Section 3 Flashcards
How to create an Art Map
Start with heavy-weight, large-sized art paper. Can illustrate one or multiple states of the autonomic hierarchy. Can create a collage, drawing, painting, gathered objects from nature, or more. Once the client has decided on the style, encourage the client to let their autonomic nervous system guide them. Once complete, ask them to take you into their creative process and tell the story of their map.
Show and Tell Exercise
Ask your client to choose an object to represent each of their three states. Explore the process of choosing and ask your client to tell you the story of each object.
Writing about Your Rhythm Exercise
Writing helps organize experiences and often leads to a new perspective.
Can write about one state, such as sympathetic or dorsal vagal dysregulation, which supports a safe re-viewing of the experience and brings perception to neuroception. Writing about ventral vagal helps client savor the experience.
Can also right about their rhythm of response and how client moves between states. Is there a stuck place? How do they get unstuck? Is there a flow? How do they feel the flow?
Impact of music on autonomic nervous system
Music is both a modulator and activator of the autonomic nervous system. Reactions include stimulation of emotion-processing parts of the brain and levels of homones. Muscles of the Social Engagement System (face, head, middle ear) are active in both listening to and producing music.
Musical Playlist Exercise
Creating, sharing, listening and experiencing playlists together with a client is a meaningful experience of reciprocity.
A playlist can focus on the ventral vagal state – such as calm, excitement, passion, connection, joy.
Another playlist can bring a musical revisiting of dysregulated moments – clients can sink into and even savor the suffering of sympathetic and dorsal vagal moments. When the music matches the mood, the autonomic resonance makes it possible for them to safely touch their suffering.
Third playlist can create the experience of moving through response cycle.
Moving with Your Map Exercise
Introduce the skills of movement mapping to your clients as a way for them to first connect to an individual state and express it in the form of motion and then to experiment with transitioning between states by linking one movement to the next. Ventral vagal movements are commonly gestures with a circular flow, sympathetic are often jagged and fast, while dorsal vagal motions are slow. Begin by extending time with ventral vagal and abbreviating time with sympathetic and dorsal movement – then change ratio as client gains confidence in ventral vagal.
The therapist mirroring of movements increases somatic and emotional understanding and increases connectedness/empathy.
Also have client take turns leading and following your own Move your Map movements.
Sculpting Exercise
Move either a partner or a mannequin to represent an autonomic state.
Mapping in Space Exercise – Individual Exploration
Gives your clients a safe way to get to know their autonomic states by physically moving in and out of them. Many clients feel stuck in a survival state and this is a way to experience movement which can counteract that stuckness and also a sense of control.
Have client identify individual spaces or seats around the room for each autonomic state and begin to move between them. Ventral vagal space is experienced most at first with sympathetic and dorsal experienced briefly. Walk with them to bring your presence to their dysregulated state.
Invite client to inhabit each space and narrate the story of the state.
Mapping in Space Exercise – Interactive Exploration
Have spaces set up as in Individual Exploration varation. Ask your client to move into the space and take on that state – just enough to swim and not drown in it.
Recognize – acknowledge the state and ask client to describe
Reach - Begin to explore ways to move into connection with your client, watching for the beginnings of state shifts. Try to find actions that support safe proximity. Track with your client how they are experiencing your different offers of connection.
Resonate - Inhabit the autonomic space and let your ventral vagal energy surround your client.
Regulate - Help your client begin to notice the ways your ventral vagal presence is affecting their state. Experiment with regulating actions.
Exercise: Notice and Name
1) Tune into your thoughts, feelings and the way your body feels
2) Notice where you are on your autonomic map
3) Name the state
4) Bring curiosity – what is there to learn from your autonomic nervous system in this moment?
Exercise: Four-Map Tracking
Four sections of a page, each with a ladder. Clients mark their placement on the autonomic ladder and then briefly describe their state through words or pictures.
As a way to introduce, use the supplied worksheet four times to track the flow of the session - beginning, two during and end.
Exercise: Soup of the Day
Helps bring attention to experiences of safety and connection and help us balance out the negativity bias. Overall soup (autonomic nervous system) is flavored by the influence of the ventral vagal, sympathetic and dorsal vagal energies (ingredients).
Can either name the soup and then look for ingredients. Or find the ingredients first and see what soup they produce.
Exercise: The Goldilocks Graph
Provides a way to bring attention to events and track movement along the just right, too much, not enough continuum. Template in the book. But it includes horizontal axis as time and vertical axis as arousal level with a few words.
Exercise: Time and Tone Graph
Variation of the Goldilocks graph without words and instead with lines (straight, jagged, curvey, etc.) connecting between the dots
Comparison: Curiosity vs Competition approach
Comparison from a competitive standpoint activates the autonomic nervous system and results in a “better than” or “not measuring up”. Noticing this process can re-engage ventral vagal brake.
Comparison from a curiousity standpoint increase ventral vagal activity. Client can appreciate the safety and social connection that comes from cooperation.
Questions to ask client
- Are you on the ventral vagal side (curiosity, connection) - If yes, how to deepen into that experience? - If no, what are the ways you can reengage your vagal brake? - At what points do the acts of interruption work? No longer work?
