Polyvagal Theory

Here's a short, clear summary on Polyvagal Theory for the layman: http://attachmentdisorderheali...om/Porges-Polyvagal/

Here's how I use it, pretty much as Leckey Harrison describes: http://attachmentdisorderhealing.com/resources/tools/

which says, down into the blog under Trauma Release Exercises (TRE®)  

Dr. Peter A. Levine, who's worked close with Polyvagal Theory author Stephen Porges for decades, showed how wild animals recover from trauma by tremoring spasms of their body core and flailing of limbs to complete the fight-flight they were in before they froze. Levine shows a National Geographic video of a polar bear shot with a tranquilizer dart. As the bear wakes up, its body shakes intensely this way.  Jump to minute 10 of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmJDkzDMllc

Our human thinking brain usually refuses to do this “reset." It's too fearful of the fierce shaking and natural aggression.  That's why we have trauma and wild animals don't: we keep the stress chemicals from that old fight flight, frozen in our bodies. Levine created "Somatic Experiencing" body work to let us experience the reset motions we need, even (or especially) decades after the trauma. 

My trauma therapist and I got a shock when I accessed this discharge shaking, and released a ton of childhood trauma. My healing was enormous. 

Dr. David Bertoli later developed Trauma Release Exercise (TRE®) to teach  this tremoring to large groups of traumatized people in refugee camps, earthquakes, poverty, terrorism, war zones, or any mass trauma.  He discovered that the psoas muscle is key to body core tremoring.  TRE® is a set of seven purely muscular exercises which induce “polar bear” tremors on a bodily basis, by exhausting the leg and other muscles that normally inhibit the psoas from tremoring. And then, if we've got any trauma in there (who doesn't?), then tremor it will. Here Berceli describes the tremor reflex and that it’s a vital survival instinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0NooNBBro0 

Levine’s friend trauma expert Robert Scaer MD on TRE®: https://livingubuntu.wordpress...-releasing-exercises. 

On “how to,” see Matt Schwenteck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3x_ITdzKbI  Matt says “only two kinds of mammals have forgotten how do to this life-saving tremoring: zoo animals and humans.”

Bingo! Haven't we all had that feeling of being kept in a zoo at times in our traumatized, frozen society?

After doing these exercises for three weeks, I felt fantastic.

We use this information in a couple ways. We teach people how to self-induce and self-regulate the body's innate mechanism to release stress and heal trauma without having to talk about it. One way we use the polyvagal theory is to show how the stress response effects these pathways in regards to muscular patterns of constriction, the relative physical diseases that can arise from this connection to the viscera being constantly "off," as well the social engagement aspect that is also diminished, and last, the freeze aspect when the event intensity escalates over time, briefly or not. 

The modality we teach (TRE®) resets the vagal tone over time, and other tools we use do as well, particularly in mitigating stress and/or anxiety in the moment. Cold water on the face, facial massage, breathing techniques.

As an educational tool it is sometimes a tad bewildering when people learn how their brain functions. They had no idea. Neither did I. Once I learned, a lot of my life made more sense.