Polyvagal Theory, Part 3: Trauma
This is the 3rd in a 5-article series on polyvagal theory and trauma. For the initial article, click here.
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Wild animals are much more in touch with their bodies than we humans are. After an animal has engaged its protection mode and survived a dangerous situation, it takes the time to “shake it off”—it literally trembles, twitches, thrashes, or sprints to discharge its protective state.
In this way, the animal brings an end to the life-threatening experience. Any sense of numbness is reanimated and any pent-up fight-or-flight energy is released. The animal’s survival responses have been successfully activated and deactivated. It has survived and now it can return to connection mode. Instead of focusing on the threat, it can relax and restore; it can play and eat and learn and rest.
We humans, however, can get tied in knots by our big brains. Our neocortex tends to override our primal instinct to feel and release our protective responses. Instead of allowing our instinct to take over, we get imprisoned by our thoughts and our emotions. We lose track of the path back to connection mode.
As a result, the survival response lives on inside us, lodged in our bodies’ tissues. This is trauma.
Understanding trauma clearly—really seeing what it is and how it works—is the first step toward releasing it. That's what the rest of this article is for; healing is the subject of the article that follows.
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Trauma psychologist Peter Levine writes, “Since the nervous system only recognizes that the threat has passed when the [protective] energy has been discharged, it will keep mobilizing energy indefinitely until the discharge happens.” [i]
On a deep, instinctual level, our ANS wants to deactivate our protection mode and “complete” our survival response, so we start looking for ways to do so. Unconsciously, we begin to apply our memory of our life-threatening event to anything resembling it.
For example, if our traumatizing experience involved us being pinned down during a robbery, we might start reacting strongly to any experience of feeling pinned down. Getting a massage while lying face-down might trigger us; or sitting in a dentist’s chair; or even wearing a seat-belt.
The drive to heal through re-enactment is powerful. This drive can take over our lives, distorting our experiences in an attempt to “complete” our initial survival response. And yet our petrified minds override our instinct, prohibiting therapeutic release and perpetuating our discomfort. Although the ANS is trying to complete a survival response from the past, we assume that the activation in our ANS means that we’re currently in danger.
Trauma occurs when we find ourselves trapped by our survival response.
Trauma can derive from any experience where we’ve felt overwhelmed. Natural disasters or war zones. Car crashes or medical surgery. Domestic violence or sexual assault. The sudden loss of a loved one or a home or a job. A persistently stressful home life, school environment, or occupation.
Trauma can also take root in our earliest, most vulnerable days as infants, especially if we were dependent on caretakers with dysregulated nervous systems. It can even occur in utero. We might have no conscious recollection of any particular precipitating event, and yet we find ourselves reacting in extreme ways to the slightest of provocations.
Trauma can manifest in so many ways, for so many of us. But the root of the problem is shared among us all: the incomplete survival response is the cause of our distress. We’re stuck in protection mode.
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In some cases, traumatized people feel "amped up," as stress hormones race through the body—sweating, muscular tension, a pounding heart. This is the hyper-arousal of the sympathetic nervous system. In other cases, people feel withdrawn, numb, and spacey—"shut down," both emotionally and physically—as the freeze response blunts the body's metabolic aliveness. Often, trauma survivors vacillate between the two, or even feel both at once: gas and brake pressed down together. It's a deeply uncomfortable place to be.
As we established in the first article of this series, a regulated nervous system operates from a home base of a "window of tolerance." In that window, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems move together in a harmonious rhythm—we rest, we become aroused, we rest again.
Trauma survivors tend to lose that rhythm. Hyper-arousal slings them upward; hypo-arousal drags them down. Here’s one way to picture this: imagine the window of tolerance as a river flowing between two banks—one bank representing hyper-arousal, the other hypo-arousal. Someone with a regulated rhythm floats easily down a wide river, with plenty of room to maneuver around obstacles. But a dysregulated person's river is narrow and choppy. Their canoe keeps bumping against the banks, tossed back and forth between hyper- and hypo-arousal. It's no wonder trauma survivors are more prone to addiction, violence, and suicide.
Trauma takes a real toll. Survivors may experience anxiety, panic, rage, dissociation, hopelessness, shame; mood swings, hypervigilance, exaggerated startle responses, sleep disturbances, memory and cognition problems—often compounded by a second layer of anxiety, simply from not knowing why they feel this way, or when it will end. And because chronic protection mode places such stress on the body, trauma is also linked to higher risks of digestive, respiratory, cardiovascular, and immune-system disorders.
Survivors often contort their lives to avoid re-traumatization—withdrawing from people and places that once brought them joy—which can leave them feeling isolated and alienated from the world around them.
Ultimately, trauma represents a severing of connection. Our bound survival energy prevents us from the fresh flow of present-moment experience. It keeps us locked in the past and braced in anticipation of a foreboding future. It makes us feel like incomplete, partial selves. Not fully “me.”
So, that’s trauma. Now, what can we do about it? Click here for the next article in this series, where we examine how we can heal our trauma wounds.
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[i] Levine PA, Frederick A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 1997: 142.