Roxy West, PhD

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/30/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race

Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race The long read: For years, racism has been defined by the violence of far-right extremists, but a more insidious kind of prejudice can be found where many least expect it – at the heart of respectable society

Neurodivergent Grief: When Loss Does Not Look the Way People Expect

Grief has never been orderly. It does not move neatly through five stages, follow a predictable timeline, or look the same from one nervous system to another. Yet our culture still carries surprisingly rigid ideas about what grieving is supposed to look like. We expect tears at certain times, sadness expressed in recognizable ways, gradual improvement, and eventually some version of “moving on.” When someone grieves differently, we can mistakenly interpret the difference as avoidance, denial, obsession, emotional detachment, or even a lack of love.

This can be especially painful for neurodivergent people, including autistic people, people with ADHD, and others whose brains process emotion, sensory information, relationships, attention, memory, and change differently. A neurodivergent person may experience a loss with extraordinary intensity while appearing remarkably calm. They may cry immediately or discover that the tears do not come until weeks later. They may need to talk repeatedly about the person who died, or they may find themselves almost incapable of talking about them. They may immerse themselves in research, replay the final conversation hundreds of times, become intensely focused on practical details, return quickly to familiar routines, or withdraw from other people altogether. None of those behaviors, by themselves, tell us how deeply someone loved.

Grief Is Also a Nervous-System Event

We tend to describe grief primarily in emotional terms: sadness, yearning, anger, guilt, loneliness and disbelief. But grief is also an enormous neurological and physiological adjustment. Our brains are prediction-making organs. Through repeated experience, the nervous system builds an internal model of what it expects to encounter: this person exists, I can call them, they will be sitting in that chair, my dog will meet me at the door, my mother will answer the phone, my partner will be beside me tomorrow morning. Attachment becomes woven into our brain’s expectations about how the world works.

Loss abruptly violates that prediction. Intellectually, a person may understand that someone is gone while other parts of the brain continue expecting their presence. That helps explain why grief can feel surreal and why ordinary moments can suddenly become devastating. For a neurodivergent person who relies heavily on predictability, routine, familiar relationships, environmental stability, or carefully constructed systems for regulating daily life, the disruption may be particularly profound. They are not only grieving someone they love; their nervous system may also be trying to reconstruct an internal map of a world that no longer operates the way it did yesterday.

Autistic Grief May Be Deep Without Being Obvious

Some autistic people experience emotions intensely while having difficulty immediately identifying, organizing, or communicating what is happening internally. Alexithymia, which involves difficulty identifying or describing emotional states, occurs more frequently among autistic people, although the two are not synonymous. This can mean that a person intellectually understands that something devastating has happened before they can fully recognize or articulate their emotional response.

That processing difference can easily be misunderstood by other people. Someone may appear composed at a funeral, handle practical responsibilities efficiently, return to work, watch a favorite television program, engage deeply with a special interest, or continue following familiar routines. Observers may assume that the person is unaffected or “doing surprisingly well,” when those familiar activities may actually be helping an overwhelmed nervous system regulate itself. Routine is not necessarily denial. Sometimes routine is the structure that makes unbearable change survivable.

ADHD Can Complicate Grief in Different Ways

ADHD can bring another constellation of challenges to bereavement. Emotional intensity, difficulty shifting attention, disrupted sleep, impaired working memory, time blindness, executive-function difficulties, and intrusive or repetitive thinking can all become amplified under significant stress. Ordinary responsibilities that were manageable before the loss may suddenly become overwhelming, while the mind simultaneously becomes intensely occupied with what happened.

This is where grief can turn into relentless mental investigation. A person may repeatedly wonder whether they missed a warning sign, should have called sooner, could have said something differently, or might somehow have prevented what happened. The brain begins reviewing conversations, dates, medical decisions, text messages, and memories as though one more examination of the evidence might finally produce an answer capable of changing an irreversible event. Rumination can begin masquerading as problem-solving. Unfortunately, there are some problems the brain cannot solve because the event has already occurred. Part of grieving is eventually recognizing the difference between a question that can teach us something and a question our nervous system is asking because it desperately wants a different ending.

When Grief Looks Like Obsession

Many neurodivergent people possess a remarkable capacity for sustained and intense focus. During bereavement, that focus can attach itself to the loss. Someone might research the medical condition that caused the death, read extensively about grief, repeatedly examine photographs, reconstruct timelines, revisit text messages, organize belongings, create memorial projects, or return to the same stories again and again. From the outside, this may look obsessive, but repetition can sometimes be part of how the brain integrates something it cannot yet comprehend.

The more useful question is not simply, “Why are you still talking about this?” The better question is whether the repeated thinking, researching, remembering, or storytelling is gradually helping the brain integrate reality or continually returning the nervous system to the moment of catastrophe. Healthy grief can involve tremendous repetition while still slowly expanding to make room for life. When repetition produces no integration and instead keeps someone chronically trapped in terror, guilt, or severe functional impairment, additional support may be needed.

Grief Can Be Intensely Sensory

Loss is not experienced only through thoughts. We also remember people through our senses, and neurodivergent people with heightened sensory processing may experience these reminders with unusual intensity. A particular perfume, blanket, song, chair, coffee cup, set of keys, dog collar, voice recording, texture, or familiar sound can suddenly activate an entire network of memory and emotion. The smallest sensory detail can temporarily collapse the distance between the present and the past.

Sometimes the moment that breaks a grieving person open is not the funeral or memorial service. It is reaching automatically for a second coffee cup, hearing a sound in another room and expecting someone to appear, waking up and forgetting for several seconds that the death occurred, or walking through the front door and realizing that an animal will never again come running to greet them. The conscious mind may know exactly what happened, but the nervous system learns absence through thousands of tiny encounters with the world that used to contain the person we loved.

Stop Grading Other People’s Grief

One of the cruelest things we can do to grieving people is grade their performance. We decide they are crying too much or not enough, talking about the loss too often or avoiding it, returning to normal activities too quickly or taking too long to recover. These judgments usually reveal more about our expectations of grief than they reveal about the grieving person. There is no universally correct performance of love after loss.

This matters enormously when supporting neurodivergent people because many already spend substantial energy adapting their natural behavior to social expectations. Asking someone to perform grief in a socially recognizable way can add another layer of labor to an already overwhelmed nervous system. Instead of asking whether someone’s grief looks normal, we can ask more meaningful questions: Are they safe? Are they supported? Can they meet basic needs? Are they gradually able to move between grief and ordinary life? Do they have relationships in which they can grieve without performing for an audience?

The Goal Is Not to Stop Loving

Healthy grieving does not require forgetting, erasing attachment, or pretending that someone has become irrelevant simply because they are no longer physically present. Contemporary grief theory recognizes the importance of continuing bonds, the ways human beings maintain an internal relationship with someone who has died while gradually adapting to life without their physical presence. We carry people’s voices, humor, lessons, values, stories, rituals and influence long after they are gone.

For neurodivergent people, intentionally creating tangible ways of maintaining that connection may be especially meaningful. Photographs, artwork, objects, written memories, music, rituals, collections, memorial projects, storytelling, charitable work, or returning to meaningful places can provide structure for a relationship that has been forced to change form. The psychological task is not necessarily to sever the attachment. It is to allow the attachment to evolve so that love can remain without requiring a physical reality that can no longer be restored.

Give the Love Somewhere to Go

Perhaps one of the most difficult truths about grief is that love does not disappear when its recipient dies. The attachment system can remain active even when the person or animal we love is no longer physically available. Grief can therefore feel like possessing an enormous amount of emotional energy with nowhere familiar for it to go. The instinct to call, protect, touch, care for, speak to, or be near someone remains even though the relationship can no longer operate in its previous form.

Part of healing may involve giving that love somewhere new to go. It can move into art, ritual, service, storytelling, advocacy, memory, creativity, caring for others, or living more fully according to something the person taught us. This does not mean turning tragedy into a lesson or forcing ourselves to find a silver lining. Some losses are simply devastating. It means recognizing that continuing to live is not a betrayal of the person we lost, and continuing to love them is not a failure to heal.

Different Brain, Different Grief, Same Love

When a neurodivergent person is grieving, curiosity is usually more compassionate than interpretation. Ask rather than assume. Offer presence without demanding emotional disclosure. Respect the need for solitude without disappearing completely. Help with practical responsibilities when executive functioning becomes difficult. Understand that routines may become unusually important, sensory environments may become harder to tolerate, and stories may need to be repeated many times before the brain can integrate what happened.

Most importantly, do not confuse a different expression of grief with an absence of grief. Human beings do not all experience attachment in precisely the same way, so there is no reason to expect us to experience its rupture identically. There is no single correct way for a brain to grieve. There is only the deeply human work of teaching a changed nervous system how to live in a changed world while carrying forward the love that made the loss matter in the first place.

Roxy West, MS
Writer • Researcher • Doctoral Candidate in Holistic Psychology

References

Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss, Volume 3: Loss: Sadness and Depression. Basic Books.

Kübler-Ross, E., & Kessler, D. (2005). On Grief and Grieving. Scribner.

Neimeyer, R. A. (Ed.). (2001). Meaning Reconstruction & the Experience of Loss. American Psychological Association.

Stroebe, M., & Schut, H. (1999). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: Rationale and description. Death Studies, 23(3), 197–224.

Worden, J. W. (2018). Grief Counseling and Grief Therapy: A Handbook for the Mental Health Practitioner (5th ed.). Springer Publishing.

About the Author

Roxy West, MS, is a writer, researcher, counselor, and doctoral candidate in Holistic Psychology whose work explores attachment, nervous-system regulation, relationships, self-awareness, and human transformation.

© 2026 Roxy West. All rights reserved. Reproduction, adaptation, republication, or commercial use requires written permission from the author.

What Spanx Can Teach Us About Failure?
Become Bullet Proof
How to Train Your Brain to Stop Fearing Failure

By Roxy West, MS
Writer • Researcher • Doctoral Candidate in Holistic Psychology

Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, grew up with a strange question at the dinner table: “What did you fail at this week?” Her father wasn’t asking to embarrass her. He was looking for evidence that she had taken a risk. If Sara or her brother had tried something and failed, he celebrated the attempt. If they had nothing to report, that was the problem. It meant they might not have stretched themselves enough.

Long before Blakely became a billionaire entrepreneur, her father had taught her something psychologically powerful: failure did not have to mean shame. He changed what happened after failure, and that helped change what failure meant.

Most of us were trained in the opposite direction. Get the answer wrong and feel embarrassed. Don’t make the team and feel inadequate. Get rejected and wonder what is wrong with you. Love someone and lose them and decide you were foolish for trying. Start something that flops and tell yourself you should have known better. Eventually, the brain begins making a brutally efficient calculation: Trying creates risk. Risk creates pain. Avoidance creates relief.

And whatever repeatedly gives us relief becomes very tempting to repeat.

Your Brain Is Learning What Failure Means

Your brain does not respond only to what happens. It learns from what happens next. When taking a risk is repeatedly followed by humiliation, criticism, rejection, punishment or shame, the nervous system can become increasingly motivated to avoid situations associated with those experiences. Avoidance then brings short-term relief, which can reinforce the avoidance itself.

That is how a person can become afraid not only of failing, but of trying.

Blakely’s father disrupted that sequence. Failure wasn’t automatically followed by humiliation. It was met with curiosity, connection and encouragement. The lesson became something closer to: The real failure isn’t trying and getting it wrong. The failure is becoming so afraid of getting it wrong that you stop trying.

That is an entirely different operating system.

Instead of Try → Fail → Shame → Avoid, we can practice Try → Fail → Learn → Adjust → Try Again.

Failure may still hurt. Rejection can still sting. Losing something you desperately wanted can still break your heart. Psychological resilience does not require pretending painful things don’t hurt. It means refusing to turn an outcome into an identity.

I failed is information.
I am a failure is a verdict.

Learn the difference.

Failure Is Data

Every attempt produces information. The relationship that ended teaches you something about compatibility, boundaries or yourself. The business idea that bombed teaches you something about the market, ex*****on or timing. The job you didn’t get gives you information. The boundary that went badly gives you information. The conversation you completely screwed up gives you information. Even the decision you would give anything to undo contains information you did not possess before you lived through it.

The psychologically useful question is therefore not “What is wrong with me?” It is “What did this teach me?”

Both questions can emerge from exactly the same failure. One converts experience into shame. The other converts experience into intelligence.

Perfectionism Is Expensive

Perfectionism can look impressive from the outside because we associate it with high standards. But perfectionism can also become an elaborate strategy for avoiding vulnerability. If I need to know I will succeed before I begin, I will attempt fewer things. If I need to look competent while learning, I cannot tolerate being a beginner. If rejection becomes evidence about my worth, I will organize my life around avoiding rejection. If mistakes are unacceptable, eventually playing small becomes safer than living fully.

And that is an extraordinarily expensive form of safety.

You can become so good at protecting yourself from failure that you accidentally protect yourself from possibility.

Think about that.

The relationship you never initiated. The book you never submitted. The business you never started. The class you didn’t take. The boundary you didn’t set. The room you didn’t walk into. The opportunity you talked yourself out of because you could not guarantee the outcome.

Sometimes what looks like safety is fear making your life smaller.

Start Measuring Courage Differently

Stop using outcomes as the only measurement of whether you are succeeding. Ask better questions. Did I show up? Did I tell the truth? Did I attempt something difficult? Did I allow myself to be a beginner? Did I tolerate somebody else’s disappointment instead of abandoning myself? Did I enter the arena even though rejection was possible? Did I learn something I could not have learned from the sidelines?

And then borrow the Blakely family question:

What did you fail at this week?

Maybe you asked someone out and they weren’t interested. You practiced courage. Maybe you submitted something and it was rejected. You entered the arena. Maybe you tried something new and were terrible at it. Congratulations—you found the unavoidable first stage of becoming good at something. Maybe you finally said no and somebody didn’t like it. You discovered that another person’s disappointment is survivable. Maybe you made a spectacular mistake. Welcome to being human.

Extract the information. Make the adjustment. Keep moving.

Rewire the Meaning of Failure

You don’t need to train yourself to enjoy losing. You need to stop interpreting losing as evidence that you never should have played.

Failure can mean: I tried. I learned. I survived. I know something now that I didn’t know before. I can adjust. I can try differently. I can try again.

The goal isn’t to create a life without failure. Such a life doesn’t exist. The goal is to become someone who is no longer so frightened of failure that fear gets to decide the size of her life.

So don’t just make a success list this week. Make a failure list. Write down three things you attempted that did not go according to plan and ask one question about each: What did this teach me?

Then ask yourself the question that matters most:

What would I attempt next if I weren’t afraid of failing at it?

Pay attention to your answer.

Your next failure might be evidence that your life is getting bigger.

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References

Blakely, S. Public interviews and discussions describing her father’s practice of asking his children what they had failed at each week and reframing failure as not trying.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change. Guilford Press.

Skinner, B. F. (1953). Science and Human Behavior. Macmillan.

About the Author

Roxy West, MS is a writer, researcher, psychotherapist and doctoral candidate in Holistic Psychology. Her work explores relationships, attachment, nervous-system regulation, self-worth, behavioral change and practical tools for creating a more intentional life.

Work With Roxy West

Roxy offers workshops, educational programs, groups and individual work focused on personal growth, relationships, emotional health and behavioral change. For workshops, speaking engagements, groups and collaborations, contact Roxy West directly.

© 2026 Roxy West. All rights reserved.

Reprogram Your Brain to Receive More Money

By Roxy West, MS
Writer • Researcher • Doctoral Candidate in Holistic Psychology

Your brain doesn’t fear money.

It fears uncertainty, threat and the unfamiliar.

If scarcity, financial chaos, guilt or struggle became familiar, having more may activate old predictions:

Don’t risk it. Don’t ask. Don’t charge that much. Spend it. Give it away. Stay where it’s familiar.

This isn’t destiny.

It’s learning.

And learned patterns can change.

Reprogram the Pattern

Notice.
Catch the moment opportunity triggers fear, guilt or avoidance.

Regulate.
Don’t make important financial decisions from a highly activated state.

Receive.
Practice accepting money, opportunities, compliments and support without minimizing yourself.

Keep.
Let money remain in your account. Make having resources increasingly ordinary.

Ask.
Negotiate. Raise your rates when warranted. Apply for the opportunity. Make the offer.

Repeat.
Brains learn through experience. Give yours repeated evidence that greater financial responsibility and opportunity can be manageable.

The goal isn’t:

“Convince myself I’m rich.”

The goal is:

“Increase my capacity to create, receive, keep and intelligently manage more.”

Your financial ceiling may not only involve what you can earn.

It can also involve what you have learned to expect, tolerate and believe is possible enough to pursue.

Expand the capacity.
Build the skills.
Take the opportunities.
Let your brain catch up with the life you’re building.

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References

Bossaerts, P. (2009). What decision neuroscience teaches us about financial decision making. Annual Review of Financial Economics, 1, 383–404.

Frydman, C., & Camerer, C. F. (2016). The psychology and neuroscience of financial decision making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), 661–675.

Giovanniello, J., Bravo-Rivera, C., Rosenkranz, A., & Lattal, K. M. (2023). Stress, associative learning, and decision-making. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 204, 107812.

Kuhnen, C. M. (2025). Financial decision-making across the lifespan: Insights from neuroeconomics. Annual Review of Financial Economics, 17, 395–410.

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About the Author

Roxy West, MS is a writer, researcher and doctoral candidate in Holistic Psychology whose work explores human behavior, self-awareness, relationships, emotional growth and the practical application of psychological science to everyday life.

Work With Roxy West

Roxy’s work can be adapted for workshops, trainings, speaking engagements, groups and educational programs focused on personal growth, behavioral change, relationships, self-awareness and psychological well-being.

Copyright

© 2026 Roxy West. All Rights Reserved.

This original work may be shared for personal and educational purposes with the author’s name and attribution intact. It may not be reproduced, modified, republished, sold, incorporated into commercial programs or represented as another person’s work without written permission from the author.

Educational content only. This material is not individualized financial, investment, medical or mental-health advice.

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She’s probably not even asking for advice. It’s an honor she wants to talk about her s**t to you. Don’t give advice or instantly think that you are the expert of her life! She just wants to be heard and seen by you! Yay!! Listen to understand her not correct her🩷😎🩷

Rattlesnake-Proof Your Nervous System

What War Horses Can Teach Us About Building a Nervous System for Uncertainty

By Roxy West MS — Writer • Researcher • Doctoral Candidate in Holistic Psychology

A bombproof horse is not fearless. It is trained to remain responsive when everything in its environment says, run. Military cavalry training required horses and riders to function amid weapons, noise, rapid movement, formations, and battlefield confusion. The goal was not the absence of fear. It was the ability to remain functional inside it. (United States War Department, 1917)

That is a powerful model for the human nervous system. Emotional strength does not mean becoming permanently calm, confident, or certain. It means becoming less controlled by discomfort. A resilient nervous system can register fear without automatically obeying it.

The goal is not: “Nothing scares me.” The goal is: “Fear does not make my decisions for me.”

Personal Field Note

I tested this theory one day while riding a trail horse through the dry riverbeds of Arizona near the treatment center where I worked.

Everything felt ordinary until I heard it—a rattlesnake at the horse’s feet.

My nervous system exploded instantly. Full-body alarm. Adrenaline. Absolute terror. I was scared s**tless. But my horse never skipped a beat. No panic. No dramatic reaction. No wild bolt. It registered the threat, adjusted, and kept moving.

That moment stayed with me because it showed me something profound. The horse was not unconscious of danger. It was not numb. It simply did not surrender control to fear. The sound was information, not instruction.

That is what nervous-system strength looks like. Not the absence of activation, but the ability to stay present enough to respond.

Uncertainty Is Not the Enemy

Much of anxiety lives in prediction: What if I fail? What if they leave? What if I embarrass myself? What if I choose wrong? The nervous system can interpret uncertainty as threat, and we respond by overthinking, overpreparing, overexplaining, controlling, avoiding, perfecting, pleasing, and rehearsing catastrophe.

Those behaviors may create immediate relief while strengthening long-term fear. If every uncomfortable situation is escaped, the nervous system never gets the corrective experience of discovering, I could have handled that.

Security is not the elimination of uncertainty. Security is increasing your capacity to function inside it.

Desensitize Yourself to Failure

Failure becomes terrifying when you organize your life around avoiding it. Practice small, survivable failures instead. Try something you are not good at. Ask for something that may receive a no. Submit something before it feels perfect. Be a beginner. Let someone disagree with you.

Then notice what actually happened. Failure did not destroy you. Rejection did not erase you. Embarrassment did not become your identity. Your brain learns through lived experience, and research on exposure and inhibitory learning supports the idea that new experiences can compete with old threat predictions. (Craske et al., 2014)

Every survivable failure becomes evidence: I can tolerate this. That is how fear loses authority.

How to Rewire Your Brain to Become Rattlesnake-Proof

“Rewiring” is a useful shorthand for neuroplasticity—the nervous system’s capacity to change with experience and learning. Human research demonstrates that repeated learning can produce measurable changes in the brain. (Draganski et al., 2004)

Whatever you repeatedly rehearse becomes increasingly familiar. Repeated panic followed by escape can reinforce one pattern:

Activation → Escape → Relief

Practicing a different response builds another:

Activation → Stay → Assess → Respond → Recover

That is the rattlesnake-proof pathway.

1. Interrupt the Automatic Response

You cannot change a pattern you never interrupt. When activated, create space between emotion and behavior before texting again, defending, quitting, checking, controlling, explaining, or escaping.

Name what is happening: “My nervous system is activated. I do not have to act yet.” Even a brief pause challenges the assumption that emotion requires immediate action. The pause is where choice returns.

2. Give Your Brain a New Prediction

The brain uses previous experience to anticipate what comes next. If disagreement once preceded rejection, disagreement may still trigger danger even when your adult life is very different.

New experiences provide new information. You believe saying no will be catastrophic. You say no. Someone becomes disappointed. You survive. The brain receives an update: Disappointment is uncomfortable, not catastrophic. Research on fear learning and extinction demonstrates that humans can acquire new learning that changes how previously threatening cues are processed. (Phelps et al., 2004)

You cannot argue your nervous system into feeling safe as effectively as you can show it something new.

3. Stay Long Enough to Learn

Immediate escape can accidentally teach the brain that escape prevented catastrophe. Remaining within manageable discomfort creates the possibility of learning something different.

This does not mean overwhelming yourself. Use small doses. Wait before checking the message. Allow an unresolved conversation to remain unresolved. Attend something unfamiliar. Try something imperfectly. Let somebody else control a minor decision.

Your nervous system does not need to learn, “Nothing bad will happen.” It needs the more powerful lesson: “I can function even when I don’t know what will happen.”

4. Practice Recovery

Resilience is not avoiding activation. It is completing the cycle.

After something difficult, notice yourself returning. Your breathing changes. Your muscles soften. Your attention broadens. You walk, stretch, rest, breathe, connect, reflect, and eventually recognize that the moment passed.

Teach your nervous system the whole sequence:

Something happened → I handled it → it ended → I recovered.

We often remember the panic and forget the recovery. That distorts the evidence.

5. Replace Reassurance With Evidence

Reassurance feels good, but constantly needing somebody to tell you everything will be okay can keep uncertainty frightening. Start collecting evidence of your own capacity instead.

Remember the boundaries you maintained, mistakes you repaired, losses you survived, conversations you completed, and moments that felt unbearable until they weren’t. Self-trust grows from remembered evidence: I have handled hard things before. I can handle another one.

You don’t need certainty about the future when you have evidence about yourself.

6. Practice Failure on Purpose

Make harmless imperfection part of your training. Send something without rereading it twelve times. Take a class where you are inexperienced. Ask the awkward question. Make mediocre art. Try something without needing to excel at it.

You are teaching yourself a radical distinction: Failure is an event, not an identity.

The more ordinary failure becomes, the less threatening it becomes. You stop asking failure for permission to participate in your own life.

7. Reward Courage, Not Outcome

If you only celebrate yourself when things work out, your brain can begin equating success with safety. Reward the behavior you want repeated instead.

Notice: I asked even though I might hear no. I stayed even though I was uncomfortable. I told the truth even though somebody might dislike it. I tried even though I might fail.

The outcome is information. The courage was the win.

Stop Practicing Catastrophe

Overthinking feels productive because the mind is busy, but sometimes it is simply repetitive fear. What if this goes wrong? traps you inside prediction.

Replace it with: “If this goes wrong, what will I do?”

The first question rehearses helplessness. The second rehearses agency. Resilience is not confidence that everything will work out; it is confidence that you can respond when it doesn’t.

Let People Be Disappointed

For many people, another person’s displeasure is one of the loudest alarms the nervous system can hear. Someone is upset, misunderstands you, criticizes you, or wants something you do not want to give, and suddenly you want to explain, appease, rescue, surrender, or fix.

Do not confuse another person’s disappointment with evidence that you have done something wrong. A rattlesnake-proof nervous system can tolerate relational discomfort without abandoning itself.

You can care deeply and still say no. You can be misunderstood without launching a campaign to change someone’s perception. You can disappoint somebody and remain loving.

That is self-possession.

Stop Trying to Prevent Life

Anxiety wants guarantees: nobody will leave, nothing will fail, nobody will criticize us, and every decision will be correct. Life does not offer that contract.

Instead of asking, “How do I make sure nothing bad happens?” ask, “How do I become someone who can recover when something does?”

Prevention has limits. Recovery can be trained.

Build Self-Trust

Every difficult thing you have survived is evidence: mistakes corrected, rejection absorbed, grief survived, boundaries maintained, conversations completed, and moments you were certain you could not handle until you did.

Self-trust is not believing you will always choose correctly. Self-trust is knowing you will not abandon yourself when you don’t.

That is a much sturdier form of confidence.

The Goal Is Flexibility

A healthy nervous system is not permanently calm. It activates, settles, learns, adjusts, and responds. The question is whether activation becomes command.

Can you feel anxious without immediately acting? Can you experience rejection without chasing reassurance? Can you make a mistake without turning it into shame? Can uncertainty exist without becoming an emergency?

That is nervous-system strength.

Become Rattlesnake-Proof

When something activates you, ask: What is actually happening? What am I predicting? Is this dangerous or uncomfortable? What am I trying to control because I don’t want to feel uncertainty? What would I do if I trusted myself to handle the outcome?

A bombproof horse is not fearless. A trail horse standing over a rattlesnake is not fearless either. What it shows is something even more useful: fear does not have to become command. Through repetition and new experience, human beings can also develop new responses to cues that once automatically produced panic. Research on extinction learning, inhibitory learning, neuroplasticity, and memory reconsolidation provides scientific foundations for understanding how experience can modify learned responses. (Craske et al., 2014; Nader et al., 2000; Phelps et al., 2004)

Failure does not require shame. Conflict does not require collapse. Uncertainty does not require control. Disappointment does not require self-abandonment.

Fear is information. It is not always instruction.

The goal is not to build a life with fewer explosions. It is to build a nervous system that can hear one, feel the ground beneath its feet, and still choose where to go next.

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References

Craske, M. G., Treanor, M., Conway, C. C., Zbozinek, T., & Vervliet, B. (2014). Maximizing exposure therapy: An inhibitory learning approach. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 58, 10–23. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2014.04.006.

Draganski, B., Gaser, C., Busch, V., Schuierer, G., Bogdahn, U., & May, A. (2004). Changes in grey matter induced by training. Nature, 427, 311–312. doi:10.1038/427311a.

Nader, K., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. Nature, 406, 722–726. doi:10.1038/35021052.

Phelps, E. A., Delgado, M. R., Nearing, K. I., & LeDoux, J. E. (2004). Extinction learning in humans: Role of the amygdala and vmPFC. Neuron, 43, 897–905. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2004.08.042.

United States War Department. (1917). Cavalry drill regulations, United States Army, 1916. Military Publishing Company.

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About the Author

Roxy West, MS, is a writer, researcher, psychotherapist, educator, and doctoral candidate in Holistic Psychology. Her work explores human relationships, attachment, emotional resilience, self-trust, recovery, identity, nervous-system regulation, and the practical psychology of creating meaningful change.

Roxy’s writing translates psychological ideas into usable tools: not simply understanding why we behave as we do, but learning how to interrupt old patterns, build new capacities, and become more intentional about how we live, love, connect, and respond to uncertainty.

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Copyright

© 2026 Roxy West. All Rights Reserved.

Original text and presentation are copyrighted by Roxy West. Except as otherwise permitted by law, permission is required to reproduce, republish, distribute, adapt, or incorporate this article into publications, courses, workshops, training materials, or commercial materials.

Brief quotations may be used with clear attribution to Roxy West, MS and the article “Rattlesnake-Proof Your Nervous System: What War Horses Can Teach Us About Building a Nervous System for Uncertainty.”

Educational Notice: This article is intended for education and personal reflection and is not a substitute for individualized mental-health assessment or treatment.