Crossing the threshold
A Transformation Tuesday Series
It was a rainy Tuesday and the fog would not lift. I was driving from Cleveland to Philadelphia to visit my daughter, gripping the steering wheel like I was headed for a cliff. My breathing was shallow. My shoulders were somewhere near my ears. From the outside I looked like a woman on a road trip. From the inside my nervous system had other ideas.
I was somewhere outside of Pittsburgh, listening to Anchored by Deb Dana, when her voice cut through the rain. She was describing the starting point for nervous system regulation. “Our starting point,” she said, “is in the state of healthy homeostasis.” I almost laughed out loud. My starting point was a death grip on a steering wheel, shallow breathing, and fog I couldn’t see through — inside the car or out.
Most books and other media about nervous system regulation are written from the assumption that you already feel safe enough to begin. This series isn’t. I’m writing Crossing the Threshold from inside the experience — still crossing, not yet arrived. That’s not a disclaimer. That’s the point.
A few months ago I read an article that opened my eyes to a possibility I hadn’t considered before. It said that trauma is not what is wrong with you. It is what happened to you. I had to sit with that for a long time. I had spent years being competent, capable, and quietly exhausted — never once connecting my nervous system’s relentless vigilance to something that happened to me a long time ago. That article was the moment I decided to stop moving around this part of my story and start moving through it. This series is what came out of that decision.
I didn’t always work in nervous systems. For a stretch of my career I was a telecommunications engineer — and for a time, that work took me to the White House. One afternoon I was troubleshooting a conferencing system issue for the Secret Service. A junior engineer was with me, watching every move I made. At some point I took an action I couldn’t fully explain. I just knew it would work. And it did. The junior engineer looked at me and asked how I knew. I didn’t have a clean answer. What I had was years of understanding how a signal moves through a network — so deeply embedded that the solution came from somewhere below conscious thought. I didn’t have to think my way to the answer. My experience thought for me.
I believe the same thing is possible with your nervous system. Not as a metaphor. As a method. When you understand how your system works — what state it’s in, what it needs, how signals move through it — you stop fighting it and start working with it. Eventually, regulation stops being something you do and starts being something you know.
Maybe you picked up this series because something in the title felt familiar. You are good at what you do. Exceptionally good. You have built a life that looks, from the outside, like evidence that you have it together. And in many ways you do. But there is a cost that doesn’t show up on your performance review. A vigilance that never fully powers down. A tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix. A version of you that is always, quietly, bracing.
Maybe you call it anxiety. The tension you carry in your shoulders before a big meeting. The jaw you find clenched at two in the afternoon. The sleep that should be restful but isn’t. The way your body is always slightly ahead of you, already preparing for something that hasn’t happened yet. You have learned to work around these things. To perform in spite of them. To keep moving.
But anxiety is not a character flaw. It is not weakness. It is a dysregulated nervous system without the language to explain itself. Your body has been sending signals for a long time. This series will help you learn to read them.
You are not broken. Your system is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It kept you safe when safe wasn’t guaranteed. It helped you perform when falling apart wasn’t an option. It got you here.
But here has a threshold. And you can feel it.
Here is what no one in your leadership development program ever told you: your nervous system is the foundation that every other skill sits on. You cannot access your best thinking from a dysregulated state. You cannot project the presence you are capable of when your system is in threat response. You cannot make clear decisions from urgency — even when it looks like decisiveness from the outside. Nervous system regulation is not a wellness practice. It is a leadership competency. And it may be the one you have been missing.
Although I am writing primarily to women, everything in this series applies equally to men. Nervous systems do not have a gender. Neither does the cost of carrying unresolved trauma into a high stakes life.
This series is for the woman who is ready to stop managing herself and start trusting herself. Who wants to lead without bracing. Who suspects that the missing piece isn’t another strategy or another modality — but a foundation she was never given the chance to build.
You don’t have to be further along than you are to begin. You just have to be here.
Over the next several months I will walk you through everything I have learned — and everything I am still learning — about building safety in your body while building the life you are reaching for. We will go slowly. Nothing here will be forced. You are in charge of your own pace, your own process, your own threshold.
There is only one thing I want you to do right now.
Just breathe. Deeply.
That is where we begin.
