virtue to happen?

One word: regulation.

When emotions can be felt, expressed, and managed with some maturity, when the nervous system isn't constantly in survival mode, the psychological and physical systems we carry around tend to work closer to how they're designed to. Prosocial behavior, empathy, patience, honesty — these show up more naturally in a regulated nervous system (Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004; Gross & John, 2003). Virtues, in this frame, are downstream. They're a symptom of a system that's working, not a discipline you bolt on top of one that isn't (when that happens, people tend to look good but feel slimy or performative).

Which raises the obvious question: what causes dysregulation in the first place?

A lot of things, but a few big ones:

The world we live in. Many of us are sorted into communities of relative sameness, insulated by race, class, and geography from people whose lives look very different from ours. That insulation has a cost. Proximity to need tends to stir something in us. It activates care. When we're buffered from it, that activation never happens, and something in our moral and emotional life stays dormant (Putnam, 2000; Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). Add to that an entire industry built around distraction and consumption, engineered to fill the emotional gaps rather than address them (APA, 2023).

How we were taught to handle feelings, or weren't. Many of us grew up in homes, schools, and cultures that didn't model emotional fluency particularly well. Not because people were bad, but because they didn't learn it either.

The hard things that happened to us. Adverse experiences, especially early ones, shape the nervous system's baseline (Felitti et al., 1998; Schore, 2003). Trauma isn't just between the ears; it's in our body and our actions (van der Kolk, 2014).

None of this is to say that gratitude journals are worthless. They're not. Wood, Froh, and Geraghty (2010) found real benefit in gratitude-based practices for wellbeing. But if your nervous system is dysregulated, you're trying to harvest from soil that hasn't been tended to yet.

So before the habit tracker, before the morning routine, before the virtue you're trying to practice into existence, ask what's underneath. Real change usually starts there.

References

APA. (2023). Stress in America 2023. American Psychological Association.

Felitti, V. J., et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245–258.

Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon & Schuster.

Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self. W. W. Norton.

Tangney, J. P., Baumeister, R. F., & Boone, A. L. (2004). High self-control predicts good adjustment, less pathology, better grades, and interpersonal success. Journal of Personality, 72(2), 271–324.

van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. Allen Lane.

Wood, A. M., Froh, J. J., & Geraghty, A. W. A. (2010). Gratitude and well-being: A review and theoretical integration. Clinical Psychology Review, 30(7), 890–905.

The Art of Setting a Boundary: In Parenting, Relationships, and at Work

One of the more painful things I witness in my office is older parents who have been cut off by their adult children. They sit across from me genuinely confused, not always blameless, but often without a clear understanding of what happened or why. In many of these cases, the boundary was never really communicated so much as it was simply enacted. Distance replaced dialogue. And when words were used, they tended to arrive as accusations rather than honest expressions of personal need.

These situations are almost always more complicated than they appear from any single vantage point. The adult child who stepped back likely didn't arrive at that decision overnight. The failure, more often than not, wasn't that nothing was said. It was that the communication never found the right language, and eventually the only move that felt available was withdrawal.

A few years ago, "boundaries" escaped the clinical world and landed in everyday conversation. On balance that's been a good thing. A lot of people found language for something they'd been living without words for: their own limits, their own identity, their right to protect their energy and time. But when a concept goes wide, it tends to lose nuance. What I see now is the word being used as a weapon rather than a tool, a way of managing or punishing others rather than honestly describing oneself. A boundary delivered as a verdict is not a boundary in any clinically meaningful sense. It's a wall dressed up in therapeutic language.

A boundary, properly understood, is a statement about your own limitations, not a judgment about someone else's character. When you set one, two things need to happen. First, be honest with yourself about why you need it, not why the other person is difficult or wrong, but what in you requires this particular limit. Second, when you communicate it, the other person needs to understand that this is about your capacity, not their worth.

This matters because being told to keep your distance activates something old and deep in most people, a sense of being cast out. That's a shame response, and many people who tend to provoke limits in others already carry a long history of being pulled away from. When a boundary lands without context or ownership, it confirms every painful story they already believe about themselves. Naming the limit as yours lowers the volume on that judgment and keeps the conversation human rather than punitive. This is especially important when their is a power difference (like when you’re the parent and you’re having to set a boundary with a child — young or old or when you are at a higher status in the company).

A former supervisor of mine used to say that boundaries don't cause change, but they are sometimes needed. Connection is what causes change. I've found that to be true. A limit, set well, can create the conditions for something better. But it is not itself the thing that transforms a relationship. If the boundary becomes the destination rather than a waypoint, the possibility of real change tends to close off.

Our culture has made it easy to cut off and call it health. Sometimes that's the right call. But forgiveness, repair, and the slow renegotiation of relationships are also forms of health, and harder ones. Somewhere in every estrangement there were probably moments where an honestly-owned limit might have changed the trajectory. That's worth considering before you decide how to use the word.

Your Body Knows Before You Do

There is a moment most of us have had. You walk into a room and something feels off. You cannot explain it. You just know. Or you meet someone new and feel a pull of distrust before they have said anything worth distrusting. Or you hear a song from your childhood and feel something in your chest long before your mind catches up to what that feeling is.

This is not a glitch. It is how you were built.

Our bodies process the world before our brains have a chance to think about it. Researchers like Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms have spent decades studying how this works, and what they found is striking. Feeling comes first. Thinking comes second. By the time you have words for an experience, your nervous system has already run the numbers.

This matters a lot in therapy.

Morality Lives in the Body Too

Here is something even more surprising. It is not just emotions that work this way. Your sense of right and wrong does too.

A researcher named Jonathan Haidt showed that when people make moral judgments, they usually feel their conclusion first and then explain it second. The explanation comes after the fact. It is the brain's way of making sense of a reaction that already happened below the surface.

One of the emotions most tied to this is disgust. Disgust started as a survival tool. It kept our ancestors away from spoiled food or disease. But over time, culture and religion borrowed that same feeling and used it to mark boundaries around behavior and identity. Things that cross those lines do not just seem wrong. They feel wrong. In the gut. In the body. Right now.

This is why moral and religious formation is so powerful. And so hard to change through conversation alone.

What This Means in the Counseling Room

If your deepest beliefs and reactions live in your body, then working only with your thoughts will only get you so far. Talking about a problem is useful. But some things need more than talk.

Think about a person raised in a community with very strict rules about sex, purity, or belonging. The rules were taught in words. But they were absorbed through experiences, through community, through what got praised and what got shamed. The body learned what was safe and what was dangerous. That learning sits beneath language. You cannot just think your way out of it.

This is why body-aware therapy can help people in ways that talk therapy alone sometimes cannot. When a therapist pays attention to what is happening in your body, not just what you are saying, they are working closer to where the original learning happened. That is where change is possible.

The goal is not to get rid of your formation. It is to understand it well enough that you can choose how to carry it going forward.

Nothing Is Wrong With You

If you have ever felt stuck, or noticed that you understand something in your head but still cannot seem to shift it in your gut, you are not broken. You are not weak. You are human.

Your body learned what it learned because it was trying to keep you safe. The nervous system does not forget easily because forgetting would be dangerous. That is a feature, not a bug.

But it does mean that healing often requires going somewhere deeper than insight. It means feeling things in the body, slowly and safely, with someone who knows how to guide that process.

At Analog Counseling, we take the body seriously in our work. Not because it is trendy, but because the research says it matters and because, honestly, your gut knew that long before you read this post.

Interested in working with a therapist who integrates body-aware approaches like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing? We would love to connect. Reach out to learn more about our team.

The Empathic Machine: What Your AI Therapist Can and Can't Do

There is a good chance you have already done it. Typed something painful into an AI LLM at midnight. Described a hard conversation with your partner, a spiral of anxiety, a grief you couldn't quite name. And received something back that felt surprisingly helpful. Insightful. Validating while also softly challenging. Organized. Warm, even. And it was free or relatively low cost.

You are not wrong that something real happened there. The question worth asking is what, exactly.

AI tools are genuinely good at certain things that matter. They don't judge. They don't get tired. They don't bring their own bad day into the conversation. They can reflect your experience back to you in a way that helps you feel less alone with it and informed, and for many people that is meaningful, sometimes even revelatory. If you have spent your life feeling like your emotional experience was too much, too confusing, or too shameful to say out loud, finding something that receives it without flinching has real value.

But here is what is worth understanding about the limits, not to discourage you from using these tools, but to help you use them honestly.

Your nervous system is a social organ. It was not designed to regulate itself in isolation. It was designed to regulate in relationship with other nervous systems. When you feel genuinely safe with another person, something biological is happening: your heart rate shifts, your breathing changes, something in the quality of their voice and presence signals to your body that the threat is over. This is not a metaphor. It is physiology. And it happens between bodies, not between a body and a server.

The AI can say calming things. It cannot send the signal your nervous system is actually waiting for, because it has no nervous system of its own.

There is something deeper here too. The therapists and thinkers who have studied what actually changes people suggest that transformation tends to happen not when we feel perfectly understood, but when we encounter someone who is genuinely other than us. Someone who can be surprised by us, moved by us, occasionally wrong about us in ways that have to be repaired. Someone who is, in a word, real. Who has their own limitations, their own interior life, their own skin in the game.

The AI has no skin in the game. It cannot be changed by you. It cannot be hurt or delighted or caught off guard. Its patience is not patience in the human sense. It is architecture. And a relationship with no stakes on one side is a particular kind of companionship, useful in its own way, but not quite what the deepest part of you is looking for.

What the AI does well is help you find language for experience, organize your thinking, and lower the threshold for getting care. Think of it as a place to start. The work that changes the nervous system, the self, the patterns that have run longest and hardest, that work happens in the presence of another person who is also, in some meaningful sense, on the line.

If something in you already knew that, you were right.

What’s the first session with michael like???

Starting therapy can feel like a big step. In this short video, Michael walks through what a first session with him is actually like. If you’ve ever wondered what to expect, this is a helpful place to start.