Episode 233: This week's guest on the podcast is Deb Dana. As part of the show, we talk about all things polyvagal theory and how eating disorders can impact this.
Deb Dana, LCSW is a clinician and consultant specializing in using the lens of Polyvagal Theory to understand and resolve the impact of trauma and create ways of working that honour the role of the autonomic nervous system. She is a founding member of the Polyvagal Institute and developer of the Rhythm of Regulation Clinical Training Series.
Deb is the author of The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (Norton, 2018); Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection: 50 Client-Centered Practices (Norton, 2020); and Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory (forthcoming from Sounds True).
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Chris Sandel: Welcome to Episode 233 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/233.
Just a note before we get started: I’m taking on new clients again. This is a much smaller intake compared to the start of the year, and I only have five spots available. I specialise in helping clients overcome eating disorders and disordered eating, chronic dieting, body dissatisfaction and negative body image, overexercise and exercise compulsion, and dealing with irregular cycles or cycles that have ceased altogether. If these are areas you struggle with and you’d like to make them a thing of the past, then please get in contact. You can head over to www.seven-health.com/help, where you can read about how I work with clients and apply for a free initial chat. The address, again, is www.seven-health.com/help, and I’ll also include that in the show notes.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I am a nutritionist that specialises in recovery from disordered eating and eating disorders or really just helping anyone who has a messy relationship with food and body and exercise.
This week on the show, it is a guest interview, and my guest is Deb Dana. Deb is a clinician and consultant specialising in using the lens of polyvagal theory to understand and resolve the impact of trauma and create ways of working that honour the role of the autonomic nervous system. She’s a founding member of the Polyvagal Institute and developer of the Rhythm of Regulation clinical training series. She’s the author of three books: The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation, and then Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection: 50 Client-Centered Practices, and then the forthcoming Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory.
I’ve been aware of Deb for the last couple years. She is someone who has had an enormous impact on me because of her books and her teaching. Polyvagal theory is foundational to the work that I do with clients. It’s a lens through which I view so much of what happens in someone’s experience, and it gives language to be able to talk about and make sense of this experience. But even outside of being a practitioner, it’s equally important. As a parent, I see things through the lens of polyvagal theory, and this can be in terms of my own behaviour and where I am in terms of the nervous system in the ladder, my role as a parent, and also seeing how Ramsay moves along the polyvagal ladder and being able to support him as part of this.
But despite the importance, this is a topic I haven’t covered that much on the podcast. Even if you are a regular listener or a semi-regular listener, this might be the first time you’ve heard the term ‘polyvagal theory’. I covered it with Tracy Brown in Episode 171, which is an excellent episode and well worth listening to if you like this one. I also went through many aspects of it with Irene Line back in Episode 111, but don’t think we used the term ‘polyvagal theory’ and just talked about the autonomic nervous system.
But it just felt like for something that is so crucial to my practice and to me as a human being, it hasn’t been covered in enough detail on the show, which is why I’m so excited about this episode. Deb is incredible and really is the perfect person to talk about polyvagal theory because she is one of the pioneers and the person who is really important in terms of bringing this work to the masses and being able to use it in practice, because this is what she writes about.
As part of the show, we talk about all things polyvagal theory. She covers what it is and the three basic principles that underpin it, which is namely hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation. We cover how restriction and eating disorders impact on the nervous system and these basic principles. We go through the acronym BASIC from Deb’s book and look at what each of these letters mean. She talks about the statement “story follows state”, which she regularly talks about, and we look at what this is and how different it is to what is typically heard in the self-help world. We go through the vagal brake, and also how to retrain our nervous system.
Annoyingly, there was a lag with our connection, which started as soon as we got on Zoom. Even though we chatted for 10 minutes, 15 minutes before we hit record, it still persisted. When there is a lag, it makes a fluid and back-and-forth conversation impossible. But luckily, the internet gods remedied this after about 20 minutes or 30 minutes of our conversation, and we were able to get into a really lovely groove and have a good back-and-forth conversation.
So I’m really happy to be able to bring this episode to you guys. I know this will be a podcast that I regularly come back to and share with clients, so I hope you enjoy it. If this is your first time hearing about this topic, you may find it a little dense or just struggle with hearing unfamiliar terms, but please do stick with it because this is invaluable information that Deb is sharing, and I really do wish that more of the world was aware of this stuff.
Without further ado, here is my conversation with Deb Dana.
Hey, Deb. Thanks so much for chatting with me today. I’m honoured to have you on the show.
Deb Dana: I’m really happy to be here. It’s fun to talk polyvagal with you today.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. I’ve been a huge fan of your work ever since I read your first book, The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, a couple of years ago, I think it was. It’s a book that’s definitely influenced how I think about and work with clients. Equally, it’s been important to my understanding of myself and my own relationships and how I am with my wife and my son and all of that. And then I’ve got your more recent book, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection. Again, I’ve found it so practical and eye-opening.
But despite how helpful all this is, I haven’t covered polyvagal theory on the podcast in much detail, so I’m excited about today and being able to have an extended amount of time to focus on this. I think it would be useful to go over much of the basics, because for many of the listeners it’s going to be a new topic. What I like so much about your work is just how practical it is in nature. You took something that was this amazing discovery from Dr Stephen Porges and then showed how it can be practical for practitioners and clinicians. So really, I’ll be using your two books as a guide for our conversation.
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But before we get into polyvagal theory, can you give listeners a bit of background on yourself – who you are and what you do?
Deb Dana: Sure. I am a licensed clinical social worker. I live in the state of Maine, so I am near the sea, which is for me a very regulating place to be. I have always been a neuroscience nerd and began my career really trying to understand how the brain works. One of my most memorable experiences was being with a group of clinicians in a histology lab, working with human brains and seeing brains dissected and seeing the sections and seeing these wonderful places in the brain that we actually work with when we do therapy.
That was where I began, and then I read Steve’s first book and was introduced to polyvagal theory. It was as if a missing piece of the puzzle fell into place for me. I thought, “This, this! Underneath the brain, before the brain comes into the picture, we have this other system that is directing our actions and creating the platform that we’re navigating life on.” So that was it for me. I reached out to Steve and asked him if he would come present to my colleagues here in Maine, and he came. And from that point on, it was this lovely collaboration.
His brilliant science – he’s a brilliant scientist, a brilliant researcher – and to be able to be with him and take his science and translate it into everyday use – and in the beginning, it was “How do I bring this into my clinical work and how do I help my colleagues become polyvagal-guided in their clinical work?” And then over the years, it’s become even broader than that: “How do I help curious human beings understand their nervous systems so that we can all begin to be active operators of our nervous systems?”
So that’s where I am now. I still consider myself a clinician, but I don’t see clients in private practice any longer. The clinical work I do is in demos and trainings and people who come to do a single piece of work, because I truly love doing the clinical work. And I have discovered that if I can change systems, if I can write so that more people read and understand, that’s a lovely way to begin to shape the world. I tease people – I say we’re changing the world one nervous system at a time. So that’s really my goal.
Talking with you today is a lovely way to reach both clinicians who listen to your show and curious human beings who are wondering about their own system and how it is either creating experiences of suffering or experiences of safety.
Chris Sandel: You write so well on this topic, and I can definitely tell that this is your life work in terms of bringing this to a broader audience and getting people to understand this.
How long had Steve’s work been out in the public sphere before you found it and then approached it? Was it something that was relatively new, or had it been hanging around for a while?
Deb Dana: Steve’s work has been his life’s work, and it has been out there for a long time. In the 1990s, he actually presented to a trauma therapist conference, and therapists began to see the ways that polyvagal theory helped describe their clients’ experiences and began to want to bring that into their work.
His book was released in 2011, the one that I read, and Steve and I actually met in person for that workshop in 2013. So it’s been a deep, rich, interesting autonomic adventure since 2013 for me in bringing this to life. I had already been working with – the way that I usually work is the autonomic ladder that helps people map their own system, and I had already been working with that. Steve said, “Oh, this is a lovely way to bring it alive in a way that’s easy to understand.” So it’s just taken off from there.
But if you look at the longevity of my life, I’m 68, and I think, wow, this past decade has been a decade of incredible change and discovery for me.
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Chris Sandel: And before that, when you were working as a clinician – I know you said you’re not doing as much of that work anymore in terms of the one-on-one client work – was it all around trauma? Or what kind of clients were you seeing prior?
Deb Dana: I’m a trauma therapist. It has always been around trauma for me. In the beginning, it was around working in the field of sexual abuse and working both with people who had been abused and with the people who had done the abusing. We worked with family systems in which abuse had happened to try and navigate what that was going to look like after the abuse was there. Certainly a clarification needed, but then beyond that, was there a reunification, or what was going to happen?
So that was where I started in my clinical practice, and it has always been working with trauma survivors. I was blessed to work with a group of people who are still working together. It’s called Island Institute for Trauma Recovery. We came together and had a shared vision about how to work with trauma survivors and about healing through relationship and kind of did things differently from other typical agencies. That really was a place where I could experiment, where my colleagues would say, “Show us. Let us try this.” It was a lovely testing ground for finding new ways of working with people who are suffering from the disconnection that trauma brings.
Chris Sandel: And why was that such a great testing ground, or why was there that ethos at that place that allowed you to be that way as a practitioner, or for the whole group to be that way?
Deb Dana: Interesting story. Island Institute was the second iteration of an agency. The first was created by my dear colleague and first mentor, Tracy. Tracy brought us all together. Tracy had a different way of thinking about working with trauma than a typical agency: that people heal in connection, so when people come to our building, there’s no receptionist, there’s no check-in. Instead, there’s a beautiful, welcoming space that has tea and coffee and food, and clients get to see each other, get to meet each other. Every therapist comes out to find their client and connects with the other clients. It was a very community sort of feeling.
And then Tracy got sick, died from cancer, and the rest of us decided we would continue that legacy and created Island Institute. So it was this shared vision about being very welcoming, being a safe environment, and really explicitly doing things that would send those signals to anybody walking in the door.
Chris Sandel: Wow. I think that’s a lot of how I thought about practicing even before I came across your work – just really understanding the connection side of things and how important that was, and just being a genuine human being.
I don’t think there’s much of a difference between me as a practitioner and then me outside of being a practitioner. Obviously there’s certain skills that come into it, but I think of it less about “How do I learn this new thing that I can work on with a client?” and more about “How do I integrate that more of my humanness comes across?” Because I do think that that’s so important, that connection, and for someone to feel like they are having a conversation with someone who is genuinely listening to them, who genuinely cares about their wellbeing, and is wanting them to get to a place they want to get to.
I think that, for me, is the most important thing, more than studying more and doing all the other research: How can I be a better person in connection with someone else?
Deb Dana: Steve has this beautiful quote, a definition of trauma. Through the lens of the nervous system, we would say trauma is a chronic lack of connection. On a nervous system level, this really is what trauma is. When we think about trauma, we enter into a traumatic experience and we feel alone. On a biological level, our nervous system takes us to survival energy where we do feel disconnected from others, from the world around us, even from ourselves.
So when we think about what’s the antidote – the antidote is to be seen, to be accompanied, to be witnessed. I like to work with people and I say, “Is it okay if I go with you?” As we’re beginning to explore a trauma story that’s held in a survival state, “Do you want me to go with you?” Because that’s the missing experience. And now, with polyvagal theory, we can understand how that is healing, biologically, what’s happening. How is that healing?
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Chris Sandel: Nice. Let’s maybe back up a little and get into polyvagal theory and what it is. Let’s imagine someone is listening to this podcast and this is the first time they’ve ever heard that term. How would you describe what it is?
Deb Dana: Polyvagal theory is a theory that describes how your nervous system helps you navigate the world. For me, it has three basic principles, which are: neuroception, hierarchy, and co-regulation. Again, foreign words as we begin to dive in, but let’s think about them one at a time because I think they’re really interesting to begin to understand through our own experience.
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Neuroception is a word that Steve created because there was no word that described how the nervous system listens and takes in information. Perception involves the brain, and the nervous system, although it does connect with the brain, is basically a system that begins in your brain stem, not in your cortex. So ‘neuroception’ was the word that he created.
Neuroception is the way the nervous system takes in information and then brings a response in order to serve your survival, to serve your safety. It’s listening through three pathways: it’s listening inside your body, it’s listening outside in the environment, and it’s listening between you and another person, so between two nervous systems.
We might take just a moment and listen in those three pathways. If you just focus your attention inside, into that internal world, you probably can find something that feels a bit uneasy or has a flavour of danger, which would be a cue of danger, or something that feels a bit at ease or a bit even warm and nourishing. That would be a cue of safety. When we do these exercises, we’re always looking to find one of each, or at least one of each. We’re so used to feeling the cues of danger, the neuroception of danger, and yet what we know is that the neuroception of safety, the signs of safety, are also there; we just miss them.
So inside, just take a moment and see. What do you notice inside? Where is there a place that feels a bit uneasy or distressed or painful, and then a place that feels more at ease and nourishing? That’s the inside pathway.
Then if we go outside, if you just turn your attention to the environment that you’re in right now and do the same thing – just notice, is there something in that environment that feels like it’s sending a warning? And is there something that feels like it’s sending a welcome? That’s through your nervous system. You’ll feel some sort of a response. You might feel a pushback or a disappear to the warning. You might feel an approach or an “I want to know more about” to the welcome. And that’s the environmental pathway.
Then the third one, that relational pathway, the between nervous systems. Maybe think of somebody who you can bring to mind. Maybe it’s me; we’ve never met, I’ve never met your listeners, but it can be through my voice. They can connect. I’m bringing you to mind right now, Chris, because you and I met just a few minutes ago. And see, can we find – what’s the welcome that’s being sent between systems? And what are the warnings that are being sent? Because usually both are happening. Just spend a moment looking at that.
So that’s neuroception. And this experience – inside, outside, between; warning and welcome – is happening every single micro-moment that we are alive. And it’s below the level of our awareness, so until we turn toward it, like we just did, and really focus on it, it’s simply working in the background and it’s bringing us in and out of states of connection. That’s neuroception.
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It leads us to hierarchy, and hierarchy is the three states that the nervous system travels down and up through. This was Steve’s brilliant discovery around polyvagal theory, that we have these three states, and we move through them in a predictable order.
So how lovely is that, for me to understand that I’m going to go from what we call ventral, which is feeling safe and connected, okay as I move through the world – I’m going to go from that state – the next place I go when I feel as if the world’s getting too overwhelming for me, I go to sympathetic, which is this place of fight and flight that most of us know. And if fight and flight doesn’t solve the problem, so to speak, my nervous system then takes me to the third state, which is called dorsal, which is a state of collapse, shutdown, some form of disappearing.
We know these three states. We can get to know those three states through turning our attention to them, and I have a mapping process that I do to really get to know, befriend – I call it ‘befriending’ each state and finding out, how does it come alive in your system? How do you know that you’ve been taken to a fight/flight? What happens? What do you feel in your body? What do you think, what do you feel, what do you say? How do you know you’ve been taken to dorsal shutdown? And how do you know when you’re anchored in that place of ventral regulation?
Because the first piece of this work is to know, where am I? Where am I right now? In this moment, I am anchored in ventral because I am really enjoying our conversation and I’m thinking about the people who are listening and hoping that they’re feeling a welcome from our work today. So I’m anchored in ventral.
People who are listening might take a moment and stop and think, “Where am I? Am I feeling a welcome? Am I feeling connected? Am I feeling safe enough to listen and dive in? Or is there something that feels a bit dangerous and makes me want to run away or makes me want to push back against what Deb’s saying?” Or the third, “Is there something that’s causing me to lose focus and not be able to pay attention?” This is a way of getting to know which state is active in your system right now.
So that’s hierarchy and neuroception, and they go together. You can see how they fit together. If I’m feeling a welcome, I’m probably going to be in that state of ventral safety and connection. If I’m feeling a warning, I’m going to go to one of those two survival states, either sympathetic fight/flight or dorsal collapse/disappear. And that’s the brilliance of the nervous system; it simply does that for you without you ever having to think about it. It just works automatically and in service of your survival to keep you safe so that you can continue to live. You will make it through whatever this moment is.
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And then just to briefly touch on that third organising principle, which is coregulation – I always end with that one because I think neuroception and hierarchy are easy to explain and get to know; coregulation is a biological imperative, meaning we don’t survive without it. We come into the world, we need another human being to meet us, greet us, care for us, be with us. And for many of us, that human being who met us was not a regulated, safe person. So we began our life in this place of feeling endangered and survival states coming alive rather than feeling welcomed in that state of ventral connection being the energy that we moved into.
So from the very beginning, our nervous system is shaped. In the womb, actually, before we’re born, our nervous system is shaped. But then again, when we come out and are met, who met us? What were we met with? What was the greeting like? That’s really where we start. And then, for many of us, people are dangerous. So what do we do with this need to coregulate? We need to be in safe connection with another human being – with another mammal. Sometimes it’s our dogs and cats in the beginning. But with other humans. We need that connection in order to truly experience wellbeing.
That means we need to have people in our world who will send that welcome. Their nervous systems open their arms, so to speak, and welcome us, and we feel safe enough to simply be who we are. We know that we’ll be greeted and we won’t be judged and shamed and blamed. That’s an amazing experience to have. It’s also essential for wellbeing and really difficult to find.
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Chris Sandel: I want to go back through those three things in detail. You’ve done a great job of explaining them to start with. I think the one with neuroception and the thing I am always really getting clients to understand is – and you said this – how much this happens of its own accord. You were talking about, okay, we have the danger or we have signals that are inside, with other people, or within the environment, and noticing all these things, but it is doing this all on its own accord in milliseconds, without you being aware of it until afterwards, where you’re trying to catch up.
I can’t remember if this was in one of your books or I’ve heard someone else use this as an example – it’s the equivalent of jumping back because you see this thing on the ground, and in the initial moment where the neuroception takes over, your body is imagining that that thing on the ground is a snake. Half a second or a second later, you then look down again and maybe you discover it is actually a snake and your nervous system was fantastic in getting you to move out of the way and to start to run, or maybe you discover actually that was just a stick and it kind of looked like a snake. But whether it turns out to be a snake or not a snake, that neuroception has already happened and has already occurred, and it is just there doing that automatically every moment of every day.
I think this also touches on something that you talk about, which is story follows state. Maybe you could talk about that and just how important that is, because I think that links in to this piece.
Deb Dana: Absolutely, yes. I love your description of neuroception. It is simply working in the background, and we don’t work directly with neuroception because it’s a biological process that’s going on. We feel the outcome of neuroception. So in your example, we jump back, we feel the response. Neuroception brought a danger and we jumped back. We feel the response, and then after that, we can bring some perception and some discernment to that neuroceptive experience.
That’s one of the things that I use all the time, this discernment question. We’ll have a response that when we reflect on it, it feels out of proportion to the moment. Like, “Wow, I really responded intensely, and it doesn’t feel like that was needed.” So the discernment question I use is: In this moment, with this person or these people, if you’re with people, in this place – so the moment, the people, the place – is this level of response or this response needed?
Then it brings our beautiful brain into this process of reflection, and it’s an after-the-fact experience. What we know is that oftentimes, there was some familiar cue in the moment that was experienced in the past as very dangerous, and it came alive in the present moment, oftentimes no longer needed, but the nervous system simply reacts to familiar cues.
One of the things we do is begin to sort that out – after the fact, though. We can’t do it in the moment, just like you said, because the nervous system is simply going to take an action in service of your safety, in service of your survival. So yeah, neuroception is so fascinating. Your nervous system is so creatively showing up to keep you safe, and it’s based on your past experience. It’s shaped by experience.
It’s shaped by ongoing experience, so even though I may have had a really intense response – like this morning there was a lot going on in my daily world, and I noticed that, wow, I was having a real sympathetic, frustrated, angry, ‘get me out of here’ response. And I couldn’t do anything about it in the moment. I simply did what I needed to do. But as I sat down later and had a moment to reflect, what it led me to was looking at the ways that the past few days have been overloaded. It wasn’t about that particular moment; that particular moment, my neuroception said, “This is it. Last straw. Taking you to where you will pay attention. You’re going to feel that activated, angry energy and hopefully you’re going to pay attention to it.”
What I like to do with clients in my trainings and just everyday people, I have them ask the question, “What’s my nervous system trying to tell me?” Because that really is the question. It is speaking to us every moment. What is it trying to tell me? How do I tune in and listen? Because it has important information for me.
Chris Sandel: I think with that discernment piece, I use it both, as you talked about there, in terms of the nervous system, but I also use it in terms of thoughts. Just the same way as our nervous system will feel of its own accord, our thoughts think themselves. We are then witness to the thought that comes into our mind. If anyone has ever tried to meditate and thought, “Okay, I’ll just clear my mind for a minute”, you realise very quickly just how unable you are to stop the thoughts coming, and that’s because you are not generating them; you’re a witness to them.
When I’m working with clients, it’s less about “How do I stop that first thought?” and more about “What is the next thing that comes after that? Just because I’ve had that thought, doesn’t mean that I believe that it’s true. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like, okay, I’ve had this thought; now what is the discernment of this? What does this mean that I’m going to do in terms of my next course of action or what choice I’m going to take?”
And the same as you’re talking about: if your nervous system brings you to this place and it feels like this is quite an eruption or this feels quite intense, you can then take that moment to think, “Is this in accordance with what I’m actually seeing and experiencing now, or is this linked to something that happened in my past?” So being able to bring the prefrontal cortex into the conversation and not be held hostage by either your thoughts or your nervous system.
Deb Dana: Yeah. That goes back to what you were talking about, state creates story. That again is a lovely way – it’s a paradigm shift. We don’t think of it that way, but it is a great way to begin to understand that from a sympathetically mobilized fighting and flight state, the story necessarily has to be one about danger. “People are dangerous, the world’s dangerous, I’m disorganised.” All of these stories. From that state of fight and flight, you cannot have a story that says “The world is safe and I’m safe in it.” It is biologically impossible.
From dorsal, the story necessarily has to be one of being alone, lost, abandoned, unreachable, unseen, because your biology has taken you into a state of shutdown.
It’s interesting for all of us to explore each state. The way that I usually do it in my trainings is I might ask you to bring up a moment when you felt that overwhelming energy of either fight or flight – anger or anxiety, where you were flooded with energy but it was disorganised, you couldn’t use it in any way – and then let your nervous system fill in these two sentences: “The world is … and I am …” What do you get from that place of overwhelming mobilizing energy? The world is what?
Chris Sandel: Chaotic.
Deb Dana: Mm-hm. And I am?
Chris Sandel: Powerless. Not powerful. Unable to control any of it.
Deb Dana: Beautiful. Right, okay. So then let’s go to dorsal for a moment, to that place of despair, collapse, no energy in your system. From this place, how do you feel in those sentences? The world is what?
Chris Sandel: Meaningless.
Deb Dana: And I am?
Chris Sandel: Alone or ineffectual. I can’t do anything.
Deb Dana: Right. Exactly. So let’s come to ventral, the place where we feel organised enough, connected enough, safe enough, we feel regulated enough. How do you feel in those sentences there? The world is what, when you’re here?
Chris Sandel: Kind. Beautiful.
Deb Dana: And I am?
Chris Sandel: Enough.
Deb Dana: Beautiful. Simple. “I am enough.” So from each state you can see the story changes so powerfully. And it’s not because anything else in the world changed; it’s simply that you are looking through the lens of your different nervous system states, and that’s the learning that we can have about our own system. I have these three stories – I have many more than that, but there are at least three stories in my system at all times, and the one that I am walking through the world believing, inhabiting, is from the state that is most active in my system in this moment.
Chris Sandel: I think that’s just so useful to hear, for a number of reasons. One, as you talked about, it can be an indicator of “Where do I find myself?” You’re having a situation where all of these thoughts are starting to come to mind, I’m having all these sets of feelings; this is indicating to me that I’m now in fight or flight, or that now I’m in shutdown mode. And then using that as an indicator. And not that it’s a ‘bad’ thing to be in those places, but more this happens as humans; we move through the different places on the polyvagal continuum, and I find myself in this place. It’s then no wonder that these are the kinds of thoughts I’m having. It’s no wonder these are the kinds of feelings I’m having. And what do I now need to do in this moment?
Deb Dana: Exactly. I say all the time, both when I’m in my own system and when I’m working with others, when you come to a place, you say, “It makes perfect sense that you’re thinking that or feeling that or doing that, given your autonomic nervous system state. It makes perfect sense.” And that takes the shame, the blame, the judgment away from it. Of course that’s happening. Makes sense, right?
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Chris Sandel: Yeah. I think it’s also useful – because I think of so much within the self-help space and how much of a focus is on your thoughts create your feelings, and it’s always like you’ve got to tell yourself a better story. While I don’t negate the fact that stories and the kinds of stories we tell ourselves matter and do have an impact, I do think this switches things round in terms of the order of things.
Deb Dana: Exactly. I love that. I love how you brought that. Truly, I can’t change my story just by thinking a different thought, because unless it’s a match for the state I’m in, I’m going to be fighting – my brain is going to fight against my nervous system. And most every time, your brain is going to lose that fight, which is why we make intentions, we set goals, we create plans, and yet if we only do it with our brain and we don’t engage our nervous system in that process, they most often are doomed to fail.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. When I was thinking about this piece and the telling yourself better stories or ‘thoughts lead to feelings’, I was thinking of – I’m sure you’ve come across Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search for Meaning?
Deb Dana: Mm-hm.
Chris Sandel: For anyone who’s not aware, he was someone who was in many Nazi prisoner of war camps. I think he was in Auschwitz for quite a while. His way of surviving that, or one of the things that he said was so helpful in him surviving it, apart from just dumb luck that he wasn’t one of the people that were sent to the gas chamber, was that he found meaning in that experience. “You can take everything away from me, but you can’t take away the meaning or the story that I tell myself about this experience, and I can then find the goodness in humanity, even in this place.” It was very much about finding meaning and how helpful that is.
But what I’ve since reflected upon as part of this was I think his role was as a physician or he had some role where he was actually in connection with so many of the different people, whether that be the Nazi guards or whether it be the other people who were in the camp with him. So undoubtedly him finding that meaning was super important, but part of what maybe helped him do that was because he had this connection constantly to people and was able to use that role to help with that.
Deb Dana: And if we think about the past 18 months that we have all been living through, how challenging it has been to be in connection with others – that’s one of the outcomes of this pandemic. We have suffered on a biological level, and it’s going to be interesting to see how that plays out. Not simply our thoughts, but biologically being separated, being unable to be with, has been incredibly difficult for all of us.
Chris Sandel: Totally. I have noticed this as a card-carrying introvert. I enjoy my own time and I enjoy my own space, and being in a situation – and look, I’ve got a wife, I’ve got a child, so it wasn’t that I was completely alone. But being unable to hang out with friends and go into a restaurant and laugh with people in real life – there’s only so many Zoom quizzes you can do before you’re like, “This just does not cut it.”
Deb Dana: Yeah. You were fortunate to be with your wife and child, and many people were fortunate to be with others. Some people were locked down with people with other nervous systems that were either dangerous to them or really difficult for them to be with. And then others were totally isolated. It’s been interesting to walk through coning back to life, so to speak, with people who’ve had very different experiences.
We have all been in the pandemic, so we’re all in the same ocean, but we’re in different boats in that ocean. So it’s been a different experience for people depending on the boat they’re in in that ocean.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think we’ll be feeling the aftereffects for a long time with this.
Deb Dana: Yeah.
00:43:47
Chris Sandel: The other one that I wanted to mention, just because of how specific it is to the clients I work with, is that working with people who have eating disorders or disordered eating or some messy relationship with food and exercise tends to mean that they are undereating, there is restriction going on, and that in and of itself has a massive impact on the nervous system. When you are not bringing in enough energy for your body, the way that the body deals with that is by turning on the stress response and stress hormones. One of their roles is to find energy in the body and liberate that so that the body can keep going.
This is one of the things that I’m focusing so much on with clients: one of the best things you can do for your nervous system is change the energy balance within your body. And without that happening, you are going to be spending much more of your time in the lower end of the ladder because that’s what’s going to happen in terms of your physiology.
Deb Dana: I think it’s a lovely way to look at disordered eating or our relationship with food. One of the questions I ask everyone when we are completing that map to get to know each of the three states is, what happens with your relationship with food when you’re in this sympathetic, highly mobilized fight and flight place? And how does that relationship with food change when you enter into the dorsal collapse? And then what does your relationship with food look like when you’re in that place of regulation and balance?
Because it is a very different experience around eating in each of those three states, and then we can begin to explore, how is your nervous system helping you survive? Because even though it’s disordered eating or a messy relationship with food, the nervous system has brought that response because it thinks you are in danger and this is helping you survive. So as crazy as the behaviour seems, the nervous system is acting in service of your survival, and if we can get to know it in that way, I think it’s a lovely way to begin to even befriend the disordered eating because we can understand it differently. “Oh, so this is what’s happening that brings this particular way of relating to food alive.”
Because disordered eating is a symptom of a dysregulated nervous system, and it’s dysregulated in some particular way depending on what particular kind of disordered eating you are experiencing. So again we come back to that question, when this is happening, when you are restricting, what is the nervous system trying to tell us? Because it’s trying to tell us something important. It’s bringing this big response to your system. That’s the guiding question that I’m always asking people to ask themselves: “What is my nervous system trying to tell me in this moment, and what does my nervous system need in this moment?”
Those are the two. Here’s the symptom; what is my nervous system trying to communicate with me? And then what does it need in this mot in order to feel safe enough to not have to do whatever this thing is? We can even ask this question, which is another thing we do: “If I wasn’t doing whatever it is – if my sympathetic nervous system wasn’t so active and keeping me in this restrictive eating place right now – then…” You’ll get the fear that is underneath that sympathetic response. And oftentimes I’ve found that what’s underneath the sympathetic is, “If I wasn’t doing this, then I’m going to fall into dorsal and die.”
So you ask the question to find out what is driving this survival response, and then you can ask the question again with the invitation, “If this wasn’t happening, what’s the wish that might happen? What’s the hope?” So you get the worry and the hope if you keep asking the question. It’s just a nice way to begin to come into connection with your nervous system from a place of non-judgment.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think when you ask it the question from a nervous system perspective, you get a slightly different response, which I think is also quite enlightening. You don’t get so much of the head thinking about it and more, “Let’s think about this from a body perspective.”
Deb Dana: Yeah. In my work – of course, because I’m always curious about the nervous system, I try to stay away from words like ‘think’ and ‘feel’. “What do you think about this?” Nope, don’t really care at the moment. “How do you feel about this?” Nope, not that either. But “Where is that emerging in your nervous system?” or “How did that land in your nervous system?” takes you to a very different place and you get very different information.
Chris Sandel: Awesome. I am definitely going to keep that in mind when I’m talking with clients and using the language that I do.
One of the other interesting things that I’ve also noticed when first starting to explore this topic with some clients is that they can be really in the depths of an eating disorder and really struggling, but in many other areas of their life they are high-functioning or they have a partner or they have a job, and for all other intents and purposes things are fine. And when we look at this, their response is “I’m always or nearly always in safe & social.” And my reaction to that is “I think you’re being very headstrong, and the eating disorder is giving that response, because when I look at a lot of the symptoms and the other things that you’re talking about, it would indicate that your nervous system is telling you something very different.”
Deb Dana: That’s a delicate conversation to have, isn’t it, with a client, especially in the beginning of creating a relationship. I think one of the things that we do when we work through this lens is that we can be very transparent because the nervous system is the common denominator in human experience. We all have one, and it’s working all the time.
I often use my own nervous system responses as a “For instance, here’s what happens for me and here’s how I try to make sense of it.” Reminding people that through the lens of the nervous system, the vagus nerve, which is the primary component of the parasympathetic nervous system, is both the ventral and the dorsal. So it’s both the regulated/connected and the disconnected/shutdown energy. But 80% of the information travelling from your body to your brain; 20% is coming back from your brain in the form of a response.
But your brain’s job is to make sense of what’s happening in the body, to make up a story to make sense of what’s happening in the body, and oftentimes clients beginning – like you were talking about your client – “It’s only here. I’m perfectly fine everywhere else.” The brain has made up that story because it’s trying to make some sort of sense of what’s going on. And like you, if we really get to map the ventral state – I love creating a map first because then when a client’s telling me about something, we can say, “Ooh, where does that fit on your map?” And when we really start looking at it, things that the brain has said are ventral regulated, really that’s not where they live.
So we go on an exploration. Rather than disagreeing with my client, because that’s not going to get us anywhere, we go on an exploration. “Ooh, tell me more. Let’s explore more.”
Chris Sandel: Definitely. Yeah, it’s not to prove a client wrong. Typically when I get that as a response, it’s like, great, let’s spend the next week at different points throughout the day just starting to check in with “Where do I find myself? What are the kinds of thoughts that are coming to mind?”, etc. It’s at that point that there’s more of the realisation of “Oh yeah, I don’t feel like I’m spending as much time in safe & social. There’s a lot more of these other things that are starting to pull me down than I was maybe noticing I was experiencing before.”
Because I think if you’ve had a longstanding eating disorder that’s been going on for 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, you just get accustomed to living at that place.
Deb Dana: Yes.
Chris Sandel: So fight or flight feels like safe & social because you don’t have enough occurrences of breaking out of that to have anything to contrast with.
Deb Dana: I love that you said contrast, because the nervous system needs a compare & contrast experience in order to know what’s happening. And for so many clients, they have had so few moments of a ventral energy that they don’t really have that compare/contrast. And then when they come to that moment of ventral, it feels really scary because it’s unfamiliar, and it disrupts their usual way of regulating. It can feel really scary.
So in the beginning, we dip into a moment of ventral. So I love you asking your clients, just stop and notice a few times a day and then bring it back and let’s see what’s happening. Because they may notice there was a moment of ventral, but there are all these moments of sympathetic and dorsal that are happening, but I need to keep them out of awareness – because what would happen if I let that awareness in, right? Sympathetic, which you may find a lot of sympathetic, one of its jobs is to make sure you don’t go to dorsal.
00:54:37
Chris Sandel: I think also, one of the things I’m always trying to get clients to understand as well is that there’s the subtler version and then there’s the full-on version. I think sometimes when someone hears ‘fight or flight’, they’re like, that’s fleeing a lion on the savanna, or you hear about shutdown and that’s like absolute catatonic freeze or like I’m lying in foetal position on my bed. They’re like, “Oh, I never get into that state.” It’s like, but that’s the more extreme version of it, but do you have points where there are thoughts where it feels a little more hopeless? Okay, that’s indicating that there is more of the subtle form.
Deb Dana: I think one of the ways to work with that – because you’re right, people hear ‘fight and flight’ and they think it’s this really big thing that happens, or ‘dorsal collapse’, you’re right, “I can’t get out of bed for weeks on end.” But what I like to do is create a continuum, because everything’s on a continuum – even ventral, but let’s start with sympathetic and dorsal.
People listening might even try this out. What is the first flavour for you of entering into a place where you feel some anxiety or anger, you feel that uneasiness that feels like a warning is coming in? That’s your first stepping in to sympathetic. And then go to the very far end; what’s the most extreme outcome of that for you, whether it’s a fight or a flight, an anxiety, panic, rage? So you identify your two ends, but then you have all the space between and you begin to note, “What happens if I move one step out of feeling a bit frustrated? What’s the next step, and the next one and the next one?” You create this lovely continuum that lists a lot of different ways that sympathetic comes alive for you.
The same is true for dorsal. I like to tell people that I think we each have a home away from home in one of the survival states because it’s the place that we’ve gotten used to riding out the trauma in. And my home away from home is dorsal, so I’m very familiar with dorsal. I tell people all the time, the first flavour of dorsal for me is simply feeling as though I’ve taken a step back and I’m not quite as present as I was a minute ago. It’s very subtle.
And then it’s like going through the motions without a lot of energy, or going through the motions without really being able to care. At the far extreme of that would truly be dissociation, or that foetal position and not moving. But there’s so many flavours of dorsal energy, that disappearing in some way energy, and I think it’s really helpful – I’m glad you brought this up – for people to understand lots of different ways sympathetic and dorsal come alive for each of us.
And then, because we really do want to understand ventral, there are lots of different flavours of ventral. Ventral is both easeful, peaceful, quiet, and it’s also passionate, alert, ready, excited. All of these flavours are under the influence of ventral because we feel safe enough to go out and move through the world.
Chris Sandel: Yeah. It’s interesting; when I think about all those different flavours – I have a son who is three and three-quarters, and I think he is the best demonstrator for me of my movements all along the continuum.
Deb Dana: I love it. [laughs]
Chris Sandel: When I’m with an adult and I can have a genuine conversation and they are not a three-year-old child, things are just very different. And then when you have a child who’s having a meltdown or they’re wanting to do this thing and you’re saying, “Okay, it’s a little bit late for doing that” – you’re just challenged in a way, or at least I feel challenged in a way, that I‘m not with an adult. I very quickly can notice how I’m moving along that continuum.
Deb Dana: Yes. And that awareness, which you have, and my hope is that every person in the world is going to begin to have, is both really a blessing, something to be grateful for, but it’s also difficult to have all the time. To know, “Ooh, I am moving too far, and it’s not going to be good, so I need to do something.” But sometimes it’s like, “I can’t. I have lost the ability to find my way back to ventral, and then I’m going to have to go clean it up afterwards.”
Chris Sandel: Yeah. For me as well, being able to have this language around it has been so helpful – and this is now moving into with an adult. If I’m having a difficult conversation with Ali, my wife, there are times where I just flip over into dorsal. I go into shutdown mode, and it feels like everything has gone out of my mind and I just cannot think. I don’t know what to say. I’m just completely gone.
And I’m now able to say, “Look, I’ve gone into shutdown. I need to take a break or I need to go for a walk. This conversation has now become completely useless because I’m not an active party anymore because this has taken over me. And there is no amount of thinking my way out of this; I need to just remove myself from this situation, do what I need to do for my nervous system, and then – it’s not that I want to avoid this and we’re never talking about this again. I want to come back and I want to be able to do this, but at this point, I am not useful at all.”
Deb Dana: Right. Couple things I love that you said. One was we do say and need to understand that whatever it is, if we could’ve fought our way out of it, we would’ve done it long ago. None of us want to be stuck in those places of suffering. But you can’t think your way out of it, and one of the reasons is because these survival patterns are held in our nervous system, not our brain.
Another thing is when you leave ventral and you enter into one of those survival energies, your prefrontal cortex stops working in the same way. It becomes hypoactive. It begins to shut down. So you can’t problem-solve. You can’t find option C solutions. And oftentimes we can’t even find words because our nervous system has taken us to a place where that kind of thinking is not necessary for survival.
01:01:34
Chris Sandel: Definitely. And again, coming back to eating disorders, this is why for so much of the work, we need people to get food in as part of the recovery process because otherwise you’re not able to make clear, logical decisions. You’re not able to think your way out of this. Without the energy coming in, you stay stuck in that rung of the ladder.
Deb Dana: It’s interesting when we think about eating and taking in and using to create energy. When we are not under the guidance of our ventral system – when I don’t have what I call a ‘critical mass of ventral’ running the show, so to speak – my dorsal system, in its everyday role, its responsibility is to run my digestive system in a healthy way and bring me nutrients to nourish me. And as soon as I’m no longer under the management of ventral, the dorsal system loses the capacity to do that.
So in effect, it is now bringing a dysregulated digestive response, and that I think plays a huge role in messy eating, as you said, or disordered eating, eating disorders. The dorsal system can’t do its everyday role because we can’t find our way to enough ventral energy to allow it to stop working in a survival way.
Even helping people understand the basic biology of the states helps people begin to see, “Oh, if I can find more moments of ventral” – in my work, the micro-moments, I call them glimmers – “if I can find some glimmers, my system is going to begin to reshape in a gentle way.” This needs to be gentle. We need to be patient. We need to be persistent as well, but bringing in those moments, those glimmers of true ventral and bringing them into conscious awareness will begin to help shape the system differently. It’s almost as if our biology can begin to then help us with the ways that our beliefs about food and eating have been so deeply ingrained.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. That’s why coregulation or finding – one of the big things I’m talking about when working with clients is finding things in your life that are bringing you joy, that are giving you a reason to recover, as opposed to life feeling totally meaningless and like “Why would I even bother recovering?” Because the more there are those things that someone enjoys doing or those relationships or aspects of their life that bring meaning, the more, as you say, there are those glimmers. The more someone can start to have more time in that ventral safe & social state, and things can then start to come back online more.
Because I know with parasympathetic, people talk about it being like rest & digest, and that digest part, as you say, is part of dorsal. I also know for many clients, despite being in a really depleted state, the response can often be “I just don’t feel hunger. I don’t feel hungry.” I definitely get that, because a lot of the feelings that they associate with hunger in terms of a growling stomach or within the digestive tract, they’re just not getting as feedback. But we’re able to look at other symptoms they’re getting that could then point to that fact. So you’re always getting headaches; you say that you’re always cold; you feel very irritable. All of these things that are also associated with hunger. So even if you’re not feeling it within your digestive system, there’s still feedback that the body is giving you that food needs to come in.
Deb Dana: Right. And again, we’re turning towards those messages and listening underneath the symptom of being cold, and what’s the nervous system telling you? I love the way you do that work. It’s really lovely to think, what are the other symptoms? What are the other signals that you are receiving? And then how do we begin to listen to those and learn what they’re trying to tell us? Absolutely.
Chris Sandel: You talk in your work about the vagal brake. Do you want to talk about that, the vagal brake and vagal anchors?
01:06:40
Deb Dana: Sure. One thing I wanted to say before, and then we’ll do the vagal brake and anchors. When you were talking about those moments that you feel “Oh, there’s a reason to be alive” – it brought me right to my work around awe.
In my work, I’ve worked with many, many clients who were alone in the world. Although we know coregulation is necessary, it was really difficult for them to find. I also worked in a very rural place where there weren’t a lot of people, so that was difficult. We discovered awe, and what I love about awe is that everyday experiences of awe are all around us. When we first find awe, we do it on our own. It’s an individual experience. So there’s no reason why every one of us can’t have an awe experience.
An awe experience is a ventral moment. Nature. You were talking about you live out in the country, and I live by the sea and nature. Right outside my window, there is nature. Nature is pretty predictably bringing of moments of awe and activating of a ventral moment. So working with our own environments to see, where are the moments where I can see there’s a moment of awe, everyday awe? A flower, a bird, the wave of the ocean, something.
One of the things I do is go out and stand under the stars early in the morning, just to see the stars. We all can find those things. Even illustrations, if you’re not in a place where you’re surrounded by nature. But find an image that can bring you that.
Anyway, I just wanted to put a plug in for awe because I think it’s – I’m always looking for ways that don’t take a lot of effort for us to bring a ventral moment, because when I’m dysregulated, I don’t have a lot of energy to spend on finding ventral. So can I just find ways to bump into it?
Chris Sandel: I really love that. Also, something that would take more time in terms of finding awe, and it’s one of the bits of research I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and reading about, is around psychedelics and how psychedelics are able to bring someone that awe experience. People who have one session with psilocybin or MDMA and talk about it being one of the top three experiences of their entire life, and that experience of just complete awe and it shattering so many beliefs that they have – yeah, it can be so transformative. But that’s not something you can do every day, or at least not at this stage.
Deb Dana: No, no, no. [laughs] And there’s fascinating research, true scientific research being done with that, so I think we will hear much more about the use of psychedelics. Especially MDMA is being really studied beautifully. So stay tuned, see what happens with that.
01:09:58
You had asked about the vagal brake. The vagal brake is this one particular circuit that is a ventral vagal circuit, and it goes from your brain stem – so if you put your hand on your neck, down near where your neck meets your spinal cord, that’s basically where this circuit is going to leave. Then if you put the other hand on your heart, that’s where it goes. It goes between brain stem and the sinoatrial node of your heart. Its job, why it’s called a brake, like brakes on the bicycle, brakes on your car, is because its job is to regulate how much sympathetic mobilizing energy you feel in your system at any time.
The beauty of this particular piece of our anatomy is that it can release a bit and allow more sympathetic energy into the system so that you can use that energy, but without going into a survival response. Like when I want to go out, if I wanted to go for a run, my vagal brake would release enough so that I’d have sympathetic energy to do that. And then when I come back and I want to sit and cool down and relax, my vagal brake is going to reengage so that there’s less of that sympathetically charged energy and I’m more in an easeful place.
So that vagal brake is always, moment to moment, moving, allowing more or less sympathetic energy to be useful in your system. It brilliantly does that and keeps us out of that survival energy of fight and flight, because the survival energy of fight and flight floods us with cortisol and adrenaline, and we all know what that feels like. So the vagal brake is what keeps us able to transition, to move faster or move slower, to move between, to be excited and then calm down. It’s a really important piece.
And if people have grown up in dangerous environments, the vagal brake has often not had enough opportunity to be exercised because our first exercising is with parents who help us calm down. You’re talking about your three and a half year old – you are helping him exercise his vagal brake and get his vagal brake to be working efficiently by helping him calm down when he’s feeling unsafe and it comes out as a meltdown.
Everybody has a vagal brake, and it’s working in every system, because on every breath cycle it works, it releases just a little bit on your inhale and your heart rate speeds up, and it reengages just a bit on the exhale and your heart rate slows down. So for everybody who’s breathing, it is working. The problem is for many of us, it’s not working as efficiently as we want it to. So when we’re doing some of the exercises we do and when we’re looking for moments of ventral and we’re tracking where we are, we’re exercising the vagal brake and helping it work more efficiently, which I think is the hopefulness of polyvagal theory. We can reshape the way our system responds, and I think that is so hopeful and so important to remember.
Chris Sandel: Definitely, because it doesn’t matter where you were or what your start was; it’s then through various practices and ways of being, you can start to change how your nervous system reacts. And I’m a full advocate for full recovery in eating disorders, and it sounds as though with you and polyvagal theory, I’m fully on board with people being able to reshape where they were for earlier chunks of their life.
Deb Dana: Yes. I think in your work with people who have longstanding eating disorders and my work with people who have developmental complex trauma, it is an important thing for them to understand and believe that “My nervous system can learn how to do this differently. And it’s not for lack of desire or for lack of motivation that I haven’t been able to do that yet; it’s that I haven’t learned yet how to reshape my nervous system.” And that’s the work that your clients are going to do with you.
I think clients often, with a longstanding symptom they’re suffering with, begin to feel blamed. They feel like it’s their fault. I would often get clients who had been through many other clinicians, and when they came to me they were probably deeply embedded in the fact that “I’m so broken I can’t be fixed” or “I’m too toxic for you to work with”, any of these feelings and stories that we get. To be able to really reassure someone that the nervous system absolutely can reshape, and we’re going to do that work slowly, and we’re going to look for the subtle changes that happen – which is the other thing I want to make sure we talk about.
01:15:34
We’re not looking for the great big huge change. That will come, but we’re tracking the subtle shifts that are happening. I often invite people to notice at the end of a day, what is something that happened differently for you? Not better or worse, but just something that happened differently. That’s going to show your system reshaped in some way in that moment. And if we begin to keep tracking what happened differently, then we being to see the pattern that’s emerging, which I think is really important – and not waiting for the day when I’ve met this big goal that I have.
We’ll get there, but that’s less important than noticing, ooh, what’s happening today and tomorrow and the next day on the way to whatever the end goal is.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. A lot of the time when working with clients, I will get them to keep an awareness log, and then using that as a way for them to notice things, but also then I can pick up on things so that when we do have our consults, I can say, “I’ve noticed there’s this thing that started to change in the afternoons. Let’s have a chat about that.”
I always start the sessions with “Tell me about what the wins have been since we last chatted” so that we can start on a positive note and get someone into that line of thinking, like let’s look for where there have been some glimmers or some wins. And then, okay, what have been the struggles? Where has it felt that it hasn’t gone so right these last two weeks? Invariably, even with the stuff that hasn’t gone so right, we’re able to find “Yeah, but you noticed that earlier than you did previously” or “That didn’t go as to plan as you would’ve liked; did you notice what happened the next day?”
Again, just building on the foundation so no matter what happens, this is a learning experience, and you can take something good out of this. I think motivation is such a terrible thing in terms of it is so undependable. You can be so motivated one day and then the next day it’ll completely disappear on you. So trying to find ways that we are not having to rely on motivation – and I think this is a good way of being able to start to notice these things, like “Okay, I did that even though I was having a pretty shitty day.”
Deb Dana: Motivation is an interesting thing because I can be motivated from a sympathetic survival/fear state, which is not going to get me anywhere, and I can be motivate from a ventral ‘want to explore, want to see’ curiosity place. So even motivation, which state was talking to you about motivation in that moment? [laughs] It really is fascinating. I do that, too; “Let’s look at the last week and notice the challenges and the moments of ventral success.”
If you and I sat down and did that, we would have both. That is the normal human experience. It is a normal human expected experience to anchor in ventral and visit sympathetic and dorsal. In small ways, hopefully, and in big ways sometimes. That’s part of being human.
Chris Sandel: Again, that is something I’m constantly hammering home – managing expectations. The expectation is you are a human being, and you are going to, every single day, go through each of these different states. What’s more important than trying to spend every waking moment in ventral vagal and that safe & social is, how are you able to handle and deal with the times when that isn’t the case? Because that’s the thing that makes the difference.
Deb Dana: Right, and sometimes it’s a matter of bringing awareness to the choice you’re going to make. I have clients that would still make the survival decision and still enter into the behaviour that they were wanting to shape differently, but they did it from a place of awareness, which is different than doing it from a place of automatically entering into it. Even that is a beginning change.
Chris Sandel: Definitely. I think with the vagal brake – am I right in assuming to be in a playful place, you need both the ventral vagal safe & social and then you also need a bit of the fight or flight? It’s a combination of those two things.
Deb Dana: Yeah, which is why we really like to call sympathetic a system of mobilization, because it can bring this lovely, nourishing, playful, passionate, excited, even alert, ready energy – and it can bring the survival energy of fight and flight. Which it does is dependent on that one circuit, which is the vagal brake.
01:21:08
Chris Sandel: There’s an acronym as part of your new book that you use, which is BASIC. I know we’ve probably touched on some of these already, but I think it would be useful to go through each of them and then you can talk about some extra information that we haven’t hit so far with each of these different letters.
Deb Dana: Befriend, Attend, Shape, Integrate, and Connect. Each of those categories brings different exercises that will bring that alive. You don’t have to go through those in order necessarily, but the first place you do need to land is befriend, and until we befriend our nervous system, we can’t do anything else. Befriending and attending both are information-gathering, skill-building processes.
01:22:05
Befriend – and I’m just looking in the book to see which one I might want to take you through – would be the ventral vagal anchor. I love ventral vagal anchors, and I think it’s a beautiful befriending experience because it’s getting to know the places in your world that bring you moments of ventral. I’ll take people through that in this moment.
What we’re looking for is a ‘who, what, where, and when’ of your ventral system. If we start with ‘who’ and just think for a moment, who is a person in your life, when you are around them you feel welcomed, you feel safe to show up, you feel seen? Think of one person. Sometimes in the beginning, it’s hard to find a person, and we find our dog, our cat, our pet – which is fine. Sometimes it’s an ancestor that we didn’t know but we feel connected to. It might be a spiritual being. It could be someone who you see on TV or read about who brings you that sense of “Oh, that would be a ventral welcome.” So find a ‘who’.
And in the beginning, I really do encourage you to find a ‘who’ that is a living, breathing ‘who’ that you could actually be with, if that’s possible. One ‘who’. All we need is one.
And then the ‘what’ – what is something you do or an object you can connect with that brings a moment of ventral? It’s a simple thing you do; it’s not a great big practice. It might be looking out the window to the nature beyond your home. It might be looking at an image that brings you a moment of ventral. It might be sending a message to a friend.
An object would be something that’s easily accessible, that’s around your environment, that you can easily look at. Again, I live by the sea, and I walk the beach often and collect beach stones because they bring me joy. It’s a ventral anchor for me. I have them all around the house, and some days, when I think “This is a day that’s going to be a bit challenging”, I’ll grab one of the stones and put it in my pocket. It’s a what that I know can anchor me in ventral.
Who, what, where. Again, ‘where’ is a place you can enter into and feel safe and okay, that brings your sense of being welcomed and protected in that place. It might be a place outside. It might be a place in your house. It could be a place at work. Wherever. Where’s a place that you feel that, that you can then either go to or remember going to? The ‘where’ can be a place I’ve been to – again, it’s the seaside for me, it’s the beach for me, and I’ve spent nine months away from my home in Maine. I spent nine months during the pandemic with my daughter and family in Chicagoland, where I was away from the beach, but I could bring the image and memory of the beach alive, so my ‘where’ was still with me.
Then the last is ‘when’. When are the predictable moments when you feel a stirring of ventral energy? I’m an early morning person, so 5:00 in the morning is a time when I feel, “Before the world gets up, this is my moment” and I can feel the ventral. So think for you, when is a moment? It could be end of the day, getting in bed, closing the door on work, eating dinner with your family. There are lots of ‘whens’, so find one ‘when’.
And write these down, because when we write them down, then we can begin to keep a list, and the list will grow. This is a living document. It’s going to change as you discover more anchors. Then when you’re feeling a bit of “I’m losing my sense of ventral, I’m feeling a bit challenged at the moment”, you can grab an anchor. Either really picking up an anchor or going to the person or place or bringing it to mind. And as you bring it to mind and you get good at doing this, you’ll grab an anchor and then feel “Oh, okay, now I’m feeling more ventral in my system.”
So that practice is a befriending practice that I really love.
01:26:36
The attending, the one that I really do like to do for people is – I call it ‘three different things’. It’s noticing at the end of the day three things that happened differently for you. If you have been in a constant dorsal place, you might feel your sympathetic mobilizing anger or anxiety coming, and that means that you’re moving from dorsal to sympathetic on the way to ventral. Again, not good or bad. Just three different things. What happened differently or maybe what didn’t happen that made it a different response? The three different things is a really lovely experience.
01:27:20
So befriend and attend is all information-gathering, and then we begin to do a lot of experiences that shape differently. The Polyvagal Exercises book is filled with different ways of shaping. The one that we’ve touched on today is glimmers and really noticing glimmers, because they are all around us but we miss them. We don’t see them. Setting a glimmer intention is one of the shaping things, because the more I see glimmers, the more I’m looking for them. If I see a glimmer today, I’m going to be on the lookout for one tomorrow.
So set a glimmer intention. Set an intention. But again, even setting an intention, write an intention and then read it and ask your nervous system, “Does that feel doable?” I would have clients say, “I’m going to notice five glimmers a day.” I say, “Great. Let me say that out loud and see what your nervous system says.” I would read it to them and they go, “Oh, no.” [laughs] That was the brain saying, “I really want to do this”, but the nervous system is saying, “Not so fast.” So we’d end up with sometimes “I’m going to look for one glimmer a day” or “I’m going to find one glimmer this week.”
Again, there is no right or wrong here. There is only what your nervous system can say yes to. That’s really what we’re looking for.
01:28:44
And then integrating, the ‘I’ in BASIC, integration – I put the vagal brake and I put creating resilience routines in the integration piece. Our resilience routines are really about, again, noticing, “For me, what are the core practices that I would like to do? And what are the experimental practices that I would like to try?” Because we need a menu. When we’re working with a nervous system – and I know we’ve all had this experience, especially over the pandemic; my inbox is flooded with ‘3 Things To Do To Feel Okay’, ‘5 Activities’, ‘7 whatever’ – it seems to be what everybody’s doing. And in the beginning I was reading them and going, “Wow, I must be really off-base here because those do not feel like what I want to do.”
What I finally discovered was what I’m reading is somebody else’s either brain or nervous system trying to tell me what my nervous system needs, and that is never going to work. We create our own resilience routines and we find a couple of predictable, sustainable practices, and then we have a whole bunch on a menu that we can choose from, because some days I get up and I think, as you were saying, “Oh, I really need to find a friend and actually watch the beach with them and not just see them on Zoom.” And other days, my nervous system says, “Today what would really be helpful would be not to be with people at all but to dive into this book.”
So I need a routine that involves all of those choices. Again, in integrate, it’s really respecting what our nervous system says and creating our own plans around that knowing.
01:30:41
And then finally, if we go to connect, connection really is about, how do I both connect to myself, connect to others, how do I connect to something beyond me? Connect those experiences of awe, of gratitude, of knowing that I’m part of something larger than myself. I like that thought of connecting. I know when I’m doing my work, I often have this thought “I am not doing this alone.”
When we are in this place of ventral anchoring, one of the things I teach is that we are inextricably connected, nervous system to nervous system. Because through these conversations that are happening below the level of awareness, nervous systems are always speaking to each other. So I am connected to this vast connection of people. There’s a oneness that I can feel in that place of connect, which I think is helpful to know that I’m not on my own here. I don’t need to solve this all by myself, and when I need help I’m not on my own. Even just knowing that there are other nervous systems that are listening to mine and hearing – it feels very filling to me. It fills me in some way.
So connect is about finding ways to connect to others, connect to my own experience, and connect in this larger way.
Chris Sandel: I think it was last week at some point I stumbled on something on YouTube of Steve-O, who was one of the people from Jackass, talking about how he got sober and how he stays sober and the thing that’s had the biggest impact on him, and he says what keeps him sober is that he helps other people. Any person who is struggling with alcohol or drug addiction, he’s like, “Yeah, put them in contact with me. Let me help them.” Just having this feeling of “This is not just about me. This is about me being of service and in connection with other people.” For him, he said that’s the hands-down biggest thing that has helped him. And he’s definitely not the only one to say that. I know it’s a fairly central tenet of 12-step and AA, etc. But I think that definitely connects to your thoughts around connection.
Deb Dana: And from a place of ventral, that desire to help comes in a way that can be freely offered and freely accepted. We can have a feeling, “I want to help, I need to help” from a sympathetic place that comes with an agenda, and then another person receives it as “I’m broken, you need to change me, you’re trying to fix me.” But from ventral, which is that lovely experience you were just talking about, that comes with “I’m here. How can I be of service?” Which is a really beautiful experience.
Chris Sandel: I’d say the same in terms of when you were talking about integrate, you were saying about all the different emails you received, the ‘5 things to do’ or ‘7 things to do’ or whatever. Whenever I’m starting this work and doing this with clients, I always start with “You tell me your experience. What are the things that, for you, seem to take you down from being in ventral vagal and going down into that fight or flight mode, or from fight or flight going down into dorsal and shutdown? And also in reverse order, because I want to hear from you and get your lived experience and what you’ve picked up and noticed so far, and then we can start to look at all these other things that have some research around them that have been helpful for other people that may be of interest to you. Some of them will be more interesting and others will not feel like they work, but let’s start with you and your experience before I start diluting that with everything else.”
Deb Dana: I love that. I love that you do that, yes. And it helps people feel like their experience has meaning – which it does. My nervous system really wants to tell its story. And I would like someone to be interested in listening to it. Not simply beginning to tell me how to change it, but let’s get to know it first. That’s why that befriending piece. I always say, when we make a friend, it begins with a connection and we come into feeling “Ooh, this can be nice.” We have to tend to that friendship or else it doesn’t blossom. We tend to a friendship over the course of our life.
That’s what we do with our nervous system. We begin to befriend, and then we stay in connection with it because that’s going to keep that friendship alive and going.
Chris Sandel: Totally. So much of the work I do with clients is around compassion, and I like a lot of the research in that field. There’s a lot of research, especially with eating disorder recovery, of how important compassion and self-compassion is as part of getting to a place of recovery versus someone who is unable to do that or there’s lots of relapse. So when I see the word ‘befriend’, compassion instantly comes to mind.
Deb Dana: Yeah, and compassion, as you know because you’ve read the research, is an emergent property of a ventral vagal state. You cannot be compassionate or self-compassionate if you’re in sympathetic or dorsal. Biologically unavailable to you. It’s just fascinating, the importance of finding ventral.
01:36:47
Chris Sandel: Definitely. The final thing I want to ask you is, I can see when I went onto Amazon that you have another book coming out called Anchored. When is that due out? What are you covering as part of that book?
Deb Dana: That has been a real joy to write. I’ve done that in cooperation with Sounds True, and it’s book for a general audience. It’s my first time writing a book for a non-clinical audience. It’s a layman’s guide to the nervous system and exercises and ways to get to know, different than the ones we’ve just talked about – listening to stories. The thing I wrote in the very beginning was all of the exercises in the book invite you to document your experience, and ‘document’ can be done through writing, through illustration, through imagery, through music. It’s just a lovely invitation to explore, get to know your nervous system.
As I say, I want you to become an active operator of your system, and Anchored – again, I love the word ‘anchored’. I think it’s a great thing to think about, to anchor in ventral. All of the exercises in Anchored are there for you to explore and return to. They’re not a one-and-done experience. You can keep going back and diving in again and create a community of people who are sharing this language and sharing this way of looking at life with you.
Chris Sandel: Awesome. I’ve loved your other two books, so as soon as that is out, I will get it and give it a read. When is that meant to be out? I know sometimes with publishing, dates get changed around.
Deb Dana: It’s meant to be out in November. I just turned in the final edits for the flat copy. So look for it in November.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. If people want to find out more information about you, where should they go? A website or social media? Anything you want to mention to people? I’ll put this in the show notes as well.
Deb Dana: Thanks. I’m one of those people who’s on no social media, so you won’t find me there.
Chris Sandel: Good. [laughs]
Deb Dana: Come to my website, which is www.rhythmofregulation.com. You can find free resources, you can find workshops, lots of recorded interviews. Hopefully we’ll post this one on the website. So come explore at rhythmofregulation.com.
Chris Sandel: Perfect. Deb, this has been amazing. I’m really grateful that I’ve been able to chat with you today. As I said at the beginning, you have had a big impact on the way that I think about things and work with clients. So I’m just thrilled I’ve been able to share this time with you, and I think the listeners are going to get a lot out of this. Nearly two hours has just flown by.
Deb Dana: I just want to say that it has been a real joy for me. I love the ebb and flow of our conversation. It has felt very connecting, very welcoming. So thank you, Chris.
Chris Sandel: Thank you.
So that is my conversation with Deb Dana. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as I enjoyed having it with her. When Deb’s new book Anchored comes out in the November time, I will likely get her back on the show, as it feels like we barely scratched the surface of the topic with this conversation.
Her other two books are also highly recommended. I’ve read both and I think they’re wonderful. They are aimed at practitioners and it’s talked about through this lens, but I think that even as a layperson, you can get a lot out of them and they will still be very useful. So if you don’t want to wait until November to read about this topic, then I suggest getting her more recent book, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection: 50 Client-Centered Practices.
As I mentioned at the top, I’m taking on clients again. It’s a limited intake, and I have just five spots left. If you want help with recovery and body image and getting your period back, exercise compulsion, being stuck in quasi-recovery, or any of the other areas that I cover as part of the show, please get in contact. You can go to www.seven-health.com/help for more information.
So that is it for today’s show. I will be back next week with another episode. Stay safe, and I’ll catch you then.
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