When Surrender Becomes Practice: What My Nervous System Taught Me at the End of 2025

As 2025 closes, I find myself unexpectedly… full.

Not full of events, social engagements, or ticking off one more thing before the year ends — but full in the way that only being present can fill you.

I’ve just returned from nine days away with my 19-year-old. Anyone who has spent time with late adolescents will know the energy: fast, impulsive, alive, unpredictable. It reminded me very quickly what it’s like to be around 18–19-year-olds again — that developmental edge where independence is loud, emotions run hot, and the nervous system is often doing everything at once.

Letting Go of Control (For Real)

One of my mantras for this year has been letting go of control. Not as a concept — but as a lived practice.

There were moments when it became very clear that no amount of reasoning, warning, or pleas to slow down would change the situation. And more than that, my opinions, however well-intended, were not increasing safety or connection.

That was sobering.

I could feel how easily fear wants to become control. How quickly love can slide into management. And how, particularly in adolescence, that move doesn’t build trust — it quietly erodes it.

So I needed another tack.

Regulate. Relate. Reason — In Real Time

So many conversations I have with clients came into full, embodied practice. Bruce Perry’s neurosequential model — regulate, relate, reason — wasn’t theory anymore; it was happening moment by moment.

I had to check myself repeatedly:

• Am I regulated right now?

• Is my nervous system adding pressure, or offering steadiness?

• What does support look like here — not correction?

  
  

There was a moment over Christmas when this became especially clear. Two nervous systems were pulling in opposite directions — one seeking connection, the other seeking sovereignty — and everything was happening at once.

My role wasn’t to fix, advise, or analyse. It was to stay present enough to co-regulate. To be the steady ground while someone I love moved through a surge of feeling.

This is one of the quiet demands of parenting adolescents:Not authority. Not answers.But regulated presence.

Developmentally, This Matters

From a human development perspective, late adolescence is a time of:

• heightened nervous-system reactivity

• identity consolidation

• autonomy seeking

• emotional intensity paired with incomplete impulse control

The prefrontal cortex — responsible for foresight, inhibition, and risk assessment — is still under construction. What is highly active is the limbic system: emotion, drive, intensity.

So when we meet adolescents with fear, control, or lectures, we’re often speaking to a part of the brain that simply isn’t in the driver’s seat.

But when we meet them with regulated presence, we offer something far more powerful: a nervous system they can borrow.

The Moments That Matter Most

Recently, my mum asked me, “What was the best part of the time away?”

And I knew immediately.

The best part wasn’t the activities or the outward markers of “having a good time.”It was discovering that I could stay present when someone I love needed steadiness, not solutions.

Those moments — where nothing needs fixing, where no one has to perform — are the ones I treasure most. Everything else, in some way, is a performance. But when regulation replaces expectation, something far more honest becomes possible.

Learning From a Five-Year-Old

I also spent time with a friend and her five-year-old daughter. Watching her guide her child through frustration was like watching nervous-system literacy in action.

“Smell the roses.”“Blow out the candle.”

Simple breath cues. Repeated calmly. No drama.

And I watched that little body regulate in real time.

It was a reminder that this work starts early — and that regulation always comes before explanation.

The Through-Line in My Work

Back home, I found myself reminding a client of something fundamental:

The nervous system does not want to connect with anyone until it has first connected with itself.

Sometimes, the most supportive thing we can do before making a decision, sending a message, or reaching out is to take ten minutes to breathe. To settle. To feel. To come home.

Only then does the question of connection become clear. Only then can choice emerge.

A Quiet Ending to a Full Year

There are invitations out there for New Year’s Eve events. Social, celebratory, loud.

And yet — I feel deeply content to be home. In my own space. With my animals. With my body settled. With my nervous system intact.

This year does not need anything more to be complete.

What it has given me is not performance, but presence. Not certainty, but surrender. Not control, but trust.

And perhaps that is the real work — as parents, as practitioners, as humans — learning how to stay present enough that when life asks something hard of us, we don’t meet it alone.