By Sheila Marina, Planet of Peace Energy Healing
You have had this moment.
Someone you love says something — ordinary, even gentle — and your reaction is immediate, disproportionate, and slightly bewildering. A tightness in the chest. A withdrawal so fast you barely register it happening. A flash of defensiveness that arrives before the words have finished landing.
Afterward, you wonder: where did that come from?
It came from your nervous system. And what your nervous system was responding to almost certainly had nothing to do with the person standing in front of you.
Our closest relationships are where the nervous system speaks most loudly. This is because intimacy — real, sustained, day-after-day closeness — activates the very systems in the body that were shaped earliest and most powerfully: the systems that learned what safety feels like, what love costs, what happens when you trust, and what happens when you lose.
Those early learnings live in the body as patterned responses. They are fast, automatic, and largely invisible to the conscious mind. A tone of voice that resembles a parent’s criticism triggers a defensive posture before a single thought has formed. A moment of emotional closeness activates a withdrawal reflex that was installed decades ago in a completely different relationship. A partner’s silence is interpreted as abandonment by a nervous system that learned, very young, that silence meant someone was leaving.
The person in front of you is real. The response your body is generating often belongs to someone else, from another time, in another room entirely.
He was in his mid-fifties. Successful, accomplished, self-aware. He came to me because his third marriage was failing, and he wanted to understand something that had been quietly troubling him for years: why the very successful, vibrant women he consistently chose as partners became less interested within a few years together.
He described his childhood as easy. His adult life was full of achievement. On the surface, there was nothing to explain the pattern.
In his session, the very first trapped emotion that surfaced was horror. From age three.
His father had left the home when he was three years old. And in that departure, his father told him: you can stay here with your mother, or you can come with me — and I’ll bring the TV so you can keep watching Sesame Street.
A three-year-old boy. Standing in a room. Being asked to choose between his mother and a television set.
It was an impossible choice disguised as a simple one. And his nervous system recorded the impossibility of that moment with absolute precision.
Over the following fifty years, every time life presented him with a decision between two things he valued — two paths, two possibilities, two people — his body returned to that room. He froze. He became unreachable. He withdrew into a stillness that looked, from the outside, like disinterest.
Three marriages. Three women who experienced his withdrawal and eventually stopped reaching for him. And the root was a moment so early he had no conscious memory of it — until his body, in the session, brought him back to the room with the television and his father’s suitcase.
When the horror was identified and released, he sat quietly for a long moment. Then he said: I have been that boy in every relationship I have ever had.
The autonomic nervous system — the part of your biology that operates beneath conscious awareness — has one primary job: keeping you safe. It does this by constantly scanning for threat, reading the environment through cues that are faster than thought, and activating protective responses when it detects something that resembles a past danger.
Dr. Stephen Porges, whose polyvagal theory has transformed the field of trauma-informed care, describes this as neuroception — the nervous system’s ability to evaluate safety and danger without involving the conscious mind. Your body makes a decision about whether a situation is safe, dangerous, or life-threatening before you have formed a single thought about it.
In relationships, this means your nervous system is constantly responding — to your partner’s tone, their posture, their proximity, their silence, their emotional availability. And it is responding based on a template that was formed long before this relationship began.
If closeness was safe in your early life, your nervous system moves toward it naturally. If closeness was unpredictable — sometimes warm, sometimes withdrawn, sometimes dangerous — your nervous system learned to approach it with caution, to monitor constantly, to protect itself preemptively.
These responses are intelligent. They were survival strategies once. And they are also, in many cases, running a script that no longer matches the reality of your current life and your current partner.
These are patterns I encounter consistently across sessions. They show up differently in different people, and the root is always specific to the individual. What they share is this: they are all nervous system responses masquerading as personality traits or relationship problems.
Withdrawal under closeness. The relationship deepens and you pull back — subtly, almost imperceptibly. Your partner feels the distance and reads it as rejection. What is actually happening: your nervous system is responding to the vulnerability of intimacy by activating a protective retreat. The closer it gets, the louder the alarm.
Hypervigilance in love. You scan for signs of trouble constantly. A shift in your partner’s mood becomes a crisis. A delayed text becomes evidence of abandonment. Your body is in a state of readiness — monitoring, assessing, bracing. This vigilance was useful once. In a safe relationship, it creates the very instability it is trying to prevent.
The freeze response in conflict. When tension rises, you go quiet. Your mind empties. You cannot find words, cannot access emotion, cannot respond. Your partner experiences this as stonewalling. What is actually happening: your nervous system has shifted into a freeze state — the body’s deepest protective mode, older than fight or flight, designed for moments when the system determines that neither action nor escape is available.
Over-functioning as love. You manage, organize, anticipate, and care for everyone around you — and experience this as love. Underneath, your nervous system learned early that your value in relationships was tied to your usefulness. The exhaustion that follows is your body carrying a role it was never designed to sustain indefinitely.
Choosing the same partner in a different body. Three relationships, three different people, the same dynamic. Your conscious mind chose variety. Your nervous system chose familiarity — because the nervous system is drawn to what it recognizes, even when what it recognizes is painful. The pattern will repeat until the root is addressed at the level where it lives.
This practice is best done with a pen and paper, in a quiet moment.
Think of a recurring dynamic in your closest relationship — a moment that repeats, a reaction you recognize as patterned rather than fresh.
Write it down in one sentence: When my partner does _____, I respond by _____.
Now ask yourself three questions, writing the answers slowly:
How old does this response feel? Trust the first number that arrives. It may surprise you.
Where in my body do I feel it most? Place your hand there. Breathe.
What is the earliest memory I have of this same feeling — not in this relationship, but anywhere in my life?
You may find that the pattern you have been attributing to your current relationship has been present since long before this partner arrived. That discovery, by itself, shifts something. It moves the conversation from what is wrong between us to what has my body been carrying into every room I enter.
That question is where the deeper work begins.
Relationship patterns are among the most consistent reasons people find their way to energy healing — because the patterns persist even when insight, effort, and genuine love are all present. Understanding why is important, and understanding alone rarely resolves what the body is holding.
My article Why Emotional Dysregulation Is More Common Than You Think — And What You Can Do About It explores how nervous system responses shape our daily experience in ways most people have never been taught to recognize.
When you feel ready to trace your own patterns to their source, sessions are available in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom.
Your relationships have been trying to tell you something. Your nervous system already knows what it is.
Sheila Marina is the founder of Planet of Peace Energy Healing and a certified Emotion Code, Body Code, and Belief Code Practitioner with over 35 years of experience. She sees clients in person in Bowmanville and Toronto, and worldwide via Zoom. planetofpeace.org
