I wanted to share on this from pat.radical.therapist on insta (search for that user name and interact directly with them on insta or substack if you can). All the below is typed up from her image posts.
>> Nervous System Care Under Fascism: Concrete Practices for Colonized + Overwhelmed Bodies
Please note: This lens is coming from my background in Somatic Experiencing + informed by polyvagal lens.
Yes this can also be the experience of those with childhood trauma, abuse, neglect.
We can experience childhood wounding with the impacts of colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. They are not mutually exclusive.
Proceed with care.
Your nervous system isn't broken.
It's responding, appropriately, intelligently - to fascism.
The anxiety. The collapse. The hypervigilance. The rage that simmers beneath your skin.
These aren't individual malfunctions.
They are biological responses to political conditions; to the daily grinding terror of living under authoritarian rule, state surveillance, racialized violence, ecological collapse, and carceral control.
Under fascism, safety is not a baseline - it's a threat.
Regulation is not neutral; it's a privilege of the protected.
Through a polyvagal lens it teaches us that our autonomic nervous systems scan for cues of safety and danger through neuroception.
But what happens when every institution; school, clinic, welfare office, police station - is a threat?
What happens when the state is the danger?
Your body knows.
It remembers.
For colonized peoples, the nervous sytem has never known safety within the state.
The parasympathic collpase of dispair and shutdown is not new.
The sympathetic flood of fight, flight, or freeze is ancestral.
These are not symptoms of dysfunction - they are symptoms of domination.
Let's be clear: colonization was; and remains a full body assault.
Fanon reminds of us.
These weren't metaphors. They were diagnoses of colonial trauma; long before the DSM pathologized them into disorders.
Fascism doesn't only target ideologies. It targets bodies.
Black, brown, trans, disabled, immigrant, poor - the fascist state seeks to regulate, restrain, and erase the bodies it cannot control.
And yet, most "nervous system care" practices are rooted in colonial wellness industries.
They offer regulation stripped of resistance. They preach breathwork while ignoring the chokehold.
They offer mindfulness while ICE raids homes. They offer somatic safety without naming the system that made the body unsafe in the first place.
This is why a decolonial nervous system lens matters.
Because our regulation cannot come at the cost of dissociation.
Because our healing must include rage, grief, collapse and resistance.
> Care Practices That Resist Fascism (Without Gaslighting Your Body:
Track Your Baseline - Without Judgement
- Your body isn't "overreacting." It's responding.
Start noticing: Am I in fight (irritated, controlling)? Flight (racing, escaping into work)? Freeze (numb, hopeless)? Fawn (people-pleasing, appeasing authority)?
Practice:
- Put a sticky note somewhere private: "This is a response. I get to choose how I relate to it."
- Build a "what helps me come back" list: 3 things for fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Reference when flooded.
> Co-Regulate Outside of Respectability
You don't need to be "calm" to be cared for.
You don't need to be articulate, soft-spoken, or politically on-point.
Practice:
- Find a co-regulation buddy. No fixing. Just breathing together. Eye contact. Mutual presence.
- During conflict, ask: "Can we pause for a nervous system check?" instead of forcing resolution.
- Let someone see you cry - not in shame, but in truth.
> Name the System. Refuse the Shame.
You are not disordered. You are not too sensitive.
Your nervous system is remembering what the state demands you forget: that you are human, and this world is inhumane.
Practice:
- Speak the truth aloud: "This isn't all mine. This is systemic. This is historical. This is survival."
- Use collective language: "We are responding. We are resisting. We are remembering."
Bill Cole 
