Author: Anthonie Torre
Affiliation: Faculty of Humanistic Systemic Transformation Studies Press
Date: November 2025
Abstract
Recent advances in affective neuroscience demonstrate that anxiety and social withdrawal can be reversed by restoring excitability balance within specific neuronal circuits of the amygdala (Lerma et al., 2025). This discovery reframes anxiety not as a fixed disorder, but as a reversible neurobiological adaptation, a form of systemic imbalance. Building on these insights, this paper proposes an integrative theoretical framework that unites neurobiological rebalancing with the PEM System Logics model (Torre, 2025) and Compassion-Focused Coaching (CFC) (Gilbert, 2018). Within this model, the phenomenon of anxiety is understood as a feedback signal between the neural, psychological, and systemic layers of human functioning. Sustainable transformation, therefore, requires simultaneous regulation across three dimensions: neurophysiological recalibration, narrative reconstruction, and systemic re-embedding.
The paper argues that compassion, conceptualized as both an ethical stance and a neurophysiological state, provides the missing link between these levels. By aligning compassion-based self-regulation (Porges, 2011) with narrative coherence (Torre, 2025) and systemic transformation, the proposed synthesis moves beyond symptom reduction toward system integration. The result is a paradigm that situates anxiety within an ecology of meaning and feedback, bridging neuroscientific precision with humanistic system theory. Implications are drawn for the triadic domains emphasized within PEM System Logics, mental health care, education, and sustainable employment, suggesting that the future of anxiety treatment lies not in isolation but in integration: between neuron and narrative, physiology and compassion, system and self.
Introduction
In November 2025, ScienceDaily reported groundbreaking research showing that scientists had successfully reversed anxiety-like behavior in mice by rebalancing neural excitability in a small population of amygdala neurons (Lerma et al., 2025). The study’s findings, that restoring excitation-inhibition homeostasis normalized behavior, marked a profound shift in understanding anxiety not as a psychological weakness or chronic state, but as a reversible neurophysiological condition. This shift represents part of a larger movement in neuroscience toward precision plasticity: targeted modulation of specific circuits to restore functional balance (Davidson, 2021).
While such findings carry enormous promise, they also expose an epistemic gap. The scientific model describes how anxiety can be reversed in the brain, but it remains silent on what anxiety means, how lived experience, relational context, and systemic environments sustain or alleviate suffering. Here lies the intersection with PEM System Logics, a framework that interprets human distress not as pathology but as a feedback expression within interdependent systems of body, psyche, and environment (Torre, 2025).
According to Torre (2025), human suffering, including anxiety, emerges when feedback loops between internal and external systems become dysregulated. The aim of transformation is therefore not to suppress symptoms, but to restore resonance and feedback flow. Within this systemic understanding, neurobiological balance represents only one layer of transformation. The deeper work occurs where physiological regulation meets meaning, where neurons, narratives, and environments become mutually coherent.
To operationalize this integration, Compassion-Focused Coaching (CFC) (Gilbert, 2018) functions as both a practical method and an ethical interface. Drawing from the Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011), CFC understands compassion as a regulatory state that down-regulates threat and re-activates the social engagement system. When applied within the PEM framework, compassion becomes a cross-level mediator, the experiential process that aligns brain, body, and system.
This paper thus situates the neurobiological reversal of anxiety within a larger systemic and narrative context. Its purpose is threefold:
- To reinterpret neurobiological “rebalancing” through the lens of systemic feedback;
- To show how compassion functions as the neuroethical bridge between physiology and meaning; and
- To outline how this integrated model applies across mental health care, education, and sustainable employment, the three transformative domains at the heart of PEM System Logics.
In doing so, the paper aims to move beyond reductionism toward a truly systemic neuropsychology, one that sees anxiety not as error but as information, not as dysfunction but as dialogue between self and system.
1. PEM System Logics: From Pathology to System Feedback
In Foundations of PEM System Logics, Torre (2025) proposes that psychological suffering, including anxiety, should be understood as the product of systemic feedback distortion rather than as isolated pathology. The PEM mode, Precision, Existence, Meaning, positions human distress as a signal that a system’s communication between internal and external subsystems has become blocked or overloaded.
The “Precision” phase identifies the concrete feedback loops that generate distress; the “Existence” phase names the lived, embodied experience of fear, loss, and shame; and the “Meaning” phase integrates those experiences within broader narratives of identity and purpose. Torre (2025) argues that sustainable recovery depends on restoring flow across these phases so that physiological, psychological, and contextual feedback systems regain resonance.
This systemic orientation reframes anxiety as an informational event: an organism’s attempt to communicate that adaptation has reached its limit. Rather than suppressing symptoms, PEM invites practitioners to decode anxiety’s message and redesign the surrounding system. As Torre writes, “Stress is not failure; it is feedback requesting reorganization” (p. 41).
By emphasizing feedback over diagnosis, PEM converges with second-order cybernetics and enactive cognitive science (Maturana & Varela, 1980), in which cognition is conceived as embodied interaction between organism and environment. Within this perspective, the nervous system functions as a dynamic regulator that continuously negotiates boundaries between self and world. Anxiety therefore emerges not as malfunction but as heightened system sensitivity, a temporary imbalance that signals the need for recalibration across scales.
2. Compassion-Focused Coaching as Neuroethical Practice
Compassion-Focused Coaching (CFC), ( Torre, 2020)derives from Paul Gilbert’s (2018) Compassion Focused Therapy, which integrates evolutionary psychology, affective neuroscience, and attachment theory. CFC extends Gilbert’s therapeutic model beyond clinical settings, positioning compassion as a trainable neuroethical competency.
In CFC, compassion is defined as “a sensitivity to suffering in self and others with a commitment to relieve and prevent it” (Gilbert, 2018, p. 11). From a neurophysiological standpoint, this sensitivity involves activation of the ventral vagal complex described by Porges (2011). When individuals cultivate compassionate awareness, the autonomic nervous system shifts from defensive states (sympathetic fight/flight or dorsal shutdown) to a regulated state of safety and connection.
This transition has measurable effects: heart-rate variability increases, cortisol levels decline, and prefrontal-limbic connectivity strengthens (Kirby et al., 2017). These markers indicate that compassion is not merely an attitude but a neuroregulatory process capable of re-balancing the same circuits implicated in anxiety disorders.
Within CFC, the coach serves as a co-regulator, an external nervous system providing cues of safety through tone, pacing, and presence. Over time, the client internalizes these cues, learning to self-regulate. This interpersonal loop mirrors the neuronal re-balancing observed by Lerma et al. (2025): both involve restoring proportional excitation-inhibition dynamics, whether between amygdala neurons or within relational fields.
Ethically, CFC situates compassion at the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy. Compassion becomes the practice through which scientific understanding of the nervous system meets moral responsibility toward the self and others. Torre (2025) frames this as neuroethical alignment: the moment when the nervous system’s need for safety and the moral system’s call for care converge in coherent action.
3. Integrating PEM and CFC: Toward a Multi-Level System Model
The integration of PEM System Logics with Compassion-Focused Coaching yields a three-level architecture of transformation:
- Neurophysiological Regulation (Precision).
At the first level, anxiety is addressed as dysregulated excitation within neural circuits. Practices such as paced breathing, grounding, and compassionate imagery directly modulate autonomic tone (Porges, 2011). - Existential Narrative (Existence).
Once physiological safety is established, attention shifts to the client’s narrative meanings, stories of shame, abandonment, or performance pressure that perpetuate threat activation. Through guided compassion dialogue, clients externalize these narratives and observe them with curiosity rather than judgment. - Systemic Reintegration (Meaning).
Finally, insight translates into systemic redesign. The individual renegotiates their roles within families, institutions, and workplaces, creating environments that support regulation rather than re-traumatization. This stage corresponds to what Torre (2025) calls feedback release: the circulation of adaptive energy through previously rigid boundaries.
Together these levels form a recursive system: physiological safety enables reflection; reflection enables contextual change; contextual change consolidates physiological safety. Each loop reinforces the others, generating upward spirals of resilience.
4. Neuroethical Implications
By combining PEM and CFC, anxiety regulation becomes an explicitly ethical process. The practitioner is not simply correcting biological error but participating in relational re-attunement. This stance contrasts sharply with reductionist biomedical models that treat anxiety as a defect in neurotransmission. Instead, the integrated model asserts that:
- Neurophysiological balance (how the system functions) must be inseparable from moral-relational balance (how the system cares).
- Transformation is sustainable only when the individual’s nervous system, self-concept, and social context evolve together.
- Compassion is both the mechanism and the metric of systemic health.
These propositions align with the movement toward embodied ethics in contemporary neuropsychology (Decety & Cowell, 2014), which argues that moral cognition originates in interoceptive awareness and empathic resonance.
5. Situating the Framework within Systemic Science
PEM + CFC can be mapped onto established models of multi-scale regulation. At the micro-level, re-balancing neural excitation parallels homeostatic regulation. At the meso-level, narrative re-framing functions as cognitive integration. At the macro-level, institutional redesign embodies socio-systemic adaptation.
This fractal coherence suggests that compassion operates as a scaling principle: the same feedback logic that stabilizes neuronal activity also stabilizes communities and organizations when compassion becomes systemic policy. Torre (2025) conceptualizes this as systemic compassion literacy, the capacity of institutions to mirror the regulatory wisdom of the nervous system.
6. Summary of Theoretical Foundations
The theoretical synthesis presented here positions compassion as the bridge and feedback as the language connecting neurobiology, psychology, and social systems. Anxiety reversal in the laboratory (Lerma et al., 2025) thus becomes a metaphor and a mechanism for systemic healing in society. Through PEM System Logics, suffering is decoded as feedback; through Compassion-Focused Coaching, that feedback is translated into relational and ethical transformation.
This dual framework lays the conceptual foundation for the next section, which explores how neurobiological rebalancing and narrative processes interact empirically and phenomenologically, moving from the micro-dynamics of the amygdala to the macro-dynamics of the human system.
:1. From Neural Circuits to Systemic Circuits
The discovery that anxiety can be “reversed” through targeted modulation of neuronal circuits represents a profound biological insight, but one whose true significance lies beyond the brain itself. Lerma et al. (2025) demonstrated that overactivity in a subset of amygdala neurons (via GluK4 receptor expression) produced anxiety and social withdrawal in mice, and that restoring excitatory-inhibitory balance normalized behavior. This micro-level phenomenon exemplifies the broader principle of feedback dysregulation: when one node in a network dominates, the system loses coherence.
PEM System Logics interprets this principle at the macro scale of human systems. Just as hyperexcitable neurons create anxiety within the neural network, hyperreactive social or institutional structures generate collective anxiety within societies. For Torre (2025), both levels are governed by the same systemic law: imbalanced feedback produces suffering. The challenge of human development, therefore, is to learn how to “rebalance” not only the brain but also the relational, organizational, and ecological systems in which the brain participates.
2. Anxiety as Feedback, Not Failure
Anxiety emerges as a functional alarm: a signal that the system’s feedback architecture is overloaded or disconnected. Neurobiologically, it corresponds to overactivation of the amygdala and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis (Van der Kolk, 2014). Psychologically, it manifests ruminative thought and avoidance behavior. Socially, it appears as disconnection, burnout, or institutional paralysis.
In each case, the form differs but the logic remains identical: feedback loops meant to maintain equilibrium become trapped in recursive amplification. Torre (2025) names this condition “systemic tension”, the point at which regulation turns into rigidity. Within PEM, transformation begins by decoding this tension: recognizing anxiety not as enemy but as message. The task of the coach or clinician is therefore to restore communication between subsystems, to “close the circuit” so that information can flow again.
Compassion plays a pivotal role here. According to Gilbert (2018), compassionate attention reduces defensive processing and reopens channels for social engagement. It is through compassion that the system learns to listen to its own signals without threat. When compassion replaces control as the organizing principle, anxiety’s message can be integrated rather than suppressed.
3. Polyvagal and Epigenetic Correlates
The Polyvagal Theory (Porges, 2011) offers a physiological model for how compassion and safety modulate anxiety. The vagus nerve, especially its ventral branch, regulates heart rate, vocal tone and facial expression, the biological substrates of social connection. When the ventral vagal complex is active, the organism perceives safety and can engage with others; when it is inactive, the organism retreats into defense.
CFC techniques (Gilbert, 2018) such as soothing rhythm breathing or compassionate imagery directly stimulate this system, reducing amygdala activity and promoting prefrontal regulation. Neuroimaging studies show that compassion training enhances connectivity between the insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and prefrontal regions (Klimecki et al., 2013). These areas are crucial for emotion regulation and empathy, indicating that compassion rewires the same circuits involved in anxiety.
At the genetic level, chronic anxiety is associated with methylation of stress-regulation genes such as NR3C1, while compassionate environments can reverse such epigenetic marks (Meaney & Szyf, 2005). Torre (2025) extends this insight systemically: social and institutional environments function as “epigenetic niches,” shaping the expression of resilience or vulnerability. Education systems that emphasize fear and performance create “collective methylation” of creativity and trust; compassionate cultures demethylate it.
4. From Neural Plasticity to Narrative Plasticity
If neurons can rewire, so can narratives. Anxiety recovery requires both forms of plasticity, the biological and the existential. Within PEM, the narrative domain corresponds to the Existence phase: the process through which lived experience is recognized, named, and re-authored. Torre (2025) argues that meaning is not the product of thought but the emergent property of relational coherence. When the individual can speak about their suffering within a safe relational field, the nervous system reorganizes accordingly.
This resonates with Van der Kolk’s (2014) thesis that “the body keeps the score”, that trauma persists as implicit somatic memory until it is integrated through embodied expression. In CFC practice, narrative and physiology are engaged simultaneously: as clients recount their stories with compassionate awareness, vagal regulation stabilizes; as regulation stabilizes, storytelling becomes more coherent. The therapeutic dialogue itself functions as a biopsychosocial feedback loop.
Such recursive integration constitutes what Torre (2025) calls meaning regulation: the alignment of narrative coherence with physiological safety. Anxiety reversal, in this sense, is not a one-time reset but an ongoing negotiation between memory, body, and environment.
5. Systemic Resonance and Collective Regulation
When applied beyond the individual, this logic yields what could be called collective polyvagalism: the capacity of groups and institutions to co-regulate states of safety and trust. Educational systems, for instance, can act like nervous systems, generating either chronic sympathetic arousal (competition, surveillance, grading anxiety) or ventral vagal resonance (collaboration, curiosity, and belonging). Similarly, organizations in the employment domain can function as safe or unsafe systems depending on leadership tone, communication feedback, and workload pacing.
In PEM terms, a compassionate organization is one that mirrors the healthy nervous system: capable of activation without panic, rest without collapse, and feedback without fragmentation. The leader becomes the “social vagus” of the institution, regulating its rhythm and ensuring coherence between precision (structure), existence (people’s lived experience), and meaning (shared purpose).
6. Anxiety Reversal as a Model for Systemic Transformation
Returning to the findings of Lerma et al. (2025), the core mechanism of anxiety reversal, restoring excitatory balance, can be read metaphorically as the guiding principle for systemic healing. In personal, organizational, and societal systems alike, transformation requires rebalancing excitation (drive, ambition, stress) with inhibition (rest, reflection, compassion).
PEM System Logics frames this as a dialectic between activation and integration. Systems that overvalue activation (constant productivity, hypervigilance) drift toward anxiety; those that overvalue inhibition (avoidance, disengagement) drift toward depression. Compassion functions as the regulator that harmonizes both tendencies. Through compassionate feedback, the system learns not to eliminate tension but to metabolize it, converting stress into information and anxiety into adaptation.
This process aligns with contemporary views of complex adaptive systems, in which resilience arises not from rigidity but from dynamic equilibrium (Walker et al., 2004). The PEM-CFC synthesis thus situates mental health within the broader logic of living systems: the capacity to oscillate between vulnerability and vitality without losing coherence.
7. Summary
Anxiety reversal, when viewed through the integrated lens of neuroscience, compassion, and system theory, becomes a template for multi-level regulation. The same principle that restores balance within the amygdala, re-establishing proportionate feedback, applies to the human self and the human collective. Compassion-Focused Coaching provides the experiential pathway; PEM System Logics provides the systemic map.
Together, they form what Torre (2025) calls a precision ecology of meaning: a paradigm in which healing is neither mechanical nor mystical but informational, the continuous rebalancing of feedback between body, mind, and world.
1. Applications Across Domains
1.1 Mental Health Care: From Symptom Reduction to Systemic Regulation
Traditional psychiatry has largely approached anxiety as a chemical imbalance to be medicated or as a cognitive distortion to be corrected. The PEM–CFC synthesis challenges this dualism by reframing anxiety as a form of systemic dysregulation requiring multi-level restoration. Within mental health care, this translates into three practical imperatives:
- Neurophysiological grounding – Integrate compassion-based interventions (breathing, toning, somatic awareness) that directly recalibrate the autonomic nervous system (Porges, 2011).
- Narrative integration – Facilitate storytelling practices where clients reconstruct meaning around their experience of fear and loss, aligning with the Existence phase in PEM (Torre, 2025).
- Systemic redesign – Move therapy from isolated symptom management toward coordinated care ecosystems involving families, communities, and workplaces.
In pilot implementations under the PEM System Logics framework, clients have reported reductions in anxiety intensity and improved relational functioning when narrative and physiological work were explicitly connected (Torre, 2025). This aligns with the evidence base showing that compassion practices improve vagal tone and emotional regulation (Kirby et al., 2017; Klimecki et al., 2013).
1.2 Education: Cultivating Compassionate Learning Environments
In educational contexts, chronic anxiety often manifests as perfectionism, disengagement, or avoidance. Schools tend to address these behaviors behaviorally rather than systemically. The PEM–CFC approach offers an alternative: cultivating compassion literacy within classrooms.
A compassionate classroom mirrors the polyvagal system, oscillating between activation (challenge, curiosity) and regulation (safety, belonging). Teachers act as co-regulators, using tone, pacing, and authentic presence to establish safety cues. In doing so, they replicate the neurophysiological process by which CFC restores balance at the individual level.
In Torre’s (2025) framework, education becomes a system of resonance: students are not passive receivers of information but participants in a relational field that nurtures both cognitive and emotional coherence. Anxiety is interpreted not as disobedience but as a signal of disrupted feedback between learner, task, and environment. By redesigning curricula around curiosity and compassion rather than compliance and performance, education systems themselves begin to “rebalance the brain” of society.
1.3 Sustainable Employment: Toward Compassionate Organizational Systems
Workplaces, too, can embody or violate the nervous system’s logic. Constant urgency, competition, and surveillance keep employees in chronic sympathetic activation, eroding creativity and empathy. Compassionate organizations, as defined by Torre (2025), mirror the balanced nervous system: clear in structure (Precision), attuned to lived experience (Existence), and aligned with shared values (Meaning).
Implementation of PEM-informed coaching within organizational development has demonstrated that when employees experience psychological safety, stress hormones decline, collaboration increases, and systemic learning accelerates (Van den Bosch van Fenema, 2021). Leadership grounded in compassion, rather than control, becomes the social vagus of the organization, harmonizing performance with well-being.
In practical terms, this implies embedding compassion competencies into HR processes, leadership training, and performance evaluation. A system that rewards regulation and reflection alongside results achieves what both neuroscience and PEM call sustainable balance: the capacity to adapt without destabilizing.
2. Conclusion
The 2025 discovery that anxiety can be reversed by restoring excitatory balance in the amygdala (Lerma et al., 2025) provides an empirical foothold for a larger philosophical claim: that suffering itself is reversible when systems regain coherence. The PEM System Logics and Compassion-Focused Coaching frameworks together propose that this restoration must occur simultaneously at three levels, neural, narrative, and systemic.
At the neural level, compassion activates parasympathetic circuits that recalibrate threat and safety responses. At the narrative level, it transforms fear into meaning, enabling the individual to integrate vulnerability into coherent selfhood. At the systemic level, it reorients institutions around feedback, care, and adaptability. The unifying principle is feedback resonance: the continuous flow of information that allows both brains and systems to stay alive, responsive, and humane.
This integrative approach challenges the reductionism of modern psychiatry and the fragmentation of social systems. It proposes instead a precision ecology of meaning (Torre, 2025): a framework in which precision science and existential understanding are not opposites but partners in systemic healing. Compassion functions as the ethical and physiological medium through which this ecology sustains itself.
Future research should investigate how compassion training influences epigenetic markers of stress, how narrative coherence mediates physiological regulation, and how organizational compassion affects collective performance metrics. By empirically bridging these levels, the PEM–CFC synthesis may offer a foundation for a new generation of interdisciplinary practice, one capable of rebalancing not only the brain, but the systems that sustain it.
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