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How Trauma Informed & Nervous System Informed Look, Side By Side.

Writer's picture: Shannon EastmanShannon Eastman

Co-authored by Roseanne Reilly and Shannon Eastman


We all navigate life from a place on the Nervous System Continuum. Nervous System Informed care will look and feel different depending where on that continuum you have spent the most time over the course of your life, and where you operate from today. 



Nervous System Continuum
Nervous System Continuum

Where you live on the continuum matters, because this inner state directly informs your lived experience, and your ability to effectively connect with other people. 


Here’s an example of how your inner state directs your outer world.



How Your Inner State Informs Your Day-to-Day Experience
How Your Inner State Informs Your Day-to-Day Experience

Hi-Res PDF of this image is here >




Nervous system-informed care is a universal language that spans the Nervous System Continuum. 


Engaging it while occupying the far left side of the spectrum will look and feel a lot like Nervous System Restoration. We are restoring the Nervous System back into balance after a long (longggggg) time locked into survival mode. This initial first stage can take up to 12 weeks with an experienced and qualified nervous system practitioner, before freeing you to move away from survival mode. 


As one moves out of survival mode and into Dysregulation state, we are inside a Meet & Greet with the felt sense of self. In this place on the continuum, we can put up internal scaffolding to support our Nervous System to recalibrate inside this new operating system, ‘Dysregulation’.


Nervous System Informed approaches focus on creating, establishing and then optimising both external and internal resources. This approach expands one’s capacity to more easily engage challenges and set backs. It facilitates a person to move deeper into states of leadership, clarity and imagination. All of this can profoundly influence one’s physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing.  


For people operating from a place of Self-Regulation on the Nervous System Continuum, Nervous System Informed Care gives you wings, enables you to scale, and create a collective impact.  


Trauma Informed Care By Contrast


People from a high stress childhood, ongoing stress career, and now in a body over the age of 40, will almost always carry evidence of this chronic-stress based trauma in the body, similar to how a stroke leaves a lesion. 


People in this state will unknowingly have a nervous system locked into the red zone; survival mode. This is a setting that you can’t turn off with the mind alone and yet permeates every area of life. It propels continuous crises inside the body, and out. It will continue to perpetuate crises until some fateful event like a spectacular crash and burn, or a complete burn-out, takes place, forcing the person to stop and make a change. 

In these moments, trauma-informed care will be the lens to understand the degree of physiological trauma held in the body, while nervous system-informed care will be used to support the person’s recovery. (Nervous System Restoration specifically for those ready to come out of survival mode.)


Trauma Informed allows us to understand the physiological impact of the past that we’ve long forgotten.  Nervous System Informed is both how we recover and heal from that past, and how we proactively expand our capacity to greet life’s challenges, strengthen resilience and protect our physiology from current and future stressors.




Hi-Res PDF of this image is here >




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Contact

Dungarvan, Co. Waterford, Ireland​

shannon at nb3 dot io

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