Experts, texts, and leaders as nervous system regulators
I was in my early twenties when I called Pastor Morgan for the first time. My life at that point felt like it was being run by chaos. I was still reeling from my childhood, trying to figure out how to stand on my own two feet, trying to build something stable with my then-wife. I cannot even remember how we got his number. Somebody must have mentioned him, or we found him in a church bulletin, or we were given a recommendation I no longer remember the source of. What I do remember is that he came over that same evening. He sat in our living room in our apartment and listened to us talk about where we had come from, what we were dealing with, and what we hoped we might be able to build. By the end of the evening, we had a sense of where we might be able to plug in. Within a few weeks we were attending services regularly. Within a few months we were meeting with him every chance we could get.
Pastor Morgan was the real thing. I want to be intentional about the way I say this, because the story I am about to tell could be misread as a story about a bad pastor taking advantage of a vulnerable young couple. That is not what happened. He was a man who practiced daily what he preached on Sundays. He was dedicated to his congregation in a way that was rare. He came to the hospital when both of our children were born. He showed up for the small moments and the big ones. He was, by every measure I had then or have now, a trustworthy person.
The story I want to tell today is about the cost of outsourcing your entire inner life to any authority, even a good one, when you have not yet built any of that life inside yourself. Because that is what I was doing. I did not have language for it at the time. I just knew that Pastor Morgan made me feel calmer than I felt without him. When my anxiety spiked, his counsel settled it. When I was confused, his perspective clarified things. When I felt guilty, his interpretation of scripture told me what to do about the guilt. When I felt lost, his presence in our lives gave me something steady to orient toward. I did not understand that what was happening to my nervous system in his presence was the same thing that happens to a child’s nervous system in the presence of a regulated parent. He was co-regulating me. My own internal regulation had never developed enough to handle the chaos I was carrying, and his presence in my life was doing the work my own body had not yet learned how to do.
This worked for a while. There were years of relative stability where I attributed my growing-up-ness to my faith, when really my faith and my pastor were doing what a regulated nervous system would have done for me if I had ever had one. The Bible became the second pillar of this arrangement. I treated it as an external regulator the way I treated Pastor Morgan. When I was confused about how to act, the Bible told me. When I felt uncertain, a passage settled me. When I needed to make a decision, I searched the text for guidance. I did not consult my own body, my own felt sense, my own internal knowing. I had no real access to any of that. The text and the man were doing the work my interior was designed to do.
And then Pastor Morgan announced he was leaving the church for a different role that he felt he was being called to. I remember the announcement like it was yesterday. I remember sitting in the pew and feeling something close to panic. I had no idea who I was without this man telling me on the regular what I needed to hear. The ground was leaving the building with him, and I had no idea what was going to be under my feet when he was gone. The crisis I felt in that moment was about losing the external regulator my nervous system had come to depend on, even though I would not have called it that at the time.
The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has written extensively about how nervous systems regulate each other, and his book The Body Keeps the Score contains some of the clearest explanations I have read of how this works. His main observation is that human nervous systems were never designed to regulate themselves in isolation. We are built for co-regulation. A baby’s nervous system regulates against its mother’s. A child calms when held by a trusted adult. An adult settles when in the presence of someone whose own system is calm. This is the design working as intended, humans need other humans in order to stay regulated.
The problem comes when the co-regulation that should have happened in childhood did not happen the way it was supposed to. When a child grows up in a home where the adults are themselves dysregulated, or absent, or volatile, the child does not get the steady external presence their nervous system needs in order to learn how to regulate from the inside. The child grows up without that internal capacity, and walks into adulthood looking for someone or something outside themselves to do the regulating that no one ever did for them when they were small. This happens without anyone deciding it is going to happen. The nervous system simply reaches for what it was supposed to have been given, decades after the original window for receiving it has closed.
This is what was happening to me with Pastor Morgan, though I would not have been able to describe it that way then. My childhood had not provided the steady co-regulation my nervous system needed, and my body went looking for what it was missing. Pastor Morgan walked into my life at a moment when I was desperate for an external presence steady enough to settle me. I did not think of him as a nervous system regulator. I thought of him as a spiritual mentor, a wise older man of God. The language I had was religious. The thing actually happening was developmental. The religious language and the developmental reality were doing different work, but the religious language was the one I had access to, so it was the one I used.
Van der Kolk’s argument continues, and this is the part that matters most for this piece. The borrowing of someone else’s nervous system to regulate your own is what humans are built to do. The problem is when the borrowing never ends, when the person being borrowed from becomes a permanent substitute for the internal regulation you never built. At that point, the borrowing stops being a stepping stone and starts being a trap. You cannot leave the relationship without losing your ground. You cannot question the authority without destabilizing yourself. You cannot grow past the arrangement, because growing past it would require the very internal capacity the arrangement has been standing in for.
This is the dynamic that Part II of this series has been trying to name from different angles. Our culture finishes the job that our childhoods started, and it does so partly by making sure there is always somewhere to outsource our authority. The pastor is one option. The political leader is another. The expert with credentials, the influencer with a platform, the wellness guru with a book, the therapist who tells you what your problem is, the financial advisor who tells you what to do with your money, the parenting expert who tells you how to raise your children, the diet authority who tells you what to eat. None of these people are necessarily bad, and many of them are genuinely helpful. The problem lives in the cultural arrangement rather than in the individuals. The arrangement has made internal authority almost impossible to build, while simultaneously offering an endless supply of external authorities to borrow from.
We have built a civilization that is, in many ways, designed to keep us in a permanent state of co-regulation with outside authorities. The systems we live inside reward people who defer to expertise. The institutions we belong to reward members who accept the institution’s authority over their own. The platforms we use reward content that tells us what to think and punishes content that asks us to think for ourselves. Even the language of self-help and wellness, which appears to be about empowerment, often ends up being another form of outsourcing, because the reader is still being told what to do by an author who claims to know better.
The cost of all of this is the same cost the previous weeks of this series have been tracing. We never learn to feel what we actually feel. We never learn to know what we actually know. We never learn to trust the internal voice that has been trying to speak to us our whole lives, because we have been busy listening to louder external voices that have promised to do our thinking for us. The compass that was supposed to develop inside us during childhood never developed, and we spend the rest of our lives borrowing other people’s compasses while convincing ourselves we are oriented.
When Pastor Morgan left, I had to start the work that should have been mine to do all along. What I did not understand at the time was how much had been resting on his presence. The structure he had been providing was holding up more than my faith. It was holding up my marriage, my sense of purpose, my sense of who I was. Not very long after he left, my marriage had dissolved and I was a fish out of water, a ship without a sail, a life without a clear purpose. I had to rebuild almost everything from scratch. I spent years looking for what I had lost. I tried other pastors at other churches, hoping to find another voice that could settle me the way his had. I tried several therapists, hoping one of them could give me what I was still looking for outside myself. The work was learning how to settle my own nervous system without an outside regulator doing it for me. The work was learning to sit with confusion without immediately reaching for someone to tell me what the confusion meant. The work was learning to feel grief and anger and joy and fear without needing a text to interpret them for me first. The work was learning to be a self, which is the work I had been avoiding for as long as I had been alive.
It took me a long time. It is still taking me a long time. I am not sure the work ever fully ends, and I am also not sure it is supposed to. Humans are designed for co-regulation, and there are still moments in my life when I lean on the regulated nervous systems around me to help me find my own ground. I started seeing my therapist Bill around 2005, and he has been the model of what a healthy outside regulator can look like. He consistently reminded me that I carried internal wisdom of my own, and even though he allowed me to co-regulate with him for a season, his goal was always to teach me how to regulate from the inside and hear my own inner voice. He could have set the same trap that so many helpers set, where the client becomes dependent on the helper indefinitely. He graciously kept pointing me back to myself instead. My wife, Bill, a few trusted friends, certain authors whose voices I trust without surrendering to, all of them have been part of the ongoing co-regulation that humans need. The difference between this and the Pastor Morgan years is that I notice when I am borrowing now, and I notice when the borrowing is starting to replace my own internal work rather than supplement it. The noticing makes all the difference.
If you are reading this and you suspect that you have outsourced your trust to someone or something outside yourself, the suspicion itself is good information. It is your interior trying to come online. It is your internal voice that has been quiet for a long time, finally starting to clear its throat. You do not have to leave the relationship tomorrow. You do not have to throw away the text. You do not have to dismantle the framework all at once. You only have to start listening to the part of you that has been waiting underneath all of the borrowing, and let it begin to say what it has been wanting to say for a very long time.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
Up next week: Why Certain Systems Feel Familiar Even When They Harm Us
This essay is part of a year-long weekly exploration of how we become who we are, and why change often begins in places we were never taught to look.
