The Porcupine's Lesson: What Happens When We Don't Complete the Cycle
- Tosca DeVito
- Aug 26
- 6 min read
On a morning walk through a White Pine-Hemlock forest, Jack just stopped on alert and didn't want to move forward. The trees are tall and widely spaced with hardly any undergrowth, but I still couldn't see what had caught his attention. His hair stood on end for a moment, but when I kept walking, he relaxed, hung back, and then followed along.
The porcupine's dark gray-brown coloring made it camouflaged at the base of the tree. I didn't see it until I was almost right up on it, about three feet away, when it puffed out its quills and transformed from brown to black and white.
It stopped me in my tracks. I got a little jolt of adrenaline and cortisol and understood why Jack's hair had stood on end. Piloerection—the same thing that raises a dog's hackles, causes goosebumps in humans, and makes porcupine quills stand tall. (Jack had tried to make friends with a porcupine one summer night a few years back and is now thankfully wary of them.)
I apologized to the porcupine for startling it and slowly stepped back. When we circled back to that part of the trail later, it was far up a neighboring tree, quills retracted. We had all had a chance to process our neurochemistry; to move the adrenaline through our systems with movement. The porcupine up the tree, me and Jack continuing on the trail.
This is what healthy threat response looks like.
When your nervous system detects danger, two things happen. First, you're flooded with activation chemistry—adrenaline and cortisol—to give you what you need to meet that threat. Then you orient yourself toward the danger. You need something to fight against or flee from to metabolize those hormones.
But here's what many people don't realize: when you're in a state of connection, you don't need an enemy.
We had all moved into safety. I was no longer a threat to the porcupine, and the porcupine was no longer a threat to Jack. The cycle was complete.
What Your Body Does in Threat (And Why It Matters)
When we feel in danger, our bodies orient to face the threat. Our heart rates rise, breathing quickens, metabolism accelerates. But that's not all, the things that help us connect to others also go offline. Our faces lose their expressivity, our ears retune from the frequency of human voice to the frequencies of predators, our digestion and immune function slow down.
That porcupine and I didn't need to connect, so my body didn't need those functions. And that's brilliant. If I had been facing a bigger threat, like a bear, the stress response would have been even more pronounced.
This moment-to-moment detection of safety or threat is called neuroception. It's continually at work, evaluating our surroundings. That feeling you get on the back of your neck when you think someone is looking at you, then turn around to see it's true? That stump that startled you in the woods but turned out not to be a bobcat? That's your neuroception at work.
But neuroception is only half the story. Interoception is how that detection feels in your body; some people call it bodily intuition; I call it felt sense. It's where sensation meets emotion and memory. It's what it feels like to be in your unique body in this unique moment.
The Invisible Problem: When We Override Our Felt Sense
Here's where things get complicated for those of us who learned early to put others' comfort before our own safety signals.
What happens when we experience something that shifts us into threat and we ignore it? When we tell ourselves it's normal, that we're fine? When we've been trained to override our felt sense to keep the peace?
The porcupine didn't second-guess his quills. Jack didn't apologize for his wariness. I didn't force myself to get closer to prove I wasn't afraid.
But how many times do we do exactly that? How many times do we stay in conversations that make our nervous systems scream danger? How many times do we ignore the pit in our stomach, the tension in our shoulders, the way our breathing changes when someone crosses our boundaries?
We tell ourselves this is being "nice." We call it being "flexible" or "easygoing."
But our bodies are telling a different story.
The Hidden Cost of Chronic Appeasement
Our bodies are resilient; we can override our safety signals for a while. But eventually, if we add enough stressors without completion, we cross a threshold. We shift from an embodied felt sense of safety to one of chronic threat.
Sometimes this happens gradually and we call it "life stress." Sometimes it happens all at once and we call it trauma. But in both cases, we find ourselves deprived of a felt sense of safety.
When this happens, our nervous systems retune. If I'm not safe, my body has different priorities. Survival becomes the primary imperative.
This is what most people don't understand: the absence of threat isn't safety. Just getting away from danger isn't enough to shift us back into connection.
What's often required is the completion of self-protective movements; the motions of defense in our arms and hands, or the movements of flight in our legs and feet. The porcupine climbing the tree. Jack and I continuing our walk. These completions are crucial to helping our autonomic nervous systems reset.
But when we're stuck in patterns of people-pleasing and appeasement, we rarely allow ourselves these natural completions.
The Appeasing-to-Freeze Cycle
Instead, we develop what I call the appeasing-to-freeze cycle. We sense threat (someone's displeasure, conflict, our own anger) and immediately move to appease—smoothing things over, sacrificing our needs, making ourselves smaller. When that doesn't fully resolve the nervous system activation, we freeze—shutting down, going numb, losing access to our authentic responses. When we start to thaw a little bit we begin to feel the discomfort of the threat, and the cycle continues.
This cycle doesn't complete the stress response. It buries it.
Our nervous systems are designed to handle adversity, stress, and even trauma but they're also designed to rest, digest, and recover. The freeze response that serves us in genuine helplessness becomes problematic when it's our go-to strategy for managing others' emotions.
Getting stuck in this appeasing-to-freeze loop creates a cascade of physiological changes. Our systems maintain states of fawn, fight, flight, or freeze long past the original threat. This isn't a conscious choice; it's our body's attempt to survive an event it never successfully escaped.
The Path to Chronic Illness
The destructive process leading to autoimmune diseases and chronic illnesses begins years, often decades, before symptoms appear. Fibromyalgia, migraines, IBS, anxiety, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Hashimoto's; these conditions don't arise from a single event but from an accumulation of unresolved nervous system activation.
When we can't take effective, satisfying action, when we can't complete the stress cycle, our bodies start attacking their own tissues to maintain survival states. It's an intelligent response to an impossible situation.
Our nervous systems lose the ability to perceive threat accurately. We become more sensitive, more likely to misinterpret safe environments as threatening, leading to reactions that are unnecessary or larger than necessary.
Chronic illness is a nervous system issue first, and only becomes a tissue issue over time.
Learning from the Porcupine
That porcupine knew something we've forgotten: completion is everything.
He didn't apologize for his quills. He didn't stay accessible when he felt threatened. He didn't override his protective responses to make me more comfortable.
He felt the threat, responded appropriately, and when safety returned, he climbed down from the tree.
The cycle was complete.
For those of us who learned to sacrifice our authenticity for attachment, reclaiming this natural rhythm isn't selfish. It is essential. It's the difference between chronic activation and genuine health.
Your body is still waiting to complete those interrupted cycles. It's still trying to protect you the only way it knows how. The question isn't whether you deserve to feel safe. You do. The question is: are you ready to let your body show you the way back to completion?
Just like the porcupine showed me.
*A couple of fun facts about porcupines: There’s some evidence that porcupine quills have antibiotic properties probably to protect them from self-injury. Nature, once again, offering its own kind of repair. And baby porcupines are called porcupettes, and they are just as cute as that name.
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