Consider the level of emotional safety you experience around people and in the world. Do you tend to feel edgy and reactive and use anger or anxiety to protect yourself? Or does reactivity cause you to withdraw and isolate to avoid wounding? If you use these coping strategies more often than you’d like and want to feel more in tune with yourself and in balance with the world, Polyvagal Practices: Anchoring the Self in Safety by Deb Dana, LCSW will help you reach your goals.

Dana seeks to help you find your “way to the rhythm of regulation that brings you safety, connection, and joy.” She explains how, outside of our awareness, the autonomic nervous system controls bodily functions through three hierarchical response pathways: ventral, sympathetic and dorsal. “Each pathway brings its own set of thoughts, feelings, behaviors and bodily experiences.”

At the top of the hierarchy is the ventral state in which, “we feel grounded, organized, and ready to meet the day. Life feels manageable . . . we connect to ourselves, to others, to the world around us . . . we are regulated and ready to engage.” One step down is the sympathetic state, which mobilizes our physical and mental energy and, survival mode, “activates pathways of fight and flight and pulls us into anxiety and anger.” At the bottom of the hierarchy is the dorsal state which shuts down in survival mode, sapping our energy and causing withdrawal from connection and the world. 

Dana says, “The way we experience daily life is shaped by our nervous systems. Beliefs, behaviors and body responses emerge from our autonomic states” . . . generating the “ways we move toward or away from people, places and things . . .” Clearly, the ventral state of safety and regulation is the one we wish to live in as much as possible. We do this by anchoring ourselves there through connection to self. 

All this might sound a bit complicated, but this book contains schematics to help simplify what Dana is talking about. She also provides many tools to bring theory alive by offering strategies to shift ourselves out of our sympathetic (fight or flight) or dorsal (shut down, disconnect) state and return back into our ventral (regulated) state. There are dozens of easy, grounding exercises to teach us how to know when we’re in ventral, sympathetic or dorsal states.

One of the reasons I’m blogging about this book is that when you’re more regulated, you’re less likely to use food to quell your anger, bind your anxiety, or soothe your hurt feelings by going “unconscious” through mindless eating.

Best,

Karen