How Resonance Heals: Sound, Safety and the Nervous System
Resonance is one of those terms that lives at the intersection of physics, biology, psychology, and lived human experience. In its simplest sense, resonance refers to vibration amplified — when one system naturally aligns with another and begins to respond in harmony. In human healing, resonance describes attunement — a felt sense that we are seen, understood, and safe in the presence of another. It is the invisible bridge that fosters nervous system regulation, deep connection, and transformation. With our offerings of The Resonance Circle and the Roots & Resonance Supervision & Consultation Group, you may have noticed that Reclaiming Beauty is kind of obsessed with resonance.
What Is Resonance and Why It Matters
At its core, resonance is the alignment of vibration between systems — whether that’s sound frequencies aligning with our body’s tissues, or nervous systems coming into sync with another person’s presence. In therapeutic contexts, resonance is what happens when words are not just heard but felt — when the nervous system relaxes because it recognizes safety at a biological level.
In healing, resonance matters because it:
Regulates the nervous system — enabling a shift out of fight/flight/freeze into safety and connection.
Supports relational attunement — helping us feel truly seen, which is essential for attachment and healing.
Creates embodied safety — so that parts of us that are scared, protective, or fragmented can finally “come out of hiding” and be met with warmth.
This process isn’t just poetic — it’s biological. Human nervous systems neuroceptively scan for cues of safety in voices, rhythms, breath, and presence long before the thinking brain makes sense of anything. When our system detects safety, resonance with another opens pathways for regulation, flexibility, and relational connection that thought alone can’t produce.
Resonance as Relational Neuroscience
Sarah Peyton’s work brings a powerful lens to what resonance actually does in the brain and body. She teaches that resonance is not merely empathy or kindness — it is a neuroscience-grounded process of being deeply understood in a way that helps the brain reorganize and heal. In her framework:
Resonance creates self-warmth and safety by offering the nervous system the kind of attuned presence that builds neural connections associated with regulation and belonging.
Resonant language and attunement help repair fractured attachment and reshape the Default Mode Network, allowing people to experience their inner world with compassion rather than self-criticism and fear.
Resonance is not something done to you — it is received by the nervous system, and that reception is what makes healing possible.
Peyton’s work shows that resonance isn’t a soft ideal — it’s a biological truth about how brains change and people heal. It’s what happens when presence meets vulnerability and the nervous system learns safety through relationship rather than threat.
Somatic IFS and Radical Resonance
In Somatic Internal Family Systems (Somatic IFS), Radical Resonance is one of the core practices that leads to embodying Self energy. IFS itself teaches that the psyche is composed of parts — protective, wounded, reactive, and more — and that healing requires listening, curiosity and relationship rather than suppression.
From a Somatic IFS perspective:
Resonance means sensing what is alive in another and in ourselves, and allowing our body to respond with presence and care.
It’s an embodied practice of felt attunement rather than intellectual understanding.
Resonance helps parts that are afraid or defensive feel felt and accompanied, which can loosen protective strategies that have kept them stuck and create space for unburdening their fears, beliefs and pain.
In Somatic IFS practice, resonance is not an abstract concept — it’s a living somatic experience in which nervous systems literally align through presence, breath, voice, and connection. At Reclaiming Beauty, we apply Somatic IFS and Radical Resonance to support healing in eating disorder recovery.
Resonance Through Sound Healing
Sound healing works with resonance in a direct, physiological way. Our bodies are filled with vibrating systems — from tissues and fluids to neural circuits and breath rhythms. Specific frequencies and harmonics can invite the body to entrain, aligning physiological states in ways that support relief, coherence, and regulation.
In many traditional and contemporary sound healing practices, sound is the medicine — not because it distracts the mind, but because it uses vibration to resonate with the body’s own rhythms and support a shift toward calm, openness, and nervous system coherence. Whether through bowls, tuning forks, vocal toning, or rhythmic beats, sound becomes a medium through which resonance can be felt as well as heard.
The Safe and Sound Protocol: A Nervous System Tool for Resonance
The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) is a sound-based, neuroscience-informed intervention that supports resonance by guiding the nervous system into a state of safety and social engagement. It uses specially filtered music focused on the frequency range of human voice — the very range our nervous systems interpret as social safety cues — to stimulate the vagal pathways and help the body shift out of chronic defense and toward connection.
Unlike talk therapy, SSP works bottom-up, engaging the auditory system and autonomic nervous system directly to create conditions in which resonance with others becomes possible and accessible. It trains the nervous system to detect safety, quiet defensiveness, and support regulation — the foundation for deep relational resonance.
The Safe and Sound Protocol is a practical application of Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory. You can learn more about it here: What Is the SSP?
Resonance and Eating Disorder Recovery
Resonance is especially powerful in the context of eating disorder recovery because so much of disordered eating stems from parts of the self that feel unheard, unsafe, or disconnected from the body. When the nervous system experiences resonance — through attuned presence, voice, or sound — those parts can begin to feel seen, understood, and valued, rather than silenced or shamed. This embodied sense of being “met” allows the body to release rigid patterns of control, shame, or avoidance, supporting a gentler, more compassionate relationship with food, body, and self. Resonance creates a container where the body can feel safe to register hunger, fullness, and pleasure again — restoring trust that is often fractured in the experience of an eating disorder.
The Resonance Circle: A Container Designed for Relational Attunement
The Resonance Circle offered through the Reclaiming Beauty practice is a 7-week, vritual group experience that intentionally combines SSP, sound, somatics, and relational containering to support resonance. In this group:
Participants are held in a small container of relational safety and co-regulation with two skilled, experienced, somatically integrated providers and the music
The SSP is woven into guided sessions, helping each person’s nervous system move from threat orientation toward safety and connection.
The group doesn’t just listen — it witnesses one another’s discoveries, creating mutual resonance that deepens insight, nervous system integration, and embodied belonging.
This experience is not only about completing a protocol — it’s about growing a living ecology of care where participants and facilitators co-create a field of warmth, attunement, and safety in which resonance can flourish.
Resonance as a Pathway to Healing
In sound healing, Somatic IFS, Sarah Peyton’s relational neuroscience, and SSP work alike, resonance emerges as the active ingredient of transformation — not merely nice to have, but necessary for healing. Resonance helps us feel heard at the level of the nervous system, reconnect parts of ourselves that have been in survival mode, and anchor us in relationships that support regulation rather than threat.
Resonance is biology and psychology converging in one human experience: being seen, felt, and known. And in that experience, real healing — the kind that stays in the body and nervous system — becomes possible.
Get Started With Resonance in Asheville, NC Today
At Reclaiming Beauty, we're here to help you on this journey. Our therapists are all nervous system trained and are dedicated to providing a weight-inclusive, safe and understanding space for you to explore your coping patterns and heal your nervous system. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and take a step towards your healing.
Schedule a consultation with us here so we can get to know your story and your therapeutic interests and match you with the best fit provider at our practice.
Schedule a 1:1 Safe and Sound Protocol journey with one of our providers.
Join our Resonance Circle - a 7 week virtual Safe and Sound Protocol group designed to support community care and healing in your nervous system so that quiet and solitiude can feel safer.
Other Services We Offer in Asheville, NC
Discover an integrative approach to well-being at Reclaiming Beauty. In addition to body-centered psychotherapy and eating disorder therapy, we offer personalized embodiment coaching to unlock the wisdom within, fostering self-compassion and resilience. Or, explore the transformative benefits of the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP). This is a non-invasive auditory intervention that enhances social engagement and reduces stress.
