One of the most common misunderstandings in trauma recovery is the belief that healing happens faster if you push harder.
People want relief.
They want progress.
They want the symptoms to stop.
This urgency is understandable. Living in a dysregulated nervous system is exhausting.
But trauma healing does not respond to pressure.
It responds to capacity.
As Reshie explains in the conversation:
“Healing isn’t about how much you face. It’s about how much your system can hold.”
When capacity is exceeded, the nervous system does not integrate experience. It protects itself.
What Capacity Really Means in the Nervous System
Capacity is often mistaken for motivation, resilience, or emotional strength.
It is none of those.
Capacity refers to the nervous system’s ability to remain present with sensation, emotion, memory, or stress without tipping into overwhelm, shutdown, or dissociation.
A system with sufficient capacity can:
- Feel emotion without being flooded
- Notice body sensations without panic
- Touch difficult material and return to baseline
- Stay oriented to the present moment
This idea closely relates to understanding the window of tolerance and how to expand it. Capacity grows as the window widens, allowing the system to hold more experience without losing regulation.
As Reshie puts it:
“Capacity is what allows experience to move through instead of getting stuck.”
Why Trauma Shrinks Capacity Over Time
Trauma reduces capacity gradually.
Each time the nervous system is overwhelmed without enough support or recovery, it learns that certain sensations or emotions are dangerous.
Over time, the system narrows what it allows into awareness.
This narrowing may show up as:
- Avoidance of emotion
- Living mostly in the head
- Dissociation during stress
- Fatigue from minor challenges
As Reshie explains:
“The system learns to survive by reducing how much it has to feel.”
For many people, this eventually shows up as chronic activation or collapse, patterns explored in are you experiencing hyperarousal, where the system remains on high alert even when no immediate danger exists.
Pacing Is About Load, Not Content
In trauma recovery, how fast something is approached matters more than what is approached.
Two people can work on the same memory. One feels steadier afterward. The other feels destabilised for days.
The difference is not the memory.
It is the load placed on the nervous system.
As Reshie explains:
“The nervous system doesn’t respond to intention. It responds to load.”
Load includes emotional intensity, duration of focus, body activation, and lack of recovery time. When the load exceeds capacity, the system shifts into survival.
This is why approaches that rely heavily on insight or awareness alone often fail early in recovery, as explored in why mindfulness alone often fails trauma survivors.
What Titration Actually Looks Like in Practice
Titration means introducing experience in small, manageable amounts, then returning to safety before overwhelm occurs.
As Reshie explains:
“We don’t dive into the deep end. We let the system touch, then come back.”
Titration might involve:
- Noticing a sensation briefly, then grounding
- Naming an emotion without analysing it
- Exploring part of a memory without staying there
- Tracking activation and stopping early
Each successful cycle teaches the nervous system something crucial: activation can rise and fall without harm.
This bottom-up learning process is why bottom-up versus top-down trauma therapy is so central to sustainable trauma recovery.
Why “Pushing Through” Reinforces Trauma Patterns
Many trauma survivors learned early that slowing down was not an option.
They push through exhaustion.
They ignore body signals.
They override discomfort.
As Reshie explains:
“When a system is forced past its capacity, it doesn’t heal. It braces.”
Instead of integration, the nervous system learns that intensity equals danger. Symptoms increase. Recovery stalls.
Healing requires a different experience: being able to stop without consequences.
Capacity Is Built Through Repeated Success
Capacity grows through repeated experiences of:
- Activation
- Safe settling
- Recovery
As Reshie says:
“Capacity builds when the system experiences success at tolerating what once felt too much.”
These small successes accumulate. Over time, the nervous system becomes more flexible, resilient, and responsive.
Sustainable Healing Is Quiet
Trauma recovery is rarely dramatic.
Instead, people begin to notice:
- Faster recovery after stress
- Less intensity in reactions
- More space between trigger and response
- A growing sense of internal stability
As Reshie puts it:
“Healing looks quiet from the outside, but it changes everything on the inside.”
Watch the Full Conversation
This article is drawn from the same in-depth conversation between Reshie and Katrina, where they explore capacity, pacing, and titration, and why trauma healing often fails when these principles are ignored.
To hear these ideas explained with clinical clarity and lived experience, watch the full conversation below.