Internal Boundaries and Co-Regulation: Rethinking What Nervous System Healing Really Requires
- gingerstherapynotebook
- Jan 25
- 5 min read
We’re often taught to regulate on our own, but our nervous systems are wired for connection. This piece explores how internal boundaries and co-regulation work together to support healing, resilience, and emotional safety.
When we talk about nervous system regulation, the message often sounds like this: learn to calm yourself, manage your reactions, regulate your emotions. While internal coping skills are important, this framing can place too much responsibility on the individual and overlook something essential about how humans are wired. We don’t regulate in isolation. Humans are built for connection, and nervous system regulation happens in relationships, too.
Internal Boundaries: Regulation That Starts Within
Internal boundaries are the personal guidelines we set with ourselves: how we engage with our thoughts, emotions, time, and energy. Unlike external boundaries, they don’t require explanation or agreement from anyone else. These internal limits are empowering because they are something you can do individually to help create psychological safety, which is essential for maintaining mental health and emotional resilience.
Internal boundaries might look like:
Limiting how long you allow yourself to replay conversations or make sense of a situation
Choosing not to engage with your inner critic
Taking a break from searching for “why,” when you don’t have the answers
Letting emotions move through you naturally without amplifying or suppressing them
These boundaries support nervous system regulation by reducing chronic stress and continuous re-activation of our body’s stress response. When internal boundaries are unclear, the body often stays on high alert, leading to anxiety, overwhelm, or emotional exhaustion. While communicating boundaries to others is important, there are situations where shifting to internal boundaries may be more effective.
Internal boundaries can be especially important when:
Repeated boundary conversations haven’t changed anything in your relationship: If you've clearly expressed a boundary multiple times without seeing change, continuing to expect different results may cause unnecessary suffering.
Rigid power dynamics limit your options and efficacy: Sometimes professional, family, or social situations don't allow for the external boundaries you need to feel safe.
You’re depleted: sometimes internal boundaries are necessary for self-preservation when certain people or thoughts become exhausting, especially for situations that lack closure.
Someone consistently violates your limits: Rather than repeatedly engaging in the same conflict, an internal boundary allows you to protect your wellbeing regardless of others' actions.
In these moments, internal boundaries become an act of self-preservation. They allow you to care for yourself without waiting for others to change or when explanations are unavailable.
Over time, strong internal boundaries support autonomy, emotional regulation, resilience, and reduced resentment. As Dan Siegel describes in interpersonal neurobiology, this kind of regulation supports integration: a state where different parts of ourselves can work together more harmoniously. Resilience emerges not from isolation but from integration, the linking of differentiated parts within ourselves and between ourselves and others. When attuned relationships support our nervous system, the body learns to settle. This state of safety enables you to be in the world from a place of flexibility, empathy, and creativity.
In summary, internal boundaries are important, but only part of the story.
The Myth of Self-Regulation
Modern culture often treats regulation as something we should be able to do entirely on our own. Neuroscience tells a very different story.
According to Stephen Porges Polyvagal Theory, our autonomic nervous system is fundamentally social, stemming from our evolutionary need to feel safe with others. Safety, calm, and resilience emerge not from solitary control, but from co-regulation, which is the experience of being attuned to, seen, and safe with others.
Our nervous system is constantly scanning for cues of safety or threat through tone of voice, facial expression and presence: a process Porges calls neuroception. When we feel safe in connection, our breath softens, our heart rate stabilizes, and our capacity for trust and flexibility increases. This is why when in the presence of a safe person, we often feel more relaxed in our bodies and minds. When safety is absent, the system contracts into protection and our brains and bodies stay on high alert.
Developmental research supports this. Allan Schore emphasizes that the parts of the brain responsible for emotional regulation are shaped through early attuned relationships. When co-regulation is missing, the nervous system often compensates through overcontrol or shutdown. It is a stress response, because our brains are wired to look for patterns, predictability, and safety with others. What looks like composure may actually be disconnection.
This helps explain why attachment patterns can play such a meaningful role in how we regulate in relationships as adults, particularly when consistent, attuned caregiving was absent or unpredictable. Healing, then, isn’t about becoming perfectly self-regulated or keeping everything contained. It’s about restoring our capacity to regulate with others by attending to our attachment needs, building safety over time, and making space for new ways of relating that support connection rather than survival.
Where Internal Boundaries and Co-Regulation Meet
Internal boundaries and co-regulation aren’t opposites, they actually support each other.
Internal boundaries help us notice when we’re becoming dysregulated, interrupt stress-escalating patterns, and stay connected to ourselves. Co-regulation helps our nervous system settle through shared safety, presence, and attunement.
As internal boundaries strengthen, we often show up more grounded and empowered in relationships. As we experience safe co-regulation, internal boundaries become easier to hold. Regulation becomes less effortful and more relational.
This is why healing isn’t about self-sufficiency. It’s about flexibility, the ability to move between inner awareness and relational support.
The Ripple Effects
What’s especially powerful about internal boundaries is how they quietly change our external relationships. When we’re more regulated internally, we’re less reactive, more intentional, and better able to choose how we engage with others. Our nervous system state influences the systems we’re part of and regulation is contagious.
Over time, internal boundaries become the invisible architecture of a regulated life: supporting stability, resilience, and connection, even when circumstances are hard or uncertain.
A Gentle Invitation
You don’t have to regulate alone. And you don’t have to rely entirely on others, either. Healing lives in the space between, within yourself and between you and the people who help you feel safe.
Take what resonates. Leave what doesn’t. And come back to these ideas whenever your nervous system needs a softer place to land.
With kindness,
Ginger 🕯️ ☁️ 🌙
Sources & Further Reading
Towery on Internal Boundaries Towery, V. (2025, November 17). Internal boundaries: The hidden key to nervous system regulation. Practice Psychotherapy. Retrieved from https://practicepsychotherapy.com/blog/internal-boundaries-the-hidden-key-to-nervous-system-regulation
Hecker on Self-Regulation & Co-Regulation Hecker, K., PhD. (2025, November 11). The myth of self-regulation: From isolation to co-regulation. Dr. Kerstin Hecker. Retrieved from https://www.drkerstinhecker.com/blog/the-myth-of-self-regulation-from-isolation-to-co-regulation
