Feeling a sense of safety in your body doesn't mean you're in an un-safe environment or that stress has disappeared from your life. It simply means you are not in a chronic state of evaluation any longer, nor are you overcome with the emotions of shame and blame to the point of anger outbursts or depressive shutdowns.
It was Divine intervention that led me to study The Vagus Nerve and The Polyvagal Theory at a time my young daughter started, what looked like, severe panic attacks. With the insight I gained, I soon realised her hypo-aroused/shutdown state was a survival response due to not feeling safe at school anymore.
Polyvagal Theory (established by Dr Stephen Porges) treats shutdown as a defence mechanism. The network that governs our shutdown state and registers heartbreak and gut-wrenching feelings is the Vagus Nerve, not the Sympathetic Nervous System. However, my daughter didn't share my childhood experiences where I spent a lot of time feeling hopeless. Yet, we shared a similar survival response to stress. So, what was going on?
Turns out, the health of my Vagus Nerve (or Vagal Tone) was passed on to her at birth. Her nervous system responses mirrored mine. Our worlds opened up. I finally understood my child. Luckily, unlike our identical eye colour, Vagal Tone was the one thing she (and turned out, I) COULD change.
However, if I were going to show her how to manage her stress I had to do it first. I finally figured out I dealt with stress the way a person in hyper-arousal fight and flight did and not for a person who tends to get stuck in shutdown. I was focused on the part of my nervous system not governed by the Vagus Nerve. I finally understood why slow-flow practices like yoga, meditation, floating pods, massages and even facials left me feeling highly agitated then drained for days. For my body, 50 laps in the pool, aerial yoga, dancing, African drumming and being the giver of treatments are far better ways to regulate my body back to feeling safe.
This is what The Polyvagal Theory helped me do:
1) I made peace with my past. I accepted my hopelessness. In childhood, due to a lack of proper and reliable attunement with my mother, I launched the shutdown state as a way of surviving my world. From the age of 10, the temporary safe environment I was blessed with was replaced by an unpredictably violent one. By adulthood, I had cemented my shutdown circuit for survival, not fight and flight.
2) I took total personal accountability for how I was being in the world. I identified my stressors and started to regulate appropriately. My body responded incredibly fast and let me feel safe enough to address my dysfunctional belief systems borne out of my need to launch shutdown as a survival response. My Autonomic Nervous System had informed my body's energy circuits and created an electromagnetic signature that manifested too many personal and health issues. I addressed it, completely gave up alcohol and cleared my life of situationships.
3) Once I felt safe enough in my body, I created The Restore Method.
I applied all my training and experience as a therapeutic bodyworker and started regulation sessions for adults and kids and continue to do so. My daughter is thriving. After six months of focused regulation, she returned to the school she left, faced the exact same unsafe environment and she graduated with calm, clarity and confidence.
Every day, in some way, I apply The Restore Method to my life and the lives of those around me. I trust my small contribution to the big world we call home will benefit your life and family, in unexpectedly transformational ways, too.
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