This work begins with a snake.
Not as metaphor.
Not as symbol.
Not as a mirror constructed for human meaning.
I keep boas, and that fact alone places limits on what I can claim. To abstract the animal into analogy would erase him, and erasure is precisely what this work refuses. The snake is the point.
Everything that follows arises from lived husbandry, daily observation of a nervous system responding to disrupted signals, restored predictability, and environmental change. Any parallels to human experience emerge second, not through projection, but through the recognition of shared biological mechanisms. The animal remains centered throughout.
I have kept snakes long before Kismet arrived. Reptiles, and boas in particular, have been part of my inner landscape since childhood. But this was the first time I met a snake on equal ground: not as a child with an unnamed affinity, but as an adult who understands and has learned to live with her neurodivergent wiring.
Looking back, I can see that my early love of reptiles was not incidental. The calm they brought me was real, even then, even without language. What I recognize now is that it was regulatory. The difference is not in the snake, but in me. As a child, I was drawn instinctively toward what steadied my nervous system, as a grown woman, aware, resourced, and no longer required to mistrust her own perception. I can finally meet that steadiness consciously, and without apology.
This realization did not come through introspection alone.
It came through care.
Predictability, Disruption, and Signal Integrity
Much of what clarifies this process is reflected in the work of animal behaviorist Lori Torrini, whose approach to snake behavior centers predictability, classical conditioning, and signal continuity. In Torrini’s framework, defensive behaviors are not temperament flaws or failures of training. They are information. When signals are consistent, regulation follows. When signals are disrupted or ambiguous, vigilance increases.
This aligns with broader cross-species research. Affective neuroscience, as articulated by Jaak Panksepp, establishes that core emotional and defensive systems are evolutionarily conserved across vertebrates. What differs is expression, not mechanism.¹ Orientation, assessment, and threat response are ancient biological processes.
I saw this clearly when Kismet’s enclosure had to be placed temporarily on the floor.
The floor was not dangerous. It was not neglect. It was a logistical necessity while I waited for a proper stand. But from his perspective, it was a profound disruption. Orientation cues changed. Vibration patterns shifted. The spatial map that had defined “home” was erased.
When he was later raised onto the new stand, nothing inside the enclosure had changed. The substrate, hides, temperatures, and internal layout were identical. What changed was his vantage point.
That mattered.
The nervous system did not register improvement. It registered novelty without continuity. Familiar contents were now framed by an unfamiliar external context. The internal map could not reconcile sameness with altered reference.
Neuroscientist Stephen Porges describes this in humans as neuroception, the automatic detection of safety or threat that occurs before thought.² Regulation cannot be chosen when cues remain unresolved. The system stays braced until predictability returns.
Seen through Torrini’s framework, this outcome is not surprising. Regulation depends on signal integrity, not intention or upgrade.
Beginning Before the Threshold
Reacclimatization did not begin with handling.
It did not even begin with the enclosure.
It began with presence.
I did not assume that Kismet still “knew” me. Recognition is not something a nervous system preserves when context shifts. So I sat nearby and worked, allowing him to observe without expectation. No approach. No interaction. Just shared space.
Over the following weeks, his behavior narrowed. He moved only between his hide and the back of the enclosure. His body stayed tightly coiled and his head tucked. This was not his baseline. Before the disruption, even at rest, he watched the room. He explored. He approached the front glass. He stretched into open space.
That stopped.
This was not escalation. It was contraction. His world became smaller while he reassessed it. In Torrini’s terms, this was not avoidance but assessment under uncertainty. When the environment becomes legible again, expansion follows. Until then, narrowing is adaptive.
So I stayed.
Presence became part of the signal. Nothing followed my proximity. Nothing was asked of him. Over time, alertness softened into watchfulness.
Only then did the work move forward.
At first, even removing one lock produced a response. His attention sharpened. His posture changed. So the lock went back on. The sequence ended there.
This mirrors what psychologist Ross Greene notes in human behavior: challenging responses arise not from defiance, but from demands exceeding capacity in the current state.³ When the signal is too large, the system contracts. Repair begins by restoring conditions under which meaning can form again.
Contraction, Misrecognition, and Cost
When my own environment changes abruptly, I respond the same way.
I contract. Even with an entire apartment available, my world becomes smaller. I stay in my room more. I reduce contact. I quiet down and turn inward until the world makes sense again. This is not avoidance. It is assessment.
This has been misunderstood.
I have been called weird, difficult, unapproachable. Stillness was misread as refusal. Inwardness was treated as flaw instead of strategy. Psychiatrist Bruce Perry’s principle of state before trait makes this clear: behavior expresses nervous system state, not character.⁴
Sociologist Damian Milton’s double empathy problem explains the rest: misunderstandings arise from differences in experience and perception, not deficits in the person deemed “different.”⁵
Because I have lived on the receiving end of such misinterpretation, I recognize it instantly when I see it applied to snakes.
A snake that strikes is called dangerous.
A person who retreats is called strange.
In both cases, the behavior is responding honestly to uncertainty.
There was a time when I forced myself to engage anyway, performing regulation when my nervous system could not support it. The cost was exhaustion, not because effort is hard, but because overriding the body’s request for contraction fractures coherence.
Knowing that, I cannot ask it of him.
An Unresolved Signal
When my apartment complex issued a notice announcing a five-day window during which someone might enter my home, the same mechanism activated.
Nothing happened.
And the signal never closed.
Research on trauma has long shown that anticipatory threat activates the nervous system as powerfully as actual disruption. As Bessel van der Kolk writes, the body responds to possibility, not just occurrence.⁶
Home became a place of vigilance instead of rest.
This mattered because for most of my life, I lived in other people’s spaces, adapting, adjusting, moderating myself. Moving into my apartment was the first time my nervous system learned it could settle. The unresolved access signal disrupted that.
The response was not disproportionate.
It was coherent.
What Changes When We Stop Misnaming Regulation
What I have learned, by finally living in a space of my own, and then by living with a snake, is that many behaviors we label as problems are actually solutions to unstable environments.
Contraction is one of them.
Snakes make this visible because they refuse to perform comfort. They do not override assessment to meet expectation. Ethologist Frans de Waal’s continuity hypothesis reminds us that this honesty is not alien. It is biological.⁷
Humans, especially neurodivergent ones, are often punished for the same truth.
What changes when we stop misnaming regulation is simple:
We stop fixing behavior and start repairing context.
We stop demanding performance and start restoring predictability.
We recognize that safety is not conveyed through reassurance, but through boundaries that hold and signals that close.
This is why I cannot erase the snake from this work.
Kismet arrived after I had already begun to understand what it meant to live in a regulating space. His presence did not create that understanding. It clarified it.
That is not indulgence.
It is accuracy.
And accuracy, in a world accustomed to misnaming nervous systems, is a quiet form of resistance.
References
Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience (Oxford University Press, 1998).
Stephen Porges, The Polyvagal Theory (Norton, 2011).
Ross W. Greene, Lost at School (Scribner, 2014).
Bruce D. Perry & Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (Basic Books, 2017).
Damian Milton, “The Double Empathy Problem,” Disability & Society, 2012.
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (Viking, 2014).
Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Norton, 2016).
Lori Torrini, Classical Conditioning and Predictability in Snake Behavior (training materials).
Book of Kismet 
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