The Interface of Healing and Human Interactions

Trauma leaves deep imprints on our nervous system, often disrupting our ability to feel safe, connect with others, and regulate our emotions. The social engagement system, which encompasses our facial expressions, vocalizations, and body language, is crucial to this recovery process. Trauma can disrupt this system, leading to difficulties in social interactions, heightened anxiety, and a constant sense of unease. By understanding how this system operates and its role in trauma recovery, we can make meaningful strides toward healing and rebuilding our lives.

The intricate system running behind the scenes of our daily lives, governed by the vagus nerve, our autonomic nervous system, and particularly the concept of neuroception, could be making more decisions than we realize, deeply influencing our interactions through our physiology, perceptions, stories, and beliefs.

“In most individuals (i.e., those without a psychiatric disorder or neuropathology), the nervous system evaluates risk and matches neurophysiological state with the actual risk of the environment. When the environment is appraised as being safe, the defensive limbic structures are inhibited, enabling social engagement and calm visceral states to emerge. In contrast, some individuals experience a mismatch, and the nervous system appraises the environment as being dangerous even when it is safe. This mismatch results in physiological states that support fight, flight or freeze behaviors but not social engagement behaviors. According to the theory, social communication can be expressed efficiently through the social engagement system only when these defensive circuits are inhibited.”   Dr. S Poges ‘The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system’

Neuroception, a term coined by Dr. Porges, refers to the subconscious process by which our nervous system evaluates and responds to environmental cues of safety, danger, or life threat without conscious awareness. This continuous background scanning affects how we perceive interactions, situations, and even ourselves. When neuroception senses safety, we can engage openly and connect deeply; when it detects a threat, it may trigger defensive responses that shape our beliefs and narratives, often without our conscious recognition.

In a balanced, healthy system, there is a tiered and hierarchical approach to our engagements, which can be summarized as connect, protect, and eject.

We try connecting the Ventral Vagal state, failing which we defend/protect the Sympathetic Fight/Flight state and failing which we eject the Dorsal State/ Freeze and possibly collapse/shutdown/submit the Fawn/Please and Appease responses.

Dr. Stephen Porges explains, “The social engagement system uses the neural circuits that regulate the muscles of the face and head to communicate our physiological state to others.” When trauma affects these neural circuits, our ability to feel safe and connect with others is compromised.

Why This System is Key to Stress and Trauma Stress Recovery

1. Creating a Sense of Safety: The social engagement system helps us feel safe through healthy, repeatable, positive social interactions. We can learn to engage with others while being aware of our internal need for safety cues and meet them through supportive practices and compassionate inquiries. Using exteroception, we can begin to accurately interpret cues of safety in our external environment. These help the nervous system shift from a state of defense to one of connection, deeper ease, and relaxation.
2. Facilitating Emotional Regulation: Trauma often leaves us in a state of hypervigilance or emotional numbness. By nurturing the social engagement system, we can improve our ability to regulate emotions and monitor and respond to stress in a healthier way. This involves recognizing and addressing dysregulation as it happens in the present moment. Rather than being overwhelmed by the deep imprints of past trauma, we can slow down trauma time and attune ourselves with tenderness.
3. Rebuilding Trust and Connection: Early relationships and traumatic experiences shape our capacity to trust and connect. By engaging in nourishing self-care, consistent practices that build both positive bio and neuro plasticity while intentionally sharing time and space with other more mature nervous systems, we can begin to rewire these patterns and build new, healthier relationships while fostering a trusting relationship with yourself too.
4. Empowering Present Moment Awareness: Healing from trauma is less about changing the past and more about what we can do right now. Mindfulness, body listening, and present-moment awareness help us recognize when we are spending too much time in dysregulation. Embodying a regulated state helps us recognize the need to invite ourselves back time and again, feeling tethered to an unwavering trust in our steadfast self-love. Our earnest efforts to help ourselves in ‘real’ ways begin to make a ‘real’ difference in promoting true inner calm, balance, and authentic connection. When you feel secure in and with yourself, you are less focused on what’s not ok and more trusting in what is.

Understanding that this system has a profound influence on our ability to heal, supports us to compassionately reframe our experiences. Through restoring the system and reclaiming agency over our stories, triggers, human-to-human interactions, and valid emotional responses. By bringing understanding and awareness to this underlying process, we can start to gently unravel and rewire the deep-seated patterns and conditioning that steer our lives, personally and professionally. Fostering a sense of embodied safety empowers us to make more conscious, aligned choices.

Past, Present, and Future Come Together

A Trauma-Informed Approach to Utilizing the Social Engagement System

1. Awaken the System: Trauma-informed practitioners can help you reawaken and reconnect with this system to increase the healing capacity within the vagus nerve, which is optimized while opening ventral vagal circuits. Roseanne believes this helps to build a newfound sense of trust between the language of the body, mind, emotions, and the nervous system and, in her professional opinion, should be the first step of trauma stress recovery. ‘Experiencing change reinforces the belief that change and healing is possible.’
2. Recognize Dysregulation: The second step in trauma recovery is recognizing when we are dysregulated. This manifests in different ways, for example as hyper vigilance, anxiety, dissociation, over pleasing and easily triggered fight-or-flight responses. Attune to the body, the direction of thoughts, the shifts and interruptions of energy, interpret internal sensations and external signals as healing intelligence. This helps us take steps to regulate our nervous system and rest more peacefully.
3. Somatic Practices and Build Interoceptive Accuracy: Deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing activates the ventral vagus nerve, promoting a sense of calm. This simple practice can help us return to a state of regulation and engage our social engagement system more effectively. Building proprioception and accurate interoception by teaching our body how to begin to recognize good sensations will nurture the integrative qualities of different brain regions. Helping it learn that different doesn’t mean bad and that it’s safe to rest and relax. Closing the knowing feeling gap – knowing safety and feeling safe- knowing joy and feeling joyful – knowing your body and feeling embodied- are completely different experiences.
4. Engage in Healthy Nourishing Social Interactions: Surrounding ourselves with supportive, understanding individuals can foster a sense of safety and connection. These interactions help rebuild trust and reinforce the social engagement system too.
5. Seek Professional Support: Therapists trained in trauma-informed care can provide guidance and techniques to help us regulate our nervous system and engage in positive social behaviors. They can also help us understand and process past trauma in a safe environment.
6. Embrace Self-Compassion: Recognizing that healing is a living experience allows us to be gentle with ourselves. As Dr. Kristin Neff, a self-compassion researcher, suggests, “Self-compassion involves treating yourself with the same kindness and understanding that you would offer to a friend.” Compassion builds vagal tone.

Moving Forward: No Judgment, Just Healing Intelligence

Life is full of our human-ness and our human mess, and we all have moments when we feel despair, deep distress, regular stress, overwhelm, emotional dysregulation, stagnation, and disconnection. The goal is not to make these wrong or bad, not to judge ourselves or these experiences, but to acknowledge them and take steps toward restoring inner balance and healing. Growth is possible, and deep restoration and rewiring of our nervous system can happen. When we focus on what is available in this present moment and engage in practices that support our social engagement system, the body-mind connection starts to work with and for us rather than against us.

By creating an inner environment of safety by prioritizing our well-being and nurturing our needs, boundaries, and social connections, we can move forward with our trauma and build a good life filled with emotional resilience and hope.

Remember, healing is not about perfection but about sustainable personal progress. It’s not about healing every aspect of our history, it’s about balancing our past with building an embodied vision of how you see yourlsef navigating life on a day to day basis. The potential to restore a true sense of connection to an inner aliveness while being able to attend to what is arising, is possible.

Each moment of embodied awareness and each act of self-compassion brings us closer to a state of embodied safety and well-being. Let’s embrace this journey together, knowing that we have the power to transform our lives, one moment of recovery at a time.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

 

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