Developing Meaning
A podcast about healing trauma and finding meaning.
Have you ever wondered what your therapist has figured out about life's big questions?
Join psychiatrist Dr. Dirk Winter as he speaks with colleagues, therapists, and other healers about what they have learned from their clinical work about how to heal trauma and build more meaning and purpose into our lives.
Developing Meaning is NOT CLINICAL ADVICE and is NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY INSTITUTIONS. It is intended to play with ideas that are emerging, fringe, and outside of the mainstream in order to discover the meaning of life.
Produced by Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff
Developing Meaning
#11: Deb Dana - on Polyvagal Therapy, Neuroscience of Connection, and How Meaning Emerges From Our Internal States
Deb Dana is a master healer, teacher, author, and the creator of a unique polyvagal-informed approach to therapy that is based on The Polyvagal Theory of Dr. Stephen Porges.
In this episode you will learn about the neuroscience of human connection, and how our autonomic nervous system is composed of three distinct internal states that determine how we feel and how we create meaning.
Learn more about Deb Dana's work and workshops at www.rhythmofregulation.com
Timestamps:
00:00:18 Understanding Polyvagal Theory and Nervous System
00:18:07 Early Influences and Therapy Modalities
00:34:15 The Power of Polyvagal Theory
00:50:16 Healing Trauma Through Nervous System
00:56:00 Exploring Mental Health Paradigm Shifts
01:05:38 The Meaning of Life and Connection
01:14:13 Exploring Healing and Connection With Experts
Theme music by The Thrashing Skumz
Produced by Dr. Dirk Winter and Violet Chernoff
Developing Meaning is NOT MEDICAL ADVICE and NOT AFFILIATED WITH ANY INSTITUTIONS. Learn more at DevelopingMeaning.com.
Hello, welcome back Meaning Seekers and Deb Dana fans. I think today we are all in for a treat. For those of you who are new to the show, which I think many Deb Dana fans probably are, this is a show Developing Meaning, where I, child and adult psychiatrist, dr Dirk Winter, travel through various healing communities and find interesting healers to see what they've learned from their clients about meaning and what we can do to apply this, how they apply this to their own lives and how we can apply these principles to our lives to create more meaning and purpose in our lives. And for those of you who are familiar with this show but don't know Deb Dana, she is the creator of an exciting new, unique, polyvagal, informed approach to therapy that is becoming increasingly popular, created by Dr Stephen Porges over the last more than 30 years. That has really revolutionized the way that we understand our nervous system and ourselves. So our guest today, deb Dana, has an exciting story of making a big career change at age 50, getting a social work degree and then befriending Dr Stephen Porges and developing this really innovative and exciting new approach to therapy. So you're about to hear that story. But before we get into that, let me just say a few words about polyvagal theory. So what is polyvagal theory?
Dirk:Until recently, most people believe that humans have two main modes of being, two states of our autonomic nervous system, which is our automatic, unconscious, involuntary system that controls blood pressure, heart rate, breathing, digestion, sexual function, connectedness. This system had two modes, which were sympathetic activated, fight and flight, high adrenaline and parasympathetic calm, rest and digest. And this turns out to not be true. Instead of two states, there are actually three states, which are organized sort of like a three-rung ladder, and at the top of this ladder is the state that Dr Stephen Porges discovered, which is a state of human connectedness, which is called ventral vagal. And then the middle rung of the ladder is sympathetic adrenaline, fight and flight, and the bottom rung is a dorsal vagal state of shutdown.
Dirk:So this three-mode model was discovered and developed by Dr Stephen Porges, who was studying premature babies in the late 1960s, working in neonatal intensive care units, to figure out why these premature babies had such a dysregulated internal blood pressure system that they kept dying. And what turns out was that they only had the bottom two states of this ladder, so their system was shifting back and forth between sympathetic high blood pressure and dorsal shutdown, sometimes zero blood pressure, and that's when they would die and they were missing the top rung, which is the ventral branch of this nerve, called the vagus nerve, which is our internal wandering nerve that connects all of our internal organs, our intestines, our heart, our lungs, and so the ventral vagal branch regulates, it provides a break on the heart, and it also innervates all of the muscles of human connectedness muscles in our face, muscles in our voice, muscles in our inner ear.
Dirk:And so without this ventral branch, there's this ping-pong back and forth between sympathetic and shutdown, and once babies are more mature, this ventral vagal branch becomes functional and can regulate and create a more harmonious balance. And it turns out that this ventral vagal branch is only present in mammals and it's most present in humans, and it represents kind of an optimal state. At least if you want longevity and long-term health, want to predict who's going to live a long time. Heart rate variability is a great predictor of longevity, and that is because this is mediated by the ventral vagal branch of our autonomic nervous system, which creates a break on our heart. So there's a fluctuation in heart rate when we breathe with each breath, and when we are in this ventral vagal state, we are relaxed, our mind is clear, we are connected. This is an optimal state, and so this is a very important discovery because by tuning in to our internal body, we can learn where we are, what mode our body is in, and it turns out that the meaning that we create you'll hear in this interview is very different depending on our internal state. And this all very much connects with meaning.
Dirk:In our last episode we heard from Dr April Menjaris that meaning comes from connection, and in this episode you are going to learn about the neuroscience of meaning and connection and you're going to learn about how these different internal states influence the meaning that we can create. And then in the next episode, with Dr Richard Brown, we are going to talk about how you can use breath to shift between these different internal states. So I'm going to foreshadow to that episode. But in the last episode we learned that meaning comes from connectedness. In this episode you will hear about the neuroscience of connectedness.
Dirk:This is a fascinating and highly relevant story and nobody tells it better than Deb Dana Strap in. You are in for a treat. Please enjoy my interview with Deb Dana. I just want to start by saying welcome. Oh, my goodness, I'm so excited to have you on my little podcast. I'm a big fan and I'm nervous, and maybe if you could just start by telling me a little bit about what's happening in my nervous system right now, Well, if you're nervous, you feel like you have a lot of jittery energy.
Deb:You've got some sympathetic activation going on, but I have to say that it feels like you're also very connected. So you would be ventral and your vagal break will have released enough to give you access to sympathetic, which brings you a little bit of nervousness, but you're still here and present and we're connecting.
Dirk:I'm nervous and I'm connected, and so there's these different channels that are active at the same time. So, yeah, maybe let's, if you could. Just, I know I've heard you do this on other podcasts and I've read your book and I have done an online PESI training. But please explain polyvagal theory and maybe contrast it to sort of the old sympathetic-parasympathetic. So yeah, what is polyvagal theory?
Deb:So polyvagal theory was developed by my dear friend and brilliant scientist, stephen Porges, and what it is is a theory of the autonomic nervous system and, as you said, it's an updated view of the system from the old way where we thought about parasympathetic sympathetic being in opposition to each other, right. So what Steve's brilliant work showed us is that, instead of one and the other, there's a hierarchy, and that's what we were just sort of talking about. Ventral, the state of safety, connection, organized, safe enough to navigate the world, is the top of the hierarchy. It's the newest part of our nervous system. It's this mammalian part of our system that allows you and me to do what we're doing now, right, to have a conversation, to connect, to be in collaboration with each other.
Deb:The next step down the hierarchy is the sympathetic nervous system. So we still have that and that's the system of activation and it helps with your breath rhythms, your heart rhythms. It brings you energy to help you navigate the day and, when it's recruited for survival, it brings you fight and flight, and I think everybody knows what that feels like, that cortisol and adrenaline flooding your body, where you're flooded with energy but you can't think and it's disorganized, it's chaotic. So that's the sympathetic, survival response. And then the bottom of the hierarchy is the other part of the vagus nerve.
Deb:Top was ventral, the bottom is dorsal, and ventral and dorsal together make up parasympathetic.
Deb:So we still do have parasympathetic-sympathetic, but parasympathetic has these two different circuits, and the dorsal at the bottom, when it's doing its everyday role, runs your digestion, so it brings you the nutrients to nourish you, but when it's recruited for survival, it takes you to that collapse place that disappear, shut down.
Deb:All the energy that was flooding you in sympathetic is now drained from your system and you are without energy, without hope. That's the dorsal experience. And so that's the hierarchy that Steve illustrated, that he defined for us with polyvagal theory, and when he did that he changed the way therapists thought about the work they were doing, because before that everything was either rest and digest, parasympathetic, or a stress response and sympathetic, and we had no way to account for our clients who would go to this collapsed, and we had no way to account for our clients who would go to this collapsed, disconnected, shut down place. And so his work really revolutionized the way we think about how we are human which I think is amazing ourselves differently, and then has given us the tools to be able to work in a different way in the therapy world and help our clients differently.
Dirk:Yeah, I agree, it is amazing work and he's a really nice guy. As a chief psychiatry resident, I was organizing the Grand Rounds and he was one of the people I invited and I got to meet him, but I didn't really realize what a big deal he yin-yang. And then how did he discover that there was another channel and I think this has something to do with the babies in NICUs.
Deb:Yeah, he was studying heart rate variability, which was sort of his entry into this respiratory sinus arrhythmia and heart rate variability, and he was working with neonates in a neonative intensive care unit where the question became how does the vagus, which is seen to be life-affirming, also impact with bradycardia, the life-threatening moments for these premature babies?
Dirk:And just to pause, the vagus nerve is cranial nerve 10. It's the vagabond, it's the one that wanders all through our intestines and brings all our internal information into the right side of our brain.
Deb:Yeah, it's a beautiful nerve, isn't it? When you see it, it wanders, hence it's named, you know, vagus, and 80% of that information is going from your body to your brain. Right, it's traveling the highways to your brain. 20% is a motor response back, and so when Steve went into the NICUs, he really delineated that there are two aspects to the vagus, hence polyvagal.
Deb:There's the ventral, that primarily is diaphragm upward, and then there's the dorsal, that's primarily diaphragm downward, because the dorsal vagus was what was causing these tiny babies to stop breathing and have their hearts slow down and stop. That was the dorsal vagal system, because their ventral vagal system was not yet developed in online, right, it develops in the last trimester, and so these tiny babies were coming into the world 25 weeks when it wasn't ready to do what it needs to do suck, swallow, breathe, vocalize, right, that's what it helps babies do. So you know all of the machines in a NICU and a NICU is a very noisy place if you've ever been in one. There's lots of noise going on. All those noisy machines are doing the work of the ventral vagus for a tiny baby because they don't have the regulatory pathways that we have. You know, later on, when you know, 32 weeks on when we're born, those pathways do develop right.
Deb:That's the beautiful thing about the human.
Dirk:And so the dorsal, the back part, goes diaphragm and down and that's very evolutionarily old. And the reptiles, they can shut their metabolism down underwater for hours and hours. It'd be helpful for them and it's helpful for us. But it's opposed by this ventral, which is diaphragm up, which connects heart, lungs, our voice, our facial muscles, muscles of the inner ear, all of the social connected. And reading his book, he really talks about figuring out how mammals this is kind of what makes mammals different, this is what makes us social creatures is the ventral vagal branch.
Deb:Yeah, and it leads us to that biological imperative, meaning something we have to have to survive, which is social connection, which is co-regulation One of the other principles of polyvagal theory of hierarchy we just talked about which is co-regulation. Right, One of the other principles of polyvagal theory of hierarchy we just talked about, we have co-regulation. We humans need to be with safe other humans in order to really thrive in life, and that is a lifelong pursuit. Right, it's not just something that we need as a baby and when we learn to self-regulate, we need as a baby, and when we learn to self-regulate, we don't need anymore. It is forever that we need to have close, safe companionship from our friends, family, you know. So it reminds us that this is important because we live in a world that really, I think, preferences individuality and self-regulation over connection and co-regulation. We need to remember our biology doesn't do that. It says we need both.
Dirk:Yeah, and I want to say a lot more about that, but just to finish with the babies. So that ventral branch isn't developed yet, so all you have is the dorsal, so these premature babies would then die, and people couldn't really figure out what was the cause, and so this is.
Deb:Right because they had two branches, Because evolutionarily in our history, dorsal and then sympathetic came next and then ventral. The same is true as we develop in the womb right Dorsal is the first to develop, then sympathetic and the last is ventral. The same is true as we develop in the womb right Dorsal is the first to develop, then sympathetic and the last is ventral. And so these tiny babies had a dorsal to slow and a sympathetic to increase, but they had no ventral to regulate. So they were doing this thing all the time and it's biologically costly, it's metabolically costly right.
Dirk:Yeah, hopefully that was helpful to the early babies. I know we've gotten a lot better at managing this, but it's also helpful in now in healing and in the new kind of therapy that you've been very involved in developing. So I want to shift gears and hear your story now. Want to shift gears and hear your story now. And so how did you develop as a healer, and maybe just starting at the very beginning with where were you born?
Deb:Oh boy, I'm a Mainer. I'm a Mainer through and through, and now I split my time between Chicagoland and Maine. But Maine is my sole home and I had an interesting pathway to becoming a social worker. I'm a clinical social worker. I did my bachelor's in social welfare I don't know eons ago, decades ago, I think. I graduated from my bachelor's in 74. And then I took a long break to raise a family, to do other kinds of work, to work in schools, to do all sorts of things, and came back to get my master's when I was 50. So I think I have always been working in the field, just not officially working in the field. So I think I've always felt drawn to people who are suffering and figuring out how to help people not suffer so much.
Dirk:Amazing. So I definitely want to hear about this 50. But before that, any early influences, either internally in terms of your temperament or your main or family surroundings that nudged you in the healing direction.
Deb:It's interesting to think about that. I haven't thought about it in that way. I think all of us who are in the helping profession reflect on our early beginnings and how it led us to where we are in the world of therapy. Most trauma therapists get here because we've had our own traumatic experiences. I think that's a pretty common thing when we do studies. That's what we find In my family.
Deb:Growing up, I think there was a focus on generosity. I grew up in a family that I didn't have to worry about the basic needs and both my father and my mother actually were people who offered what I would probably call now some sort of goodness, benevolence out into the world. They felt that that was kind of just what you did. I think and I'm not sure where that came about for them they met in the war. They were both in the army. They met. They came home.
Deb:My dad was a lawyer and one of the lovely things I heard about him after he died was that you could always trust his handshake. You didn't have to sign anything, you didn't have to, you just could trust, and I just thought that was heartwarming to me. So I think there probably was some sort of an environment of knowing that we were privileged in many ways and there was a responsibility to not take that for granted. I also had a challenging growing up and had an independent spirit, I guess I would say, even though I was very quiet about it, and so I would go my own way. And I'm not sure how I ended up in the social work world, but when I did it just felt right.
Dirk:Can you say more about the challenging or you don't?
Deb:we can edit it if you don't want to, and if I look back and think about it through the lens of the nervous system, what I call my home away from home, which is the place where the survival strategy that you default to right and we all have one of those we either spend more time in sympathetic or we spend more time in dorsal when our system says it's unsafe. And for me, dorsal was the place. Dorsal was my home away from home. So I spent a ton of time sort of on my own, disconnected, longing for connection, as all nervous systems do right. And so I was pregnant very young.
Deb:I married very young, I started a family very young and I think, as I look back, it was probably my system reaching for some kind of a connection and, you know, trying to build my own world around that. So that's probably what sort of took me in a different direction. Rather than graduating and going to work, I had a child, it was family raising and I ended up single mom for a while. And so all the things that you think about and you get to live it and you get to experience, how do you walk through the difficult times? And I think my own difficult times have been certainly helpful when I sit with clients, right, I've experienced a lot of challenges and I can sit with clients and I know what that's like right which you know you don't have to do but I think when you do that, you have an embodied knowing. It's like oh, I've been there. I haven't been exactly where you are, but I've been in that similar world and I get it.
Deb:You have a credibility and a connection many people who have had loved ones who they've cared for or loved ones who have died. I think anybody who's a therapist works with those issues over the course of their career. But I was a caregiver to my husband, bob, for a little over eight years and he died last fall, and I have a very different experience of grief and loss and this grieving process because I'm now living it. It's fascinating when you're embodying it from a lived knowing. It just feels different, which doesn't mean I couldn't be a good therapist before this experience, but it means it feels different now and I'm drawn now to want to do something with this experience. It feels important to me to use it in some way.
Dirk:It's such an important experience and it's a hard one to really know how to talk about. And I was just having a conversation. Actually, a guest was talking about having lost a son who was 18. And my gut response is, oh, I'm sorry for your loss. But he was saying, yes, that's okay, but really what is helpful to him is to just sort of be together in this space of that loss and to just make space and be present.
Deb:Yeah, and again, through the lens of the nervous system, you get to sort of follow along, like some days my nervous system really wants close connection with people and other days my nervous system wants nothing to do with other people. Right, and if I can trust that my system is wise and is going to help me move through this time, then I can say to others no thanks today. Or I can reach out to someone the next day and say would you like to?
Deb:whatever you know, but it's again, it's that nervous system knowing and that I think for me has been the gift of finding Steve's work. I was a neuroscience nerd always. I loved the brain. I loved teaching my clients about the brain. It's such fun. You maybe had a chance to be in a histology lab during your school. We had a medical school down the street from our group practice in Maine, in Southern Maine, and we arranged a series of sessions where we got to go into the histology lab with human brains and see brains being sectioned and really work with brains. And to me that was magic right, because this is what I'm working with, or so I thought at the time. I'm helping clients change their brain patterns. I want to know what I'm working with, this organ I'm working with. And then I read Steve's first book and it was like, oh my gosh, there's this whole other thing that has influenced the brain. Maybe I should understand that.
Dirk:Where were you when you read that book?
Deb:I was at home in my home in Maine. I live in Kennebunkport. I was in Kennebunkport, maine, reading this book and I can remember telling Bob I don't even know how to tell you about this, but this is really exciting and Bob was wonderful. He would ask questions and he, I think at the beginning, helped me be able to explain in a way that was understandable to others, because you know he's not a therapist, but he was a very bright guy. So I could you know, kind of say, does that make sense? Crazy in the beginning, because I would come in every day and share something new that I had read and then I started trying to figure out okay, this is a great theory, this is an amazing theory. It makes so much sense to me. How do I bring it into my work?
Dirk:So at that point just to sort of freeze for a second. So you had completed your social work degree and you were in a practice, and what were the main therapy tools that you had accumulated up until that point?
Deb:I was IFS trained, I was sensory motor trained and I was tapas acupressure technique trained. So those were my three basic modalities and our group practice. We were individual clinicians in a group practice and our focus was working with sexual abuse. So we worked with families that had experienced sexual abuse. We worked with both the people who had done the offending and the family members who had been abused, in putting together an interesting sort of way of helping families figure out. What does this next stage look like? Is there going to be reunification? And if not, how do we create the story about what happened? Because, as you probably know, for so many people and sexual abuse is very common in families, it happens oftentimes in families and it gets silenced, it gets not talked about, the person goes away, disappears, and yet how do we make a story about who this person still is and what happened? And so we were developing a way of working with that and my colleagues still do that work.
Dirk:That's a really interesting set of modalities and I've come to really love IFS. I'm now lucky to be level one, trained and continuing to learn. So IFS Internal Family Systems Therapy developed by Rick Schwartz and Dick Schwartz. And it's not family therapy People get confused but it's our internal parts and wounded parts and protector parts and then the self-energy, so that, and then there's, you said, somatic experience.
Deb:Sensory motor, sensory motor psychotherapy, yeah, so.
Dirk:I don't know that. What is that Sensory motor?
Deb:is Pat Ogden's work and it came out of the Hikomi world but it's another somatic. It's like somatic experiencing. They all do the same sort of things, just as different, different ways of of engaging. So it's a body oriented therapy process which I really appreciated. I, that's I did that first.
Deb:I did sensory motor first and then went to internal family systems and, as you talk about I found it made so much sense IFS. And of course that was back in the days where you could sign up for a training and just take a training right. So back in the day when there weren't thousands of people in a lottery trying to get in. So it was lovely. And I had a colleague, actually a dear friend. We met the first day of sensory motor training and she lived a couple towns away. We'd never met and we have continued to be dear friends and did all our trainings together. So we moved to IFS together and we did level one, level two together and I love tapas acupressure technique as an energy psychology. I think it's lovely to have an energy psychology in your menu of ways you've worked as well, because again, getting away from the talking is so helpful for working with trauma survivors.
Dirk:This is a new concept for me and very much this is kind of the story of my podcast of coming from a medical model left brain talking, thinking to getting really interested in trauma and all the Bessel van der Kock body keeps the score, all those modalities and really the right brain and that's.
Deb:Yeah, yeah, and it's interesting, with the right brain it's also the right side of the vagus, because vagus cranial nerve, we have two, right, they're pairs. And it's the right vagus that comes down to your sinoatrial node. So it's interesting to just think about how we're put together, isn't it? And I do a lot of work with people. Nowadays I don't see individual clients, so the work I do is in my trainings. I do demos, I do this sort of things, and I rarely know my client's story. And yet they have powerful healing experiences, right, and it just reminds us. Story is important because we re-story, we create the new story after the work is done, but we don't need to know necessarily the trauma story to be able to do that work.
Dirk:So yeah, I want to hear how that works and how you work. Before that, I just want to also hear how you connected with Steve. So now your light bulbs are flashing and you're doing all this somatic and stuff for trauma and you're realizing, oh my goodness, polyvagal is really relevant for this. So how does it go from there?
Deb:Yeah, so I reached out to Steve. It's interesting because the world of whether they're model developers or scientists, it's a small world. They kind of all know each other, right? And we had invited Alan Shore to come to Maine and give a workshop. And he had been and he and I had been talking and he knew Steve and I said would you feel comfortable making an introduction to Steve for me? And so Alan made the introduction and then I reached out to Steve and said would you like to come to Maine and give a workshop? And who doesn't want to come to Kennebunkport, maine, right, it's a gorgeous place in the world.
Deb:So Steve and his wife, sue and if you don't know, sue Carter Porges, sue is a brilliant scientist in her own right and just the one who discovered the role of oxytocin in relational bonding. So the two of them came and Sue did a piece and Steve did a piece. And you know, I got to get to know Steve. He came a few days early, he stayed a few days after, really got to spend time with him and I don't know, I just I felt as though he was a kindred spirit. He's a scientist, I'm a social worker, but we were both wanting the same things to happen and I showed him my early work you knowic ladder and the maps I'd been creating to work with clients and he was I mean, I know if you've met him and been with him but he is brilliant and also very kind. He's a human who, just you know, we tease. We say he's a scientist with the heart of a therapist or something right, and he was just so supportive.
Dirk:What year was this?
Deb:Maybe it was either 2012 or 13. I don't remember which, but he just loved it and so kind of it was okay, I'm going from here. So the next thing that happened in our relationship and that set me off of my own book writing journey was we were at Bessel's trauma conference and Steve came and sat next to me. He said would you co-edit a book with me? And I said, sure, I'd love to. And then he walks away and I had absolutely no idea what. I just said yes to None whatsoever.
Deb:But you know, Steve Ford just asks you, do you want to do this? You go, yes, thank you, right. So it was so, it was sweet. And he, I will say this it's, it's, you know I. I love to feel this part come alive for me again, because he came back a little while later and he said do you know why? I asked you and I said I have no idea. And he said because you're really smart, you're really intuitive and you're kind. And I thought I will hold that forever right. The smart, the intuitive, okay, but the kind was like. I am holding that. I still feel it now. I can feel my system coming alive when I remember that moment.
Dirk:I feel that too, and I feel like that's somehow that's the key right.
Deb:It is Yep, yep, just do the kind thing. You know we say do the right thing, and I agree, but do the kind thing. It's amazing what happens when you can offer that to another human their nervous system response you had a biological response, right. And then that biological response became a story, right. And that, I think, is how we begin to change the world by offering that sense of regulation connection to nervous systems. Then the brain says, oh, this feels good, this feels safe, yes, right.
Deb:So you know, in some ways I think Steve is changing the world, I think his theory is changing the world and I think those of us that are trying to help everyone understand how the nervous system works I think that's our goal is to help shape the world towards regulation, safety, connection, kindness. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he would send me the names and contact for authors to write chapters and we started calling that our Polyvagal family and that's kind of where it all started. So every time we you know, here's another member of our family, and every time he gave a talk or I gave a workshop, welcome to the Polyvagal family. And it really feels, you know, still to this day, that it is, it's a community and it's a family and I think that's the gift that Steve brought and that polyvagal theory brings. It's a welcoming connecting theory.
Dirk:And so I have two questions. I don't know what to ask first, but one is why are we so disconnected in general, and this is really relevant for everybody therapists, not therapists just going through the world? And then my next question is more about therapies, but let's maybe stay with.
Deb:I think as humans we well, we disconnect when we feel there is some threat or we feel unsafe in some way. Disconnection is where we go. We either go to that sympathetic fight-flight which is a polarized world. It's me against you, us against them. That's the natural nature of sympathetic survival. It's all about survival. We no longer focus on social engagement because our biology is now focused on survival. So that's a disconnection.
Deb:Dorsal disconnect is an even deeper disconnect, because now I'm disconnected from myself, from others, from the world, from everything. I'm just sort of floating through the world. And this happens all the time because the cues of danger at any moment outweigh the cues of safety and our nervous system automatically responds by taking you into a survival response. And I think we don't understand the nervous system, so we don't bring it into explicit awareness, we just go along with wherever the nervous system is taking us. And so, again, to understand the nervous system, we can interrupt, we can bring curiosity to. I wonder what just happened so that I all of a sudden felt disconnected or felt anxious or angry? But we can't do that if we're just caught in the moment without any ability to see it as a biological response. So making the world a safer place.
Dirk:That's a beautiful explanation and, as you're talking, I'm thinking about there's the concept of neuroception, which is a gorgeous concept of we're always, our system is always unconsciously scanning for threat and then, based on that, we're either in this, sympathetic or dorsal, and then the story of how we respond to our environment becomes very different. So we're always sort of unconsciously in. Some people are saying, hey, let's be curious and let's become aware, which then shifts us into this ventral connected place. That's many more resources become available, many different strategies become available.
Deb:And I like to think neuroception, which is Steve's again, his brilliant word. He coined that term because the nervous system doesn't use the prefrontal cortex to make decisions. So it had to be, couldn't be perception. So he came up with neuroception and it's always scanning for safety and danger, for both, not just danger, but safety and danger right. So when it feels welcome, right, when it feels those that you know, like, you know your smile, your eyes, your words, the environment, what's happening inside my body. Those are the three pathways there's an inside pathway, an outside pathway and a between pathway. That neuroception is always scanning and when it feels enough cues of safety, it moves us into that ventral state of regulated and ready. You know, we can connect, we can be curious, but when it feels more cues of danger than safety, when those cues outweigh the cues of safety, it's going to take us first to sympathetic, and if that doesn't resolve the issue, it doesn't help us feel safer. It'll take us to dorsal. That's the predictable hierarchy. Again, brilliant that Steve identified. This is what we do. Ventral, take us to dorsal. That's the predictable hierarchy.
Deb:Again, brilliant that Steve identified. This is what we do ventral, sympathetic, dorsal. So we can kind of understand where we are and where we're heading. But, yes, neuroception is happening below the level of awareness. So when, in the polyvagal approach, we bring perception to neuroception, because then we can do something with it right, if I'm feeling under threat, I can say what are the cues of danger right now? Right, what are the cues of danger that I can identify and maybe I can reduce or resolve? What are the cues of safety that I can bring more in and I can begin to shift that equation. That's the beauty of the nervous system. It is a dynamic system that is moving moment to moment, to moment.
Dirk:It is beautiful and it's exciting, and so how do you then combine it with various types of therapy?
Deb:Yeah, it's interesting because a couple of things happen. One is, you know, no matter what kind of therapy you're trained in, you are working with your client's nervous system. It doesn't matter if you're trained to work with it or not. You are working with their nervous system because it is at the heart of everything we do right. So your nervous system and your client's nervous system are in a conversation and the therapy models you're using are needing there to be enough neuroception of safety for them to be able to work right, because if you go into a survival response, change can't happen right. Biologically change stops. So the therapy model that I'm using will no longer work because the system says no, says not safe enough.
Deb:So one thing I think is that every clinician should understand the basics of the nervous system, the basics of polyvagal theory, because then it gives them a platform for understanding what they're doing with their clients. So that's an easy thing to say foundation, and then any model you're trained in can fit on top of it beautifully. Then, if we look at individual models, let's take IFS for a moment. I just did a three-day integration workshop in Portugal with a colleague who's an IFS colleague, talking about polyvagal and IFS. And how did they-.
Dirk:Are you going to do that again next year, by the way?
Deb:We are doing that again next year.
Dirk:All right, sign me up. I want to go.
Deb:So we're thinking how do they fit together? Because, if you think about the parts that IFS uses, we have self, which would be an emergent quality of ventral right. We have firefighters, which are either active firefighters that are making you do things, which would be sympathetically charged driven energy, or firefighters that are numbing you out and making you float away, which would be dorsal, disconnecting energy. We have managers that, for me, can either live in sympathetic, where they do, do, do, or be in ventral, where they just help us move through the day. And we have exiles which hold the old trauma stories, which usually live in dorsal, where they are pushed away right.
Deb:And so you can easily see how Dick's model with parts works seamlessly with states, right. And the difference between, I think, the way Dick works and I work and we keep discovering this as my colleague and I work together is, I believe, we enter a state and then the state comes alive and all of the parts that inhabit that energy are then free to come out out and one of them is going to take over, right? Dick probably would believe the other, that a part comes and the state comes with it. So it's, I mean, we're all going the same place, it probably doesn't much matter, but the way I work is to work with the states and do that general global work first, and then there may be parts left who are holding something that you know you want to go work with the part, but I love working with the state first.
Dirk:I love that and I'm associating to, like Tony Robbins and hypnosis, and he'll say state story, strategy, and always first get yourself to the optimal state and then you can come up with a story and a strategy.
Deb:Because the state determines the story. Right, you know we think about the old ways of working. Think about CBT. Where you change your thought, you're given a script, you change the thought whatever. Where you change your thought, You're given a script, you change the thought whatever. And if you are in an active survival state, the brain is going to try and change the state. It's not going to work. But if you change the state, the story automatically changes, right, because that's how the nervous system works. Right, when I'm feeling safe and regulated, I have a very different story than if I'm feeling under threat. And it's not because I choose a different story. My brain doesn't choose it. My biology chooses it. It's a biological choice.
Dirk:So you're basically saying in therapy our first step is to assess where is a nervous system and then, if it's not in ventral, do we want to connect and help or get to some kind of a more optimal?
Deb:Yeah, if there's not enough ventral. I mean none of us are immersed in ventral all the time, some of us are rarely immersed, but I can have a foothold in ventral and sometimes it's my ventral that I am holding my client in because they can't find their way to any of theirs. And you know it's important to let people know that we don't go to ventral to get away from the suffering or get away from the trauma. We go to ventral so we can have enough access to ventral to then visit sympathetic and dorsal, which is where trauma is stored in survival strategies. We have enough ventral regulation to safely go to be with, process, the trauma, remember it but not relive it. Because that's the hallmark of good trauma therapy you don't relive, right. You remember, you restore, you do not relive. You can't do that unless you have enough anchoring and ventral. So that's why the first step is to figure out how do we get enough ventral to safely be with the trauma.
Dirk:So what does a therapy session with you look like? A therapy session with you look like, and maybe what's kind of a typical?
Deb:or a particularly well suited client. Yeah, it's interesting. People ask me all the time what kind of client. And it's so fascinating to me because I probably overgeneralize, but I keep going to every human has a nervous system, so right, I mean, if my work is to help you befriend your system and then have a disconfirming experience through your biology rather than through your brain, right, Then it kind of doesn't matter who my client is. I'm going to work to help my client be able to map their system and track what's happening, and then my client and I are going to find enough of a way to hold on to Ventral.
Deb:While we visit Sympathetic visit Dorsal, hear the stories and the interesting magic happens. When you know, I always ask my clients do you want me to go with you? Right, we're going to travel from the land of ventral. We're going to travel to your sympathetic survival stories. You're going to travel to your dorsal survival experiences. Do you want me to go with you? That's that co-regulating offer, right? Most of the times clients say yes. And when I go with my client, so I am ventral regulated and I go with my client and we bring my ventral and some of their ventral to the survival moment it changes. We don't even have to know the story, we don't have to do anything because the nervous system is having a new experience. It's having the experience of having ventral available when the survival strategy is active and it's having the experience of having another person there witnessing and lending.
Dirk:So you're creating kind of a resonating connected system with your client and then, together with them, making space and moving into the trauma.
Deb:Bruce Acker calls it in his coherence therapy. He calls it a disconfirming experience, and I think that's what happens autonomically. There's an autonomic expectation that when I go to my dorsal place, that no one's going to be there, right, that no one is going to come with me and I am alone and lost. And so if you're my therapist and you travel with me and you let me know I'm right here with you, it violates my nervous system's expectation, it's a disconfirming experience and it's a powerful change moment.
Dirk:I'm glad you yeah, we said that disconfirming, and I was thinking of Bruce Ecker and this is, I think, a hugely important concept that I have only recently become aware of that basically our nervousness, our brain stores things in a way that's set, but when there's a moment of surprise where somehow there's some kind of information that doesn't make sense, that's disconfirms, our expectations. That's when the old brain structures get rewritten and you can bring up the traumatic memory or components and write it in a way, so it's totally symptoms get totally resolved. He has really amazing science.
Deb:Yeah, he has amazing work. Yeah, and you know, on a nervous system level, the same thing's happening and it's pretty magical, right. It's pretty magical. Clients will have these moments and, you know, will finish a session and will sort of reflect on what happened and they feel changed, right, Because when your nervous system reorganizes in some way, you feel it in a full body experience and sometimes there's not language, right. Sometimes it takes a while for the new story to emerge and it is important to then let's find the new story that's connected with this new feeling in your body. But sometimes it takes a while for a story to come.
Dirk:Can you create kind of a hypothetical example that illustrates this?
Deb:Yeah, I'm trying to think of. Yeah, let me. I'm trying to think what I can share, that I can I know that's the hard part.
Deb:yes, it is the hard part, isn't it to figure out what's possible to share that's not violating people's privacy? You know, I do have people who have done demos for me and have agreed to have those out there. So let me give you a story of one person. He won't mind that I share this because it's interesting. His home away from home was dorsal as well. So we already had that felt comfortable and safe and we traveled slowly down.
Deb:And when you travel I think of the hierarchy we're traveling down from Ventral we first come to Sympathetic and you have to go very slowly and figure out how do we get there in a safe way, how do we not just get dumped into Sympathetic? So we traveled to Sympathetic. We come back, because you make that journey down and back, down and back to really remind the nervous system it knows how to do it right. And then we decided, okay, can we maybe step into, or at least next to, the world of dorsal? And so we moved down very slowly and we had to keep going back to get a little more connection to ventral. And then we ended up in dorsal. It was a cave and that's kind of the imagery that's often common caves, holes, you know all that dark places in dorsal, and we were a bit away from the mouth of the cave and he had this moment. He said no one has ever been here with me before and we just stopped there. No one has ever been. I mean, think of that, right, and think of what's happening in the nervous system to know you're not alone in this place.
Deb:And we spent some time and we went towards the mouth of the cave and he went in, but he wanted me to stay out and he wanted me to be on the lookout. Then he wanted me to turn and then I could come in and stand inside. And again he kept having these experiences of. This has never happened before Right, and I have no idea what the story was of his his you know, probably early developmental trauma. No idea, didn't need to know.
Deb:We did this, this, this work, we. We then ended up I didn't even go all the way in Right and and we came back up to ventral and we sat on the bench for a while and and he was exhausted, because it's exhausting work to just do that. But he had this experience that there was a before and after for him. His world had changed and it wasn't done changing. There certainly was lots to do, but it was a powerful change. That had happened simply because we went together, and I still, to this day, have no idea what the story is, nor do I need to right. So that's that lovely example of what accompanying someone with a regulated nervous system and bringing that ventral energy of safety and connection to a trauma place, to a place that holds unresolved trauma, is sometimes all you need to do, right? It's pretty amazing, isn't it?
Dirk:Mm-hmm, and what I'm imagining, as you're telling this story, is a person who has this sort of split-offness or dissociation, where that's such a powerful protective function that we have. And so there's this fear memory that's, on the one hand, creating this constant sense of alert, and then there's this split-off that allows us to cognitively move through the world, but there's this continuous sense of disconnection the world, but there's this continuous sense of disconnection. And once you heal that the fear memory, then that sort of brings the whole system into more integration to bring in Dan Siegel.
Deb:Right, right, yeah, absolutely, yes, you know that mind-body system that you know Dan talks about the embodied brain. Which he's really talking about is nervous system. Dan talks about the embodied brain. Which he's really talking about is nervous system, brain working together, IPMB and polyvagal. They inhabit the same space very nicely together. These moments have patterns of protection. We all have patterns of protection. We have patterns of protection and patterns of connection and sometimes we are more in a pattern of protection and we also can be very effective in the world. So it's an interesting both and that that can happen, right, yeah, yeah.
Dirk:So, I want to ask what are you most excited about now in the world of mental health and what are maybe some old dogmas that could fall away?
Deb:Yeah, I think, if we think about some of the things that I would like to see not around anymore, diagnosis would be one of them, right?
Dirk:I'm with you, yeah.
Deb:Yeah, because really, whatever you're looking at is some sort of nervous system dysregulation that's coming out in certain symptomology. We say that all the time. We say symptoms are a nervous system's way of trying to communicate something, right? So I get diagnosis for insurance, for billing, for whatever. But truly I wonder about the usefulness of diagnosis. I also wish that we would not work in silos so much that we could all work together, that we could have teams.
Deb:In my early work in my group practice, we created teams because you can't do this work by yourself. You've got families, have lots of therapists, they have med providers, they have child protective, they have all sorts of people and we are all part of a team. We need to work as a team, you know, and I think finding a med provider who will work with you is so important, rather than just putting your client on a med and that's it. So I think more collaboration would be really lovely as well. And seeing the mind-body system as a system right, instead of looking at the end organs that you know, we want to treat the end organ. That's what Steve always says. Can we just have a one system system right Rather?
Deb:than everybody's working with some little piece of it. So that's what I'd like to see, probably begin to.
Dirk:Yeah, I'm aligned with you and that was sort of starting this podcast. I was thinking about meaning and sort of well, when is a symptom a part of some kind of a disorder, or is it just sort of our internal compass that says maybe we need to make a change in our life? And I liked Viktor Frankl's meaning as a sort of central organizing concept. So yeah, I want to ask you about meaning and how you think about meaning, maybe what you've learned from your clinical work.
Deb:You know, when you were saying meaning, I was thinking well, this is really interesting because the meaning that I ascribe to something again changes depending on my nervous system state, right, it's so fascinating to me because when I think about where I am in my life right now and when I'm anchored in ventral, I find purpose. Right, I think purpose is one of the emergent properties of ventral. My passion, my purpose, I kind of can begin to have a sense of where I'm going in this next phase of life. For me, when I'm in sympathetic, the meaning is totally different, right, it's a drivenness, it's a fear-based meaning, right.
Deb:And then when I'm in dorsal, the meaning is it doesn't matter, right, it's hopeless despair, give up, it doesn't matter, there's no meaning. So it's fascinating when you talk about it, because I think meaning is so important and it's so dependent on what state I'm in and what I have access to. So, yeah, and I do think trauma sort of hijacks our purpose and passion, right. And I think when we can resolve and come back to you know again, as Dan Siegel would say a coherent narrative, when we can bring in all of our life experience and build a life story that makes sense, then I think we rediscover purpose or discover a new purpose, right? So yeah, I do love purpose and passion and know that we have to have enough regulation and safety in order to find our purpose and passion.
Dirk:Are there things that you do day to day or moment to moment to monitorize, not monetize? I don't know what it is to monitor and optimize your state.
Deb:Well, I'm pretty good at the noticing and naming and tracking right. I've been doing it for long enough that I recognize when I have become or are becoming dysregulated. I have discovered, you know, since Bob died and I had worked really hard for over eight years as a caregiver and I discovered I'm really tired and so I can notice a name and track states Sometimes I'm not as efficient as reaching for the resource right. Sometimes it's like I just can't, can't do it and that's okay. Then I go okay, not in this moment, right, not right now. And I think self-compassion practices are probably so important and also hard to reach for. So sometimes I just go to the self-compassion that is so simple and says makes sense, my biology just can't do it at the moment. That's where I go. But I think when I do have ways to feel more resourced and reach for resource, I reach for music. I've started playing tennis again. I love movement, I have my grandkids around, so it's connection. So I try to hit the sort of categories that I know my nervous system appreciates and that's what I invite people to do is to find the resources that work for your nervous system.
Deb:I think we're like the anniversary four years when the pandemic was officially sort of whatever. And that's when I was getting all these emails coming in saying you know the five things to do to survive social distancing or the 10 things to do to whatever. And I would read them. I would think there must be something wrong with me, because I don't want to do any of those. And then it led me to really thinking about it and I thought oh, people are telling me what works for their system and they think it works for everybody. And really what we want to know is what works for me and I'm going to help you discover what works for you. We've got categories movement, breath, connection, nature, the general categories but within those categories everybody's going to find their own path and I think that's some of the joy of working this way is that there aren't nine steps you follow, you kind of get in a conversation with the nervous system and see where are we going, and to me that's the joy of it.
Dirk:That's beautiful and for me that connects a lot to meaning and that is sort of a North Star for me, in part because it's different for every person and it's different from moment to moment.
Deb:So I relate to so much of what you're saying right, because glimmers have kind of taken over the general curious human being world, which I'm so delighted for. I started working with glimmers with my trauma survivor clients, you know, decade ago, and then more recently it's been that feels reachable. You can find a tiny moment that's a glimmer of okayness in the world and people seem to be attracted to. It's the tiny moments, because that's what's doable, right? We don't need these great big, long experiences of feeling balanced and regulated to change our nervous system. Tiny moments are what change the nervous system, which, again, I think is so lovely to think about, because a tiny moment is within reach. Right. Big long moment, many days, no way.
Dirk:but I can find a tiny moment, I can find a glimmer, and again that's Steve's brilliant work helping us understand that this is how the nervous system changes doing small things over and over and I think it's also your work and I think the glimmer is, I think, from you this idea of shifting just a little bit into a positive direction from a ventral vagal, yeah because when I first started talking with clients about glimmers, I wanted them to really understand that I was not trying to disavow their suffering or their trauma or silence them or not work with it.
Deb:But, again, glimmers build the capacity, slowly but powerfully, to be able to work with what is stuck in your system, the suffering that is happening. So it's not you know. Count your blessings, everything's fine. It's not toxic positivity. It truly is a way to build that resource so we can work with the trauma. And it's fun along the way, right. I mean people have fun sharing their glimmers with each other. So added bonus fun sharing their glimmers with each other.
Dirk:So added bonus, nice. So I want to have fun just asking you a couple rapid fire sentence completion questions. Oh boy, let's do it. So to begin, with.
Deb:According to me, deb Dana, the meaning of life is oh yeah, good Lord. Huh, the meaning of life is Ay, ay, ay, good Lord. The meaning of life is, I think, in this moment, what comes for me is connection. That's a hard one. I really it's hard to just but yeah, connection and feel free to elaborate a little bit well, I'm thinking that that, you know, life lived solo does not feel purposeful to me.
Deb:It doesn't feel like it brings the meaning that I want. So if I can live in connection, whether that's with my family and friends, where I feel like I'm sharing life with them, or whether it's connecting like to you, or connecting to people through my writing or my teaching, I feel that that's when things can happen right, when we're in connection. So, yeah, yeah.
Deb:Yeah, I agree completely, and the most meaningful thing that I did yesterday was Hmm, yesterday the most meaningful thing was ooh, I had a lovely dinner time FaceTime with my 12-year-old granddaughter. That, I think, was important for both of us.
Dirk:Yeah, Nice After I am gone, after I'm dust. The thing that I would like people to most remember me for is oh, it's got to be connected to my.
Deb:I mean, it is all about ventral energy in some way, so remembered for helping people find their way to ventral, understanding ventral, bringing them more ventral into the world, something around that.
Dirk:Nice and the most meaningful work of art in the last week that I've seen could be music, movie theater.
Deb:Oh, I don't know Meaningful to me because I have two granddaughters here. I have a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old granddaughter and they took my phone and they made playlists for me and so I've been playing their playlists and that has been incredibly fun and meaningful and I send them a message saying I drove to work today playing your playlist and I'm learning songs I've never heard before.
Dirk:Can you tell us a song or two on the playlist?
Deb:Well, there was a thousand years, which other people may know, but I loved it. And then the World Cup song from when the World Cup was in Africa Waka, waka, and I just love it. It makes me want to dance. So there you go, that's great, I love it I sing, I dance. It's like, oh my God, don't anybody be watching me?
Dirk:Very nice. So another question if I come to you and I'm saying I'm lacking meaning, what's the first step or what's your?
Deb:Yeah, my first step is going to be to say I think that this is your brain telling us something and your brain is getting information from your body. So what I'm going to invite us to do is first, let's set that over here. We'll come back to it, but we'll put the lack of meaning over here. We're going to come here. We're going to get to know how your nervous system works. Then we're going to take this lack of meaning, bring it back and look at it again and see what it looks like now, because once we've done some of this work, it will change right. That lack of meaning is going to shift in some way. I don't know how, but all the information we need lives inside your system, and we just need to be able to have a little bit more regulation, and then you're going to begin to hear different words there around. Meaning, yeah.
Deb:It's interesting because clients come to us with stories right Like can't find meaning with behaviors. They've done something in the world that's gotten them in trouble with feelings. They're depressed, they're anxious. And every one of those, and like every other therapist, I love story. I could get pulled into that story. I can get pulled into helping someone change behavior or stop feeling depressed or anxious. And yet if I go to state first, if I can get a client's agreement, let's go to nervous system first and help the state change the feeling, the behavior. The story will all change on its own the feeling, the behavior, the story will all change on its own right.
Deb:So I discovered you know the hard way, as most of us do, when we learn something, rather than fighting against, the state got to go to state and clients, once they feel a shift in state and then can recognize that everything else is moving, they're hooked right. It's like, oh my gosh, right. And one of the I'll share a client's story that was so profound for me. I had a client who was trying to decide whether to leave a relationship or not, and it was. It could be abusive. It was certainly-.
Dirk:Not healthy or not positive Right a toxic relationship.
Deb:Yeah, couldn't decide. And I thought, well, I could list all the pros and cons, we could do all this stuff, I said, but that will take us forever, right? So instead I'm going to help her find her way to enough ventral and see what happens. And so we worked to come to enough regulation and resourcing in ventral so that she could stay there for a while and she knew exactly what to do. I mean, that's the power of regulation is you know? It opens up what you already know inside. But you can't get to right. And I thought afterwards. I thought, oh, this is. I have to remember this because, rather than six months of trying to help her figure out what to do, three sections later she had made a decision. And it was her decision, it was based in her knowing, which was great.
Dirk:That's a great example. My last question is if you had a big message sort of Tim Ferriss Billboard kind of question.
Deb:Maybe you already alluded to it in your last story. The big message, I think that I would like people to begin to consider is you can become an active operator of your nervous system, right. You can partner with your nervous system, you can befriend your nervous system and when that happens, you can move through the world differently. You can have choice about the way you move through the world and you can shape the world in a new way. And I do think, as each one of us becomes more able to reach for regulation, we then send that energy, that autonomic message out into the world, and I often will end things when I'm writing or speaking that I think this is how we change the world one nervous system at a time, and I think it's possible. I think that can happen.
Dirk:Anything else that we didn't get to that you would like to?
Deb:That's been a fun conversation. We've gone all over the place. It's great fun. I guess the thing that I also would say is that we are also responsible for the way we move through the world. Right, and all of us dysregulate sometimes. The goal is not to be in regulation all the time. Nobody can do that Unachievable. We don't want to do that, and when I go out into the world and I am angry or anxious, I'm sending that message to every other nervous system around me. When I go out into the world and I'm despairing, I send that message. When I go out into the world and I'm regulated, that's the message I send. And so I think we need to think about the fact that every nervous system is connected in some way to every other nervous system. Right, there's this ripple effect that happens. So let's begin to think what am I putting out into the world today?
Dirk:I love that and my sister helped me prepare for talking with you and she highlighted a quote of yours and we both listened to your 10% Happier podcast. But you said the way we move through the world impacts the world, which I find fascinating. I find it's a huge responsibility, but also a great opportunity.
Deb:Yeah, yeah, and I think that's what we want to help people understand. Right Again, that's a different way of looking at who we are and how we shape the world.
Dirk:Yeah, so yeah, so your work has helped me a lot. It's helped so many people and I really appreciate you talking with me right now.
Deb:It's been lovely, really fun, thank you.
Dirk:Thank you. So what a cool person, right? Learn more about Deb Dana and her tools and workshops at her website, which is rhythmofregulationcom. One word I will link to it in my show notes. And join us next time with Dr Richard Brown, creator of the Breath Body Mind Institute, which is an amazing program that heals trauma all over the world using breath and movement. Also, keep your eye out for the Developing Meaning Community webpage, where we're going to start having conversations and giving you ability to ask questions and communicate with each other and with me. Check the developingmeaningcom website that's going to be coming up and until we meet again, I hope you have a meaningful, meaningful month and if you figure out the meaning of life, let me know. Outro.
Deb:Music Moscow Pumpkins. Take your food and eat.
Dirk:Provide the taste you desire.