How to Work with Emerging Defense Responses to Trauma (Beyond the Fight/Flight/Freeze Model)
 | with Pat Ogden, PhD; |  |
with Pat Ogden, PhD; Stephen Porges, PhD; Bessel van der Kolk, MD; Janina Fisher, PhD; Kathy Steele, MN, CS; Deb Dana, LCSW; Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD; Thema Bryant-Davis, PhD; Ruth Buczynski, PhD
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This session gave me a different perspective on my times with difficult teenage children. I had no idea about boundaries then, nor how to set them with one daughter especially, who challenged and imposed her will on her 2 sisters. I have beat myself up for years for not handling the situation better since she still has issues today with a lack of emotional intelligence and patterns of narcissism.
I now see Collapse/Submit response could have been the cause of my many years of depression and insomnia. In a sense, I was out of control and could not set boundaries for myself or others. However, I have always perceived myself as a commando-fighting survivor due to the womb trauma of being the sole survivor of a triplet pregnancy. After years of CBT therapy with a skilled psychiatrist, I reached the end of her capabilities, and she referred me to a somatic psychotherapist. That was the missing link – I was very disembodied, so it was a long road to begin to feel and work with my body. From there we explored trauma-holding patterns, and I live a life of freedom today. Very rarely do I feel the gravitational pull of depression.
While the idea of Collapse is outside my paradigm as a survivor, I can now see that it was a coping mechanism with factors over which I had no control to deal with, through the strength of my will. Perhaps a missing link to increasing my self-compassion.
thank you,
I am a survivor of with a chronic dystemic disorder who has survived to many situation to count.
I had no words for how I was behaving.
I have spent decades seeking those words.
I am a please appease response person.
it has kept me alive over decades of traumatic experiences.
I am no long living in trauma but the response is still the same…causing me to create relationships where this pattern can play out.
I will now move forward and have healthier genuine relationships, as well as seek a counselor who can assist me with this.
I am no longer a victim. And I can’t wait til next week to deal with shame.
I hold a full time job working with people in fight or flight mode, I work in early A&D recovery program.
I could only take them as far as I have gone.
This is amazing info.
Role playing responses from different parts of the polyvagal ladder – so clients can practice and feel ventral vagal.
Thank you. Another great workshop.
Fantastic. I will be working with my clients to experientially practice/roleplay what it feels to say ‘no’ from a sympathetic versus a dorsal shutdown focus etc. Thank you so much ! Noel
Wish they had taught at least have of these in Graduate schools… wow.
Thank you! It was another wonderful class, but hearing dr. Lanius’ explanation of dorsal vagal shutdown was a powerful aha moment for me. It explained the powerful effect I observed with myself and clients of letting go of everything for a minute, putting one’s attention into the body’s contact with the back the chair/couch and just breathing into it. Well, and of course there is shavasana… So, could we think that the beneficial effect of feeling into the back of the body is connected with some sort of restoration in the dorsal vagal?
I plan to use the question: “When did you learn that expressing your needs was dangerous?”. I have several clients who are in overwhelming situations and who see ignoring their needs as a virtue, I have been trying to come up with a way to challenge that belief without being judgmental, and this might be the answer I am looking for.
I also want to try practicing saying no with clients, like the example of saying no to broccoli, and moving the pillow that represents broccoli away as a way of learning to engage the sympathetic nervous system in standing up for oneself.
I find this training helpful in multiple ways. It helped me to understand the responses of a family member diagnosed with major mental illness. It helped me to understand my own trauma responses. It helps me understand the responses of some of my clients while working in the prison system.