The Tiger You Can't Outrun: Understanding Your Nervous System
Imagine a tiger.
You see it before it sees you. Every cell in your body responds instantly — heart rate spikes, muscles flood with blood, breath quickens, vision narrows. Your whole system has one job now: survive.
First you try to fight. But the tiger is bigger than you. So you run. You are fast, faster than you knew, but the tiger is faster. And then, when fighting didn't work and running didn't work, something else happens. Something that feels like giving up but isn't. Your body goes still. Your heart rate drops. You collapse. You play dead.
Freeze.
Not because you chose it. Not because you are weak or broken or giving up. Because your nervous system made a calculation in a fraction of a second: the only chance of surviving this is to disappear. And it was right.
This is what your nervous system was built to do. And this is why, years after the tiger — years after the relationship, the childhood, the accident, the loss — you might still find yourself frozen. Not because something is wrong with you. Because something very intelligent happened, and it hasn't yet received the signal that it's safe to thaw.
The nervous system doesn't distinguish between a physical threat and an emotional one. It responds to a critical parent the same way it responds to a predator. It responds to chronic stress the same way it responds to ongoing danger — because to the nervous system, that is what chronic stress is. Ongoing danger.
Stephen Porges, whose polyvagal theory has transformed how we understand trauma and the body, describes three states the nervous system moves through in response to threat. The first is the state of safety — what he calls the social engagement system. This is where connection, curiosity, creativity, and genuine rest live. It is the state we are meant to spend most of our time in.
When safety is threatened, the system drops into mobilisation — fight or flight. The sympathetic nervous system fires. Energy floods the body. Everything non-essential shuts down. Digestion, immune function, the capacity for nuanced thought — all of it goes offline. You are built for one thing now.
When fight and flight both fail — or when the threat is so overwhelming that mobilisation itself feels dangerous — the system drops further, into the oldest response of all. The dorsal vagal shutdown. The freeze. The collapse. The going-away-inside that so many trauma survivors describe: the dissociation, the numbness, the flatness, the sense of watching your own life from a distance.
This is not pathology. This is ancient wisdom. It kept your ancestors alive long enough for you to exist.
The problem is not that these responses exist. The problem is when they get stuck.
A nervous system that has lived through chronic threat — an unpredictable home, a violent relationship, years of not feeling safe — learns to stay on high alert even when the danger has passed. The threat detection system recalibrates around danger as the default. Safety starts to feel unfamiliar, even suspicious. The body that once froze to survive keeps freezing, because it never received a clear enough signal that the tiger is gone.
This shows up in ways that can be confusing and frightening if you don't know what you're looking at. The anxiety that has no clear cause. The exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix. The emotional numbness that sits alongside a desperate wish to feel something. The relationships that keep recreating the same dynamics. The sense of being permanently braced for something bad.
These are not character flaws. They are a nervous system doing its job — just in a context that no longer requires it.
Healing the nervous system is not about willpower or positive thinking. It is not about deciding to feel safe when your body doesn't believe it yet. It is about slowly, carefully, building evidence — in the body, not just the mind — that the tiger is gone.
This is what somatic therapy does. It works directly with the body's responses — the breath, the posture, the subtle contractions, the places where sensation disappears. It helps the nervous system complete responses that got interrupted and frozen mid-cycle. It builds what Peter Levine calls the felt sense of safety: not a thought about safety, but the actual physical experience of it.
It is slow work sometimes. The nervous system changes at its own pace, not according to anyone's timeline. But it does change. The freeze thaws. The bracing softens. The body that learned to live in perpetual anticipation of threat begins — gradually, with the right support — to find its way back to the state it was always designed to live in.
Safety. Connection. Rest.
The tiger is gone. Your body just needs help knowing that.
If you're ready to begin that work, I'd be glad to walk alongside you.
Megan Shea is a trauma-informed psychotherapist and holistic counsellor integrating somatic therapy, polyvagal theory, nervous system awareness, and depth psychology. She works with adults online across Australia and worldwide.
