Catching in the Rye

How the Nervous System Learns to Trust Again

My grandmother’s family of origin. Back: my great-grandfather William Lawrence Hardy and my great-grandmother Alice Hardy, Front: My great-uncle Larry and my grandmother Caroyln

It was a tragedy that echoed through our family like a parable. My grandmother Carolyn was ten years old, her brother Larry thirteen—they had the same dark hair, the same deep eyes. They were arguing over something so small that by the time I came around decades later, no one remembered what it was. But what remained, carved into my grandmother’s memory with the precision of grief, were the last words she threw at her brother as he walked out the door that summer morning: “I hate you.”

Larry and a friend were teaching a boy to swim that summer day–one of those quiet kindnesses of childhood. When play turned to panic, the boy's fear became a grip that drew Larry down into the dark water with him, drowning them both.

Larry Hardy, taken shortly before his death

After her son's death, my great-grandmother Alice retreated into a silence so complete it had walls. For months, she lay in a darkened bedroom, turned away from sunlight, from meals, from those who loved her. My grandmother and her father would sit with her, speaking into the space where she used to be. Then one morning, looking at her mother's blank face, my grandmother tugged her father's hand like a small bell pulling at silence and whispered, “Let's just leave, Dad. Mom doesn't love us anymore.”

A wound like this doesn't heal like ordinary injuries. It becomes architectural—part of the blueprint of who we are, coloring every moment we label as safe or dangerous, threading through each relationship we forge. What looks like withdrawal, like madness, like surrender, often speaks to something deeper: the primitive wisdom of a body trying desperately to survive.

This survival instinct speaks differently through Holden Caulfield, the teenage protagonist in J.D. Salinger's “Catcher in the Rye”–who wanders Manhattan alone, asking taxi drivers about ducks, hiring prostitutes just to talk. The editors who first read his story were convinced he was insane. But beneath his strange behavior lay a wound: his younger brother Allie was dead. “I broke all the windows in the garage the night he died,” Holden tells us, “with my fist, just for the hell of it. I hardly didn't even know I was doing it, and you didn't know Allie.” To understand this wisdom—this language of broken windows and endless wandering—we must first understand its keeper: our nervous system.

This intricate network of neural pathways serves as our body's command center, continuously operating below the level of conscious thought. Like an ancient river with countless tributaries, our nervous system extends from our brainstem and spine to organs throughout our body. In this brain-body connection, our organs are not merely passive receivers but active participants in a constant dialogue about safety and survival.

We share this vigilance with our animal kin—it's what causes a herd of zebras to scatter at a lion's approach, what makes a lizard go still in the face of danger. As creatures of flesh and memory, we are biologically conditioned to seek safety, even when we don't know we're looking.

Trauma, then, lives not just in memory, but in the body's oldest pathways–circuits that keep vigil like an animal in the dark, testing each moment for danger. These ancient circuits sometimes speak through our repetitions–through questions we circle and circle, senseless on their surface but carrying deeper truths about what we've lost and what we fear to lose again.

From the novel's first pages, Holden can't stop asking about the ducks in Central Park–where they go when winter freezes the lagoon. He asks every taxi driver he meets, his questions growing more urgent as the night grows colder:

“I was wondering where the ducks went when the lagoon got all icy and frozen over. I wondered if some guy came in a truck and took them away to a zoo or something. Or if they just flew away.”

In asking about the ducks, Holden reveals his own fear: Who cares for the lost ones when their world freezes over? A boy adrift in a winter city, he's really asking if anyone will notice if he disappears, if anyone will come to carry him to safety.

American neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges maps our nervous system’s survival responses into three circuits, each operating not like a simple switch but like part of an intricate symphony, each playing its part in our daily survival. Through this lens, we see both my great-grandmother and Holden more clearly: two people whose bodies remembered, in different ways, how to stay alive when the world stopped making sense

In my great-grandmother's retreat into darkness after Larry's death, we see our most ancient circuit at work—the dorsal vagal response. This primal instinct to intense trauma pulls us into stillness when any action feels futile, conserving energy by shutting down like a tortoise drawing into its shell. It's the wisdom of immobility: when there's no escape, we survive by becoming invisible, even to ourselves.

The next evolutionary strategy is the sympathetic surge that sets the heart racing and bones thrumming with wild energy. When danger threatened our ancestors, this response flooded their bodies with the power to run or fight. It's the same ancient wisdom that now drives Holden's fists through garage windows and his restless feet through city streets, as if constant movement could somehow outpace grief.

But it's the third circuit—unique to mammals—that holds the key to healing. The ventral vagal pathway turns our faces toward one another, attunes our voices to soothing frequencies, helps us read the minute shifts in expression that signal friend from foe. It's the pathway that makes us feel, in our bones, when we're safe with another person. This is our most sophisticated strategy for survival—not fighting, not fleeing, not freezing, but connecting.

When Holden finally makes his way to the frozen lagoon in Central Park, searching for those ducks that have preoccupied him, he finds only emptiness–a dark stretch of ice under a winter sky. The absence of the ducks becomes a mirror for his own attempts at flight–the frenetic motion, the endless seeking. It's here, contemplating this void, that his thoughts turn first to his brother Allie, then to his little sister Phoebe. It's the image of Phoebe, alone and waiting, that finally draws him homeward.

In his darkest moment, Holden confides to Phoebe his dream of being a catcher in the rye—standing guard at the edge of a cliff where children play, catching them before they fall. In this vision of protection, we see our most sophisticated survival circuit at work: when trauma leaves us feeling unsafe, we heal not by running or hiding, but by creating safety with others.

Just as Holden finds his tether in Phoebe, my great-grandmother Alice found hers in her daughter's desperate words. When ten-year-old Carolyn whispered, "Let's just leave, Dad. Mom doesn't love us anymore," she didn't know she was awakening her mother's deepest survival instinct. She only knew her own grief, spoken with the raw clarity that only children possess. But those words—that moment of a daughter believing herself unloved—reached past her mother's shroud of grief and touched something deeper, something as ancient as mammals themselves: the profound biology of need.

My great-grandmother rose from her bed not because she had finished grieving—she would carry that loss forever—but because her daughter's words became a lifeline cast into the depths of her despair. In that moment, both mother and daughter discovered what Holden had also found: that sometimes the surest way to feel caught is to become the catcher.

My great-grandmother, Alice Hardy