The Art of Regulation: What the Body and Creativity Teach Us About Healing
- Kit Louis
- 19 hours ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 5 hours ago
(Reflections from The Awake Network’s “Nervous System Regulation in Therapy” Summit)
Where the Body Tells the Story Safety and the Nervous System
“Our state creates our story,” Levine (2025) reminded. When the body settles, the mind begins to make new meaning.
The summit opened with an invitation to see the nervous system not as a linear mechanism, but as a living, rhythmic landscape. The polyvagal theory, first introduced by Stephen Porges (2011) and expanded by many trauma-informed practitioners, describes how our autonomic nervous system moves fluidly between three primary states.
In ventral vagal, we experience calm curiosity and connection — the state of “rest, digest, and connect.”
In sympathetic, we mobilize energy to survive: fight, flee, or protect.
In dorsal vagal, the system slows down into collapse — a freeze or shutdown that preserves life when escape seems impossible.
Trauma occurs when the natural rhythm between these states is lost — when the nervous system becomes stuck in defense. Healing, Levine explained, comes through pendulation: “the cycle of contraction and expansion through which consciousness opens again.”
In Somatic Experiencing, therapists don’t go directly into trauma but first cultivate safety, helping clients anchor the opposite experience — sensations of calm or strength — before touching the pain. “Safety,” Levine emphasized, “is what allows the body to go near what was once unbearable.”
As van der Kolk and Sky (2025) noted, “After trauma, the world is experienced with a different nervous system.” The task of therapy is to restore flexibility — the ability to shift between activation and rest, between bracing and release.
The Animals That Live in Us
The Language of Survival
Linda Thai (2025) brought these principles to life with vivid metaphors. The coyote, quick and alert, embodies fight or flight. The possum, collapsing into stillness, reflects dorsal vagal shutdown.
“The possum doesn’t decide to freeze,” she explained. “Its body shuts down to protect life.”
These instinctive patterns, shared across species, are not conscious choices but biological imperatives. Even the polar bear shaking violently after being tranquilized shows the body’s innate wisdom to discharge survival energy once safety returns.
Our neuroception — the body’s pre-conscious scanning for cues of safety or threat — governs these shifts. But when we’ve lived too long in danger, neuroception misreads the world. The body stays braced, even when the threat is gone.
Art-making can reawaken this rhythm. When clients roll clay, tear paper, or repeat gestures, they often complete movements that were once interrupted. As somatic art therapist Cornelia Elbrecht (2018) describes, “The hands find what the mind cannot yet name.” Through this sensory engagement, regulation is not taught — it is remembered.
Co-Regulation
and the Power of Presence
“Safety is the treatment,” Badenoch (2025) affirmed. Her words capture the essence of co-regulation: two nervous systems finding rhythm together. “Simply the presence of a face that’s eager to see you, that’s delighting in you, is healing.”
Through attunement — voice tone, pacing, and genuine regard — the therapist’s calm becomes a bridge for the client’s system. Presence restores what trauma fractured: the capacity to be safely seen.
Even online, this rhythm can be felt. Mischke-Reeds (2025) offered practical ways to maintain co-regulation virtually:
Begin sessions with shared grounding: noticing light, breath, or surroundings.
Track both bodies: breath, shoulders, eyes, voice.
Mirror small movements and pauses.
Name shared moments: “I notice we both just exhaled.”
Encourage tactile grounding: feet pressing into the floor, hands holding an object.
“Presence online,” she reminded, “is less about technology and more about rhythm.” These micro-adjustments cultivate neural synchrony, reassuring the body — even through a screen — that it is not alone.
The Warmth That Holds the Pain
Compassion as Regulation
Empathy helps us feel another’s pain, but compassion sustains us in it. Quaglia (2025) drew a crucial distinction: empathy activates the body’s pain circuits, while compassion engages the caregiving and oxytocin pathways, widening the window of tolerance.
“Compassion doesn’t absorb pain,” he said. “It holds it, with steady care.” Even simple acts — looking at puppies, recalling laughter, sensing tenderness — can spark the physiological state of compassion and expand warmth in the nervous system.
In art therapy, this happens naturally. When therapist and client paint or sculpt together, compassion becomes visible — two rhythms in sync. The artwork itself becomes a third nervous system in the room — a living symbol of containment and trust.
As Malchiodi (2015) reminds, creativity itself is a regulator. “Through imagery and imagination, the body finds safe sensory routes to integrate experience.”
When the Body Learns to Stay
Rewiring Through Creative Experience
“We are always becoming,” Hanson (2025) said, “and the question is whether we guide that process for better or worse.”
He outlined a gentle roadmap for transformation:
Duration — linger in moments of safety a little longer.
Embodiment — feel them fully in the body.
Reward — notice what feels nourishing.
Surrender — let the experience shape you.
“The more we marinate in safety, the more our brain encodes it as home.”
In creative work, this might mean staying with the sound of brush on paper or the exhale that follows a line of colour. Every sensory detail tells the body: you are safe enough to create. Over time, these embodied experiences become new neural pathways — traces of stability and ease.
Coming Home Again and Again
The Art of Returning
Across all the talks, a single message echoed: healing isn’t perfection; it’s returning — returning to the body after dissociation, to curiosity after judgment, to connection after withdrawal.
Van der Kolk and Sky (2025) called this embodied synchrony — how rhythm and shared movement rebuild what trauma once fragmented. Ogden (2025) added that posture itself can become a resource: softening the shoulders, lifting the gaze, turning toward instead of away.
Art-making offers this same pathway home. Each brushstroke or mark is a rehearsal of return — a small act of courage that whispers, I’m here now.
Levine (2025) once said, “The opposite of trauma is an expanded state of being.” And perhaps creativity, when held with safety, is exactly that expansion — a living reminder that life wants to move again.
The Breath Beneath It All
Closing Reflection
Regulation isn’t the absence of stress; it’s the rhythm of returning to safety after activation. It’s how we breathe again after the storm.
As therapists, artists, and humans, our greatest tool is not a method but our presence — a nervous system that quietly says: “I’m here. You can breathe again.”
References
Badenoch, B. (2025). Co-regulation as treatment: How safety and attunement rewire the nervous system [Webinar]. The Awake Network. https://www.regulationandresilience.com
Elbrecht, C. (2018). Healing trauma through guided drawing: A sensorimotor art therapy approach to bilateral body mapping. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Hanson, R. (2025). Neuroplasticity and resilience in the nervous system [Webinar]. The Awake Network. https://www.regulationandresilience.com Levine, P. (2025). Trauma and the nervous system: Foundations for safety, regulation, and healing [Webinar]. The Awake Network. https://www.regulationandresilience.com
Malchiodi, C. (2015). Creative interventions with traumatized children. Guilford Press.
Mischke-Reeds, M. (2025). Attunement and regulation in virtual therapy: Tracking the nervous system online [Webinar]. The Awake Network. https://www.regulationandresilience.com
Ogden, P. (2025). Regulation and resilience: The sensorimotor approach to developing resources [Webinar]. The Awake Network. https://www.regulationandresilience.com
Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
Quaglia, J. (2025). Compassion as container and compass: Navigating nervous system regulation through care [Webinar]. The Awake Network. https://www.regulationandresilience.com
Thai, L. (2025). Mapping the nervous system: Understanding survival responses and the path to regulation [Webinar]. The Awake Network. https://www.regulationandresilience.com
van der Kolk, B., & Sky, L. (2025). Synchrony and safety: Embodied presence in trauma healing [Webinar]. The Awake Network. https://www.regulationandresilience.com
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