Polyvagal Theory, Part 4: Healing Trauma
This is the 4th in a 5-article series on polyvagal theory and trauma. For the initial article, click here.
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Most trauma therapies address the mind through talk and the molecules of the minds with drugs. Both of these approaches can be of use. However, trauma is not, will not, and can never be fully healed until we also address the essential role played by the body. We must understand how the body is affected by trauma and its central position in healing its aftermath. Without this foundation, our attempts at mastering trauma will be limited and one-sided.
—Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger [i]
Trauma-informed care is critical to helping survivors move incomplete mobilization responses out of their tissues, allowing them access to more life-giving and relationship-enhancing choices, and freeing them from the incomplete processing of trauma memories frozen in time.
—Alaine Duncan, The Tao of Trauma [ii]
There may be nothing else to do with the traumas that befall us than to use them for our own awakenings.
—Mark Epstein, The Trauma of Everyday Life [iii]
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Healing trauma is a relational process. It involves reestablishing connection to what’s happening here and now—especially to what’s happening in the body.
Humans possess the capacity to create and inhabit “relational homes.” That is, we can learn to relate to our inner events with tender awareness. We can “hold” our experience with clear-seeing and compassion. As the psychiatrist Mark Epstein writes, “Trauma becomes sufferable, even illuminating, when there is a relational home to hold it in. Without this, it is simply too much to bear.” [iv]
So, how do we build this relational home? Well, it starts with feeling. As I’ve already suggested, wild animals don’t get traumatized, at least not the way humans do. Instead, they instinctually recover from the shock of life-threatening events by feeling and releasing their protective energies. With animals as our guides, we can re-discover our “wild side” by honing our “felt sense”—our ability to feel the body from the inside out. Levine writes:
The experience of the felt sense gives us a backdrop for reconnecting with the animal in ourselves. Knowing, feeling, and sensing focuses our attention where healing can begin. Nature has not forgotten us, we have forgotten it. A traumatized person’s nervous system is not damaged; it is frozen in a kind of suspended animation. Rediscovering the felt sense will bring warmth and vitality to our experiences. This sense is also a gentle, non-threatening way of re-initiating the instinctual processing of energy that was interrupted when the trauma occurred. Completing this process prevents post-traumatic reactions from becoming chronic. We have built-in mechanisms for responding to and moving toward a natural resolution of trauma. [v]
Feeling is a practice, a skill to be developed. We’re practicing making room for our own aliveness. This includes the times we’re operating inside our window of tolerance—when we have access to our connection mode—but it also includes the times we’re outside that window, when we’re in protection mode.
When I start working with clients in my individual sessions, I help them establish connection-mode anchors. I guide them in recognize what it’s like in their body to feel connected. They learn the “landmarks” of the connection-mode “landscape.” Maybe they notice, for instance, that their diaphragm feels more comfortable and they can breathe easier, or maybe their jaw is unclenched.
Once clients have a reliable set of connection-mode anchors they can return to, I guide them in a practice called tick-tocking. Here, they experience the rise and fall of their up-waves and the down-waves with a gentle, tender curiosity. Clients usually find that '“up” naturally gives way to “down,” and “down” to “up,” if they only allow the rhythm to unfold. In the process, their window of tolerance expands, along with their sense of ease and empowerment.
Sometimes, for instance, a client is feeling hyper-aroused. They might notice: “I’m hot and sweaty. I feel tension in my shoulders. My breathing is shallow and my heart is racing. My thoughts are racing.” Their alarm system is blaring and they’re responding physiologically. Their up-wave is very “up”! Yet, as we stay with this experience, bathing it in a gentle inquisitiveness, and remembering our connection-mode anchors, the experience naturally shifts. The up-wave gives way to the down-wave of relaxation.
On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes clients feel stuck in hypo-arousal. When they bring their awareness toward their state of collapse, they tend to tell me something like: “I’m noticing coldness, tiredness, some nausea. My body feels heavy and my muscles weak. I’m feeling disconnected and spacey.” They’re recognizing that their body has slammed on the brake. Again, we can respond with tenderness. With one foot remaining in connection mode, they bring their curiosity to their experience of collapse, remaining as embodied as they can. Gradually, their numb parts tend to awaken and they re-establish their place in the flow of aliveness.
We’re getting to know and tend to our states of hyper- and hypo-arousal as they arise. Doing this work of “getting to know” and “tending to” our protective modes promotes healing. The nervous system knows how to return to connection mode. We’re simply allowing it to regulate itself. We’re letting our own “inner physician” do its work.
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As we get to know and befriend our autonomic states, we can also lean on our capacity for discernment. We can look around and let ourselves know that, “Hey, wouldya look at that, I’m actually not in danger in this moment!” With practice, we can teach our nervous system what safety and danger actually are. Gradually, this reshapes our nervous system. We find that we’re no longer “biased” toward threat. We’re seeing things as they really are. This can support the process of allowing our ANS to “complete” its thwarted survival response.
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It’s great news that it’s not mandatory to dredge up old memories—to relive traumatic events—in order to heal. It’s not about remembering or conceptualizing our way toward resolution; it’s about feeling.
I’ve heard trauma described as “the intrusion of the ‘there and then’ into the ‘here and now’.” Feeling helps us “uncouple” our present-moment experience from the past, which can be deeply transformative. Developing our felt sense, in a gradual, manageable way and ideally in the presence of a compassionate ally, is how we create an inner atmosphere that is primed to heal our protection-mode wound.
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My role is to help people build their relational homes. I provide a safe “container” in which they can practice developing their felt sense, so that they can start to free themselves from the stranglehold of their survival responses.
I help people cultivate pathways out of protection mode into connection mode. And I support them in savoring the experience of being within the window of tolerance—that smooth, undulating wave of activity and restoration that is always available to us, even in the midst of inner chaos. Trauma specialist Alaine Duncan writes:
Trauma-informed care can help us access the permanent, regulated wave of resiliency that remains unbroken despite the overlay of dysregulation caused by overwhelming life experiences. Restoring access to this wave builds our inherent capacity for healing and helps us return our bodies, minds, emotions, and spirits to resilient function. The more we experience this wave, the wider our [window of tolerance] and the greater capacity we have for managing stressful experiences…We become better able to transform the imprint of past traumas and navigate future threats more successfully. [vi]
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Trauma is a state of fragmentation and disorganization. Survivors are imprisoned by protective responses from the past, preventing them from participating in the fresh unfolding of experience. Their inner rhythms are chaotic and uncomfortable.
But by gradually developing a sense of safe connection with the body, as well as safe connection with our environment and with other nervous systems, we can shift from an inner domain of fragmentation and disorganization to one of integration and coherence. We can thaw. We can become whole again. Ultimately, our traumas can become our gateways to freedom.
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Feeling is an activity many of us need practice in; we’re accustomed to over-riding our felt sense. In the final article in this series, I’ll provide some guidance in the practice of feeling. Click here to read it.
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[i] Levine PA, Frederick A. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 1997: 3.
[ii] Duncan AD, Kain KL. The Tao of Trauma: A Practitioner’s Guide for Integrating Five Element Theory and Trauma Treatment. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 2019: 25.
[iii] Epstein M. The Trauma of Everyday Life. New York, NY: Penguin Books; 2014: 32, 63.
[iv] Epstein, 197.
[v] Levine, 86-87.
[vi] Duncan, 24.