Polyvagal Safety by Stephen W. Porges

Author:Stephen W. Porges
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

TASKS OF THE GROUP LEADER: THREE PRINCIPLES BASED ON POLYVAGAL THEORY

This section elaborates on how three polyvagal processes (i.e., neuroception, social engagement, and vagal brake) work during therapy to promote positive clinical outcomes. The group leader needs to understand these processes in order to integrate the recommendations put forth by Polyvagal Theory for increasing the effectiveness of group therapy:

1.Become familiar with the social and environmental features that bias neuroception and how this nonconscious neural process impacts a person’s ability to discern between safety and threat.

2.Construct a group environment that utilizes environmental features to promote a neuroception of safety to downregulate defensiveness and provide opportunities for the exercising of each group member’s social engagement system.

3.Exercise the vagal brake by providing repeated opportunities for group members to neutrally navigate through a sequence of states from calm, to vigilant, to startle, and back to calm.

If these principles of Polyvagal Theory are used to guide clinical interventions during group treatment, four essential outcomes will naturally emerge: (1) improvement in both explicit and implicit affect regulation; (2) enhancement of affect recognition and refining emotional literacy; (3) correction of faulty neuroception; and (4) expansion of relational capacities by increasing acuity in reading social cues and nonverbal implicit communication. Before we can expect our group members to achieve any semblance of understanding what their emotions and their body-based visceral feelings are communicating to them and others, we must help them recognize and identify their emotions as they are currently occurring in the group. We must assist them in becoming aware of their visceral signals rather than avoiding them, by dissociating and numbing them out, becoming frightened by their feelings, or acting them out.

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