My Approach to Trauma: Nervous System Wayfinding
Just like the wilderness, the wild of your being is full of dynamics beyond your conscious control. Most are benevolent and awe-inspiring, while others are forces of nature to approach with discernment. We could call this trauma, or survival energy stuck in the body. As a guide into this wild, one of my responsibilities is to know how to relate to these forces, and to equip you with the capacity to do so too.
My approach to trauma is based in Polyvagal Theory, which maps the way our nervous systems inform our social and survival responses: social connection (where we reside when we feel safe and available to ask for help), and the survival impulses fight, flight, and freeze or shutdown. These are capacities we have inherited from our animal ancestors, and share with many of today’s creatures. We can feel them in our bodies intimately.
This work primarily works in the “social connection” realm, by emphasizing and embodying our innate interconnectedness more fully, on all levels: the level of the personal body-mind, the social level, our greater world, and the spiritual level. We work with survival energy insofar as it reinforces your embodied experience of interconnectedness. Unlike specialized trauma therapy, our work only engages with survival energy when it arises of its own accord as a part of your emergent process. We don’t dig for it as something to “heal,” but we do honor it as a true aspect of your experience, and work with it skillfully as it arises.
I like to think of our work as “nervous system wayfinding.” You’re learning how safety and survival energies live in your body, getting to know your way through the terrain of your nervous system through your own experience. You learn to come back home to safety and connection, no matter how far off you’ve traveled. You get to know the terrain more intimately, so that a wider range of your experience feels like “home.”
These are some of the nervous system wayfinding capacities you can develop in our work together:
Self-regulation—finding comfort, safety, and connection, through your body and your environment. Getting curious about all the ways to follow your pleasure, curiosity, and aliveness.
Moving intense survival energies through the arts, reclaiming their creative potential and integrating them into a more dynamic expression of Self.
Replacing movement patterns that have kept you looped in survival mode, and replacing them with new patterns that support your wellbeing and belonging.
Holding healthy boundaries when it comes to survival energy and the situations that trigger it. Grounding in your sense of “home,” discerning how much intensity will support your vitality rather than deplete it, and choosing how much you let in at a time.
Gaining a sense for the pace at which your nervous system assimilates new information. You come to know your natural rhythms after a stimulating experience, through discharge, integration, and then settling back into the whole of your experience.
Reclaiming the full capacity of the parts of yourself that stuck survival energy has locked up. We restore their relationship with the whole of you.
Understanding what needs your emotions are pointing to, and asking your body and creative intelligence for guidance on how to act on those needs.
Strengthening your relationship with resources that bring you safety, connection, and new perspectives. These may be inner resources, like creative practices, movements, body parts, or images that came up in our work together; they also can be outer resources like key relationships, activities, or environments.
Practicing relating to all qualities of our experience from Presence, that within us that welcomes these qualities just as they are. When we are seen and heard in this way, no aspect of our experience can threaten our belonging or ultimate safety.
