Working Through Transplant Shock: How We Learn to Grow in New Conditions

By Brooke Levy

Let’s go back to the pothos for a moment (see my article The Space Constraint: How We Learn to Contain Ourselves).

Say you finally repot it. You’ve done everything right. Bigger container, fresh soil, better drainage. You move it somewhere with more light. And then it just… sits there. Maybe the leaves go a little limp. Maybe it looks worse than it did before you touched it. This is called transplant shock. The plant isn’t dying, and it isn’t rejecting the new conditions either. It’s just that its whole system was calibrated around something else, and it needs time to figure out how to be in an environment that’s actually good for it.

Things can look worse before they look better. The uncomfortable part isn’t a sign it’s failing.

It’s just what adjusting looks like.

The Pot You Grew In

Most of us assume we’d recognize a healthy environment if we were in one. That ease would feel like ease. That safety would feel like safety. That our bodies would send some kind of clear signal when something was right.

But the nervous system doesn’t work that way. It calibrates, learns what to expect, and starts measuring everything against that. Researchers describe something called the window of tolerance, which is essentially the range in which your nervous system can function without shifting into survival mode. What doesn’t get talked about enough is what happens when that window gets built around a contracted baseline, one shaped by chronic stress or emotional unpredictability early on (Ogden et al., 2006). Over time, dysregulation stops feeling like an exception. It starts feeling like the normal temperature of a room.

So when something genuinely safe shows up, a relationship without an edge to it, a moment of real ease, a day where there’s nothing to brace against, it doesn’t always register as relief. Sometimes it registers like something is wrong or like something is missing. It feels as though the quiet is actually a warning sign. A plant that spent years in poor soil doesn’t automatically know what to do with nutrients. The new conditions might be better, but that doesn’t mean the adjustment is easy or comfortable.

When the New Soil Feels Wrong

There’s a name for this. Researchers call it positive emotion dysregulation, the difficulty experiencing or trusting positive emotions, often because the nervous system learned to read any kind of arousal as a signal that something was about to go wrong (Weiss et al., 2018). A lot of people describe it as waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things are going well, which means something bad is coming. Happiness starts to feel like exposure. Calm starts to feel like being unprepared.

This isn’t pessimism, it’s adaptation. It’s what happens when a system spent years learning that relief was temporary and threat was always around the corner. The nervous system did exactly what it was supposed to do to protect us. The problem is that it doesn’t automatically update when the environment changes, even when our previously successful survival strategies are no longer necessary or helpful.

What makes this harder is that many people who grew up in emotionally restricted or chaotic environments also develop something called alexithymia, which is difficulty identifying andnaming what they’re actually feeling (Ditzer et al., 2023). Not because they don’t feel things, but because they never had consistent help developing the language for it. When a caregiver struggles to sit with their own emotional states, that skill doesn’t get passed down (Ramos & Buss, 2024). You end up with a lot of internal sensation and not enough words for any of it.

It’s a bit like trying to describe a color you’ve never been taught the name for. The experience is real. The language just was never handed to you.

What the Roots Actually Need

Accessing what feels right isn’t one single skill. It’s closer to a sequence, and most people who grew up in smaller pots are working against themselves at every step of it.

The first piece is noticing. This is what researchers call interoception, the ability to pick up signals from inside your own body. Your breath, your heart rate, the tension in your jaw or the ease in your shoulders (Price & Hooven, 2018). A lot of people have learned to turn this channel down, not on purpose, but because feelings that were too big or too inconvenient in the environment got managed away early. The signal that helps us realize what we’re feeling is still there. It’s just very quiet, and there’s been a lot of noise on top of it for a long time.

The second piece is naming. Even when you can notice something, putting language to it is its own work. Sensation and emotion aren’t automatically the same thing. Your chest being tight is real. Whether that means anxiety or excitement or grief or something else entirely requires some interpretation. Many people have had that process running on autopilot for so long they’ve never slowed it down enough to question whether the interpretation is accurate, or whether it’s just familiar.

The third piece, and the one that gets the least attention, is trusting. Researchers studying interoceptive awareness have identified trust as its own distinct dimension, the degree to which someone feels at home in their body and trusts their bodily sensations (Mehling et al., 2018). For a lot of people, their feelings were treated as too much or inaccurate or inconvenient often enough that they stopped giving them much credit. You can notice something. You can even name it. But without trust, the signal just gets bypassed. It never becomes the useful information it's meant to be.

When the New Pot Starts to Feel Like Home

How do you do this? The answer is slowly.

Start with the absence of something rather than the presence. You may not be able to identify what good feels like yet, but you might be able to catch what it feels like when you’re not bracing. When you get to the end of a conversation and don’t feel like you need to recover from it. When you’re not scanning. When your body isn’t already preparing for something that hasn’t happened.

Pay attention to what comes after rather than during. In the moment, unfamiliar conditions can feel neutral or even uncomfortable because your system is still adjusting. But how do you feel an hour later? The next morning? More like yourself, or less?

Let yourself not know. This is harder than it sounds. You don’t have to decide immediately whether something is right for you. You’re allowed to be in the process of finding out.

Uncertainty about whether something is good is not the same thing as evidence that it isn’t.If you've spent years defaulting to tension, the only way to start feeling at home in healthier conditions is to stay in them long enough to let your system catch up. That’s what repotting actually looks like from the inside. There’s a period where you look worse before you look better. Where the new soil feels unfamiliar and the system doesn’t know where to go yet. Where nothing seems to be happening even though everything is.

Years of adapting to one set of conditions doesn't disappear quickly. The new pot just needs time to become familiar.

You’re not broken for not recognizing what good feels like. You’re just in the middle of the shock. Give it time. Plants don't thrive on the first day in a new pot, but that doesn't mean they won't eventually feel at home in it.

References

Ditzer, J., Wong, E. Y., Modi, R. N., Behnke, M., Gross, J. J., & Talmon, A. (2023). Child maltreatment and alexithymia: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 149(5–6), 311–329. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000391

Mehling, W. E., Acree, M., Stewart, A., Silas, J., & Jones, A. (2018). The multidimensional assessment of interoceptive awareness, version 2 (MAIA-2). PLOS ONE, 13(12), Article e0208034. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0208034

Ogden, P., Pain, C., & Fisher, J. (2006). A sensorimotor approach to the treatment of trauma and dissociation. Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 29(1), 263–279. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psc.2005.10.012

Price, C. J., & Hooven, C. (2018). Interoceptive awareness skills for emotion regulation: Theory and approach of mindful awareness in body-oriented therapy (MABT). Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 798. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00798

Ramos, M., & Buss, K. A. (2024, June 17). The role parents play in shaping children’s emotion regulation. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/growing-hearts-and-minds/202406/the-role-parents-play-in-shaping-childrens-emotion-regulation

Weiss, N. H., Dixon-Gordon, K. L., Peasant, C., & Sullivan, T. P. (2018). An examination of the role of difficulties regulating positive emotions in posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 31(5), 775–780. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22330