In this conversation, I talk with Dr. Arielle Schwartz about polyvagal theory and how it helps us understand trauma and rebuild a sense of safety. We dive into how the vagus nerve shapes our responses to safety and threat, and how complex PTSD from early developmental trauma impacts the nervous system. We also explore why social connection is a biological necessity and how co-regulation helps us heal.
The following is the raw transcript from my conversation with Dr. Schwartz.
Dr. Arielle Schwartz on Trauma Safety, and Recovery
Emma: [00:00:00] Today we are gonna be talking about how to restore your sense of safety when you’ve experienced trauma or chronic stress. And I am just so excited to have such an amazing guest today. It’s Dr. Arielle Schwartz. She has like written the book. She’s written eight of the books on this topic, and she has so much depth of knowledge as far as somatic approaches to healing trauma, polyvagal approaches.
EMDR also teaches trauma-informed yoga. She’s also written a book The Polyvagal Theory Workbook for trauma and I’ve gone through it. It’s great stuff. So today we’re gonna be talking about how trauma shows up in the body, how to restore your sense of safety. We do two exercises together where I get to release a little bit of trauma from my body.
And we talk about is healing from CPTSD really possible, like actually, and I think you’ll be really happy to hear the answer. So let’s jump in.[00:01:00]
Thank you so much for being here today. Really appreciate you taking the time outta your schedule to join us.
Arielle : Yeah. As I mentioned, I’ve really been looking forward to this. I admire you. I admire the information you put out there. I recommend it to lots of folks to listen to you.
Emma: Wow.
Arielle : And so it’s exciting to be part of your work.
Understanding Polyvagal Theory
Emma: Oh, thank you so much. That is like the highest praise. So I really appreciate that. Oh, okay. So today we’re gonna be talking about how to restore a sense of safety after trauma. And I was wondering if maybe we should start, would you be willing to do a quick overview of Polyvagal theory and how that works?
For the audience, she’s written her eighth book, which is the Polyvagal Theory Workbook, and I’ve just been working through it and I’m like, this is good stuff. So I’d love to hear your perspective.
Arielle : Yeah, I’m happy to, [00:02:00] I’m gonna give you polyvagal theory in a nutshell. How’s that?
Emma: Perfect. I love it.
Arielle : Alright, so there are some key elements that I think really help us understand what is polyvagal theory. Probably the first thing that I’ll name is that if we think about the name, polyvagal, poly refers to multiple, vagal is referring to the vagus nerve. Vagus nerve is our 10th cranial nerve. It’s a mind body superhighway of connection.
And this idea that we have multiple circuits of the vagus nerve basically means that we have from an evolutionary standpoint, one of those circuits is very much about social connection and sensing safety. We also have a circuit of the vagus nerve that is very much connected to the lower body, our digestive organs, our reproductive organs, and it’s often associated with the parasympathetic nervous system or our [00:03:00] capacity to go into a rest and digest state.
So why do we have multiple circuits of the vagus nerve? It’s maybe the kind of short answer to that is that if we think about going into stillness as mammals, and I’ll broaden this out beyond humans, in order to rest and stillness, we need to know that it’s safe enough that there’s not a predator out there, that there is not some danger lurking.
And so we utilize this upper vagal circuit and where that travels into this, the kind of fibers of the vagus nerve go into our sense organs, our eyes, our ears, as well as our ability to call out or express through our voice. And so we’re going to track our environment is are there cues of safety or are there cues of threat, or is there something super dangerous out there?
We’re gonna listen with our ears for cues of safety, [00:04:00] cues of threat, cues of danger, and depending on whether we’re receiving those cues of safety or threat, basically our vagus nerve helps our nervous system and our body respond to that without us even having to think about it. So what would be a cue of safety that allows us to rest, that allows us to go into stillness? A cue of safety might come from the loving gaze of another person. Where we really receive that kind smile, the body language, the facial expressions. Another cue of safety that we might receive is the voice tone that comes in through our ears that is basically letting you know through soothing tones.
I’m right here. I’ve got you. And if we think about an [00:05:00] infant that is totally dependent upon our caregivers, an infant is gonna rely on those cues that lets the infant know it’s safe to rest in the arms of my caretaker, because essentially they’re gonna protect me. They’re going to know whether there’s dangers out there.
They’re gonna give me the cues that let me know it’s safe enough and therefore I can rest into stillness in closeness to that person that’s going to protect me.
Emma: Yeah.
Arielle : One other phrase I’ll add here and then I’ll pause, but one other phrase that I’ll say is that, we think of this upper circuit of the vagus nerve as prioritizing connection as a biological imperative.
I need connection to you in order for my psychobiology, my body, my mind, my [00:06:00] capacity to digest my food, my capacity to to navigate this world. I need that connection. Especially as infants, we need those connections in order to survive.
Emma: A biological imperative. So if we’re feeling rejected or isolated or alone, or we don’t feel like anyone’s around us to support us, that feels like as real of a threat, as if, as some other physical threat was coming after us.
Arielle : Especially if that was true for us when we were young. One thing about my kind of career focus is on complex PTSD, especially as related to developmental trauma. And what that means is that it’s the accumulation of the experiences of lack of safety, of the dangerous experiences, of the rejections, of the not belonging of of the betrayals that may have gone on for many years.
[00:07:00] And when that begins in early childhood or even in infancy, we basically have an impairment now in that early wiring because that upper vagal pathway is experienced dependent. That basically means that I need those experiences of safety, those cues in order to develop that within myself so that now I can basically cultivate a sense of connection and safety on the inside, independent of whether someone else is there.
But that’s because I had enough of those early relational and of root systems that really support the treated crow.
Emma: Interesting. Yeah. And it makes so much sense. And I have four daughters and every one of them as a baby, they’re looking for your eyes. After they’re about three weeks old when they can focus their eyes, but they’re constantly scanning and looking for that eye contact.
They’re looking to see is there someone here? And we’re primed for [00:08:00] that, right? We’re wired to seek that safety. So when, especially children don’t get that, you’re saying that can impair the ability to feel that felt sense of safety throughout their lives. Yeah.
Polyvagal Theory: The 3 Levels of Trauma Response
Arielle : Yeah. So another key component of the polyvagal theory is this idea that we go through a tiered response to threat.
Emma: Oh, yeah.
Arielle : Meaning that we have kind of three levels that we go through in order to help us navigate a potential threat out there. The first of those is that if you know there I experience something that’s a cue of danger, I’m going to seek connection. I’m going to use this upper pathway.
Steve Porges, who developed the polyvagal theory, he refers to this as the social engagement system. The social engagement system is basically, can I make connection with you through eye contact or calling out for help that’s going to help resolve that potential threat. [00:09:00] If I cannot establish that sense of safety and connection through the social engagement system, the next layer of my threat response in this tiered response to threat is to go into the fight flight system, which is our sympathetic nervous system, you speak so much about this, and and, basically like how we mobilize our bodies to get away from the threat or protect ourselves from it.
Emma: That’s so good that you highlight that because it’s something I’m completely aware of and I forget to mention moving through those states.
Yeah. So if we talk about like a de, like I consider it a default state of safety, and then if something happens like, oh, I’m trying to think of a good example and I can’t, but the first thing people do when something is like startling is they scan and they look for someone, right?
Arielle : That’s right.
Emma: They look to connect with someone, oh, am I okay? And they look, their eyes get big and they’re looking for someone to connect with to create a sense to see if they’re okay. They’re safe.
Arielle : That’s right.
Emma: Or they’ll call out [00:10:00] Ha. Yeah. And that’s communication. That’s like communicating and they say, are you okay? Oh, yeah, okay. I’m okay. Yeah.
Arielle : It’s beautiful. It’s it’s built in kind of biologically wired in, and I think that’s what’s so important about the polyvagal theories, recognizing that like that that desire within us to reestablish connection or tend and befriend through relational sources of safety.
That is something that we’re wired for. And that I think sometimes we can feel a sense of shame, like, why can’t I handle it on my own? Or what’s wrong with me that I that I keep reaching for other people when I’m suffering, but actually that’s what we’re supposed to do. Set up for that.
Emma: And there’s so much cultural messaging that’s like self-help when it’s like, such individualized languaging, like our entire culture is full of individualized language. And it’s [00:11:00] other help, like connection help might be more like valid and actually fulfilling and restore that felt sense of safety more than just trying to be alone and feel like safe.
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Interesting. I love how you highlight that. That’s so good. Okay.
Arielle : All right. So if we go back to the tiered response to threat, and there’s three layers to this. So the first is social connection, the second is fight flight. But let’s say we can’t run away from that source of danger.
Let’s say we can’t fight back, we can’t protect ourselves. The next layer that can come in is the, basically a urge to withdraw, to hide, to get smaller, to feel fatigued, to feel disoriented, or what we can sometimes even see as a faint death or a faint response, a deep collapse within the nervous system.
That, once again is driven by the vagus nerve. So the sympathetic [00:12:00] nervous system is not a vagal. It’s not driven by the vagal system. But the social engagement system is the upper vagal pathway. And this what we call dorsal vagal, faint death response or faint response is driven by the lower vagal system that goes into our organs that also has a kind of safety mechanism built into it.
And the urge to get very still, to get small, to immobilize in the context of a threat, it’s if we look at the animal world we can see the ways in which going into stillness. And getting smaller or hiding would help an animal survive. The respiration rate gets very slow. The heart rate slows down in order to be less [00:13:00] noticeable by a potential predator out there.
And in the cases of what we would call a full vasovagal syncope, is a faint response that vasovagal syncope is basically taking us into a full on collapsed state in the way can think of a possum that also often accompanies nausea, dizziness, disorientation, sometimes loss of bowel control.
But if we go back to the animal world for a moment. Those experiences, if we go back to the possum, if the possum goes into a feigned death response, it often emits a foul smell. And if a predator approaches it and senses that says, “Ooh, like maybe you’ve been poisoned and if I eat you, I’ll get poisoned too.”
So we as humans have way of ways of deterring the predator out [00:14:00] there. Feigning death. Becoming less interesting, becoming smaller, hiding away, feeling like I I just wanna stay in bed. I have lots of conversations with a colleague of mine, Deb Dana, who also teaches a lot about applied polyvagal theory and psychotherapy.
And she and I have different ways of describing this. I call it like, I wanna go into my cocoon. And she calls it her duvet day. It’s like the day you just wanna pull the duvet up and be like, I’m not getting out of bed today.
Emma: Yeah. Yeah. You just wanna curl up, cover up, hide, not move. Yeah. I feel that.
The Fawn Response (People Pleasing) in Trauma and CPTSD
Emma: This is maybe a tangent, but where would you put the, like fawn response or the people pleasing response in the, within the polyvagal? I’ve heard various takes on this. I’d like to hear yours.
Arielle : Yeah. Yeah. So generally, the way that we think about the fawn response is we call it a hybrid nervous system state.
And that it’s [00:15:00] engaging that social engagement system, but there’s also a sympathetic vigilance. So now when we look at kind of both of those co activations of sympathetic, I know that there’s a threat out there. I’m trying to navigate, I’m trying to mobilize to take care of that threat. But how I mobilize, how I move in response to that threat is through taking care of you.
If I take care of you, maybe you won’t hurt me. Yeah. If I take care of you, maybe I can take care of you enough that you’ll take care of me. And so we recruit in a sense, that social engagement capacity to sense what somebody else is feeling, sense what they might be needing, and then we go into some kind of people pleasing or appeasement behavior in order to promote our own safety.
Emma: So within polyvagal, would that be a sympathetic state usually, or mixed state you would call, you would consider it a mixed [00:16:00] state, that’s what you were saying?
Arielle : Yes. Okay. That’s right. It’s a mixed state, so we can think of pulling in the recruiting, the vagus nerve of that social engagement system and coactivating the sympathetic mobilization.
Emma: Okay. Okay. That makes sense to me. That makes sense to me. I’ve heard some people place it within like the shutdown response or the dorsal vagal response. And that has never quite sat right with me because it is so activated. It’s such an activated state.
How Submission Shows Up in Complex PTSD
Arielle : Yeah there’s a closely related state to the fawn response that I think doesn’t get discussed as much. And this one we’ll call the submission response Yeah. And what happens here, and again, we’ll describe this as a hybrid or coactivation of nervous system states, but what happens here is I’m still recruiting my social engagement system in order to keep that biological imperative of connection up and running.
But the person [00:17:00] who is, who I’m trying to connect to, my attachment person or my partner, is also a source of harm. And so now in order to keep that biological imperative of connection, in order to uphold my need for relationship with you, I actually have to submit to the harm that’s occurring. I go into an immobilization, which would be that, that more collapsed state. And sometimes what happens with the submit state is that I have to dissociate. I have to dissociate from what my body knows about that harm. In order to stay in relationship with that same person.
Emma: Yeah. So it might be like, like a teenager who’s parent is really controlling, or it just setting really strong boundaries that they really don’t like and they say, fine, I don’t care. [00:18:00] I don’t care. That’s a form of dissociation. I’m not gonna feel this anymore. Or fine, I’ll just go along with it.
And that could be on various levels of severity. We could take that to much more severe state, but it’s like, I don’t care. Or I’m just not gonna care, or I’m gonna stay in this relationship, but I’ll be numb and I’ll just give in like that
Arielle : And I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.
Emma: And that makes sense part. Yeah. I’ll just go along with it. I’ll comply, I’ll be submissive. Try and not make things hurt worse. And yeah. And you’ll see this in marriages where people go through these stages where they’re like, hey, we’re in love, we’re great, we’re awesome. And then they go through oh, we’re fighting a lot.
And then when they go to the last state, it’s we’re detached. We don’t really care about each other. We don’t really talk about the issues anymore. We just and then they’re like just living as roommates. I really appreciate polyvagal theory and I think it’s so applicable.
How Trauma Shapes the Nervous System
Before we talk about how to restore a sense of safety, how would you describe [00:19:00] trauma? Can you give us that in a nutshell?
Arielle : Yeah, there you go. What is trauma? Anything that overwhelms our capacity to integrate an experience. Ordinary human capacity to make sense of, integrate it into my overall sense of identity and who I am as a person to make that experience that I had useful in some way to process it, if we wanna use that word, to process through what happened.
And I like the definitions of trauma that are out there that emphasize more what has happened on the inside of an individual versus what was the event itself? Because I think if we identify trauma as an external event, it feels like it just happened to me and there’s nothing I can do about it.
When we locate trauma as the internal event, the emotions, the somatic [00:20:00] experience that I had in relationship to something, then I can actually do something with that interior landscape of who I am.
Emma: I love that. I love that. And I, one of the things I’m noticing a lot on social media is there’s a lot of conversations about, hey, the reason you feel insecure is because your parents did such and such when you were a child.
And I don’t wanna invalidate that. I don’t wanna say like that that’s not the case. And of course there’s a broad spectrum of parenting out there, but, what happens is some of the most comforting messages out there on social media are basically saying trauma was not your fault. It’s caused by your parents.
It’s in the past and now you’re broken and because of it. And it’s no. Trauma’s a response, a learn like a response to an event that happened, and it’s a response that’s continuing to go on in your nervous system because you haven’t integrated it. And because it’s continuing in the present moment, it’s, I’m not saying it’s your fault, [00:21:00] but there is an opportunity here in this moment to practice responding differently to those experiences.
Not to invalidate someone’s experience, but we gotta remind people that we do have capacity within our nervous system to create change.
Arielle : Yeah. And there’s a few pieces to name about this. One is that if you put several people in the same situation,
Emma: Oh yeah.
Arielle : Right. Let’s say a car accident, not everyone in that car might would feel traumatized by what happened.
It depends on were we able to respond, did we feel effective? One of the classic studies done by a colleague of mine, [inaudible], speaks about a car accident in which one person in the car went into more of a collapsed immobilization. Like basically then
Emma: Froze up,
Arielle : And the partner mobilized, pulled her out of the car before it caught on fire. Saved their lives, right? Yeah. And so the, even though it was [00:22:00] objectively a traumatic event that they both went through, she suffered from more post-traumatic stress because her body basically went into a place where she struggled to respond, but because he took action in that moment, he didn’t have the same symptoms afterwards of post-traumatic stress.
And I’ve seen that in my work so often that, if we were able to complete an action, then our bodies feel in some sense, like the process had an arc and I’m okay. I did something. And Peter Levine, who develops somatic experiencing, he often says that what is housed in the interior experience of post-traumatic stress is the incomplete actions or the thwarted actions that didn’t get to happen.
I didn’t get to climb my way out or [00:23:00] call for help or reach for connection or say no.
Emma: Yeah. And then that gets stuck and your body gets trapped in that state ’cause it hasn’t moved through it. Yeah,
Arielle : That’s right. And that ties us back to the nervous system. When we look through the lens of the nervous system, when we have an incomplete action we’re basically cycling back around either the experience of an urge to flee and we’re always looking for the exit plan. We’re restless, we’re irritable we don’t feel comfortable resting in stillness in ourselves. Maybe conversely, we’re constantly stuck in a fight response. We’re always looking for the next battle.
And again, it becomes hard to rest. There’s a lot of muscular tension. We feel vigilant. Or sometimes where we get stuck is in that place of, no matter what I do, it’s not gonna make a difference. So what’s the [00:24:00] point of trying? And that state of collapse is what is known internally by the individual, and therefore we just keep returning to what is known.
Emma: Yeah. When our stress levels increase or whatever, we’re quick to revert back to that.
Completing the Trauma Response: Healing PTSD and CPTSD
Emma: Yeah. Yeah. I often getting stuck in this trauma response, I often use the analogy of it. It’s like watching the Lion King and right after Mufasa dies, turning it off ’cause that’s so stressful. Now, every time you think of The Lion King, the only thing you can think of is that stress response, and if Simba like never if the, movie stopped right there, Simba’s stuck in shame and helplessness and guilt for the rest of his life. If we just stop the movie there and if we keep playing through that movie, we come to this place where he works through his shame and he understands he wasn’t actually at fault.
And he goes back to Pride Rock and he takes action to save Pride Rock, right? [00:25:00] He’s mobilizing and he’s working through this process instead of getting stuck, like turning off the movie right when that stopped. And then he has this lovely experience with his dad. His spirit dad and, it’s all resolved.
And I think that if only resolving trauma was easy as watching a movie, but that is the process, right? Working [inaudible].
Arielle: It’s such a perfect movie example. And thank you for bringing that in. And I have another kind of example along similar lines that I use when I’m teaching about the kind of processing through the incomplete experience of trauma.
Our minds are always looking for how does the story end? It’s just how we think, right? Yeah. And I remember one time I was going to teach a training for therapists and and I was traveling from Colorado where I live to Ohio, and I had started the movie a little bit too late into the airplane flight.
And so by the time we landed, we had, I had 20 minutes of the movie yet unwatched, right?
Emma: Yeah. There you [00:26:00] go.
Arielle: And it was a great movie, but my mind for the rest of the evening was like, how did it end? Did it end this way? Did it end that way? Do I wanna Google it? Because then my mind can finally rest. Do I wanna wait till I get on the return flight to watch the ending of the right?
But that’s how, that’s what happens with trauma is that when we have the incomplete experience there is some way in which our brains are basically wired to live on repeat inside of the weight. How is it gonna end? What’s the ending of this story? And how can I take an active part in creating the ending of this story?
Polyvagal Theory: Building Safety in the Body
Arielle: And that’s partially gonna lead into this next question of like, how do we create safety?
Emma: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things you’re describing is something that can be done with narrative therapy, right? People can write out their trauma story and say, with an ending, and they call this a contamination story of and [00:27:00] that’s how I got broken.
That’s how my life got ruined. Or you can write this story and say, okay, let’s write a redemption story at the second half of this, and we’re gonna, even if it hasn’t happened yet, let’s visualize this. But that’s a form of cognitive therapy. That’s a form of like word therapy. How do we do this with our nervous system? How do we do this with our bodies?
Arielle : Yeah. And I think we need both. Like I just wanna pause on the narrative piece on this. I one of my books is called the Post-Traumatic Growth Guidebook. And the purpose of that book was basically to guide the reader through a narrative therapy journey of how do you write through your own trauma story.
Emma: Ooh, I love it.
Arielle : And the book includes polyvagal theory and it includes somatics. And so it’s weaving in the both end because as humans we are storytellers. And in some ways we also, as part of healing, need that truth telling. We need our stories to be known by us and to be heard by others in order to feel validated [00:28:00] and in order to have some redemptive elements to it.
And then let’s include the body. So when we look at the remnants of trauma as they live inside of us, we might notice chronic tension patterns, chronic vigilance patterns, the way that it interrupts our sleep, the way that it interrupts our digestion or our like all of those rhythms of that are also where trauma intersects physically with our health, right?
Emma: Oh yeah.
Arielle : If we’re in chronic states of fight, flight and that sympathetic nervous system, that in essence is living on repeat. We are basically staying in more of an elevated heart rate, elevated respiratory rate. It’s going to impair that rest and digest system. And conversely, sometimes where we’re stuck in post-traumatic responses is in more of that [00:29:00] collapse, depression, nothing’s gonna make a difference, fatigue, malaise.
Emma: I have no appetite. I can’t feel anything. I can’t even cry. Like I feel dead inside. That dissociate, but like in the body, right? That the heavy feeling.
Arielle : That’s right. Yeah. So let’s start there. Let’s say that heaviness, that again, maybe depressive thinking or more despairing thoughts are where we’re stuck.
One of the phrases that we sometimes use in the applied polyvagal theory model, and this comes from Deb Dana, is this idea of climbing up the polyvagal ladder in the sense that we have to go from that dorsal vagal shutdown and collapse back through mobilization. In order to come back to social connection. So we think about reversing that tiered [00:30:00] response to threat.
Emma: So we can’t go from a state of shutdown to a state of I feel calm, safe, and relaxed. We have to go through like a little bit in an activated state. Yeah.
Arielle : Sometimes, and I’ll say that that’s one of the trajectories. It doesn’t mean that we always have to do that. There are actually ways of layering in that sense of relational safety into that collapse and shut down.
Emma: Okay.
Arielle : In a sense, help us to maybe then reclaim mobilization. So I don’t always put it quite as linear. And I think that the field is continuing to understand this and that’s what’s beautiful about it. But very often, at some point in the trauma recovery journey, we do need to remobilize, we do need to embrace our stress response to befriend it and to recognize its value in helping us to [00:31:00] feel empowered and alive and energized, right?
Creating Safety in Your Environment After Trauma
Arielle : So that if we are feeling collapsed, how do we re-embrace a little bit of, all right, I can look around, right? I’m going to just model for a moment the one of the most simple and subtle re mobilizations that is so necessary for our nervous system. Which is literally to use our orienting response and to find something that serves as a cue of safety. And even though it’s a subtle movement, I am still turning my head.
I am look, looking with my eyes and whether that point of connection and safety [00:32:00] is with another person, right here with you, or whether that’s point of connection is through an object or an item from nature, a plant, or if I look out my window, I see our sunflowers in our backyard. It’s late summer, and the finches love to land on them, and it’s such a delight to watch them.
They’re like acrobats. They hang upside down. Sometimes the squirrels get on them, and that’s really fun, pulling on those little seeds.
Emma: Awesome. Yeah.
Arielle : But like all of a sudden you can feel like, oh, I’m orienting my attention to something other than the trauma as it lives inside of me, or as it lives inside of inside of the mental stories about that I’m orienting to something that is, even if it’s neutral, it’s a sign of okayness right now.
Emma: Yeah. I love that. And I saw that exercise in your book and I thought, oh, this is such a simple and [00:33:00] basic exercise, but it like, there’s two things that send cues to the body and one is your outside environment, which is safe usually, right? Your environment in your room, I’m actually safe here. And that sends a message like, through your eyeballs, into your body and your, nervous system, but also just the act of moving your head and opening your eyes and expanding your peripheral vision.
That also sends a message from your body up through your nervous system to your brain to say, I’m, I like, if I can move my eyes and I can see around me like I am safe.
Arielle : That’s right. That’s right. It’s beautiful. And we actually need it’s one of the reasons why we need safe enough environments now to unwind the trauma.
And it also speaks to one of the biggest challenges in our world is that sometimes the trauma is ongoing and there isn’t enough current safety to heal from the past. And so instead we’re still bracing. And [00:34:00] when I am working with individuals where there is ongoing exposure to trauma, we need an essence like safe hubs in the midst of this world. So we can find the smaller temporary spaces, where in this current moment is it safe enough to reorient to yourself, your breath, your body without feeling chronically overwhelmed?
Emma: Yeah. It’s so easy to do with our ability to hear about pain and suffering or threats in the world.
It’s so easy to feel like we’re always unsafe. And so I like that. I like two things you said. One is safe enough, I’m safe enough now, and to focus on like a hub, an area like a, or even sometimes I think about this as oh, I can’t do everything to make the whole world safe. I can’t do everything to [00:35:00] eliminate all the threats that I might read in the New York Times or whatever.
But I can, within my sphere, within my home, I can foster safety in my backyard. I can foster safety with my children. I can try and be a safe place for them, and I can feel safe with them.
Arielle : Yeah. And you just named something so key in this, which is that when I am capable of generating that within myself, I can also then generate it outside of myself.
How Safety Ripples Outward: The Power of Co-Regulation
So it brings us back to another key element of the polyvagal theory, which is something that we call co-regulation. When I am regulating my nervous system or maybe receiving the co-regulation from a safe enough environment, I can then become a co-regulation for others, in this case, your children, right? And so it be, it becomes something that, that is a bit of a ripple effect outward [00:36:00] as we generate more of that positive state.
Emma: Yeah. And I immediately felt that interacting with you, like you emanate that and it helps me calm down ’cause I get a little worked up about all the things I have to do for my interviews.
And so like I can see you expressing that and we all, I think we can all, I hope everyone can identify someone in their lives who they can interact with that helps them feel a little bit safe or secure. A lot safe or secure would be great. I think in your book you mentioned that, right? Talking about identifying a safe person or even visualizing a safe person who’s not present.
Arielle : Yeah. Yeah, it’s true. And sometimes we can draw upon kinda real people in our lives and sometimes we have to draw upon allies, even allies that we’ve never met, but allies that have been, like maybe a public figure or a historical figure that have served [00:37:00] as representatives of what that safe relationship could feel like.
And one of my favorite examples of this, and someone I grew up with, and maybe not as relevant for younger generations, but I grew up watching Mr. Rogers.
Emma: Oh yeah.
Arielle : I loved Mr. Rogers. If the viewers here have not seen the documentary about his show, I highly recommend it because it, you just bring your tissues with you.
It’s so beautiful. Because what he intended in his show that was on PBS Public Broadcasting System was to be that offering of validation and kindness and generosity and compassion for children really throughout our country. And I’m gonna say beyond. And he’s someone that I can pull on in my consciousness as a presence that brings that feeling of how you know, of what [00:38:00] goodness should feel like. And we can pull on spiritual presences and we can pull on even our animal presences. Our pets as those allies of what safety can and should feel like.
Emma: I love it. I love it. Mr. Rogers is your safe person. I love it. I think we could all come up with someone like that in our lives.
Arielle : I hope so.
Emma: That’s cool.
Arielle : I hope so.
Polyvagal Theory in Practice: Yoga, Meditation, and Breathwork
Emma: Yeah. Okay. Do you have another exercise or activity you’d be willing to share that can help us restore our sense of safety?
Arielle : Yeah part of what, for me as a somatic practitioner and as a yoga teacher, part of what I come back to again and again are what are the sources of safety that do live inside of us, that therefore, no matter where we are in the world, no matter what we’re doing, we can tap into that, which comes with us everywhere.
Emma: Yeah.
Arielle : And [00:39:00] and this doesn’t mean that we don’t also need each other. This is not a replacement for the social forms of connection and safety, but it’s a once we have the foundation of those co-regulating sources of connection, we can then carry that inside of us. For example, right before coming in to do this interview with you, I spent an hour on my yoga mat, which is pretty much my morning routine.
I have meditation practice, I have a yoga practice, and the practices that I engage in, which are basically an applied polyvagal theory in yoga, or I just generally call it vagus nerve yoga, and it’s my YouTube channel. You can can find it under Dr. Arielle Schwartz. But there’s basically lots of tools that we have inside of us.
And the basics that I’ll share here are your breath and your posture, your spine. Because when we think about [00:40:00] both of those and I’ll, share about each one and I’ll share just some basic practice around this, is that your breath mirrors your nervous system. Every inhalation will key in a little bit of your sympathetic nervous system.
Every exhalation brings in a little bit of parasympathetic quieting.
Emma: Yeah.
Arielle : When we look at the health of the autonomic nervous system, and this relates to safety, what we want to see is this ability to move pretty fluidly between sympathetic and parasympathetic. We feel unsafe if we’re stuck in sympathetic.
Activation, vigilance, irritability, restlessness, anxiety, panic. And we feel unsafe. If we’re stuck in the parasympathetic nervous system, we feel shut down heavy again, more depressed, more despair, more collapse. So when we look at the health of the autonomic nervous system, we are wanting to restore this [00:41:00] rhythm of sympathetic, parasympathetic.
Yeah. It’s built right into your breath. Oh, yeah. Our physiology mirrors that. So the basic practice is rhythmic breathing. When I inhale for, let’s say four to five seconds, and I exhale four to five seconds, I’m cultivating this rhythm of my nervous system, and I’m maximizing on that.
Conversely, if I’m breathing erratically, which I won’t do very long ’cause it feels terrible. But even just a few breaths like that, we can get that sense of erratic breathing being more linked to that form of erratic breathing to panic and anxiety.
Emma: Yeah.
Arielle : Conversely, if I’m breathing shallow, almost imperceptible, you can sense how that breath pattern would be linked [00:42:00] more to shut down and depression. So our rhythmic breathing that allows for an even inhale and exhale is restoring the rhythm of the nervous system. And from the bottom up, from your body to your brain via your vagus nerve, sending signals of safety back to the brain.
I’m gonna link it to one more piece and we’ll breathe together again. But the posture is also a mirror of our nervous system. So when we think about curling forward, totally valid shape, valid when we need to [00:43:00] grieve, valid when we’re sad, valid when we feel helpless or powerless, we just don’t wanna live here all of the time, and that’s a parasympathetic shape.
We sometimes need to curl upon ourselves, right? In yoga, we would go into a child’s pose or a forward fold, and it allows us to make contact with what our body knows from this shape. And in its opposite, sometimes we go into spinal extension. This is going to lift my gaze, it’s going to bring more breath into the upper chest.
It’s going to be more sympathetic in nature. I’m going to be very aware of my surrounds, and I’m able to respond to what’s happening out there. So a spinal extension is more sympathetic in nature. We want it, but we don’t wanna be stuck here. [00:44:00] So when we’re looking at the health of the autonomic nervous system as related to posture, once again, we can see how rhythmic postural transitions like in a yogic cat cow, or even a seeded cat cow. We’re basically restoring the rhythmic integrity of the nervous system.
Emma: Okay.
Arielle : So when we put it all together, my favorite practice, and I love it, you’re like, oh yeah, I feel it.
Emma: Every time you talk about breath though, it brings your awareness and you’re like, oh, yeah. Don’t forget to breathe, Emma.
Arielle : We all do, right? We all do. I think what I love about polyvagal theory is it’s a compassionate way to understand ourselves, our tendencies, and our symptoms. It’s so important when we speak about trauma recovery to not use these things against ourselves.
Emma: Right.
Arielle : If only I could breathe, if only I were blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. [00:45:00] Our tendencies to hold our breath, our tendencies to breathe shallowly, our tendencies to be stuck in kind of postural inefficiencies, if you wanna think about it that way. That’s just called being human. So as we layer in breath posture, and let’s add in compassion.
Guided Seated Yoga to Restore Safety from PTSD
Those are all kind of recipes for restoring a sense of safety. And if we put this together in a practice, a very simple one that in yoga, we call the Robin’s Breath. And I’ll guide this here is with your hands on your shoulders, you inhale, you lift your spine, maybe even lift your chin, open your elbows on the exhale pattern, we find the opposite.
We curl inward, we let our chin tuck, elbows come to touch, and then we move rhythmically. Finding your rhythm with breath and movement open [00:46:00] and closing back in.
And very often when we do this, we also find the areas where maybe our spine feels sticky or maybe even a little bit painful. And then you get to know what your body knows, what it’s holding on your behalf. So say for example for me was I go into this kind of curling forward and I feel into some of the tension that sits between my shoulder blades, I might pause and just breathe right here two or three times, right?
Just acknowledging, oh man, it could be so tight in there sometimes. Can I feel into that with some compassion and then open back up. Opening the eyes reorienting to the safe enough here and now even as [00:47:00] we attend to where the body houses tension. Or pain from the past. And just two more breaths. Your rhythm, your sensing into yourself. Yeah.
Emma: Feels good.
Arielle : It is good. And it’s simple. It’s a practice we can do, even sitting at our desks.
Emma: I love it.
Arielle : Especially if we’ve been sitting at the computer a long time. We get into good postural inefficiencies or my favorite this one. Ooh. Yeah. So we have to restore. But notice, and I’m sure for our viewers too, notice the subtle shifts from a relatively short practice.
Emma: I love it. Yeah. I felt myself becoming more aware of my heaviness and my tension back [00:48:00] here. And then as I breathed into it, I felt like laughing a little bit because I was like, oh yeah, it’s like, that release, like a little bit of like it’s softening up and yeah, like it was very, I really liked that.
Thank you for sharing that. That’s fun. Yeah. And of course there’s always the thinking part of my brain that’s am I doing this right? Am I doing this right? It’s it’s okay, just you can be there, but just go back to just feeling it.
How Neuroplasticity Restores Safety after Trauma and CPTSD
Arielle : The truth is there is no right or wrong way to do these practices. And I think that’s such an important element of it because the more that we get to know our bodies, the more that we allow ourselves to follow sensation and feel comfortable moving towards what the body holds for us. And that can take time. And something that we were speaking about just a little bit early on, I think even before we started recording officially, is just this idea of can we really restore a sense of safety? Is that really possible? And [00:49:00] when we’re up against a lot of kind of neurological wiring of trauma that may be accumulated over many years, what we need to recognize is that to restore a sense of safety as a new baseline requires repeated practice. When we look at the research on neuroplasticity and what helps support us to change in a positive direction, and Rick Hanson has some beautiful research on this with something he calls the Heal Protocol, right? He talks about how we have to counteract those negativity biases or the ways in which we are again, via survival, orienting towards what is wrong and what are the threats because we, as we orient towards that, it helps us prepare and keep ourselves safe and know what’s out there. But the problem is that sometimes we’re [00:50:00] so oriented to the threats or maybe historical threats or it just becomes all that we can see. So we have to actively counteract that by looking for cues that let us know that we’re safe enough now. That it’s okay right now, that this is a time when I can go into myself and I can relax and restore that sense of safety. And we need to repeat that every single day, right? As we’re trying to rewire something that has been orienting us vigilantly into survival states, and so this heal protocol, it stands for, have a positive experience orient to that one thing, the finches on the sunflowers, the sweetness of another person and their kind of social engagement cues back of, I’m with you, I’ve got this we’ve got this together.
Find that one thing, [00:51:00] have a positive experience, enrich it. Get to know all the details of how your body registers that as a sense of safe, of what about that feels safe enough, right? It can be simple things like, I like the color of your pink shirt. It brings me a little bit of oh wow. I’m, I like I love, that you chose that color today, and it draws me towards you.
I like your smile. I I like the way that you gazed toward me in a very kind way, right? So I’m like registering those details. So heal, have a positive experience, enrich it, absorb it, linger. Don’t jump away from it so fast. Stay there for 20 to 30 seconds with whatever this small, yet meaningful, positive shift might be.
And then the last step, heal. Have a [00:52:00] positive experience. Enrich it, absorb it, stay there longer, and L stands for link it. Link it to that one area of challenge where you’ve been suffering, whether that’s a trauma related memory, whether it’s an ongoing struggle in your life. Because what we’re doing when we’re linking is we’re basically building a new neural connection that says, sometimes I’m suffering, but sometimes I feel okay.
And I wanna know that I can move between my suffering. I don’t wanna ignore it, I don’t wanna deny it. That would be toxic positivity. To just focus on all this good stuff. I wanna know that I can turn towards my despair, my shame, my worries, my fears, but I’m not gonna get stuck there either.
So I can link that sometimes I feel okay. Sometimes I feel connected. Sometimes I feel joy. And [00:53:00] sometimes I feel suffering and they both are part of me.
Emma: Ooh. That is so good. It’s so profound and it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is that like truly healthy people, they aren’t just calm all the time and they aren’t just happy all the time.
Truly healthy people do both. Like they hold, they can hold both sadness and joy in the same day.
Arielle : That’s right.
Emma: Or someone who maybe gets stuck would be like I had this happen to me on my drive, so today’s gonna be a terrible day. And then they scan for the bad and then they pay attention to the bad.
I had someone tell me the other day, I have this theory that all my even years are good and all my odd years are bad. Like bad things happen in my even years. And I was like, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy in all the even years. You’re just looking and scanning for all the bad that happens. And truthfully, like an even year probably has some bad and probably has some good.
Arielle : That’s [00:54:00] right.
Emma: And a an odd year probably has good and bad.
Complex PTSD and the Need for Safe Relationships
Emma:And so I love this idea of linking, maybe I can give an example from my day to day. I definitely have an old story that’s like never good enough, gotta be better, gotta be better. Like just this constant like seeking of perfectionism or something and I’m a parent.
It’s like you literally cannot be like perfect as a parent. It is not possible. Like I mess up. People are like, you must be such a good mom. Your girls are so lucky to have you. This is in the YouTube comments. And I’m like you should see my house at dinner time because I definitely yell occasionally more often than I would like today.
I picked up my daughter from bed. She was like, not wanting to go to school. And I just hugged her and I, and she laughed and smiled and I just paid attention to how it felt. She’s six to be like holding her and to listening to her laugh and like seeing her smile. And I [00:55:00] tried to like, take a picture of this mentally and just stay with it for a few seconds even though we were like late, already late.
And I love what you’re saying is pair that oh, I have this feeling like, oh, what if I’m a bad parent? What if my kids never want a relationship with me in these catastrophizing thoughts? And if I compare that with we just we, try to have little beautiful moments each day and try and linger on that.
I love that. So link it. Link it. Thank you for sharing that. Do you really believe, do you really believe in neuroplasticity? Do you really believe like with CPTSD people can heal?
Arielle : Yeah. Yes. And with CPTSD, given that the majority of complex trauma comes from relational betrayals and relational wounds, I just wanna say this again and again, we don’t heal alone, right? We need relational sources of safety. And that’s where gratefully we have [00:56:00] those in our world, right? Whether that’s through psychotherapy or I love group work. I love running. I run vagal toning groups. I run vagus nerve yoga classes. I love these opportunities that we have to come together with other people who are like-minded, who are on the healing path, where we get to show up as we are and be welcomed in whether that’s one-on-one spaces or community spaces that reduces the isolation and aloneness of, the kinds of suffering.
Polyvagal Theory and Incremental Healing Practices
Arielle : But the the research I’ve spent so many years researching how we change and why we change, and the research shows that it’s the commitment to the things that make a difference.
And that I often like in trauma recovery and the practices that support it to the practices that we need to do every day, like brush our teeth, right? If I found a practice that helped me feel good on Monday, and I think [00:57:00] that’s good enough for the week, it’s probably not.
Uhhuh we can brush your teeth multiple times a day. So like engaging in practices that are shifting your nervous system, even if that dial is moving super slow that are going to shift you in that positive direction. And speaking of slow transition, when we think about the shift from the summer solstice to the winter solstice or the winter solstice to the summer, right?
It’s super subtle changes that we don’t really notice. On a day-to-day basis, but that each of those 10 minute increments of the change in the sun and its arc on the horizon dramatically changes a season. So we have those seasons inside of us and we just have to remember that it’s the small incremental shifts that ultimately accumulate and build on each other.
Emma: I love that. Yeah. The sun, the [00:58:00] length of day changes by 60 to 90 seconds a day, and it changes it from winter to summer. It’s cool. Tiny changes. When I first learned about polyvagal, my trainer recommended to like try to notice and just touch base with your nervous system multiple times an hour. What do you think about that?
Arielle : Oh, I think it’s great when we can remember to do those things. How many of us remember to do those things?
Emma: I set, yeah, I use like a timer, literally, totally. When I’m, rewiring something, I use a timer to remind myself multiple times an hour. Yeah.
Arielle : Same. I think it’s really profound to use use our technologies. Don’t I have a fun little thing on the back of here. It’s my little pop socket, but it’s cute.
Emma: Cute.
Arielle : Anyhow, we use our technologies to support us to grow and I think that there’s nothing wrong [00:59:00] with using these little crutches. I prefer the little, I have sweet timers like chimes that go off versus the rubber band technique that we learned way back in the day before we had smartphones. That basically said every time you have a negative thought …
Emma: [inaudible] yourself [inaudible] Yeah.
Arielle : That doesn’t feel like it supports my growth. The gentle chimes that says, are you breathing right now? Or take a two minute breath break. Oh, I can do that. And I think I think again, like we can look for what supports us to do the practices. I think that’s one of the biggest barriers out there is that we know what we should be doing, but we don’t do it.
Where to Learn More: Polyvagal Theory and Trauma Healing
Arielle : I actually want to shamelessly plug something that goes along with the book. So the Polyvagal Theory Workbook for trauma. One of the things that I’m really proud of is that I thank you. I collaborated with New Harbinger, [01:00:00] the publisher of the book, and we created a course that accompanies the book and the course is less than the cost of a single therapy session. It’s less than a hundred dollars. And it basically is me on video guiding you through every practice in the book. And it’s a lifetime access. And so it’s one of those kind of really deep passions for me, which is to increase accessibility because we all know that psychotherapy is expensive. And that sometimes it’s hard to find that person and so on and so forth. And like you, I think that shared mission of how do we increase accessibility to trauma-informed skills and therapy awareness skills it’s one of those tools that are out there.
Emma: Ooh, that’s so good.
Arielle : And the course is called Let Your Body Hold You. Let Your Body Hold You.
Emma: Okay. And where can people find you? I’m so glad you plugged that. And where can people find you? Your books? Do you have a website? What [01:01:00] is it?
Arielle : Yes. Alright. I have two websites. One is simply Drarielleschwartz.com. So it’s pretty easy to find me, Drarielleschwartz.com. The other is Resilienceinformedtherapy.com. Resilienceinformedtherapy.com. And that one is basically a hub for all of the people that have trained with me, or like-minded clinicians that are offering similar types of work out there. They’re I would say sign up for my newsletter, which you can do from either of those websites.
It’s the same newsletter to get to know what are the courses that I’m offering, some of which are for therapists on how to treat trauma and complex PTSD. Some are for lay person. I offer retreats called the Beyond Trauma Retreat and vagal toning retreats. And I have a YouTube channel under Dr. Arielle Schwartz, where you’ll find again, lots of free resources on trauma recovery on Instagram. I am @arielleschwartzboulder and YouTube Dr. Arielle Schwartz. So [01:02:00] lots of ways to find me.
Emma: That’s so great. Okay. We will pop links to those in the description or in the show notes if y’all are on the podcast.
And it has just been a delight. Thank you so much for your time, your wisdom, your years of experience. Really appreciate you coming on.
Arielle : Thank you.
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