Sublime

I am pleased that clinicians and clients are using Polyvagal Theory to validate personal narratives of how the body responds to trauma in a heroic manner. They are learning that their body responded in an adaptive way that enabled them to survive.

clinicians realized after evaluating survivors of trauma that the neurobiological expression of their trauma is not always along a continuum of a highly mobilized defensiveness that we categorize as fight or flight reactions but often is expressed along a continuum of immobilization.

Trauma is not a disease, he points out, but rather a human experience rooted in survival instincts.

Learning to live through states of high arousal (no matter what their source) allows us to maintain equilibrium and sanity.

the same psychophysiological systems that govern the traumatic state also mediate core feelings of goodness and belonging.

Trauma retunes our nervous system to pick up signs of danger where there may be none.

we can see that all traumatic events share one characteristic: they overcharge the body and put it into overwhelm.

Resonance is the essential process underlying all relating.