Coupling Dynamics Pt. 1: Time travel, decoys, and the amulet of breathing

Artwork: Untitled by Rachel Dinwiddie

This month, I've been away in Vancouver with the incomparable Kathy L. Kain studying trauma coupling dynamics. "Coupling dynamics" is a body-centered framework for understanding how trauma shapes our nervous system responses through conditioning. In coupling dynamics, somatic responses become linked that shouldn't be, or severed when they're meant to be connected.

Here's an example: imagine someone receives difficult news over the phone that overwhelms their system. If that experience gets over-coupled, their body might begin to associate the phone itself with danger. Now, every ring triggers a somatic response - an urgent lunge to answer, bracing for what's on the other end. Someone else experiencing the same event might under-couple their response, which can look like ambivalence. The phone rings, but they don’t really notice, nor do they pick up - and have no idea that their avoidance is tethered to a past moment of distress.

All trauma has coupling dynamics. Our brain and body couple things in hopes of preventing harm from recurring, and the result is what we call our conditioning: The phone rings - I lunge in fear to answer (over-coupled). Or, the phone rings - I am awash with ambivalence, and feel nothing (under-coupled). In both scenarios, the phone itself is neutral: it is not the event, but a messenger of it. Still, the everyday task of answering the phone, once benign, becomes over- or under-coupled by our safety system, which organizes itself to perceive the phone as a threat and either amplifies or dampens the charge. Make sense? (Perhaps not.. Honestly, after four days of intensive training, this writing is my own earnest attempt at digestion.)

Let's try another example. Imagine you experienced harm by someone in a blue shirt. The shirt itself is neutral, as is the colour blue, but our bodies might learn to flinch at those wearing blue shirts, or unconsciously avoid blue all together - this is coupling.

Any sensory stimuli - a touch, taste, sense, object, relationship - can become over- or under-coupled. While over- and under-coupling responses show up differently, they are both expressions of the same underlying stressor: a prior event that overwhelmed the system, and a present-day body that’s still bracing. What we are left with is a nervous system that is acutely sensitized - or desensitized - to neutral stimuli that are unconsciously tethered to underlying traumatic experiences. These responses are not flaws; they are echoes - intelligent echoes - trying to keep us safe in a world that once wasn't.

Decoys, tricksters and the animacy of coupling

Coupling is not pathological. It is biological brilliance. Defensive wisdom. A body organizing itself toward survival. By bracing against or avoiding the stimuli (the phone, the shirt), the body believes it can best protect itself against recurrent harmful experiences. In making the phone or the shirt the spokes-trigger for the charge, the body cleverly displaces our attention away from the overwhelm of the original event that was just toooo real.

What follows is a sophisticated weaving of stimulus and response - a myth-making that unconsciously obscures the viscera of the wound and tucks it cleverly and tenderly beneath the bones of what feels more familiar, more survivable. Here, our couplings redirect our gaze away from the core of the ache and toward something else entirely (like a phone, or a shirt). In this way, our over- and under-coupled responses become the tricksters at the hidden door, insisting we are looking in the wrong direction as we tread toward the centre of the wound. They act as symbol, decoy, red herring, becoming shape-shifters who disrupt linear logic and subvert our attempts at "figuring ourselves out". When we arrive here, we often find ourselves asking:

Why am I so upset?

It’s just a phone..

It’s just a shirt..

It's just a ....(you fill in the blank)

But the "logic" of trauma is not tidy or linear. It is cyclical, ritualistic, blobular, sensing - disorganized in its organizing. When we sense that coupling is afoot, we are likely at the threshold of the wound - what beloved teacher Bayo Akomalafe might call “a crack.” These over- and under-coupled places are sites where a boundary bleeds and things are not quite what they seem: a phone is no longer simply a phone, it becomes a life/death-line, a messenger, a god. A blue shirt is more than laundry - it becomes an omen, a relic, a doorway into the belly of what we have survived. Here, coupling dynamics amplify and animate the mundane world, giving breathless objects like a phone or a shirt the power to unsettle us. In doing so, they queer the boundaries between object and subject, stimulus and response, living and non-living - and call us, again and again, to our knees.

When we work with coupling dynamics, we are entering the unseen realms. What we often call “triggers” are the grief stones - talismans, symbolic touchpoints, material expressions of our immaterial wounds. How human, how brilliantly adaptive, that our bodies create intricate systems to hold and organize our pain so that we might go on. And just as coupling dynamics can render us undone, they also awaken us to the animacy of the material world. A bird is not just a bird - it is an ancestor in flight. A stone is not just a stone - it marks a life, a memory, a burial.  A shirt is not merely a garment - it is living fibre, woven into memory with the body that wore it. It is written into our very nature to couple, to symbolize, to make meaning. This is not a flaw, but a collective inheritance - a sacred strategy for survival that puts us in contact with the aliveness of the more-than-human world.

Time travel and the amulet of breathing

Coupling itself is a safety-making ritual. It is a body sensing for ways to predict patterns, establish rhythms, and render the unknown known. Coupling dynamics - what we might also call "trauma responses" - are our system's attempts at organizing our aliveness. If we lean toward the wisdom of our over- and under-couplings, these "cracks" within them will show us the places in our bodies and our psyches that we are meant to revisit, renegotiate and repair. Even when we seek to avoid them, they will generously return us over and over to what is incomplete. Like a steady drum, they call us into deeper intimacy with the parts of us that were frightened, abandoned, or harmed. They are the half-formed, hidden, and unstable parts of us that long for safety and connection. And, through their precise and predictable rituals of agitation, they call us back to the places they got left behind.

Our over- and under-coupled reactions may seem disproportionate - until we realize that the proportions don’t belong to the present moment. They belong to the past, still living in our bodies. Coupling dynamics signal to us that we have slipped out of normative time and into the undigested experiences that linger in our soma, our memory, our bones. Here, we enter the time-bent presence of our tenderest parts, still holding the half-told stories that have shaped us. In these moments, trauma coupling dynamics become portals into past events, offering us opportunities to travel through time and notice the places where we are holding patterns of fear, urgency, bracing or avoidance. 

So how do we know if something is over- or under-coupled? When we do know, how do we travel through time to revisit and retrieve? A good way to sense for our coupling dynamics is to notice when something feels especially alive, or curiously numb. This can tell us when we are reaching the centre of something particularly sacred, heavily armoured by the protective rituals of over- or under-sensing. It is difficult work. Truly - it is tender and it is hard. If we choose to venture into the waters of un-coupling, we are going to want to do so with care, and with a reverent slowness. And like any good time travel journey, we're going to need an amulet to transport us back home when it is time to return.

For me, I like to use the breath. A steady, soft stream of breath can do wonders for safety-making in our systems that have learned to brace. When we anchor into the breath, we are better able to follow the matrices of our over- and under-coupled responses, and begin to track the threads of their origins - not to fix them, but to be with them. Breath reminds us that we are present-day beings, with present-day bodies. In time travel work, our breath becomes both compass and companion, helping us stay tethered as we touch into the aliveness of our old pain and joy. In this way, the breath is more than physiology - it is a living ritual. A quiet ceremony of return. A portal back home. An amulet. A soft spell of protection that coaxes a little more ease from the places in us still holding vigil. And when it’s safe enough, even for a moment, they rest.

This is the first part in a series I'm writing on Coupling Dynamics. Stay tuned for Coupling Dynamics Pt 2: Ancestrality and the pre- pre- pre- pre- pre- prodrome.