Polyvagal theory has had a huge impact on the field of trauma. This book takes it into the field of addiction, challenging the disease model by providing a radical paradigm shift. Through this lens addictive behaviours that I saw in my womenâs group are adaptive attempts to regulate the ANS. The central goal of the healing journey is to support autonomic regulation through embodied practices.
Origins of the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model of Addiction (FSPM)
Over 40 years of keeping my clients company, I have developed a model to understand what I saw and heard as I sat with their stories and ways of managing their intense experiences. As I began to learn about polyvagal theory, I realized that I was applying the theory as I explored the field of addiction. The theory enhanced my understanding of what I knew intuitively: Clients were using addictive behaviours to propel themselves from a state of sympathetic arousal to a dorsal vagal response of numbing, and vice versa. Through understanding how the ANS operates, we see these behaviours as adaptive. They have developed over time to help the addicted person survive when enough safety isnât available.
I now saw Siegelâs continuum of emotional chaos and rigidity as reflective of the ANS. Chaos is the sympathetic state, and rigidity is the parasympathetic shutdown the body experiences when the dorsal vagus is activated. Thinking back to Brigette in the womenâs group, it became clear that her vaginal cutting was an adaptive response to intolerable experience. It propelled her from the overwhelming flooding of anxiety, terror, and ensuing chaos characteristic of sympathetic arousal, to the tunnelling, funnelling journey down into a place of floating oblivion and rigidity, which is a dorsal vagal response. This cutting behaviour became her addictive, adaptive response to trauma.
Addictive/Adaptive Responses Often Tell a Detailed Trauma Story
Another part of the mystery is the way in which the addictive response may tell a story about the clientâs trauma history. Sometimes the chosen addiction points to the source of the trauma. For example, some studies show that 80 per cent of sex addicts have a history of sexual abuse (Carnes, 2001). Another example is dysregulated eating, which can be a response for those with a trauma history around food.
Sometimes clients reenact specific behaviours that take place during the addictive experience that link back to early childhood abuse. The reenactment tells a piece of the story, hence puts the client in touch with the feelings, without directly making the link. The dissociated, fragmented story is held in the body.
Van der Kolk (2014) was curious about re-enactments. He asked the question, âWhy are so many people attracted to dangerous or painful situations?â He found a paper written by Beecher (1946) entitled, Pain in Men Wounded in Battle. Beecher was a surgeon working with soldiers wounded on the Italian front. He observed that 75 per cent of the severely wounded did not request morphine. He then speculated in this paper that if emotions are strong enough, they can block pain.
Van der Kolk and some colleagues conducted a study with eight war veterans who agreed to watch violent scenes from the film Platoon (1986) and at the same time take a standard pain test. They measured how long the veterans could keep their hands in a bucket of ice water. They then repeated the process with a calm and peaceful movie scene. Seven of the eight veterans kept their hands in the freezing water 30 per cent longer during the violent movie. He states, âWe then calculated that the amount of analgesia produced by watching fifteen minutes of a combat movie was equivalent to that produced by being injected with eight milligrams of morphine, about the same dose a person would receive in an emergency room for crushing chest painâ (Van der Kolk, 2014, p. 33).
In clinical settings it is apparent that clientsâ addictive behaviours of traumatic re-enactment â that is, re-exposing themselves to painful, humiliating, dangerously abusive experiences â activates a dissociative, dorsal vagal response. This response is often activated at the beginning of the addictive cycle, the phase of pre-occupation, and endures for hours after the event. Clients report that it brings them a powerful sense of relief and often the ability to sleep.
Now, it all begins to make sense through an ANS lens. The primary responsibility of the ANS is to ensure safety and hence survival, and the shift in states facilitates this mandate. Without safety, our body will automatically resort to survival mode, although our ancient survival mechanisms are not always the best response in the modern world.
Addictive behaviours are adaptive strategies for survival that kick in when there is no sense of safety. A sense of safety is a prerequisite for the ventral vagus to support a socially engaged state. Addiction occurs in isolation, during avoidance of social engagement. Instead of regulating our nervous system in safe connection with self and others, in addiction we regulate with objects, behaviours, drugs, alcohol, food, and with relational reenactments. Porges (2017) states, âWhen individuals have difficulty regulating s...