Dear Psychologists: Make Up Your Mind

Psychology has been on a journey.
A very slow one.
A very top-down one.

Let’s rewind.

Early 1900s:

“It’s all about behaviour.”
You’re a machine.
Stimulus → response.
Reward → repetition.
Emotion?
Not observable. Not useful. Not real enough to measure.

Mid-1900s:

“Actually... it’s your thoughts.”
Welcome to the cognitive revolution.
We upgraded from Pavlov to thinking.
Now it’s about beliefs. Mindsets. Scripts.

Still no mention of the body.
Still no space for grief.
Emotion was background noise —
unless you could reframe it.

Late 1900s – Early 2000s:

“Wait — the body might be involved?”
Trauma enters the chat.
The vagus nerve shows up.
Mindfulness gets packaged.
Somatic therapy peeks through the door.

Suddenly the body is interesting.
But only in nervous system terms.
Still not emotion. Not yet.

Now:

“It’s the nervous system. It’s trauma. It’s dysregulation.”
Ah — now we care.
Now we speak of sensation, of memory, of the subconscious.

Now we dare to say:
"Feeling" matters.
Emotion might actually be the thing.

But,

But even here —
we’re still missing it.

We’ve just swapped cognitive fixes
for somatic ones.

We treat the nervous system
like a broken machine.
Something to regulate.
Something to hack.
Something to smooth and silence
with cold plunges, weighted blankets, and vagus nerve tools.

But the nervous system isn’t a gadget.
It’s not broken.
It’s not misfiring.

It’s a charged vessel —
holding everything you couldn’t afford to feel.
Holding grief. Rage. Silence. Surrender.
It doesn’t need fixing.
It needs discharging.
It needs feeling.