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Pendulation is one of the most basic — and most misunderstood — functions of a regulated nervous system. It’s the natural rhythm of moving between contraction and expansion, discomfort and relief, effort and ease. For every swing into something hard, there is an equally real swing back toward something softer. Not because we make it happen. Because the body does it on its own. You’ve probably seen this without realizing it. In grief, for example. One moment you’re crying so hard your chest feels cracked open. The next moment you’re sharing a memory and laughing through the tears. That’s pendulation. The nervous system moving organically between intensity and relief. Trauma can interrupt that rhythm. The pendulum gets stuck on the side of contraction. Everything feels tight, heavy, pressed. Every emotion feels like a tsunami. Eventually the system gets exhausted and shuts things down — numb, flat, disconnected. Why bother feeling anything at all? Growing up, I heard “think about the bright side” a lot. Maybe you did too. For me, that didn’t create relief — it created disconnection. It felt like the hard parts of me weren’t welcome. Like I needed to hurry up and be positive in order to be acceptable or supported. So I tried. I trained myself to look for the good in everything. Instead of feeling better, I felt lonelier. More frustrated. More emotionally drained. I wasn’t actually moving through anything — I was skipping over it. My grandmother used to say, “Nothing stays the same forever,” and “This too shall pass.” She wasn’t teaching nervous system science. She was sharing the kind of grounded, lived wisdom that comes from being in a human body for a long time. At the time, I heard her words — but I didn’t yet know how to live them. It wasn’t until much later — really within the last five years — that it all started to click. As I learned more about the nervous system, I could finally see what those phrases were pointing toward. Not optimism. Not bypassing. Not forcing ourselves to feel better. But allowing the body to move through its natural rhythm. What actually creates pendulation is staying with sensation just long enough for the system to complete its own cycle. Not fixing it. Not narrating it. Not breathing it away. Simply noticing: Where do I feel this in my body? What does it feel like? Can I name the sensation? Maybe the emotion? If I stay present — without spinning into story — something shifts on its own. The intensity softens. The system naturally swings back toward neutral. Because the truth is that sometimes life is just really shitty and there is no fixing it, there isn’t a positive way to spin it- it just sucks. AND your nervous system will pendulate away from that feeling soon. You don’t have to push yourself into the light. You don’t have to “think positive.” Your nervous system already knows how to move — if you let it.
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