Regulation is one of the most misunderstood parts of couple work. People assume it’s about calming down, breathing, slowing the heart rate, or doing something soothing. It isn’t. It’s about noticing when the system is shifting long before the mind catches up. Everything in couple therapy depends on which state the nervous system is in. In a ventral vagal state you can stay open, responsive, collaborative, able to hear nuance and adjust tone. But once activation rises, the capacity for connection drops. And if the system shifts far enough into sympathetic mobilisation or dorsal withdrawal, a constructive conversation is no longer biologically possible. Not from lack of care, but because the body has moved into survival.

This is where understanding polyvagal theory becomes essential. Neuroception is always running beneath awareness, scanning for safety or threat. In distressed couples, it is primed. The threshold for detecting danger is too low because the system has been shaped over years of relational injury, unmet needs, ruptures that weren’t repaired, and conversations that left residue. The body remembers. It reads the present moment through the past. This isn’t personality or mood. It’s an adaptive survival response.

Once activation rises, perception shifts first. Perceptual narrowing isn’t a cognitive distortion. It’s a biological shift in how attention selects information. People scan for micro-signals: a tone, a pause, a small change in expression. None of these cues mean anything alone, but once the system has assigned danger, the meaning is already fixed. You stop seeing your partner clearly and start seeing the threat-shaped version of them.

So early in therapy the work doesn’t start with history or analysing the partner. It starts with learning to notice activation as it rises. To recognise the internal intensity gradient rather than just the outward behaviour. Anger, defensiveness, withdrawal, shutdown — these aren’t character flaws. They are nervous system states, showing where someone is in the sequence long before they can articulate anything.

Seeing this from the perspective of neurobiological regulation changes the whole narrative. It removes the personal attack from the behaviour while keeping each partner responsible for their own activation. It shifts the focus from “you’re doing this to me” toward “something is happening in my system.” And until a couple can see that clearly, they can’t interrupt their pattern, because they’re still fighting at the level of behaviour instead of the level where the pattern begins. When biology takes over, psychology follows it. The work is to catch the shift before the old pattern takes over.