Beyond Symptom Reduction: Expanding Our Capacity for Well-Being
In psychotherapy, we are exquisitely trained to work with suffering. We learn to track symptoms, regulate distress, and stabilize trauma responses. This work is essential. But somewhere along the way, therapy can quietly narrow its focus, becoming more about reducing pain than expanding life.
And yet, something important can get lost along the way.
Too often, therapy becomes primarily about moving towards or away from pain, rather than also supporting movement toward well‑being. The implicit hope is that if suffering decreases enough, happiness or fulfillment will naturally take its place. Research in positive psychology suggests this isn’t quite how it works.
The absence of distress is not the same as the presence of well‑being.
The Red Spiral and the Blue Spiral
In Somatic Experiencing, there is a teaching often illustrated through two spirals. One is sometimes referred to as the trauma vortex, often depicted as a red spiral. This represents the pull toward threat, constriction, fear, pain, and survival-based responses. When someone has lived with chronic stress, trauma, or prolonged adversity, this spiral can become very strong.
Less often emphasized, but equally important, is what is sometimes called the healing vortex, often symbolized as a blue spiral. This spiral represents experiences of safety, pleasure, play, curiosity, connection, joy, and presence. These are the states that allow the nervous system to rest, repair, and expand.
Digital Artwork by Sarah Tucker
Both spirals shape nervous system learning. One organizes around survival; the other organizes around living. When someone has endured a great deal of suffering and trauma, their overall capacity (often referred to as “the window of tolerance”) can shrink. This is true not only for tolerating difficult sensations and emotions, but also for tolerating positive ones. Pleasure can feel unfamiliar, vulnerable, or even overwhelming. Joy may feel out of reach. Presence can feel unsafe.
This is where trauma work can quietly go off balance.
We become very skilled at working “in the red”; titrating into pain, carefully pacing difficult memories, and expanding tolerance for distress. Working intentionally “in the blue” is just as important, not only for stabilization and resourcing, but for moving toward aliveness.
Why the Blue Spiral Matters
Just as we slowly and respectfully approach difficult material in trauma therapy, we often need to titrate into positive experiences as well. Too much pleasure, connection, or goodness too quickly can feel dysregulating for nervous systems that have been shaped by threat.
This doesn’t mean avoiding well‑being practices. It means approaching them with the same care, pacing, and respect we bring to trauma work.
What Doesn’t Create Lasting Happiness
This isn’t only a somatic insight. Research on well-being consistently shows a similar pattern. Many things we naturally chase in the name of happiness do not lead to sustained well-being:
Achievement and productivity as primary goals
External validation or approval
Material success beyond basic security
The belief that “once this problem is solved, I’ll finally feel better”
Symptom reduction as the sole marker of healing
It’s important to name this without shame.
From a systems and nervous-system perspective, it makes sense that many of us orient toward these goals. In cultures shaped by capitalism, productivity demands, economic precarity, social comparison, and chronic stress, focusing on achievement, control, and problem‑solving can be adaptive strategies. These pursuits often arise not from vanity or denial, but from attempts to create safety, stability, or belonging within constraining systems.
Understanding their limits is not about pathologizing these strategies, it’s about expanding what becomes possible.
What Actually Supports Well‑Being
Well‑being is supported by small, repeatable experiences that gently strengthen the blue spiral. A few core categories appear again and again in the research:
Gratitude
Noticing what is supportive, meaningful, or nourishing in your life — even in small ways. Gratitude isn’t about forcing positivity; it’s about allowing what’s already present to register.
Savoring
Letting pleasant or neutral moments last a little longer. Savoring is the practice of staying with a positive experience long enough for it to be felt in the body, not just noticed cognitively.
Connection
Experiencing attuned, safe relationships; including moments of warmth, shared laughter, or being seen. The quality of our relationships deeply impacts our well-being. Invest time and energy into your healthy relationships.
Meaning and Purpose
Engaging in activities that feel aligned with values or contribute to something larger than oneself. This can look like helping others, advocacy work, engaging in your spirituality or religion, or any kind of creative expression.
Kindness and Care
Offering care to others or to oneself in ways that feel authentic and sustainable. This can be through your own self talk, self care, paying it forward, listening to a friend, cooking for a neighbour etc.
Why Insight Isn’t Enough: The Brain Science
Neuroscience helps explain why these practices matter and why they often don’t “stick” without intention.
The brain has a well-documented negativity bias. As Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson often describes it, negative experiences are like Velcro for the brain, while positive experiences are more like Teflon; they tend to slide right off.
From an evolutionary psychology perspective, this bias is not a flaw. It helped our ancestors survive by prioritizing threat detection, learning quickly from danger, and remembering what could cause harm. Noticing what went wrong was far more protective than lingering on what went right.
The challenge is that many of our nervous systems are still operating in chronic stress, especially considering what our collective nervous system is undergoing at this time.
This is where neuroplasticity becomes important. While the brain is biased toward negativity, it is also capable of change. With repeated, embodied attention, positive experiences can move from fleeting states into more stable neural traits. This does not mean we are cultivating “toxic positivity”, rather, we are working mindfully both “in the red” and “in the blue” to increase our capacity in both. The more capacity we have to be present with one, the more it influences the other; this is true regulation, coherence and well-being in our nervous systems.
A Somatic Approach to Rewiring Well‑Being
From a somatic perspective, practices like gratitude and savoring are not primarily cognitive exercises. They are physiological experiences, felt in the body, repeated over time, and approached with care.
This might look like:
Noticing a pleasant moment with mindful awareness
Bringing attention to sensations in the body (warmth, softening, expansion, ease)
Allowing the experience to stay (or even expand) for 10–30 seconds longer than usual
Tracking internal responses without forcing or judging
This gentle staying is what allows the nervous system to learn safety, pleasure, and presence, slowly strengthening the blue spiral and rewiring the brain.
Importantly, this work often needs to be titrated. For some nervous systems, even small moments of goodness can feel vulnerable or intense. Going slowly is not resistance; it is wisdom.
Expanding Capacity, Not Just Reducing Pain
Rather than trying to do everything at once, it can be helpful to choose one evidence-based practice: savoring, gratitude, connection, or kindness and build consistency with it. You can also explore what is “in the blue” for you?
You might ask:
What helps me to feel alive?
What brings me joy?
What brings me ease?
Which practice feels most accessible right now?
Where in my day is there already a small opening for this?
What would it look like to approach this with curiosity rather than pressure?
Consistency matters more than intensity. Small, repeated moments, approached with presence, gradually strengthen the blue spiral. Just like building muscle, neuroplasticity helps rewire the brain with repetition.
Healing is not only about decreasing suffering. It is also about increasing our capacity to experience ease, connection, and aliveness when they are available.
When we make room for both spirals, we’re not just helping people survive their lives. We’re helping them inhabit them.
