In this episode, neuroception, the unconscious mechanism that
detects cues of safety and danger and shifts your autonomic state
without your awareness, but affects absolutely everything you experience.
Hi, I'm Justin Sunseri, a therapist, self-regulation coach, and Polyvagal
Institute editorial board member.
You are listening to Stuck Not Broken, Book One, Trauma
and the Polyvagal Paradigm.
If you're just joining in, welcome, first off.
But second, um, this is an audiobook, and it's meant to be
listened to after the previous ones.
So head back on over to the beginning if you're brand new to this material.
If you've been listening, I sincerely hope that you're benefiting from the audiobook.
You can purchase the written version, which has numerous journal reflections
and primary source citations through the link in the description.
It's available in all formats.
Neuroception.
You understand the autonomic nervous system and its three basic states
based on the previous episodes.
So how does one access these states?
What is the mechanism of action here?
Dr. Stephen Porges coined the term neuroception to describe the
unconscious process of detecting cues of safety or danger from the
external and the internal environment.
I've seen others call this the body's threat detection system or compare it
to Spider-Man's superhuman spider sense.
These are helpful but incomplete.
Neuroception does not detect only danger, it also detect, detects safety.
External information from the environment passes through our
five senses and then reaches very primitive parts of the brainstem
outside of our conscious awareness.
The brainstem makes the neuroceptive decision to shift autonomic state
up or down the polyvagal ladder.
Ideally, the brainstem shifts to the appropriate autonomic nervous
system state and meets the survival needs in the context of the moment.
Neuroception has nothing to do with choice.
It has everything to do with predetermined neurobiological
responses to safety or danger.
Evolution encoded these responses into our DNA generation after generation.
The encoding helped our evolutionary ancestors survive long enough to pass
on what helped them to autonomically survive to the next generation.
But neuroception also occurs internally.
Your body sends signals to your brainstem, which processes them
and adjusts your state just like to the external environment.
But neuroception also occurs internally.
Your body sends signals to your brain stem, which processes them
and adjusts your autonomic state.
For example, if you're too hungry, you shift into a fight
state and you become hangry.
Neuroceptive keys.
Each autonomic state restricts or enables the options of our different
experiential domains, our behaviors, our sensations, our impulses, our emotions,
and even our cognitions, our thinking.
In essence, the possibilities of these domains are controlled by each state.
For example, the biology of the safety state unlocks access to behaviors linked
to social engagement, like gentle eye contact and a rich prosodic vocal range.
You can't use these behaviors from flight, fight, or shutdown,
at least not in a genuine way.
I, I think some people can, uh, fake it pretty well.
As one's active state descends the polyvagal ladder, the individual
loses access to the experience that are higher up the ladder.
When you enter the flight state, you lose the feelings of hope and
joy that come from the safety state.
When you enter shutdown, you lose the impulse to aggressively enforce
boundaries that come from the fight state.
Imagine a wide-eyed young boy running from a dog.
Is this young boy capable of smiling in social engagement while fleeing?
Of course not.
Is it because he hasn't chosen to socially engage?
No.
Those behaviors are simply not accessible while he's in flight.
He dropped down the polyvagal ladder and is in a sympathetic survival mode.
His body's potential is entirely skewed towards survival through
flight, through mobilized evasion.
His polyvagal state, flight, dictates the limits of his experiences in behavior
and emotions and cognitions and impulses.
Even within the same context, your state can limit or expand
your experience and behavior.
If you're playing chess in your safety state, you'll be patient
and you'll think clearly.
If you're playing chess from flight, you'll feel nervous and catastrophize
a potential loss in your mind.
If you're playing from shutdown, well, you may not have even shown up.
You lack motivation to try, since in your brain at least,
you think you'll lose anyway.
Shifts down the polyvagal ladder are temporary.
When the boy successfully escapes the dog and returns home, his autonomic nervous
system will return to its safety state.
He'll go to his mom and get a reassuring hug as she soothes him with her voice.
He'll tell her the story, share a smile with her, and perhaps even laugh
about the situation He enters flight when he needs to, mobilizes, then
returns to a safety state when in a safe environment and with a safe other.
Although defensive states are temporary, it is possible to get stuck in them.
We will discuss this, uh, more in section three.
Neuro- neuroceptive predictability.
Some interpersonal cues are more predictive than others in providing
a neuroception of safety or danger, though this can vary significantly
across individuals, of course.
For example, safety, vocal prosody, which is the musical quality of voice, gentle
touch, face-to-face interaction, uh, gentle eye contact, the use of facial
muscles, especially the upper face.
These all… These can typically all indicate safety.
Danger.
Examples are harsh tone of voice, like too low or too high, monotone voice,
wide eyes, flat affect, or encroaching on space, getting too close to people.
Those can typically predictably be neurocepted as cues of danger,
though of course, lots of variation.
We take in others' behaviors through our senses.
These behaviors will trigger responses of safety or danger, basically.
When someone smiles genuinely, it triggers a neuroception of safety within us.
When we see someone who has no facial movement, it triggers
a neuroception of danger.
Other sensory inputs that don't involve people are also likely to trigger feelings
of safety or danger, like environmental cues such as the feel of a gentle
breeze, the colors of a sunset, or the sound of waves crashing on the shore.
These will likely trigger safety.
Other things will likely trigger defense, like loud, booming bass
sounds or the prick of a thorn.
We don't choose how we feel about these, nor do we decide how we neurocept them.
We simply take in the external stimuli through our senses.
Then that stimuli gets filtered through our brain stem, shifting our autonomic
nervous system state accordingly.
This discussion of the unconscious nature of neuroception may lead to a
harsh mechanical view of ourselves.
We're obviously not machines.
We aren't computers running code.
But in a way, we kind of are.
Humans can do incredible things that seem to detach us from
the rest of the animal kingdom.
We make tools that help us make other tools.
We create incredible works of art and foods that seem to touch us to the core.
At the same time, underneath it all, we are very much biological
organisms just like any other.
Our bodies do indeed receive sensory inputs and then shift state in
response to those sensory inputs.
I'm positive you can think of at least one example of your body doing something
that you didn't consciously want it to, like a time when you froze when you would
have preferred to fight, a time when you collapsed in helplessness when you
really wanted to speak powerfully, a time when you desperately wanted to connect
to someone but could not force yourself to hug them or to receive their hug.
While we are inherently biological organisms, we also seem to have a lot
of choice every moment of every day.
Now, you can't choose to exist in your safety state in this moment.
Not exactly.
But can you choose to extend your exhale?
Can you choose to cut open a lime and mindfully smell it?
Can you choose to step outside your home and feel the sunlight?
It seems like we can generally choose within every small moment of the present.
Those choices add up and help us access more safety.
Yes, we are organisms, and our state limits our experiences, but
we can influence our state to become more experientially expansive.
As we access more safety, our neuroceptive triggers still exist,
but we'll have more capacity to notice and then use them in our decisions.
Noticing neuroceptions.
Let's do a quick experiment using your imagination.
I'll share a story, and all you need to do is fill in the blanks.
Notice what internal shifts are happening within you throughout the story.
It might be difficult, but do your best to identify any subtle emotions or
sensations that come up in your body.
You're walking down a sidewalk after having gotten off work.
It's dark outside as you make your way to your car about a block away.
You can hear the dull hum of traffic in the distance.
As you walk, you think about the day's events, particularly the stressful ones.
You look down as you walk, remembering what someone said that upset you.
Your thoughts focus on the memory, wondering why that person talked
to you that way, what you should have done differently, and so on.
You feel blank.
As you think, you lose connection to the sounds of the environment,
including the footsteps behind you.
When you do notice the footsteps, you feel blank.
Your body feels the impulse to blank.
You may have felt minor autonomic shifts within you as you
imagined the scenario unfolding.
You may have shifted into defensive activation, accompanied by a slight
impulse to run or to use aggression toward the potential danger.
Or perhaps you tensed, your gut twisting, feeling immobile with a tinge of fear.
Or maybe you just felt uneasy because you didn't know where I
was going to take you in the story.
You can notice neuroreceptions as they happen, or even afterward
when you're reflecting back.
That's a lot more common.
We look back and recognize these neuroceptive shifts
in our autonomic state.
After the fact, we can see when these shifts happen, identifying what state
we were in and which one we shifted to.
We may also notice the environmental stimuli that triggered the state
shift, but commonly we don't.
What we neurocept as safe or dangerous easily and typically goes unnoticed, even
when we examine the situation later on.
There could be otherwise benign aspects of the environment that mean something to
a particular individual, and they don't realize that they are cues of danger.
Got to pay attention.
I was working with a teen student on identifying what fidget might help her
to discharge some stuck defensive energy.
More on this in Stuck Not Broken Book Three.
I offered her a green rubber ring with spikes all around it.
She declined with a forceful shake of her head, but offered no explanation.
She explained later on in the session that the color green
causes her to feel nauseous.
Green being the color of her father's deceased body the last time she saw him.
Green has no inherent meaning or value by itself.
It's just a color.
Honestly, it's probably more likely a neuroception of safety for most people,
given the, you know, the greens in nature.
But for this person, the color green had meaning.
Not, uh, primarily a cognitive meaning, but more of a, a
visceral, a body-based one.
She felt the bottom-up activation during the session, a defensive neuroception
that she experienced as nausea.
Neuroception has some generally predictable elements.
However, neuroceptive triggers and autonomic shifts vary
from person to person.
Traumatized individuals may show the greatest variance, as I'll
discuss more in section three.
You may have your own version of green, something that triggers
defensive activation for you, but not really for anybody else.
Maybe a specific place or object, maybe a scent, a sound, or a texture.
Healthy neuroception.
Healthy neuroception means functional based on external and
internal survival needs for the organism in the present moment.
Healthy does not refer to good.
Healthy does not carry judgment either.
Healthy refers to being biologically optimal for maintaining
ideal body functioning and responding to contextual danger.
Personally, I think functional neuroception might be a better phrase.
Through healthy neuroception or functional neuroception, the body
detects and shifts to the appropriate state based on contextual needs.
The body uses social behavior in a safe environment with safe people, and it does
not use defenses like running or fleeing unless it's in a dangerous environment.
The individual with healthy neuroception accurately detects safety cues and then
climbs to the top of their polyvagal ladder, or they maintain access to it.
This individual might be a student who goes to a safe school, lives in a safe
home, and can sit in class, interact with others appropriately, and learn.
The student neurocepts safety in their life contexts, and their behaviors follow.
This same student can also access their defensive states when necessary,
like when actual environmental danger cues trigger defense.
They will feel mobilization, flight-fight mobilization, if they hear a loud
booming sound in the distance.
At that moment, their body will access flight activation.
If they can't flee the dangerous situation, they'll access fight.
If they cannot escape or fight, they will neurocept life threat and then
immobilize in their shutdown state.
This sequence is the path of healthy neuroception based on environmental cues.
Again, this is not an issue of the individual choosing to react or
choosing to neurocept and shift state.
Neuroception is an unconscious process that aided our evolutionary
ancestors in surviving and passing on their genetic material without
conscious direction or control.
They needed to accurately and immediately detect safety and danger,
shift state, and also shift behaviors.
These processes are still alive within us today.
Unhealthy neuroception.
Through unhealthy neuroception, the body does not accurately detect or shift
state in response to the environment.
The body does not fight or flee in a dangerous environment, and it does not
use social behavior in a safe environment.
In other words, the individual's threat detector is missing threats, and their
safety detector is missing safety.
Or if it is detecting it, it's not shifting to the appropriate
state for that context.
Unhealthy neuroception may be why some traumatized individuals
continually repeat the same harmful decisions, and even why trauma passes
from one generation to the next.
They don't recognize danger in others and don't respond appropriately.
They also don't recognize safety when it's there.
They end up feeling safe with dangerous individuals and feel
danger with safe individuals.
They unknowingly fill their lives with the wrong people, repeating
the same disastrous relationships.
The following is a common scenario of generational trauma
that I've seen in my practice.
The mom who was sexually abused by her authoritarian stepfather does
not pick up on the danger of her own short-term boyfriend living
with her and her own children.
She feels a pseudo-connection to him and fails to recognize his red flags.
He's jealous, controlling, and demanding.
The short-term boyfriend sexually abuses a child in the home, and Mom denies it
occurred when the child comes to her.
This dynamic creates a new generation of sexual trauma by a substitute
authoritarian father figure.
The mother's unhealthy neuroception thwarted her
from detecting the boyfriend's
danger cues early on.
She did not neurocept
other red flags that may have been right under her nose, such
as inappropriate gift-giving by him to one child in particular.
It also prevented her from listening to her own children
and taking them seriously.
Instead of mobilizing with flight-fight energy to protect her
children, she denies the allegation and retreats into pseudo-connection
with her abusive boyfriend.
As she looks back from her safety state someday, those red flags become
much more apparent, and she'll realize the cues that she saw but did not
at that time register as dangerous.
She may remember the first time the boyfriend erupted in anger over
something minuscule or a joke he made with a perverse sexual innuendo
that was far from appropriate.
She can look back and see the escalation of control over her
children and his manipulation of her emotions when the child raised,
raised the alarm and told the truth.
At the moment, she missed those red flags because of an unhealthy
neuroception from her own traumatic past.
Later, as she builds more safety in her system and can think more clearly, these
things will become painfully obvious.
I'm sure you see the child victim in this scenario may end up stuck in trauma
and repeat this dysfunctional pattern.
As an adolescent, the abused child will find comforts in romantic
partners that soothe their emotions, providing a pseudo-connection
and a false sense of safety.
The partner will use the adolescent for their own selfish motives,
and the adolescent will miss red flags, such as forcing them to share
their mobile location at all times.
As the adolescent enters adulthood, the same patterns solidify.
They will consistently seek connection with others and
find it in the wrong people.
Their unhealthy neuroception will keep them from using their own
flight-fight inner power, preventing them from forming real and safe,
loving connections with trustworthy individuals and partners as well.
I have worked with kids, adolescents, adults, families, and sadly have
seen this scenario unfold many times.
I've seen it at every stage through the various age groups that I've worked with.
Maybe not exactly like this, but some variation of this general story.
Of course, this does not have to be a predetermined outcome for anybody,
and steps can be taken to prevent this potential from becoming a reality.
If you identify with this story or your own version of the story, I
hope the Self-regulation System helps you break the generational cycle.
Please seek out a professional if needed.
That's neuroception.
Next time, as we continue Stuck Not Broken Book One, Story Follows State.
Why do you think the way that you do?
Thank you for listening.