Why Your Nervous System Is Not Broken. It's Brilliant · Episode 16

Your nervous system is not misfiring. It is doing exactly what it was built to do.

In Episode 16 of The Unfuckwithable Woman, somatic psychotherapist, counsellor, educator, activist and leader Briony Montgomery offers a complete reframe of the nervous system regulation conversation and names exactly why most of what you're seeing in the neurowellness space right now is missing the point.

Nervous system regulation is the #1 trending wellness topic of 2026. Two hundred and thirty thousand TikTok videos. Mainstream media. Corporate wellness programs. And almost all of it is asking the same question: how do I fix my dysregulated nervous system so I can perform better?

That is the wrong question.

In this episode, Briony breaks down the autonomic nervous system in plain language · what it actually is, what it was designed for, and why dysregulation is not a character flaw but a survival solution. Fight, flight, and freeze are not failures. They are your nervous system's most intelligent response to an environment that said: this is not safe.

The shame women carry about their own dysregulation is the wound beneath the wound. And it is the thing that body-based therapy, when it is done right, begins to repair.

Briony introduces her foundational framework Body Knowing · the practice of receiving and trusting the information your body is already giving you, rather than overriding it in service of productivity, performance, or other people's comfort. She walks listeners through a live soma check-in practice they can do anywhere, and names the emerging (spiritual bypassing) neurowellness industrial complex for what it is: optimisation culture dressed in somatic language.

This episode also opens the bigger conversation that runs through all of Briony's work: that coming back into your body is not a private, individual project. It is how you come back into instinct, desire, community, and life itself. One nervous system coming back online is a revolution in miniature.

If you have ever been told you are too sensitive, too reactive, too much, this episode is for you.

Topics covered in this episode include nervous system regulation, somatic therapy for women, body-based healing, the fight or flight response, vagus nerve healing, neurowellness, Body Knowing, felt safety, and somatic check-in practice.

Book a free 20-minute Clarity Session at thesomatherapycollective.com/20-minute-clarity-session

Find Briony at thesomatherapycollective.com · Instagram @reclaimmeproject · YouTube @nervoussystemsupport

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If something in this episode landed in your body, sit with it. That's the work beginning.

The Unfuckwithable Woman is a space for women who are done managing their pain and ready to feel their way back to themselves. Each conversation goes deep into somatic therapy, nervous system healing, matrilineal repair and the kind of embodied living that doesn't ask permission.

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This is not about f...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:48

I want to start this episode with something your body is doing right now that you probably haven't noticed. Your breath. The way your weight is sitting in your seat or your feet on the floor. The temperature of the air on your skin. The tiny almost subtle lift of your shoulders, if the word nervous system just made you brace a little. That bracing, that's not a problem. That's intelligence, and today that's where we begin. Welcome to the Unfuckwithable Woman. I'm Briani Montgomery, somatic psychotherapist, educator, and founder of the Soma Therapy Collective. This is the podcast where we come back into the body, repair the motherline, and build a life that your nervous system can live in. Not manage, not survive, live in. If you're new here, welcome. This episode is a good place to start. If you've been here since the beginning, I'm glad you're back. Something in today's episode has been sitting with me for a while, and I'm glad we finally get to have this conversation. Here's what I keep seeing, and here's what's driving this episode. Nervous system regulation is everywhere right now. It is the wellness conversation of 2026. 230,000 TikTok videos, mainstream magazines, corporate wellness programs. Your GP is starting to use the language. Your Instagram feed is full of it, and most of it is getting it wrong. Not dangerously wrong, just kind of skimming and in the shallows of what nervous system work is. Symptom management wrong. Fix yourself faster wrong, which is the same framing, just dress differently. Today I want to offer you something different. I want to reframe the conversation entirely because the premise behind most nervous system content is that your nervous system is misfiring, that dysregulation is a bug to be corrected, that if you can just breathe right, ground right, cold plunge right, you can override the system and get back to performing normally. But what if the system isn't misfiring? What if it's doing exactly what it's designed to do? What if your nervous system isn't broken? What if it's brilliant? That's what we're getting into today. So let's begin with talking about what your nervous system actually is. Let me give you a little physiology first because I want you to have this in your body, not just in your head. Your automatic nervous system, the part we're talking about when we talk about regulation, and I just want to say that regulation needs to be reframed because it really is. I'm going to talk in this episode about reg and use the word regulation. Regulation is coined and represented as this calm state and this state of being where we are relaxed and calm. And that is not what we're working with when we work with the nervous system and healing the nervous system. So I just want to frame that up now, and we'll be doing more. I would be doing an episode on that at a later stage, though I'm just going to use the word regulation for this episode. What I really mean is response. So just to kind of frame that up for you before we step in. So when we talk about regulation, it is the ancient pre-verbal part of you. It is not the thinking brain. It is not the part that makes your grocery lists or runs you through your to-do list at 2 a.m. It is older than that, far older. It predates language, it predates civilization, it predates pretty much everything we have built as a species. Its job, its only job for hundreds of thousands of years was to keep you alive. Not comfortable, not happy, not high performing, alive. And it did it through three states. You may have heard of these. It's the fight, flight, and freeze state. And later on in human history, we've added the fawn state. Though I want to add another state that often gets left out, which is the state of connection, ease, and rest. The ventral vagal state, if we're going to be precise. The state where your nervous system has scanned the environment, found it safe enough, and come back online into social engagement, warmth, curiosity, creativity. That is a state we're trying to return to. That is the responsive, regulated, as the industry calls, state. So when we're trying to return back to social engagement, warmth, curiosity, and creativity, we don't do that by bypassing the others. We do it by understanding them. Because here's what the TikTok content won't tell you is fight, flight, freeze, and fawn states are not failures. They are solutions. They are your nervous system's best answer to an environment that said, This does not feel safe. Doll everything towards survival, do it now, and it worked. You're here. Whatever your body has done to keep you alive, it worked. That matters. So let's move into dysregulation as survival genius. I've worked with women in clinic for over 20 years, and one of the patterns I return to again and again is this. The moment a woman understands that her dysregulation was never a character flaw, something shifts in her body before I've even finished the sentence. You can see it. The shoulders drop a fraction, the breath changes, something behind the eyes goes a little softer because she has been carrying shame about her own survival. Let me say that again. She has been carrying shame about the very mechanisms that kept her alive. She has been trying to fix the part of her that protected her. And that is the wound underneath the wound. Not the dysregulation itself. It's the self-abandonment that happens when we decide that dysregulation is the problem. Now I want to be careful here because I'm not saying celebrate dysregulation, stay dysregulated. Dysregulation is the goal. That's not what I mean. What I mean is this: if you want to change the state your nervous system is living in, you have to start respecting what it built, the foundations, the patterns. You have to understand why it made the choices it made, because a nervous system that has been in survival mode for years, for decades, sometimes across generations, is not going to trust your deep breathing. If it doesn't believe the threat has actually passed, it doesn't respond to logic. It doesn't respond to positive affirmations. It doesn't respond to willpower. And felt safety is different from cognitive safety. From thinking you're safe, from telling yourself you're safe, felt safety is what happens in the body when the nervous system itself gets the signal the threat has passed. You can rest now, you can come home. That is the work. Not overriding the system, coming home to it. This is the foundation of what I refer to as body knowing. And I'll talk more about that in a moment. But first, I want to address something that's been building in me as I look at what's being offered out there right now. And what I refer to as spiritual and somatic bypassing. I said at the beginning of this episode that most nervous system content is getting it wrong. I want to be specific about how. The dominant framing in 2026 in the wellness industry, in the neuro wellness space, and even in some therapeutic spaces is optimization, regulation as a performance tool. Hack your nervous system, train your vagus nerve for peak output, regulate to perform at your best. And I want to name what's happening here. The framing is still asking your body to serve the same master. It's still asking you to produce more, output more, achieve more, just with a regulated nervous system, doing it instead of a depleted one. The goalposts haven't moved. The extractive relationship with your body hasn't changed. We've just added a breathwork protocol at the front end. And I don't think that's healing. I think that's a more sophisticated form of the same disconnection. It's colonization in the wellness field. It is bypassing, spiritual bypassing, instead of actually facing the core and turning towards what the issue is here. Real nervous system healing, body-based healing. It's not about optimizing your output. It's not about restoring your relationship with your own body. It is about building a life that your nervous system can actually inhabit. Not a body that can perform the life you've been told to want. That distinction matters enormously. It changes everything about how we approach the work. So when you're scrolling through nervous system content and something feels off, hollow, like it's asking you to fix yourself faster, trust that. That discomfort is body knowing at work. Your body knows the difference between a practice that asks it to perform safely and a practice that actually creates it. And examples of this is regulation for optimization, regulation as a biohack, vagal tone as a productivity tool, regulation in itself, the whole word regulation screams, colonization, screams, spiritual bypassing, actual long-term healing, and creating safety in the body. Any framework that still asks you to override the body in service of external goals. Instead of these types of performative nervous system approaches and practices, what you can look for is practices that start with curiosity rather than correction. Frameworks that honor the intelligence behind the dysregulation. Approaches that allow you to connect innately with your own body's intelligence in a safe relational space. Practices and ways that encourage reflection and ways in reframing regulation that creates opportunity to reflect and incorporate diversity in your system. Your body is not a project, it is not a problem to be solved, it is an intelligence to be listened to. And that brings me to talking about body knowing. Body knowing is the framework I've developed over more than two decades of clinical work with women through embodiment practice, tantrika work, yogini work, somatic therapy and energy and Reiki healing. And at its heart, it's simple. Even though the practice of it takes time and sometimes courage, body knowing is the practice of learning to receive and trust the information your body is already giving you. Not interpreting it through the mind first, not running it through the filter of is this appropriate? Is this too much? What will people think? Receiving it first, first impulse, best impulse, directly in the body. Your body is speaking all the time. Most of us have been conditioned over years and sometimes generations not to listen. To override a sensation in our chest, in our gut, in our pelvic area through the exhaustion. To smile when something in your gut says no, to keep the peace when every cell in your body is asking us to leave. Body knowing is the practice of reversing that conditioning slowly, gently, without re-traumatizing the system in the process. It begins with the simplest thing: noticing, not changing, not fixing, noticing. And that's what I want to give you right now a live practice. Something you can do with me right now, wherever your body is inhabiting at this particular time. Let's do a little soma check-in. So I'm going to invite you into this moment. You can stay where you are. You don't need to change anything about your position, your environment, or what you're doing. This is a soma check-in. Takes a few minutes. And it is the foundational entry point into body knowing. Start by letting your feet make contact with whatever surface they're resting on. Floor, chair, bed, or the ground beneath you. Just notice the weight of your body moving downward. Allowing gravity to do what it does. Now without changing anything, notice your breath. Don't control it, just follow it. In and out. Notice where does it live? Notice it doesn't reach your chest. Notice if it reaches your belly. Notice if it stops somewhere around your collarbone. It doesn't go further. There's no right answer here. I just want you to be with noticing. Now scan your body slowly from the feet upward. I want you to notice where are you holding on to something right now? Where is it tension or tightness? Racing. Numbness. And as you're scanning, I'd like you to notice equally where is there ease? Where is there softness? You don't want to analyze or attach any story to what you're noticing. I just would like you to scan and map your system. Instead of trying to change what you have noticed, I want you to turn towards it. I want you to turn towards any tension that you have noticed. Any areas of tension in the body. It could be in your shoulders or a holding in your jaw. Or you may have noticed tightness, maybe across your chest, or even numbness in your hands. I just want you to turn towards what you have noticed. And I just want you to affirm that whatever is there, just to let it know that it's been noticed. Not fixed, not dissolved, noticed. In my clinical work, I've watched this moment again and again. The moment a woman realizes it's not about being overridden. That someone is witnessing and finally listening. And once we witness and acknowledge what we're noticing without trying to fix it, you will you'll see in the system and your experience in the system is like a dropping. Or the system lets out an exhale. Let it be whatever size it needs to be. Or you can do several breaths. And now gently come back into the space. That's the beginning. That's always the beginning. The nervous system doesn't need you to do something extraordinary, it needs you to stop outsourcing your body's knowledge to everyone else long enough to receive it yourself. That's it. That's the whole practice at its root. So, why does this work matter right now and doing this practice with you right now? I want to bring this home to something larger because I don't think that this is just personal work. I think this is the work of this moment in history. We are living in a time of profound collective dysregulation. You can feel it in the news, in the culture, in the conversations happening in your own kitchen. People are bracing, they're braced. People are in fight, people are numbed out, they are frozen. People are fawning to create safety. And the system we live inside is not offering resources for the kind of nervous system healing that actually changes things. What it's offering is optimization, productivity, perform better through trauma. And I think women in particular, and I'm talking about women broadly, inclusively, are feeling the cost of that most acutely, and that is rolling onto our children, our families, our communities, and collectively because we have been conditioned across generations, not just years to override our own bodies in service of a culture built on our compliance. That's not dramatic language. That's what I see in my clinic every week, what I see in my community and what I'm feeling personally in my own nervous system. Women who have been so trained to be useful, manageable, undisruptive that their own bodies have become strangers to them. The healing I'm describing is not just personal. When you come back into your body really back in, not performing regulation but inhabiting it, you come back into your instinct, into your knowing, into your boundaries and your desire and your rage, your grief, your love, your sensuality, your pleasure and your passion. All of it. The whole animal and a woman who is fully back in her body is not a woman who is so easy to control. That is not a side effect of this work. That is the point of it. Coming home to your body is how you come home to community to each other to life itself. One nervous system coming back online is a revolution. That is what we are building here one body, one motherline one woman at a time if something in this episode landed somewhere in your body and you'll know if it did because body knowing has already been at work this whole time I would love to keep the conversation going with you. The best next step is a free 20-minute clarity session. This is an opportunity to have a real conversation about where you are and what kind of support would actually serve you. You can book this complimentary 20 minute session at wwwthum therapycollective.com. You can also find me on Instagram at briny montgomerytherapy and the reclaimme project and on YouTube at nervous system where I put out short form content to support your nervous system between these longer conversations. If this episode was useful to you share it with a woman in your life who needs to hear that her body is not broken. That might be the most powerful thing you can do today. Watch out for the next episode of the Unfuckwithable woman where we will be exploring the mother line what is actually passed down through generations in the body and what it looks like to begin repair. Until then take care of your body it's the only one telling the truth The Unfuck with a woman is hosted by Briney Montgomery of the Soma Therapy Collective music by Finn Holliman photos by Beth Cronin. Find Briney at www.theSoma Therapy Collective dot com on Instagram through Briney Montgomery and the Reclaim Me Project on YouTube through Nervous System Support on TikTok through Briney Montgomery. If this episode moves something in you subscribe share and leave a review it helps more women find their way here