Looking through the lens of Polyvagal Theory, we get revelatory insights into the experiences that shape the nervous system. Our clients move through the world – turning towards, backing away, sometimes connecting and other times isolating, while at the same time, their autonomic circuits continue to operate outside of conscious awareness – instinctively and continually assessing safety and risk and initiating actions to navigate the challenges of daily living.

For many clients, states of fight, flight, and collapse are frequent, intense, and prolonged while the state of safety and connection is elusive.  If only, as therapists, we could read and dissect an updated map of the autonomic nervous system – a whole new world of therapeutic intervention would present itself that links and utilizes the post-traumatic patterns of hyperarousal, hypervigilance, disconnection, and numbing. At this intellectually challenging, therapeutically relevant and extremely cutting-edge workshop, globally acclaimed trainer Deb Dana attempts to provide us with such a reliable map that allows our clients to move out of adaptive survival responses into the autonomically regulated state of safety that is necessary for successful therapy.

Essentially, the premise of the webinar is: what begins with our biology becomes the story that shapes our days. Crucially, when the influence of the ventral vagus is missing, the ability to regulate autonomic responses is compromised.  Adaptive survival responses become habitual autonomic patterns and the response patterns that were once necessary for survival now bring suffering. Our role as psychotherapists and counsellors then becomes finding a path for our clients that enables them to create new resourcing patterns of connection.

In this two-part series, – participants will develop an embodied understanding of Polyvagal Theory and learn how to bring the theory alive in clinical work.  Through didactic teaching and experiential practices, participants will explore how to use the body’s regulating circuits to help clients regain a sense of safety and skills to engage the nervous system’s natural pathways to regulation.

Focusing on practical application skills, the workshop will:

• Explore the three organizing principles of Polyvagal Theory and how to use them to guide clients in reshaping their nervous systems:
  • Hierarchy
  • Neuroception
  • Co-regulation
• Introduce the “autonomic ladder” as a way for clients to get to know their autonomic states and monitor state shifts.
• Consider ways clinicians can use individual elements of the social engagement system to send cues of safety.
• Learn key tools and exercises for autonomic regulation to support safety and connection
• Identify practices that support clients in relaxing habitual patterns of protection and exploring new patterns of connection

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