FILE NAME : TU 18 Polyvagal Theory Part 1

Date: January 17, 2017

FILE NAME : TU 18 Polyvagal Theory Part 1 Length of file : 00:26:37 Speaker 1 : Ann Kelly Speaker 2 : Patty Olwell Speaker 3 : Sue Marriot

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[AUDIO BEGINS] [TU 18 Polyvagal Theory Part 1]

Host: Welcome to Therapist Uncensored, a podcast where therapists freely speak their minds about real-life matters.

Ann: Welcome back to Therapist Uncensored. I am Ann Kelly.

Patty: I am Patty Olwell.

Sue: I am Sue Marriot.

Ann: We are happy that you have either rejoined us or found us because we are going to be talking about something that we actually haven't covered at all yet on the podcast. It's going to be a new subject about the brain and figuring out why we do the really dumb things that we do sometimes.

Patty: Which is kind of our specialty, isn't it?

Ann: Doing the dumb things or talking about [inaudible 00:00:46] I guess.

Patty: I think my specialty is probably doing them.

Sue: The book, let's just start with that, and who that we are going to be covering is a researcher and a clinician and his name is Stephen Porges and the book title, it's a mouthful, it's Polyvagal Theory: the Foundation of Emotions, Attachment, Communication and Self-Regulation. I thought I would start with a very embarrassing example. Is that going to be okay?

Ann: Sure. We would be delighted to hear your example.

1 Sue: Exactly. You would be delighted for me to humiliate myself. Speaking of humiliating myself actually, let me give an update for our listeners that we are super excited about – that we are watching this podcast for [inaudible 00:01:25] and we can't believe it, but we are spreading around the world and I wanted to do a quick shoot-out to our listeners internationally in particular, and we've got all these countries – people listening from ...

Patty: We are now up to 71 countries.

Sue: That's right. We are all over the United States. So we really want to know that we are thinking of you and we are giving you a big shoot-out in a big way and we hope that you communicate with us and tell us what you think and any ideas you have and so hello and welcome. I say that as I give my [inaudible 00:01:53] example, as I realize that the world is listening. The reason I am willing to offer this is because I don't think I am alone, and that is that by day I am a professional and a successful therapist and happily married and have kids thriving. I appear to be an ordinary person mildly successful I would say. However, at a drop of a hat, I can lose my mind. I can get triggered and I think of it as [turtling 00:02:21] up. What that looks like is I have trouble making eye contact, I kind of go mute, I don't understand what's going on, I feel like almost fiddling out, you know what I mean. I would really withdraw and efforts to reach me feel invasive or intrusive. To me it's very obvious what's going on and what needs to happen, but apparently it's not that obvious to everybody else.

Patty: Right. Because everybody gets it wrong.

Ann: They pick up your shell and start throwing it against the wall.

Patty: That's right. It's like everybody is tapping on and like ...

Sue: I use that as an – like I want to understand what the heck is going on, and there's this new research, relatively new and again it's different than what we've talked about before with [Segal 00:03:06] and with interpersonal neurobiology, and it's called Polyvagal theory. Does anybody want to pick up from there, we will kind of keep digging into this. It's a more advanced or it's a more detailed kind of digging in a little deeper than what we've done before.

Ann: Right.

Patty: I think it's basically talking about how our nervous system can react to safety or lack of safety.

Sue: Yeah, so why do I turtle up Patty?

Patty: You turtle up because you think that the situation is unsafe and you can't figure out how to get away, so you go in.

2 Sue: Right. That's exactly right. So what Dr. Porges has, through a lot of research, and – he actually does a lot of work with autism in particular. He has basically thrown out on this theory – not thrown it out, but really refined it that the nervous system has basically from an evolutionary standpoint going from reptilian to mammal – and he does actually talk about turtles, so it's not an accident that I think of it that way. Probably some of you listening might relate to some of this that basically there's kind of three different systems in our body. The three different systems were designed to adapt to three different things. The three different things are safety, there's a safety system, and there's a threat system and there is a danger system.

Patty: All these systems are there to keep us engaged in the world in the safest way. I mean, we are talking about survival and our bodies are intricately developed to have three systems to be able to help us engage in the world and protect us when there's threat and danger.

Sue: That's right. They are evolutionarily stacked on top of each other. What's unique about this is that the way we've talked about it before, is almost more of like that its chunked, like that it's one thing. This we are beginning down to differentiate it, that it's actually three separate systems that can get activated. What we are going to do today is we are going to go through those different systems and I want you as you are listening to really think about – because you have this inside you, and so I want you to think about how you relate and what it looks like for you when you are in any of these three systems. Where do we want to begin?

Patty: One of the things you had said for the listeners is that we generally divide it into two things and we are adding the third. I was just going to clarify what I think you mean by the two things. We talk quite a bit about how to feel safe and open and that when we feel threatened or we think there's danger, we go into more of a fight or flight mode, and I think for the listeners that's a pretty familiar thing. You either feel safe or if you feel threatened you go into this activation and you are ready to snarl at somebody or run from them, and that's our survival, and the [inaudible 00:05:39] we've talked about and conceptualized it for so many years and watched Stephen Porges really adding in his third part is what we are going to speak about.

Sue: Right.

Patty: We are going to add to it.

Sue: Right.

Ann: Well, and I would say just a little bit differently, which is yes ...

Patty: And develop the safety part in a much more complex way instead of you are safe or you are threatened, but the safety and what that safety is about and the social engagement.

Sue: Exactly, that's right and that's perfect.

3 Ann: He developed a term, and he coined it himself, it's called neuroception, and that's a fancy way for saying that we are scanning and we are perceiving outside of our awareness. We are not thinking about it but we are perceiving all the time, safety and danger. The best example – let's just talk about safety for example, and that's where you had started Patty. When we are in the green zone, we are not even necessarily aware of it, we are not consciously society I feel safe. When you see a child playing, and they are really spontaneously playing and their smile takes up their whole face and their eyes are smiling and they are cuddling – he talks about something called immobilization without fear, and that is a sign of real safety. It's like when two lovers are holding one another and your body is really still, but there's no fear, that's gold. That's a sign that you are in the green zone totally. That's what all this is leading to, is we want to maximize our green zone and what that is called is the ventral vagal system, it's the 10th cranial nerve, and Patty do you want to tell us a little bit about the 10th cranial nerve?

Patty: Sure. Basically, there's two parts of this nerve, two branches, and one is called the ventral vagal and it's a myelinated nerve system, and what that means is it's faster. It's more modern. It's a later developed system. Basically it controls your cranial muscles. If you are making facial expressions, if you are humming or singing, it also controls your throat and your vocal cords, so when you are doing those things, you are actually stimulating the ventral vagal.

That's great, and that's the green part, that's what we want to be doing. And so let's just say for example we are sitting there, and a person comes, a stranger comes in, it's a little bit easier to talk about it from a child's perspective, but it equally true, let's say at a party or just socially that someone comes in, the first thing that we do is we assess them socially. We look, our ears perk up, and maybe we engage them, either with our eyes, like we make eye contact and we are scanning to see is it a friend or a foe. If that goes well, then they signal to us non-verbally usually, maybe verbally, they smile, their eyes give us something. It's always good to be staying in the green zone. Let's say we pick up something a little creepy or they snarl as we said earlier Ann or just that they are flat, their face – actually what's interesting is immobilization of the face means that they are armored that they are not in the – they aren't in the green zone. Guess what happens, if they are not in the green zone, what's that going to do my green zone?

Ann: It's probably going to stimulate you and make you feel threatened.

Patty: That's right.

Sue: It's unconscious.

Patty: You don't even know you are responding.

Sue: Exactly. One of the things about neuroception is it's outside of our awareness. We don't even know it. So, the next stage, so remember we talked about three systems. The first system is safety and the green zone. There's two red zones, so the first red zone is that if that doesn't work and I check out the person and they don't give a good vibe, then I am going to get activated and

4 that's kind of what you were talking about Ann about the fight/flight, like maybe I will give them a mean look back, or ...

Patty: Leave the party.

Sue: Or leave the party. Or let's say it's me and my partner, and he or she is rude when they come in, and I am like hey what's up, and then they are still rude. Then either I am going to aggress back or maybe I withdraw right. Now I am activated and I am in fight/flight mode.

Ann: So much of that Sue, just a reminder, is instinctual. It's not our conscious process. I think that's so hard because it feels conscious – if your partner snaps at you and you snap back, how often do you go, but you snapped at me first. It's sort of irrelevant but what it is, is your body are both matching each other in this feeling of feeling danger. Like you look at me and what you are talking about Patty now that your eyes are squinting and those things in your face that are saying I am upset, I am angry and you are communicating a sense of danger to me, then my body is prepped, and it's instinctual. It's a part of us that are just nature calling us to, remember, to prepare us to protect us.

Sue: You know Ann that's really valuable and part of what I hope we can just talk about a little bit is how you can recognize those things and do things to change, to recruit your body to change your state.

Ann: I totally want to get to that for sure, because we want to know, we want to learn how to go from the red zone back to the green zone.

Sue: Absolutely.

Patty: Even before we get into that Sue, take us into the part about trying to understand the other red zone, because I think that's the really the need of what we really want to understand, before we get [crosstalk 00:10:59]

Sue: Yeah, you're very excited about that, aren't you?

Patty: [crosstalk 00:11:01].

Sue: Just one other quick example of this red zone and then I will promise, I will get to the other one, but like the activated red zone is – what we are talking about just for those of you who are kind of following on a little more depth is that that's a sympathetic system where you are activated, you are going to move, you are going to get into safety in a more – you are going to fight the sabertooth tiger, or you are going to be able to run from the sabertooth tiger. You are armored now. Now you have your spear in your hand, and so that's kind of like let's go back to the fight with the partner, and sometimes that sounds like, well, I said, I am sorry, what else do you want to. You can hear that there's not the open-hearted, and a lot of times you don't know

5 that you are armored, and you think you've checked off the box. What else do they want from you? I don't know if you will can relate to that, but then what you are putting out is red, but you are not aware of it, and then guess what you are going to get back, is probably not green.

Patty: Lots more red.

Sue: Exactly. But I said I am sorry Patty, like, what's the problem.

Ann: That's an apology.

Sue: You are relentless.

Patty: I don't know listeners if you can relate to any of this, but if you can begin, the part of the idea is that we can begin to read our bodies and sort of outsmart these old – the Polyvagal system right. So Ann, we've got the green zone of the safety, the red zone of activation and the sympathetic system of fight/flight and then the third one that Ann is pointing out is the dorsal vagal system which is the other part of the nerve and that is where we drop down and that is when there's a neuro perception – well, actually I guess that's true that there's the perception, it's usually non-conscious, there's a perception even sometimes of life threat. Somebody else might not see that but there's something that feels to the body, to the unconscious very, very dangerous. That's the mouse that kind of passes out, in the cat's mouth and the cat kind of loses interest and puts the mouse down, and starts licking its paws and the mouse gets to get away. It often happens in sexual abuse, in severe trauma.

Sue: Yeah, and PTSD. If a veteran hears a horn go off and they feel like it's a siren, you know, and they are all of a sudden back in the warzone, ready to face combat. It doesn't matter that that was a car horn. It still feels like a life and death threat.

Patty: That's exactly right.

Sue: That's the dropping all the way down, and that goes back to the parasympathetic, and the parasympathetic is what controls the high activation so a lot of – earlier when I talked about me turtling up, some of that has to do with like just dropping all the way down, it's a way of finding safety when there's a perception of real danger. Sometimes there really is that danger, the sabertooth tiger actually has you, and the thing is bigger than you and there's really no way out, or sometimes there's just a perception of that. Or maybe you have used that defense at some point in your life and so it's kind of already habituated.

Patty: Yeah, it's grooved.

Ann: So that when you get particularly frightened you just kind of go there.

6 Sue: I like what you are saying, how you are saying it. It's an intense threat that hits us, and so what makes us go to a fight or flight in that one red zone versus when we feel danger versus the intense threat where we actually drop that down into a more parasympathetic effect, like the mouse or Opossum is a great example.

Ann: Yeah, opossum is a great example.

Sue: Playing dead. They are not actually playing – their whole body just went dead.

Ann: That's right.

Sue: Their system shuts down, the heart goes lower, their digestive tract slows down, so you have an actual physiological response that is not conscious, you didn't choose it, but it's because not only do you feel a great deal of threat, you feel trapped or you are trapped, or you have the perception that you can't get out. And so your body, if you think about it, is doing it to protect yourself, because if you can't run and we can't outrun a sabertooth tiger and we know it, like you cannot run, so your body is going to drop down and it's actually, for many, they can be functional in a sense of deep threat where you are trapped. Patty you talked a little bit about that, talking about the functional elements of what happens when you drop down that low, what does it provide for us in our survival?

Patty: Sure. Yeah, I mean, if you are the mouse, what it provides for you is that in some cases the predator would go away, and you will survive. If the predator sticks around, it raises your pain tolerance so that if you actually are killed or injured you won't feel it as much as you would if you weren't in the dorsal vagal system. It's a defense of last resort.

Sue: Defense of last resort or protective, and you mentioned, if we bring it to a human level, you mentioned PTSD or sexual abuse, and its [inaudible 00:16:00] touch on that, because you are really sensitive. If something is happening to you as a child or even as adult, and it isn't overwhelming your system and you are trapped, the idea of being able to distance and disassociate and ...

Patty: Its life saving.

Sue: You are not as aware in your body and you leave your body. It protects you in pain, and it helps you disassociate. You even don't have as much of a memory in some ways of it, because you have distanced, so it's a really protective at the time a threat and what you mentioned, Patty, and we talked about habituated is that we can habituate to it. And then it's not as functional when a bell goes off, or your partner is there and your partner is really not threatening to you, but your body is responding in a real traumatic way.

Patty: Right, and then the other half of that though is like you say, that in the world now, or like not anymore, not in an abusive situation, if somebody is turtling up on you, then it's very

7 deregulating for the other person. Because what the other person needs is again the green zone, social engagement. They want eye contact, they want to hear a soft voice, and if you've dropped into that dorsal vagal ...

Sue: Dorsal vagal.

Patty: Yeah, you are unavailable and that is frightening to the other person, but frightening in a sense of stimulating. And so they try harder and as they try harder, you turtle [crosstalk 00:17:19] on the show. You are right.

Sue: Going against the rule.

Patty: It's sort of a feedback loop that couples off and get caught in, you know, where – and this is really true with parents of autistic kids who can't make eye contact, who have a flat affect, and that stimulates the parents to keep trying harder and harder, try to make eye contact, to try and reach their children. In essence that harder and harder is really counterproductive. It's counterproductive, but I really love getting that other half in because it also sort of helps us have compassion for how much we need social engagement, just from the most fundamental level, that we are social animals, we are social creatures, and to lose that even for a moment is very threatening and very stimulating.

Sue: It feels very threatening.

Patty: [crosstalk 00:18:10] I think it is. Because when you think of the very early studies of infants, like Stern and things like that, when mother just even goes flat faced, the infant gets very dysregulated. I think of it is as a kind of fundamental need. As we are talking about this, so we are beginning to think about if you go low, the goal is to get like to look up, to reengage, to at least speak, to peek, like sometimes you are in different groups and the way that I think about it is like moving from isolation and withdrawal to any kind of contact and I call it peeking, speaking, take your time, but basically it's like almost seducing someone out of it, in a very slow, but yes I am interested, take your time, we'll come back to you, that sort of – that's the kind of feel of it. Then when it's high and it's activated it's more of containment and talking quietly.

Also you were talking earlier, before we were on the podcast about when you had a baby and the child was crying a lot, that you would hum. I thought that was a great example, because your vocal cords are actually invaded by your smart vagus and your social engagement system, when you sang to your child, you were actually stimulating the vagus nerve and you were calming yourself down, because all his crying had made you agitated, but you were also by singing making him calmer, because when we listen we actually have to use some of the muscles that are also invaded by the vagus nerve. And so the social engagement system is pulled back online and moved into that green zone. So both mother and child are both moved into the green zone.

8 Yeah, it's such a great example of just the natural, like, I didn't know any of that right. But I would get so upset and I didn't know anything else to do, but somebody had said lullabies right. So now you are right, like now I understand what that is or was. Thank heavens, but, for millennials, that appeal naturally did that, and just kind of chanting and humming and singing and lullabies as a way of regulating oneself so I totally agree.

Ann: Let's take a break for just a second, because this, I love talking with you guys. We are doing this podcast out of labors of love and it's a wonderful love because you can tell that we love this topic and we love our listeners who are interested in this topic. We have such appreciation and gratitude for a sponsor, we want to tell you about it, that's helping us produce this.

Patty: Yeah, we have a new sponsor, it's TheraNest and TheraNest provides practice management software for therapists, and so those of our listeners who are therapists, this might be of interest to you. You can contact them by going to our website and there's an ad on our website that will have a special offer just for our listeners that they put together. You can click that and it will take you to their website and it will explain all about the special offer.

Sue: For those of us that don't really love the business aspect of our profession, we feel gratitude for those kind of services.

Patty: That's right.

Sue: To jump back for a second, why we are talking about when you were saying the different ways that we want to help our listeners and ourselves recognize that these different systems because it's really hard not to get mad at your partner, because it seems so like if you just say would you just give me eye contact, look up and when you are upset and you are trying to talk to them, and they are turtled up and they are avoiding eye contact and not looking at you, it's really hard to feel it unjust, unfair. And then not to even realize that you are getting activated and stimulating, and you are coming further and more intense like we were speaking about it. And so it's not like this insight all of a sudden means that when your partner starts looking down and turtling up or you are the turtle and they start banging you, and saying stop it, that you are going to have all this awareness and insight, because we have to go back to that, this is really automatic and this is really deep inside of us. So it would be nice for us to talk about some strategies of how to get out of it when you see your partner activated and you are activated at the same time. Because that's probably the more common dynamic right, because the turtling up is really, really hard or the person that's raising their voice and gnarling their teeth, it's really hard not to feel our own activation.

Patty: That's right. Porges talks about the face, heart and as a system, and particularly the upper half of the face. And so that's one of the things to sort of emphasize is like this is a physiologically driven, it's in our body, like you said, it's not in our awareness, it's not conscious, nobody is doing this on purpose, but the whole point of this is to help us become more conscious

9 of it, and to give strategies. What we are going to do, just for time, so that we don't go on and on and on, is we are going to wrap this up pretty quickly, and then we are going to do a part 2 that's going to be nothing but talking about strategies, when you are in the red zone, how to get back to the green.

Sue: Or how to help someone else get back to the green.

Patty: That's right. But I just sort of just last thought is that in order to feel compassion for another person, there's no way to feel compassion if we are armed, and so the face, heart and like if we want to think of it as a portal, and so it's almost like, I mean – this is Porges' language is that one of the things about the nerve is that 80% of the information goes from the body to the brain, and 20% of it is muscular. Literally, this is just a hint of what's to come, that if we begin to consciously do things like make eye contact, soften our voice, breathe, in some situations just you know rub our arms, rub our shoulders, particularly neck. Because the nerve goes down the neck. We will talk in more detail about that and cover that, but the notion is that we are trying to give the body from the gut, and from all of these systems that its running up to the brain signals of safety. That's also going to come with our thoughts and what this is about is the more that you can understand what's happening, and that don't let the body be in charge that we are going to begin to be able to master and these old brain systems, they are very ancient.

Sue: Right, reptilian.

Patty: Yeah, and one of the things for our listeners to keep in mind is you are not doing something bad and you probably can't change it overnight, but patience and compassion for yourself and your partner or yourself and your child will help you master these systems.

Ann: That's right. Thanks for listening and we are going to, if you like this, then stay tuned, or go on to the very next episode, it's going to be part 2. Check us out on our website and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do, your favorite podcast platform. If you are already a subscriber, then please rate and review us, give us an honest rating, and review. We would really appreciate that. Our website is www.therapistuncensored.com. If you haven't yet, and if you are on our email list, we are going to be sending out, this is from a previous podcast, Dan Siegel offered very graciously a PDF of his founding article about interpersonal neurobiology. So we will probably by the time this is out, we would have sent it out to our current subscribers. If you would like a copy of that, then get on our email list, and we will send you a copy. Thanks for listening. See you around the bend.

Host: Therapist Uncensored is Ann Kelley, Patty Olwell and Sue Marriott. [Tamara Lindsey 00:26:20] edits the show.

[AUDIO ENDS]

[TU 18 Polyvagal Theory Part 1]

[00:26:37]