Tamias's thesis on trauma

I mostly agree with the Continuum Concept, that humans evolved to be happy and healthy most of the time, and that the misery, addiction, chronic illness, etc. of modern humans says more about modern civilization than it does about human nature. I think that trauma is one of the main causes of our modern civilized human suffering. Bessel Van der Kolk, Peter Levine and others have described cases of both physical and psychological symptoms resulting from trauma, and resolving when the trauma was resolved.

I'll start with some terminology and my basic explanation of trauma, then offer some theories about how modern civilized humans came to carry so much trauma and some strategies that help me process my own trauma more effectively.

Some Words and Phrases to Start With

The autonomic nervous system is sometimes described as having two parts, the sympathetic nervous system, which gets us moving, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which slows us down and helps us rest. According to polyvagal theory, the parasympathetic nervous system can be better understood as two nerves: the dorsal vagus nerve, which is involved in the Rest and Digest, Freeze and Collapse states, and the ventral vagus nerve, which is more involved in the Feed and Breed state, and in social engagement with fellow humans.

According to my understanding of Polyvagal theory and evolution, our dorsal vagus nerve is evolutionarily very old, perhaps billions of years old. We share it with all animals. The sympathetic nervous system is slightly less old, hundreds of millions of years, and slightly less universal, but still shared with all vertebrates and some invertebrates. The ventral vagus nerve evolved with mammals, reptiles and fish don't have it. I'd guess it's about a hundred million years old.

I'll be using the term "threat" to mean what my autonomic nervous system perceives as a threat. That is not the same as what my logical mind understands as danger, or what would feel threatening to another person in the same situation, or even what seems threatening to me in retrospect. Steven Porges offers the term "neuroception" for the way one's autonomic nervous system instinctively interprets cues of threat, safety, opportunity and connection. These cues come from our senses, both intenal and external, but neuroception is neither the raw sensation nor the stories our logical, verbal minds tell to make sense of our perceptions. The autonomic nervous system tells its own stories. In this article, unless I state otherwise, when I refer to threat, safety, connection or agency, I mean, as perceived by one's neuroception in the moment.

I can list several autonomic nervous system states (also called responses) in order of increasing threat and decreasing agency, like this:

• Rest and Digest
• Feed and Breed
• Social Engagement
• Active Play
• Flight
• Fight
• Freeze
• Collapse

And two that don't easily fit into the order:

• Orient
• Fawn

If I organize them according to what parts of my autonomic nervous system are most activated in each state, adding red highlights for responses to neuroception of threat and green for neuroception of safety or connection, I get something like this:

The ordered list goes around in a circle. That makes sense to me because in the Collapse state, my dorsal vagus nerve shuts down my body and mind because my neuroception says that all is lost, there's no point doing anything, whereas in the Rest and Digest state, my dorsal vagus nerve shuts down most of my physical and mental activity because all is well, there's no need to do anything.

If I add red highlights for responses to neuroception of threat and green for neuroception of safety or connection, then it looks like this:

In the Rest and Digest state, mental activity slows down and changes, I might fall asleep, and physical activity slows down or stops. My energy is directed toward the internal processes of digestion, healing and growth.

The ventral vagus nerve, supporting stillness, and the dorsal vagus nerve, supporting connection, can work together to support cuddling, intimacy, and quiet, thoughtful conversations.

The Social Engagement response is the one I want to access in myself and a toddler when I greet them: eyebrows raised, voice soft and melodic, slight smile, eye contact. I read recently that this instinctive social engagement system also tenses the stapedius muscle in the inner ear, tuning our ears to hear higher pitched sounds more clearly, which helps us understand speech.

Feed and Breed is another state activated with the ventral vagus nerve. These are, after all, activities best enjoyed with others.

The dorsal vagus nerve and sympathetic nervous system can combine to support Active Play, especially with friendly, face-to-face human interaction.

The Fight and Flight responses feel warm, sometimes hot, and fast. Their signature is movement, heart racing, flushed face, breathing fast, movements may not be coordinated or precise. The point is to MOVE, FAST.
Fighting faces toward a threat, and humans tend to do it more with our arms. My fighting voice is loud, and my language is simple, direct or rude.
Fleeing faces away from a threat, or rather, toward safety or connection, and I do it more with my legs. If my voice gets involved, I'm interrupting and changing the subject.
Fight and Flight both relate to sympathetic nervous system activation. Fighting is my response to reduced options or reduced agency. Given a choice, I prefer to flee, and so do most mammals.

If I don't perceive any option to fight or to flee, then I Freeze. The Freeze response feels blank, still, stuck. I might go limp or stiff, curl up like a foetus or tuck in my head like a frightened turtle. Speech becomes impossible or monotone, simple, confused or repetitive. I can think about half a thought at a time, maximum. Both my sympathetic Fight or Flight system and my dorsal vagal parasympathetic Collapse system are activated at the same time. If I perceive an opportunity to fight or flee, I can switch from frozen to moving very, very quickly. Evolutionarily, it makes sense for situations where I need to hide or play dead while I wait for an opportunity to flee.

In the Collapse state, muscles go limp, blood supply to my brain decreases and I might lose some or all of my senses. Peripheral vision and balance are often the first to go. Understanding language can become difficult, maybe because my stapedius muscle goes limp or because language is evolutionarily very new, and the collapse state is very old.
In a fully Collapsed state, a person can even die of shock. In first aid courses, I was told to offer rest and reassurance to a person who's in shock, and keep them warm. The reassurance we offered in our practice sessions wasn't very sincere. It would come across as even less sincere in a real emergency, and I think the advice was misguided. What I try to offer now is not reassurance but connection. The point is to activate the person's instinctive Social Engagement system, which keeps them out of total Collapse.
Collapse is a dorsal vagal shutdown response without a simlutaneous sympathetic activation. I think this can happen in two different ways: A threat may become so overwhelming that my sympathetic nervous system gives up on actively responding, or it may be a kind of threat that I can't actively respond to.

Orienting is the Wood Between the Worlds of autonomic nervous system responses. When I'm Orienting, I'm looking around, head turning, eyes wide open, listening, focussing on information coming from outside my body in the present moment. We mammals go into orienting intuitively when our neuroception tells us that it may be time to switch states, the response we're having is no longer relevant, there's new information available. I'm practicing consciously activating my Orienting response. I'll get back to that below.

The Fawn response may be unique to humans, and I don't understand it very well, though I know of a few situations where it's my default response. I try to avoid getting into those situations. I wonder whether it's unique to mammals who are already traumatized. All the other responses have uses that make sense for a mammal living in a natural envorinment with a healthy, non-traumatized nervous system.

Trauma means a creature has gone into a Freeze or Collapse state, and not fully come out of it. When the Freeze or Collapse state is happening in response to a present or very recent situation, it's called shock, or more specifically "psychogenic shock" to differentiate it from shock caused by physical injury or illness. When does shock turn into trauma? Well, for our ancestors before the agricultural revolution, threats where generally immediate and physical. We probably evolved to maintain a Freeze response for seconds or minutes, rarely hours and never days. Similarly, Fight and Flight responses were most often needed for a few minutes at a time, and very rarely for more than a day. The Collapse response may have been experienced only during natural disasters, or when people actually got caught and eaten by predators. We could say that any psychogenic shock (Freeze or Collapse) that lasts for more than a few days is trauma. Alternatively, we could say that any Freeze or Collapse that outlasts the threat is trauma. That gets confusing, though, because the threats we perceive in modern life aren't as immediate and physical as the ones faced by our distant ancestors. Sometimes it's not obvious what's ongoing evidence of a real danger, and what's a mistaken neuroception of threat. What I believe is that trauma starts off as shock, with the normal symptoms of temporary shock, and then if it's not resolved after some months, it gets wierder, and goes on getting weirder until it's resolved. Over months and years, symptoms go from recognizable patterns of distress that relate to the stressful experience(s) that started the trauma, to patterns of mental disturbance that are more difficult to understand, to physical symptoms and eventually to almost any constellation of mental and physical symptoms. I'm not going to list the possibilities because it would be an exhaustive list of all symptoms known to humankind, and then some.

Humans, more than any other creatures, can compartmentalize our shock and go back to day-to-day life without resolving it. While I realize this is useful in some situations, it can also mean that we accumulate trauma from year to year. Civilized humans, in particular, seem to accumulate more trauma than humans still iving outside civilization, and more than domesticated non-humans living within civilization. Why?

I believe we evolved to adapt to a huge variety of lifestyles, but they had some patterns in common. Humans evolved to live in tribes with dozens of people, sharing food, sharing a land base, sharing an oral culture, tending fires and building shelters collaboratively. I've been to an event that aimed to replicate this experience for a week. It was nowhere close, because we were missing the attachment relationships that would come from having lived, worked, learned, eaten, played, sung, danced and grieved together all our lives. For most of human evolution, traumatic experiences probably happen most often while away from the tribe, hunting, exploring, travelling. I imagine a traumatized person coming home at the end of the day or at the end of a journey: They're welcomed home by dozens of friendly, familiar tribespeople. No one quizzes them immediately about what happened. Instead, they are welcomed, offered food and water, affectionate touch and a safe place to sleep. If they are injured, someone tends to them with whatever medicines are available. Later, after eating and resting and reconnecting with others, maybe they'll tell their story. We don't question them too soon. Maybe we don't ask questions at all. Some stories come spilling out that same evening, over dinner. Some won't be told until the little kids have gone to sleep. Some stories might wait until the situation is just right, around a fire late at night with a few particularly close friends, or in some kind of ceremony, or in the winter when we have nothing to do but tell stories for hour after hour. Even if a traumatic experience happened close to home and involved other members of the tribe, sooner or later a situation would arise where the story could be told. One way or another, the person who had felt traumatized eventually gets a hero's welcome, with dozens of attachment figures celebrating their survival, their courage, skills, luck, strength, whatever brought them home alive. Once the story has been shared once, it might be told and retold a thousand times, with genuine gratitude that this person is back with us, and genuine curiosity about all the details, and genuine interest in learning everything we can learn from their experience. When someone has an experience that's so overwhelming it leaves them traumatized, the tribe as a whole needs to learn from it, to help avoid similar situations for many generations to come. That group learning is what oral cultures are made of. It's probably the evolutionary purpose of culture. I think it's also why humans are so good at compartmentalizing our trauma. Now that we have symbolic language, there's an evolutionary reason for storing the most overwhelming memories until the situation is just right for the story to be told and for the whole tribe to learn from it.

I've heard that cultures who are still opting out of civilization have specific rituals to help people tell stories that are difficult to tell. These rituals are connected to natural rhythms, such as every evening after dark, or every winter at the very end of the harvest season. No one has to ask for a ritual to tell their particular story; the tribe holds the space, because the tribe needs the stories.

When I was struggling with my own trauma, I noticed an impulse that I called the Go-Home-to-your-Tribe response. My autonomic nervous system was telling me that it was time to go home, find those friendly humans who know me so well that they accept me unconditionally, and tell them what I'd experienced so that the tribe as a whole could learn from it and protect ourselves better in the future. Unfortunately, those people were few and far between, available only on the phone and not very often. I don't live in an intact tribe.

What's offered as talk therapy in modern civilization is missing several important elements of the hero's welcome. The therapist is in a limited professional role. I might never see them in another role, and if I do, it'll be awkward. That's not a robust attachment relationship. For another thing, it's up to me to show up on time for therapy. The time, place and length of session are dictated by the therapist's schedule, not my needs and certainly not my intuition. The worst part is that I'm supposed to pay them to listen to me, and pay them three times as much as I ever make per hour, and the even worse part is that they aren't learning from my stories! I'm paying someone to take my hard-earned stories, my incredible, irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime stories of survival and recovery against all odds, and throw them out the window! No wonder talk therapy didn't magically resolve my trauma. My trauma magically resolved, but it was the kind of magic I have to work hard at, not the kind I can simply pay for.

There are elements of modern civilization that create excess trauma, as well as elements that interfere with resolving it. As one tiny example, if I watch the mainstream news ... Well, actually, I don't and can't watch the mainstream news. It wrecks my nervous system for days. The news is full of disasters and tragedies _that _I can't do anything about._ If I witnessed these firsthand, I would be taking action, running away, running to help, helping someone survive, helping someone grieve their losses ... but when it's on a screen, I can't take action. The result is a partial Collapse, and a kind of trauma.

I suppose the next thing to discuss is transitions between autonomic nervous system states. Going back the the list and the circle ... I'm going to use the term stress for the combination of more perceived threat and less perceived connection and agency, and I realize that's not the only definition of stress, but that's how I'm using it here because I don't have a more exact term.

When my neuroception perceives more threat or fewer options in the face of a threat, it doesn't take my autonomic nervous system very many seconds to jump from a state of less stress to a state of greater stress. Skipping over the states in between takes a fraction of a second.

On the other hand, says the other hand (Zworb took the pencil here,) shifting from a state of high stress to a state of lower stress takes minutes, and I sometimes need more minutes to go through the states in between.

For example, if I'm in Social Engagement, having a conversation with someone who doesn't seem threatening at all. Then they reach out and grab my arm with no warning. For me, this is a trigger, and because it restricts my movement, I go straight into Fight, skipping over Flight before my verbal mind even knows what's happening. I scream and smack the other person on the face.

The ordered list goes around in a circle. That makes sense to me because in the Collapse state, my dorsal vagus nerve shuts down my body and mind because my neuroception says that all is lost, there's no point doing anything, whereas in the Rest and Digest state, my dorsal vagus nerve shuts down most of my physical and mental activity because all is well, there's no need to do anything.

In the Rest and Digest state, mental activity slows down and changes, I might fall asleep, and physical activity slows down or stops. My energy is directed toward the internal processes of digestion, healing and growth.

The ventral vagus nerve, supporting stillness, and the dorsal vagus nerve, supporting connection, can work together to support cuddling, intimacy, and quiet, thoughtful conversations.

The Social Engagement response is the one I want to access in myself and a toddler when I greet them: eyebrows raised, voice soft and melodic, slight smile, eye contact. I read recently that this instinctive social engagement system also tenses the stapedius muscle in the inner ear, tuning our ears to hear higher pitched sounds more clearly, which helps us understand speech.

Feed and Breed is another state activated with the ventral vagus nerve. These are, after all, activities best enjoyed with others.

The dorsal vagus nerve and sympathetic nervous system can work together to support Active Play, especially with friendly, face-to-face interaction.

The Fight and Flight responses feel warm, sometimes hot, and fast. Their signature is movement, heart racing, flushed face, breathing fast, movements may not be coordinated or precise. The point is to MOVE, FAST.
Fighting faces toward a threat, and humans tend to do it more with our arms. My fighting voice is loud, and my language is simple, direct or rude.
Fleeing faces away from a threat, or rather, toward safety or connection, and I do it more with my legs. If my voice gets involved, I'm interrupting and changing the subject.
Fight and Flight both relate to sympathetic nervous system activation. Fighting is my response to reduced options or reduced agency. Given a choice, I prefer to flee, like most creatures I know of.

If I don't perceive any option to fight or to flee, then I Freeze. The Freeze response feels blank, still, stuck. I might go limp or stiff, curl up like a foetus or tuck in my head like a frightened turtle. Speech becomes impossible or monotone, simple, confused or repetitive. I can think about half a thought at a time, maximum. Both my sympathetic Fight or Flight system and my dorsal vagal parasympathetic Collapse system are activated at the same time. Evolutionarily, it makes sense for situations where I need to hide or play dead while I wait for an opportunity to fight or flee. If I perceive an opportunity, I can switch from frozen to moving very, very quickly.

In the Collapse state, muscles go limp, blood supply to my brain decreases and I might lose some or all of my senses. Peripheral vision and balance are often the first to go. Understanding language can become difficult, maybe because my stapedius muscle goes limp or because language is evolutionarily very new, and the collapse state is very old.
In a fully Collapsed state, a person can even die of shock. In first aid courses, I was told to offer rest and reassurance to a person who's in shock, and keep them warm. The reassurance we offered in our practice sessions wasn't very sincere. It would come across as even less sincere in a real emergency. I think the advice was misguided. What I try to offer now is not reassurance but connection, to activate the person's instinctive Social Engagement system, which keeps them out of total Collapse.
Collapse is a dorsal vagal shutdown response without simlutaneous sympathetic or ventral vagal activation. This can happen in two different ways: A threat may become so overwhelming that my sympathetic nervous system gives up on actively responding, or it may be a kind of threat that I can't actively respond to.

Orienting is the Wood Between the Worlds of autonomic nervous system responses. When I'm Orienting, I'm looking around, head turning, eyes wide open, listening, focussing on information coming from outside my body in the present moment. We mammals go into orienting intuitively when our neuroception tells us that it may be time to switch states. There's new information available, the response we're having may no longer be relevant.
As part of the strategies I'll discuss later, I'm practicing consciously activating my Orienting response.

The Fawn response may be unique to humans, and I don't understand it very well, though I know of a few situations where it's my default response. I try to avoid getting into those situations. I wonder whether it's unique to mammals who are already traumatized. All the other responses I just described have uses that make sense for a mammal with a healthy, non-traumatized nervous system, living in its natural environment.
I guess wolves and some other carnivores show submissive behaviour in the wild, as a way of taking a break from power struggles. What I think of as a Fawn response in humans isn't always blatantly submissive. For example, if someone I feel afraid of tells a joke that I feel really uncomfortable with, my impulse is to answer, participate, even extend the joke. I consider that a Fawning response. Another phenomenon that comes to mind is that several women I know, in heteroromantic relationships, find it impossible to coherently disagree with their partner's opinions when the partner is present, even if they have strong objections that they can articulate very clearly in their partner's absence. I have a sense that this is related to ancestral trauma about heterosexual relationships. It seems to occur even without traceable, relevant trauma in the current relationship, or in the individual's life.

So, what is trauma?

Trauma means a creature has gone into a Freeze or Collapse state, and not fully come out of it. When the Freeze or Collapse state is happening in response to a present or very recent situation, it's called shock, or more specifically "psychogenic shock" to differentiate it from shock caused by physical injury or illness.

When does shock turn into trauma? Well, for our ancestors before the agricultural revolution, threats where generally immediate and physical. We probably evolved to maintain a Freeze response for seconds or minutes, rarely hours and never days. Similarly, Fight and Flight responses were most often needed for a few minutes at a time, and very rarely for more than a day. The Collapse response may have been experienced only during natural disasters, or when people actually got caught and eaten by predators.

We could say that any psychogenic shock (Freeze or Collapse) that lasts for more than a few days is trauma. Alternatively, we could say that any Freeze or Collapse that outlasts the threat is trauma. That gets confusing, though, because the threats we perceive in modern life aren't as immediate and physical as the ones faced by our distant ancestors. Sometimes it's not obvious what's ongoing evidence of a real danger, and what's a mistaken neuroception of threat.

What I believe is that trauma starts off as shock, with the normal symptoms of temporary shock, and then if it's not resolved after some months, it gets wierder, and goes on getting weirder until it's resolved. Over months and years, symptoms go from recognizable patterns of distress that relate to the stressful experience(s) that started the trauma, to patterns of mental disturbance that are more difficult to understand, to physical symptoms and eventually to almost any constellation of mental and physical symptoms. I won't list the possibilities here. It would almost be an exhaustive list of all symptoms known to humankind, and then some.

Humans, more than any other creatures, can compartmentalize our shock and go back to day-to-day life without resolving it. While I realize this is useful in some situations, it can also mean that we accumulate trauma from year to year. Civilized humans, in particular, seem to accumulate more trauma than humans still living outside civilization, and more than domesticated non-humans living within civilization. Why?

I believe we humans have evolved, and are evolving, to adapt to a huge variety of lifestyles, but up until the last ten thousand years or so, these lifestyles had some patterns in common. Humans evolved to live in tribes ot about 20 to 150 people, sharing food, sharing a land base, sharing an oral culture, tending fires and building shelters collaboratively. I've been to an event that aimed to replicate this experience for a week. It was nowhere close, because we were missing the attachment relationships that would come from having lived, worked, learned, eaten, played, sung, danced and grieved together all our lives. In fact, there was something oddly disturbing about it. Maybe it would have helped if more of us had acknowledged more loudly that the pseudovillage on surrogate land, while interesting as a learning experience, was completely different from anything humans ever evolved for.

The basic tribal pattern dates back at least to the taming of fire, hundreds of thousands of years ago, and I would guess millions of years beyond that. Somehow, around the same time as learning to use fire, we developed symbolic language that allowed us to tell stories and jokes, and make plans. Eventually spoken language developed a life of its own, in the literal sense that language, culture and stories evolve in their own right, using humans as their host species or substrate. That was fine as long as culture was co-evolving in a cooperative, mutually supportive relationship with its human hosts.

Some time within the last hundred thousand years, maybe as recently as ten thousand years ago, spoken language evolved a new level of complexity that gave culture more of an independent life. Human brains evolved new capacities for more abstract thought, apparently including new ways of thinking about time, past and future, and therefore death. This may have been a gradual shift over thousands of years, but I consider it an important turning point when human culture began to evolve way, way faster than human biology. Our instincts have kind of evolved to deal with stone tools, fire and the older aspects of spoken language. We have not had time to evolve for agriculture, thinking about the distant past and future, understanding death, social hierarchies beyond the known tribe of at most two hundred people, arithmetic, clocks, calendars or writing.

Before the shift to more abstract thinkinng, a human was most likely to have a traumatic experience while they were away from their tribe, hunting, exploring or travelling. I imagine a traumatized person coming home at the end of the day or at the end of a journey: They're welcomed home by dozens of friendly, familiar tribespeople. No one quizzes them immediately about what happened. Instead, they are greeted, offered food and water, affectionate touch and a safe place to sleep. If they are injured, someone they know and respect provides whatever medical care is available in their culture and their ecosystem. Later, after eating and resting and reconnecting with others, maybe they'll tell their story. We don't question them too soon. Maybe we don't ask questions at all. Some stories come spilling out that same evening, over dinner. Some won't be told until the little kids have gone to sleep. Some stories might wait until the situation is just right, around a fire late at night with a few particularly close friends, or in some kind of ceremony, or in the winter when we have nothing to do but drum, dance and tell stories for hour after hour. Even if a traumatic experience happened close to home and involved other members of the tribe, sooner or later a situation arises where the story can be told.

When the time is right, the person who had felt traumatized gets a hero's welcome, with dozens of attachment figures celebrating their survival, their courage, skills, luck, strength, whatever brought them home alive. Once the story has been shared once, it might be told and retold a thousand times, with genuine gratitude that this person is back with us, and genuine curiosity about all the details, and genuine interest in learning everything we can learn from their experience. When someone has an experience that's so overwhelming it leaves them traumatized, the tribe as a whole needs to learn from it, to help avoid or survive similar situations for many generations to come.

That group learning is what oral cultures are made of. Maybe it's the main evolutionary purpose of language and culture. I think it's also why humans are so good at compartmentalizing our trauma. Now that we have symbolic language, there's an evolutionary reason for storing the most overwhelming memories until the situation is just right for the story to be told and for the whole tribe to learn from it.

I've heard that cultures who are still opting out of civilization have specific rituals to help people tell stories that are difficult to tell. These rituals are connected to natural rhythms, such as every evening after dark, or every winter at the very end of the harvest season. No one has to ask for a ritual to tell their particular story; the tribe holds the space, because the tribe needs the stories.

When I was struggling with my own trauma, I noticed an impulse that I called the Go-Home-to-your-Tribe response. My autonomic nervous system was telling me that it was time to go home, find those friendly humans who know me so well that they accept me unconditionally, and tell them what I'd experienced so that the tribe as a whole could learn from it and protect ourselves better in the future. Unfortunately, those people were few and far between, available only on the phone and not very often. I don't live in an intact tribe.

I tried several different talk therapists, trained in different modalities, and got in arguments with all of them before figuring out my problem was with the basic framework of talk therapy. What's offered as professional talk therapy in modern civilization is missing several important elements of the hero's welcome.

For one thing, the therapist was in a limited professional role. I might never see them in another role, and if I do, it'll be awkward. That's not a robust attachment relationship. For another thing, it was up to me to show up on time for therapy. The time, place and length of session were dictated by the therapist's schedule, not my needs and certainly not my intuition.

The worst part was that I was supposed to pay them to listen to me, and pay them three times as much as I could earn per hour, and the even worse part is that they weren't learning from my stories! I was paying someone to take my hard-earned stories, my incredible, irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime stories of survival and recovery against all odds --- and throw them out the window! No wonder talk therapy didn't magically resolve my trauma.

My trauma magically resolved, but it was the kind of magic I have to work hard at and wait forever for and pounce on when I catch a glimpse of it, not the kind I can simply pay for.

There are plenty of things in modern civilization that create unnecessary trauma, as well as things that interfere with resolving it. As one tiny example, if I watch the mainstream news ... Well, actually, I don't and can't watch the mainstream news. It wrecks my nervous system for days. The news is full of disasters and tragedies that I can't do anything about. If I witnessed these firsthand, I would be taking action, speaking up, running away, running to help, helping someone survive, helping someone grieve their losses ... but when it's on a screen, I can't take action. The result is a partial Collapse, and a kind of trauma.

And what can we do about trauma?

I suppose the next thing to discuss is transitions between autonomic nervous system states. Going back the the list and the diagram ... I'm going to use the term "stress" for responses to more perceived threat and less perceived connection and agency, and I realize that's not the only definition of stress, but that's how I'm using it here because that's what I need a term for.

When my neuroception perceives more threat or fewer options in the face of a threat, it doesn't take my autonomic nervous system very many seconds to jump from a state of less stress to a state of greater stress. Skipping over the states in between takes a fraction of a second.

On the other hand, says the other hand [Zworb took the pencil here], shifting from a state of high stress to a state of lower stress takes minutes, and I sometimes need several more minutes to go through each of the states in between.

For example, suppose I'm in Social Engagement, having a conversation with someone whom I don't perceive as threatening at all. Then they reach out and grab my arm with no warning. For me, this is a trigger, and because it restricts my movement, I go straight into Fight, skipping over Flight before my verbal mind even knows what's happening. I scream and smack the other person on the face.

Suppose they have the sense to let go of my arm, apologize and take a few steps back. Can I go straight back into Social Engagement? I would need to Orient first, both to my surroundings (by looking around) and to the other person (by talking, getting to some kind of understanding so we don't make the same mistake again.) Then I would probably shake for a minute or two, as a kind of abbreviated Fight or Flight response that helps me transition back into Social Engagement.

This makes sense evolutionarily. When higher stress states were needed, they were sometimes needed immediately, with not a second to waste. The lower stress states are just as necessary for survival and wellbeing, but because they are the default states for a healthy animal in the wild (including a human in a hunter-gatherer tribe,) there are hours and hours for feeding, breeding, resting, digesting and connecting. A wild animal can spare a few minutes in the transition to a lower-stress state, to orient and really make sure the state it's transitioning into is appropriate for the situation.

Here are some of the things my body does to transition from states of higher stress to states of lower stress:

• shaking,
• crying tears,
• yawning,
• spontaneously moving or stretching,
• sighing,
• tingling,
• I'm sure there are others...

And some things I can choose to do, to help my nervous system reset to a calmer state:

• Orient,
• dance, drum, sing,
• wrestle,
• play tag, hide-and-seek, etc.,
• clean,
• build,
• yell,
• NVC yell,
• listen to calming music,
• make my story count,
• connect with a human,
• talk,
• notice and honour the transitions I listed above,
• walk, run, swim, climb,
• connect with nature,

... and I'm sure I have others. I'll elaborate on some of the strategies I invented for myself, because I needed them and they weren't culturally available, and some that I heard or read about that I wish I'd known about earlier.

The NVC Yell

I see yelling as an expression of the Fight response. NVC stands for Non-Violent Communication, developed by Marshall Rosenberg and others. NVC focusses on four types of information: observations, feelings, needs and requests.

When I need to yell, I find it helps my sense of agency to fit some NVC content in, instead of (or as well as) yelling four-letter words or incoherent sounds. There's no need to control my tone of voice; I can yell "I! Feel! Angry! Please GIVE ME SOME SPACE!!!" in the same tone of voice I might use to yell, "#@$#@%$ OFF!!!!" It does feel better for my body to use my diaphragm and breath support, when I can.

Choosing to Orient

I learned this one from Janelle Hardy in Vancouver. I'm practicing using it when I notice that my neuroception might be missing cues of safety, agency or connection. To orient, I look around, turning my head from side to side and letting my eyes wander until something catches my interest. I'm looking for something that promts a sense of delight, appreciation or curiosity. If I'm outdoors, I listen for bird songs. When I see something that catches my interest, I spend a minute paying attention to the raw sensory information I get by looking at it: colour, shape, shade, texture. I'm not looking for a name for the thing or a story about its meaning. Then I go back to looking around and repeat the process, finding another sight or sound to focus on.

What if my house is a mess? What if I start to orient and my gaze falls on the dirty dishes, the dirty floor, the mountain of laundry, the half-cleared table, the stinky garbage and a dozen other things I wish I'd dealt with days ago?

I can think of two options that work for my nervous system, and two that don't.

One that works is to step out the door. Then I can orient to plants and birds, or at least to the sky. Walking out the door is a flight response. I do it with the idea "I just need to get out the door, and then I'll feel better," and then as soon as I get out the door, I orient to the outdoors and feel better.

A Fight response that often works is to do one simple cleaning task and then either orient to the finished task and the indoor space, or step outside and orient to the outdoors. Either way, I switch back to orienting as soon as I feel able to. My priority is not to get the house clean, it's to take care of my nervous system.

Trying to thoroughly clean up everything I see is another Fight response, one that doesn't work so well for regulating my nervous system. The problematic part is "everything". If I direct my Fight energy toward an impossible goal, I'm very likely to slip into Freeze when I get tired or distracted, or into escalating Fight (rage) when my frantic movements cause me break one of those dishes I'm trying to wash.

Gazing helplessly at the mess is the other response that doesn't help take care of my nervous system, or my house either. It can easily become a Freeze or Collapse state.

A messy house is just one example. There could be any number of things preventing me from orienting to safety in a given time and place, and it might not be obvious what they are. As a general rule, I find it helpful to briefly do something that feels like fighting or fleeing, and as soon as it feels complete, go back to orienting. Often I'll let myself perceive a pretend threat, and then run away from it, hit it, break it, throw it away from me, etc. As soon as I notice my Fight or Flight energy dissipating, I go back to orienting.