Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Practical Applications for Treating Trauma

The autonomic nervous system is at the heart of daily living powerfully shaping experiences of safety and influencing the capacity for connection. Operating outside of conscious awareness, autonomic circuits assess safety and initiate actions to help us navigate the challenges of daily living. Polyvagal Theory, through the organizing principles of hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation, has revolutionized our understanding of how this system works. We now know that trauma interrupts the development of autonomic regulation and shapes the system away from connection into patterns of protection. With an updated map of the autonomic circuits that underlie behaviors and beliefs, we can reliably lead our clients out of adaptive survival responses into the autonomically regulated state of safety that is necessary for successful treatment.

A Polyvagal Theory guided approach to therapy begins with helping clients map their autonomic profiles and track their moment to moment movement along the autonomic hierarchy. With this foundation, the essential clinical questions address how to help clients interrupt habitual response patterns and find safety in a state of engagement. Polyvagal Theory gives therapists a guide to becoming a co-regulating resource and concrete ways to help clients find, and savor, experiences of safety. Working from a foundation of Polyvagal Theory, therapists have practical ways to effectively help clients identify and interrupt their familiar response patterns and strategies to shape their autonomic nervous systems toward safety and connection.

In this experiential workshop participants will first learn the basics of Polyvagal Theory and then work with practices designed to bring the power of Polyvagal Theory directly into clinical work. Working individually and in dyads, participants will experiment with multiple ways to map autonomic responses, skills to safely explore patterns of action, disconnection, and engagement, and techniques to build autonomic regulation and resilience. The workshop will bring Polyvagal Theory into practical application with a roadmap to help clients safely tune into their autonomic states, reshape their nervous systems, and rewrite the trauma stories that are carried in their autonomic pathways.