The Nine Senses: What Therapists Weren’t Taught About Nervous System Regulation
with Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby and Alyssa Blask Campbell, M.Ed
The Layer Beneath Emotion That Training Skipped
Nervous system regulation happens in two layers, sensory and emotional, and the sensory layer has to settle first. Most of what we were taught to read as resistance is a nervous system that has not yet reached safety.
You have had this session. One partner is escalating, the other has gone quiet, and the room has tipped somewhere you cannot talk it back from. Or it is an individual client, someone bright and motivated who has done the reading and the homework, and in the exact moment it matters they cannot reach a single skill you built together. If you have ever sat in that moment and thought that no one actually trained you for this specific thing, you were not imagining it, and it is not a hole in you.
Across two full training programs I did not get one hour on the physiology underneath dysregulation. My supervisees tell me the same thing. That gap is exactly what this conversation is meant to close.
I sat down with Alyssa Blask Campbell, M.Ed, an early childhood and nervous system educator, the founder of Seed and Sew, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Tiny Humans, Big Emotions. Working with a group of occupational therapists, she built a free nine-senses assessment — the kind of tool that used to require an OT referral. We get into the nine senses (four of which rarely make it into clinical training), why sensory regulation precedes emotional regulation, when dysregulation is variation rather than pathology, sensory mismatch in couples and in the therapy room, coping mechanisms versus coping strategies, and how your own wiring quietly shapes what you conceptualize as “the right way” for a client to feel.
“It’s just part of being a human on planet Earth.” — Alyssa Blask Campbell, on why most dysregulation is variation, not pathology
What’s in this article
No. The whole point of the tool Alyssa built is that this used to require an OT referral and now it does not. You can learn your own profile, and a client’s, in minutes.
The phrase is having a moment, and Alyssa says so herself. The underlying physiology and the sensory framework are not a trend, and that is what this article stays anchored to.
Sensory regulation comes before emotional regulation. With a flooded client, lowering sensory load can be step one, and the skills you were trained to lead with become step two.
No. It sits alongside it. Neuroception genuinely shifts with trauma. The point is to stop writing a trauma story onto ordinary sensory difference, not to ignore trauma when it is there.
Moments from this episode
Episode transcript
LMB: Therapists. I know you’ve had this experience sitting in a session in a tense moment. I experience it so often as a couples counselor. One person is escalating, the other person is shutting down, and you’re thinking, wow, how do I even start to bring this back to the center?
LMB: When we’re in a state of distress, we don’t have access to self-control. Your adrenal glands are firing cortisol or adrenaline, and it turns on your primal freeze or fawn amygdala and it turns off, shuts down your prefrontal cortex, your rational thinking brain, where you can do problem solving, where you can access the skills and the tools that you have.
LMB: And this is something important to consider that a lot of therapists don’t hear often enough. And oftentimes, our training has not prepared us to cope with the realities of nervous system dysregulation in the moment, to help people come back into their bodies, calm down physiologically so that they can be more expansive cognitively and emotionally.
LMB: Every single human on the planet has a nervous system that you’re born with and how you interpret the information, the stimuli that your brain is taking in is unique to you.
LMB: So that’s why we’re going here on today’s episode of Love, Happiness and Success for Therapists. If this is your first time here, welcome. I’m your host. I’m Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby. I’m a psychologist, a marriage and family therapist, a board certified coach, and the founder of Growing Self Counseling and Coaching. And I’m an AAMFT approved clinical supervisor.
LMB: And I hear a lot from my trainees about how hard it can be to deal with big feelings that derail the productivity, sometimes, of an otherwise great session. How do we help folks figure out what is going to be most regulating for their unique nervous system in that moment, that is going to be a strategy — and then taking that information, what is most regulating for them all throughout the day to give them the most capacity for regulation?
LMB: So that is why today we are calling in the big guns to tackle sensory systems and nervous system differences that we need to have in our awareness in order to handle these moments effectively. My guest today is Alyssa Blask Campbell. She is a childhood educator, nervous system expert, and the founder and CEO of Seed and Sew. She is a bestselling author of Tiny Humans, Big Emotions and the author of the book Big Kids, Bigger Feelings. Her work focuses on helping us understand how nervous systems shape emotional regulation and behavior so that we can work to manage it effectively. Alyssa, I’m so excited!
Alyssa Blask Campbell: I’m so excited to be here. Thank you.
LMB: Well, you know, this is such a huge topic. And I think that, you know, it’s getting buzzy. We’re hearing more about nervous system dysregulation on civilian social media. But I was so excited to talk with you on Love, Happiness and Success for Therapists because personally, through two training programs, I didn’t have any instruction on what is really going on on a physiological level that contributes to dysregulation, much less how to address it. And you know so much about that. So I was hoping to get your perspective for the benefit of our community here.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: 100%. Yeah, I have a master’s in early childhood education and did research in building emotional intelligence in kids. And it is not something that was a part of my training program either. I’ve had the privilege of diving into it as an adult outside of that, but it is something that we are lacking in training programs and something that we’re bringing now to schools and to tiny humans, because we have the ability to learn about how our brains and bodies work from such a young age. And we want to start there and not wait until you’re an adult. But it’s never too late. So I’m excited to be able to kind of shed some light on it. Nervous system regulation is such a buzzword topic these days, and regulation in general. And I’m just glad we’re talking about this stuff, and also a lot is lost in the shuffle in that, right?
LMB: Right. Well, we’re going to take it to the source. And I know that a lot of what you write about and what you teach in a variety of environments, there’s a large body of research that supports all of this. And we’re going to get into all of this. But why don’t we just start at the beginning? I mean, maybe we could even define some terms — how would you describe what nervous system dysregulation is, and just take us into what’s going on at a physiological level?
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Yeah, it can show up in a number of different ways. The way that one experiences dysregulation — I have two children. I have a five year old and a two year old. And my five year old calls one version of this being a turtle, where you just want to hide inside your shell and you want to be as small as possible and kind of disappear to the world, where you might feel embarrassed or disappointed or left out or overwhelmed. For some people, their reaction to the overwhelm — the dysregulation of overwhelm — is to want to be a turtle, to hide inside your shell, to climb into bed and not get out, to run away on a vacation and pretend the rest of the world does not exist in that moment.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: It can also show up as a heightened state where there’s urgency in your body and you’re like, no, I have to respond to this thing right now, or I am not really listening to somebody. I hear them talking to me, but I’m just mounting my counterargument, and I’m in a state of urgency. I’m heightened. Your heart’s beating fast, your shoulders come up to your ears. You might get sweaty or clammy. And then there’s distress. And this is where we might see something like a panic attack, where our body is fully out of control.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When we look at it from a nerdy perspective, what’s happening — your adrenal glands are firing cortisol or adrenaline, and it turns on your primal fight, flight, freeze or fawn amygdala, and it turns off, shuts down, your prefrontal cortex — your rational thinking brain, where you can do problem solving, where you can access the skills and the tools that you have. And when we are operating from our amygdala, we’re in a reactive state. When we’re in a regulated state, we have access to our whole brain. But when we’re operating from our amygdala, we don’t have access to all those tools.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: And what we look at here is what happens next, and how it’s going to be unique to the individual. There are some things that are neurobiological that just happen next. We look at this in terms of dopamine versus serotonin or oxytocin. We can tap into some tools that are dopaminergic that are going to produce dopamine in our body. And that dopamine will make you feel better pretty immediately — it really just masks the production of the cortisol or adrenaline. My favorite coping mechanism, my favorite avenue for dopamine, is Facebook Marketplace. Is it still available? Done.
LMB: Oh, God. I don’t have to go that far — same, just like “mine.”
Alyssa Blask Campbell: And what happens is that when I get off Facebook Marketplace — when I stop tapping into that dopamine — my body needs more and more to keep feeling good. Because as it wears off, not only do I have a crash from the dopamine where my body has to replenish it, but also you start to feel the adrenaline and cortisol that was living beneath the surface that we had just masked.
LMB: Okay, so wait, hold on. One big takeaway. You’re saying Facebook Marketplace is a progressive illness is what I’m hearing.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Yeah.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: I mean, yeah. And that’s the story of a number of different things where I really needed dopamine. We call them coping mechanisms. Coping strategies are what we tap into intentionally; coping mechanisms that produce dopamine are like the snooze button on the alarm clock — that alarm’s going to go off again in a little bit, we’re just hitting the snooze button. We’re buying ourselves a little bit of time. This can come through the reward system of scrolling Instagram, or filling a cart, or shopping. It can also come through substance use. It can come through anything excessive — excessive cleaning, excessive exercise, excessive eating — anything we’re doing where really it’s, I don’t want to feel this hard thing, so I’m going to go do this other thing and just mask that real quick.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Now when we’re looking at our coping strategies, this is where we produce serotonin or oxytocin or sometimes both. And in the production of that serotonin or oxytocin, we pump the brakes on the adrenaline or cortisol. So we’re actually shutting down that cortisol production. And we’re producing literally calming, active effects on the body. This could be accessed through talking to a friend or therapist. It could be accessed through movement. It could be accessed through downtime, like arts expression, drawing, coloring, journaling. And it can be accessed through deep pressure, like a hug or tight squeeze. It can be accessed through a break in stimuli, where maybe you step outside and just experience the outside world, and not the maybe screaming child that’s in your house. You’re like, oh, I’m in nature. That’s going to produce serotonin, or sometimes also oxytocin.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: And for both of those, we’re going to get a longer-term effect for regulation of our nervous system, because we’re pumping the brakes on the adrenaline or cortisol. But also, it takes a little longer to feel that effect. If I pop on Facebook Marketplace, immediately I’m gonna feel something. If I turn to talk to a friend, I’m still going to be amped up while I’m talking until that serotonin starts to hit and the cortisol slows down. It takes a little longer to feel those effects than it does to turn to a mechanism, which is why it makes so much sense that so many of us are like, let me turn to this mechanism because I want to stop feeling this hard thing yesterday. I want to stop feeling this hard thing five minutes ago, not in five minutes from now.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When we are looking at nervous system regulation, we’re looking at: how do we help folks figure out what is going to be most regulating for their unique nervous system in that moment — that is going to be a strategy — and then, taking that information, what is most regulating for them all throughout the day to give them the most capacity for regulation? So that if you think about maybe how you feel at 9 a.m., after you’ve had a good sleep and you’ve just had breakfast, the small potatoes can feel like small potatoes at that moment. But at 9 p.m., when you’re exhausted and you’re ready for bed, the small potatoes can feel like baked potatoes because you don’t have as much capacity as you had in the morning.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When we’re looking at this all throughout the day, we’re saying, how do we help give folks the most capacity we can? And humans are not one size fits all. So our approach to them can’t be either. Our nervous systems recharge differently from person to person.
LMB: I love that, and I’ve heard you speak on that before — how there are different, almost orientations, like genres or flavors of nervous systems, and that there can even be an assessment process for figuring out your own, because therapists can also get activated personally and professionally. But before we go into that, can I just ask you something I’m so curious about? In your work, your research or professional opinion, how often is it the case that what you’re describing related to activation or dysregulation is part of the life experience of being a human, versus something that many therapists — I know I’ve done this in my practice — can automatically conceptualize as trauma?
LMB: This is a trauma response. And if there isn’t trauma somewhere in the past that needs to be resolved in a trauma-focused way, then there will be a deactivation, or it’s conceptualized as some type of psychopathology. I’m curious about, is that the case, or — I guess even the prevalence, because of course sometimes it is. Versus, is this just something that happens to all humans? I mean, I myself can have that experience, and thankfully I’m not a trauma survivor. But I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: It’s just part of being a human on planet Earth. And we know that because our research started with kids as young as four months old, and everyone has a nervous system. How you navigate the world, what you see, how your brain and body filters information, is unique to you. And trauma can change that — we’ll talk about that. Our neuroception is most particularly the one that we look at when we see a reaction that’s from trauma. And every single human on the planet has a nervous system that you’re born with, and how you interpret the information, the stimuli that your brain is taking in, is unique to you.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: And when we put together a tool — that we use as our flagship tool that’s totally free, though there is a paid version that we use with schools, which is where most of our work happens these days — it’s 100% free for the general public to take. And we worked with a group of occupational therapists to put it together. It looks at your nine senses.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When we’re talking about your nine senses, folks often hear of their first five — sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. And even within those first five, there are some folks who are sensitive to some and seeking of others. When you’re sensitive to it, it means you’re really aware of it — your nervous system is very attuned to that stimuli. So if you have somebody who is visually sensitive, they’re going to notice if things shift in their environment. Their brain can feel overwhelmed by clutter or visual chaos. My husband is like this. I recently had clipped my nails and he said, oh, hey, noticed you clipped your nails. And I was like, oh yeah, thanks, feel seen. And he was like, yeah, you put the nail clippers back in the wrong spot. And I was like, that’s not where I thought that. Thank you for correcting me. For the record, same cabinet, just a little to the right. His brain notices these things. And I’m the annoying partner who’s not visually sensitive, and I leave a trail of me everywhere I go. My shoes are here, my jacket’s there, the pile of mail I grabbed is on the counter — there’s a trail of me everywhere. And for his nervous system that’s very dysregulating. For me, visual stimulation only feels overwhelming when I’m already in a dysregulated state.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: We look at it on a scale of negative two to plus two, negative two being most sensitive, plus two being highly seeking. I’m a zero on the visual scale. So I’m not super visually seeking. I don’t love a lot of bright colors around me and a lot going on around me in my environment, but I’m also not super sensitive to it. And for all five of these first senses we talked about, all of us are somewhere on this minus two to plus two scale. The minus twos are draining our nervous system all day long, because we’re really attuned to that stimuli — our brain is working hard to pay attention to that information.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: For me, I’m sound sensitive, and so it is the worst when my son is running around our house being an ambulance and my daughter is listening to music in the background, and then they’re both like, mom, mom, mom, mom.
LMB: Oh my God, me too. I feel like I’m in a pinball machine. I get so overstimulated.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Yeah, it’s so draining for me. And I’ve witnessed my sister-in-law, who’s not sound sensitive, at Christmas this year with her youngest — climbing all over her body, saying silly things in her ear and leaning over and saying them in her face while she’s having a conversation with someone else. In our family, where I have four siblings, there’s a million people in my family. She’s just in a regulated state, having a conversation. And I was watching this and I was like, I could not maintain regulation with that happening in and around me. But we have very different nervous systems. She’s highly sensory seeking. She needs a lot of stimuli to be in a regulated state. My husband is very sensory sensitive — for most of the nine he falls on the sensitive side. So for him, he needs a break from stimuli throughout the day or supports and tools to maintain regulation or access it.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: We have those first five — sight, sound, taste, touch, smell — and then we have four others that are super critical. We have our interoceptive sense. This lets us know what’s happening inside my body. Am I hungry, am I tired? Do I have to go to the bathroom? And it also plays a huge role in emotional regulation. Is my heart beating fast? How am I feeling? What emotions might I be experiencing? Folks who are interoceptive sensitive — it’s like the volume is turned up on their feelings. These are what we often refer to as highly sensitive, big feelers, deeply feeling. Mammalian labels for it at this point. But it’s really that they’re interoceptive sensitive. They don’t feel something kind of — they feel it big. When they’re hungry, they’re angry. When they are tired, they’re exhausted. When they feel shame, they feel it deeply. When they feel guilt, they feel it big. When they feel anxiety, it can spiral pretty quickly. These are folks where we help them really start to notice those things and name them, and be able to identify what’s happening so that they can regain access to their whole brain, because they can go from zero to a hundred.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Then we have our vestibular sense. This is located in our inner ear. It’s responsible for our movement and balance, keeps you upright. If you’re vestibular sensitive, you might get motion sickness or vertigo pretty easily. If you’re vestibular seeking — my husband, for example, sits in an office chair that swivels back and forth. He can rotate in it. If I sat in that chair all day long, it would be draining me. I would leave the day less recharged. And for him, he leaves the day more recharged. I’m vestibular sensitive. He’s vestibular seeking.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Then we have our proprioceptive sense. This is located in our muscles and joints. It lets us know where our body ends and something else begins. I have low proprioceptive awareness. I need proprioceptive input to know where my body ends and something else begins. My bed frame hasn’t moved in years, but I run into that sucker all the time. I just have bruises and bumps and scrapes on my leg because I have a hard time knowing where my body ends and it begins. I’ve never once seen Zach run into our bed frame. He forever misses it because he has high proprioceptive awareness. What this means for him is that he doesn’t need a lot of deep pressure, or heavy lifting, or big body movement, or big hugs — he doesn’t need a lot of that for that system to know, where do I end and something else begins. This also means he gets touched out in a way that I don’t know if I’ve ever felt touched out. I could have a massage for four days and I’m like, I want more. I loved the newborn phase when I could just have a baby sleeping on my body. And for him, he was like, no thanks, please take said baby, have her sleep on your body.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: A friend of mine has two young kids, and she has a high proprioceptive-seeking son who wants to climb all over her and be close and snuggle up. And she is proprioceptive sensitive. So for her, she’s like, he will not stop touching me and he’s all over my body and I need space. There’s sensory mismatch. And part of this is looking at how do we get that need met for him that isn’t involving her body.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Then we have our final sense: our neuroceptive sense. This is the one we touched on earlier. It lets us know whether we are safe or in danger. For folks who are neuro sensitive, they’re super attuned to the emotional experience or the dysregulation of somebody else. Tone, body language, facial expression. They read the energy in the room. You know that feeling if people have been in conflict and they stop arguing, but you walk in the room and you can feel it — that’s your neuro sense at work. It reads that energy. It pays attention to people’s faces and body language and tone and says, oh yeah, she just said, “I’m okay,” but she is not okay. And for neuro sensitive humans, they are really reading this energy. Very high end. We see a lot of this actually in therapists, in social workers, in teachers, where they’re hyper aware of how somebody else is feeling in a way that can be really exhausting and draining.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Often these are our neuro sensitive humans who are like, oh my God, my brain was just reading somebody else’s energy all day, or in that entire hang. In our work with kids, a lot of this starts to look at — when we have neuro sensitive kids, they are going to notice other people’s energy and their emotions, and they’ll start to tell themselves a story about it. I walked into the lunchroom and those two people were sitting and they were laughing and they looked over at me, and now I have this story about, they don’t like me and I’m left out and they were making fun of X, Y, Z. And a lot of our work is helping them identify: what’s the story you’re telling yourself, and how do you communicate about that to find out if that is the true story, or if that’s the story that you’ve created because they’re so attuned to everybody else. The inclusion and belonging component of neuroception is a sense that shifts and changes with trauma.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: For the most part, you are born with the nervous system that you have, and we support you with tools to navigate the world with your nervous system. There are two senses that shift and change. Your vestibular sense, as you get older, starts to go — you get more sensitive. This is why maybe if you liked roller coasters when you were a kid, but now you’re 45 and can’t handle their coaster. And then your neuroceptive sense shifts and changes with trauma. It’s designed to keep you safe. And so it has to heighten in order to do that. I experienced trauma when I was 14, and from there I have certain things where my neuroception says, oh, I don’t like this. This doesn’t feel good for me. It’s hyper aware of certain things related to my traumatic experience. It’s doing its job of, I need to keep you safe. And when we see this, we get to help kids and adults alike build awareness of that’s what’s happening here. And when you can notice that story you’re telling yourself about, am I safe here — sometimes, yeah, you got to listen to that, because you’re not safe. And that’s how you stay safe in this world. And sometimes you’re not 14 anymore, and you are safe to go to the basement and do the laundry where the butterfly jeans are, and you’re safe to put those on. But my neuroception says, one time when I went to the basement, that was not safe for me. And so we get to do that work of helping them start to notice what your neuroception is trying to communicate to you.
LMB: There’s just so much to think about, and thank you for doing such a beautiful job of explaining all of this in such an easily understandable way. Just to recap — there are nine different senses, many of which I don’t think about at all, but that are very salient. As you’re talking, I’m like, yes, yes, yes, all these moments of recognition. And then you’re also saying that for each of these nine dimensions, every human has a different orientation. Some people are very sensitive, some people need a high degree of stimulation, and then there are others that are neutral, but we all have our own pattern, meaning we have a different relationship with these senses than maybe the person standing next to us or our partner or our kids. And understanding those differences is really important. And you’re also saying that the vast majority of those are kind of hard-wired in, and they are not necessarily a symptom of pathology. It’s a difference of variation, with the exception of the ones that can change — particularly the attunement toward being able to read the energy of others, that neuroception, that one can really be influenced by trauma. But the rest of these are really stable traits.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Unless there’s an injury, right? Then you could trigger visual, sound, etc. But otherwise, yeah, we’re really born with what we have and we often develop little mechanisms or strategies throughout our world to cope with them, to adjust to what we have. My son is autistic and he’s sensory sensitive for most of those nine. He falls on the sensitive side. We were at a birthday party — a little kid birthday party — and at one point I was like, does he have a UTI? What’s going on? He’s going to the bathroom so many times. I went and checked on him and I was like, hey buddy, what’s going on? He’s like, oh, it’s the only place I can get some peace and quiet around here. What an awesome tool, right? He was like, where can I get a break? Fast forward to what that looks like — he’s a very similar nervous system to my husband. In early dating years when we were in conflict, I remember he was like, I just need a minute. And the more there was silence, the more I filled that silence. He’s walking away from me, I’m following him around the house, arguing. He got in the shower because he’s like, where can I escape you? How can I get you to just give me a minute?
Alyssa Blask Campbell: I look at that five-year-old version and the 30-year-old-at-that-time version of their nervous systems — where can I find this peace and quiet? Because my brain needs that in this moment. And my brain needed to be able to talk through things. For me, what’s regulating and calming isn’t a break from stimuli, it is touch. It’s talking to someone. And I see this in my daughter. She’s two, and when my son is dysregulated, he wants me to be near him, but not touching him, not validating his feelings, not talking really at all. He just wants me to stay and create a safe space for him to cry or to feel. And my daughter loves the validation. She’s like, yes, talk to me about what happened. Validating my — my gosh, it’s so frustrating. You were working so hard on that. And she’s like, I was. That is really regulating for her. She loves a hug. She loves to have my hand touch her back or hold her hand. That’s regulating for her. And that’s regulating for me. So as a parent, when they’re dysregulated, I have to use my conscious brain and be so intentional when I’m responding to my son because I have to give him the opposite of what I need in that moment. And for her, I can do it from my subconscious, because I can give her what I typically need in those moments. And we see this in couples, we see this at work, in relationships across the board. What your nervous system needs is unique to you. The tool that we created with the OTs — that minus two to plus two — there are almost 2 million unique combinations, and you have a unique one.
LMB: Oh, this is so important. Certainly in your own self-awareness — what do I need? But as an MFT who does so much relational work, I think that there can be so much upset, hurt feelings, but also judgment that happens in relationships when people are in a situation and they have different needs and different responses to the same environment. There can be hurt feelings that come from personalization, or this lack of understanding that turns into a criticism of someone else for being the way they are.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Oh, yeah. Because I am the person who leaves the piles of stuff. I use my friends — when their partner is that person, they’re like, oh my God, he doesn’t do anything helpful. He doesn’t take the laundry up the stairs. It’s been sitting on the stairs forever. He is not putting anything away on the counter. And I’m like, oh my God, I’m this person. And as I don’t see it — my brain doesn’t see that. And my husband’s like, how can you not see that? For him that is so foreign that I wouldn’t see. When we understand how our unique brains and bodies work, it just gives us so much more compassion and less judgment. It’s still annoying that I’m not seeing that — we still need a system for me to be able to participate in the household tasks that will also be regulating for his nervous system. And he can now have more compassion and recognize, I’m not doing this because I’m like, oh, whatever, he can take care of it. It is truly an oversight from my brain.
LMB: This is why I think it’s so important for us to be bringing exactly this conversation and your work to professional therapists — to the front-line boots-on-the-ground MFTs and psychologists who are the ones tasked with helping people with these relational issues, or witnessing what’s happening, but not really having a good framework for understanding it. I know that a lot of your work to date has been in the school systems working with kids, but now you’re branching out to other providers — physical therapists, audiologists, and also professional therapists. I’d love to talk about the evolution. For our therapist friends who are with us today, could you paint us a picture of things you’ve seen happen, perhaps with well-intentioned mental health professionals who have these situations emerge but don’t really understand what they’re seeing through the lens of what you’re describing — these baked-in differences that everybody has, and how do we understand them and just manage them, which is part of life, versus an operating theory related to psychological dysfunction, emotional dysfunction: where’s the trauma, where’s the wound, how is this evidence of something that needs to be healed or corrected?
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Yeah, love this question. And I also want to shine a light on: it’s not at a deficit or a fault. It truly just is that we don’t talk enough about this. Until I met you, I never thought about it seriously. I came across your work and I was like, oh my gosh, yeah. I see it as a tool and as a framework and approach that really just strengthens how we show up as humans across the board in the world. And when we’re looking at this in a therapy setting, we can see a lot of focus on the cognitive or the felt experience, the emotion processing of it all, without the understanding of the sensory regulation.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: When we talk about regulation, we separate it into sensory regulation and emotional regulation — sensory processing and emotional processing. And when we’re talking about emotion processing, I’ll give you an example. In my household, if I in therapy were to build these tools for how to process emotions and how to talk about them and how to validate them, that’s going to work for my daughter. What I practiced in therapy and what I learned through my own therapy journey works really well for my daughter, who is sensory seeking, who benefits from talking and sharing — that’s how she receives connection.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: For my son, what’s most beneficial for him is for me to have a shared activity with him where we’re not talking about any of it yet. Where something happens and if I can sit down on the ground with him and I can build magnetiles and not talk at all — and not say, oh man, it’s sometimes so hard to have a sister who comes in and knocks down your stuff, or not say any of that, and just be with him in a shared activity where active engagement and proximity are how he receives connection the most. Allowing a lack of stimuli for a good, often at least ten minutes, sometimes closer to 20 — then he can access emotion processing, but it takes this sensory regulation component before we can access that.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: We often hear about coping tools for folks, and they’re usually quite one-size-fits-all. They’re quite generic. That’s, again, no fault to anybody. It’s just that we have not provided tools in this world, or the understanding, that actually coping is really unique to your nervous system. What helps you cope in calm is unique to you. And up until really the questionnaire we worked to put together with the OTs, you had to go to an occupational therapist to find out this information about your nervous system. Access to that information has been so limited. And it’s a huge part of why we created this tool — why we’re doing this work in schools. I had the privilege of working alongside OTs who were doing this and learning all about it. And I’m like, why is it that only if something is so bad and so hard for a kid, now we can figure out how their nervous system works — now we can bring an OT in and have specialized supports and services to figure that out. We’re doing this backwards. A huge part of creating this tool was saying, everyone should get access to this. It should be accessible information to understand what drains you and what recharges you. It’s basic information around how you’re organized as a human — not looking for pathology, but rather just a new dimension of who I am.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Even, what type of therapy is going to be most helpful for me? Well, how does the nervous system work? What environment is going to be most regulating for me? Well, that depends on my nervous system. And my husband was actually recently sharing — he is on the sensory sensitive side. He’s mostly sensitive to stimuli. He said, it was a game changer in therapy for me when I could do it virtually versus in person. In person I have the energy exchange — she’s neuro sensitive in a way that’s draining for him, not recharging. For him, it was draining. He was like, the stimuli of this space — I remember staring at the decor she had. That shelf was just a little bit off crooked. And his brain notices all those things. Even in the office, there was the white noise machine, but I could hear if a door shut in another office, and that pulls me out of it. For me being able to go virtual — such a game changer. I could control my physical environment from a stimuli perspective to be able to access the therapy.
LMB: I was just missing information that’s really so important to understand the lived experience.
LMB: I do a lot of clinical supervision, primarily with early-career clinicians who are working to become licensed marriage and family therapists. It’s a lot of couples work, some family work. One of the things I’ve become aware of over the years is that people who gravitate into the counseling profession tend to have a lot of things in common in terms of their personality, the way they’re wired, that can also turn into beliefs around what should be happening in a relational dynamic — how we experience emotion, how we experience other people, how we process feelings, how we communicate. The standard for the “right way” to do it can frequently become filtered through this very counselor sort of personality, that can have no consideration for the different wiring between two people in a couple.
LMB: Even just having visibility into these individual differences, as well as your own, can create some more self-awareness for a professional therapist around, I think, a tendency to guide people to be more like them, especially in our female-centered profession — in a heterosexual relationship, siding with a female-oriented partner sometimes versus a male orientation. Which is actually a question for you: I don’t want to assume there are patterns of differences between genders related to differences. Stereotypically we might think of men as being more sensation seeking, or — I don’t know if that’s true.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Our data says no. It’s so fascinating. That’s the nature-versus-nurture piece really coming in here. Maybe we say to females that they are allowed to experience certain sensitivities in certain ways, and to folks assigned male at birth that they are allowed to show up — like we hear a lot in schools about big boy energy. Of course, hormones can play a role. Testosterone can play a role. But when we look at the data on who’s proprioceptive seeking — that big body play, that big body energy — it is not gender specific. Actually in my own household, my sensory seeker is a girl and my sensory sensitive human is a boy. And in our marriage, the sensory sensitive one between us is a male and I’m the sensory seeker. It is more, I think, just cultural influence on what do we tell people they can do or how they can express, or how they can show up — less about what’s their actual experience of what their body needs.
LMB: Alyssa, we’ve been talking for a while and we’re only scratching the surface. Everything you’re saying is like bombs going off in my head. This needs to be part of the conversation in a very overt way, certainly in my profession. I know you’re doing so many things to bring these ideas, and also the strategies. Certainly through Seed and Sew, through your books, Tiny Humans, Big Emotions, the other one, Big Kids, Bigger Feelings. So you’re definitely doing the work. But tell us a little bit more for any of our friends listening who are like, I need to understand this in a more organized way, or referral opportunities for clients.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Where do we go from here? So our tool — seedquiz.com — is where they can fill out the questionnaire. Any age. You can fill it out for any age and it will give age-specific questions, specific results. It’s all housed within the software that we built. And it is completely free. You can see the results there and they’ll get a PDF of the results. So if you’re like, hey, I want to do this with people I’m working with right now, they could fill it out and they could share that PDF with you.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Then there’s a paid version where people could have a portal and they could add as many questionnaires as they want. They could add everyone from their family — take it — and they could see, how do we all match up or not. And within there, there are workshops from us. There’s a bunch of resources that go hand in hand with that. And there’s an AI trained chatbot, trained by me and by all of our resources, that won’t comb the internet for guidance. It’ll only be trained to do this, and it will help people understand — oh, why is it that I am so annoyed when I’m in the car and it feels like I’m in a prison with my kids? What is happening here? And it can say, let’s look at your results and let’s see why this is coming up for you and what might be helpful for you. That is a paid access, $9 a month, to have access to that.
LMB: That’s amazing. Would that be an appropriate tool for a therapist like me who’s thinking, I need to start giving this assessment to my clients just to even have the conversation? Could I send an assessment, get the results back, and then have resources to show the client, or even educate myself further? Or would you recommend something different?
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Totally. So yes. And what we are right now doing is this whole suite of tools — it’s originally built for schools and for child care programs. The clinician part was strictly incoming. We had therapists and social workers and other disciplines, physical therapists, etc., working with folks who were like, we actually, this would be really helpful in my work. And so we’re right now in this beta phase of looking at what would be most helpful and how can we best serve you. If you’re interested in sharing your experience with the tool and what would be really helpful for you in your practice — to know more about, to dive deeper into, to have access to — we have a spot right on our website where you can fill out a form and let us know. And we love to continue to learn from you about what feels really helpful, what you still feel like you need more support in, to better understand this. One of the things we do in our work is any time we’re working with a school, we train boots on the ground to be able to use our tools. We have observation tools for classrooms that look at all this information. We have coaching tools for taking this information and coaching teachers on it. So we have a coaching program right now for folks who are working in school systems. And we just want to learn — would it be helpful for us to build something where we can teach you how to dive deeper using these products into your work? So you can head to our website at Seed and Sew and fill out that form and let us know if you would love to share information with us about your journey with it.
LMB: So for professional therapists who begin experimenting with this work, one of the hopes is to potentially develop a therapist-specific coach training program to help people like me learn how to use these tools, how to use them to help our clients. And that right now is really just gathering information around what are the gaps, what are you seeing in your practice, what do you feel like you need to learn or tools you need to have. So then it’s collaborative. That’s amazing. Alyssa, I really appreciate that, and just the thoughtfulness going into it, because I think it would be an easy assumption to just do a lift-and-shift — like what educators need is probably what therapists need. But you’re right, because the reality is that in addition to the normal variations and individual differences, there can also be layers of sometimes complex mental health stuff, trauma — I mean, somebody with an anxiety disorder that is going to be a lot more activated physiologically — and how to just understand the relationships between those two things. I’m glad you’re asking those questions.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: As just a human on planet Earth, I have no desire to add noise, only value. And so for me, if I’m going to be — I mean, yeah, it costs us a crap ton of money to create these tools. If I’m going to create a tool, I want it to be something that’s actually going to be useful, that’s actually going to serve you. That’s not going to add noise, that’s going to add value. And I learn best from the humans who are on the ground doing this work of what’s actually going to add value for you. Even for our elementary schools, for a child care programs, daycares, all that — I mean, I have boots-on-the-ground experience in those spaces, which was helpful, but we did so much beta testing from people doing this work, so that we could create tools that are actually going to serve them. It’s been really cool to see that play out. In our elementary schools, we’re seeing behavior support calls reduced by 60% just using this tool alone. And we have states that are funding this for child care programs now, because the data we had — third-party researched — and the data is really clear on how supportive it is for teachers. And that’s because we listen to the people doing it. So before we create anything bigger for folks outside of “here’s the tool that you can use right now,” I got to learn from you.
LMB: Well, congratulations. That must feel so good for you to have your work growing and being supported and being disseminated and used. Well, this has been such a great conversation, and I hope it’s okay to share, because I think I have talked you into actually coming in and doing a mini training for therapists as part of my CE series, where we’re going to do a deeper dive into some of these and maybe even share some of your tools — like a starter pack for therapists to get up and running, totally free.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Same. I’m stoked. I’m excited to get to dive in more with you and bring this in a new way to folks who are doing such incredible work, and we just get to expand your toolbox.
LMB: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us today. I really, really appreciate it, and I’m excited to keep going.
Alyssa Blask Campbell: Same. Thanks for having me.
What to take with you
Regulation has two layers.
Sensory regulation and emotional regulation are different, and the sensory layer has to settle before a client can access emotion processing or any skill.
Insight goes offline in distress.
When cortisol and adrenaline fire, the prefrontal cortex quiets down, so “they know better” is not the same as “they can do better in the moment.”
Most dysregulation is variation, not pathology.
Across nine senses on a sensitive-to-seeking spectrum, there are millions of ordinary profiles. Not every activation is a trauma response.
Sensory mismatch is a dynamic, not a character flaw.
Two nervous systems needing opposite things explains a great deal of what we hear as criticism in couples work.
Mechanisms mask, strategies regulate.
Dopamine-driven habits buy minutes; serotonin and oxytocin strategies actually lower the stress response, and they take longer to feel.
Your own wiring is a clinical variable.
Counselor temperament can quietly become the “right” way to feel, which makes sensory literacy part of self-of-the-therapist work.
The Nine Senses: What Therapists Weren’t Taught About Nervous System Regulation
You have had this session. One partner is escalating, the other has gone quiet, and the room has tipped somewhere you cannot talk it back from. Or it is an individual client, someone bright and motivated who has done the reading and the homework, and in the exact moment it matters they cannot reach a single skill you built together. You know the one. If you have ever sat in that moment and thought that no one actually trained you for this specific thing, you were not imagining it, and it is not a hole in you.
Here is the short version, because I know a lot of you are reading this in the ten minutes between sessions. Nervous system regulation happens in two layers, sensory and emotional, and the sensory layer has to settle first. When someone is flooded, cortisol and adrenaline have pulled the thinking brain offline, so the insight and the coping tools they genuinely have are not available to them yet. And a great deal of what we were taught to read as resistance, or as a trauma response waiting to be excavated, is often something quieter: a nervous system that has not reached safety, wired in a way that is simply different from ours. Learning to see that layer is a big part of the work our team does with the therapists who train and consult with us.
I want to be straight about why I am writing this, because it is not a fun fact. I am a psychologist and a marriage and family therapist, I run a group practice, and I am an AAMFT approved supervisor, which means I spend my weeks with early career clinicians who are carrying the same quiet question I carried for years. Across two full training programs, I did not get one hour on the physiology underneath dysregulation, let alone what to do with it in the room. My supervisees tell me the same thing, over and over.
That gap is exactly what Growing Self exists to close for clinicians, and I do not mean with one more article you skim and forget. I mean the ongoing kind of professional development where you actually change how you practice, alongside other therapists doing the same work. What follows will give you language and a framework you can use this week. The part where it becomes yours, where it changes your next hard session, is the part we do together. My guest for it is Alyssa Blask Campbell, an early childhood and nervous system educator, the founder of Seed and Sew, and the author of the New York Times bestseller Tiny Humans, Big Emotions.
What are the nine senses, and which four do therapists rarely learn about?
Most of us were taught five senses. There are nine. The four that rarely make it into clinical training are interoception, your read on the internal state of your own body; vestibular, your sense of movement and balance; proprioception, your sense of where your body is in space; and neuroception, the subconscious system that scans for safety or threat. Each of the nine sits on a spectrum. Alyssa’s team maps it from minus two to plus two, sensitive on one end, seeking on the other, which produces close to two million unique profiles.
Interoception is the one most tied to our work. When someone is interoceptive sensitive, the volume is turned up on their feelings. They do not feel something a little; they feel it big, and they can go from zero to a hundred fast. Vestibular is why one person recharges in a chair that swivels and another leaves that same day depleted. Proprioception governs the space bubble, how much deep pressure or closeness a body wants, and why one partner feels touched out while the other could happily be hugged all day.
Neuroception is the one you will recognize immediately, because our profession is full of it. It reads the energy in a room, the face that says “I am fine” when the person is not. Alyssa points out that we see a lot of it in therapists, social workers, and teachers, the people who can love a social gathering and still leave it wrung out. If you want the research spine underneath that idea, Stephen Porges’ work on neuroception and the STAR Institute for sensory processing are good places to start. And if the notion of stable individual difference as a whole clinical dimension interests you, we go deep on it in our conversation on patterns of personality.
Why does sensory regulation have to come before emotional regulation?
Because you cannot process an emotion with a nervous system that has not settled. Regulation splits into sensory regulation and emotional regulation, and the sensory piece comes first. Until the body reaches enough safety, the tools we love — naming the feeling, validating it, reframing, the good cognitive work — do not have anywhere to land.
Alyssa made this concrete with her own two kids. Her daughter is sensory-seeking, so validation and talking work beautifully; the emotion tools she built in her own therapy transfer straight over. Her son is sensory-sensitive, and none of that lands until she has spent ten to twenty minutes in a quiet shared activity with him, building with blocks, saying nothing about the feeling at all. Same parent, same love, opposite opening move, because the nervous systems are different. Only after the sensory system is met can he actually process the emotion.
Translate that to a flooded client and the first move may not be a question at all. It may be lowering the sensory load in the room. “Name it to tame it” is real, and it is often step two, not step one. This is close cousins with the body-based, present-moment stance in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, where the work starts with what is happening in the body before it moves to meaning.
Knowing this and doing it live are different skills. The version of you reading a blog post and the version of you across from a dysregulated client at four in the afternoon are not the same person. That gap, between the framework and the room, is the entire reason coaching and consultation exist, and it is what our team helps clinicians build.
How can you tell sensory variation apart from a trauma response or pathology?
Most of it is variation. As Alyssa put it, it is just part of being a human on planet Earth. The large majority of the nine senses are hardwired, stable traits you were born with, not deficits to fix. There are two exceptions worth holding: vestibular shifts as we age, which is why the roller coaster you loved at twelve is unbearable at forty-five, and neuroception shifts with trauma, heightening to keep you safe and sometimes flagging danger that is no longer there.
The clinical implication is a discipline more than a technique. Before you reach for a trauma formulation, ask whether you might be looking at a stable sensory profile. Not every activation is a wound. This does not erase trauma, and it does not compete with good attachment-informed work. It just stops us from writing a trauma story onto ordinary difference, which is a thing many of us, myself included, have done.
If you have been quietly pathologizing something in a client, or in yourself, that might simply be wiring, that is worth saying out loud to someone. Our team does exactly this kind of case-consultation thinking with clinicians all the time, and you do not have to be stuck or in crisis to bring it. That is what the first conversation is for.
What is a sensory mismatch, and how does it show up between partners or between therapist and client?
A sensory mismatch is when two nervous systems need opposite things. One craves the input the other finds overwhelming. In couples work it almost always arrives disguised as a character complaint: he never puts anything away, she will not give me a single minute. Reframed as wiring, it stops being an indictment and becomes a design problem two people can actually solve.
Alyssa is refreshingly honest that she is the one who leaves a trail through the house, and her husband is the visually sensitive one who notices the nail clippers moved two inches. Understanding the mismatch gave them more compassion and less judgment. It did not, and this part matters, excuse anyone from building a system. Both halves are the intervention: the reframe that lowers the blame, and the practical structure that still gets the laundry upstairs.
The therapy room is a sensory environment too, and so are you. Her husband found virtual therapy changed things for him because he could control the stimuli. A painting hanging crooked, a door clicking shut past the white-noise machine, and he was pulled out of the work. Your office, your lighting, your own presence are all variables in a client’s regulation, sitting right alongside the body-below-cognition contributors we tend to underweight and even the metabolic factors that shape how activated a brain arrives.
Sensory mismatch is one of the most common dynamics our couples-trained clinicians work with, even when the couple in the room has never heard the term. Naming the wiring is the move that turns a fight about laundry into a conversation two people can actually have.
What’s the difference between a coping mechanism and a coping strategy?
A coping mechanism masks the stress response; a coping strategy lowers it. Mechanisms run on dopamine — the scroll, the full cart, the quick hit — and Alyssa calls them the snooze button on the alarm clock. They feel good fast and quietly demand more over time, because the cortisol underneath was never touched. Strategies run on serotonin and oxytocin — movement, connection, deep pressure, time outside, a real break from stimuli — and they actually pump the brakes on the stress response. The catch is that they take longer to feel, which is exactly why people reach for the mask instead.
Two things follow for practice. First, when a client’s coping “is not working,” check whether it is matched to their nervous system, because deep pressure that regulates one person irritates another. Second, capacity moves across the day. A small problem at nine in the morning after sleep and breakfast can feel like a large one at nine at night, when the tank is empty. This is not only about clients; it is about you, and it is closely tied to why compassion fatigue creeps up on the most conscientious clinicians.
Most therapists I work with can already list the strategies. The hard part is building them into a real life, in the right order, matched to the right nervous system, and staying with it past the point where the quick fix would have felt better. That is the kind of thing a coach or consultant helps you actually do, not just understand.
Your own wiring, and the client you accidentally side with
People who become therapists tend to share a temperament, and that shared wiring can quietly become the standard for the right way to feel, communicate, and process. In a female-centered profession, it can look like subtly siding with the more expressive partner in a couple. Sensory literacy gives you a mirror. It lets you catch the moment you are nudging a client to regulate the way you regulate, which is a close relative of the values conflicts we are trained to watch for but rarely name in these terms.
One data point worth keeping, because it undoes a common assumption: Alyssa’s data shows no gender pattern in who is sensory-seeking. The stereotype that men are the sensation-seekers does not hold. In her own home the sensory seeker is her daughter and the sensitive one is her son, and in her marriage those roles run opposite to the stereotype too. All of which is a good argument for looking at the actual person in front of you, and for the kind of self-care and self-awareness work that keeps our own wiring from masquerading as clinical truth.
Self-of-the-therapist work is hard to do alone, for the obvious reason that your blind spots are, by definition, where you cannot look. This is one of the most valued conversations inside the community of clinicians we have built, and it is a big part of why the community exists.
Why Reading This Won’t Change Your Next Session
I want to be honest with you about something, because you have read this far and you have earned it. Everything above is real, and it works. But if you close this article believing that reading it was the work, I will have done you a disservice.
Here is what usually happens. You read something like this, something clicks, you feel a little more hopeful, and you make a quiet note to try it next time. Then next time arrives, mid-session, with a real client and your own tired nervous system also in the room, and you reach for the old move because it is the one your body knows. Nothing changed, and you are left wondering why.
You are not unmotivated and you are not a bad clinician. You are trying to install a new behavior in the exact moment your old pattern is most active, by yourself. That is the hardest possible way to do it.
What actually works is doing it with people. Someone who knows how you practice, who you can bring a real case to, who can help you debrief the session that went sideways before the next one arrives. That is what the Therapist Growth Collective actually is. Not a lecture series, an ongoing room of clinicians building this together. Finishing a hard session and being able to bring it somewhere the same week, to people who genuinely get it, is the difference between an interesting idea and a changed practice.
If something here landed on a specific client, or on a specific pattern in your own week, that is the signal. You do not have to be stuck to reach out, and that first conversation is exactly for figuring out whether what we do is a fit for where your practice is going. Questions get a real answer, not a sales pitch.
If you want to keep working on sensory literacy, self-of-the-therapist, and the frameworks our field never taught with peers who are doing the same, the Therapist Growth Collective is where that happens. No pitch, no pressure. Just colleagues.
Join the Collective →Where to Start This Week
Start with your own profile, then bring it to your clients. Alyssa’s team built a free nine-senses questionnaire with occupational therapists, at seedquiz.com, that used to require an OT referral to access. It takes minutes, it works for any age, and it gives a plain-language read on what drains and recharges a given nervous system. There is a paid tier with a portal and resources for those who want to go further, and a place on the Seed and Sew site where clinicians can help shape a therapist version of the tool.
The data behind it is not small. In the elementary schools using the tool, behavior-support calls dropped by about 60 percent, third-party researched. That is the kind of ground-floor work worth being part of.
Two next steps from us. First, Alyssa is joining me for a free CEU mini-training for therapists on Thursday, September 17, from 11 to 12 Mountain, a deeper dive with a starter pack of tools. [CEU REGISTRATION LINK — add when live.] Register even if you cannot attend live and you will get the recording, the slides, and the tools. Second, if you want a place to keep building skills like this between trainings, with other clinicians who understand the isolation this work can carry, that is what the Collective is for.
You were not meant to do this work, or your own growth, in isolation, and neither of those has to cost you your sustainability in this career. Come see what it is like. No pressure, and a real answer to your questions.
xoxo,
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby is a licensed psychologist (PhD), licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT), board-certified coach (BCC), AAMFT approved supervisor, and the founder of Growing Self Counseling and Coaching. She is the host of the Love, Happiness and Success for Therapists podcast. Read Dr. Lisa’s full bio.
About this episode’s experts
Alyssa Blask Campbell, M.Ed
Alyssa Blask Campbell is an early childhood and nervous system educator and the founder and CEO of Seed and Sew, an organization that helps parents, teachers, and increasingly clinicians understand how the nervous system shapes emotion and behavior. With a master’s degree in early childhood education, she co-created the Collaborative Emotion Processing method with Lauren Stauble and has spent years translating research on emotional development into tools people can actually use. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Tiny Humans, Big Emotions and its follow-up for the middle years, Big Kids, Bigger Feelings. Working with a group of occupational therapists, she built a free nine-senses assessment now used in schools where it has been tied to a meaningful drop in behavior-support calls, and is opening that work to clinicians.
Dr. Lisa Marie Bobby
Licensed psychologist, marriage and family therapist, and Board Certified Coach. Founder of Growing Self Counseling & Coaching. Host of the Love, Happiness & Success podcast (15M+ downloads) and Love, Happiness & Success for Therapists. AAMFT approved supervisor. Her work focuses on the professional development, leadership, and sustainability of mental health clinicians and the practices they build.
Questions therapists ask about nervous system regulation
The familiar five (sight, sound, taste, touch, smell) plus four that clinical training usually skips: interoception (internal body cues), vestibular (movement and balance), proprioception (body position in space), and neuroception (subconscious safety detection).
Sensory regulation is settling the body’s response to input; emotional regulation is processing the feeling. The sensory layer has to settle first, because a flooded nervous system cannot access emotion processing or coping skills yet.
In distress, cortisol and adrenaline activate the amygdala and take the prefrontal cortex offline. The skills are stored in a part of the brain that is temporarily unavailable, so knowing them and reaching them are two different things.
No. Most sensory profiles are hardwired, stable variation. Neuroception does shift with trauma, and vestibular shifts with age, but the majority of the nine senses are traits you are born with, not wounds to heal.
Interoception is your read on your internal state, from hunger to a racing heart. It is tightly linked to emotion. Interoceptive-sensitive clients feel things big and can escalate quickly, which changes how you pace a session.
The subconscious sense that scans for safety or threat by reading tone, faces, and body language. It runs high in many therapists and helpers, which is part of why the work can be so draining, and it heightens after trauma.
When two people’s nervous systems need opposite input, so what regulates one drains the other. It often gets misread as a character flaw. Naming it as wiring restores compassion while still requiring practical systems.
A mechanism (scrolling, shopping) produces dopamine and masks the stress response, demanding more over time. A strategy (movement, connection, deep pressure, nature) produces serotonin or oxytocin and actually lowers the stress response, but takes longer to feel.
Start by learning your own profile, then invite clients to complete the free assessment. Use it to spot when a client needs sensory regulation before talk can land, and to reframe “resistance” as a nervous system that has not reached safety.
Growing Self hosts a free CEU mini-training with Alyssa Blask Campbell (registration link forthcoming) and runs the Therapist Growth Collective, an ongoing community where clinicians build skills like these together.
Sources cited in this episode
- Porges, S. W. (2004). Neuroception: A subconscious system for detecting threats and safety. Zero to Three, 24(5), 19–24.
- Craig, A. D. (2009). How do you feel, now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(1), 59–70.
- Critchley, H. D., & Garfinkel, S. N. (2017). Interoception and emotion. Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 7–14.
- Dunn, W. (2001). The sensations of everyday life: Empirical, theoretical, and pragmatic considerations. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 55(6), 608–620.
Organizations and third-party resources mentioned: Stephen Porges (polyvagal theory, neuroception) — stephenporges.com; STAR Institute for Sensory Processing — sensoryhealth.org; Frontiers in Psychology (peer-reviewed research) — frontiersin.org/journals/psychology.
Guest resources: Alyssa Blask Campbell — free nine-senses regulation questionnaire — seedquiz.com; Seed and Sew (organization; paid portal and clinician-feedback form) — seedandsew.org. Books: Tiny Humans, Big Emotions (HarperCollins, 2023) and Big Kids, Bigger Feelings.
Note: The “60% reduction in behavior-support calls” figure is the guest’s stated, third-party-researched school data, attributed to Seed and Sew.
