Her Nervous System Remembers: A Therapist’s Take on Nesta Archeron

I think it is finally time for me to talk about one of the most polarizing women in the fantasy world, Nesta Archeron, and how her traumatic experiences shaped her. 

If you have read Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, you probably have an opinion about Nesta. People seem to either fiercely love her or absolutely cannot stand her. She is angry and cutting. She pushes people away. She can be cruel. She drinks too much, spends too much, sleeps with people she does not particularly care about, and seems determined to destroy relationships with the people who are trying to love her. 

And yet, as both a therapist and a reader, I have so much compassion for her. 

Full disclosure: I am biased. I loved the way Nesta was written. Not necessarily because I loved every choice she made, but because I thought her character was an incredible and authentic human depiction of what the aftermath of trauma can actually look like. 

One thing I say to my clients all the time is: “We are a sum of our experiences.”

Trauma Affects Our Nervous Systems

Not all of our experiences. Trauma does not get to become the entirety of who we are. Still we are shaped by what has happened to us. Our nervous systems remember. Our relationship blueprints remember. It is then that we use these experiences, often unconsciously, to anticipate what might happen next and how safe – or unsafe – it is to exist in a relationship with other people. 

Nesta makes so much more sense when we look at her this way. When we go through painful experiences, we develop ways of protecting ourselves. These are what therapists often call defenses. The tricky part is that our defenses do not develop to make us likable; they develop to help us survive.

Traumatic Experiences Are Stored in the Body

From a polyvagal perspective, trauma is something we remember in our bodies, not only something we remember cognitively. Our nervous system learns from experience and continually scans our environment for cues of safety and danger. (Some people know this as hypervigilance.) Nesta has experienced profound loss, helplessness, violation, fear, and enormous disruptions in her sense of control. So when the immediate danger ends, her body does not simply receive the memo that everything is okay now. 

Instead she remains organized around survival.

Trauma Can Put You in Survival Mode

Sometimes that survival looks like fight: anger, hostility, sharp words, pushing others away before they can get close enough to hurt her. At other times, it looks more like collapse: isolation, disconnection, numbing, drinking, and disengaging from the people and world around her. 

And this is where I think readers can get stuck with Nesta. We want trauma survivors to be sympathetic. It makes sense that we want their pain to look like sadness, vulnerability, or fear. Those responses make it easier for other people to offer compassion. Defenses are not always sympathetic. Sometimes the very behaviors that protected someone from being hurt are the behaviors that make it harder for other people to get close to them. 

Nevertheless, sometimes trauma looks like anger.

How Does Trauma Look in Relationships?

Sometimes it looks like I will reject you before you have the opportunity to reject me.

Relationally and psychodynamically, Nesta’s defenses make tremendous sense. Her abrasiveness can be understood not simply as a character flaw, but as protection. If closeness has historically been associated with disappointment, helplessness, shame, or loss, intimacy itself can begin to feel threatening. The very relationships capable of offering safety can simultaneously activate all the places where safety has previously failed. In other words, our nervous system does not always distinguish between “this relationship is unsafe” and “this closeness feels familiar to a time when I was unsafe.” From a polyvagal perspective, the body can respond to that familiarity as a cue of danger, even when the person in front of us may actually be offering safety. 

In a strange way, the fact that so many readers strongly dislike Nesta tells us something important: her defenses are working. If some part of her has learned that closeness is dangerous, then anger, hostility, and rejection are remarkably effective ways of keeping people at a distance. Her nervous system is accomplishing exactly what it believes it needs to do to protect her.

That does not mean her behavior does not hurt people. Understanding someone’s behavior is not the same thing as excusing it.  However, understanding gives us somewhere to go.

What does Trauma Healing Look Like?

That is perhaps what I appreciate most about ACOSF. Nesta does not heal because someone finally explains to her she should behave better. She heals, in part, because her nervous system is repeatedly given opportunities to learn something new. Through relationship, movement, mastery, choice, and connection, she begins to experience that closeness does not always end in danger and vulnerability does not always end in rejection. Her world slowly becomes larger. She develops relationships in which she experiences belonging without having to earn it by becoming someone else. She begins to tolerate vulnerability and discovers that she does not always have to protect herself in the ways she once did. She finds strength in her body rather than experiencing her body only as a place where terrible things have happened. 

In therapy, we sometimes call these corrective experiences: moments in which an old relational expectation meets a different ending. 

Perhaps this is also why fantasy can be such a powerful place to tell stories about trauma. The monsters can be literal. The battles can happen outside of us. Magic can give physical form to power, fear, rage, grief, and transformation. 

Underneath all of that, though, the story is deeply human. 

Most of us are not fighting creatures from another realm or wielding ancient magic, but what we can do is enter relationships carrying stories about what happened before. Our nervous systems make predictions. Our defenses try to protect us. We sometimes push away exactly what we long for because some part of us learned that wanting something also means risking its loss. 

So yes, I am a Nesta defender. Not because everything she did was okay. But because I think there is something profoundly compassionate about looking at someone who is difficult to love and becoming curious about what their nervous system had to learn in order for them to survive. 

Perhaps, maybe, that is something we can take out of Prythian and into our own relationships, too. 

Instead of only asking, “What is wrong with you?” we might become curious enough to ask, “What happened to you and what did you have to learn to survive it?”

How Curiosity Drives Trauma Informed Therapy

That same curiosity is something I hope to create in therapy with trauma informed care: a safe, relational space where we can wonder together about what your nervous system has learned, what your experiences have taught you, and how those patterns may still be showing up in your life and relationships today. You do not have to arrive already knowing the answers. We can become curious about your story together, with compassion for the parts of you that learned how to survive and space to discover what you may need now. All parts of you are welcome in my therapy space and I look forward to being curious about them together. 

To meet with me, schedule a free consultation call with our client care coordinator.