This week’s episode with trauma-informed systems thinker Jill Barrett opens with a gentle existential jolt: Keegan, riding a wave of political and psychic tension, asks whether deregulation under authoritarian regimes is dysregulating our nervous systems.
Now, deregulation is typically what happens when lobbyists win—rules get gutted, protections disappear, and markets run wild. But the nervous system doesn’t deregulate; it dysregulates, getting stuck in survival mode. That means either revving into fight-or-flight or shutting down into freeze or fawn, even when there’s no real threat.”
And yet… Keegan’s slip might be more accurate than it seems.
Because what is happening in this moment—through media, policy, climate disruption, fascist tactics, and everyday isolation—is both a political and a biological dismantling. The rules of human thriving are being stripped away. This isn’t just an assault on government protections. It’s an assault on our ability to feel safe, grounded, and connected.
So yes, we are watching deregulation and dysregulation.
We are watching them converge.
Jill reminds us that nervous systems don’t heal in isolation. They regulate in relationship. This is the political project beneath the political project: to stay human in the face of dehumanizing systems. To build co-regulating cultures—within our families, our movements, our institutions. To hold each other steady even as the center wobbles.
And while Keegan’s question may have been “wordy,” it cracked something open:
The deeper the unraveling, the more vital it becomes to notice how language itself either clarifies—or confuses—what’s happening to us.
So here’s your AI-splanation:
Deregulation guts policy.
Dysregulation wrecks your sense of self.
And maybe the real revolution is breath, presence, and a nervous system strong enough to love in the middle of collapse.
Until next time—stay regulated, or at least co-regulated.
—Moss