The Black Box:

What My Children Taught Me About the Human Experience That No Training or Education Possibly Could

I was sitting in a pediatric dentist's office, half-listening to the conversation about my daughter's tongue tie, when something shifted in my understanding of human psychology forever.

My wife and I had taken our daughter for a consultation after feeding and sleeping difficulties led us to suspect a tongue tie might be the culprit. During the consultation, the conversation turned to the general tenseness and rigidity she had demonstrated since birth. "If somebody has a tongue tie," the dentist explained, "their whole system is just tight. That individual is always in a constant fight-or-flight mode."

I nodded, paying attention to what this meant for my daughter, but in the back of my mind, something else was happening. I couldn't stop thinking about the hypervigilance this would create. The constant anxiety. The way her little nervous system must be braced for danger, day after day, without her even understanding why.

Then I asked myself a question that would reshape my entire clinical practice: What if somebody grew up and came out of the womb not knowing why they felt so scared, so terrified, so uncomfortable, and didn't even have the words to communicate it? What would that do to a person?

The Evolution of Understanding

My clinical journey started like most therapists' - with a solid cognitive-behavioral foundation from my master's training. But during my doctoral work, it became evident that I needed a deeper understanding of why negative core beliefs develop in the first place. Psychodynamic theory gave me that missing piece, helping me understand where our sense of self, our identity, our defensive patterns actually come from.

By the time I entered private practice, I had developed what I believed was a comprehensive and eclectic approach. I could weave together different theoretical orientations to paint a complete picture of the people I worked with. Most of the time, I could trace my clients' patterns back to their developmental history - the small traumas, the big traumas, the belief systems that formed about themselves and the world. Everything usually made sense.

But every now and then, I'd encounter someone who left me puzzled. I'd see intense hypervigilance, defensive avoidance, patterns of emotional overwhelm - but I couldn't find the developmental artifacts that would explain the intensity. The formulation felt incomplete. There was a hole I couldn't quite identify.

I recall thinking about an essay I wrote in one of my early doctoral classes about nature versus nurture. I had described genetics as the clay and environment as what shapes that clay. Some people's clay, I wrote, has different textures, different moisture levels, different composition. The sculptor - the environment - has to work with whatever clay they're given.

I was starting to suspect that the sensory world was really all of those different components that make up the variables of the clay. But I didn't yet understand what that meant clinically.

The Moment Everything Changed

Sitting in that dentist's office, watching my daughter, my clinical brain couldn't shut off. Here, a medical professional explained how a physical condition—something as simple as restricted tongue movement—could indicate that an entire nervous system is in a state of chronic activation.

What if, I thought, somebody came out of the womb with that kind of system activation and never understood why the world felt so overwhelming?

That's when I realized something profound: Psychology has been studying the outputs - the behaviors, the emotions, the patterns we observe - without understanding the processing system that creates them. We've been cataloging symptoms and temperament differences without looking inside the black box to see what's actually happening.

The black box is the sensory processing system - how someone's nervous system converts internal sensations into emotional experience and reality construction. Before we develop consciousness, before we start constructing our perception of reality, our nervous systems are getting their foundational wiring. The volume settings are being calibrated - some turned up high on threat detection, others tuned to different frequencies entirely.

The Missing Color in My Clinical Palette

This revelation didn't overturn my existing framework - it completed it. Those clients with the unexplained intensity patterns? They weren't carrying psychological trauma in the traditional sense. They were carrying the imprint of nervous systems that had been calibrated to high volume from the very beginning, often through no fault of anyone involved.

Some clay is soft and malleable, able to handle rough sculpting. Other clay is delicate, requiring gentle hands and careful techniques. Psychology had been assuming all clay was the same, using standard approaches for everyone. But what if someone had been born with clay that required completely different tools?

I started working with clients differently, helping them understand not just their thoughts and behaviors, but their actual nervous system wiring. "This is your nervous system telling you this," I'd say. "It's okay. You've got a high-volume nervous system, and of course you'd feel this intensely."

We'd go back through their histories together, recontextualizing moments that had always felt like evidence of being "too sensitive" or "overreacting." Of course you felt it that way, I'd help them see. Look at this moment - if you had a high-volume nervous system, this is exactly how you would have experienced it. Your reactions made perfect sense.

For myself, this understanding brought its own validation. I hated swimming as a child - the way the water felt on my face, in my ears. My parents, trying their best, couldn't understand why I struggled with something that seemed so simple to them. They probably thought they were helping by encouraging me to push through, even dragging me to the pool while I insisted on wearing jeans. But my high-volume nervous system was processing those sensations as genuinely overwhelming. Eventually, I had to assert my desire to overcome it, and I learned to love swimming.

Now, when my son refuses to swim, I can say, "I get it, dude." He gets to grow up knowing his nervous system responses are valid, not evidence that something's wrong with him.

They say that you get the children you deserve, and I know I have gotten that in spades. But I also got the children who were necessary to complete me as a clinician and as a psychologist. I have children who have helped me understand the human experience far better than any graduate course or PhD program could have provided.

Where We're Going

This isn't about throwing out everything psychology has taught us. Cognitive-behavioral approaches work. Psychodynamic understanding is crucial. Trauma therapy saves lives. However, we've been missing something fundamental—the sensory foundation that everything else is built upon.

Over the next several posts, I want to take you on the journey this revelation has created. We'll explore what I call "Reality Forensics" - understanding how our realities are constructed from the materials we're born with, the architects who design our early blueprints, and the environment that shapes our sense of self.

We'll dive into why some people's limiting beliefs stick so much harder than others, how certain types of childhood experiences create wounds that traditional therapy struggles to reach, and why what we call ADHD or anxiety might actually be intact sensitivity in a world designed for sensory numbness.

Most importantly, we'll talk about what it means to stop fighting your nervous system and start working with the one you actually have.

If you've ever felt things more intensely than the people around you, if traditional approaches to mental health have felt like they were missing something crucial about your experience, if you've wondered why you seem to be wired differently, this series is for you.

Because maybe the problem isn't that you're broken. Maybe the problem is that psychology has been trying to understand you without looking at your foundation.

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Dr. Bryan Jester is a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice, specializing in helping people understand and work with their actual nervous systems rather than fighting them. He's also the founder of Engaged, a mental health app designed around individual patterns rather than diagnostic categories.