🧩 When the Body Waits for Friday: Nervous System Conditioning in High-Conflict Separation

💬 Opening Quote

“The body keeps the score, even when the mind wants to move on.”
— Bessel van der Kolk

🌿 Introduction

Separation from a high-conflict partner doesn’t just end a relationship; it reshapes the body’s sense of safety.
For me, it showed up every Friday at four o’clock when my lawyer’s emails arrived like clockwork. My heart would race, my stomach would twist, and I would brace for another weekend of uncertainty.

At the time, I thought I was being reactive. In truth, my body was doing its job: remembering, protecting, surviving.

This is what happens when the nervous system learns to expect danger. And it is what many people silently live through after a high-conflict separation.

🌿 What Happens When the Body Learns to Brace

The nervous system doesn’t need a conscious reason to prepare for impact; it learns through repetition.
Every Friday letter became a lesson: threat followed by activation, followed by collapse.
Soon I wasn’t responding to my former spouse; I was responding to Friday itself.

That is what trauma does. It teaches the body to anticipate threat long after the threat is gone.
Polyvagal Theory calls this a neuroception of danger, the body’s way of scanning for cues that something isn’t safe. Even when my inbox was empty, I couldn’t rest. Sleep was broken. Focus was impossible. My body was waiting for the next shock that might never come.

🌧️ The Loneliness of Dysregulation

The hardest part wasn’t the conflict itself; it was the isolation.
I wasn’t in full-time work. I was looking for my next role, attending job interviews, raising children, navigating courts, tying to complete the course work in my doctoral studies and carrying a private storm inside me.

My lawyer was competent and professional. He did his job well, focused on the facts, the filings, and the deadlines. But my nervous system wasn’t used to working with a lawyer. Each call, each letter, each update felt like another jolt of adrenaline.

While he focused on the legal aspects of the matter, which was his role, what I needed in those moments was for the activation in my body to settle. I needed someone who could see that my body was in fight-or-flight and to offer co-regulation, not just that my case was in progress.

I also experienced deep shame.
All of this happened while I was living in Singapore as a trailing spouse, a term that already carried its own quiet identity challenges. When the separation began, I had to move out of our family home into a small apartment. I didnt get a chance to say goodbye to our neighbours.

I felt ashamed to show up at my children’s school and sports events. Ashamed to interact with people whom I thought were friends, only to discover that some had taken sides. The social world that had once given me a sense of belonging now became a landscape of quiet avoidance and polite distance.

That shame lived in my body. It tightened my chest, shortened my breath, and made the world feel smaller.

Without co-regulation, the nervous system has nowhere to land.
We can’t think our way into safety. We feel our way there, ideally through connection.
And when that connection isn’t available, the practice becomes internal: learning to hold the frightened, rejected, and ashamed parts of ourselves with compassion.

🪞 Finding Meaning and Context

Years later, I found the missing context through educators like Dr Ramani Durvasula, Dr Tara Palmatier, and HG Tudor, who teach about high-conflict and narcissistic relationship dynamics.

It wasn’t that I lacked communication skills or empathy. I was trying to engage with a system that thrived on chaos and control. That realisation changed everything.

For years I tried to apply Non-Violent Communication (NVC), a tool that assumes mutual empathy. But empathy cannot land where there is no shared commitment to safety.
In those contexts, NVC can become a form of self-harm disguised as harmony.

Understanding this freed me from self-blame. It helped me see that my body wasn’t the problem; it was the messenger.

🌱 From Triggered to Trained

Healing began when I stopped trying to manage the outside world and started understanding my inner one.

Through Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, I met the parts of me that were terrified, angry, and exhausted.
Through Polyvagal work, inspired by Deb Dana, I began mapping my states from fight to freeze to safety and learning what helped me move gently between them.

I began to pay close attention to the organising principles of Polyvagal Theory: hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation.
These principles helped me understand that my reactions weren’t random. They were patterned, adaptive responses that made sense given my history.

I also learned the 3 Cs of regulation: context, choice, and connection — a simple yet powerful framework for restoring agency.

• Context reminded me to pause and see the bigger picture rather than react from the past.

• Choice helped me remember that I always had options, even small ones. Options to say yes or no to small things, then eventually to big things. Growing up, I didn’t feel I had permission to say no. Learning that I could, and that I would still be safe, became one of the deepest shifts in my nervous system.

• Connection guided me back to relationship - with others, with myself, and with the universe.

Gradually, I began to apply these principles to my decision-making: in how I worked, how I spent, and how I engaged with others. Instead of reacting, I began to respond. Instead of collapsing, I learned to orient toward safety.

Breathwork, orienting, and daily grounding helped me teach my body a new lesson:

“It’s Friday, and you’re safe now.”

Healing didn’t mean forgetting. It meant retraining the body to trust again, slowly, kindly, and consistently.

I began to notice how much time I was spending stuck in a painful story — what Somatic Experiencing calls the trauma vortex - compared to how much time I spent resourcing myself, or dwelling in the counter vortex.
As I learned to balance or pendulate between the two, my system became more flexible, less reactive, more alive.

I also began to shift my language. Instead of saying, “I feel angry,” I started to say, “A part of me feels angry.” That simple change created space in my body. It reminded me that anger wasn’t all of me; it was just one part seeking care, protection, or voice.

Each time I noticed, paused, and named a state with kindness, I built a small bridge back to regulation.

🔄 From Survival to Self-Leadership

In a high-conflict separation, you don’t just lose a relationship; you lose the illusion of relational safety.
But that loss can awaken something profound: self-leadership.

It is the practice of becoming the steady adult within, the one who can hold the younger, frightened parts when the world feels unsafe.
It is pausing before reacting, feeling before fixing, and choosing presence instead of protection.

That is nervous system mastery: not staying calm, but staying connected.

The journey of self-leadership is what Internal Family Systems (IFS) is all about.
It invites us to meet the parts of ourselves that carry pain, protection, and wisdom — and to relate to them from a place of curiosity, compassion, and courage.

Very few people can do this work alone. I certainly couldn’t.
At the beginning, I had an excellent therapist who helped me find stability and self-understanding when everything felt uncertain. Later, while still navigating the Federal Family Court system, I began formal study in IFS Level 1 and continued with the sessions.

I watched experts operate — calm, grounded, and confident under pressure — and slowly began to internalise that steadiness. Eventually, I cultivated the courage to represent myself in court.
Not from defiance, but from presence.
Not to win, but to stand in my own authority.

Learning the model from the inside out - while living through the very dynamics it describes; that helped me see that self-leadership isn’t a concept.
It is a daily practice of relationship: between parts, between nervous systems, and between the self and life itself.

💭 Conclusion

If you find yourself bracing for the next message, the next conflict, the next Friday, you’re not weak. Your body is doing what it was trained to do: protect you.

The work isn’t to silence that alarm, but to teach it that safety is possible again, not in someone else’s behaviour, but in your own steady presence.

🌾 Call to Action

If this story resonates with your experience, you’re not alone. I support people navigating the aftermath of high-conflict relationships through trauma-informed, body-based coaching.

👉 Explore more reflections at rudidoku.com/blog