When we never feel safe, everything is simply worse than it could be. Our physical and mental health suffers, and a numbing fog becomes the norm.

This need to shift states is often not conscious but driven by the body on a foundational survival level.

we don’t necessarily need a surgical operation to take advantage of the nerve’s power to shift our bodily state, calm us down, and heal us.

This is a major shift. The goal of talk therapy is often to create an explanation for why a patient feels the way they do. The goal of polyvagal-informed therapists such as Dana is to shift that question from “why” we feel the way we do to “how.”

The problems tend to come when our Yellow and Red systems are overused in the service of defense (as is endemic to our stressful modern world), or when we become effectively trapped in them and shut out of access to the restorative and healing Green state (as is common with those who suffer from trauma).

This approach involves framing the patient’s negative feelings as the manifestation of a foundational survival mechanism that has been baked into our bodies through millions of years of evolution.

Quite simply: The environment we are in changes the way we feel, and how our bodies operate.

To be traumatized is to rarely or never feel truly safe. In the absence of that felt sense of safety, trauma leaves our bodies largely stuck in the hands of the aggressive Yellow and dissociative Red systems—or at least makes it a whole lot harder for us to get to Green.

Trauma is not merely psychological but also physiological