Episode 274: I'm chatting with Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist Justin Sunseri on the podcast this week. This is a deep dive into all things polyvagal: looking at what it is and all the component ideas, how to build safety anchors, getting unstuck from being in a defensive state and dealing with trauma.
Justin Sunseri is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist that thinks the world needs a new understanding of mental health. One that’s simplified, easily accessible for anyone and doesn’t rely on abstract psychobabble. He is deeply passionate about Polyvagal Theory and its transformative role in trauma recovery. And as a therapist and educator, his mission is to demystify the mind-body connection and empower individuals on their journey toward emotional balance and self-regulation.
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 274 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/274.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach, and I help clients to fully recover from disordered eating or an eating disorder so that their days are no longer governed by fear and anxiety, and instead they can live a meaningful life in alignment with their values.
Today’s show is a guest interview. My guest today is Justin Sunseri. Justin is a licensed marriage and family therapist that thinks the world needs a new understanding of mental health – one that’s simplified, easily accessible for everyone, and doesn’t rely on abstract psychobabble. He is deeply passionate about polyvagal theory and its transformative role in trauma recovery, and as a therapist and an educator, his mission is to demystify the mind-body connection and empower individuals on their journey towards emotional balance and self-regulation.
I’ve been aware of Justin for many years now, which I talk about in the intro. I first invited him on the show back in March of 2021, and it’s taken until now for us to be able to find some dates and make this happen. But I’m really glad that we finally got to speak, as this is a really great episode.
Polyvagal theory is a huge part of how I work with clients, and Justin is one of the people who I followed and have learned a lot from because of his knowledge in this area. So this episode is really a deep dive into all things polyvagal theory. The interview really can be broken down into three main areas.
There’s polyvagal 101, and this looks at what polyvagal theory is and all its component ideas – the three primary states, neuroception, the three mixed states, the vagal brake, coregulation, self-regulation. If any of these terms are new to you and mean nothing at this point, within a short amount of time they will.
The next bit is then chatting about creating safety anchors and safety cues. This is a hugely practical section, with Justin sharing lots of ideas and insights.
And then the final part is getting unstuck from being in a defensive state and dealing with trauma.
At the end, Justin mentions a free resource that he has. You don’t have to sign up to get it. I’ve added it to the show notes, so if you go to www.seven-health.com/274, you can access it there.
This two-hour conversation flew by, and I felt like I could’ve chatted with Justin for many more hours. I learnt a load from this conversation, and I know you will, too. So let’s get on with the show. Here is my conversation with Justin Sunseri.
Hey, Justin. Welcome to Real Health Radio. Thanks for joining me on the show today.
Justin Sunseri: Absolutely. Super happy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Chris Sandel: I think it was a couple years ago that a client recommended your podcast to me, and we’d been talking about polyvagal theory, which is the reason I’ve invited you on today. We were going through it, and then she found your podcast and said, “Hey, I think you should check this guy out.” I started listening and I’ve been following your stuff ever since, and I use a lot of the resources that you provide with clients. So yeah, I think this conversation is going to be all about polyvagal theory and wherever our conversation leads.
Justin Sunseri: I’m here for it. Can’t wait. Thank you to that client, by the way, for helping spread the word. I appreciate that.
Chris Sandel: Yeah, Julie, thank you very much for the recommendation.
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I guess as a starting place, do you want to give listeners a bit of background on you – who you are, what you do, what training you’ve done, that kind of thing?
Justin Sunseri: Sure. I’m Justin Sunseri. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist here in California. I’ve been practicing as a therapist for 15 years or so, I think, and the majority of my experience has been with teenagers. I currently work in a public school system with very, very high needs, high risk kiddos. I have lots of experience with family therapy. I work with younger kids. In the past couple years, I’ve been working with adults in private practice as well.
I would say my expertise at this point probably leans more toward applying the polyvagal theory, which we’ll talk about, to my therapy practice, and specifically helping people work through trauma. That’s where I found my interest and my desire being pulled in that direction, because I think it applies not just to trauma, but to so many things.
Besides that, I do the podcast and book writing and all kinds of stuff, which I don’t want to go too far into right now, but tons of stuff.
Chris Sandel: When you first studied as a therapist, what was the area you thought you were going to study, or what was the pull even just towards that as an area of interest?
Justin Sunseri: I had originally started off in junior college. I went to junior college after high school, and I was an art major at first. I realised within the first year I did not like to do what the teacher told me to do creatively. I’m like, if I can’t do this for a teacher, I probably can’t do this for a living if I’m working for somebody.
So about a year into my college career, I talked to the academic counsellor at the time and I’m like, “Hey, what’s that thing where people talk one-on-one with somebody else and help them with their problems?” She’s like, “Psychologist, counsellor.” That started me on my path. I was already drawn towards psychology. In high school I remember learning about psychology, subconscious stuff. I was just into it, and I remember being really into hypnosis and teaching myself how to hypnotise my friends, which was a ton of fun. I don’t know if I used it terribly responsibly, but overall I think I was pretty morally responsible with the powers I had as a high schooler with being able to hypnotise my friend volunteers. [laughs]
But yeah, I’ve always been drawn to this stuff, and I think polyvagal theory brought a level of objectivity that I also feel drawn to. But it provided an actual paradigm for psychology, which is kind of lacking in the field. It brought this paradigm of how to view mental health and trauma and relationships and all kinds of stuff. It’s like it just clicked. It clicked, and it’s something I had to pursue. Very much aligns with my interest in therapy and mental health, but it brought a level of objectivity that clicks within me, that I need. Something very concrete to work with instead of just vague ideas that float around in the psychology realm.
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Chris Sandel: One, you’ve got a great voice for hypnotism. [laughs] I’ve just got to say that. And two, how did you then discover polyvagal theory? What was your entry point into it?
Justin Sunseri: I work for a public school district, and during the summers typically kids don’t really want to have anything to do with school, and that includes meeting with the school therapist. So there was a summer a couple years ago, I think 2019, where I had time to do some professional development, and I was really frustrated with my outcomes when it came to working with kids that I knew had heavy trauma, or things they had been through that were traumatising, as best I knew it back then. I was frustrated with my ability to make a deeper connection with them and help them get to the next step of making change in their life.
With my time during the summer, I went to YouTube – because I’m a fantastic scholar – and I typed in ‘trauma’ and saw what came up. I told myself, “I know nothing and I’m starting from scratch.” With as best of a blank slate as I could get to, I just started learning. Specifically, I think what I was looking for was understanding of how trauma ‘lives’ in the body, because we hear that so much, and I learned that in school and through continuing education and stuff, but no-one ever explained why or what that means. There was no explanation of what the heck that means. They just kept saying trauma lives in the body.
Chris Sandel: Had you read Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score?
Justin Sunseri: No. But I eventually stumbled upon Peter Levine, who was the creator of somatic experiencing, and he had answers. He had answers for how trauma lives in the body. He specifically focuses more on the shock trauma kind of stuff, but it was very – I didn’t believe it. I thought it was nonsense at first. [laughs] I was like, this is ridiculous. No, you can’t just shake and tremble and release trauma or feel better.
Chris Sandel: For the listeners, what is his stance in terms of how trauma lives in the body?
Justin Sunseri: The basic idea is that somebody goes through traumatic incidents where their body is prepared to run away or fight, but then is immobilised, and that locks the fight or flight energy in the system. So from a shock trauma perspective where you’re surviving a thing, that’s his idea. The way that you release that could look like shaking and trembling – and there’s way more to it. But if you’re looking at stuff on YouTube, that’s what you’re going to find. That’s the basic idea. He has much more in depth in his books and whatnot, but that’s the basic idea.
At that point I was like, “This is nonsense”, but I reminded myself “Nope, you know nothing. Keep going with it.” So I kept pursuing that and eventually found Dr Stephen Porges, who was doing a really dry lecture with terrible PowerPoint on the polyvagal theory. There was enough there for me to be like, “Oh, he’s talking about the autonomic nervous system, brainstem stuff.” I didn’t know much about that at all, but it was like, here’s someone who’s doing research, who’s compiled evidence connected to evolution, he’s talking about the autonomic nervous system – this guy is a primary source. He’s building on other primary sources. That seemed much more legit.
And I think Peter Levine is totally legit; I really like his work. He’s fantastic. But Porges is that primary source that really lit me up and was challenging in a way to where I just had to keep learning more and figuring out what the heck he was talking about. So that’s how I got into it. Not being happy with therapy as a therapist working specifically with people who were heavily traumatised.
Chris Sandel: And then from Porges, where did you go from there? Who are others that are big influences for you in polyvagal theory?
Justin Sunseri: Deb Dana is really the only other one that’s really spoken to me and really gotten me interested. She was probably the only person that was able to translate it. She works directly with him. So she took his work and directly translated it into language for therapists, but really for anybody. She made it very, very accessible. So those two, plus Peter Levine, are really my main resources of understanding this stuff, but also got me going on how to approach working with people who are stuck in a traumatised state.
I’ve tried a couple other sources, and it seems like they don’t quite stick to the primary source. Deb Dana has been the one that I stick with. I’ve read her books and her interviews. She does a really, really, really good job and is a really great springboard for anything polyvagal. Yeah, Porges and Dana are my go-tos, and then Levine as far as the shock trauma stuff, because he focuses more on that. Those are my three mains. And then Bessel van der Kolk, the book you mentioned, Body Keeps the Score. Really interesting read. I haven’t gone to him for how to implement and whatnot. So those three sources are my polyvagal trinity, I would call it.
Chris Sandel: I’ve had Deb on the podcast, so listeners, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. I agree, I think she does a really great job. Her most recent book, Anchored, was the first one that was very much aimed at the lay public as opposed to practitioners, but even her practitioner books I think are very friendly for the layperson. She does a really great job with breaking things down, and obviously, when you’re reading it, it’s like, ‘this is how you do it with your client’ and then you either just substitute ‘this is how I do it with myself’ or ‘this is what I take to my therapist to help them do this with me’.
Justin Sunseri: Yeah, she does a really good job with not just breaking down the theory, but also what to do with it, and she really focuses more on – actually, she does a pretty good job of really getting you curious about all of your polyvagal states. But the glimmers and from the safety state, that’s I think more of her specific thing. She makes it very accessible but then also has tons of ideas about like ‘here, try this, try this’.
I like the theory stuff more; I really want to get in depth into blending the theory, but also how to apply it, but then also Porges’s actual primary source. I want to combine all those and then use that as my springboard.
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Chris Sandel: What did you notice shift – maybe just even in the early stages, so six months after, a year after. What did you notice shift in terms of how you were working with the clients? If it was just kids at that stage, what was different? Or if it was adults and there’s a difference, mention that.
Justin Sunseri: The initial thing I noticed was for the clients who were interested in learning about this stuff – I found ways to teach these things very simply with my teenage clients, and for the ones that were interested in it, it actually provides – we call it a new narrative. It provides a non-judgmental, non-shaming explanation for how they are the way they are, why they are the way they are, and it doesn’t involve blame, doesn’t involve anything like that. I think it’s just a very accessible way of understanding yourself.
Actually, last week there was a client who was finally ready to open up to more – actually, a couple clients that were finally ready to be open to more answers. Teaching them these pieces, they were ready to learn about the different polyvagal states and whatnot, and you could see in their face, there was this lightening or releasing of judgments. ‘Clarity’ is the right word. It was this clarity that came over them that they were able to smile about, even though we were talking about things that are really difficult. Hearing the theory and how it applied to them and their specific life and what they went through and why they are the way they are right now and what they could do about it – you could see in their face the clarity and being able to shed a lot of the judgment and blame they had toward themselves.
Chris Sandel: Nice.
Justin Sunseri: That’s the initial impact of this thing. If you just learn that, it really opens up the potential for further work if you’re going to go that route. It really opens up, “Oh, if I’m not the way that I am because I’m broken or I was born defective in some way, then what can I do with this?” The potential for making change goes up if you have that foundation of non-judgment.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. This is something I bring up really early with clients as well. The way I talk about it is it’s a framework or a lens which you can then see things through, and it means that after we’ve had these conversations and after they’ve started to understand the stakes – and this is all stuff we’ll go through today – you just keep coming back to it, and you keep noticing, “What does that tell me about this thing?” It becomes a really helpful lens to see things through.
And this has been so important for me, for understanding myself, for me as a parent, for so many things. I learn all this stuff and yes, I use it with clients, but I use this so much with myself.
Justin Sunseri: Absolutely. I have nothing to add to that. I am in complete agreement.
Chris Sandel: I know that you’ve created a thing called the Polyvagal Trauma Relief System, which is a programme that takes people through polyvagal theory in a specific order, and there’s three parts to it; there’s Polyvagal 101, then Safety Anchors, and then Unstucking Defensive States. I think it’s probably a good way of structuring this. Let’s go through each of those three things.
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If we just start at the very beginning with Polyvagal 101, what is polyvagal theory?
Justin Sunseri: The one sentence idea of the polyvagal theory is that it’s the science of specifically how mammals connect, but also how we respond to danger. It’s more than that, but that’s the basic idea. It’s just how we connect. We’re human beings, we’re mammals. How do we connect to each other, but then also, when there’s danger around, what happens? That’s the basic idea.
And then from there, once that information is out, people in the trauma realm latched onto it. It’s like, “Oh, this is the explanation for how trauma lives in the body.” But that’s a basic, basic idea of polyvagal theory. It’s the science of how we connect and how we respond to danger. I think Porges calls it ‘the art of human connection’ or ‘the science of human connection’. The Polyvagal Institute calls it that.
On a deeper level, it’s an explanation of how the autonomic nervous system shifts in response to safety and danger. It teaches us that we have three distinct, but overlapping, autonomic states that we can exist in. We can be in our safety state, where we can connect with each other and smile and hug each other and greet and make eye contact and make crinkles in our eyes when we listen to each other. But all those things come from our access to be in our polyvagal state of safety and social engagement.
If we can’t be in our safety state, then we exist in our sympathetic flight/fight state. And all these things have specific biological pathways that are associated with them, but I’m just going with the basic idea. So if we can’t be safe, then we go into our sympathetic flight/fight state, but specifically it’s flight first and then fight. That’s how we respond to danger. Our first impulse is to get out of the situation, to escape if there’s danger, and if we can’t escape it then our next impulse is to be aggressive and actually get closer to the danger to get it to back off. That might be actual physical aggression, but also it might be raising our voice or lowering the tone of our voice to be more commanding and directive and imposing through voice. We could also physically get closer to someone to get them to back off, or to a danger.
If that doesn’t work – so we can’t be safe, can’t run away, can’t fight – the last option is our shutdown state, and that is where we immobilise. And this isn’t a choice, by the way. It’s all unconscious and impulsive. It’s an impulsive sequence of events we have to go through to survive a danger or life threat. So if our life actually is in threat, then we go into our shutdown state, and that’s immobilisation, and that’s where we may potentially collapse and full-on dissociate, at the extreme. But it’s really a limp collapse. It’s called ‘death feigning’ or ‘playing dead’, ‘playing possum’ is the basic idea. It’s like to survive a thing that actually is life-threatening, we go into this collapse.
The hope there is that the danger leaves or gives up. Especially if you’re death feigning, the evolutionary intent is to imitate a corpse, and if the danger is detecting somehow that you’re a corpse, and maybe even defecated yourself and you smell rotten or whatever, then the potential for that threat to leave and go to a fresh kill, maybe, goes up.
So all these things have evolutionary benefits to them. They’re not chosen. It’s not a conscious thing. No-one exactly chooses to run away or fight or shut down, or at least we don’t choose the impulse to do so. Now, what we do with that impulse, maybe there’s some level of conscious awareness and choice you can bring to it, but generally these are pretty much unconscious things that we go through, even in our day-to-day life.
That’s the basic idea of the polyvagal theory: there are different states of our body. I think that’s what people take from it and build from.
Chris Sandel: A couple other things I want to ask from that. You said Porges is your original source with this; what was his discovery? What has he brought to science that wasn’t there beforehand?
Justin Sunseri: I need to brush up on – there’s only so far I can get into his actual studies and whatnot having to do with infants or neonates and their heart rate. I need to be able to go deeper into that. I can’t do that quite yet. There’s a limit to what a therapist can do, I think. [laughs] What was the question? Oh, what did he bring that was different?
Chris Sandel: Yeah.
Justin Sunseri: Pre-polyvagal theory, the idea was that we basically exist in sympathetic or parasympathetic. We exist in flight/fight or…whatever else they would call that.
Chris Sandel: I think ‘rest and digest’. That’s what I remember from nutrition school. There were two branches within the autonomic; one was sympathetic, one was parasympathetic, yeah.
Justin Sunseri: Yeah. But the way they were viewed was as if they were at odds with each other, like a duality. It was either this or this. One was bad and one was good. I think flight/fight or sympathetic was viewed as less desirable and parasympathetic ‘rest and digest’ was viewed as more desirable.
Porges hypothesized that there actually might be a second parasympathetic branch, so it’s not this at odds thing, but really these things work together, and they all are working in concert to make sure that organism survives and is able to optimise its bodily resources. So it’s not about two things; there’s really three autonomic states, and there’s not just one parasympathetic system but two. One of them is the ventral vagal safety/social engagement branch; the other one is the dorsal vagal shutdown system. Both of those are parasympathetic. One is just newer than the other one. The ventral vagal safe & social state is a newer branch of the vagus nerve that is responsible for safety and social engagement, if I got that right.
So there’s two parasympathetic, and then there’s a sympathetic. It’s not exactly either/or. We can conceptually break them down and compartmentalise them, but really they’re active at different levels all the time. Like right now, we’re probably existing in our safe and social state, but we’re both immobilised. We’re both standing or sitting, and it seems like we’re mostly okay with it. But at the same time, when I do these things I have a little bit of flight energy in my system, and I notice that when my thoughts stumble, my anxiety, my flight energy, goes up, if I can’t precisely say what I want to say.
So it’s like, yeah, these things are off and on throughout the day. They turn off and on at benign times, it seems like, but also in situations where there’s something going on. That’s what he brought to the table: it’s not just the parasympathetic and sympathetic. There are two parasympathetics, one sympathetic, and these things work together, and they can actually mix and whatnot to make sure the organism optimises its resources and/or survives a situation.
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He also brought the whole coregulation aspect to the polyvagal theory, or to I guess the world. [laughs] As mammals, we can do things like smile and make gentle eye contact and squint our eyes, and these behavioural things that we do send a signal to other mammals that we’re safe, and these signals are picked up by the other mammal and received hopefully as safety cues, and that helps them to access their own safety state.
Like this morning, we have a dog who’s really anxious. He’s very, very anxious. We think he was heavily traumatised. We got him from the pound, or dog rescue. I don’t know what you want to call it. But heavily traumatised. I don’t know what you call it, but he was like the dummy dog for the fighting dogs, or like the test dog. But heavily traumatised. He’s still a very, very anxious dog. He’s got some attachment issues, we think. He doesn’t do very well on his own, and this morning he came to me – he’s basically dysregulated. He has less access to his safety state, is what I’m trying to say.
This morning he came and sat by me on the couch and just got close to me. He’s not quite at a point where he’ll just lie on you. He waits for permission. So I put my arm up and he came in and rested his head on my chest. You could feel his softening. He had less access to his safety state, got close to me – that’s coregulation – felt my warmth, felt my petting, gentle touch, and that helps him to access his safety state and to actually calm down, slow down, and to exist in stillness. After he got enough, he walked away and curled up on the couch and went to sleep.
That’s what coregulation is, and that’s what polyvagal theory helps to explain. There are these cues of safety we can give to each other that help the other person – or the dog, in this instance – to access their safety state, which is really an ideal. That’s where we can rest, that’s where we can connect with each other, that’s where our resources are optimised for health and growth and restoration, by accessing our safety state.
Chris Sandel: I definitely want to come back to coregulation because I think it’s super important.
Justin Sunseri: It’s really important.
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Chris Sandel: The other thing I wanted to say in terms of your basic overview is I think a lot of the time, people can hear this and think this is about life and death situations. It’s like, no, you can go into shutdown when it’s not a life and death situation. And shutdown doesn’t mean just being immobilised and lying in the foetal position. You can be in shutdown while you’re in a meeting. You can be in shutdown while with someone. I just want people to understand that as well, that there’s subtlety to this. It’s not like the all-out fight and flight and the all-out shutdown.
Justin Sunseri: Exactly. I laugh because I totally go into shutdown with large groups. I don’t do well with large groups. I can’t stand meetings, especially ones that could be done through email. I don’t do well with those, so when I go to these big staff meetings, I sit in the back because that’s where I’m the most comfortable. It kind of feels like I’m hiding a little bit. I do well back there. If it’s a potluck or something like that, I’ll be in the corner. Leave me alone. That’s just not my thing.
If I’m one on one with someone, I’m fine. Especially someone I’m comfortable with or a friend. There’s zero issues. But I know for my system, when I’m around large groups of people or new people, I just don’t do well. I’m not super social. In those instances, my life’s not in danger, but I definitely notice more of a shutdown reaction than typical. There are contexts where I’ll have more of a shutdown reaction. So yeah, it’s not about your life being in danger. These things evolved within us to help deal with those situations, but typically we’re not in actual life or death – totally could, but day to day, we’re not in life or death situations.
But there are things that can trigger our defensive states that eventually you can learn to predict. Like, “I just know that that situation for me is not ideal for my system.” But yeah, these are things we experience day to day, and it has different flavours. Your ‘fight’ state might not be an actual fight. It just might be you being irritable, snapping at your kids, snapping at your spouse, or yelling at the person on the road or whatever. But it also could just be a general irritation that you notice. It’s not overwhelming but it’s just there. So these things blend, they have different levels of intensity, they have different flavours to them.
It’s just you can break it down to the basic groups to help you identify where you’re at.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think what you’re describing is your level of awareness with all this. This is the early part, after I’ve explained ‘these are the different primary states as part of polyvagal theory, this is what polyvagal theory is’, it’s then getting clients, like, “Over the next week, I want you to pay attention and start to notice what are the things that start to shift within your mind, what are the things that start to shift within your body, with your thoughts, etc., so there is more awareness of how different situations/events/people affect my system.” Is that where you start with people as well? Like ‘let’s start to build awareness’?
Justin Sunseri: It depends. No, I don’t, but that’s only because the majority of the people I work with don’t know what this is, so they’re not seeking it out, and they’re teens and they couldn’t care less. With them, no, they’re just not open to that quite yet. But if I have someone that is coming to me, they know what I do – like the adults I work with in private practice or my coaching, clients – they’re more interested in this, and they want to know and they want to apply it.
In general, yeah, I think it’s totally fine to be curious about these things. I actually set up an email sequence – it was a 3-day challenge – to teach people how to recognise these things in their day-to-day life so it’s not triggering. Just to find benign situations, kind of like what you’re explaining, where you notice a little more of this or a little more of that, and that’s it. We’re not delving into things, we’re not meditating and calling upon past pains or whatever. It’s just lightly touching upon – and Deb Dana does a really good job with this exploratory stuff as well. So I think it’s fine. I think it’s totally cool.
And once you start hearing about these things, I don’t know if you can help but do that, so I think that is the next logical step that I think people will get into. “When do I feel this or that?” and identifying emotions that they can categorise into one group or another.
But when it comes to treatment, if someone’s saying, “I want to work on my trauma, I want to work on my mental health, I want to change this or that”, the first thing I assess is, what’s your access to your safety state? Can you remain grounded in the present moment? Are you curious about how you feel? Are you able to tolerate these more defensive types of emotions that come from your defensive states? So that’s usually my first stop: what’s your capacity to do this kind of work? Because it can be really, really difficult, and if we keep going down this road of working on dysregulation, the safety state has to be developed.
That’s why the second phase of my system is called Building Safety Anchors. You have to build your potential and capacity to feel safe, to access your safety state. So after learning the theory, that’s the next step: building safety. And it’s totally okay to be curious about your other states as well, but to get to the third step of actually working on the dysregulation or the stuck defensive state, you really have to have the groundwork of safety in your system first. So that’s usually my next step.
Chris Sandel: We’ll come back to that in a little bit.
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Another term that comes up is neuroception. What is neuroception?
Justin Sunseri: It’s an unconscious process where our brainstem detects cues of safety and danger from both the outside environment and the internal environment, and interpersonal, which is outside. Like right now, I have lights on in my office that may or may not be triggering some level of safety or defence. I have a bunch of bright white ones on that I feel less safe. I’m not in danger, I don’t feel like I’m in danger, but they’re probably triggering a little bit more flight energy. Maybe an ever so slight amount. I might be prompted to get up and turn them off once we’re done.
But the sunlight outside, which is more of a natural – well, it is a natural source of light [laughs] – versus these bright white, fake ones – that one, I would like to go out there and be in the sun. So that triggers my safety state, it triggers my ability to be in the present moment. And I’m neurocepting, I’m picking up on these cues of safety or danger. There’s two examples behind me. I have the orangish light, which is calming for me. That is more of a cue of safety for me that I neurocept as safe.
So neuroception is picking up on cues of safety and danger from the outside environment, a d then our body, our brainstem, shifts our polyvagal state into more safety or more danger. That’s the basic idea. But also, it’s true for interpersonally. If right now you went wide-eyed and stopped talking, I’d probably shift out of my safety state more into an anxious flight energy. I’d wonder what the heck is going on and try to talk to you and be like, “Hey, are you okay?” So I would pick up on that interpersonal lack of coregulation. I would pick up on that and my brainstem would shift my state to more of a defensive one.
Likewise if I live with a chronic illness. I’m probably going to exist potentially in more of a defensive state. I’m picking up on something within, if I have a chronic illness, or I’m hungry. If I feel hunger, my body shifts to a more – eventually it gets to a fight state and I get ‘hangry’. Hunger plus anger is ‘hanger’. So those internal things that I just need, or that I’m wrestling with internally as far as illnesses, that’s probably going to shift me down into more of a defensive state.
Things like hunger, I can deal with that. I can eat something and that’ll help me shift my state as well. Other things, people live with chronically where they can’t exactly – it’s still possible to access safety, but there’s things neurocepting inside that are probably going to be a lot more challenging for them.
That’s the basic idea. You’re picking up on things unconsciously. You could be consciously aware of it. I’m consciously aware of my lights. But I’m talking with you right now; I’m still picking up on these things without my conscious awareness. Not just lighting, but sounds. Right now it’s pretty quiet for me, so nothing that’s taking me out of my safety state. If I heard my kid scream, I’m going to shift out of my safety state. I don’t have to think about it, I don’t have to hear it and then process it and think “Oh, I should feel this way” and then go do the thing. No, I hear it, my brainstem hears that shrill sound, and within my DNA is encoded an autonomic reaction to shift into flight energy so I can go run over there and deal with the situation.
So that’s neuroception. Picking up on and then shifting into these different polyvagal states.
Chris Sandel: I think what you said is really important in terms of this happens at the unconscious level. Even when it comes into your consciousness, the shift has already happened. I can’t remember if it was Deb who used this example, but it’s like you see something on the ground and you jump back, and you thought it was a snake, and then actually when you look a second time, it’s a stick. But obviously you’d already jumped. It’s not that we wait for it all to come into the conscious awareness. Your body is taking you to this place, and then you come up with a story or come up with a meaning of why this thing occurred.
Justin Sunseri: Yeah, the story eventually settles in. And it’s a good thing that we do these things outside of our conscious awareness, because day-to-day existence would probably be a lot more difficult if I had to take in stimuli from the outside world or the inside world, interpersonal world, and somehow think of how to feel about that.
And then what happens is, through natural neuroception, the brainstem not only shifts your polyvagal state, but that shifts other things, like my metabolism or my pupil dilation, how much I’m sweating, my muscle tension. Imagine having to think about all these pieces and somehow know the correct amount of how much my eyes should be dilated right now. And when I turn my head, it’s going to shift. How could I ever possibly consciously do that and have healthy relationships and be able to binge watch something on Netflix, maybe?
We’re watching something called BEEF. It’s fantastic, by the way. It’s really interesting.
Chris Sandel: Some friends were over and were recommending it, but I don’t know anything about it.
Justin Sunseri: Oh my gosh, really good. So there’s no way – I don’t think we could ever live a life where we had to consciously do all those things. So the fact these are outside of our conscious awareness makes our life much more streamlined, and it makes survival possible to simply react to something instead of noticing, thinking, deducing, and then planning and executing. That would take way too long for survival. That stick really could be a snake, so the brainstem detects it as potential danger and reacts because that is the default – to assume danger, even if it’s not. And that’s probably a good thing.
Chris Sandel: Yes, definitely. It feels like it’s less important now, but definitely through our evolution, it was incredibly, incredibly important.
00:41:40
Justin Sunseri: Pretty much. So hopefully people can pick up on a potential danger but then do some sort of – they can detect there’s a snake, and then look over and realise it’s a stick and do something called self-regulation, which is you climb back up into your safety state. You’re able to relax and the body can self-regulate itself out of flight/fight and back into safety.
People who live in more of a traumatised state have a difficult time doing so. It’s maybe a silly example for what we’re talking about, but the basic idea is the same: if somebody gets triggered – let’s say they get triggered by somebody’s words or a certain image or a meaning; they’re triggered by something on the internet, let’s say that – that might really live within them, and their ability to self-regulate out of it might be very, very challenged.
Or maybe there’s some sort of interpersonal issue at work. For most people, they might roll with it and say the person is a jerk and move on with life or whatever. But for someone who lives in more of a flight/fight state, that really may sit with them and eat away at them throughout the day, and they’ll ruminate on it. They’ll stay stuck in that flight/fight state and play it over and over and over again in their mind. Not consciously, not like they’re choosing to. But their ability to self-regulate out of that and back into a safety state is compromised.
Chris Sandel: The one I come up with a lot with clients is the triggering of these defensive states connected to food. Someone can intellectually know that eating a sandwich or eating this thing or that thing isn’t unsafe, but once they’re put into that situation, this gets triggered within the body. And again, this is where them understanding polyvagal theory can be so helpful, because there can then be all this judgment and shame of like “Why can’t I just do this? This should be really easy. I want to get better, I want to recover”, and yet they enter into this situation and it becomes really challenging for them.
This is where their body, at that point, is cataloguing this experience as danger, and it’s through time and us working together that that can be re-learnt so that there is then not that response that is triggered within the body, and so that their body is able to then catalogue eating food or eating this particular type of food as now being a safe experience.
Justin Sunseri: That’s tough to do. Conceptually, these things make sense, but as you were talking, I was thinking about my clients that, when it comes to food, there’s a lot of family pressure or cultural expectations, familial expectations of how they should look/not look, how much they should eat/should not eat, and it semes like with these families that apply a lot of pressure around food, it’s really more about the parents’ issues or the family’s issues that are being inflicted onto the next generation.
But food, eating, really does become this danger, in a sense. They’re not actually in danger, but being judged and being rejected by their family is very much triggering of those defensive states. So when you’re being told you’re not eating enough, then you eat more and they say, “Why are you eating so much?” That is judgmental, kind of blaming, kind of shaming. It’s a rejection. It’s being pushed away from the family, period. And that is, especially for a child, absolutely a danger cue. So eating very much becomes intertwined with rejection and shame and blame and judgment. Danger is just saturated in – not literal danger, but also, yeah, kind of literal danger because you’re being rejected. So yeah, the activation of flight/fight and maybe even eventually shutdown and eating kind of go together, or they could.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. The difficulty as well is the longer – and I’m often working with clients who’ve had their eating disorder go on for a really long time. There can be people where this has been going on for 20 years. They are in a very malnourished, compromised state, and when the body’s not getting the amount of energy it needs, it turns on the stress response as a way of finding energy. That’s one of the ways that it brings energy to your cells and keeps you alive.
So you’re in a situation where you are coming down the polyvagal ladder, you are in sympathetic, unless you are being coregulated. And you’ll have moments of coregulation which are bringing you back into that safe and social, but as soon as that isn’t there, you drop back down because your body is like “We need this energy to keep you alive”, and this is why this sympathetic is being turned on.
Justin Sunseri: Oh, interesting. I can’t really comment on that, but that makes sense.
00:47:23
Chris Sandel: What about the vagal brake? What is this?
Justin Sunseri: The vagal brake is not a thing as in a physical thing that exists. It is more of a metaphor. I mean, it is a thing, but it’s not like a flap that stops these signals. The vagal brake is the influence of the safety state on the heart. So when the safety state is strong enough, when those pathways are developed enough, then the heartbeat can stay at a calmer pace.
What that means is if there’s some sort of – let’s say a mild danger. Let’s say food. Let’s say there’s a social situation, a work gathering or a family thing, and food’s involved. You’ll have to help me out here and make sure I get this right, but just that by itself could be triggering of flight/fight. Let’s say that person’s in their safety state, they go to this event, and all of a sudden, oh God, there’s food, and there’s expectations now of eating and socialising. That could trigger flight/fight – and other things, but we’ll just go from safety down to flight/fight.
If the vagal brake is strong enough, so if the safety state is strong enough, the safety state will stay active, which means the activation of flight/fight might still happen, but it won’t be out of control. It might be able to be felt and then you might be able to do some self-regulation or connect with someone, receive coregulation, and then get through that situation. And I don’t know how that looks. Maybe someone can eat and they’re okay with it, I don’t know. But it also might be like, “You know what, I just don’t want to eat”, and they own that and they’re okay with coming from their safety state.
I don’t know the right way of how that looks behaviourally, but internally as far as the vagal brake is concerned, it keeps the defensive activation at bay. My vagal brake when it comes to social situations is not super high. I don’t do well with potlucks, I don’t do well with, like I said before, the big meetings that could be done through an email. My vagal brake is not super strong when it comes to that context, for some reason. I don’t do very well with that.
But that’s the idea. The vagal brake is not yet strong enough, and the safety state needs to be developed further in order to address that situation if that’s something you want to address. It’s up to that person. For me in my meetings, I get through them and I’m fine with that. I don’t feel the need to really grow in that area. There’s other areas where I do want to grow where my vagal brake strength is important, so I focus on those. But when it comes to meetings and stuff, I’m like, eh, I’ll just get through it. I’m fine.
Chris Sandel: Are ‘vagal brake’ and ‘window of tolerance’ words that can be used interchangeably, from your description there?
Justin Sunseri: Yeah. If you don’t have the polyvagal theory information, you would say, “My window of tolerance is just not wide enough yet. My distress tolerance is not strong enough yet.” It’s the same thing. When it comes to the polyvagal theory, we’re just saying here’s the mechanism. This is why. This is what’s happening. It’s the safety state. Your ventral vagal pathways are not active, basically. If they were active, then your heartbeat would stay calmer and your defensive state activation would not happen because your heartbeat is at a calmer place because the safety state is active.
00:50:52
Chris Sandel: The last thing I want to talk about in this polyvagal 101 before we move on to the safety piece is we talked about the three primary states in terms of safe and social, then sympathetic, which is fight and flight, and then the shutdown. But there’s also mixed states. Can you talk about the mixed states?
Justin Sunseri: This is where things get a little more complicated. Not much, though. Like you said, primary states, just like primary colours, red, yellow, and blue. Just like you can mix two primary colour paints and get a mixed colour, same thing. When you have two primary polyvagal states, you can mix them and get a mixed state. So when you combine – let’s start with safe and social. When you combine that with fight and flight, you get a mixed state called play. The idea here is when flight and fight are active, you’re mobile. You can run away, you can be aggressive. The idea is you’re mobile.
Chris Sandel: And I like the way that Deb uses ‘mobilised’ for flight or fight and sympathetic, because I think ‘mobilised’ is a nice neutral term.
Justin Sunseri: That’s really what it is, yeah. Totally. That’s exactly what it is. When you flight and fight, you think defensive, we think bad. But really it’s about mobility. That’s really what it is.
So when you have mobility plus safe and social, that’s social engagement. So mobility plus you can socially interact with people, that’s play.
Another mixed state is stillness. Right now, you and I have some level of stillness because we’re hopefully safe and social enough to be immobile, and shutdown is really immobility. We call it shutdown, but it’s immobility. It’s just we stop moving. That could be from a defensive life threat, but it also could be like right now. We’re not moving, but we’re okay with it. We go to sleep, we’re not moving, but hopefully we’re okay with it. That’s stillness. Or when you’re meditating, that’s stillness.
The final mixed state is when you have mobilise and immobile, but in more of a defensive capacity, so mobile and immobile. That’s the basic idea. Flight/fight plus shutdown. When those two are active, that results in freeze. And freeze is where your body is basically prepared to run away or fight, to be mobile, but can’t. So immobilised at the same time. It could be a panic attack. A panic attack is freeze, and that’s where you have high heartrate, muscles might be tense, maybe even sweating. Eyes are wide. You’re ready. You are ready to run away. I think panic is more of a flight or fight thing, but you’re ready to mobilise and get out of the situation, but your body is also frozen. It’s shut down, it’s immobile at the same time. So that’s the mixed state of freeze. Freeze and shutdown are different. Shutdown is that limp collapse, whereas freeze is a very stiff, tense immobilisation. Shutdown is a limp immobilisation.
Chris Sandel: In terms of the fawn response, would that be also a version of those?
Justin Sunseri: No, fawn is something different. Fawn I would say is a behavioural – and I don’t think Porges ever talks about fawn in his – I’ve never seen him mention fawn as a polyvagal state. There’s no biology for fawn. There is no pathway for fawn. Fawn is a behavioural adaptation that I would argue can come from any defensive state.
Fawn is where you are – and I’ve seen some people try to differentiate; I read an article recently about how appeasement is different than fawning. I don’t know if I quite buy that. It really comes down to maybe opinion. But fawn is you’re getting your needs met by appeasing or complying with – I’m not sure of the right word. Maybe someone’s in a domestic violence situation and they have to survive, they have to get their needs met, and they can’t quite escape, they can’t quite fight back, but they can keep the danger at bay by complying or by taking on certain behaviours that just keep the danger at bay.
I think the argument for appeasement is that it is some level of – they call it ‘super coregulation’. I don’t think it’s worth getting into right here, but the basic idea of fawning – that’s how I understand fawning. Can someone exist in a flight state and do some sort of behaviour to get the danger to back off or calm down enough to just get their needs met? I think I would call that fawning. Could someone exist in a fight state and do the same thing? Could you exist in shutdown and take on some sort of behaviour and get the danger to lessen or to get your needs met? I would say yeah.
So yeah, I argue that fawn is a behavioural adaptation, which is a polyvagal concept. Behavioural adaptations. That’s a much bigger concept. I would say fawning fits into behavioural adaptations. I don’t talk about fawn very much, so if I’m struggling, that’s why. But it’s a behavioural adaptation to a polyvagal defensive state like flight/fight, shutdown, or freeze.
Chris Sandel: That makes complete sense.
00:56:40
I guess the other thing that we haven’t mentioned at this point is within each of these different states, there are different thoughts that will naturally arise. There are different emotions that will naturally arise, there are different sensations that will naturally arise. And in the same ways we talked about that neuroception and this being very much an automatic response, it’s the same here.
I think this is where the awareness piece is so helpful, because you can notice your experience of “Okay, I’m having these kinds of thoughts come up, I’m having these sort of sensations within my body; what does that tell me about the state I’m in?” I’m often, when I’m working with clients, will talk about, let’s not get so hooked in by the content of the thought and how to outthink this thought, as opposed to just, “Where did this tell me that I am on that polyvagal” – and they talk about the polyvagal ladder. Where am I on this ladder? What does that information tell me?
Justin Sunseri: To go really literal based on what you just said, if someone’s able to recognise their thoughts and their emotions, maybe their sensations, maybe even their impulses, that person’s pretty well-anchored in their safety state, in my opinion. If you can recognise all that stuff and allow it, that’s a really good sign that you have enough anchoring in your safety state. That’s a really good sign.
To recognise these things is not easy. If you’re in a fight state, your capacity to be curious about your inner world is very low. You’re much more engaged and interested in dealing with the threat of the outside world and getting it to back off. You’re not going to have much capacity to notice what’s going on in your thoughts and your feelings and stuff. So it might be more of – in the moment, that might not be happening. Probably won’t be happening, unless you have enough anchoring in your safety state and you can actually feel that fight energy and be okay with that mobilisation, that power. You can totally have some level of mindfulness there and own it and whatnot.
So it might be more after the fact, where you look back and you’re processing something and you’re anchored in your safety state, and now you’re thinking about that interaction with somebody at work or with your spouse, and you can recognise, “Yeah, I was in my fight energy. My thoughts were all about blame and I was really judging that person and accusing them of this and that or bringing up the past” – which might be valid, but you get the idea. “I was tense and my eyes were dead locked on them and they were wide.” You can totally look back and be like, “I was really in my fight state and not in a very well-regulated place.”
I’m not sure if that answers your question. [laughs] What was the question?
Chris Sandel: It actually was just more a rhetorical question of the importance of recognising your state. And I agree with you – and again, it depends on the flavour of things. I’m thinking of experiences with my son. We’re not in a head to head battle; it’s not a specific altercation. It’s just “I can notice a tenseness to this thing here, I can notice how I’m feeling. I’ve definitely come down the ladder and I’m not being the kind of person I want to be in this moment” or “Gosh, I’m noticing how this is affecting me.”
So I think there are definite moments where I’m just in the moment and I’m so in the moment that I don’t even recognise it. And actually, the more I’ve learnt about polyvagal theory and the more I’ve practiced this, it is amazing how much more awareness I can bring for all of those different things. I’ll have conversations with my wife where sometimes it will go in a certain direction and I’ll be like, “Honey, I’m in shutdown now. I’m so unproductive as part of this conversation. I need to go for a walk. I need to go and do something because I can barely string a sentence together. I can’t really think” because I can notice where I am in my body.
It’s taken time to get to that place, but I do think that that is on the menu of where you can get to if you start to really pay attention to this stuff.
Justin Sunseri: Yeah, ideally what you’re describing is your vagal brake. If you can notice these things, then that person’s vagal brake is strengthened enough to be able to tolerate some level of activation of their defensive state, the mobilisation or immobilisation or whatever it is, their vagal brake is strong enough to notice some of that without getting caught up in it and spiralling into it and entering dysregulation. The safety state being active allows us to notice those probably more mild to moderate levels of activation of a potentially more defensive state.
I think that’s what you’re describing, and that’s a really good place. It’s not bad to feel these things at all. It’s not bad to feel angry. It’s not a bad thing. It’s not bad to feel sad or anxious. It’s not bad. Ideally, though, we just want to notice it and either allow it – like if you’re alone and you’re feeling these things, then we want to allow it, and eventually mindfully experience it. But that’s later on down the road. That’s like Phase 3 stuff with my system.
But at a minimum, if you can just allow it and be like, “I’m just noticing this. I don’t want to feel it anymore, but I’m going to let it be there and just go do something else” – that’s fantastic. I think it’s a really good thing. If you can just notice it and talk about it, awesome. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with these things being there. You might actually notice it, feel it, and then do something about it. When you said that you noticed it and you shared with your wife, “Hey, I’m not doing very good right now. I’m not a productive member of this conversation” – you did something. That’s amazing. That’s great.
I would love it if we had more people that could do that. And people on the other end of those messages that are like, “Okay, let’s take a break. I got you. Do your thing. I’ll be here when you’re ready to come back.” That would be amazing. That’s a really good thing. These aren’t bad.
Chris Sandel: I wish more people knew about this. I wish this was part of the education at school. I wish I had this information when I was growing up and this was just a part of how we were and how we understood the world. It would make such a difference, because the fact that both myself and my partner have this shared vocabulary makes it really easy to be able to talk about it, to talk about our son, to be able to talk about it in terms of our own relationship. It makes such a difference.
And again, when I’m able to talk about it with clients and they’re able to have that framework and that lens, it just makes things easier. And I don’t think this is so conceptually hard that at an age of 10 or 12 or whatever, you couldn’t get this. Even younger. You just talk about it differently.
Justin Sunseri: This is stuff – the knowledge, I argue, is born within us. We already know this. It’s a nonverbal thing. We already know it. We lose it because – a bunch of things. Trauma. We lose it because on higher order things outside of ourselves as biological organisms, we’re taught things through family and culture and religious institutions, government institutions.
We’re taught things on how to think and act and what to believe that I would argue get in the way of our natural knowledge, wisdom, our natural compulsion or tendency to self-regulate and coregulate. I think we’re born with it, or we’re born with the potential to. If we receive coregulation when we’re born and as we’re raised, we don’t have to have perfect circumstances, we don’t have to have a mansion, we don’t have to have – these are unnecessary. They’re nice, sure, but if we’re raised in homes where our needs are met and we have appropriate coregulation, we do pretty darn well, I think. and we can offer that to others as we get older.
But babies are born with the potential. They’re ready to receive coregulation. They are ready. They’re ready for skin-to-skin contact. They’ve already been hearing voices. They’re ready eventually to make eye contact. They’re ready. It’s there, and it just needs to be grown. But then it gets diverted here and there and shut down. Instead of listening to our body’s natural hunger, we’re told, “You’re eating too much”, to bring it back to eating.
So that message, that judgment from people like parents or adults in our lives that we trust and we’re supposed to be – we’re taught to be obedient to them – that gets in the way of our natural, as I understand it, ability to listen to what we need. Like my body needs more hydration; my solution is to get water. My body knows that. But if someone’s teaching you that for some reason you’re drinking too much water – I don’t know if that’s a thing, but that’s going to get in the way of that natural self-regulatory capacity that you have.
01:06:30
My son is seven. I try to teach my kids about emotions and feelings and whatnot. I don’t teach them the polyvagal stuff. I’ve never taught them. I use the language of it, but I don’t teach them ‘here’s the autonomic nervous system’. I don’t do that.
Chris Sandel: “Sit down, kids. We’ve got a lecture coming.”
Justin Sunseri: No. And that’s fine if you do that. That’s totally fine. I just don’t do that. But I’ll use the language. I’ll sneak it in here and there. But really when it comes to emotions, I think as parents, our tendency – one thing I do differently – our tendency is to solve the problem.
My son is seven years old. He came over here right next to me a while back. I think it was at nighttime. I think he was having trouble sleeping, or I don’t know what it was, but he came to me and he’s like, “I don’t feel good.” I think he said, “I feel bad” or something like that. I was like, “What is it you’re feeling? What are you going through?” I think I asked him maybe, “Are you feeling sadness?” Something like that. He goes, “I don’t know why.” I said, “Don’t worry about why.”
First off, we didn’t know the solution, so I didn’t worry about the solution. But then the other thing we do as parents or as adults is we try to figure out why. We ask, “Why do you feel that way?” Rather than figuring out why, I said, “Let’s not worry about why. I want you to tell me what you’re going through right now in this moment.” That gives him a chance to use language like, “I feel heavier, I feel down, I feel whatever, empty.” I’d rather he use words like that as much as we can, but we totally use words like sadness and angry and whatnot. But there’s a felt sense or experience of these emotions.
So when he was able to name what he was going through – and he just used simple words like “I feel heavy” or “I feel down or alone” or something like that, once he was able to do that, then I could ask him, “What do you want to do about that?” Then a solution could come into place. He’s like, “I don’t know.” I said, “Do you want a hug? Would that help?” He always loves hugs, so that was enough. He got coregulation from me. He was able to name his feelings, experience them enough. He didn’t meditate on it for 20 minutes. He just felt it and talked about it, and then he got a hug from me, coregulation, and he was good to go. That was it.
The idea here is I think we have the capacity to notice these things. I think we naturally seek out coregulation. On some level it’s kind of taught. I teach him words for it and I teach him how to notice these things as they come up. But I think the tendency, the compulsion to naturally self-regulate is there; we just do all these things that get in the way. And I’m not a perfect parent, I’m not claiming that I am, but I think that instance went pretty well.
But yeah, I totally have instances where it’s not super coregulatory and you just have to get your clothes on and get ready for school. Like, deal with it, go, let’s do it. [laughs] And I have to apply a little more flight/fight energy because we do have time limits and we do have pressures in life and we’ve just got to deal with it.
Chris Sandel: That was lovely hearing about you with your son. I think the thing with that as well is, as you said, you didn’t instantly jump to ‘how do we solve this’. There was more, in a sense, ‘let’s be curious, let’s explore this a little bit’, and then, as you said, “You tell me what would help in this. If you can’t tell me, I’ll suggest some ideas.”
Justin Sunseri: Yeah, we can totally brainstorm. Nothing wrong with that at all. But if you jump to the solution, then their curiosity about what it’s like to be them I think goes down, and their ability to put words to it. I’m not going to say – if I told him just to go away in that moment, that’s hurtful on some level, but I’m not saying it’s irreparable or that he’s traumatised for life. I don’t need people to be perfect parents. That’s not necessary.
But as much as possible, when you have these little moments to be curious, I would really encourage people to hold off on the parental need to solve the problem or to give advice. Pull back on that a little bit. There’s totally room for that, but before that, you need to be self-regulated as a parent or as a partner or whatever it is, and then be curious. Just “Hey, what’s going on? What are you feeling? What’s happening inside?” And then put language to it, and then yeah, we can totally have room for problem-solving after that.
Chris Sandel: The next area is getting into developing the safety anchors. I’m going to start it as a very open, broad question – talk about this, developing safety. What does that look like?
Justin Sunseri: Actually, I don’t know if you’re going to touch on this, but I think one more big concept, especially for your audience, which is the behavioural adaptations concept.
Chris Sandel: Sure, let’s go there.
Justin Sunseri: Do you want to do that later on?
Chris Sandel: Yeah, let’s do that.
01:11:32
Justin Sunseri: I think this is really important and it’s going to really help frame what people might be going through as far as eating or whatever they do. A behavioural adaptation – I mentioned it before, but it’s basically we do a behaviour that reduces the intensity of the defensive activation.
So in that example of my son, instead of coming to me and seeking out coregulation, what if he just went on his tablet and ignored how he felt? Using the tablet, or for us adults or teens or whoever, everybody at this point, mindlessly scrolling through your phone – I don’t go on TikTok because I see how addictive it is and I do not want to get sucked into it, or the reels or whatever, those short videos that you turn into a zombie and you go through it – that’s a behavioural adaptation. In my opinion, you’re doing something to distract yourself from whatever the hell you have going on inside.
Drug use, cutting, eating, overeating/undereating, all these things and more – just simple examples, picking at your cuticles, fidgeting – all these things relieve or reduce – I’ll say reduce, not really relieve. They reduce the activation of your defensive state enough to where it’s not out of control. That’s what behavioural adaptations do. They do something to reduce the intensity of whatever it is you’re going through. So I think it’s really important for your audience to get that.
Whatever, you’re in flight, you’re in fight, freeze, shutdown, instead of mindfully feeling it, experiencing it, and letting it be there and do its thing – we all do. We go to these behavioural adaptations just to reduce what we’re going through, to reduce the intensity of it.
Chris Sandel: I agree. The way that I talk about this with clients is I truly believe eating disorders are anxiety disorders. The thing with anxiety disorders is it’s about avoidance. It’s about “I don’t want to feel this particular feeling” or “I don’t want to have to do this thing”, and as you say, by avoiding – if you’re thinking “Today I want to challenge my eating disorder and I want to take a day off doing exercise”, and then it comes to it and that feeling rises up and becomes so intense to try and take that time off exercise and you’re like, “Screw it, I’m just going to exercise today. It’s too hard to take it off.”
You get that mini reduction in the anxiety by doing that, and that then just creates this vicious cycle where it becomes harder and harder because there’s more avoidance that gets baked in and baked in. for a very, very long time, it’s like “But I haven’t had a rest day now in six months or a year or five years” or whatever it may be, so then it becomes very, very difficult. That behavioural adaptation is then that I have to keep doing this thing.
Justin Sunseri: I’m curious – if you don’t mind me switching things up a little bit, I’m going to ask you a question. I’ll plead ignorance on this; is it possible someone could have a – do you call it eating disorder, disordered eating?
Chris Sandel: It works on a continuum. An eating disorder is something that is officially diagnosed, and disordered eating is something that doesn’t have that official DSM –
Justin Sunseri: I’ll stick with disordered eating. Is it possible someone could have disordered eating or be anywhere on that continuum from a stuck fight state, a shutdown, or a freeze? Or do you think it’s always a flight/anxiety kind of thing?
Chris Sandel: The answer is all of the above. There can be so many reasons and ways that someone enters into an eating disorder and why it happens. You can have someone where it’s purely physiological. It’s the genetics that someone has the propensity to develop an eating disorder, and they go on an innocuous diet, and by getting into a low energy state, that basically turns on the sensation so that, for you or I – I don’t know what your feelings are when you don’t eat. If I don’t eat, within a very short amount of time I feel terrible, and my body is like “You need to eat.” For someone who has the propensity to develop an eating disorder, rather than feeling that terrible sensation, actually there’s some calmness that comes over them.
So you can have someone who really, they were pretty unlucky. They went on a diet, they had the genetics, and they fall into this place. Or at the other end of the spectrum, you can have someone who’s had huge amounts of trauma that has gone on from a very young age, and the eating disorder is something that developed. It can be connected to managing anxiety; it can be because that was part of the trauma and their parents were like “You shouldn’t eat this much.” Long story short, there are many different routes into this.
Justin Sunseri: That makes sense. That’s what I would assume. I would assume that any of the defensive states could lead to eating as a behavioural adaptation. I think if you’re stuck in an anxious flight state, although I think it’d probably be more of a freeze, that could lead to skin picking or hair picking. I think some behaviours, you can pretty much guess what sort of state they come from. When it comes to eating, I just don’t know enough, but I know with my clients that I hear from that talk about disordered eating or flat-out eating disorders is that guilt and shame are often a part of it. To me, that lives in a gut, and that’s a very shutdown kind of thing. Or potentially even freeze, controlled. So it seems like shutdown could definitely be a part of this. I don’t know if it’s common or not, but that’s what I’ve seen or heard from in my clients.
Chris Sandel: I would say the shutdown is very common with the clients I work with. And often more so than being in more of that sympathetic fight or flight. But it also depends. They can be in shutdown and then you put a meal in front of them, or you say, “Now you need to take time off exercise”, and you can get someone who then becomes much more mobilised because of that experience now being on the table.
Justin Sunseri: I also wonder if – I think this was true for me for a very long time, because I’ve lived in mostly a shutdown state my whole life. It’s not debilitating; I’ve been functional. But I definitely notice it, or have noticed it historically, but I’m coming out of it more and more and more. For me, I noticed I probably had disordered eating for quite a while. What I think was happening was I was coming out of shutdown, and my flight energy I couldn’t handle, so I would eat and eat and eat and eat, and that would calm me back down.
So I can see this as a behavioural adaptation for someone coming out of or up the polyvagal ladder and it’s too intense. That makes sense. That could be a way to reduce the intensity of – even though it’s self-regulation, or even the potential for self-regulation, to climb the polyvagal ladder, which is a metaphor we didn’t get into – but yeah, the behaviour could totally tamp it down and bring you back to a place that is predictable or – not comforting, but tolerable or you’ve been there so you already know it. You feel it.
Chris Sandel: There’s that. The other part – and I don’t know what your experience has been like, but as I said before, if you’re having long gaps between your meals, you’re getting into a lower energy state. So there could be this sudden recognition of food’s available, and the body’s like, “Let’s make good here. There’s finally food available and energy coming in. We’re going to make the most of this situation.”
I think often because of the way that culture talks about food and how we should eat and everything, and because of the guilt and shame and stuff connected to it, it can be thought of as like, “I’m eating in a way to self-soothe” when actually, it’s not self-soothing to take care of the emotions; it’s your body like, “Great, we now have something in front of us that could really help us”, and that’s what happens and then we just create the story or the meaning to explain what happened.
Justin Sunseri: Yeah, the story of the state.
01:20:35
Chris Sandel: So, let’s get on to safety.
Justin Sunseri: Let’s do it. This brings us back to the vagal brake concept. The idea is that we need our safety state as strong as possible to be able to handle day-to-day stuff, to be able to handle those little minor insults at work or on the road. We need our safety state strong enough to be able to handle that without spiralling into dysregulation, into a defensive state.
We need our safety state strong enough also to be able to handle trauma work and potentially dealing with, eventually, our stuck defensive state. The vagal brake has to be strong enough. The safety pathways have to be strong enough. We have to be able to know what safety feels like, first, because that can be very different for people, to access it, to identify it, to practice being there, and to build and build and practice, practice, practice so you can eventually begin to feel your more defensive stuff, to feel mobilisation.
And hopefully when you feel it, it’s not felt as defence, but you’re actually able to welcome it as mobilisation or playfulness. That’s the goal: eventually you can, from your safety state, be curious and allow self-regulation to happen, which is going to involve feeling those more defensive – to feel immobilisation and mobilisation and then eventually to be really well-anchored in your safety state as you climb your polyvagal ladder as you self-regulate. That’s the basic idea. Identifying safety, practicing being there, building the strength of your safety state.
Just doing that – I say ‘just’ doing that, but really, it’s a lot. It’s not easy. But doing that could increase your potential for being curious about your inner world, to feel more in the present moment, to be able to connect with other people. But doing that could also reduce the intensity of your stuck defensive state because your vagal brake is now stronger.
Let’s say someone’s been through something traumatic and they’re in a context where they’re neurocepting something as dangerous and it’s triggering that trauma all over again. They’re having a full-blown flashback, they’re in a panic attack or rage. Maybe that’s their standard. In that situation, they get triggered into something that is very dysregulated.
If they develop their vagal brake strength enough, their safety state, in that same situation, they probably will still get triggered, but it may not be nearly as much – and they will be more likely to notice it and be like, “Whoa, what’s going on here?” and actually, they could do some mindful self-regulation. They probably would be able to know, “I feel this. I’m going to let it be there and I’m going to go actively do something that helps me re-regulate. I’m going to connect with somebody that I know is a really good coregulator. I’m going to do something that I know helps me to slow down and breathe easier.”
That does not involve directly experiencing the defensive state, necessarily. It could, but just building the safety state, they might not be at that point where they’re actually able to feel their defensive state. And when it’s triggered it’s probably too much anyways. So just from building a safety state, the potential to be triggered, and to be triggered in a really dysregulating way, goes down, based on what my clients are telling me and whatnot. It goes down.
So that’s the benefit and the need of building the safety state. Day-to-day functioning goes up. There’s more capacity to exist in the present moment, to think clearly, not get caught up in interpersonal issues. Defensive activation stays down, and things that are typically triggering might be triggering, but way less so, or noticeably, and then you can do something about it. The potential is higher, I think.
Chris Sandel: From a practical standpoint, what does that look like? Can you give some examples of things that can help in terms of either building that safety or things that people can turn to in those moments?
Justin Sunseri: I like to make things extremely practical and concrete and actionable. Let’s break this up into two potentials. To be in your safety state, to feel like you’re in the present moment, there’s a couple different pathways. I don’t want to call it – I’ll stick with pathways. The first one is to passively anchor in safety, and the second one is to actively anchor in safety. Let’s break it up into active and passive potentials.
Passive would be you’re neurocepting things from the outside world, typically, that are going to trigger your safety state. This orange light behind me is a passive cue of safety for me and my system. I don’t know what it does for you, but for me it’s passive. It calms. Typically warm lighting tends to do that, whereas my bright white lights over here don’t do that. But it’s out of my view, it’s less, whatever.
So passively versus actively. The thing I recommend – and this is the second step in my Building Safety Anchors course – is setting up the passive environment. What I recommend to people is find the safest – I don’t mean literally safe, although yeah, literally safe. But find a spot in your home, maybe. It could be a whole room, it could be a corner. Maybe you share a space, an apartment with somebody, or maybe you don’t have a whole room, I don’t know. But find the safest spot or room in your home. It could be the backyard if you have a house. The point is, find the safest location you can, and that is where you can start to bring in those passive safety cues.
You could even take it a step further and start to manipulate your environment. I put these things on my wall, these shelves. These are filled with things that I just like. This 49ers football helmet, that’s from my childhood. My brother and I used to play football in our front yard. We’d wear our 49er helmets. That’s a passive cue of safety for me. It’s back there. When I think about it, I can actively recall and feel those playful feelings, but passively, it’s just there.
Chris Sandel: And when I look and see Seinfeld – I’m a big Seinfeld fan, so I can see that and I’m like, okay, cool. I wouldn’t necessarily say that’s a cue of safety, but in polyvagal language, it is a cue of safety.
Justin Sunseri: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be actively soothing, if that’s the right way to put it. It’s just things that are there that bring a generally passive cue of safety. The way things are organised on my shelves here, I’m not excited about it, but it’s good enough. There’s enough organisation there for me to feel contained or organised, and that’s a cue of safety. I think generally that’s a cue of safety for people.
But some people might want to go super minimal and they want really clean walls. That might be a cue of safety for them. So when it comes to this passive, what I recommend is you have to listen to what feels more like versus dislike. I have more of a like for my setup than a dislike. To me, that’s a safety cue. This lighting is more of a like versus a dislike. That’s where I would recommend people start. Pick the safest environment in your home, and if you can, start to tweak things. Add things, take things away. You don’t have to paint the walls, you don’t have to go out and buy stuff. You might just have to clean up a little bit. You might have to organise and tidy. Doing those things can have a very big impact.
If you can do that, that sets up your passive safety environment. Just start with one environment, and go to that environment let’s say once a day. Practice there for 10 minutes just being in safety. And what you could do while you’re there is ask yourself, “How do I feel?” Look inward and say, “How is this lighting? Do I like this or dislike this? How can I tell?” That could be one thing you could do. That way you’re bringing some mindfulness to your passive safety cues.
On top of that, what you can do is utilise active safety anchors. These are things that you do. These could be movements, it could be using your imagination – that’s a really fun one I like to build with my clients. It could be sensory things, like smelling things, seeing things. But those are also passive. But it could be a thing where you set up your environment and then you light a candle, so it’s like you’re actively doing something but then you’re also passively taking it in. You could passively have a candle going and you’re smelling it without consciously being aware of it, but then you’re also doing some sort of movement or a fidget or using your imagination or listening to music. So there’s a lot of blend between active and passive.
But there’s all these different things you can do that can help increase your chances or increase your anchoring in your safety state, passively and actively. That’s the idea.
Chris Sandel: I get that and I think that’s a really helpful place – to hear this is where you start with people, that makes complete sense.
Justin Sunseri: I think that is the starting point. I had a client where we were discovering her safety cues, and for her, she knew water was it. Water, water, water. Can’t really bring a pond or anything into the house, but she knew, “If I go to this place in my neighbourhood, in my city, there’s a manmade lake. If I go there, I can receive passive safety cues.” So she just went and sat in her car and was by the water, and she asked herself, “What does it feel like for me to be in safety?”
The next step was she walked around the lake, so she was mobile. She was more active, mobility. And then she’s like, “How do I build on this?” The next step was, what can you bring to your home environment that is safe? We had to use her imagination, so we built on that. The way I recommend is start in that safety environment, that one place that you identify that’s safe, safer. And then use your imagination or whatever.
Then if you can do that, cool; the next step is now do that active safety anchoring, so your imagination or a movement or a fidget or whatever. Do that outside of your safety environment to see if you can still access safety even outside of those passive safety cues. So pick an environment that’s a little bit more challenging. I don’t want you to go on the sidewalk in New York. Don’t do it there. But can you go to your living room? Is that a little bit more challenging? Just someplace that has a little bit less passive safety. Practice using your active safety anchors in that other environment and see if you can access your safety state. That way you’re challenging yourself a little bit more and you’re exercising the strength of those pathways.
01:31:50
Chris Sandel: I know you said you work with kids. How easy is it for them to at least understand this, and then start to implement it?
Justin Sunseri: Pretty easy. Even for people – actually, even adults – most people don’t seek this stuff out. They find me as a therapist and they just want to work with a therapist, and I seem trustworthy enough so they click on my profile. They’re not looking for polyvagal stuff. But I can still bring in the language of these things, I can still bring in the concepts without teaching them the biology of it and all that stuff.
So yeah, it’s like asking someone, “When do you feel calm?” What I’m asking is, when do you access your safety state? But I’m like, “Hey, when do you feel calm? When do you feel like you can actually breathe and relax?” and they’ll be able to identify, “There was this one time” or “This environment feels the best.” Same thing with the teens I work with. It’s like, when do you actually slow down? When do you feel like you can breathe? They might say never, but they’ll be able to identify what that looks like for them, and then we can start to build from there, even if I’m not giving them the polyvagal language.
But these ideas are generally pretty accessible I think in general.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I remember – it may have even been very early on in your podcast, but you played music. You’re like, “I can play this music and it’s very much associated with safe and social. I play this music, it’s very much associated with fight/flight.” If you know that information, then “Okay, if I’m going to do something active and I want to be more channelling that safety, what’s the kind of music that I can put on?” Which, again, it could be active, and I’m intentionally putting this on, or it could be more of a passive thing of I’ve set up this playlist and I put this playlist on and it’s often in the background while I’m in that room or I’m doing my work.
Justin Sunseri: Exactly. That’s the way I would put it. I like to listen to something called lo-fi chillhop, and I could actively put it on and listen and do some self-regulation, but I could also passively put it on in the background so that I can actively focus on writing my next blog or whatever. So it’s passively calming me, but also, I find it kind of mobilising – but then actively put my energy into this thing that I’m working on. That’s the idea. So you could totally use a lot of these as active and/or passive.
Chris Sandel: You’ve talked about throughout this knowing yourself and what kinds of environments are good for you or not so good for you. It was really interesting when I stumbled upon polyvagal theory – and I can’t remember how long ago it was; I think it was probably four years ago, five years, somewhere in that ballpark. I reflected upon my choices with life, and at that point I’d moved from London out to the countryside. I realised how much more I enjoyed the open spaces, being able to go to the forest and hang out with my dog.
Yeah, I had spent a lot of my time being in a club and love that kind of music, but I also know what’s really good in terms of regulating me on a regular basis. It was really interesting for me to reflect on how I was living. Like, okay, a lot of this is just me unconsciously making these choices towards what’s actually good for my system.
Justin Sunseri: Yeah. You just knew. Is that what you’re saying?
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It wasn’t, oh, I’ve found out about polyvagal theory; let me now start to reverse-engineer it. It was like, upon reflection, I’ve already started to do some of these things. And it’s not that I then didn’t add in some other stuff when I became aware of it, but it was just interesting. And I think maybe how this could be helpful for someone is like, let’s reflect back on points in your life or let’s reflect back on other times – where has it felt safe for you? When were times where this was great?
Especially, like I talked earlier, about exercise and how someone can have a really not-great relationship with exercise. At some point they get to a point of like “Hey, I want to change this. I’ve had a break, my body’s in a better place”, so we can then start to explore, “Are there memories that you had when you were a kid of times when you were moving your body in a way that felt very intuitive and felt really nice to do? Cool, let’s use that as a starting place of starting to explore some of this.”
Justin Sunseri: Yeah, I would really encourage people to start off with safety and asking themselves – and it can be a big challenge – “What memories do I have of safety?” It can be challenging, and maybe you don’t have any, like legitimately just don’t have any. But all these different pathways, like you said, it comes down to, for you as an individual, what is actually safe for you? What triggers your safety state? And you can tell just by do you like it or dislike it. Just start there.
But the next step would be also, what helps you to feel more connected to the present moment?
One red flag I have for people, if they’re deepening their learning in this stuff – if someone’s telling you how to do it, that’s a red flag for me. If someone’s telling you that you have to gargle or crane your neck in a certain way – I saw this one guy contort himself. He’s like, “This is how you activate your vagal nerve.” That’s red flag for me. Red flag. Someone cannot tell you how to do it. We can give you recommendations. For me, that chillhop music does it for me. For the next person it might be not helpful. So it ultimately comes down to, what helps for you individually to feel safe? That’s really it.
If you can start there and become curious about then, then you can ask yourself, “These things I don’t like, like that music, that chillhop stuff that Justin recommended – I have more of a sense of dislike. So where does that bring me as far as my polyvagal ladder? Do I feel more like running away, fighting, or shutting down?” And maybe it’s not obvious, like a huge impulse to do either of these things, but there might be a little more activation of annoyance, and maybe annoyance could be a flight/fight kind of thing. With country music I feel completely shut down. I can’t stand that stuff. It’s awful.
So yeah, looking inward and asking yourself is not easy, but if you can just start off with a like/dislike, I think it’s a really good place to start, and then become more curious about “What are these other things that I’m feeling? Do I feel more flighty, more fighty, more shutdown, more freezy?” You can start to be curious about those things, especially as you have your safety state developed.
Chris Sandel: I think it’s hard to be, as you said, curious when you’re not in safety.
Justin Sunseri: It’s not going to happen.
Chris Sandel: Because I can recognise that I’m in fight or flight, I can recognise, but it’s hard to be curious in that place.
Justin Sunseri: Yeah, it’s hard to be curious and to let it be there. I think with my self-regulation practice, I’ve gotten to a point where I can recognise definitely mild, more moderate. When I’m really upset, yeah, I can notice it, but am I going to mindfully let it be there? Probably not. But I can maybe do something like “I’ve got to get a space. Leave me alone” or something. Maybe I could do that.
But from the mild and moderate stuff – which is going to be different for each of us, I guess – but I can be like, “Whoa, dude, I’m really stuck on irritation and this aggressive feeling.” I know for me, if I take a breath into my belly, let it out slowly, and I just let myself feel whatever the hell’s going on inside of me, that is oftentimes enough to where I feel these waves or tingles come up. They emanate up, and that’s how I know something has released, and I know cognitively, but I feel much more grounded and present, and I can be like, “Okay, what’s going on and what do I want to do about this?”
So eventually someone can get to that point where they’re actually able to feel it, let it be there, and then do something. If you feel it mindfully, it can actually resolve on its own, depending on what it is. For those day-to-day things, I think, it can resolve on its own for the most part, and then you can do something about it.
Chris Sandel: I definitely agree with you on that one. You can bring the awareness and label what it is.
Justin Sunseri: You could, yeah.
01:40:40
Chris Sandel: The final bit that I want to go through is the unstucking defensive states. Again, let’s start broadly. What is that about? What does it look like?
Justin Sunseri: That’s a big one. I’m glad we spent more time on the first two because they’re way more important as far as the overall process. I know that people want to get relief from their trauma, obviously, and they want to know “What’s the thing, what’s the hack, what do I do?” I don’t have that. I don’t think there is a hack. I really don’t. there might be things that generally make you feel less crummy or better, maybe, but in my opinion it’s a long process, depending on a whole bunch of stuff.
But it’s a process and it comes down to, eventually, can you actually feel what the hell is going on inside of you? Do you actually want to know what it’s like to be you, in all of your domains, including the more defensive stuff? Maybe the answer right now is no, and that’s totally fine. That tells me that it’s probably time to learn more – and that could be the Polyvagal 101 kind of stuff, and/or you need to just spend more time in your safety state, and that’s fine too. You can go a long way with just doing that.
And you might get to a point where you’re functional and you’re like, “You know what? I don’t want to deal with my trauma. I just want to live my life and enjoy all my new connections and my curiosity.” Cool, run with it. Go at it, have at it. I’m happy for that person.
But there may be someone that’s like, “I know the polyvagal stuff, I’ve studied attachments and this and that and I follow all the Instagram gurus and I’ve listened to podcasts and I’ve done retreats, and I really want to get unstuck. I really want my defensive state activation to go away, or I want to feel it” – I think if they’re really grounded in their safety state, they’ll be more curious. It won’t be about making it go away. It’ll be more about like, “What the hell is going on? What does this actually feel like? What does my body need?”
For that person, any sort of general trauma stuff could be helpful, but what I do is really how to feel what you’re going through without judgment, without shame, without blame, without re-traumatising yourself. I don’t encourage people to go into trauma narratives. That’s not necessary. Could be helpful, especially in a professional capacity, but when it comes to self-regulation, it’s not necessary, so I don’t do any of the trauma retelling. It may come up, but I don’t think it’s necessary for my self-regulation, self-guided practice that I’ve set up. It’s not necessary.
I don’t do parts work, I don’t do any archetypes or ego stuff or reparenting. It’s just you. I’ve got you and I’m going to work with you through this programme. As a therapist, I don’t bring this stuff – it’s you and me as a therapist or a coach. But I think it’s important – I want to teach people how to actually feel what they’re feeling. So we start from safety and then eventually go into, “What am I actually going through? What does my defensive state actually feel like, my flight energy that I feel as anxiety constantly?”
If I can welcome and notice my ruminating thoughts, or if I can notice them while they’re there, then I can ask myself, “What does it feel like to be stuck on this thought? I’m thinking about this person at work and our interaction. What’s the emotion driving that?” Because thoughts and emotions I think very much are self-reinforcing.
If I can name the emotion, that might be the next level. “Okay, I feel anxiety.” Just validate it. “I do. It’s real. It’s genuine. I feel it.” We’re not asking why; we’re just saying, “This is what I feel.” We’re just naming it. So my thought is rumination, but my experience, my emotion, is anxiety.
And then, can you let it be there? After validating, can you normalise it? Can you say, “Based on the context I was in, yeah, I felt anxious and that makes sense” or “Based on the context of my larger life, I got in this situation today that left me feeling anxious, and here I am thinking about it. Yeah, that makes sense”? So, can you validate it, name it, but also can you normalise it based on the context? That would be the next step. This is top-down stuff.
The tricky part, though, is: Can you give it permission to be there? Can you allow anxiety to be there, to be felt, to be in your system? If you can do that, which is not easy, but if you can do that mindfully, maybe in your passive safety environment that you set up previously – if you can mindfully sit with it or stand with it or lay with it, I don’t care – if you can be with your anxiety, can you then get to the next level, which is not easy, but it’s actually describing what it’s like to be anxious and to mindfully experience it?
What I mean by that is, when you feel anxious, that’s the emotion, but what’s it like to be anxious? What does it feel like? What happens within you? Where does it live in your body? Where does anxiety live in your body? Usually people feel it in their chest, heartbeat increases. They might feel it in their legs. Legs shaking, that bouncy leg thing that we do when we’re anxious.
So there might be places where you can allow the emotion on an emotional level and then ask yourself, “Where does this live in my body?” and then identify that, and then get really mindfully in tune with that spot in your body and ask yourself, “What does it actually feel like?” It might feel jittery. It might feel sharp. You might be able to put a colour to it. You might be able to put an image to it, or maybe a memory will pop up. You might be able to put a temperature to it. Maybe it’s really hot. It’s different for everybody. There’s general answers that come up, but it’s different for everybody.
But if you can start to describe the emotion, that really means you’re mindfully with it. And if you’re mindfully with it and you’re actually able to describe the emotion that allows the sensations of the emotion – that jittery feeling, that’s a sensation of the emotion. If you can let that be there and hold on to it for a little bit, you may notice an impulse of what to do with it. Maybe an idea pops in your mind, “I’m going to go for a walk.” There’s an impulse to be mobile.
So if you can go through that process and get to an impulse to do something about the emotion that ultimately you’re feeling, and then go do it, mindfully and from your safety state, that can really help to resolve this stuck defensive state that you’re going through. That’s the general idea of how to feel and what it looks like to go through that process.
But you have to stay anchored in your safety state the whole way through. You have to remain curious. I don’t think you can really force these things; you just have to build your capacity to be in safety, practice it, and then come at it from the safety state. Depending on the intensity of these things – that was a pretty benign, simple example, but if you’re really wrestling with some stuck freeze trauma, sexual abuse trauma, it’s a lot harder to access, it’s a lot harder to be with that. But it is possible, especially as you develop the strength of your vagal brake. It eventually is possible.
Chris Sandel: Nice. When I listen to you talk about that, I see a lot of overlap with acceptance and commitment therapy. This is something I use a lot with clients. I think polyvagal theory and acceptance and commitment therapy work very well together because a lot of the tenets of acceptance and commitment therapy is about that mindfulness piece of how you stay in the moment, how you can be aware of what is going on, how you can stop the resistance of “I don’t want this, why is this happening again?” Just like, how do I stay present to this? And then also just self-compassion work, especially stuff from Tara Broch, like, how do I remind myself that this is part of the common humanity? As you talked about, how do I normalise it?
Justin Sunseri: Exactly.
Chris Sandel: Like, “That was a really difficult experience and it makes sense that I was feeling anxious there.” That self-compassion piece is so helpful. When I’m practicing with clients, that’s some of the things that I bring in as well with polyvagal theory because I think they all work very well together.
Justin Sunseri: Can’t disagree with you. I’m with you.
Chris Sandel: I love this conversation. I think you are doing tremendous work. I really do.
Justin Sunseri: Thank you.
Chris Sandel: I’m glad that you’re out there doing this. I know we’ve chatted for a long time; is there anything we didn’t cover that you wanted to mention?
01:49:52
Justin Sunseri: Oh man. No, honestly. I just really encourage people – I laid out that last part pretty quickly, just an overall large blueprint of it. Do not rush into that, please. There’s foundational pieces of knowledge to all of these things, like learning the polyvagal theory, learning about what safety feels like, how to identify it and how to identify it for yourself and how to practice it. But then also, that last piece, there’s a lot of foundational knowledge that comes into place about how to describe these things, what trauma is. I don’t want people rushing into it. That was a really large overall viewpoint of it.
So if someone’s new to this and they want that next step, I recommend polyvagal theory. I think it’s so normalising and validating. It’s an answer. It’s an explanation that doesn’t involve shame and blame and judgment. It’s a pretty damn good place to start, in my opinion. So I would go there, and then from there get really curious about safety and what that feels like for you. I have all my stuff. Deb Dana is amazing with what she does. She’s a really good resource. I highly recommend her as well.
I think those two places – I want people to start there. I don’t want them rushing into the direct trauma work. I don’t recommend it until you’re ready for it.
Chris Sandel: Cool. Where can people go to find out more about you?
Justin Sunseri: Just go to my website. It’s www.justinlmft.com. I wish I had – can I give your audience a freebie?
Chris Sandel: Yeah, for sure. Go for it.
Justin Sunseri: I’m not going to make them sign up for my email or anything. I’ll give it to you, is that okay? And then you can give it to them.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I’ll talk about it in the intro and then I can put it in the show notes of the podcast as well, so that’s all good.
Justin Sunseri: It’s a one-sheet resource. I call it SSIEC. We already touched upon it, but I think it’s a really good, simple, approachable resource to start to name these things and connect them to your polyvagal state. It’s five columns, and each column has a different domain – I call them domains.
There’s State, your polyvagal state, Sensation, Impulse, Emotion, and Cognition. They’re in columns with these different rows, and there’s all these different words, adjectives and whatnot, to help you name what you’re going through. So if you know you feel anxious, you go to the Emotion column and identify anxiety or anxiousness, and then you can look across the row to see what sensations there might be to help you describe what you’re going through, as well as an impulse that might come from it, as well as the polyvagal state and cognitions as well.
All these things are laid out to help people to build vocabulary. I really want them to get that top-down knowledge that they can bring to their internal world. I’ll send you that, and please share it with people. It’s the SSIEC sheet.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Just so you know, I already use that with clients. [laughs] They get sent that when we’re going through this, and they really like it.
Justin Sunseri: Cool.
Chris Sandel: So yeah, I do it with clients, but I will very much share it with everyone, any listeners that want this as well.
Justin Sunseri: Awesome. Thank you so much for that. Anything we can do just to get that next level of mindfulness I think can be really helpful.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Thank you so much for your time. This has been such a great conversation. I feel like I could chat with you for hours.
Justin Sunseri: Ditto. It was fun. Thank you for having me on again.
Chris Sandel: That was my conversation with Justin Sunseri. If you liked what he shared, then check out his podcast, Stuck Not Broken, and all the wonderful things that he has going on at his site. You can also access the free resource that he talked about that I mentioned I use with clients by going to the show notes at www.seven-health.com/274.
I don’t have any recommendations for you; my movie and documentary viewing has been non-existent lately. I recently got Sky Sports and have been watching a ton of golf, but there’s nothing to recommend.
I will be back with a new episode soon. Until then, take care of yourself.
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