Knowing your Nervous System: Polyvagal-Informed Therapy
Back when I was teaching yoga more often, I would share stories and things I found inspiring at the beginning of each class. These things were nuggets of truth that might offer a perspective or insight into our shared human experience; our dharma, if you will. One story I shared a lot in those days came from David Foster Wallace. In a graduation speech, he told of two young fish meeting an older fish while swimming. The older fish said something like: “Hey boys. How’s the water?” and swam away. The two young fish looked at each other and one finally said: “What the hell is water?”
I share this now, in a therapy blog, because the point still holds. What we acclimate to becomes our truth, and sometimes we do not even know it.
What does this mean in the sense of polyvagal-informed therapy? It means that our nervous-systems are in the water. So the question we need to ask is: what water is your nervous system swimming in?
At its core, the nervous system functions to optimize your survival. The nervous system does not care if any perceived ‘threat’ is in the comments section of Youtube or a bear in your backyard; it just wants to keep you safe. Your nervous system does this automatically. It does not check in and go, “what do you think of that angry bear Jamie?” Nope. Your nervous system tells you to haul ass out of the backyard or to collapse down into play-dead-possum mode. This is because when activated, your nervous system responds automatically - based on its conditioning - to keep you safe. Your nervous system always acts in support of your survival.
Polyvagal theory teaches us that the nervous system protects us through two primary pathways: our sympathetic pathway and our dorsal vagal pathway. The sympathetic system is commonly referred to as our “fight or flight” system, although I much more resonate with its other name: the “anger and anxiety” system. The sympathetic system will mobilize us to move, activate, and do something about it.
The second pathway is through our dorsal vagal system just a few steps deeper on the activation ladder. This system is deep in our brainstem and our guts and is most commonly associated with disassociation, shutdown, and total collapse. For my trauma survivors that could not safely mobilize away, their nervous systems might have shut down all experience of being, so that they did not have to feel (and sometimes even remember) what happened to them at points of danger. If you are not there - you cannot feel it. Like I said, your nervous-system really wants to protect you.
Lastly, and worth mentioning, our nervous systems have the ability to “blend.” This happens when both activation pathways (sympathetic and dorsal vagal) are fired simultaneously. You might have sympathetic activation and dorsal collapse, or what we commonly refer to as “freezing and fawning.” When this happens we might feel stuck physically but have all the sympathetic activation of “do something” mentally; or, our “doing something” might be giving over our power and control in the name of perceived safety.
Now, before I lose you or you start to judge your own responses based on what you’ve read so far, let me say this; your nervous system is incredibly smart and capable. It’s taking care of us - remember that. In an ideal situation, our sympathetic system (which always activates first, if only for a flash) would actively mobilize us away from harm, and then we would (co)regulate ourselves back to feeling safety. We might see the bear, run, return to safety, co-regulate with our loved ones, and build a really, really sturdy anti-bear fence. Then, the bear memory might become a funny story that you remembered over Thanksgiving and that would be that. You probably would not prefer bears, but you also would be able to heal beyond that activation and live with safety in your day-to-day.
The problem is, this is not usually how activation (and regulation) work in a chronically threatening (from a nervous system standpoint) system. The majority of us are over-activated and under-regulated, and it’s not our fault. Our society is not set up for caring connection.
Gabor Mate talks about trauma as not being the exact event that happened to us, but rather being how our system organized around the healing of the event that happened to us. For example: we cut our knee - it gets cleaned and bandaged - it heals - no trauma; versus: we cut our knee - it goes under-acknowledged and uncleaned - it gets infected and requires surgery - we are eventually ‘better’ but our body lives with a ghost of guarding and pain. This is what we refer to as trauma. In this latter scenario, even though we have healed physically, we might become hypervigilant (excessively careful) with our knee. We might experience tenderness or pain. We might not trust our own body or stability. Our body has adapted to a new homeostasis of sorts, and our nervous system reflects this too. Our nervous system has changed.
Now, what if your knee was a broken heart? An absentee caregiver? An alcoholic parent? The wounds might not be as clear and specific but the trauma that your nervous system organizes around is. Remember: your nervous system is a survival system. Your nervous system is *always* trying to do right by you based on its perception and memory. For a lot of us, our nervous system doing *exactly* that is what got us to where we are today. Our ability to numb out or hold on to our angry and righteous sense of justice may be what saved us.
That is, until that numbing out or angry sense of justice (or whatever else) stopped working and started causing trouble of its own.
This is where I come in.
At a fundamental level, I help you get curious about the nervous system you are in. I help you witness your activation patterns and pick apart what is present and what is memory. Eventually, I help get you to the place that begs: what sources of activation in my nervous-system are historical and not accurate representations of your here and now? Or, said another way, are there *actually* any bears around?
There is a saying in polyvagal theory: “the nerves that fire together wire together.” What this means is that once you have encoded on a nervous system level that the internet is scary (for example) and requires righteousness and vigilance, your body might automatically default to that state in those conditions. And depending upon how significant the activation and trigger is, your arousal might not be able to tell the difference between cat videos and the toxicity in the comments section. On a nervous system level, this makes sense. Your nervous system is reading your memories, associations, and moment-to-moment activations, and making predictions with your survival in mind.
This happens because, in nervous system speak, your “present” is the moment you are in plus all associated memories and activations that your nervous system is reading on a subconscious level. Your body is in constant processing and predicting mode (“fire together, wire together”), and will always prioritize what it thinks is keeping you safe. (I cannot help but pause to marvel at how deeply our body works to help us survive!) When activated, your nervous system doesn’t care about nuance - it only cares about you.
“This makes sense but what do I do about it, Jamie?” I am glad you asked! From a therapeutic, healing perspective, we need to have repetitive, disconfirming (meaning confirming the opposite of what the nervous system has learned to expect) experiences to change our nervous system’s operations and create new neural pathways that will “wire together.” We need to practice anchoring and other ventral vagal activation skills that help strengthen our existing regulating pathways.
We need to know our nervous system and teach it safety.
In my work, I teach my clients to understand their nervous systems and work with them from a safety-first standpoint. I do this in our sessions through dialogue and active co-regulation. Of course, this means that I also work very consciously in my own daily practice to maintain my nervous system health so that I am able to do this for you. Your nervous system’s safety matters to me. The truth is, we often cannot regulate through something alone. If we did not encode rich, attuned co-regulation as a child (and very many of us did not for reasons that are not our fault), it is likely that our nervous system was conditioned to do something less healthy and adaptive when activated. A healing relationship is often required for nervous system recalibration.
Remember that cut knee analogy? In an ideal world, when you cut your knee (nervous system activation), your caregiver attuned to you and regulated with you. Your caregiver met you at your activation point (scary blood, big feelings, stress) and then co-regulated with you until you felt better. The truth is, again, not a lot of us got this; and frankly, it was not even the paradigm that most parents were working from. Heck, it still isn’t. Even with parents that loved us and tried their best, most of us did not live in this ideal nervous system-conscious world. This means that for most of us, our nervous systems are not anchored to the ventral vagal, connected state. To state once more: this is not your fault, and it’s not entirely your caregivers’ fault either. Too many of us over generations (myself included), missed having truly connected, consistent, attended regulated space growing up. We cannot give what we do not know to be true. I call this the inter-generational nervous system burden.
My clients are survivors. They often have more strength than they know. And for many of them, their nervous systems are burning out. They have been conditioned to be hypervigilant, over-performers, or chronically disassociated from the signals of their bodies – because they *had* to be that way. I have told more than one client: you actually *are* that strong, and I want you to live in a world where you do not have to be.
Because living in a world where we have to be “strong” has a cost: less connection; less vulnerability; less regulation; less nervous system safety.
Our bodies are the ultimate truth-tellers. Our bodies have honesty to dialed to a heartbeat and they are constantly trying to get our attention. Our job is to listen.
Let’s talk.
If you are curious about how our mental health therapy approach can support your mental and emotional health (or that of a loved one), you can book a cost-free, 15-minute Consultation with Jamie.
Jamie Van Auken, MA, Registered Marriage and Family Therapist Associate, E-RYT 500
Jamie is a nervous system-forward Registered Marriage and Family Therapist Associate who believes in bringing together the wisdom of the body with evidence-based therapeutic modalities to support genuine, sustainable transformation.
