What is Polyvagal Theory? SIMPLIFIED!

Today, I'm going to give you a crash course in what polyvagal theory is and explain why it can be a helpful model for understanding and healing from trauma.

Watch the video below or read on for the full transcript.

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I have both PTSD and CPTSD and have found polyvagal theory to be really helpful as I navigate my own recovery. So let's get started. At its core, polyvagal theory is a more nuanced way of understanding the autonomic nervous system. You're likely familiar with the fact that our nervous system has two main modes: 1. Fight or Flight, AKA, the sympathetic nervous system, and 2. Rest and Digest, AKA the parasympathetic nervous system.

At any given time we humans are in one mode or the other. If you have, or are familiar with trauma, either PTSD or complex PTSD, you're likely also aware of both the fawn and freeze states. So the model becomes fight, flight, freeze, or fawn versus rest and digest. Developed by Stephen Porges, the polyvagal theory, however, breaks down our nervous system even further. It adds an emphasis on safety and puts the various autonomic states on a hierarchical ladder instead of a simple either or format. Let's take a look at that polyvagal ladder.

So here's a diagram of the polyvagal ladder that I've made. You can see it goes from top to bottom. And at the top we have the ventral vagal state, which encompasses safety, play, and social engagement. Then if we move down a rung, we get to the sympathetic state. This is the one that you're familiar with. This is fight or flight. And it's also fawn. Both the ventral vagal and sympathetic are ways of mobilizing. But if we move down to the bottom rung of the ladder, we get to the dorsal vagal state, which is immobilization. This is where we freeze, where we play dead, as it were.

The thing that's really crucial about this ladder format is that in order to go from the top of the ladder to the bottom or from the bottom of the ladder to the top, you have to go through the sympathetic state. So if you're stuck in freeze, in order to unfreeze, you have to mobilize yourself. You have to activate your nervous system and you have to go through a sense of more activated fight or flight or fawn in order to get up to the top where you can start feeling safe again. And vice versa; if you're in a state of safety and you become triggered, let's say, into a sympathetic nervous system activation, you go through fight or flight first before your body can arrive at freeze or playing dead.

For those of you with complex PTSD, particularly from history of childhood abuse that was ongoing and chronic, you might have a sympathetic type that pairs two of the fight, flight, freeze, fawn together. And that's what you tend to do the most. So for example, I'm a fawn/freeze type. I very rarely experience fight or flight. Instead, my nervous system has learned to go through those really quickly onto fawn and freeze.

Comment below and tell me which part of the polyvagal ladder you find most interesting and why.

The thing that really stuck out to me when I first learned about it was that in order to get to safety from a freeze state, the neurosystem has to go up through sympathetic arousal to get there. That one little detail has helped me so much, and it's something I teach my clients about regularly.

Now that you've had a crash course on polyvagal theory, I want to share some of my favorite quotes from Stephen Porges's book, The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe. Side note, however, I don't necessarily recommend this book as it's really dense and doesn't focus on how to apply the theory. I'm still on the hunt for a better book to recommend to people. So if you know a good one on polyvagal theory, definitely let me know down in the comments. Anywho, back to some of my favorite quotes.

"Trauma treatment and diagnosis have been focused and biased on the event and not on understanding that an individual's response to the event is the critical feature. For some people, specific physical characteristics of an environmental challenge will trigger a fight/flight behavior, while others may totally shut down in response to the same physical features. I want to emphasize that understanding the response, not the traumatic event, is more critical to the successful treatment of trauma."

This is something I have wanted to rant about for a while on this channel, but haven't found the right context to do it in. And it's the difference between what society tends to see as big T versus little t trauma. The idea that being a war veteran is more severe than being a victim of child abuse, for example. This construct focuses on the event that causes trauma and not the human response to trauma. And just like the quote I just read, this distinction is crucial.

There was an example, I believe in the book, The Body Keeps The Score, where a couple experienced a horrific car accident. One was the driver. One was the passenger. However, most of us would logically see that as a big T trauma based on the description of the accident. I'm not going to tell you because I don't want to trigger you so I'll leave those details out. But what was interesting was one person from the couple ended up experiencing severe post-traumatic stress from that event. And the other did not. Ultimately what we know as post-traumatic stress, whether it be from a singular traumatic event or from ongoing chronic complex trauma, like complex PTSD, what is important is how the individual responds to that event. It's the individual's nervous system response that determines whether you go on to have post-traumatic stress or not, how big or little we perceive the traumatic event or events to be has zero bearing on whether or not the person then becomes traumatized.

"Polyvagal theory provides an understanding that feeling safe is dependent on autonomic state and that cues of safety help calm our autonomic nervous system."

So here's another distinction that is super important. And it's the idea that if we logically understand that we're safe. For example, I'm sitting in my desk chair in my office, looking at a camera. Logically, I'm perfectly safe right now. However, if I were triggered in any way and in an emotional flashback, like I talked about in this video, my nervous system would be time traveling back to a time when I wasn't safe. And this is really important: when your sympathetic nervous system is activated, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, which is our logical brain, the brain that can make decisions and look at things rationally.

Basically our old reptilian brain takes over. We cannot logic ourselves into a state of safety if our autonomic nervous system is convinced we're not safe. This distinction is important not only for healing from trauma, but also when having experienced a new trauma. If we are not able to return to a state of safety rather quickly after experiencing what could be a really traumatic event, we're more likely to go on to develop post-traumatic stress.

This can be one of the distinguishing factors between that couple I was telling you about earlier, where one experienced the car accident then developed post-traumatic stress, whereas the other one did not. It might simply be that the one that did not had more resilient nervous system and was able to return to a sense of felt autonomic safety, which helped them process the event better and faster, so it didn't go on to become post-traumatic stress. Whereas the other person did not have that ability.

"Moreover, and perhaps most important, the theory explains how safety is not the removal of threat and that feeling safe is dependent on unique cues in the environment and in our relationships that have an active inhibition on defense circuits and promote health and feelings of love and trust."

With this quote, we start to understand where the cues of safety come from to help teach our autonomic nervous systems that we're safe and everything's okay. So much of it comes from not just environmental cues, but social cues. The people all around us, are they helping us feel safe? Are they helping take care of us? For example, if you were a child who was forced To constantly self-soothe and you could not lean on the adults around you, that teaches your autonomic nervous system that you're not safe. Social cues are so crucial for not only presenting trauma from setting into post-traumatic stress in the first place, but also to heal from post-traumatic stress.

One of the things that I have been honored to see, start developing in my coaching membership is it's also a really rich support group where we all deeply understand each other and where we're all coming from. So when one of us says we were triggered, or we had an experience that really activated us, nobody questions it, nobody questions the severity of what someone's sharing, and that deep understanding and true empathy... It has been so healing for my clients, and I'm not going to lie, it's been healing for me too. Finding the people that you are truly safe with is something you deserve. And I cannot emphasize that enough.

"Polyvagal theory informs us that the inability to read these cues is a function of physiological state. Functionally, if a person is mobilized and in a defensive state, it will be difficult for them to detect cues of safety. If a person is shut down or dissociated, it will be almost impossible for them to detect cues of safety."

This quote essentially explains why toxic positivity is toxic because it's never as simple as just thinking positive or just getting over it. Our nervous systems are involved when we have post-traumatic stress, when we have experienced trauma that sticks with us to this day. We can't logic our ways out of that traumatic response. It's an ongoing way that the body thinks the trauma is still happening. We need to be kind and address the nervous system from the nervous system's perspective and not expect us to just suddenly feel safe just because someone tells us we are. That's not how it works.

There you have it: your crash course in polyvagal theory. I hope it's been helpful. If you enjoyed this video and are curious about what I do as a coach, and you struggle with procrastination and resistance to any degree, I highly recommend checking out my free masterclass, where I teach you three mindset shifts and one simple three-step system to help you kick procrastination to the curb. All you have to do to get access is go to this link and sign up.

Check out this blog post next to learn about complex PTSD emotional flashbacks.

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I'll be back next week with another video. See you then. Bye.