Embracing the Messiness: Dysregulation as communication not dysfunction
In contemporary conversations about mental health, regulation is often positioned as the goal. We are encouraged to regulate our emotions, our behaviour, our nervous systems — as though steadiness were a personal achievement that could be reached through enough insight or effort.
Within this frame, dysregulation is usually understood as failure. A breakdown in self-management. Something to be corrected, resolved, or worked through.
Another meaning is possible.
Dysregulation is not always a sign that something is wrong within a person. Often, it is a signal that something is wrong around them.
Dysregulation Does Not Occur in Isolation
Nervous systems do not exist in a vacuum. They form, adapt, and respond within families, institutions, cultures, and economies. What we label as dysregulation is frequently the nervous system responding accurately to its conditions.
Chronic time pressure. Insecure housing. Sensory overload. Social surveillance. Power imbalance. Relational inconsistency. A lack of choice.
When demands exceed capacity, the nervous system does what it has always done: it mobilises, protests, withdraws, or collapses in an attempt to restore safety.
Seen this way, dysregulation is not random or irrational. It is patterned. Predictable. Contextual.
It carries information about what the body is being asked to hold.
From Individual Symptom to Systemic Signal
When dysregulation is framed solely as an individual problem, responsibility is quietly relocated onto the person experiencing it.
Why can’t they cope?
Why can’t they calm down?
Why are they still struggling?
This framing obscures a more uncomfortable question:
What conditions make this response necessary?
In environments that prioritise productivity over pacing, compliance over consent, and endurance over care, dysregulation is not an anomaly. It is a consequence.
Children and the Cost of Misinterpretation
In children, dysregulation is often interpreted as misbehaviour, immaturity, or poor emotional skills. Yet children have the least power to alter the conditions shaping their lives.
Noise-heavy classrooms. Rapid transitions. Emotional labour. Inconsistent caregiving. Expectations to self-regulate before co-regulation has been reliably experienced.
When children become dysregulated, it is rarely because they lack capacity. More often, they are signalling that capacity has already been exceeded.
Treating these signals as dysfunction risks teaching children that their bodies are the problem — rather than helping adults examine the environments they are asking children to adapt to.
Why Dysregulation Persists Despite Insight
One of the quiet frustrations many adults encounter is this: I understand myself now — so why does this keep happening?
Insight does not automatically change conditions.
A nervous system shaped by ongoing pressure, instability, or relational threat may continue to respond protectively even when those patterns are consciously understood. Dysregulation persists not because healing has failed, but because the context continues to require adaptation.
At times, dysregulation also reflects a nervous system that has become organised around survival. When threat, unpredictability, or overwhelm has been prolonged or inescapable, protective responses can become more easily triggered and harder to shift — even when present-day conditions appear safer.
This does not mean the nervous system is malfunctioning. It means it has learned, over time, that staying alert, mobilised, or withdrawn was the safest available option. Flexibility returns not through insight alone, but through sustained experiences of safety, choice, and reduced demand.
In these cases, regulation is not something to be achieved internally. It depends on changes in pace, structure, support, and expectation.
Messiness Is Not the Problem
Dysregulation is messy. It disrupts timelines. It resists neat solutions. It does not move in straight lines.
But messiness is not dysfunction.
It is what happens when living systems encounter limits — when something needs to change but cannot yet be named or negotiated safely.
Suppressing dysregulation may restore surface-level order, but it also silences information. Listening to it requires a willingness to tolerate discomfort, uncertainty, and complexity.
A Different Measure of Responsiveness
If dysregulation is communication, the question shifts.
Not: How do we eliminate it?
But: What is it telling us about the conditions we’ve created — and the costs of maintaining them?
This is not a call to remain dysregulated. Nor is it an argument against developing supportive regulation. It is an invitation to stop locating the problem solely within individual bodies.
Sometimes the most regulated response is not greater self-control — but reimagining the structures, relationships, and expectations we are asking nervous systems to live inside.
Related Resources
Important Information
This post offers a conceptual and relational inquiry into dysregulation as a nervous system response shaped by relational, environmental, and systemic conditions. It does not provide clinical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and is not a substitute for professional support. The reflections shared here are intended to support understanding and reduce the pathologisation of adaptive nervous system responses.
