Welcome back to the Trauma Informed Herbalist Podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth Guthrie, and today we’re going to be continuing our conversation about how trauma affects us. In the last episode, we talked a bit about the different ways we can group trauma, so the different types of trauma and the different layers of trauma, or the way that trauma can appear throughout our lives, and how it can affect us even when we aren’t personally affected.

And then we ended the episode discussing a little bit about being wired for fear versus wired for connection. And hopefully I’ve impressed upon you the fact that your body responded a specific way to keep you safe, and you should not blame yourself for that response.

So today I want to carry this discussion a little bit further, talking some about the nervous system’s response, what happens when we get stuck in that trauma response, a little bit about polyvagal theory, and then we’re going to end with a small discussion on top-down and bottom-up processing and why having both of those can be so important for the healing process.

So I want to start with a brief overview of the nervous system.

This is by no means a comprehensive discussion, it’s just to kind of give you a few pieces of the puzzle. And to frame the different things that you’ll hear me talk about throughout this season.

So the nervous system is divided into two parts. You have your central nervous system and your peripheral nervous system.

Your central nervous system is composed of the brain and the spinal cord. And in the brain we have the limbic system, which controls how memory is processed. And you’re gonna hear me talk about that a lot, especially in season two with aromatherapy and that kind of thing. But a lot of the trauma conversation centers around parts of the peripheral nervous system.

So we have the central, which is the brain and the spinal cord, and then we have the peripheral nervous system, which carries out commands from the brain and helps us to interact with the world around us. Now, the peripheral nervous system consists of the somatic and autonomic nervous.

So the somatic system is what allows me to talk right now. The muscles, the movement that we do when we make a decision to point a finger or to say some words, that all comes from the somatic nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system consists of the processes that are automated in the body, so your blood pressure, your heart rate things that you don’t want to have to consistently be thinking about, like how many breaths you’re going to take per minute, or what your blood pressure is going to be if you need to stand up.

So the autonomic system receives information from the other parts of the nervous system and determines how fast your heart needs to beat, what your unconscious breathing should look like, so on and so forth. And this autonomic system is made up of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system. Now, the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system are what comes into play when we have trauma trapped in the body.

So you may be thinking, Well, if it’s automated, thus autonomic nervous system, then we don’t have any control over it. Well, yes and no. While we don’t have direct control over what our autonomic nervous system is doing with the information it’s receiving, we can help to send information to the autonomic nervous system that helps it come back into a state of relaxation, calm, connected, and able to think clearly.

So when you choose an essential oil, that helps to bring you back into that ventral vagal… Or when you pick out some nerving herbs to put into a tea that helps you to relax and reduces the feelings of stress in your body… Or maybe you take a restorative yoga class, or maybe there’s a guided meditation, whatever that looks like…

When you choose these things to help to reduce stress levels, you’re sending signals to your autonomic nervous system that, “we are in a safe place at this moment in time right here. We are safe.”

The catch is: when you have had trauma, you have to adjust the practices to work with whatever you have going on.

So restorative yoga may be too slow. It may put you into a space where you’re starting to have intrusive thoughts and maybe you need to do more of a gentle yoga movement. Maybe sitting meditation doesn’t work well. Maybe you need walking meditation, because trauma changes the way that the autonomic nervous system reads the stimulus that it’s received.

Most natural medicine options will still work. You just may have to adjust, change what you’re doing, make it a little bit different so that your body can come back into that state of being relaxed and calm and ready to heal. So hopefully that gives you a little bit more clarity about the different pieces of the nervous system and how we interact with them, especially in a trauma informed environment.

Next, I wanna take a few minutes and discuss the polyvagal theory and the three autonomic nervous system states that are described in the polyvagal theory. So the polyvagal theory was created by Dr. Stephen Porges, and it describes three different states of the vagus nerve. These three states are the sympathetic, the dorsal vagal, and the ventral vagal states.

Dr. Porges has written a few different books on the subject, and he goes into a lot of detail as to how he determined these three different states. He’s based off of biology. There’s a lot of interesting information, and if you’re wanting to read about it, his book, Polyvagal Safety: Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation is a good starting point.

So for our discussion, we will start with the sympathetic state. In healthy and safe interactions, we do still move into the sympathetic state some, but we just become alert and more aware. So think of activities that make you more excited, playing sports, going for a fast walk, things that consist of movement and being more alert.

I mean, even certain board games that maybe you’re not physically moving, but you have to be quick, you have to be on alert. That activates a portion of that sympathetic system.

Now, when someone is in danger, that becomes the fight or flight. Which, again, is healthy. It’s a good thing to have the adrenaline pump it through your veins and getting ready to move if you need to in a dangerous situation.

So this is a good response. It is a healthy response that protects us. Fighting or being able to run very suddenly is a good thing when you’re in danger. What happens though is once we’ve experienced trauma and we’re trapped in that cycle and unable to resolve the trauma, then we’re in a scenario where we become hyper vigilant when we’re in the sympathetic state.

So if someone is stuck in a sympathetic reaction, this is where that feeling of jumpiness comes in. The feeling of always being on edge. My mom described at the beginning of the pandemic being in a sympathetic state, and she said that for her it was like watching a scary movie. And you’re in that scene where you know something’s about to jump out from behind the corner and you just are perpetually in that emotion of the anticipation of something about to go horribly wrong.

And that is the sympathetic state that we see when somebody is dealing with a trauma response. And while everybody’s responses are different, a lot of the times when somebody has hyper vigilance as part of their trauma response, they may struggle with meditation or slower yoga practices, and the reason for this is their brain is still in a hypervigilant state.

It’s still looking for the danger. It’s still trying to figure out what’s going wrong. So instead of being able to relax into a calm state that allows the body and the mind to release that sense of hyper vigilance… Instead, you may find that your brain is either scanning the environment around you, trying to figure out what would happen if you needed to escape.

Or it’s possible that it’s worrying about things that could happen, intrusive thoughts, that kind of thing. That’s very, very common when somebody is first trying to use these slower things like restorative yoga, yoga nidra, and they’re dealing with a trauma response. Now, I’m not saying you can’t ever do these things if you have the sympathetic state of fight or flight, but it takes a little bit of practice.

And we’ll talk some about that, especially when we get into meditation.

So the sympathetic state is your fight or flight state. The dorsal vagal state is your freeze response. And in complex trauma, sometimes the fawn response. So while the sympathetic system is, um, activation, your dorsal vagal state is deactivation.

In healthy interactions, we do have some dorsal vagal state moments. If you think of moments where things are so calm and so serene that you almost kind of fall into a lull. So for me, that’s times where I’m snuggling up with one of my animals and we’ve just been laying there and I’ve been petting them for a little while and we both start to… You don’t quite drift off to sleep, but you’re just kind of in that really almost “twilight” state.

Some people, it’s sitting by the fire sipping on warm tea in the wintertime. Those moments that are just reserved for quiet intimacy, that sensation is a healthy dorsal vagal state.

Now, when we find ourselves in danger, the dorsal vagal response offers us the freeze reaction, and also in complex trauma, it comes into play with the fawn response.

So in dangerous situations, if fight or flight is not an option, freeze can set in where a person is unable to respond. In that moment, their body shuts down and in that time they’re frozen and cannot move. And in complex trauma, especially when there’s a specific abuser that’s been around for a long period of time, a person may come to a place where their brain responds to the threat of, of danger by shutting down and doing whatever it can do to please the other person.

So it freezes any kind of personal response that we may have, and instead of knowing what we want, and instead of knowing what would be best for us, We begin to fawn and defer to the other person and what the other person wants and needs, and the brain creates this response to attempt to keep the other person from harming someone further.

So the fawn response is very common in trauma, but freeze also is something that you may be dealing with and not even realize it is a trauma. It’s the shutting down and not being able to move forward with things. Um, sometimes for me, it will come into play if I’m trying to do something and I’m getting a little wound up doing it, and I start messing things up because my response has been activated and so then it’s almost like everything shuts down.

And then I just can’t do it at all. It, it kind of goes into that. I, I can’t even, I just can’t even, um, which is humorous. But also it could be very frustrating when you get up and all you can do is stare at the wall because you’re so stressed out. So freeze response in the dorsal vagal state does occur a lot.

We normally think of a sympathetic response when we think of trauma, but that dorsal vagal response happens as well, and depending on your personal constitution and the way that things work for you, sometimes herbs that help us to energize can make a dorsal vagal response better, but sometimes it can actually make it worse.

So it’s one of these things. We’ll talk more in depth about this when we get into the herbs here in a couple of episodes, but it’s one of these things that we really have to kind of pay attention to. What does our body do right before going to the dorsal vagal state? And that can give us clues as to whether or not relaxing herbs make more sense or stimulating herbs would make more sense because whatever we choose, we want to try to come back to a ventral vagal.

So we’ve talked about the sympathetic state being fight or flight, and dorsal vagal being kind of a freeze or fawn response in complex trauma. And we’re trying to come back into a place where the ventral vagal, calm and connected state is our main source of interaction.

Think of those moments where everything around you is a little bit more crisp.

It’s a little bit more bright or vivid, and in those moments you are connected with your environment. You’re not worried about what might happen. You’re not ashamed about what has happened in the past, just in that moment, (which is part of mindfulness work, right in that moment) everything is connected the way it should.

Even if there are things that are swirling around you that are stressful in that moment, you are able to find the space of calm and you’re able to ask for what you need, and you’re able to do the things that help you continue to feel safe and connected. That is a ventral vagal state.

So in a healthy situation, we’re normally going to be in the ventral vagal.

But there, as we’ve discussed, there are times where you’re going to fluctuate into the sympathetic state. Sometimes you’ll drop a bit into dorsal vagal, but generally, we’re going to stay in that calm and connected space. So as we talk through some of these therapies over the next few weeks, I want you to see what you might want to implement in order to help yourself stay more in that ventral vagal.

When you find yourself in a calm and connected environment, then when you go to therapy, you’re able to sit down with your therapist and process other things, knowing that you can get back to that calm, connected state afterwards. It’s very empowering. It made a big difference in the type of work that I was able to do with my therapist when I first realized this was an option.

And a good trauma informed therapist is going to have tools for top down and bottom up processing. Now, what do we mean by top down and bottom up processing? These terms kind of evolved from the triune brain theory. It’s a bit of an outdated theory. The polyvagal theory has really kind of replaced it, but the triune brain model shows us that there are three distinct parts of the brain.

You have your reptilian brain, which is very visceral, and notices things on a very instinctual level. You have your proto-mammalian brain that notices things on an emotional level, and then we have the neo-mammalian brain (or the human brain, depending on who’s presenting the model) that is very logical.

So if we start at the top with the logic and we process through the logic, through the emotions into the visceral, that’s called top down processing.

If we start with the visceral and process from the bottom, the visceral into the emotions, into the logic, that is called bottom up processing.

So many forms of talk therapy are going to be top down processing, but things like EMDR, the eye movement desensitization and reprogramming, is a bottom up type processing.

There are also somatic experiencing techniques that Dr. Peter Levine has created. That’s very bottom up processing that doesn’t necessarily have to be done by a therapist, but if you have a good therapist, you can do both. You can do top down and bottom up based on where you are. Many people when they first start therapy, really need that more visceral, bottom up processing in order to clear certain things out so that they can go back and do top down, logical processing of what’s occurred.

If somebody only does that top down processing and doesn’t have any kind of visceral physical processing that occurs from the bottom up side, then they may still have residual things in their body. That are causing them to struggle and that could surface in the form of unexplained emotions or physical ailments.

There’s all kinds of things that could occur there. We will talk a little bit more about bottom up processing when we talk about yoga and movement therapies, but just be aware that if you’ve worked with a therapist from the top down processing, but haven’t done any somatic experiencing, EMDR, any of these things that help you from the bottom up, then there may just be some more work to do.

It’s not that you haven’t done good work, it’s just there are some other things that could help you to process these things that maybe don’t have as logical of a hold in your body. , so stay tuned. We are going to revisit the nervous system here in a couple of episodes, but this next episode we’re going to dive into immunity and we’re going to discuss the, the information that’s out there about how stress affects the immune system and how that might lead to an understanding about how trauma forms, especially when somebody has higher levels of inflammation or they’re already dealing with a chronic disease or an autoimmune condition.

Thanks again for listening, and if you have questions, as always, reach out to me, elizabeth@empathiccoaches.com and I’ll catch you in the next episode.