What’s Your Yellow Dress? On Hope & The Nervous System
There’s a novel I read years ago that has never left me.
It’s the story of a Sudanese boy, Valentino, who becomes one of the thousands of children, later called the Lost Boys, forced to flee war. Throughout unimaginable hardship— violence, separation, starvation, and walking for weeks on end across country lines— the image of his mother in her favorite yellow dress becomes a tether, a resource, a sensory memory that carries him through.
The image becomes a thread throughout the story. A memory Valentino keeps coming back to.
As a reader, you can feel how the novel pendulates— between visceral accounts of horror and trauma, and embodied narratives of love, connection, safety, and most importantly, hope, even if only held by memory and the image of his mother in her yellow dress.
Years later, I began studying and training in Somatic Experiencing— and I finally had language for why this threadline in the story had such a strong impact on me.
It explains exactly what I do as a Somatic Experiencing therapist.
In Somatic Experiencing (SE), we talk about the different “languages” through which the nervous system communicates and can reorganize itself: sensation, movement, emotion, and image.
Image is powerful because it is not purely cognitive. It is sensory. It recruits the body.
When Valentino pictured his mother in her yellow dress, he wasn’t just remembering her.
He was:
Activating attachment circuitry
Touching an embodied sense of warmth, safety, and connection
Reconnecting to a pre-trauma state
That image actually shifted his autonomic nervous system state — even subtly — away from fight/flight/or collapse, and into a ventral vagal parasympathetic state which sustained him.
In SE we call this resourcing: bringing in experiences (real or imagined) that evoke safety, connection, or strength. It’s not just about trying to calm down or manage activation, it’s about finding capacity through pendulation.
In Somatic Experiencing we understand trauma as a kind of physiological vortex — the nervous system getting pulled again and again into memories, sensations, and states associated with threat, helplessness, or overwhelm. Peter Levine calls this the trauma vortex.
But alongside it, there is also what SE calls the safety vortex— experiences that organize the body toward safety, connection, vitality, possibility, and healing physiology.
Healing happens when we increase our capacity to pendulate between them— touching a little bit of the traumatic material and then returning to resource, safety, or support.
This gentle oscillation between the vortexes is what allows the nervous system to renegotiate trauma without becoming overwhelmed, and sustain through hardship in real time.
The reason why image is particularly powerful for this process is because the body does not strictly differentiate between “real” or imagined safety. So when Valentino continually recalled imagery of his mother in her yellow dress, he actually:
Increased his nervous system’s vagal tone
Supported his orienting process toward safety- the first step of trauma renegotiation
Shifted his autonomic nervous system into a more ventral vagal state
Counterbalanced traumatic activation through activating the resource vortex/healing physiology
Restored access to hope
In my personal life, I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of hope.
It’s not just fluffy positive thinking, bypassing, or delusion. And it’s certainly not pointless.
Hope is imperative for navigating hardship.
From a physiological perspective, hope is the capacity to access a felt sense of possibility when the present moment feels constricted.
Hope is the nervous system’s ability to hold and move through hardship without collapsing into it.
When we are stuck in fight, flight, or freeze:
The future disappears
Possibility collapses
We see only threat or futility
Hope widens.
It does not change circumstances. It changes our nervous system.
Through hope, the nervous system regains access to ventral vagal regulation— the state that allows connection, imagination, creativity, and meaning-making.
While I have not worked with child survivors of the 2nd Sudanese Civil War like Valentino, I do work with clients who have endured:
Infertility
Traumatic Births
Separations and divorce
Chronic illness or pain
Loss
Uncertainty that feels unbearable
& the wars we fight within ourselves
As much as we wish it were the case, what carries us through these experiences is not a 5 year plan, or guaranteed outcome. And it’s usually very painful coming to terms with that.
But what does carry us through is actually something much smaller…
The memory of a loved one’s smile or your favorite place. The image of a future child or lover or home. The idea of sitting at a dinner table surrounded by all your family and friends.
These become regulatory anchors.
When we intentionally orient toward these images— and feel what happens in the body as we do— we are strengthening the neural pathways of hope and increasing ventral vagal capacity in our nervous system.
Hope Is Not the Opposite of Grief
One of the most important things I teach clients is that hope and grief can coexist.
In fact, healthy hope often only emerges after we have metabolized a least a little of the grief.
Hope is not pretending we are not hurting, or disappointed, or scared.
It is the physiological and biological knowing that even in pain, we are not entirely cut off from connection and meaning.
The nervous system that can pendulate between pain and resource is the nervous system that can sustain hope— and therefore, sustain hardship.
What’s your yellow dress?
If you’re in a hard season right now, I invite you to experiment:
Close your eyes and let an image come to you.
Not the image of what you should have or want.
But something else— something small, true, and dare I say possible.
Notice:
What do you see?
What details are present?
What happens in your shoulders, chest, throat, and belly as you hold that image?
Hold on to that image. Keeping hoping.
