Growing up as an only child my malignant narc mother was constantly going overboard on the abuse, I was getting infantilization, invalidation and one-way enmeshment from her and even "narcissism by proxy" from the entire neighborhood. It's still all very much in my life, I have such severe hypervigilance that I have to take a prescription antipsychotic just to get to sleep. So I'm reading about polyvagal theory and I'm wondering, is it possible that my abuse was sufficiently severe that maybe I never developed a ventral vagal system at all, or if it could be found and activated what might cause that to happen? I do currently have a trauma therapist, I'm 71 years of age and it isn't clear to me that I ever experienced ventral vagal state.
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