There are days when school reveals itself not as an institution, but as a living organism made of nervous systems in constant conversation. Today was one of those days – grief rising in my chest after hearing my mother’s funeral date, the tenderness of co-regulation in wood shop, the sudden flare of sympathetic activation with X, and the slow settling that followed. A whole arc of human experience compressed into six hours.
What interests me now is not the story but the reflexes underneath. The reflex in me that escalated with X. The reflex in the system that tries to pull him back into the timetable. The reflex in the adults around me to appease, to enforce, to withdraw. When you begin to see through the lens of the nervous system, the day looks less like a series of incidents and more like a choreography of inherited survival strategies.
This is where Gabor Maté’s four questions come in. They were written for therapists, but they might be the most important questions an educator can ask:
Where did you learn your needs were less important than others’?
Who did you have to become in order to stay safe?
What did you have to suppress to stay attached?
Who did you tell?
These questions didn’t appear to me in a quiet room; they surfaced in the middle of a tussle over a Chromebook. One moment I was regulated. The next, something ancient took the wheel. A reflex I didn’t choose, but one that has been rehearsed in my body for decades.
That is the truth of trauma: it lives in reflex, not memory.
The boy I was – the boy shaped by my father’s wartime hypervigilance, the boy conditioned in the Catholic school to appease authority, the boy who learned that compliance was survival — that boy meets my students before the adult does. When X grabbed the laptop back, the escalation wasn’t between a man and a child; it was between two nervous systems trying to feel safe.
What I suppressed long ago – anger, assertion, the right to say no – surged to the surface with a speed that surprised me. And because I never told anyone, because these patterns were never witnessed or reflected when they first formed, they surface now in places that appear disproportionate: classrooms, corridors, Chromebook disputes.
This is why healing is not an abstract idea. It is a somatic practice. And in the context of a school, it moves through the arc of repair, reconnection, and reclamation.
Repair is the pause after the rupture; the moment I acknowledged the reflex that took over without collapsing into shame. Repair is not an apology; it is an honest witnessing of what the body did to protect itself.
Reconnection happened later, quietly. Sitting next to X without reaching for the laptop again. Letting my breath settle. Letting my face soften. It wasn’t a strategy; it was a nervous system returning to social engagement. Reconnection is when two bodies stop competing and begin to sense each other again.
Reclamation is the deeper work — the work of remembering who I am beneath the patterns I inherited. The work of teaching from a place that is not shaped by appeasement or performance. The work of trusting that co-regulation is not optional but foundational.
Across the school day, I watched this arc unfold in different rooms.
In math, where movement kept X tethered to his body.
In wood shop, where the quiet presence of boys sanding projects allowed me to stay with my own impulses to withdraw instead of obeying them.
In the moment I handed my Tim Hortons voucher to the science teacher, sensing she needed the gesture more than I did.
In the small thawing of my system as staff asked how I was doing, even when I didn’t know which part of my life they meant.
The more I pay attention, the more I see that every moment holds an invitation. Not to perfect my regulation but to notice its edges. Not to transcend my history but to recognize how it lives in me. Schools are full of people who have never been asked Maté’s four questions. People who carry their histories alone. People who mistake reflex for personality.
The system appears unfeeling, but only because it is full of unprocessed survival adaptations – polite, kind, exhausted bodies doing their best while carrying more than they can name.
This is why nervous system literacy is not a luxury but a necessity.
We repair what has been broken.
We reconnect with what we abandoned to survive.
We reclaim what was always ours.
In the end, this is not a about trauma.
It is about remembering who we are – one reflex, one rupture, one moment of softening at a time.