experience a sense of unease. It’s the mobilization piece that has us either fight, flight, or freeze. According to Dana, examples include feelings of escape, being hypervigilant, looking and listening for danger, experiencing a sense of separation, cut off from others, a focus on the predator, missing and misreading signs of safety. When we are fearful, angry, or anxious, we are activating our survival responses, we are in essence fighting back and taking action, (Dana, 2018).
Understanding Regulation Allows for Better Interpretation The polyvagal approach to trauma, offers a way to attune within ourselves, where our very own control and safety center can be our resource, ally, and our aid. Control and a sense of safety are often ripped from us in trauma, yet they are ironically the very options we have within at our disposal to respond to it. The nervous system is continually scanning for cues of threat/danger and cues of safety, under our conscious awareness. This is something Stephen Porges, who discovered the polyvagal, has called neuroception. In neuroception, our nervous system is “listening” inside and outside, between us and other people. According to Dana (2018), our nervous 14
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system is picking up cues of safety and danger from other’s nervous systems. According to Dana, the ventral vagal state is where we connect and co-regulate with others, experience feelings of wellness, calmness, social engagement, where we are nourished. Through regulation in ventral vagal, we feel healthy, connected, and grounded. It is evidenced in our heart rate, our breathing, our eye gaze, and facial expression. Through our own regulated ventral state, we can bring others to a place of safety within themselves once we have done so for ourselves. We, by this very process, become a place of safety for others. The implicit, subcortical message, according to Dana, is that the “world is safe; what’s valued is protected.” There is havoc on the ANS when ventral regulation can’t be accessed, nor is coregulation possible. We recognize cues of threat/ danger when our nervous system reacts to stimuli. In the sympathetic nervous system, we
Dana further explains in dorsal vagal state, we disconnect and disappear. It is immobilized or collapsed energy. This state includes a conservation mode of being numb, foggy, untethered, alone, lost, abandoned, unreachable, in despair. In dorsal collapse, there’s an inability to take action. Dana describes trauma as a “chronic disruption of connectedness; when it happens, we lose our connection to ourselves. Trauma stories are carried in autonomic dysregulation… not a cognitive experience” (Dana, 2018). This is powerful information. It means healing isn’t solely possible through cognitive techniques. Trauma is stored and trapped in the body and it is worked hard upon by the autonomic nervous system moving through the vagal states. The ANS can inform when the stress is present and it can respond by calming the vagus nerve via regulating the nervous system, mitigating the residual powerlessness and helplessness of trauma. By witnessing our reaction and the states that have consumed us, it is helpful to understand it was a form of protection, of survival. Thus the experience is a process that’s purpose is to keep us safe, from the “insult” to the psyche and or body (Dana, 2018). Thus, regulation and coregulation
