Addicted to Chaos: When Your Nervous System Mistakes Drama for Home

EMOTIONAL REGULATION & NERVOUS SYSTEM • April 2026

LAST UPDATED: APRIL 2026

Last reviewed: June 2026 by Annie Wright, LMFT

A Quiet Afternoon That Feels Like a Storm

It’s 3:14 pm on a Thursday. Aarti, 39, has just closed her laptop after finishing a project two days ahead of schedule, the first clear afternoon she’s had in months. The apartment is quiet except for the faint hum of the air conditioner. A stillness settles around her like a dense fog. But inside, Aarti’s nervous system buzzes with tension. Her fingers twitch, restless. She reaches for her phone, unlocks it, and refreshes her email inbox. Nothing new. She scrolls through her messages again, then checks Slack and her calendar. No urgent notifications. No crises.

The silence feels wrong.

Her throat tightens. Her chest constricts as if someone’s pressing on it. Her mind races to manufacture a problem, a meeting that needs rescheduling, a client who might be unhappy, a deadline she forgot. She dials a colleague to ask about a non-urgent detail, then texts a team member with a “just checking in” message. Each ping from her phone ignites a brief spark of relief, a flicker of adrenaline, before the gnawing emptiness returns.

Aarti’s body screams for action even when there’s no emergency. The calm terrifies her more than any conflict ever could. Peace doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like a warning sign, an absence of the familiar storm. She’s addicted to the chaos because it’s what her nervous system knows as home.

If this scene resonates, you’re not alone. What looks like chronic drama-seeking or perpetual crisis-creation isn’t a character flaw or a failure of self-control. It’s a deeply ingrained survival pattern wired into your nervous system during childhood. For the child who grew up in unpredictable, high-drama environments, calm felt like a threat, not safety.

This article exists to offer clarity and compassion for that pattern. We’ll explore why your nervous system confuses chaos with connection, how this shows up in the lived experience of driven women, and what science reveals about the neurobiology behind it. Most importantly, we’ll map out a path forward toward rewiring your autonomic set point so that peace can finally feel safe.

If you want to learn more about how this pattern interacts with your relational life or your leadership style, I encourage you to explore my work on Fixing the Foundations and Executive Coaching. You can also join my newsletter for ongoing support and insights.

What Does It Mean to Be “Addicted to Chaos”?

This isn’t about personality or poor choices. It’s about a nervous system that was wired during childhood to expect unpredictability. When your early environment was marked by emotional volatility, conflict, or neglect, your nervous system adapted by tuning itself to a high-arousal baseline. What looks like “addiction” is really a survival strategy gone awry.

Dr. Gabor Maté, MD, physician and author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, explains that the dopamine system in the brain plays a crucial role in this pattern. Dopamine doesn’t just reward pleasure; it rewards novelty and stimulation, which can include chaos. When calm doesn’t register as stimulating or safe, your brain craves the chaos that triggers dopamine release, perpetuating a cycle of seeking intensity.

Pete Walker, MA, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, describes this dynamic as fight response manifesting as chaos-seeking. When fight feels like the only available mode of survival, creating drama or conflict becomes a way to activate the nervous system and feel alive. This explains why you might pick fights or invent crises even when you logically know everything is fine.

Understanding this pattern with clinical precision removes blame and opens the door to healing. It’s not about “just calming down” or “being more mature.” It’s about retraining a nervous system that’s been living in hyperarousal or dysregulation for years.

If you want to dive deeper into the roots of this pattern in your nervous system and emotional regulation, you might find my therapy work helpful. It’s designed specifically for driven women navigating these complex dynamics.

The Neuroscience Behind Chaos-Seeking

Your nervous system operates on a hierarchy of responses mapped out in Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and creator of polyvagal theory. This hierarchy moves from the ventral vagal complex (social engagement and safety) down to sympathetic activation (fight or flight) and finally down to dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze or dissociation). In people addicted to chaos trauma, the autonomic set point is often stuck in the sympathetic zone, hypervigilant, primed for crisis.

This means your body is perpetually scanning the environment for threats or stimuli that recreate that familiar high-arousal state. Calm doesn’t register as safety because the nervous system learned early on that the absence of chaos signals danger. This is neuroception in action, the nervous system’s unconscious evaluation of safety or threat described by Porges.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, highlights that traumatic memories are often stored somatically, encoded in the body and nervous system as sensation rather than narrative. This somatic imprint means that the nervous system compulsively tries to recreate familiar sensations, even if those sensations were distressing as a child.

Gabor Maté, MD, emphasizes how this cycle is fueled by the dopamine system’s craving for stimulation. The dopamine surge from chaos or crisis becomes neurologically reinforcing, creating “addiction” to the adrenaline highs that chaos provides.

This neurobiological feedback loop explains why you might feel restless in peace and alive in crisis, even if your mind wants to rest. It’s not about willpower; it’s about rewiring deep, implicit nervous system patterns.

If you’re curious about how this science translates into therapy and somatic healing, check out my article on Fixing the Foundations, where I detail nervous system regulation and trauma-informed care approaches.

How Addiction to Chaos Shows Up for Driven Women

Shalini is 41 and leads a fast-paced marketing team at a tech startup. It’s 6:05 pm on a Friday. Her inbox has been quiet all afternoon. Instead of unwinding, Shalini finds herself stirring conflict with a colleague over a minor miscommunication. The tension crackles between them like static electricity. Her heart races, palms sweat, and she feels an odd relief in the chaos.

She’s been the “fixer” in every crisis at work for years, the one who jumps in to solve emergencies, smooth conflicts, and take control when things spiral. When the office is calm, Shalini feels restless, bored, and almost unmoored. She checks her email compulsively, even outside working hours, searching for something, anything, that will spark adrenaline.

Shalini’s pattern isn’t about poor leadership or lack of professionalism. It’s a nervous system that equates calm with danger and chaos with connection. The adrenaline rush feels like safety because that’s what she internalized as a child in a volatile household.

In my work with driven women like Shalini, I see this pattern play out across relationships, work, and self-regulation. The compulsion to create or maintain chaos can look like picking fights when things feel too calm, staying in toxic relationships long after the red flags appear, or feeling most alive in crisis and most dead in peace.

This pattern also fuels the “people pleaser” dynamic described by Pete Walker, MA, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. When fight or flight is the dominant mode, fawning or over-functioning in chaos becomes a way to survive emotionally.

Shalini’s story is common among driven women who grew up in unpredictable environments. Recognizing the pattern is the first step toward reclaiming your nervous system’s capacity for safety and peace.

If Shalini’s experience sounds familiar, you can start exploring these dynamics in my Addicted to Chaos trauma quiz or connect directly for personalized support at Connect with Annie.

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[End of Part 1 / First Half of Article 32]

Both/And: Loving the Adrenaline AND Recognizing That Your Nervous System Is Running a Childhood Program

It’s 8:22 pm on a Monday. Tasha, 44, sits at her kitchen table, the soft glow of her laptop illuminating her face. She’s just wrapped a virtual team meeting, an hour without interruptions. Now the silence presses heavily against her ears. She grabs her phone and scrolls through messages, then opens her email again. Nothing urgent. She texts a coworker with a question about a project due in two weeks. The ping of a reply sends a rush through her chest, a familiar jolt she can’t quite name.

Tasha loves the adrenaline. It fuels her. It makes her feel sharp, capable, alive. Yet at the same time, a part of her knows this craving for crisis is a relic, a childhood program wired deep into her autonomic nervous system. She feels caught between these two truths: the addictive pull of chaos and the desperate need for calm that feels almost impossible to sustain.

This paradox is central to unraveling the “addiction to chaos” pattern. You can hold these truths simultaneously: You crave the adrenaline because it’s familiar and energizing, and you also need to honor your nervous system’s history that programmed you to survive by staying on high alert.

Pete Walker, MA, psychotherapist and author of Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, frames this as the “fight” response morphing into chaos-seeking. When fight is the default survival mode, adrenaline becomes a lifeline, a way to activate the nervous system and stave off numbness or shutdown. Yet this survival strategy becomes a double bind, one that keeps you locked in cycles of tension, conflict, and exhaustion.

This both/and dynamic is not a failure of willpower or character. It’s a natural, neurobiological dance between the survival brain and the adult self trying to heal. The nervous system is wired for safety first, but when safety wasn’t reliably available, it defaulted to what was known, even if that was chaos.

In therapy, acknowledging this complexity is crucial. I’ve sat across from women like Tasha who simultaneously mourn the exhaustion of living in crisis while fearing the stillness that peace might bring. The core work is not about denying the adrenaline’s power or shaming the survival strategies. It’s about gently expanding your window of tolerance and offering your nervous system new signals of safety.

This expansion often happens through somatic awareness and co-regulation. When you learn to notice the physiological pull toward chaos without judgment, you create space for choice. When you experience sustained, regulated connection with another calm nervous system, whether a therapist, partner, or friend, you begin to retrain your autonomic set point.

If you want to explore how this dynamic plays out in your nervous system and relationships, my Fixing the Foundations course offers a trauma-informed roadmap to regulation and recovery. For personalized guidance, consider my therapy with Annie program designed specifically for driven women navigating these challenges.

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Both/And: You Can Love the Adrenaline AND Recognize That Your Nervous System Is Running a Childhood Program

It’s 7:03 am on a Tuesday. Lauren, 37, stands in her kitchen, coffee in hand, ready to start the day. Her phone lights up with a notification: a last-minute request from her boss. Instantly, her breath quickens. Her muscles tighten. The sudden urgency floods her system like a shot of adrenaline. She feels alive, focused, but also tethered to an old nervous system script that learned early on that calm meant vulnerability and danger.

Lauren knows this well. She’s built a career as a project manager in a fast-paced nonprofit, thriving on deadlines and last-minute fires. Yet beneath the rush, a small voice whispers: “Is this what safety feels like? Or just familiarity?”

This is the tension that many driven women live with daily. You can deeply appreciate the energy and focus adrenaline brings while simultaneously recognizing that your nervous system is replaying a childhood program. That program learned to equate chaos with connection or survival, making peace feel unfamiliar or unsafe.

In my work with clients like Lauren, I emphasize holding these truths side by side without forcing premature resolution. You don’t have to vilify adrenaline or deny its energizing effects. Instead, you can begin to see your nervous system’s patterns as adaptive responses to past environments, not character flaws or moral failings.

Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of Internal Family Systems therapy, offers a useful framework here: your parts that seek adrenaline are protectors trying to keep you safe, even if their methods feel counterproductive now. Recognizing these parts with curiosity and compassion creates a foundation for integration and healing.

Lauren’s morning unfolds as she notices the familiar pull to jump into crisis mode. Instead of immediately responding to her boss’s request, she pauses and tunes into her body’s sensations, the quickened heartbeat, the tightness in her shoulders. She names the feeling as “adrenaline craving” rather than “real emergency.” This subtle shift begins to loosen the grip of the old program.

Holding both the love for adrenaline and the awareness of its roots opens space for choice. You can still engage your drive and ambition, but with increasing capacity to regulate your nervous system and create safety internally.

For more on managing these dynamics in leadership and life, my executive coaching program supports driven women in cultivating resilience and nervous system regulation alongside their professional goals.

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The Systemic Lens: When the World Rewards Your Chaos Tolerance

Zooming out from the individual experience reveals a cultural and systemic backdrop that often rewards chaos tolerance, especially for driven women. In workplaces, social circles, and even family systems, the ability to handle relentless pressure, multitask crises, and perform under stress can be praised as strength, grit, or leadership.

This dynamic complicates recovery because the external world often valorizes the very pattern your nervous system is trying to escape. It’s not just your internal wiring; it’s also the structures around you that reinforce the idea that calm is a luxury and chaos is a badge of honor.

Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, developer of the PACT model, highlights how early nervous system wiring interacts with adult relational patterns to create “island” prototypes, individuals who self-rely and suppress vulnerability as a survival adaptation. Society’s push for productivity and resilience often mirrors and amplifies these survival strategies.

Similarly, Gay Hendricks, PhD, psychologist and author of The Big Leap, describes the “Upper Limit Problem,” where people unconsciously sabotage their own success or happiness to avoid exceeding an internal set point of allowable peace or joy. For women wired to expect chaos, this means peace can feel like a threat to their very identity.

This systemic reinforcement can look like:

, Workplaces glorifying burnout and crisis management

, Social groups rewarding drama and emotional volatility

, Family roles that assign the “fixer” or “rescuer” identity

, Cultural narratives equating busy-ness with worth

Recognizing these forces removes shame and self-blame. Your nervous system’s addiction to chaos isn’t just a personal glitch; it’s a logical response to environments that have rewarded and required this pattern.

Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP, author of My Grandmother’s Hands, reminds us: “Our bodies exist in the present. To your thinking brain, there is past, present, and future, but to a traumatized body there is only now.” The system’s demands for chaos tolerance shape that present.

This broader lens also invites collective compassion and systemic shifts. Recovery isn’t just about individual regulation; it’s about creating environments, at work, in relationships, and society, that honor safety, rest, and connection as foundational rather than optional.

If you’re interested in unpacking how these systemic dynamics impact your personal and professional life, my Fixing the Foundations course explores relational trauma in cultural context and offers tools for navigating and transforming these patterns.

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Breaking the Cycle: Toward a Nervous System That Tolerates Peace

Healing from addiction to chaos trauma is a process of rewiring the nervous system’s autonomic set point from hyperarousal toward safety and regulation. This work demands patience, self-compassion, and clinically grounded strategies aligned with the three stages of trauma recovery described by Judith Herman, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance and author of Trauma and Recovery: safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection.

Stage 1: Establishing Safety

The first and most essential task is establishing physical and psychological safety. This means creating conditions where your nervous system can begin to settle without the constant pressure of crisis-mode vigilance.

Stephen Porges, PhD, neuroscientist and creator of polyvagal theory, emphasizes the importance of ventral vagal activation, our social engagement system, as the gateway to safety. Practices that engage the ventral vagal circuit include:

, Safe, attuned relationships and co-regulation with calm others

, Mindful breathing and gentle movement

, Prosodic vocalizations and facial expressions (even self-directed in the mirror)

Deb Dana, LCSW, clinician and author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, calls this “the ladder of autonomic states.” The goal is to increase your nervous system’s capacity to dwell in ventral vagal safety rather than defaulting to sympathetic hyperarousal or dorsal vagal shutdown.

Techniques to Support Safety:

, Somatic Experiencing: Tracking body sensations and pendulating between activation and resource states (Peter Levine, PhD)

, Grounding exercises: Feeling your connection to the present moment through senses (Janina Fisher, PhD)

, Co-regulation: Spending time with trusted people whose nervous system models calm

Stage 2: Remembrance and Mourning

Once safety is established, your nervous system can begin to process fragmented trauma memories without becoming overwhelmed. This involves reconstructing the trauma story and grieving losses with support and care.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, highlights that traumatic memories are often somatic and nonverbal, requiring therapies that work with the body as well as narrative.

Internal Family Systems therapy (Richard Schwartz, PhD) can help you access and soothe protective parts that have been holding trauma in isolation.

Stage 3: Reconnection

The final stage focuses on rebuilding a life where safety and connection are the norm. This includes developing new relational patterns, cultivating self-compassion (Beverly Engel, LMFT), and integrating a more expansive sense of self beyond survival-driven parts.

Practical Steps to Begin Rewiring Your Nervous System:

1. Slow down your reactivity. Notice moments when your body craves chaos. Pause and breathe. Label the sensation without judgment.

2. Seek co-regulation. Engage with therapists, coaches, or friends who can hold your nervous system in calm presence.

3. Practice somatic awareness. Tune into bodily signals. Allow incomplete defensive responses to complete through movement or visualization.

4. Build a “safety toolkit.” This might include mindfulness practices adapted for trauma sensitivity (David Treleaven, PhD), grounding objects, or rituals that signal safety.

5. Set boundaries on chaos. Learn to say no to drama or crisis creation, even when it feels familiar or necessary.

Healing is non-linear. You will revisit old patterns at new levels of understanding, gradually expanding your window of tolerance (Daniel Siegel, MD). There will be days when the chaos feels magnetic and peace feels alien. That’s part of the process.

If you want structured guidance, my Fixing the Foundations course offers a step-by-step approach to nervous system regulation and relational trauma recovery. For tailored support, therapy with Annie provides a safe container to navigate this healing arc.

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Sometimes the hardest step is simply recognizing that the chaos you crave is a wound’s echo. But with clinical precision, compassionate support, and practical tools, you can learn to live in peace without feeling like you’re losing yourself. Your nervous system can learn that calm is safe, and that safety is home.

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Warm communal close:

If you’ve read this far, I want you to know you’re seen. The pattern of craving chaos isn’t a failing; it’s a deeply human adaptation to childhood experiences that demanded vigilance above all else. Your nervous system did its best to keep you alive, and that same system can learn to rest.

Recovery isn’t about erasing the parts of you that love adrenaline or drive. It’s about expanding your capacity to hold both the fire and the calm. To move toward a place where peace feels not only possible but nourishing.

You don’t have to do this alone. Whether it’s through therapy, courses, or community, support is available to help you rewire, regulate, and reclaim your life from the compulsion to chaos. I invite you to take gentle steps forward with curiosity and kindness toward yourself.

You are worthy of safety. You are worthy of peace. And one day soon, you will know what it feels like to truly come home, to your nervous system, your body, and your life.

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The Neurochemistry of Familiar Chaos

When you think about why chaos can feel like home, we have to look beyond behavior and into the brain’s neurochemistry, especially the role of dopamine in the reward system. Gabor Maté’s work in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts offers a crucial lens here: he describes how the brain’s reward circuitry becomes attuned to high-arousal states, particularly when a child grows up in an environment marked by unpredictability and intermittent safety. Imagine a household where a parent oscillates between warmth and rage, where safety is not a constant but a fleeting option. For the developing nervous system, this inconsistency is not just confusing, it rewires how safety and threat are encoded.

Dopamine, often framed as the “pleasure chemical,” is more accurately a neurotransmitter that signals salience and motivates seeking behavior. In a chronically dysregulated environment, the brain learns that high-arousal states, whether fear, anger, or frantic activity, are the most salient experiences. Over time, this creates a feedback loop: the nervous system craves the unpredictable spikes of stimulation because that’s what it has learned to expect and rely on for a sense of being alive. When calm or safety arrives, the dopamine signal is absent or diminished, and the nervous system interprets this absence not as relief but as an alarming void. This is where Deb Dana’s concept of the autonomic resting state becomes essential. Ideally, the ventral vagal system, the branch of the parasympathetic nervous system associated with social engagement and safety, is the nervous system’s default. But when chronic sympathetic activation is the baseline, calm doesn’t register as a resting state; it feels like a threat itself.

This shift in baseline autonomic state means that the absence of chaos triggers neurochemical discomfort. The ventral vagal system, which should foster feelings of connection and ease, is under-activated or even inaccessible. Instead, the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight circuitry, dominates, constantly scanning for the next spike in arousal. This is why, clinically, women who grew up in chaotic environments often describe calmness as “boring,” “unsettling,” or even “dangerous.” Their nervous system is literally calibrated to perceive safety as an anomaly, a lapse that could precede harm.

Neuroscientist Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory deepens this understanding by emphasizing that safety is not merely the absence of danger but the presence of cues of connection. Without reliable cues of safety in early life, the nervous system’s neuroception, the unconscious evaluation of risk, defaults to suspicion. It’s not that these women consciously choose chaos; their neurochemistry is pulling them toward what is known and neurologically predictable. This alignment between dopamine-driven reward seeking and sympathetic dominance explains why familiar chaos becomes addictive. It is not willful self-sabotage but a neurobiological adaptation to an unpredictable world.

How This Shows Up in Driven Women

In clinical practice, the driven woman addicted to chaos is often the paradox of productivity and exhaustion. Take Anjali, a 38-year-old executive who walks into my office at 7:30 a.m. on a Monday, already three meetings behind schedule, her phone buzzing with urgent messages. She is the most capable person in the room, the one everyone depends on to fix crises before they explode. But ask her what she wants, and she shuffles uncomfortably, confessing that she feels like she’s running just to keep from falling apart.

This pattern is not uncommon. Driven women with a nervous system wired for chaos often create urgency where none objectively exists. They take on more than they can reasonably handle, not out of ignorance or lack of boundaries, but because an overfull plate is the only state their nervous system recognizes as “normal.” This is the neurobiological echo of childhood unpredictability: when the nervous system expects constant activation, quiet or ease triggers anxiety or restlessness. It’s a form of “neurochemical homeostasis,” even if it comes at the price of burnout and overwhelm.

Relationship patterns mirror this dynamic. Women like Anjali often find themselves drawn to emotionally unavailable or volatile partners. This is not a failure of judgment but a manifestation of the nervous system’s familiarity bias. Bessel van der Kolk observed, “Many traumatized people seem to seek out situations that replicate the original trauma.” This is not masochism or poor taste, it’s the nervous system’s attempt to recreate the predictable patterns it learned as a child. Volatility, unpredictability, even subtle emotional neglect feels safer than steady, easy connection because it matches the implicit memory encoded in the body.

These women may also sabotage relationships and opportunities when things are going well. Grace, a 42-year-old lawyer I saw recently, describes how she “accidentally” picks fights with her partner or misses deadlines just as a big project is about to conclude. This sabotage is not conscious self-destruction. It is the nervous system reacting to calm as if it were a threat. When the external environment shifts into stability, internal alarm bells ring. The body braces against the unknown, triggering fight, flight, or freeze responses that manifest as conflict, procrastination, or withdrawal.

This pattern creates a paradox: crisis feels like home, and contentment feels like exile. The woman addicted to chaos may be the most reliable person in the room, but she is also the most exhausted, carrying the invisible load of a nervous system that cannot rest. This is consistent with Pete Walker’s descriptions of the fawn response and emotional flashbacks, where survival strategies become deeply embedded parts of self-regulation, even when they are no longer adaptive. The nervous system’s relentless search for the familiar can feel like a trap, but it is simply doing what it was designed to do: keep you alive in a world you learned was unsafe.

The Paradox of Healing: Learning to Tolerate Calm

Here is the hard truth: healing from this neurobiological addiction to chaos is neither quick nor linear. Judith Herman reminds us that recovery unfolds in stages and spirals, and the first task is establishing safety. But for the woman whose nervous system is calibrated to chronic sympathetic activation, safety does not mean calm, it means learning to tolerate calm. This is the paradox of trauma recovery.

Peter Levine’s concept of pendulation is invaluable here. Healing involves oscillating between activation, the familiar high-arousal state, and resource, which includes calm and connection. This pendulation is not about forcing calm but gradually expanding the window of tolerance so that calm becomes accessible without triggering dysregulation. It takes repeated, incremental experiences to teach the nervous system that calm is not a prelude to danger but a state where growth and integration can occur.

The therapeutic relationship often becomes the first place where calm feels safe. When a woman like Shalini, who has never known consistent safety, sits in a therapy room and experiences steady empathy without drama, her nervous system begins to register a new pattern. The absence of chaos in the relational field is not the calm before the storm, it is safety itself. This is the relational healing Judith Herman emphasizes: trauma heals in relationship. But this safety must be earned slowly, as the nervous system resists what it has never known as safe.

Resmaa Menakem’s poignant observation reminds us why this process requires patience: “Our bodies exist in the present. To your thinking brain, there is past, present, and future, but to a traumatized body there is only now.” The body encodes chaos as home in implicit memory, and to update this, it needs many experiences of calm-as-safe. Each encounter with safety rewrites neuroception, recalibrates dopamine signaling, and strengthens the ventral vagal pathway. Over time, the paradox resolves, calm no longer feels like danger, and the nervous system learns that it can rest without losing connection or aliveness.

This is not about forcing yourself into quiet or contentment but about cultivating tolerance for states that your nervous system has historically rejected. It’s a re-patterning of neurochemistry and implicit memory, rooted in relationship and embodied experience. The path out of chaos addiction is slow and sometimes agonizing, but it is possible, and it begins with the radical act of allowing your nervous system to feel calm without fear.

Related Reading

• van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking, 2014.
• Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, 1992.
• Porges, Stephen W. The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A GUIDE AND MAP FOR RECOVERING FROM CHILDHOOD TRAUMA. Berkeley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.

References

Peer-Reviewed Research (Vancouver)

1. van der Kolk BA, Wang JB, Yehuda R, Bedrosian L, Coker AR, Harrison C, et al. Effects of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD on self-experience. PLoS One. 2024;19(1):e0295926. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0295926. PMID: 38198456.
2. Cloitre M, Stolbach BC, Herman JL, van der Kolk B, Pynoos R, Wang J, et al. A developmental approach to complex PTSD: childhood and adult cumulative trauma as predictors of symptom complexity. J Trauma Stress. 2009;22(5):399-408. doi:10.1002/jts.20444. PMID: 19795402.
3. Payne P, Levine PA, Crane-Godreau MA. Somatic experiencing: using interoception and proprioception as core elements of trauma therapy. Front Psychol. 2015;6:93. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00093. PMID: 25699005.
4. Porges SW. Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2025;22(3):169-184. doi:10.36131/cnfioritieditore20250301. PMID: 40735382.
5. Reisz S, Duschinsky R, Siegel DJ. fearful-avoidant attachment and defense: exploring John Bowlby's unpublished reflections. Attach Hum Dev. 2018;20(2):107-134. doi:10.1080/14616734.2017.1380055. PMID: 28952412.
6. Brenner EG, Schwartz RC, Becker C. Development of the internal family systems model: Honoring contributions from family systems therapies. Fam Process. 2023;62(4):1290-1306. doi:10.1111/famp.12943. PMID: 37924221.

Books & Cultural Sources (Chicago Author-Date)

• Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No. A.A. Knopf Canada, 2003.
• Fisher, Janina. Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors. Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
• Menakem, Resmaa. My grandmother's hands. Penguin Books, Limited, 2017.
• Walker, Pete. Complex PTSD. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
• Dana, Deb. The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Norton & Company, Incorporated, W. W., 2018.

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