What’s so funny ‘bout Peace, Love and Understanding?
Nick Lowe penned this song in the early 1970s on the back of the hippie revolution, as the glow of the flower power era began to fade and the cultural paradigm began to shift towards division and disillusionment. He wondered:
As I walk through
This wicked world
Searching’ for light in the darkness of insanity
I ask myself
Is all hope lost?
Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?
If we grew up in a world of complex trauma, then we might ask that very same thing.
In a world shaped by complex trauma, our nervous system learns to be on high alert. When we’ve experienced overwhelming stress — especially early in life — our autonomic nervous system steps in to protect us the best way it knows how. One of its oldest survival responses involves the dorsal vagal pathway of the vagus nerve. This is our system’s emergency brake. When fight or flight isn’t possible — when danger feels inescapable — the body shifts into a freeze or shutdown state. This isn’t a choice, it’s biology.
For an infant, whose options are limited, this freeze response is the only line of defence to overwhelming threat. I cry, I get ignored, I cry harder, I still get ignored. I rage, I get ignored. So instead I shut down. With no ability to run, fight, or reason, their tiny system leans on this primal response: to go still, quiet, and numb. It’s protective. It helps them survive.
As adults, especially if we carry a history of chronic threat or disconnection, our nervous system may still default to this freeze state. We might feel flat, foggy, withdrawn, or stuck. And because our physiology deeply influences our thoughts, we may find ourselves spiralling into shame, helplessness, or the dull ache of hopelessness.
It’s also worth noting that the gut — a powerful part of our nervous system — sends far more information to the brain than the brain sends back. The gut-brain axis refers to the two way communication network between your gut (digestive system) and your brain, linking the Central Nervous System with the Enteric nervous System (the vast network of nerves lining your gut). So the old saying “trust your gut” has some scientific clout!! But here’s the rub: with complex trauma, our neuroception (the nervous system’s ability to detect safety or danger without conscious thought) can get a little... off. That gut feeling? It might be tuned more to threat than the reality that we are safe in this moment.
The great news is that with care, safety, and connection — especially in the presence of a regulated other — these patterns can shift. The system can learn that it's safe to thaw and neural pathways related to safety can be laid.
To come back to Nick Lowe’s question: when we do the work of healing from trauma and learning to self-regulate and be present to ourselves without critique, we also learn that we can rest into a sense of Oneness, and feel the expansion, quietness, spaciousness and the peace that comes with that. Surprisingly, it can be very funny!! Have you ever had that experience? Touching into a sense of something much greater than the sum of only you? Feeling the sense of yourself being a part of a Whole, and simultaneously ‘being’ the Whole, and there is both no separation between them, and also a clear sense of yourself at the same time?! There is something of that Paradox that is inherently amusing.