I want to pick up where I left off in my previous post about the Polyvagal Theory that had 3 pictures in it for Safety, Fight/Flight, and Freeze. Those pictures helped me see that what is going on is an interaction between your nervous system and your environment…when your nervous system senses something that signals danger, you shift states to prepare to address the threat. Seeing the colors change in the background in the pictures connected with my mind because I think we have all had experiences where something happens and it’s like the background changes to yellow/danger and everything feels different. 

I wanted to try making images that would help me get clarity about how the physiological states can only change in a certain sequence. In terms of the Polyvagal Chart, they can only go from green to yellow to red and then red to yellow to green. So you can’t get back to green without going through the yellow.

For these images I just used stick figures so we can concentrate on the color changes/state changes. First, let’s just look at what the different states are. Then we will look at them in sequence. Here are the 3 states:

Safety (Ventral Vagal)

Danger (SNS): Fight/Flight

Life-threat (DV): Freeze, Shutdown/Collapse

The sequence the states change in must be green to yellow to red, and then from red back to yellow and back to green. Here’s what that would look like:

These images help us see that a person’s physiological state changes based on their perception of the environment – whether they feel safe or not. If you sense danger, your body prepares to fight or flee. If you sense that any more motion would endanger you, your body floods your system with immobilizing neuro-chemicals to put you into a sudden freeze. Looking at these pictures helps me think about what happens between the pictures…what it would take to go from feeling like you do in green, to feeling like you do in red. And then it helps me to see what it would take to be able to be in a calm state again after being in a defensive mode. And that helped me to be able to envision what it means to be living on the Squiggle of Trauma.

The Squiggle of Trauma is if you get stuck going from red to yellow but can’t get back to green so you just go from red to yellow to red to yellow. Here is a table I made to help see what it means to be stuck going between yellow and red…unable to resolve the threat…unable to return to safety:

This helped me see that the problem is that you never feel like you are in a safe environment. The fight/flight-freeze cycle can be triggered by physical threats, but I think this table shows the difficulty of our nervous systems being triggered into this cycle by emotional stressors. It can make it feel like you are going from one stressful situation to another without ever really reaching a point of calm. And this type of chronic stress can lead to health problems, which I think is what happened for me. 

If that pattern keeps going, it turns into something like this:

Here you can see how the person stays in freeze for longer periods of time and then goes into stress mode when they need to be active and then just refreezes. That made me think of the imagery of a storm. It’s like there’s a serious storm going on outside which makes it where you are pretty much in a freeze when you are inside…and then if you need to go outside for some reason, you go into SNS to enable you to go out into the storm for your daily activities. 

So while these tables helped me see what the problem is, it also helped me see what the solution is…what we are trying to do when we are trying to get to green. In the article I was talking about in my previous post called “The polyvagal theory: New insights into adaptive reactions of the autonomic nervous system”, Stephen Porges says, “Any stimulus that has the potential for increasing an organism’s experience of safety has the potential of recruiting the evolutionarily more advanced neural circuits that support the prosocial behaviors of the social engagement system.” So when we are stuck in yellow or red, what we need to do is look for any stimuli that will help increase our experience of safety in our environment. If we are able to feel safe again, we can return to green. The Squiggle of Life we are trying to get to is where you mostly just go from green to a little bit of yellow and then easily back into green again after completely discharging the action energy that got cued up when you went into yellow. It would look like this:

I’m a visual learner and these AI images really helped me, so I kept working with it and will share them with you in several separate posts. I was able to make some that helped me think of stimuli, or resources, we can use to help us feel safe. But the first group of animated pictures I will share with you is about your nervous system being triggered by a physical threat of a tiger and seeing how to resolve that. Hopefully soon I will share in separate posts the other groups of images that are about emotional stressors.

In this picture, the stick figure is calm and feeling safe.

Then he sees a tiger in his environment. The tiger sees him, too, and starts chasing him. So the stick figure quickly changes physiological states to Danger (SNS) and feels a surge of mobilizing chemicals and takes off running.

When he sees that the tiger will be able to catch up to him, he hides behind a tree and feels a surge of immobilizing chemicals and becomes undetectable to the tiger. (If a tiger had been as close as in the previous picture, he probably wouldn’t have been able to hide, but I think the picture is still helpful. I couldn’t get it to where the tiger was farther away.)

The tiger can’t find him, so the tiger walks off. The stick figure waits to be sure the tiger is completely gone.

Then he feels a surge of mobilizing energy…he shakes off the compressed SNS energy from when he had to freeze…and then he takes off running to safety. The AI image generator made him smiling because I had typed in that he was relieved to be getting to safety. I couldn’t get it to change it, but I think it works. It’s really important to remember that running to safety will feel good. So he is excited to make a successful escape!

After he has been back in safety for awhile, his heart rate and breathing rate return to normal.

I hope you find these images helpful. They really help me see what is happening when we are changing states — we are reacting to a stressor in our environment. And it helped me see what we are trying to do when we are trying to get from red, through the yellow, to green again — we are looking for safety…we are trying to feel safe again.

I will stop here for today and post sometime soon the pictures of what Fight/Flight-Freeze looks like with emotional stressors.