Modern neuroscience has changed everything we once believed about healing and emotional development. For many years psychology focused almost entirely on the mind and assumed that if we could change the way we think, our feelings and behaviour would naturally follow. This approach suggested that healing was a mental process and that awareness alone could resolve emotional pain.
The latest research shows that this is incomplete. We now understand that human beings are biological, electrical and energetic systems and that the body leads the way. The body signals the brain long before conscious thought begins. Our thoughts and beliefs arise from our underlying state. If the nervous system is dysregulated or carrying unprocessed memories, no amount of positive thinking or insight will calm it. We do not think our way into safety. We feel our way into it.
This is the foundation of a bottom up approach to healing. It begins in the body and works upwards into the mind rather than the other way around. To understand why this method creates lasting change, we must explore how trauma and stress are stored, how the nervous system functions and why cognitive processing alone cannot reach the deeper layers of experience.
The Body Sends Most of the Information to the Brain
The vagus nerve is the main communication channel between the body and the brain. It carries electrical signals and sensory messages between the organs and the central nervous system. Research shows that around eighty per cent of the messages travelling through the vagus nerve move from the body to the brain. Only around twenty per cent travel from the brain to the body.
This means the body is leading and the brain is following. Your internal landscape shapes your emotional reality long before you create a thought about it. The brain does not create emotional states. It interprets signals coming from the heart, the gut, the immune system, the fascia, the muscles and the visceral organs. It creates a story based on what it receives.
When the body senses safety, the brain reflects this through calm thoughts and feelings. When the body senses threat or unresolved memory, the brain creates interpretations that match that state. This is why cognitive reframing can be helpful but cannot give you lasting change without bodily work. It only engages the smaller part of the communication chain.
A bottom up approach works directly with the eighty per cent that truly shapes your experience.
What Trauma Does to the Brain
During a traumatic or overwhelming event, the brain does not operate in its usual balanced state. The hippocampus, which stores explicit memory and helps create a linear timeline, becomes less active when adrenaline surges. This happens because the brain is prioritising survival rather than reflection. The result is a sense of mental fog, difficulty forming coherent memories and the feeling that the event is scattered or incomplete.
At the same time, cortisol increases the activity of the amygdala, the emotional alarm system of the brain. The amygdala becomes more sensitive and reactive. It records the sensations, emotions and impulses present at the time of the threat. This is why traumatic memories are often remembered as body sensations or emotional flashes rather than clear narratives. They are stored as fragments rather than stories.
This creates a split between two memory systems. The explicit memory system, which helps you understand a situation logically, is muted. The implicit system, which includes emotional memory, sensory memory and bodily memory, becomes dominant. As a result, trauma is not experienced as something that happened in the past. The body experiences it as something that is still occurring.
The brain does not need a conscious thought to activate a survival response. It reacts based on stored bodily patterns. This is why trauma cannot be resolved by thinking about it. It must be addressed at the level where it was stored.
Once this occurs, the autonomous nervous system is in control. It is completely involuntary, and runs outside of our conscious awareness. Neurons are fired up and it’s signalled neuroceptively through receptors and synaptic impulses (chemical, electrical, mechanical).
The Autonomic Nervous System Takes Over
The autonomic nervous system controls survival responses. It operates outside conscious choice and cannot be influenced through logic. Once the amygdala detects danger, the autonomic nervous system decides whether to move into fight, flight, freeze or shutdown. This process is guided by neuroception, which is the subconscious detection of safety or threat. Neuroception reads cues such as tone of voice, facial expression, posture and even the energy or atmosphere in a room.
If the system believes you are unsafe, it will activate a survival response without consulting your thinking mind. The nervous system may cause anxiety, withdrawal, irritability, numbness, collapse or hyper vigilance even when there is no actual danger in the present moment. This is because it is responding to unprocessed implicit memory.
We cannot argue with these states. We cannot simply override them with logic. They are biological and instinctive. A bottom up approach helps the body complete these survival responses and return to a state of regulation.
Trauma Lives in the Body
Trauma is stored not as thoughts but as patterns in the body. It is held in muscle tension, connective tissue, fascia, breath patterns, visceral responses and sensory memory. It is also stored in the autonomic nervous system as learned defensive states. When the body experiences something overwhelming and does not complete the instinctive response for fight, flight or release, the energy of that experience becomes trapped in the system.
This is why emotional pain feels physical and why the body reacts even when the mind believes the event is over. Anxiety often appears in the stomach. Grief is felt in the chest. Fear tightens the diaphragm. Frustration contracts the jaw or shoulders. These sensations are not random. They are remnants of incomplete survival responses. True healing involves engaging directly with these stored patterns. The body must feel safe enough to release, discharge and complete what was not resolved at the time of the event.
The Limits of Cognitive Therapy
Cognitive or top down therapy can be valuable, especially for gaining clarity, awareness and language for experiences. It helps people understand patterns, recognise dysfunctional beliefs and create new interpretations. However, it cannot reach the parts of the nervous system that hold implicit memory.
Top down work cannot deactivate the amygdala, soothe the vagus nerve, complete a fight or flight response or restore a dysregulated autonomic system. It operates in the prefrontal cortex, which often becomes less active during stress. This means that cognitive therapy is working in the part of the brain that is least available during emotional overwhelm.
Awareness alone does not resolve stored energy. Insight does not create nervous system regulation. Understanding a wound does not heal it.
This is why people can know exactly why they behave in certain ways yet still feel trapped in the same patterns. Cognitive tools do not reach the deeper implicit layers. Real change requires speaking to the body directly.
How Bottom Up Healing Creates Real Change
A bottom up approach works with the body first. It uses the language of sensation, breath, movement and emotional presence to access the nervous system. When the body feels safe, the brain can integrate. When the body releases old energy, the mind can create new meaning. This approach uses principles from somatic therapy, polyvagal theory, trauma informed breath work, mindfulness, body based processing and embodied awareness.
As the nervous system regulates, neuroplasticity increases. This means the brain becomes more able to form new pathways. Safety allows the prefrontal cortex to return to full functioning. The amygdala quietens. The vagus nerve becomes more responsive. The whole system becomes more flexible and resilient.
This is how the brain rewires. Not through thinking but through experience. Not through analysis but through embodied presence.
A bottom up approach creates real and lasting change because it works where trauma is stored, where safety is felt and where regulation begins. When the body shifts, the mind follows. When the roots change, the branches grow in a new direction.
Healing is a Full Body Experience
Healing is not a purely cognitive practice. It is a full body experience. We are bottom up beings whose emotional life is shaped by the state of the nervous system. Trauma lives in the body and must be released through the body. Cognitive understanding is helpful but cannot reach the deeper levels where pain, memory and survival responses are stored. Real transformation happens when we follow the intelligence of the body, restore safety to the nervous system and allow energy to move and complete. From this place the mind can finally settle, integrate and create new meaning. This is the pathway of true healing.
Firefly Somatics™ 
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