approx. 15 minute read time
"If you want to improve the world, start by making people feel safe" - Dr Stephen Porges
'Feeling safe in the body' is an idea discussed often in the field of somatics.
What does this mean?
I’ll be discussing this here through the lens of Dr Porges’ ‘Polyvagal theory’ (no previous knowledge required… I’ll try and make it as simple as possible! Although it does take a while to digest this stuff, take your time with it. Especially if you’re feeling like you’ve had enough, listen to that…. and come back to it. It may be planting seeds, and you can revisit again over time. Here goes… :)
Did you know that we're constantly and automatically taking in the world around us, through our senses? This sensory intake, along with predictions of what will happen, based on past experiences of our lives, make up the experience we have in the present moment. This happens automatically, without us having to will it. All of the time.
This sensory intake, along with predictions about what will happen, based on our past experiences, creates changes in our autonomic nervous system. Moment to moment, our autonomic nervous system shifts gears / states according to whether it perceives we can feel safe and relaxed or whether we need to be on guard or move because of an imminent threat. As we cycle through these different states, adjustments are made in our physical bodies as well as our minds to either allow us to be present, connect and savour the moment, rest and digest (if we feel safe) or if we need to prepare to move or freeze in response to danger (if we don't feel safe).
The process that's automatically assessing our environment for safety or threat is called 'neuroception'.
"What does safety in the body mean?" One way of answering this is that it’s when our nervous system perceives the world around us to be safe - and we shift to a nervous system state that reflects this. The table below shows some of the different states we can visit in our autonomic nervous system. Each has physical, emotional, psychological and felt sense characteristics. Please note, there are other modes too, such as the 'fawn' response, and the parasympathetic rest and digest (which is like a blended state of parasympathetic ventral and dorsal - ‘safe and still / rest & digest) but for simplicity here today, we'll be looking at the three states below.
Table above showing different states in our autonomic nervous system according to Polyvagal Theory by Dr Stephen Porges. Note : some of the above is my own presentation of information from Deb Dana’s ‘Polyvagal Flip Chart’ (cited in references below).
Notice from the above how our nervous system state creates our experience of the world in each moment? It's the lens through which we're experiencing the world, moment to moment, and will effect our body, our thoughts, our posture and whole way of being at that moment in time. The parasympathetic ventral-vagus is a place we arrive at when we sense safety. This is reflected in our relaxed body, free and easy breathing, resting heart rate, optimistic mood, connected joyfully to our surroundings.
It’s my hope that in sharing this, it might inspire the beginning of curiosity around how your physiology and state is, moment to moment. And maybe being able to view it all as information, and have compassion with it, rather than judging yourself harshly for it. For example, noticing ‘I’m feeling really out of sync with my coworkers today. Maybe i’m in my fight/flight energy’. This is a process that can take time. Go gently.
If we’re in our parasympathetic ventral-vagal (safe and social) energy, we’ve perceived minimal stress or successfully discharged held stress.
If we’re in our sympathetic (fight or flight) energy, we’ve perceived a certain level of stress so we're prepared to fight / flee to help resolve the situation and keep ourselves safe.
If we’re in our parasympathetic dorsal-vagal (freeze, shutdown) energy, we’ve perceived so much stress that we interpret it as life-threatening. We don't have the option to flee or fight, our only remaining option is to shut down, and conserve energy / maximise our chances of survival.
We’re designed to be able to move through all of these different states, to keep us safe, returning to a baseline sense of safety when we no longer need to be on our guard. Sometimes, of course, the threat we’re picking up on is real and real-time, and we need to respond to that. Often, however, the perceived threat we’re picking up is like a ‘faulty wiring’. The perceived threat relates to something that happened to us in the past rather than a present moment true threat. The faulty wiring can keep us stuck in a particular state (fight / flight / freeze), rather than cycling with flexibility between states. If we’re being unconsciously controlled or stuck in a limited range of state(s), we call this nervous system dysregulation.
More often these days, we’re not returning to the baseline of ventral-vagal safety. We’re living more in a stress response as a baseline. If we’re living in sympathetic (fight/flight) or parasympathetic dorsal-vagal (freeze) mode, you could call this ‘living in survival mode’ rather than thriving mode, as these responses are designed to be temporary to help us deal with a perceived stressor / danger, before returning to the baseline sense of safety. When we feel safe, we have more energy freed up to digest, to rest, to play and be creative.
The good news is, we can train our perceived sense of safety and make it more of a familiar place. This has to be done by working with our body, we can’t think our way into this sense of safety. We know, through neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the nervous system to change its activity in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli by reorganising its structure, functions, or connections, that we do have the ability to create change in our brain pathways and nervous system responses. We can do this through Somatic Experiencing and other body-based practices (further detail about different ways we can train this and how this works a little further on).
Why are we living more in ‘survival mode’ these days? This is influenced by the minor and major stressors we each experience, day to day individually and collectively. Our perceived sense of safety is not a level playing-field, and will be influenced by the way we’re living our lives, our level of oppression, our family and upbringing and our unique trauma histories.
Collectively, we’re taking in an unnatural volume of information these days. When we scroll on social media or read the news, we open ourselves to ingesting a charge of energy that naturally comes from the nature of each picture, word or story. Due to the ‘attention economy’ there’s a negativity, drama and outrage bias (we know that these are qualities that grab attention, so they’re harnessed for likes and clicks). Everything that we take in influences the state of our nervous system. We might see by looking at the table above how wide the effect will be when we ingest this ‘charge’ from scrolling : on our body, thoughts, emotions and beliefs. All of this information needs to be digested and processed, and as much of it will be perceived as a stressor by our nervous system, we need to actively train our sense of safety as an antidote. More on ways to do this below.
Another reason is the impact of trauma on our nervous system.
We all experience the world differently due to our own unique bodies and histories. As well as taking in the world around us through our sensory system, we’re also making predictions of what will happen moment to moment based on our past experiences.
What is trauma & the difference between trauma and a traumatic event
Trauma is survival energy that gets stored in the body, as it didn’t get the chance to mobilise / release. The traumatic event is the event that led to the stored survival energy. Think of someone in a life-threatening situation that suddenly summons the strength to lift a car, to save someone’s life. That gives an idea of the level of survival energy that we can receive when our nervous system picks up a threat, and takes us into sympathetic fight / flight. If someone receives this survival energy and they never got the chance to act and use the energy, for example if they’re attacked and pinned down, and couldn’t run or fight, the energy will then be reabsorbed by the body. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to hold this stored survival energy, and that often affects our health in a negative way. This is where we experience symptoms of post traumatic stress. Somatic Experiencing and other trauma-focused therapies help to resolve / release this stored survival energy, in a slow, gentle and natural way, working with the body. We all have trauma to greater or lesser degree, and we might have experienced it in much more subtle ways than through attack : not having our needs met in childhood, for example, or any incident which was perceived by our nervous system as ‘too much, too fast, too soon’, or the accumulation of so much stress over time, that we can no longer metabolise it, and instead it gets absorbed by the body.
If we’re holding stored survival energy / trauma this will make us more sensitive to the daily stressors around us, and our perceived level of threat will be heightened. We’ll be subconsciously driven by this into a state of dysregulation (meaning, that rather than cycling through the different nervous system states we ease, we go into one of our survival responses and live there as our baseline, or we cycle between fight-flight-freeze, and we don’t return to the baseline of sense of safety. The stored trauma will be felt through our somatic experience (what we feel and experience in our body), for example through our sensations, movements, thoughts, behaviour and the totality of our experience.
Our stress and trauma begins to accumulate from pre-birth, through birth, and then through our lives. Research shows that in the womb, foetuses receive and are affected by their mother’s emotions, and our unique experience of birth will also potentially impact us, leaving us with a stress / trauma imprint, or not.
In a nutshell, the more stress and trauma we've experienced through our lives, the greater level of threat we perceive. We predict that bad things will happen (ie perceive a high level of threat) if bad things have happened to us in the past. However, we can help resolve this by training our sense of safety, through working with our bodies.
Training a sense of Safety in our Bodies (ie building nervous system regulation)
This is largely the goal of somatic work : to train our ability to perceive safety when it’s actually there (rather than to perceive threat when we’re actually safe).
To do this, we build our nervous system capacity, and then the way we process stress will be more efficient, we will have more ability to cycle through stress responses and return to a baseline sense of safety. Nervous system regulation isn’t about feeling calm and safe all the time, but our ability to cycle through our stress responses and return to our baseline of safety. We’re building healthy, wide-ranging, dynamic responses, rather than limited, rusty or stuck responses.
Practices to train our sense of safety the body, below:
Think of these practices rather than a magic pill that will make us feel calmer and safer immediately in the moment (although they may do that), something that we work with over time, and they become gradually more effective, in synergy, as a part of our lifestyle. This is the way we build more nervous system capacity, and more access to our sense of safety in our bodies, over time. That said, the first few in the list, in bold, may also work to help create quick shifts in the moment if you’re feeling dysregulated and would like to feel more settled. We explore some of these in my online classes and 1:1 sessions. Feel free to get in touch with any questions :
-Be with or speak on the phone with someone you love and feel safe with (nervous system coregulation is where we feel safer and more settled when in the presence of someone we trust, and who has a regulated nervous system. Through touch this is particularly effective, but could also work speaking on the phone)
- Trauma-informed massage and bodywork - again, this works through coregulation and touch
-Smells - essential oils - working with scents you like, we can create a quick shift through our olfactory (smell) sense system to feeling more settled and grounded.
-Self hug / self massage - wrap arms around your chest, with one hand on outer rib cage and one hand on top of shoulder. Feel the firm edges of your body. Breathe here and sense the support of your hands resting with care on the edges of your body.
- Natural breath awareness and gently lengthening the exhale (lengthening the exhale brings the parasympathetic online)
-Place your feet on the earth and shift your weight to find your centre of gravity, notice the steadiness and support that comes from the ground
-Orienting to our surroundings, through our senses - looking around you for 1-5 minutes and really see, hear, enter into the present moment. Here we can notice the absence of threat in this moment. Make a practice of this, 1-3 times a day. You can set a timer to remind you.
-Building an awareness and words for body sensations - this is the beginning of building a moment to moment experience of how we are, so we can listen and respond to what we need, and to move and express energy and honour our energy levels
Sensations will help us become aware of how we are in the moment / where we are in our nervous system
-Learn how to shift / move the energy we’re experiencing at a particular moment in time, for example using techniques like ‘voo breath’
- Yoga and Qigong
-Go outside into nature - take the time to notice your surroundings, with orienting, as above
-Become discerning and create more boundaries. A simple example of this is in how you structure your day. Choose when you let potential stressors in : checking emails at certain time of day when it feels you have the space to do this and it’s least invasive for example not first thing, at night or while eating your lunch, limiting dings and alerts - this way, we’re limiting the hits of stress to our system
- Rhythms, regularity and routines are all regulating for our nervous system
- Last but not least - supporting our body with foundational health : good nutrition, moving enough, good sleep routines, social time and time for rest
Longer term training
Over time working with the above, we can:
Become more skilled at noticing our state, moment to moment, notice what we need and respond to that
Integrate / release stored stress and trauma - we might find we can begin to make a positive shift with the above practices by ourselves. At the same time, I advise seeking advice and support from a Somatic Experiencing practitioner or other nervous-system / trauma-focused therapist as you go.
Working with a therapist
It can be very helpful as you begin and continue with this journey to seek support from a therapist. You can choose to have just one or a few sessions, and then continue by yourself for a while, or to have them regularly and ongoing.
The way we approach this in Somatic Experiencing is to compassionately enquire around : how are the ways your past is still controlling your present in an unhelpful way, and how are these showing up in your body sensations, level of reactivity, your thoughts, behaviour, etc. For example, you might be experiencing :
Poor sleep
Explosive anger
Insecurity
High levels of anxiety
Body tension, constriction, aches and pains
Our goal is to heal the wounds that underlie that behaviour. We do this not by directly revisiting these past events or dwelling on the past painful experiences, but by helping to unwind the stored stress / survival energy that your body is holding around these.
We slow things down, and we gently contact the more uncomfortable sensations and energies. We do this in a balanced way, also taking time to notice the more comfortable-feeling sensations, too. Often, without realising it, we’ve been running away from the more uncomfortable sensations. We can get highly skilled at running away, with various coping strategies. By learning to gently feel, rather than run away, we can then learn again that it’s safe to feel. We help to create a new, safer and more positive association of being in our bodies, rather than being controlled by fear and reactivity.
Summary of key points:
Safety in our body is a felt sense, and a nervous system state which can be trained
Our different autonomic nervous system states affect our bodies, thoughts, posture, emotions
Our perceived sense of safety is not a level playing-field, and will be influenced by our level of oppression, our family and upbringing and our unique trauma histories
Trauma is the stored survival energy, the traumatic event is the event that led to the stored survival energy
The more unprocessed stress and trauma we’re holding, the more sensitive our nervous system will be to ongoing stress and perceived stress
We can help process stress and train our sense of safety through body-based practices (list above)
Even if we have trauma, Somatic Experiencing and other nervous-system / trauma-focused therapies can help resolve / complete / release the stored survival energy which will help us to find more capacity and more nervous system regulation (nervous system regulation = we feel safer in our bodies, and cycle through all autonomic states with ease)
How did this blog land, for you? Feel free to share any comments below,
or do get in touch with any questions, or to discuss how we could work together to help process your stress and train more safety and ease by working with your body.
Warmly,
Charlotte
‘The body will reorganise when it feels safe’ - Dr Stephen Porges
References :
Deb Dana (2020) ‘Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection’
Deb Dana (2020) ‘Polyvagal Flip Chart - Understanding the Science of Safety’
Bessel van der Kolk (2014) ‘The Body Keeps the Score’
Peter Levine (1997) ‘Waking the Tiger’