Polyvagal Theory

Most people come to therapy because they are, in some way, uncomfortable.  Usually, that discomfort is due to a challenge in their life that they are not equipped to deal with skilfully.  As a Trauma Counsellor I have learned, and have come to see in my practice, that we have three basic states in our response to a challenge. You can think of this as similar to the different states (or gears) that our cars have: park, neutral, reverse and drive.

 

Humans have three basic gears (relaxed, mobilised, or immobilised) and in this article I’m going to describe those states to you so that you can learn to recognise them in yourself and to learn how to change those gears when you want.

 

The first state, or gear, to understand is our (hopefully!) default state of feeling safe, relaxed, and connected to others.  To understand this, it’s important to understand that, as tribal mammals, one of the most important ingredients in our ongoing ability to survive is to be in a tribe.  Humans die alone in the wild, but in groups they survive very well.  Therefore, we have learned that getting along with others amicably is – in a fundamentally real sense – essential to our personal survival.  And anything that threatens our connection to the tribe is life-threateningly dangerous.  So, let’s look at what it takes for humans to be safe.  Then we can look at what happens when that safety is threatened.

 

A safe human is one that have all their basic needs met, including having a tribe that they feel closely connected to.  One of the important gifts that relaxed and happy tribe brings to us is their ability to ‘co-regulate’ what state we are in.  If we are panicked and anxious, a calm tribe will help you to calm down.  Conversely, if you are calm and relaxed you will immediately get tense if the tribe becomes agitated.  That’s coregulation.  How other people feel affects how we feel.  These different states tend to be “contagious” in a tribe whether that tribe is our family, our friends, or our professional colleagues.

 

When we are safe, we (and our tribe) tend to feel:

 

1. Calm

2. Curious

3. Clear

4. Compassionate

5. Confidant

6. Courageous

7. Creative

8. Connected

 

We call this state “calm and connected”, although there is obviously several more experiences that are included in the list. Hopefully, this is the state you are in for much of the time.  Unfortunately, a lot of people are unfamiliar with this state, so I’ve described each of the characteristics in a bit more detail in an addendum at the end of this article.

 

Let’s now introduce a challenge. It really doesn’t matter what challenge we introduce, as long as it makes us no longer feel calm, connected (and all the other items in the above list).  Essentially, this is anything that threatens our emotional and/or physical safety.  Examples include someone threatening us, or us experiencing something that makes us question our inherent safety (like seeing, or being in, a horrible accident).  Such a challenge causes us to immediately evaluate our sense of safety and correspondingly adjust our state to match the threat.

 

Again, for example, let’s image that we (unfortunately) meet someone who threatens us.  Perhaps we’re being robbed as we walk down the street.  Our first reaction is to assess the threat.  If it’s a kid holding a paper knife, we’re not going to react very strongly.  But if it’s someone who looks like they might legitimately be able to challenge us the first question we ask is some variation on “Can I take him?”.  Now remember, it might not be a person; it might be a deadline, or a rolling rock, or anything else that makes us feel threatened.  The question is: can we overcome it?

 

If we think we are up to the challenge, then we switch from our calm and connected state to one of the two states of mobilisation.  The first mobilisation state is the “fight” reflex.  You can tell you are in the fight stage if you feel:

 

1. Angry

2. Impatient

3. Frustrated

4. Aggressive

5. Strong

6. Powerful

 

This is how, for example, a martial artist might feel when they step into a ring fully expecting to win, or when a surgeon begins a challenging operation that they know they can do, or when an architect wins a big contract that they know they’re going to do so well on that it will set their career.  “Woo hoo!  Let’s do this!” - that’s our mobilised ‘fight’ state.

 

However, things might go the other way.  We might look at the challenge facing us and determine what we are NOT up to it, and therefore in a LOT of trouble.  Our question then becomes “Can I escape”?  If we think we actually can escape the threat, then we click into the “flight” reflex.   You can tell you are in the flight stage if you feel:

 

1. Weak

2. Panicked or scared

3. Wanting to run (often to the exclusion of any other thought)
    

These two states – fight or flight – are both mobilisation states.  We are activated or mobilised and we want to DO something (either fight or flee) to return back to our preferred state of being calm and connected.  It looks kind of like this:

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As you can see in the chart, if the challenge we are presented with is one that we determine we can neither fight nor flee (the ‘uh oh’ point) then we turn to one of our two immobilisation states. 

 

The first of these two immobilisation states is to try and appease the threat.  Perhaps we give the robber our money, or we promise the school bully that we’ll be their ally.  We might hate ourselves for doing it, but hate it or not, it’s our best bet, so we do it. 

 

This state is one that we didn’t know about for a long time (at least in the public sphere).  It became widely known in 1973 when a bank robber took 4 people as hostages in Stockholm, Sweden.  Unexpectedly, the hostages formed a bond with the bank robber and eventually refused to testify against him! At the time it was a very surprising event, and the term “Stockholm Syndrome” became commonly known, but today we have come to see that attempting to appease someone or something that is threatening us is a very common (and ancient) way for us to protect ourselves.

 

You can tell if you are in the appease stage if you find yourself:

 

1. Trying to Calm down the person who is threatening you,

2. Trying not only to Comply with their instructions,

3. But going even further and giving them Support. 

 

Many people who are trapped in abusive relationships will, unfortunately, be very familiar with this state and may even have been in this state for years.

 

If we can’t appease the threat, then we’ve really run out of options and our last remaining chance is to ‘play dead’ and hope the threat goes away. This is our final option of entering into a ‘freeze’ state.  You can tell you are in the freeze state if you feel:
 

1. Numb

2. Vacant or overwhelmed

3. Spaced out

4. Paralysed by fear

5. Trying to disappear

6. or (importantly) entering the state of “Dissociation”

 

A dissociative state or dissociative episode is when a person feels disconnected from themselves, the world around them, or both. During these periods a person may experience different types of dissociation such as:

 

1. Have no recollection of what occurred (dissociative amnesia)

2. Forget their own identity (dissociative fugue)

3. Feel that people or objects aren’t real or don’t recall emotions or sensations associated with a specific memory (derealization) 

4. Feel they’re disconnected from their bodies and watching their lives in the third person (depersonalization)

5. Change identity; speaking or behaving differently or going by different names (identity alteration)

6. Feel like there are multiple people inside you; finding it difficult to define who you are (identity confusion)

 

If we include the two ‘appease or freeze’ states to our chart, we get this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That is a full description of the options available to us for responding to a threat.  You can see that these have been divided into three colour-coded states in our chart – the green state (calm and connected) the red, mobilised state (consisting of either fight or flight) and the blue, immobilised state (consisting of either appease or freeze).  You can also see the flowchart that our nervous system subconsciously chooses based on its interpretation of threat. It's important to emphasise that we do not consciously choose the state we want to be in.  Usually, our bodies make this decision, usually without involving our conscious mind (but we can become aware of it and learn to influence what’s happening). 

 

So, how do we use these states to understand our trauma response?  Of what benefit is this knowledge to us when we come to a trauma counsellor feeling, in some way, uncomfortable?

 

As a trauma counsellor I use this knowledge (generally labelled the ‘Polyvagal Theory’ in trauma therapy, for complicated biological reasons that I’d rather not get into now for fear of diving too deep) to help clients in the following way.

 

First, it’s important to know the different states. Like learning to drive, it’s hard to make a car do what you want to do without knowing the gears that the car is capable of, and what each one is for. 

 

It’s also important to know that none of these states are ‘bad’.  They are all actually quite useful in their own way at the right time.  So, we’re not trying to get rid of any one state or ensuring that we always stay in the green zone.  The green zone is great, but it can also get a bit boring.  That’s why people go to scary movies or go skydiving, or do any of the other things we like to do to get our heart racing.  The red zone can be fun and exciting, as long as we know that we’re not in any real and immediate danger (everyone who jumps out of an airplane usually expects their parachute to work). And the blue zone can be (in ideal circumstances) an enjoyable way to zone out and relax.

 

Once you know the different gears it often takes some time to be able to figure out which one you’re in in any given moment. It’s a real skill, believe it or not, and it’s one of the areas where a trauma counsellor can really help you. Learning to determine your current state is an absolutely fundamental step in mastering our response to trauma and to taming our nervous system so that we can get into the zone we want to be in.

 

Once we’ve learned to recognise which state we are in, it is very helpful to watch our states change through the day.  We might wake up in the green zone, realise we are late for a horribly early online meeting for work and immediately get bounced into the red zone.  During that meeting you might be asked to present the project that you were supposed to have spent the last month preparing and realising that you’ve forgotten about it completely and there’s nothing you can do now and so you get bounced into the blue zone.  You might try to appease your boss and colleagues, or you might just freeze and dissociate.  Three zones in the space of an hour!

 

Remember – and this is important – we don’t choose our state.  Instead, it feels more accurate to say that these states happen TO us, and the best we can do is to realise which state we’re in and (if we don’t like that state) how to get out of each one and back to one we want to be in.  Let’s take a look at how we do this.

 

If you’re in the green zone and you want a bit more ‘spice’ in your life then you can set up a challenging situation which will push you into the red (mobilised) zone.  Go for a run, start boxing, watch a scary movie – the choices are many.  If you’re stuck in the red zone you can try to relax into the green zone, or, downshift your gears into the blue zone by stepping back from the threat and voluntarily immobilising yourself. 

 

For example, imagine going to a scary movie, like Jaws (which I foolishly did as a child), and then freaking out every time you get into water for the next several months.  The solution there is to learn to ‘relax’ in the pool and accept your fear without giving into it.  This is a healthy form of ‘immobilising’ your fears.  In fact, there is some research that shows that intentionally ‘immobilising’ yourself by doing something mindless (like playing Tetris) immediately after encountering a threat and securing your safety can help prevent stress disorders such as Acute Stress Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  Have you ever found yourself ‘doom scrolling’ (for example, endlessly scrolling through TikTok or other social apps forever, long past when you wanted to stop)?  If you have, you know what it feels like to be immobilised in the ‘freeze’ state.  In small, controlled amounts, this can be quite fun, but when you can’t control it, you get locked into doom-scrolling forever, gambling, abusing alcohol and other drugs, over-eating, getting lost in porn or risky sexual activities, or many other activities that cause us to ‘zone out’.

 

All the states can be interesting and enjoyable if we are able to change them when we want.  Alternatively, they are all horrible traps if we can’t voluntarily get out of them.  In fact, a lot of our unexpected and not-quite-conscious activity can be understood if we realise that it’s out nervous system’s way of unconsciously trying to get us out of a certain state.  Here are some examples:

 

GREEN TO RED

• Someone with the ‘perfect’ family, health and social situation who becomes bored and has an affair or gets absorbed into an extreme sport, cult, or unhealthy community (like conspiracy theory groups).

 

BLUE TO RED

• A police officer who is overwhelmed by the sadness and cruelty of the human condition (a freeze state) might get themselves out of the blue zone and into the red zone by getting really, really angry about the whole situation.  The ‘angry cop’ is almost a trope at this point, but it happens to all of us.  I’ve met angry firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and doctors as well as people from all other walks of life.

• A high school student who is so numbed by the brutality of teenage social violence (a freeze state) that they cut themselves lightly but repeatedly with a knife or other sharp object in order to get out of the blue zone and into the red zone.

 

RED TO BLUE

• A paramedic who has become exhausted by the constant stress of the work (a red state) that they give up and stop caring (they ‘freeze’).  This sort of reaction is very common and is the focus of a great deal of study, especially in medical professionals.  It could be due to compassion fatigue (becoming exhausted by caring too much, or for too long) or moral distress (being forced to do things you don’t agree with).  Both of these are red zone states which we transform into a blue zone state by giving up and no longer caring. 

• The colleague who “sucks up” to the abusive boss much to the detriment of the other victims stuck working for that boss.  That’s someone switching from red (fighting or fleeing the abuse) to blue (trying to appease the abuser).

 

So, let’s look at each of the states and I’ll offer you some quick tips how you can consciously change them when you want in ways that are less destructive.

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When we take a look at these various states and how they affect us, as well as the chart showing us how to move out of each of them, we see that there is a basic strategy for intentionally controlling the state of our nervous system.  It goes like this:

 

1. Learn the different states

2. Learn to identify which one you are in at any given time (which isn’t easy at first)

3. Learn what triggers each state in you (by keeping track of what state you are in and noting the external or internal events that cause you to shift states).

4. Learn how to “change states” intentionally

 

A good trauma counsellor can help you learn each of these steps (this essay hopefully accomplishes the first goal), and they can help prepare you for some of the unexpected reactions you’ll encounter as you learn to do this.  It’s a subtle and complicated skill that we can learn if we put in the time and effort.  The benefits are, of course, quite remarkable.  Learning to control our nervous state is very rewarding, but it is also extremely unfamiliar territory for many (if not most) of us.  Part of the problem here, and this is a whole other essay, is that we have been taught that we can ‘think’ our way out of these states, which isn’t true.  In order to truly change them we have to learn to ‘feel’ our way out of them.  It’s more a change of heart than it is a change of mind.  That’s subtle.  And it’s difficult.  It’s usually something that is ‘caught, not taught’ to us when we are children.  But if our parents don’t know how to modulate their nervous state, we can’t learn it from them.

 

This inability to modulate our nervous state is particularly common in emergency services personnel (police, fire, paramedic, nurse, doctor, dispatchers and call takers) which often have a ‘suck-it-up’ culture which encourages us to completely ignore the state of our nervous system until we run out of psychological resources to cope and we subsequently crash and burn, ending up in therapy without actually understanding why we ended up there in the first place.

 

If that’s you (or, if it’s about to be you, or it once was you) then hopefully this will be of some help.  Understanding the different states (or gears) that our nervous systems use to get us through our lives and address the challenges that present to us is the first step in learning how to work with your mind so that you can decrease your discomfort and increase your sense of peace and your personal and professional efficacy. 

 

If you find that you are unable to modulate your nervous state and it is causing you distress in your life, then you would probably benefit from working with a counsellor who is familiar with the Polyvagal Theory and who has experience helping others to learn the practical skills for recognising, understanding, appreciating, and changing your nervous state when needed. 

 

Just like the advice to ‘eat less and move more’ is appropriate when trying to reduce body fat, learning to change the state of your nervous system to improve the quality of your life is sound advice.  However, as anyone who has been on the weight-loss journey for a while can tell you it’s not always easy, and there’s often a lot of issues that arise in us when we start walking the path.

 

Give it a go, and if you need help, don’t be afraid to reach out to a professional.  Look for someone who has studied Polyvagal Theory and who has experience helping others to learn and master it.

 

 

 

Addendum – More Detail About Being In The Green State.

 

1. Calmness

1. A physiological and mental serenity (often regardless of the circumstances) 

2. The ability to react to triggers in your environment in less automatic and extreme ways 

3. To be less vulnerable to adopting the common fight-flight-freeze response when threatened
    

2. Curiosity

1. A strong desire to know or learn something new about a topic, situation or person 

2. To have a sense of wonder about the world and how things work 

3. Genuinely interested in non-judgmentally understanding something or someone
    

3. Clarity

1. The ability to perceive situations accurately without distortion from extreme beliefs and emotions 

2. The ability to maintain one’s objectivity about a situation in which one has a vested interest 

3. The absence of preconception and objection 

4. The ability to maintain a “beginner’s mind” in which many possibilities exist
    

4. Compassion

1. To be open-heartedly present and appreciative of others without feeling the urge to fix, change or distance from them 

2. An intuitive understanding that the suffering of others affects you because of your connectedness to them 

3. To simultaneously have empathy for others and a belief that the other has a self that once released can relieve his or her own suffering
    

5. Confidence

1. To maintain a strong belief in one’s ability to stay fully present in a situation and handle or repair anything that happens with the belief that “no matter what, it’s all okay and will all work out the way it can” 

2. To have healed from previous traumas and learned from previous failures to such a degree that their effect does not spill into the present 

3. To understand that mistakes are only lessons to be learned
    

6. Courage 

1. Strength in the face of threat, challenge or danger 

2. The willingness to take action toward a goal that others would find overwhelming 

3. The ability to recognize the damage we do to others and then take action to make amends 

4. The willingness to reflect and “go inside” toward our own pain and shame, carefully examine it and act on what we see
    

7. Creativity 

1. The use of the imagination to produce original ideas 

2. The ability to enter the “flow state” in which expression spontaneously flows out of us and we are immersed in the pleasure of the activity 

3. The ability to create generative learning and solutions to problems 
    

8. Connectedness

1. The state of feeling a part of a larger entity such as a partnership, team, community, or organization 

2. A connection to a meaningful purpose or a higher calling above the circumstances of daily life 

3. To be in a relationship with someone who truly knows and accepts you for who you really are 

4. To be able to relax your defenses with others as you know that you won’t be judged or controlled and are not afraid of getting hurt because you have confidence that you can repair any damage or misunderstandings that may occur