The Autonomic Nervous System is a spiral or a circle and not a ladder or a line, and why this matters
Our visual design team has just created a beautiful poster that presents Autonomic Physiology through color theory. We felt that this was important to do, after having created the Official Polyvagal Poster with Dr. Stephen Porges, to continue to present visual metaphors for people that help to demystify the Autonomic Nervous System, which is the biological system most important to your wellbeing, but one that most people know very little about.
In much of the discourse about this system, there is a focus on the elevation of ventral states. Many of the current metaphors conceptualize these systems as being hierarchical: like a ladder. And while it is certainly true that wellbeing is associated with spending more of our time in states that are based on safety and connection, it is also the case that both sympathetic (fight/flight) states and dorsal (shutdown states) are necessary for our biological flexibility, and required to experience the full repertoire of human functioning.
What is interesting to note is that most people experience sympathetic activation, e.g., fight or flight, when they are not feeling safe. If we leave a connection state because we neurocept danger, then entering the zone of the high-activation sympathetic states (essentially the stress response) is, in fact, stressful. Yet strangely, and importantly, if we don’t leave the connection system behind–if we are able to stay anchored and grounded in our connection physiology, then the activation of sympathetic states opens the door to elite levels of performance. We learn how to ride this wave.
Athletes know this, and they know to harness it: how to lean into the surge. At the highest levels of performance is not merely physical capability, but Autonomic Nervous System stability and mastery. Elite athletes, on the biggest stages, can enter into the full range of sympathetic response without losing their grounding in ventrality. Their connection systems stay online. What athletes at this level often have in common is a profound mindfulness practice. But were we simply to call this mindfulness we would be missing out on the understanding that what is happening here is not simply the disciplining of attention, but of the stability of the ANS. Novak Djokovic, capturing his most recent French Open title with an almost terrifying display of steadiness, points at his head as if to suggest that it is mental toughness that saw him through.
Um Novak? Impressive results in the French Open, 23 titles unbelievable, etc etc., but you are pointing at the wrong place.
He should be pointing at his heart, and at his brainstem. Novak isn’t thinking, which is what happens in the part of the head Novak is pointing at.
Similarly, on the dorsal side of things, we need the restoration that dorsal energy brings to digest our food and to rest. The problem here, again, is that most people’s experience of dorsality comes through the neuroception of lifethreat. If you enter dorsality, which is a boundary-dissolving state, through terror, as most people do, the boundary dissolution ejects you from the center of yourself. Yet importantly, to access dorsality grounded in a felt sense of safety opens up something else entirely, something that you’ve experienced in your deepest states of meditation, and your moments of greatest intimacy. If the boundary dissolves and you stay in your center, you enter the state of union.
What this implies, and importantly teaches the trauma healing community, is that the recovery and repair of dorsal states does not necessarily involve passing back through sympathetic states, though this is the standard model in most somatic trauma therapy models. Rather, what the fundamental relatedness between the three facets of neuroception shows us is that social is also adjacent to dorsal.
NEWSFLASH: Social is also adjacent to dorsal.
There is a doorway there, by shifting neuroception from lifethreat back to safety, for paths of recovery through union and intimacy. This more, dare I say it– feminine — lineage of trauma healing is under-documented in the literature. Yet is this not the kind of healing from deep dissociation that happens when someone has a spiritual or mystical experience? An experience of union? An experience that gathers together fragmented parts in a deeper broader container of unconditional love and safety?
Is this not the elusive gift that ceremony and psychedelics sometimes grant, and part of the reason that they are successful in treating trauma? If there were no doorway directly from life threat to safety, these experiences couldn’t happen.
And so the spectrum of the Autonomic Nervous System is not a ladder. It is a spiral. It is not a line. It is a circle. And trauma healing is not really about trauma. It is about creating a container of safety large enough for that which is fragmented to re-organize along the lines of the original intelligence that has been waiting there the entire time.
BTW: If you’d like to order our new 24 x 36 inch Autonomic Spectrum poster, you can do so here. Go here for an 8.5 x 11 flipchart of the same material that you can print for clients.
