Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory

by Deb Dana

Polyvagal Informed Therapies shift the focus of therapy from the traumatic event to the bodily feeling. This is an important theoretical transformation about how trauma is both treated and embedded in the survivor’s nervous system.

Polyvagal Theory is the science of feeling safe enough to fall in love with life and take the risks of living.

The role of the autonomic nervous system is to store, conserve, and release energy to help us safely move through our daily lives.

The autonomic nervous system could also be called the automatic nervous system since it takes care of our body’s basic housekeeping responsibilities (i.e., breath, heart rate, digestion) without our needing to pay attention to them. The wonderful thing about this system is that it not only functions automatically with preprogrammed settings but, with Polyvagal Theory, it can also be adjusted. To do so, we have to understand the following three main principles: 1.Autonomic hierarchy: The system is organized around three building blocks that work in a certain order and come with preset pathways. 2.Neuroception: The system has a built-in surveillance system that watches for signs of safety and warnings about danger ahead. 3.Co-regulation: Having moments of safely connecting to others is a necessary ingredient for well-being.

Neuroception follows three streams of awareness: inside, outside, and between.

While the world seems to be increasingly focused on self-regulation and independence, co-regulation is the foundation for safely navigating daily living.

In order to co-regulate, I have to feel safe with you, you have to feel safe with me, and we have to find a way to come into connection and regulate with each other.

The experience of connection encompasses four domains: connection to self, connection to other people (and pets), connection to nature and the world around us, and connection to spirit.

Immobilization and disappearing are the survival strategies of the dorsal vagal system.

The information carried along this vagal pathway travels in two directions, with 80 percent of the information going from the body to the brain and 20 percent from the brain to the body.

When we are disconnected from our bodies, we are also disconnected from the ability to tune in to the important information being sent from the body to the brain through the vagal pathway.

The function of the vagal brake is to allow us to feel, and use, some of the mobilizing energy of the sympathetic nervous system without being pulled into the survival state of fight and flight.

1.My nervous system is in a survival response. 2.Moments of protection happen for everyone. 3.May I bring some ventral vagal energy to this moment.

Engaging in moments of befriending and learning to listen change the way we see our own experiences and the way we see the world.

Stephen Porges describes trauma as a chronic disruption of connectedness.

One way to explore your experience of connection is with this short version of the UCLA loneliness scale.11 On a scale of hardly ever, some of the time, and often, answer the following three questions: 1.How often do you feel that you lack companionship? 2.How often do you feel left out? 3.How often do you feel isolated from others?

Both social support and social connection are needed to help us meet the demands of our days. Social support comes from the people we count on to show up and help us in concrete ways and who make it possible for us to manage our daily living. These essential connections are formed around the exchange of services. When my husband had a stroke a number of years ago, he and I both appreciated the social support that brought some ease to our daily living. As you reflect on your daily living, who are your social supports? Social connection, on the other hand, comes from the people in our life we know, and who know us, in deep ways. This is the person we call when we’re feeling distressed and need someone to sit quietly with us without offering advice, the person who understands our need to rant sometimes and celebrates with us when life is good. Socially connected relationships are filled with reciprocity. With social connection we give and take, offer and receive. There is a rhythm to the relationship. As you reflect on your relationships, who is in the category of social connection for you? With whom do you feel that co-regulating, safe, predictable connection?

We humans are storytellers, meaning-making beings, and it is through our autonomic nervous systems that we first create, and then inhabit, our stories.

When we have the ability to befriend, anchor in ventral energy, and be with our experiences, we listen with interest to the messages our nervous system sends and are curious about where they might take us.

Zulu phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which means “a person is a person through other people.” It is often translated to mean “I am because we are.”