How to Work with Emerging Defense Responses to Trauma (Beyond the Fight/Flight/Freeze Model)
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with Pat Ogden, PhD;
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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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It was very important to learn about the 3: Cry for Help, Please/Appease and Dorsal Shut Down. It feels like theres way much more to say about all of them. Really appreciate that you reffered to these topics, I am very grateful to have an opportunity to learn more, thank you for preparing this. Very important to distinguish that in cry for help it’s about surviving, not just about having soothing company, which can be often confused.
I will listen multiple times. Taking notes the first time is how I learn, but I miss things trying to get the notes on paper. Plus, that kind of cognitive tasking also has a stressor response on the body. Therefore, I will be listening to the entire broadcast as least one more time to fully integrate the information both on conscious and subconscious levels.
As a bodyworker and skilled manual muscle testing practitioner, I also have always used my own body’s “barometer” to guide me on what kind of bodywork is appropriate to the moment in each session. I have also seen how every nervous system response mentioned today can weaken a manual muscle test. I use muscle testing to interact with a client’s nervous system, asking the questions “can you hold this contraction?” and interpreting both conscious and subconscious “answers.” Examples of a client’s “answer” to a muscle test include: “yes”, “no”, “only if brace elsewhere first”, “only if I hold my breath”, “only for a second”, and “I have no idea what you are asking”. What I cannot do as a bodyworker is delve into the talk therapy portions of why the answers are what they are. But in a well regulated client, their own nervous system is capable of making appropriate changes very quickly.
On a practical note: I wish you would include bodyworker/massage therapist on your list of potential occupations. I have found that a basic understanding of your work is ever present in getting true results in therapeutic massage. I don’t mean that the LMT should step into an out-of-practice counseling role; only that the bodyworker also needs to do his/her job from the ventral vagal state, set compassionate but firm boundaries, deal healthily with transference (happens in our profession a lot), and be aware of the physical aspects of both the hyper-sympathetic state (hard as rock tissue, bracing, holding breath, inability to relax), as well as the Dorsal vagal state (loss of strength in the “back line” (dorsal muscles), repeated escapism (not wanting to do any muscle testing at all or falling asleep in the middle of an interaction), and when to back off from an engaged session because neither a hyper-sympathetic state or a dorsal vagal state is capable of relearning body posture or muscle strengthening from a nervous system perspective. Advanced bodywork practitioners are moving away from a muscle and fascial system focus towards an integrated neurological understanding.
Barbara Sharp, LMT GA
this is fascinating to read. Thanks for sharing!
My wife saw my healing as making me worse, it’s scared her and placed her into a stuck mode, her safety zone. She feels like trauma healing should look like wound healing and since it’s not linear (better) as she looks at my progress and only sees it as being worse. She’s a trauma survivor and a healer and amazing leader herself but she’s not aware in scary medical language of what she’s doing or how she’s so amazing, so she’s resistant/denial/shut down to therapy and understand the brain. I’m getting my formal education DIY style and have no paper trail to prove my experience but I’m still not giving up. This course helps to organize what my brain already knows and my desire to show/help her is met with fear/resistance and disgust. Time is my only solution right now and time is so valuable. It’s also delaying my own healing because I’m a very experienced RN currently on a sabbatical. Eventually I’ll be back out there healing/helping/and saving lives again. This is what I hope to gain from this series. Because the two of us together have a vast network of people that our healing reaches.
Not a therapist but I work in the delicate field of early years Steiner education.
This discussion tonight contributes to deepening my understanding of my own system’s deregulation in order to strengthen my ever evolving capacities of empathy compassion, tolerance, love.
All the things I need in my tool kit for the type of work I’m in.
A key component of Steiner’s guidance for being human is to work on the self , one’s own human qualities , in order to be, by virtue of oneself, a healthy example of a world which is safe for the child to grow in.
We are prepared to be the soil for them.
I reiterate Ruth’s sentiments about the universal good of this work.
Thank you
I wonder what the best option is for online training in child psychology?
wonderful, keep up the good work 🙂
So much valuable and practical info in this module! Thank you for your wonderful work! So many practical strategies to work with!!
Some of the strategies I will be using:
To be reminded of how important it is to psycho-educate our clients regarding how their own nervous system works and how they might respond in each different state, helping them find the resources they feel their nervous system needs, in their own time, and in each of these states so that they feel safe enough before we can move on in therapy. (techniques from Deb Dana)
Modelling for them and role playing with them: how would your dorsal say no? How does it manifest for you?
How different does it feel when it comes from a ventral state? What does that look like?
How to say “yes” in each of these states? and to show them how it works for us, which might be different to how it works for them and that it is ok.
And from Pat Ogden, to use a somatic approach when they are in a collapse-shut down state with the physical impulse:
by first aligning their body posture to fit with the physical impulse of pushing away or out (with non-threatening situations) and to coach them along the way so they can integrate the posture that best fits the movement they want/need to perform.
OT from Cornwall, GB
Thankyou for offering this session. I will use it with clients in the future to know how to recognise and navigate these presentations. I found it very helpful to know how to approach cues from my own nervous system when working with a client and how to open out to this. I found the discussion about language use interesting and beneficial to know how to approach terminology the client can engage with. I also really recognise that in the past, I was being held in the position of all-knowing and idealised therapist and that created difficulties that I didn’t have the insight to handle in the best way and caused me to be triggered into collapse.
– The difference between a cry for help and acting from a place of secure attachment is the element of desperation for survival, and a lack of self awareness in the moment.
– How to deal with attach/cry for help: activate boundary muscles in body, and speak with warm voice to hold a boundary.
– Practice speaking from different vagal states to learn how to get out of collapse/submit.
– Practice pushing motions to deal with collapse on a somatic level.
– Ask: ‘where did the people pleasing start? Where did you learn it was dangerous to have your own wants and needs?’
Really enjoyed this. I’m familiar with so much of this from past trainings with many of you, but this is very well put together and I always hear something in a new way, make a new connection.
I definitely will be more aware of maintaining boundaries and engaging “boundary muscles” ( which was new for me to hear and really helpful”) with attach/cry for help, and checking for collapse-submit dorsal state in compliant as well as depressed/helpless clients.
The exercise of saying “no” from the different states seems really helpful and I will try to use that today with a chronically overwhelmed client who oscillates between helpless and getting sympathetically charged, with awful results in relationships and daily interchanges.
Thanks.
As a trauma survivor myself and having been in counseling for years, this video has helped me see my own responses with my own therapist through the years. I understand all the models and the examples that I have worked through in my own healing. Now, as a life coach, my first goal has always been to create a safe environment for my clients physically and emotionally. It’s what I needed and had a hard time finding. I now have more tools to recognize, understand, and name these feelings and trauma responses and get on my client’s maps in order to help them regulate their own emotions. It also helps me to understand when my clients need more help than I can give alone.
Not a practitioner, I learn why therapies in the past didn’t work or very little and I always regressed.
I am very grateful for this opportunity and I read some books of the experts talking during the webinar.
Anonymous
Excellent presentation using information that was never a part of my training years ago. Thank you! Listening today prompted a question: Is there a spectrum of severity (pathology of behavioral patterns that get in the client’s way of healthy functioning) between what we have long acknowledged as “people pleasing behaviors” and the internalization of the survival mechanism of “please and appease”??
I have two clients in the please and appease state – but each react to situations very differently. One continues with please and appease thoughts and behaviors when confronted with something unpleasant another person is saying or doing, while the other engages in the please and appease behaviors, but internally feels angry, resentful, victimized, and blaming. It’s as if he’s angry that they are forcing him into appeasing them. They both feel like they have no choices, but each feels differently about it. I’m guessing that would be because of the original source or circumstances under which this response created.
I’ve learned so much today about how to continue helping them to create the change they are seeking.
I will integrate what I learned in the polyvagal model Sympathetic, parasympathetic responses to define and elaborate elaborate to clients what happening for them and working towards integrating it into experiential work. I especially like Ogden’s focus on the body and expressing through activity. I love the ways the experts defined trauma responses and the ways they work with clients. I see the need for more study in defining responses to stress and finding ways to work through it. I love the integrative approach to working with trauma.
Now do I purchase this training program!!!!!!
Valuable knowledge accompanied by practical application. So helpful.
THANK you for all you do.
Looking forward to checking in back and forth for NS sensations, clear language working towards feeling of safety with please and appease and having client practice saying no.(at last!)
I appreciate the differentiation between the collapse response & depression. I will share this information with the counselors I supervise.
You have convinced me that I want and need to get the Gold Package!
This is so rich and practical. I can chew on what I’ve been able to take
in today, but I want to review time and again, especially what is modeled
by each of your wonderful presenters. Thanks and God Bless
As an International Chaplain working with Trauma clients I have always been in tune in watching my own feelings and responses- This is a continuous reminder on the importance on being sensitive to what i am feeling and facing as i help my families. Interpreting my own nervous systems and conscientiously take a moment and be honest and open with the client- “lets take a moment here and both respond to the “nervous system barometer”. Thank you so much- so helpful. Specially with the different cultures and backgrounds that I work with.
Continuous Blessings.
Natalia Rodriguez LIRS
We are the drop- and we are the ocean. One well thought out and then delivered drop= micro shift = freedom for life.
I appreciate the differentiation between the collapse response & depression. I will share this information with the counselors I supervise.
really appreciated the way this identification of symptoms of chronic trauma were teased out and how to respond to them as a therapist, with the goal of getting the work done. I also appreciated how it was explained, what the therapist can look out for in their own self care and how to use it in the room towards the therapeutic goal!
excellent 👌 presentation!
That was a really helpful session with enough practical tools to help me identify these responses in clients and how I may be able to work with them. Working in the field of sexual abuse I see a lot of the Please/Appease response but it will be really helpful to work with it from the nervous system rather than just as responses ingrained in women by society. Thank you
Slow down and be aware of my own system changes. Thank you very much
I think it will be ok for me to recognize and name a client’s “please and appease” and “idealizing me” behavior and try to find a way with them to relate to others that recognizes their boundaries. Possibly role-playing? Trying to figure out what triggered their appease-idealize behavior, and so on.
I will try to be aware of behaviour that causes individuals to say what they think I want to hear rather than the truth.
I am working with a patient now with complex trauma and I think the insights about the defense responses has affirmed and gave me important understanding on what the patient is going through. Thank you.
Teaching clients to say no in the 3 states of the nervous system was fascinating. I want to learn what that is and how to do it.
Thank you for what you do! It is a very useful and well-structured program.
I am not a therapist, I am interested in my own healing. I had an ah-ha moment as Deb Dana talked about playing with her client to learn how ventral vagal responses feel to their nervous system. I had tingles on my arms and legs. I have noticed such sensations with increasing frequency lately. I now equate these sensations as me being in ventral vagal and social engagement. Perhaps this new recognition will assist me as I face continuing trauma that follows me.
Thankyou Ruth! Your final statement about how helping one life can help all of humanity always touches me so deeply also because it’s one of the versus of Quran. 🙂 Thankyou NICABM team ❤️
Realize that please appease can be so subtle that it can look like an ok client state
Very helpful insight
Excellent session… was there a “Road Map for Module 3”? I didn’t see one in the emails; and I’ve been finding them helpful to print out & refer to along with the other notes I’m taking as I watch. Thank you!!
I don’t think so, I think they said something about upgrading to Gold to get the worksheets for the other modules.
I
I was able to download worksheets for all 5 modules without having the gold package.
Hi, yes on the road map is on the very bottom of the email, or if not there then on the very bottom of the screen that is displayed when waiting for the webinar to begin. 3 pages.
I found this session a little hard to follow. At one point you would say you were going to help therapist deal with these clients, then you told stories about clients. not about we as practitioners should handle situations. Like I said a little confusing. I was never sure who and what you were talking about
I am NOT a therapist but had no trouble following. So perhaps it would be helpful to you to watch the webinar once again, or even if multiple times, and take notes.
BPD is now called EUPD.
Useful to have reminders of the somatic techniques.
Very good section
I will use checking in with my nervous system and stopping to acknowledge what I am feeling to reroute myself and model for my clients that it is ok to be off the track but to get back on by using coping skills.
Information of the please and appease survival response was very useful and important. Thank you for these webinars.
Thank you very much for this session. I run a very small, all-volunteer adaptive riding program. As a riding instructor, special educator, and NOT a therapist, my take-away is that of recognition of problems and how not to make them worse while suggesting possibilities for the family to get help.
I am a psychologist in The Woodlands (right near Spring, Texas) and also agree with the therapeutic value of horses. They are so intuitive.
In Usha Tummala-Narra’s story of how her client thought she might disappoint her, based on the fact that Usha was the kind of person ‘who would never let herself get into that situation’. How can we let our clients know enough about ourselves and our fragile, broken parts, to make sure they do not feel that? I was not sure how Usha dealt with it. This has happened to me, and I exposed personal parts of my own journey, but I know when I have been in therapy, the therapists do not do that.
x
ps THANK YOU
I feel in my practice as a therapist that it is so important to share something of ourselves when it will help our clients -and only then- to create a sense of ‘my therapist is also just human and fallible and recognizes some of the things I’m telling her about’ to close the gap between us, so that we can resonate together and start the healing.
Lou, my foster-girl’s Sophie’s sister has long had discussion around a DID diagnosis, which her sister, who is well-progressed in therapy has always said feels wrong. That “her problem iis our shared childhood trauma. Nothing else.” Today’s accounts of the “collapse and submit” response and the “cry for help” nervous system origin will make a critical difference to both my clever girls. Always when Sophie can understand the logic of her nervous system another level of trauma programming falls out of her system. And Sophie is the only person Lou trusts enough to open the trauma wiring. But between my “stable base” and Sophie’s sibling relationship we may be able to help Lou along. Thank you especially to the lovely kind man who tells his clients “I wish you could see what I see”. That man has lots of ways to articulate what’s true- he loves his clients. I recognise it because I love my girls, in a different-boundaried but equivalent way. My counsellors have repeatedly commented on it as very strong and surprising. However while I love both my girls, love on its own hasn’t been enough. Today gives me a response to Lou other than nights and days of holding her like a small child. Both girls are in their 20s and Lou bore the brunt of the sexual abuse for which Sophie has survivor guilt. We have the raw ingredients to work – I have all the love and resilience and both girls trust me. Now we have some insight and new ways to articulate and balance. I have renewed hope for both girls as a family and for Lou themself to get to more good times. Together and in life. In general, without more years passing them by which jjst adds to their grief load. To all the survivors reading here, Sophie, Lou and I want you to know that you are never alone and someone careseven if you can’t see or feel us. We spend a few hours every week just sending out love and care to all the other grown up kids who still need it. We trust (and pray) you feel it when you need it. Thank you forthis which Lou and Soph could never afford and now Lou and her co-residents aretalking about it. So much lovefrom Claire in Scotland (not a legal fosterer. Just a borrowed-Mum.)
This has been so helpful to me as a client. I have unfortunately had a lot of very harmful therapy and it has often been explicitly said to me that there is too much wrong with me to be helped. Hearing these things gives me a lot of hope not only that there might be someone out there who knows how to help, but that I’ll also be able to recognize someone who knows what they are doing and distinguish between that and someone who doesn’t know. It also of course helps me to know better how to help clients and how to properly refer out when i feel like I don’t have enough experience to hone able to help someone.
Thank you so much for this brilliant module. I believe every person working in the trauma field should have this knowledge and understanding. As a trauma survivor and practitioner this has been invaluable and I have learnt so much about how to work with the subtle communication in the therapeutic relationship. Looking forward to next week 🙂
wow. the most valuable information about trauma. some other courses i have done was all overloaded with theory, irrelevant (at that stage) information that i just found to be overwhelming. This has been so insightful, relevant, to the point information that i can go and use with some of my clients straight away. Thank you for an opportunity to be part of this.
Another stellar module today! I learned a lot. My biggest takeaways were learning the four ways that Collapse/Submit may present and how to approach those, as well as the function of the Please/Appease response. Not only was this module eye-opening and empowering for me personally, I have also gained profound knowledge and tools to better assist my clients when trauma responses present themselves. I am grateful to all the presenters here at NICABM. The work you do is greatly appreciated. Much gratitude.
I will work off my notes and use a colleague to practice some of the subtleties of what I learned today or that I had forgotten over the years.
I plan to apply this to a client who is a multiple personality. I have been holding back some of the subtleties of what I know, because I was afraid of hurting this client, which made her feel I didn’t know what I was doing.
I am encouraged!
This research is highly practical, wonderfully nuanced work. I see clients move between collapse/submit and please/appease in session and in the narratives they share. I am not completely clear on how freeze differs from collapse/submit, except that collapse is a full showdown. Would you say that collapse/submit is the high end of a freeze (Dorsal) spectrum? Thank you.
I heard those two states differentiated in terms of muscle tonicity amongst other things
This is a better frame for understanding how women stay in domestic violence relationships and fosters more patience on the part of the therapist.
Thank you for discussion how to listen to patients and our own bodies nervous system reactions to trauma and abuse from attachment, collapse, please and appease. Will discuss with my patients.
I actually was able to use the understanding of please/appease today to help a client understand what their NS was doing. It really helped them to calm and to be curious about learning more to understand themselves. Thanks so much for making this free, as I simply could not afford it! You have made a difference in the lives of my clients.
My biggest takeaway is to use my nervous system to recognize what may be going on with my client’s nervous system.