It seems like anytime I take a scroll on social media, I can almost instantly feel it in my body.

It isn’t the happiness or excitement for what is happening in the lives of people I care about that I’d hope for.  Although thankfully, that does happen too.

It is my blood pressure rising and my heartbeat increasing.

It is my body veering off center.

I can sense my mind (and my mouth) wanting to clap back.

The urgency.
The rigidity.
The blame.
The absence of curiosity.

The inhumanity, ugliness, hatred.

What I’m noticing isn’t just political or ideological differences, even though that seems to be the root of it all. It’s something deeper and more concerning: the normalization of hatred, the rise of confirmation bias, and the widespread dysregulation of our nervous systems.

We are living in a moment where outrage is rewarded, dehumanization is normalized, and fear is constant. I am at a point where if something is on social media (besides my friends’ and family’s updates), I automatically assume it is clickbait, propaganda, or lies (which far too many people refuse to fact-check).  I have had to resort to fact-checking everything because there is too much misinformation and untruths out there.  And, to take it an unfortunate step further, when a fact-check or reference is shared as to why something is incorrect, people are so committed to their willful ignorance that they will laugh, debate, or gaslight to avoid facing reality. A large segment of the population will choose to avoid the truth, no matter how clearly it is presented and proven, because it challenges their beliefs and doesn’t align with their views.

Why does this matter, and why am I writing about this?

When we are constantly fed hateful and fear-filled rhetoric, the nervous system stays in a chronic state of threat, everything becomes personal, everything becomes dangerous, and everyone becomes the enemy. We stop holding more than one truth at a time. Everything gets flattened into right vs. wrong.  We lose the ability to sit with “both/and.” Civility erodes. And real humans are harmed.

This isn’t abstract. This is happening in real time, to real people.

At the beginning of last year, I shared on my personal social media that I was stepping back from posting certain types of content online. That decision came from a desire to reduce division, to protect my peace, and to stay grounded in my work. I wanted to stay connected and hear about what was happening in people’s lives without the ugliness.  At the time, I had no idea just how chaotic and destabilizing our world was about to become.  I didn’t keep my word.

What I didn’t anticipate was how quickly silence could start to feel like complicity.

I try now to be intentional. I do not post from rage, fear, or the desire to “win.” I don’t post to draw sharper lines or inflame already frayed nervous systems (even though sometimes that is a byproduct for people who are stuck in fight mode and can’t find a way out). But I also refuse to disappear when injustice unfolds before my eyes. There is a difference between feeding division and refusing to look away.  For as long as I have a voice, I will choose to use it for good.  For humankind.  For my brothers and sisters on this planet, no matter what color they are, how much money they make, how much power they hold, who they love, etc.  And sometimes, using our voices will make people uncomfortable.  It will lead to the loss of friends and relatives.  It will lead to unlikes and unfollows.  It will lead to discomfort at the holiday dinner table.  But for me, it will lead to a life I can be proud of, and for my spirit to follow a path of love.  I refuse to alienate or hate people because we don’t look alike, live alike, or sin alike. 

Being a voice for the voiceless is not the same thing as fueling hatred.
Standing up for human dignity is not extremism.
Naming harm is not the same as creating it.

Something that troubles me a lot is how often we’ve been told that civility requires silence, or that caring deeply means picking a side and fighting at all costs. Two extremes have spent so much time drawing lines in the sand that we’ve forgotten how to see the people standing across from us.

Moderation has been framed as weakness. Regulation has been mistaken for apathy.

But balance is not passivity.
Regulation is not disengagement.
Love is not ignorance.

When nervous systems are dysregulated on a large scale, we lose access to empathy, reflection, and discernment. We stop asking, Who is being harmed? and start asking, Who do I need to defeat? We become reactive instead of responsive. We trade wisdom for certainty.

And the cost is enormous.

Children grow up in a culture that models contempt instead of care. Families fall apart. Communities sit in turmoil. Policies become weapons rather than tools. And suffering gets explained away instead of tended to.

I deeply believe that much of what we are experiencing today is physiological. It is what happens when fear lives unchecked in the body, when trauma goes unaddressed, when power operates without accountability, and when hatred becomes socially acceptable.

Healing work and nervous system regulation are not luxuries right now. They are acts of resistance. Healing is resistance!  It is how we remember that the person in front of us is not an abstraction, not an avatar, not an enemy, but a human being with a story, a heartbeat, and a life that matters.

We need the people who are not on the fringes to find each other again.

We need those who still believe in dignity, accountability, and care to look one another in the face and remember what connects us.

We need to choose courage and compassion. Clarity and regulation.

A friend, who I deeply respect as someone who shares and spreads love, recently shared, “I don’t have the answer to any of this. I only know that I wasn’t put on this earth to be a warrior.

I was meant to keep balance. We all are. We’re meant to keep the balance. When just one chooses to abandon balance, it creates a ripple that goes through us all. It forces us all to join the fight. It’s all so pitiful.”

I too wasn’t put here to be a warrior.
I was put here to help restore balance.

And balance does not mean staying quiet.
It means staying human.

If we are going to move forward, it will not be by shouting louder or hardening further. It will be by regulating our bodies, softening our hearts, and refusing to let fear dictate who we become.

Real people are watching.
Real lives are at stake.
And how we show up, regulated or reactive, matters more than ever.

And a last thought, one thing I have learned through my own healing and through years of doing this work alongside others is that a need for control is often an immediate signal of a dysregulated nervous system. It is frequently a trauma response. Control is what the nervous system reaches for when it does not feel safe.

Healed people do not need to control others.
Healed people do not need to dominate conversations, beliefs, or outcomes.
Healed people live and let live.
Healed people have found peace and seek to maintain it.

That peace doesn’t come from certainty. It comes from regulation.

There’s a quote I keep returning to lately about the willingness to change your mind being a sign of intelligence. I would take it one step further: the capacity to unlearn may be the highest form of learning. Rumi spoke to this long before algorithms, echo chambers, and outrage economies, before we confused certainty with wisdom.

Unlearning requires humility and regulation.

It asks the nervous system to tolerate discomfort long enough to let new information land without immediately defending against it.

When we are dysregulated, changing our minds feels dangerous. It can feel like a threat to identity, belonging, or safety. But when we are regulated, curiosity becomes possible again. We can pause. We can listen. We can update our internal “software” without collapsing or attacking.

The goal was never to be right.
The goal was always to be in relationship with truth.
And truth evolves as we do.

Unlearning is not betrayal.
It is growth, maturity, and a return to discernment.

And in a world pulling us toward rigid certainty and hardened positions, choosing to stay open, to remain teachable, reflective, and human, may be one of the most healing acts available to us.