I have made the argument in a number of places that it is both foolish and irresponsible for trauma healing practitioners to attempt to shift the neuroceptive baseline of their patients and clients. I have argued vigorously that we cannot, in our healing work, ever make anyone else feel safe. The feeling of safety is a sovereign discernment of each individual nervous system. No matter our intention, or our degree of skill as a practitioner, in whatsoever modality we may practice, we cannot grant safety to someone else. Nor, I believe, should we try.
What I think we can do, and should spend a great deal of effort learning how to do better, is to create the context where it is possible for a client’s sovereign sense of their own safety to arise. This is, however, primarily a question of tending to context. It is not primarily a doing.
At any time that we are working with anyone whose social location is not identical to our own, e.g., anytime I am not working with a heterosexual white American man, the dimensions of safety in my work with a client are sociological. Polyvagal Theory is married to sociology, even if many of its practitioners do not yet understand this.
Neuroception is our moment-to-moment neural detection of safety or threat by the embodied nervous system, and it is a deeply embodied awareness. In studies of memory, we make a distinction between explicit (or autobiographical) memory, and implicit memory, which is typically less easily accessed, and is held in embodied sensation, emotion, and memory. Eugene Gendlin, PhD, the pioneering developer of Focusing-oriented Psychotherapy calls this the felt sense, and while I like this term, it is salient to note that Gendlin did not discover this sense. Ancestral and Indigenous awareness traditions have been working with ‘the felt sense’ as a primary embodied way of knowing since time began. It is one of a number of non-cognitive ways of knowing that have been developed and refined by ancestral cultures since always, but that has both by accident (these way of knowing have not been generally valued in the west) and design (they constitute threats to established authority and have therefore been suppressed), been removed from the epistemological repertoire of the modern western world.
Autobiographical memory arises between 18 and 24 months of age, and its archetypal form is to remember yourself, in a place. I might remember myself, as a young child, walking through a water fountain at the Missouri Botanical Garden. I do, in fact, remember this. There was a sense of ‘me-ness’ and I remember the sights, the sounds, the smells of the place. There were an abundance of antique rose bushes, and I remember how they smelled. I remember my grandmother who was there with my mother, and the warmth of summer in St. Louis. I loved that place. This is an autobiographical memory with a pleasant tone.
Implicit memory, by distinction, tracks back to a time before we developed a conscious sense of self: our experience in utero. People do not consciously remember their experiences in utero, but the body remembers them. These memories are not held in language. The clearest analogy I can give you here is a sense of aquatic sensation, fluid dynamics in the dark, enveloping pressure, fields of electricity, vibration, gurgling sounds. There is a felt awareness of this experience, and it is being recorded cellularly, because it is the context in which the body is being assembled, and our entire body is designed to feel.
Once we are born, this implicit memory continues to develop, beneath language. It has, in fact, nothing to do with language. Or, better said, its language is the nuance of sensation, emotion, and our intrinsic and relational (with whom do we share these experiences?) meaning-making of this information. Peter Levine, PhD, who developed Somatic Experiencing, calls sensation the language of the reptilian brain.
What does it feel like to arrive, as a newborn, and to be totally dependent on others? The deep substrates of our human experience are formed here, and this explains in part why early attachment experiences are so foundational to setting the course of our lives. Before we can speak, articulate our needs, or experience a boundaried sense of self, what was it like for our biology to be nested within the context of the place we arrived? Was it, in fact, a nest we arrived into? Was it that safe?
As a connection phenomenologist, someone who has studied human wellbeing rigorously for thirty years, initially because I was much in need of it myself, and eventually because the trans-disciplinary work we were doing was so effective in helping others, I want to note that I believe humans can only develop to their full capacity within a village. We are social mammals with unique social neurobiology, and only in the context of a properly constructed community, of a certain size, does the true brilliance of our hearts fully activate. I think you will not find it astonishing that this experience, of the intact ancestral village requisite to building the most fully realized human beings, is not an experience most modern people are having.
We moderns, generally speaking, are having the opposite of a village experience. We are being born into, and socialized into system that are profoundly anti-human and anti-life. Most of us are being raised by deeply traumatized parents, who are fairly isolated in deeply dysfunctional societies, in a deeply death-inflected civilization. I say all of this not to alarm you, nor because I am alarmed by it, but simply to note its reality.
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