Building Capacity for Aliveness: Joy, Peace, Love and the Nervous System

In healing work, there’s often a strong focus on uprooting the pain of the past—and not enough attention on what’s working well in one’s life or on orienting towards joy. Insights and breakthroughs are meaningful, but to sustain real change, those shifts need to be embodied.

This means learning to tolerate aliveness and also to move with the biologically wired dance of expansion and contraction, connection and disconnection.

For the purpose of this blog, I define aliveness as connection to your core self—your essence, authenticity, and true nature. Trauma disconnects us from the innate blueprint within each of us that holds our capacity to thrive and live the life we’re meant to live. Our aliveness knows how to heal and reorganize us from the inside, just as it once knew how to grow your body.

Expansion Through Reconnecting With Your Innate Blueprint

In the healing process, clients often get brief tastes of this blueprint of aliveness. When we make space to experience exactly what’s present—perhaps a part that loves your sister, a part that feels furious with her, and another that feels guilty for having that anger—something profound can happen.

There is no fixing, only spaciousness. An internal reorganization begins—an alignment with self and heart. It is deeply freeing to land back in our true nature after spending so much energy managing our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in order to be accepted and loved.

Clients often feel liberated by these moments and want to hold on to them. As my NARM teacher, Dr. Laurence Heller, says, “There’s no need—it’s who you are.” And the veils return. Expansion is naturally followed by contraction.

Waves of Connection–Disconnection

In my own trauma healing—nearly a decade of intensive training and personal sessions—there came a time when I sometimes woke up feeling a spontaneous bubbling joy and aliveness, only to crash for half the day. I had to learn to tolerate aliveness. I am still riding waves but they are smaller.

I’d like to offer some psychoeducation for my clients to normalize the natural rhythm of expansion and contraction that often unfolds in our work.

This pattern is a normal and expected part of a session.

For example, a client may feel protest toward a self-absorbed mother—energy rises, a sense of self emerges—only to then contract into guilt. Another client might experience comfort, joy, and ease for the first time in years, followed later by a shutdown accompanied by the belief, “Don’t get too happy—it will hurt more if I’m disappointed.”

This process also unfolds over time.

After two months, a client reported less shame and more energy, with some contraction. By four months, he felt greater wholeness and strength. At six months, he became dysregulated without an external trigger and was concerned he had lost that stability.

As we explored this, he recognized subtle shifts—advocating for himself more and feeling less guarded. The expansion had brought deeper layers of early trauma to process. Weeks later, he felt more stable and whole, with a growing sense of deservedness and peace, even as contraction still arose at times.

Why Expansion Can Feel So Challenging

When we’ve lived in contraction or fear for a long time, opening to goodness can actually feel unsafe—like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Feeling fully alive can also be threatening because it risks breaking attachment to the psychological parent we carry into adulthood. In NARM, this is called the core dilemma: connection to self and authenticity versus disconnection from self in order to be loved and accepted. I work with this bind frequently.

Just today, a client said, “I want to be okay with what I think and feel.” When I asked what that would be like, she replied, “I have no idea.” When we explored what was in the way, she said, “If I did that, people wouldn’t stick around.”

Dr. Peter Levine, developer of Somatic Experiencing (SE) speaks about the natural rhythm of expansion and contraction—it’s how life moves. The goal isn’t to avoid contraction, but to learn how to flow with it.

For many, early trauma wires the brain into survival and hypervigilance. Even when things finally feel calm, the nervous system continues scanning for danger, trying to protect against the pain of what might happen next.

Real change takes time. The mind may understand, but the body needs repetition. As Dr. Aline Lapierre, creator of NeuroAffective Touch says: the mind can draw the map, but the body has to build the road.

We are wired to have needs, to reach for needs, but caregiver wasn’t available. When the internal platform for taking in goodness wasn’t built, there’s nowhere inside for it to land. The result is a painful loop of I want, I need and pushing it away when it does come or be a giver in the hopes of getting.  In the work, we slowly build tolerance for receiving—taking in small bits of goodness, so those pathways can form.

How Do We Build Capacity for Expansion?

I’ll name just a few key elements.

Unbrace the body

Those of us who have early trauma have a lot of freeze in the body. So moving the body and opening up the joints where emotions and activations are held helps, but be careful not to open up too much too fast. The ankles are important as they are rich in proprioceptors that help orient us in space and time—here and now, not back there and then when things were frightening.  With my clients, we may move feet, ankles, hips, spine, arms, clavicles (gateway to heart) and cranial base (connects mind with body and heart). 

I learned from Dr. Aline LaPierre that we can’t take in care unless we can yield to support. So I invite clients to soften into the support of their chair.

Focus on what's working and on simple Joys

From an SE perspective, each time we orient toward safety, pleasure, and what is working, the nervous system learns that the present moment is not dangerous. With repetition, this leads to a tipping point where regulation and ease become more available.

Interrupt hypervigilance and build safety

Early trauma wires the nervous system to scan for danger. To build new pathways for safety, we practice breaking that pattern. “In this moment” is a simple, powerful phrase that helps anchor attention in the present—away from future “what ifs” and past fear. Even staying present for ten seconds matters.

Titrate expansion

We don’t want to overwhelm the system with too much joy, freedom, or relaxation. Capacity grows when we feel the container of the body that can hold these states—often by sensing the outline or boundaries of the body. Too much expansion without containment can lead to overwhelm or collapse.

Tolerating Uncomfortable Sensations 

This is for those who have tools to regulate:  Instead of scrolling or running for food, you might consider a Somatic Experiencing teaching: When the nervous system reaches a threshold where we can hold intensity—because we have enough internal container to feel fear, anger, confusion, or anxiety—and we stay present with what’s arising, physiology naturally discharges and settles. 

A Note on Womb and Preverbal Trauma

With very early trauma (my case), contraction lives deep in the viscera—within connective tissue and organs. It’s reflexive, like an amoeba being poked: the system automatically pulls away. Working here requires exceptional slowness, safety, and respect for the body’s protective intelligence.

I hope you found something useful in this blog. Healing is not a straight line toward feeling more alive—it is a living rhythm of opening and closing, expansion and contraction.   We slowly build the internal structures that allow goodness to land. We orient ourselves to what's good in our lives.  Aliveness becomes less threatening and more familiar. We can come home to ourselves and know our true nature as joy, peace and love. 

Brianna Lia Ho, MBA, BBA-PSYC, is a NARM Master, Neuro-Affective Touch, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. She's also in an MA Integrative Psychology program. She's trained in other somatic modalities as well as in spiritual counseling with One-Spirit Interfaith in NYC. She works with clients internationally via Zoom. www.Essence-Alive.com

Disclaimer: Please note that I am not a psychotherapist or mental health counselor. The info above is not a substitute for licensed medical, psychological or psychiatric help.