That's bulls***.
That was my immediate reaction to the work I now build my entire career around.
In this episode, I will share how I came to this work and how I almost
dismissed it, what a paradigm is and why you need a new one, and the urge
most people feel, and probably even you, to skip ahead to the quick fix,
and of course, why there is not one.
I'm Justin Sunseri, a therapist, self-regulation coach, and Polyvagal
Institute Editorial Board Member.
You're listening to Stuck Not Broken, Book One: Trauma and the Polyvagal Paradigm.
First, that's bulls***
Twenty eighteen, I worked as a staff therapist in a very high
needs public school district.
Trauma was a regular aspect of therapy.
The students often told me about traumatic incidents they had been
through, their depressed emotional states, their panic attacks at school,
and their failing love interests.
Often, and probably most often, they told me about poor relationships with their
parents, ranging from hyper-controlling to neglectful and abandoning.
On top of this, these students often lived in poverty, sometimes homelessness.
Many were foster children and had lived in numerous homes with numerous people.
Their friendships were unreliable, untrustworthy, and fleeting.
They struggled to identify a single adult with whom they felt a connection.
The students have numerous defenses, and they default to
distrusting others with very good reason, I don't blame them at all.
During the school year, I would meet with the students once a week,
at least once a week, to once a month, depending on their needs.
However, during the summers, students typically want nothing to do with
school or school personnel, even beloved therapists, so they skip
therapy for a couple of months.
Not all, but most.
That gives my colleagues and me time to catch up on stuff, create curriculum, and
increase our professional development.
In the summer of twenty eighteen, I was caught up in all my paperwork, or
what I would call busy work, and set aside time for professional development.
I chose to revisit my understanding of trauma and how to work with trauma.
"Why, Justin? Why focus on that?" you ask.
Well, because even though I could connect with the students and
build strong therapeutic rapport, I wasn't getting the therapeutic
outcomes that I was hoping for.
The sometimes poor outcomes were maybe most glaring with the most
heavily traumatized clients.
Such clients were more disconnected and dissociative, with the
fewest safe, ongoing, reliable relationships with others.
The students lacked motivation for academics or any other
type of success in life.
The ones who saw little point in putting forth effort in school I
was doing all my, you know, typical therapy stuff, but something was
missing, and I had no idea what.
I was struggling to help these students escape the dark hole
that they were trapped in and to make real, lasting change.
I was struggling to help them feel motivated and then act on
that feeling if they had it.
I struggled to help them care about their life and its direction.
I knew it had something to do with trauma, and that was as far as I could take it.
Yeah, we're taught about trauma in therapy school, sort of.
We're taught things like trauma lives in the body.
You've probably heard it.
This message is repeated ad nauseam through various continuing education
courses, seme- seminars, and lectures.
But no one ever explained how.
They didn't explain what that meant.
But that phrase stuck in my mind.
So I did what any good scholar would do, and I searched for trauma on YouTube.
But before delving into things, I told myself that I knew nothing about trauma.
I needed to start over, start from scratch, and work from the ground up.
Then I let the YouTube rabbit hole do what it does, taking in
video after video, sifting through the ones that needed sifting.
I was looking for primary sources, not influencers with general
trauma or, or therapy knowledge who danced in one-minute clips.
I wanted an expert, the person who took things to another level
and could tell me how the heck trauma could live in the body.
I eventually stumbled upon Peter Levine's work on YouTube, probably,
uh, one of the interview, interviews where he talks about Nancy.
Levine is the creator of Somatic Experiencing, a modality that
utilizes the felt sense of the body to release trauma stuck in the body.
He had a treatment for trauma and also an explanation of what
trauma lives in the body means.
He discussed the autonomic nervous system and how the body
prepares for safety or defense.
I saw him put his knowledge into practice and perform what seemed like
little miracles with his clients.
I'm glossing over the specifics.
They don't matter right now and will be discussed later in the book.
The point is this.
I found someone who could answer the question of how trauma lives in the
body, and my immediate reaction was, "That's bullshit." Was this Levine some
sort of snake oil huckster con man?
"This is nonsense," I thought.
And then I reminded myself that I know nothing.
I reminded myself to work from the ground up, assuming I had everything
to learn and many gaps in my knowledge.
So I took a deep breath and continued giving this Peter Levine
character a chance, while remaining wary of any snake oil offers.
The lessons intrigued me as I continued with Levine's interviews and teachings.
Information started to click.
I was unlearning and relearning.
The body gets stuck in a state of defense.
It can't complete its survival impulse.
Okay, got it.
So I continued down the YouTube autonomic nervous system trauma rabbit hole.
Next, I found a very dry academic lecture, uh, by Dr. Stephen Porges.
He was lecturing about his Polyvagal Theory.
The PowerPoint slides were awful.
The audience seemed interested, but I could hardly
understand what he was saying.
However, I could make out some.
He was talking about the autonomic nervous system just like Peter Levine
did, but he was able to go deeper into it.
Apparently, he had been doing heart rate studies and literature
reviews and could connect them to evolution or something like that.
Things began to make more sense, though.
Trauma lives in the body was making more sense.
The pieces were coming together As I continued to take in lectures
and interviews with Dr. Porges, a bigger picture emerged, providing
me with a new grounding and understanding in treating trauma.
From Porges, I found Deb Dana through the YouTube autonomic nervous
system, trauma, vagal rabbit hole.
She made things a lot easier to understand, a lot.
I got my hands on the writings of Levine, Porges, and Dana.
I studied and studied and studied.
I highlighted and underlined and scribbled notes, shared them with others, wrote down
things that didn't make sense to me so I could look deeper into it, and eventually,
I built presentations on trauma.
I knew I understood and could teach this to my colleagues, like teachers and school
district staff and other therapists.
Polyvagal theory had me hooked.
I had clarity and direction for my clinical trauma work.
Although, "hooked" is probably an understatement.
Obsessed might be closer to the truth.
I went deep into the primary polyvagal books and papers and then went further.
I eventually got to a point where I had to remind myself I'm a therapist.
Focus on how this stuff applies to therapy, to trauma recovery,
and to self-development.
Actually, my wife reminded me I'm a therapist.
"You know, people go to school for years for this stuff, right?" she said to me one
day, and yeah, that was a good reminder.
Trauma made sense.
I had answers about trauma living in the body and how it gets stuck
and how we get unstuck from it.
I identified how the theory works in the therapeutic process, and I could
see it alive in my therapy clients.
When I shared pieces of the theory with clients, it made sense, and
it normalized their experiences.
They felt validated and gained a deeper understanding of themselves.
It opened up compassion and real avenues for change.
I was really onto something revolutionary, both in my mind and in the field of
psychology and the practice of therapy.
It answered my questions, provided a new foundation, and it inspired
me to evangelize the th- the theory.
I created The Polyvagal Podcast, which is now Stuck Not Broken.
I created a YouTube channel, social media accounts, a blog, the Unstucking
Academy, and the Self-Regulation Coach app, all grounded in the polyvagal theory.
And I now proudly serve on the Polyvagal Institute's editorial board,
reviewing submissions for accuracy.
But I'm not done.
I keep learning and deepening my understanding of the theory and my
ability to apply it to whatever I can.
Now, I want to pass it on through this audiobook.
I think you'll find it interesting, if not enlightening, and probably
normalizing and validating.
That's my hope, at least.
And no, Peter Levine never tried to sell me any snake oils.
A polyvagal prescription
A paradigm is like a pair of glasses, put simply.
It's a way of viewing reality.
If you put on the glasses, it changes how you see things, and if
you take them off, the same thing.
If you try out a new paradigm with different lenses, your
view of reality changes again.
The current paradigm glasses you're wearing may be incomplete, like
when no one teaches you what is meant by trauma lives in the body.
Your paradigm may need an update.
Otherwise, it may lead you to see things in very distorted
ways that aren't helpful.
Paradigms are everywhere.
There are paradigms for understanding the cause of mental
health issues, for example.
One view is that they're caused by a chemical imbalance, while another
view is that the individual, well, they're just not strong enough.
There's even paradigms for the news.
If you watch one news source, they'll have a much different
way of seeing things compared to another, if you haven't noticed,
like M- MSNBC versus, uh, Fox News.
It's not about right or wrong.
They're both incomplete and biased means of understanding an objective reality.
Paradigms don't have to be versus each other.
They can complement each other.
The intersectional view of an individual is incomplete but can be
helpful along with other paradigms for understanding ourselves.
It could be helpful to see yourself as a product of socialized racial
and gender roles, while also viewing yourself as an individual
responsible for your own change.
These can live side by side, though neither is quite enough on its own.
You need accurate paradigms in your life.
A paradigm aligned with reality is necessary for growth.
If I told you that techno organic fairy sprites living in your head
control your thoughts, that would not help you make changes in your life.
Believing in techno organic fairy sprites is not grounded in reality, so we can't
do anything useful with that belief.
Unless, of course, we knew how to appease the fairies, I suppose.
The new paradigm I want to pass on is the Polyvagal theory.
However, I don't want you to simply take in this new paradigm.
I encourage you to actively tell yourself that you're creating a new
way of understanding your reality.
You're an active participant, even in learning new information and
unlearning information you've held onto that has fostered an unhelpful,
maybe even harmful paradigm.
Or you're adjusting a paradigm you're holding onto.
No matter what, you are an active participant, so own that.
I invite you to look more deeply into the possibility that more is happening
within each of us, specifically at the, the biological level.
This new information can be instrumental in developing greater knowledge
and a more accurate paradigm.
You can then apply this knowledge to yourself to create a new narrative.
Having a new paradigm is the start.
The next step is to build your personal narrative.
Once you understand the paradigm, you can apply it to events in your own life
and gain a new understanding of them.
Not just the events, but also how you reacted or did not react to those events.
If you do, I suspect you'll have a far less judgmental understanding of yourself.
You'll become more curious about who you are, how you are, and
why you are the way you are.
I invite you to keep this idea of building your new narrative in mind
as you listen through book one.
In the written version, there are numerous optional journal prompts to help you out.
I'll also guide you through a short and simple, uh, narrative
writing exercise toward the end of the written and audiobook.
This self-regulation system phase will involve reflecting on your past.
It's pretty much unavoidable in the trauma recovery journey.
However, when and if you do, it should be light.
None of what I ask you to do in these pages or soundbites, audio
soundbites, involves detailed accounts of your experiences.
I have no goals of triggering your past trauma or traumas and
getting you to re-experience them.
That would be counterproductive at this point.
So yeah, we reflect, but keep it very, very light.
Goals of book one.
I have two goals for this book.
Number one, I want you to learn some new foundational pieces of
knowledge and build a new paradigm, uh, for mental health generally.
Specifically, understanding the polyvagal theory and its relationship to trauma.
Number two, I want you to begin applying the knowledge to your life.
A new top-down narrative can be validating and normalizing.
But I don't want you to rush into the second.
It can be challenging as well, and I want you to be very honest
about your capacity to do so.
As you read this and learn the new paradigm, you will naturally
apply it to yourself and form a new narrative for your life.
Pieces will fall into place.
I hope they fall gently, like a Tetris piece at the beginning of a
new game, snugly fitting into its exact fit at the bottom of the screen.
However, the new pieces could also come crashing down and
stack chaotically if unprepared.
I hope that Tetris analogy is not lost on you.
So be honest with yourself.
Go at a pace that feels right.
Challenging is okay.
It's even a good thing.
Triggered and out of control is not.
OMG, I just wanna get unstuck.
I know you're ready to get unstuck.
You're ready for the next step.
You want to know what to do.
You want to know the hack, the trick.
You wanna know how to reset your nervous system, rewire your brain, consolidate
your memories maybe, integrate your parts, unveil your shadow, clear your
ego, and whatever else is currently popular in the world of psychology.
So let's clarify this right now as part of our paradigm.
There is no hack.
No quick fix.
The TikTok vagal nerve influencers are misguided and
misinformed, to say the least.
No, gargling is not the answer, nor is a frozen bag of peas on your chest or
craning your neck in awkward positions.
I don't wanna dissuade you from your path, but I also don't wanna provide empty
promises of rapid change or quick fixes.
Getting unstuck is work.
I don't know how else to put it.
This Self-regulation System is a sustained practice with a
paradigm shift at its center.
Things can get better, yeah.
You can begin implementing things today to improve your life.
Just by listening to this book and learning a new paradigm, you may
feel a small shift internally toward more regulation or more goodness.
You may feel more compassion and gratitude for yourself now and regarding your past.
So yeah, things can get better, and little things can happen right away.
But the trauma recovery journey is a long one.
It's a path that unfolds gradually, revealing its next steps as you
feel the impulse to move forward.
This journey is about more than just getting unstuck
It's about relearning how to experience the world and your emotions.
It's about discovering a sense of safety within yourself, and eventually about
inviting discomfort with compassion.
As you move through the three Stuck Not Broken books, you'll
have moments of profound insight and challenging reflection.
Trauma recovery is a process of ebbing and flowing, of taking
steps forward and sometimes feeling like you're stepping back.
Yes, you're going to feel like giving up or like it's pointless to try.
The trauma recovery journey does not follow a straight path.
There are obstacles along the way.
These obstacles can come from old patterns resurfacing, uh, unexpected
triggers, or moments of self-doubt.
Obstacles are not signs of failure, but expectations of the journey.
They may indicate progress.
Each obstacle is also an opportunity to apply the new skills and
insights that you're learning.
You'll learn to navigate moments of discomfort, sit with difficult
emotions without overwhelm, and steadily get more and more unstuck.
Right now, in this book, you're embarking on the initial leg of
your trauma recovery journey.
Think of this phase as the beginning of a long trek through varied landscapes.
Just as a hiker would prepare by learning the route and understanding the terrain,
you do the same through book one.
You're acquiring the knowledge necessary for navigating the path ahead.
This foundational understanding of the Polyvagal Theory and its application
to trauma is like orienting yourself with a map before setting out.
You'll learn the direction to go and landmarks to keep an
eye out for on your journey.
Book two and book three will provide you with the tools necessary for your trip,
building on the knowledge from book one.
As you continue this journey, remember that every step moves
you forward, no matter how small.
There will be times when the path seems clear and progress feels
effortless, and others when the way is obscured and challenging.
But with each step, you move closer to a deeper understanding of yourself,
to healing, and to a life where trauma no longer dictates your path.
Next time, the autonomic nervous system.
I will see you then.