58. Q&A: How to Navigate a Relationship Ending, Functional Freeze & Nervous System Work for Beginners

Written By Brittany Broderick

One of the hardest parts of nervous system work is learning not to assign meaning too quickly to what you feel. Anxiety doesn't always mean danger. Exhaustion doesn't always mean you made the wrong choice. Missing someone doesn't automatically mean you belong with them. And feeling settled after a big life change doesn't mean you should undo the change.


That thread runs through almost every question in this month's Q&A. My hope is that by the end, you have a little more discernment around the difference between what your body is experiencing and the story your mind immediately tells you that experience means.


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Where do I begin with nervous system regulation?

If you're brand new to this work, I don't want you to start by collecting a bunch of regulation techniques. That's one of the reasons people get so overwhelmed by nervous system content in the first place. They have the breathing practices, the tapping, the humming, the cold water, and fifteen saved Instagram posts, but they still don't know how to recognize what's actually happening in their body.


The first skill is awareness, not intervention. We call it tracking, or interoceptive work. Before you ask "how do I calm myself down?", get curious about what your system is actually doing. When anxiety shows up, where do you feel it? Pressure in your chest? Heat in your face? Tightness in your throat, restlessness in your legs, a mind that suddenly speeds up?


This matters with intrusive thoughts too. A mobilized body often produces a mobilized mind. The brain starts scanning and forecasting, searching for an explanation for the urgency that's already happening inside you. That doesn't mean every intrusive thought comes down to your nervous system, and if they're persistent or distressing, please reach out for mental health support. But it does mean that debating the thought may not be the only place to intervene.


A simple place to begin: once or twice a day, when you're relatively okay, pause and ask yourself three things. What do I notice around me? What do I notice inside of me? Does my body have an impulse to move toward anything right now? Maybe it's the light through the window, your feet on the floor, or an urge to stretch your neck. That's enough. Over time, it builds a vocabulary for your body.


Regulation isn't becoming exceptionally skilled at getting back to calm. It's having enough flexibility that stress isn't automatically an emergency, shutdown isn't automatically failure, and you don't abandon yourself every time your state changes. If you're completely new, my free mini course is the easiest place to start.

How do I quiet passenger anxiety when I can't get out of the car?

This is more nuanced than "you don't have control, so you're anxious." Lack of choice absolutely matters, especially if your nervous system has a history of needing to anticipate danger. But there's also a tremendous amount of sensory information coming at you in a moving car. Your eyes are tracking speed and distance, your vestibular system is registering every acceleration and stop, and someone else is making the decisions about where your body goes.


I speak about this from experience. I lost my brother in a car accident when we were in high school, and for a long time I had anxiety in the passenger seat. It's something I've worked through, slowly.


Start by noticing how your body is preparing. Are you gripping the door? Pressing back into the seat? Holding your breath every time someone touches the brakes? Instead of ordering those muscles to relax, give the response some recognition. You might press your feet into the floorboard on purpose for a few seconds, then slowly release some of the pressure. That lets your body feel its own strength and agency instead of treating the bracing as the enemy.


Your visual field matters too. If staring at traffic is escalating things, let your gaze move farther out, toward the horizon or the landscape out the side window. And yes, a slower exhale can help, but use breath as support rather than a command. Nothing makes an anxious person more anxious than believing they're now breathing wrong on top of everything else.


If you're with someone you trust, talk before the drive about what helps. The goal isn't to make the world perfectly predictable. It's to give your nervous system enough manageable experiences that the passenger seat stops automatically meaning "I have no agency and something bad is about to happen."

What helps with functional freeze, and how do I get back to ventral vagal?

Functional freeze has become a popular phrase online, but it isn't a formal diagnosis. Most people use it to describe still functioning on the outside while feeling inhibited, disconnected, or unable to begin on the inside. You're working, caring for children, answering messages, keeping life moving, and you still can't figure out where to begin with folding the laundry.


At that point, more planning can become just another layer of demand. You make a list to organize the list, then a new list because the first one is overwhelming. So I'd work with action before organization. Choose something small enough that your body can experience a beginning, a middle, and an end. Put one dish away. Open one piece of mail. Reply to one email. Then give yourself a few seconds to notice that something actually finished before jumping to the next thing.


Completion matters because overwhelmed systems start to experience life as one giant field of unfinished business. All the tabs are open, and nothing has edges. A little movement first can help too: walk through the room, press your palms into the wall, step outside for a minute.


As for getting back to ventral vagal, I want us to be thoughtful with that language. Ventral vagal is our state of safety and connection, but it isn't the "good" state, with everything else evidence that something went wrong. We need mobilization, rest, protective responses, and connection. A healthy nervous system isn't one that permanently lives in ventral. It's one with flexibility and choice. So instead of asking "how do I get back to ventral?", try asking "what would give me a little more access to connection or agency right now?" Sometimes that's soothing. Sometimes it's gentle movement, contact, rest, expression, or one clear decision. Some states are asking for movement before settling becomes available.

Is the Body-First Healing Program useful if I'm already in SE training?

Yes, because they serve very different purposes. I'm a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner myself, and that three-year training deeply shaped how I understand trauma and the nervous system. But it's a professional training. The Body-First Healing Program is a personal healing program.


You can understand regulation intellectually and still have very little capacity to experience it in your body. You can understand defensive responses clinically and still override your own impulse to say no. You can know what titration and pendulation are and still miss the moment your own system tips from manageable activation into overwhelm.


The program is six months of working with those patterns in your actual life: relationships, capacity, boundaries, agency, shutdown, desire, anger, and the ways your body learned to organize around survival. Many of our Somatic Practitioner Certificate graduates have come back to the program for this reason. The most important foundation for any practitioner is their own nervous system's health and capacity.

Why do I feel burned out after making an aligned choice?

First, if you have the flu, you're sick, and the illness deserves care as an illness. Nervous system language can become unhelpful when we use it to assign meaning to every headache or infection.


But there's a broader part of this question I find fascinating: our expectation that the right decision should feel good right away. You can make a choice that's deeply congruent with who you're becoming and still have an enormous physiological response to it, especially if it changes a relationship, a family system, a home, a job, or a future you spent years organizing your life around.


Your nervous system works with prediction. Even when a situation is no longer right for you, there can be tremendous familiarity inside it. You know the rhythms, your role, where you belong. Changing that introduces uncertainty, and uncertainty is metabolically expensive. There can also be a delayed awareness of how depleted you already were. The body keeps mobilizing through a high-demand season because life requires it, and when the demand shifts, the exhaustion that was already there finally surfaces.


A decision can be right and still cost you something. Grief can accompany integrity. Fear can accompany clarity. Exhaustion doesn't automatically mean you betrayed yourself. So the question becomes less "does this feel good?" and more "when I look at the larger pattern of my life, does this feel true?"

How do I find the strength to go no contact with an ex?

The first thing I'd reframe is the idea that you need to feel strong enough before you do it. If you've decided that distance is necessary, your attachment system may not agree right away. You can know something cognitively and still have a body that wants closeness.


People often assume that if they miss someone badly enough, that longing must hold some profound truth about the relationship. Sometimes it holds information. But longing by itself is not a verdict. Attachment systems are designed to preserve connection. If contact with this person has historically shifted your state, even temporarily, then removing contact can create a very real nervous system protest.


So if no contact is a decision you've made thoughtfully, I wouldn't measure success by whether you stop wanting that person. I'd measure it by whether you can experience the wanting without being governed by it. Support matters enormously here. This isn't the moment to isolate and prove how independent you are. Call a friend. Go somewhere you feel connected to life. Move your body. Write the message somewhere private instead of sending it. Let the urge become a sensation you can observe rather than a command you have to obey.


If the relationship involved abuse, coercion, stalking, or threats, this moves beyond nervous system education and into safety planning. Please reach out for professional, legal, or domestic violence support. But in an ordinary, painful breakup, one of the most freeing things to understand is that missing someone and choosing not to return to them can coexist. The longing isn't false. It just isn't the only truth you have to live with.

A personal update

Someone recently asked why I've said the past few months have been the hardest of my life. David and I are divorced. We were together for fifteen years. We built a family, homes, and a version of the future together, and we have children we both love deeply. There are parts of this story I'll never share publicly, because some things belong to me, some to him, and some to our children.


What I can share is what this season has been like inside of me. I've been discovering how much certainty and grief can exist together. Sometimes grief is simply the body's recognition that something mattered, even when another part of you knows deeply that it's time. And what surprised me most is that I also feel incredibly alive. Not happy every second. Alive in the more honest sense of the word.


For a lot of my adult life, healing was oriented around safety. What I'm finding now is that once you're no longer using all your energy just to survive your life, you become able to ask whether you actually want the life you're living. I've been writing my way through that question every morning, and that writing now has a home: my Substack, [Aligned + Alive](ADD SUBSTACK LINK). New essays arrive every Tuesday.

A gentle reminder

What you feel is real, and it's worth listening to. It just isn't always the whole story. Anxiety, exhaustion, and longing are information, not verdicts. The practice is learning to stay with what your body is experiencing long enough to find out what's actually true.


If you want support in your own nervous system work, you can always join Britt in the Body-First Healing Program.


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This blog and podcast are for educational purposes only and are not a substitute for medical care, therapy, or crisis support. Please reach out to a qualified professional for support with your specific situation.

Brittany Broderick
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57. You Know Better. So Why Does Your Body Still React?