Parenting With a Wrecked Nervous System: Love in the Middle of Collapse

This has been the hardest year of my life. By far. Nothing even comes close.

The weight of legal battles, the strain of moving homes, the endless confrontations with people who do not operate in integrity. It has taken a huge toll on my nervous system and stripped it down to the bone.

Some mornings, I wake up and it feels like my body is still bracing for a punch that hasn’t come yet. Sleep doesn’t repair it. Breathwork feels like a small drop in a raging fire. My system is stuck in survival mode, and there is no “off switch.”

And in the middle of that collapse, I am a father to a 15-month old baby boy.

The Raw Paradox of Parenthood

Parenting with a wrecked nervous system is a paradox you cannot prepare for.

Children don’t wait for you to heal. They don’t pause their needs while you regulate your breath. They don’t know or care that you are neck deep in legal documents or that your heart feels like it’s carrying a rather intense Biblical war inside.

Children want you now. They want to play, to laugh, to be fed, to connect, to be held.

And here is the tension: I also have misophonia and when your nervous system is in fight-or-flight, even the smallest sounds, a toy, a wrong tone of voice from someone, all can feel like a tsunami hitting a defenceless beach.

You want to be patient. You want to respond with love. But your body is screaming for silence and solitude.

That is the paradox. You are both the patient and the healer, the exhausted one and the protector, the fragile man and the father who must stand tall.

The Nervous System Hijack

When you parent from a nervous system that is wrecked, it shows up in ways you don’t want to admit.

• You snap at tiny things, not because they matter, but because your body has no buffer left.

• You feel unsafe even in your own living room.

• You try to be present, but half of your awareness is hijacked by anxiety, by the “what ifs,” by the next demand waiting in the shadows.

And then comes the shame spiral.

Am I failing my child? Am I failing my bloodline? Am I failing my family and my wife? Am I passing this stress into his tiny body? Am I going to break him the way I feel broken?

The answer is probably “yes” to most of these questions but that’s because I’m human. If know that even if I mess up, I can still choose integrity and love, I can find a way to repair these things after I mess up.

These questions cut deeper than any lawsuit, deeper than any business problem because they hit the place where love and fear collide: the place where you would give your life for your child, but you wonder if you’re poisoning him simply by existing in your own unrest.

The Truth That Saved Me

Here is the truth that has saved me: children don’t need perfect parents. They need present ones.

My son doesn’t need me to have a flawless nervous system. He needs to feel that even when I am stressed, I don’t abandon him. He needs to see that emotions are real. That stress is real. Anger is real. Pain is real. Yet, love is stronger.

Sometimes that looks like telling him:

Do you know what happens when I say those words? He usually dances and laughs. He understands and he’s only 15 months old.

That is the gift: repair matters more than perfection.

The Higher Initiation

Parenting in this wrecked state has become its own initiation.

It has forced me into humility. I cannot pretend to be in control anymore. I cannot fake “everything’s fine.” My son doesn’t buy masks — he feels energy, he reads truth.

This is the higher initiation of parenthood: to realize that sovereignty is not about how much you can carry, but how deeply you can surrender to love when everything feels unbearable.

My nervous system is not enough. My willpower is not enough. But when I allow God, the Higher Self, the field of love to flow through me, something shifts. Even for a moment, the body calms. Even for a moment, my son feels safe.

And maybe that is the point.

What Helps in the Fire

I don’t have magic answers. But here are three anchors that keep me from drowning:

1. Micro-regulation. Just two minutes of slow breathing before I pick him up. It doesn’t fix everything, but it creates a crack of space.

2. Co-regulation. Lying on the floor with my boy on my chest, breathing together. His little body syncing with mine. It reminds me that we heal in connection, not isolation.

3. Radical honesty with my partner. Saying, “I really can’t cope right now. Can we create a silent space?” I can’t pretend that I’m invincible and that my misophonia and broken nervous system are not like two atom bombs colliding in a phone box, when they totally are.

4. Gym. Non-negotiable. A strong muscular systems helps build a strong nervous system.

5. Choose comedy and dance when I’m with him. This is the core of my personality when I am with people, I must not forget it. I love to dance and I make jokes all the time.

These are not particularly heroic. They are small, imperfect acts. But they work.

The Closing Realisation

This year has been f-ing brutal. My son aside and the joy he brings to me life, I would say this has been the worst year of my life due to bewildering betrayal from people around me. My nervous system is in tatters. But here’s what I am learning: maybe the wreckage itself is part of the initiation. I’m also learning that I have gone from trusting too much to now probably trusting almost nobody. Which is sad and liberating at the same time. Yet God - The Great I AM- (fill in your description here), will always get me through. My Higher Self is always guiding the show. My nervous system needs to catch up.

Maybe my son doesn’t need a father who is endlessly calm like a Tibetan monk (tho, that is great and I always aim to be calm), but a father who is willing to love endlessly, even when he is broken.

Perhaps the real inheritance I give him is not a life free from stress, but a model of how to walk through stress without shutting down, without abandoning love.

And maybe, just maybe, that is enough.

With love,

Stephen James

Let me know… When your nervous system has been at its limit, how did you still choose love?