Description
The polyvagal theory presented in client-friendly language.
This book offers therapists an integrated approach to adding a polyvagal foundation to their work with clients. With clear explanations of the organizing principles of Polyvagal Theory, this complex theory is translated into clinician and client-friendly language. Using a unique autonomic mapping process along with worksheets designed to effectively track autonomic response patterns, this book presents practical ways to work with clients’ experiences of connection. Through exercises that have been specifically created to engage the regulating capacities of the ventral vagal system, therapists are given tools to help clients reshape their autonomic nervous systems.
Adding a polyvagal perspective to clinical practice draws the autonomic nervous system directly into the work of therapy, helping clients re-pattern their nervous systems, build capacities for regulation, and create autonomic pathways of safety and connection. With chapters that build confidence in understanding Polyvagal Theory, chapters that introduce worksheets for mapping, tracking, and practices for re-patterning, as well as a series of autonomic meditations, this book offers therapists a guide to practicing polyvagal-informed therapy.
The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy is essential reading for therapists who work with trauma and those who seek an easy and accessible way of understanding the significance that Polyvagal Theory has to clinical work.
Easy to understand the basis nerve and how it works in the body.
I use the Polyvagal exercises with my clients often to help explain what happens in their body when they are under stress. This is useful and highly informative in a down-to-earth kind of way.
Highly recommend for therapists.
Wow! I had previously read about Gottman’s theory of emotional communication though until I read this book, I didn’t realize the extent of how attunement mutually influences physiology. I can feel the impact of connection in real-time and it’s obvious to me how useful Polyvagal theory is. Highly recommended!
I found Deb Dana’s book to be both informative and practical. Ms. Dana was able to explain what happens with our nervous system when anxious or depressed, and how to focus on regulation. Although I am a psychotherapist, I found this to be useful both for my profession and my own life.
…Dana’s typically LCSW notion that CO-regulation of autonomic affect is the be-all and end-all bothers me =plenty=. I admit to being grounded in and loyal to Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior Therapy for good reason: It was the first major fix for early life trauma built in large part on insistent and repeated skills training as opposed to dependence upon interaction with a clinician for affect recognition, acknowledgement, acceptance, ownership, appreciation and processing. Pardon me if I missed any assertion of similar necessity in Dana’s volume, but I don’t think I did.
In my therapeutic world, the clinician is someone the patient will only see a few times before the insurance carrier says, “No mas, amigo.” (One on one therapy is almost strictly a private pay product anymore.) Thus, Vygotskyan, 12-Step-type, monkey-see-monkey-do (because others did it) group dynamics are key to moving the patient out of his or her self-“protective” defenses and into sufficient trust to allow a therapist to Teach The Patient HOW to Process Affects when he or she runs into them and NOT make the patient dependent upon the therapist for such.
“Give a man a fish and he eats today. Show a man =how= to fish, and he eats forever.” Or at least when he takes responsibility for his own self-care.
Other than that, the information here will be “revolutionary” for those who didn’t grow up on Hans Selye, Herbert Benson, Joseph Wolpe, Bruce McEwen, Sonya Lupien, Robert Sapolsky, Stephen Porges, et al, and/or missed the lectures on the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis; cortisol, CRF, ACTH & adrenaline; the autonomic nervous system and the general adaptation syndrome. Porges deserves enormous credit for staying the course amid decades of yawning and pharmaceutical ignorance; Dana deserves as much for re-simplifying it all sufficiently that MFTs and maybe even LCSWs can understand and apply it.