I imagine we all have an experience, or many, like this:

As a child, you’re sitting at a family dinner table or at a group gathering or even at church. Someone says something negative, stereotypical, or ugly about a group of people. You may not know at the time that it isn’t kind; it may be something you don’t quite understand, but you can feel it.  The tone shifts. The energy in the room changes. You don’t have the words for it yet, but your little nervous system is recording everything. Soaking it all in.  Encoding the details of how it smelled, how it looked, what you heard, and how your body felt.  The tension in their jaw. The disgust in their voice. The way the adults around you either nod along or go very, very quiet. Your body is taking notes before your brain can even form a coherent thought about it.  Your system is regulating to all the grownups, because that is what our systems are designed to do (co-regulate), especially kiddo nervous systems.

This is where it starts. Not in some sleep-away camp for discrimination.  Not in grown adults at rallies. Not in comment sections. Not in arguments on mainstream media about who is lying more.

It starts at the dinner table. In the car. At bedtime. In the silences.

We are not born hating anyone.

I want to say that clearly and boldly, because I think we sometimes talk about hatred and bias as if they’re just character flaws some people have, and others don’t. As if some people just came out broken, and some came out fine. But that’s not what the science tells us, and it’s not what I see in my work.

What we are born with is a nervous system that is beautifully wired for connection and survival. From our very first breath, we are scanning our environment for safety. We are looking for cues from our caregivers about what is safe and what is threatening. This is called neuroception (a term coined by Dr. Stephen Porges in his Polyvagal Theory), and it happens below conscious awareness. Our nervous systems are constantly, automatically asking: Am I safe? Are the people around me safe? What does danger look like? What does love look like?

And our grown-ups answer that question. Every. Single. Day. But it isn’t always in ways that are truly safe and loving.

Co-regulation is the first classroom.

Before kiddos can regulate their own nervous systems, they borrow from their grown-ups. This is called co-regulation, and it is not a metaphor. It is a biological process. When a grown-up is calm, that calm is transmitted through voice tone, facial expression, touch, and proximity. The kiddos’ nervous system syncs to it. When a parent is dysregulated (anxious, angry, impatient, divisive), the kiddo’s nervous system syncs to that, too.

Research in developmental neuroscience has shown us that repeated co-regulatory experiences shape the developing nervous system. They influence how the brain wires itself, which neural pathways get strengthened, and what states feel “normal.” This is neuroplasticity in its most foundational form, the brain literally reshaping itself around its relational experiences.  This is why some people grow up to equate drama or tension with love, silence with danger, walking on eggshells as respect, and control with safety.  Just because it’s wired doesn’t mean it is truly safe or healthy.

So, when a child grows up in a home where certain groups of people are spoken about with contempt, with fear, with disgust, their nervous system learns to associate those groups with threat. Not because anyone sat them down and demanded they feel that way. Because the body of the person they depended on for survival tightened every time that group was mentioned. Because the tone of voice shifted. Because the eyes narrowed. The child’s nervous system filed all of that under: danger. watch out. not safe.

And here’s the thing about the brain. It is an efficiency machine. It is not interested in being messy. It is interested in keeping you alive. So, it creates shortcuts. These shortcuts, called heuristics, are incredibly useful when you’re in actual danger. They can be incredibly destructive when they’re built on learned prejudice rather than a real threat.

The brain seeks what it knows, even when what it knows hurts.

There’s a concept I come back to again and again with clients: familiarity and safety are not the same thing, comfort and health are not the same thing, but our nervous systems often treat them as if they are.

This is why people stay in dynamics that harm them. This is why we reach for the same coping strategies that stopped working years ago, if they ever worked in the first place. This is why we seek out environments, relationships, and even political movements that feel like the emotional texture of our childhoods, even when that texture was painful.

The neuroscience behind this involves the brain’s reward and prediction systems, particularly the dopamine pathways. Our brains don’t just reward pleasure, they reward predictability. There is a strange comfort in knowing what to expect, even if it is bad. The nervous system experiences uncertainty as a threat. So, we move toward what we know. What we learned. What feels familiar in our bodies, even when our minds know better. 

If what feels familiar is contempt for “the other,” whoever that “other” was in your household, the nervous system will seek that out. It will feel like home even when it looks like hatred. And this is where implicit bias lives, not in conscious choice, not in deliberate cruelty, but in the quiet, automatic shortcuts of a brain that learned what to fear before it ever learned to think critically about it. Implicit bias isn’t a character flaw. It is a nervous system doing exactly what it was trained to do.

Mirror neurons, modeling, and the emotional education we didn’t ask for.

Around the age of two, children develop what researchers call mirror neuron systems (neural circuits that activate both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else performing it). These systems are foundational to empathy. They are how we learn to feel what others feel.

But they also work in the other direction.

When kiddos watch grown-ups express contempt, disgust, fear, or hatred toward a person or group, their mirror neurons are firing. They are practicing that emotional state internally. They are building the neural architecture for contempt and disgust toward that group before they’ve ever interacted with a single member of it.  Add to this the research on emotional contagion (the demonstrated tendency for emotions to spread between people through nonverbal cues), and you start to understand how hatred can ripple through families, communities, and generations without ever being explicitly taught.

We don’t just teach children what to think. We teach them how to feel. And those feelings get wired in.  From a lot of personal exploration and public observation, I have found that very rarely do kiddos choose the football team they will cheer for, decide which foods they love, or even truly pick their religion on their own. It is all through conditioning. And conditioning doesn’t stop at the dinner table, it follows us into the world. It shows up in who we move to the other side of the street from. Who we clutch our purse a little tighter around. Who we assume is dangerous before they’ve said a single word.

The dysregulated nervous system is primed for an in-group.

A chronically dysregulated nervous system craves belonging and safety with an almost desperate intensity. These are the nervous systems that may have grown up in chaos, scarcity, fear, contempt, or instability, or that, as grown-ups, have come to experience life in a similar way for a variety of reasons (trauma, stress overload, disconnection, lack of presence, alienation, isolation, etc.).  And belonging, for a stressed nervous system, often gets defined in contrast. I am safe because I am with my people. And my people are not those people.

The research on social identity and threat is fairly consistent on this: under conditions of perceived threat, people are more likely to identify strongly with their in-group and more likely to dehumanize the out-group. Their nervous systems essentially outsource the regulation they never learned to do internally by uniting with the collective.

This is not stupidity. This is not simply moral failure. This is a nervous system doing what it was shaped to do.

Leaders, limbic systems, and the power of a familiar frequency.

When a leader, in any context, political or otherwise, communicates primarily through fear, contempt, blame, and the language of threat and enemy, they are not just making a political argument. They are speaking directly to the nervous systems of the people who were wired in those frequencies.

They feel familiar. They feel safe, in that strange nervous-system way where familiar and safe get confused. The anger feels like righteous protection. The contempt for the out-group feels like belonging. The certainty feels like regulation in a body that has rarely experienced it.

This is not new. History has shown us this pattern many times. What is new is how well we understand the neuroscience behind it all, and therefore, how clear our responsibility is to name it.

When a movement is built on contempt, on othering, on the language of enemies within, it is not recruiting people’s logic. It is recruiting their nervous systems. It is calling home every person who learned that love looks like “us against them.” Every person who sat at that dinner table. Every person who learned to feel safe through the shuddering in someone else’s body when a certain kind of person walked into the room.

Here is the super hard, come on Dr. Anna, what are you saying, part: those people deserve compassion. Not because what they’re participating in is okay, because it may not be. But because you cannot shame a nervous system into healing. You cannot bully a person out of a pattern that is written into their biology. You can only offer something that the nervous system hasn’t had enough of, which is safety without an enemy. Connection without a cost. Belonging that doesn’t require someone else to be cast out.  That L word…(love).

This is why the work matters. This is why your work matters.

Right now, I feel like I am watching something ancient and biological play out on a massive, terrifying scale. There is a grief in that, grief watching people be so perfectly loyal to their wounds, and watching those wounds be weaponized by people who know exactly what they are doing. I spend more time grounding myself in safety just to stay connected with people I care about than I ever thought necessary.

Neuroplasticity is real. The brain can change. Nervous systems can heal. People who were wired in fear and contempt have found their way to something different, not because someone argued them out of it, but because they had experiences that gave their nervous system something new to pattern around.

Safety. Warmth. Genuine connection across differences.

The table is big enough. It always has been.  And at my table, we don’t use contempt and fear and disgust and hatred toward others.

The work of healing, your healing, my healing, our collective healing, is not separate from the political moment we’re in. It is the political moment we’re in.

Healing is resistance, friends.  Healing is resistance.

One more thing before I close, I want to add something important. I have been talking a lot about childhood and conditioning, and that is where so much of this begins. But it is not the whole story or the only story. Some people grow up in loving and welcoming homes and still somehow grow into hatred. Life does that. Profound loss, repeated injustice, chronic stress, betrayal by institutions or people they trusted, even the “you are who your friends are” type situations.  These experiences can dysregulate a nervous system just as thoroughly as a difficult childhood can. We are not only shaped by where we started. We are shaped by everything that happens to us along the way, and by whether or not we ever had anyone to help us carry it.