Fresh from four days at a polyvagal gathering, where she presented, Tracy brings back one quietly reorienting idea: co-regulation is not something you switch on when a child melts down, it is a continual presence of connection. The episode goes somewhere rare and brave when Michelle plays back video of her own co-regulation wobbling with a little boy and a pool noodle, and the three of them sit in how this work asks us to know ourselves, over and over.
Tracy has just spent four days immersed in polyvagal theory at the Polyvagal Institute’s gathering, rubbing shoulders with the field’s leading thinkers, Kim Barthel among the OTs, and was invited by Stephen Porges himself to present on the interface between sensation and neuroception. She brings back the felt sense of a room manifesting safety, and a reminder of the theory’s three pillars, the autonomic hierarchy (ventral, sympathetic, dorsal), neuroception, and co-regulation, all resting on one deceptively simple word: safety. If your nervous system does not feel safe, inside, outside and in between, you struggle, and it can shape your development.
The heart of it is a revelation about co-regulation. Watching Deb Dana co-regulate a colleague live, Tracy realised how often therapists treat co-regulation as a rescue, something you do when a child is dysregulated, rather than a continual presence of connectedness that never goes away. Cory and Michelle pull the concept apart: it is co-constructed (a child can co-regulate you, sometimes into dysregulation), and the place you anchor a child is not a lower state but safety, whatever state they are in. Then Michelle shares, live and unscripted, a hard case: a little boy with attachment themes who slapped a pool noodle near her, how she neurocepted a threat that the video later showed was never there, and how her own wobble rippled back to him. Tracy reframes the mismatch as part of the repair, a chance for a boy whose intensity has always been misread to experience being met. It lands on a truth this work keeps teaching: knowing yourself never stops.
Lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels and chapter markers match the published episode.
Cory: Hello, everybody, welcome back. Sorry about the little hiatus, Tracy has been a super busy lady, and we will jump into that in today’s episode. Michelle, I think you are on it today. What are we talking about?
Michelle: Today we want to invite everybody to join us as we hear from Tracy, who has just been to the Polyvagal Institute’s gathering over four days. Her brain was immersed in polyvagal theory, and she was rubbing shoulders with the really leading people working in this area. Lots of OTs were there, which is fabulous, and Trace was given the honour to present a couple of times over the four days. Trace, I just want to say congratulations, you are so humble, you will not say what a big deal that was, but I am going to say it is a big deal, and I am so happy for you. There were other OTs who presented too. So today we really wanted to hear what made Trace’s brain explode, what was confirmed, and what was new. We will go over the three key components of polyvagal theory, which I will let Trace talk about. How was it, Trace?
Tracy: I can hardly describe it. You know that feeling when you go to camp and have that deep connection, and then you leave and long for the intimacy and camaraderie. Because the topic was polyvagal theory and safety, everyone was manifesting it, so it was like magic, almost too good to be true, that deep felt sense of safety and connection. You felt really engaged and your brain was switched on, and people were talking about profound approaches to fixing humanity, save-the-world kind of stuff, and for real, it is not a pipe dream, there is incredible work happening. To witness that and feel a part of it was transcendent. There were so many magnificent speakers we cannot call them all out, but one of our colleagues we all have a lot of affection for, Kim Barthel, was magnificent, so that was a treat, and how beautifully OT was represented was amazing. Dr Porges had invited me, and Randall Redfield, the CEO of the Polyvagal Institute, they really see that the work occupational therapists are doing, especially grounded in sensory integrative and processing theories, has so much direct relevance to polyvagal theory and how it is evolving. Dr Porges sees the influence in paediatrics and in trauma-informed approaches, the most direct current applications, but at this conference there were so many discussions about application to social justice, education, and how we treat each other in the world for our survival as a planet and a people. It is big, and we are not going to talk so much about that earth-shattering part, but I want to hold onto it deep in my essence and work toward manifesting it wherever I can.
Tracy: In Dr Porges’ theory there are three key components. There is the hierarchy of the polyvagal state, with ventral, sympathetic and dorsal states as these really big concepts that are critical to understand. The second is neuroception, which we have talked about in a previous episode. My talk, and what Dr Porges encouraged me to share, was the interface of sensation to neuroception. And the third core idea is co-regulation, and how neuroception and the wiring of the polyvagal system both depend on co-regulation, and how they support our social outcomes, our ability to become deeply connected in meaningful ways, and how each deep, meaningful connection begets a deeper level of humanity in each of us, moment to moment. It is the spiraling continuum we talk about in the Spirit model, but with the core being our social-ness, our sociality, the word Dr Porges uses. Even though I feel like I understand this theory really well, it slips away from me when I see the magnificence of it, and yet it is simple in one way, and the simpleness comes from one word, safety. The whole essence is that if your nervous system, or you as a person, do not feel safe inside, outside, and in between, you are going to have difficulties, you will suffer and struggle, and that can even impact your development. So safety is embedded in neuroception, and thinking about safety as the base of regulation simplifies things.
Michelle: Deep neuro is not my strength, but we have an online subscription to The Gathering, and I have watched a few of those presentations. Even without thinking about it clinically, I could neurocept that all of you in that environment, while there were nerves speaking initially, there was this sense of, oh, look at them, something is happening there, in how you were speaking, how your body was. I knew you, and Kim, were being held, that the crowd was holding you and you were all in it together. I was an outsider looking in, not in live time, but it was, wow, what is happening there. So I perceived that while everybody had some nerves, there was felt safety, despite speaking in front of thousands of people.
Cory: You know what was hilarious, Tracy? Michelle and I texted each other watching your presentation, and I said, Michelle, I am getting really emotional watching Tracy talk, I am so proud to know her. It was exciting to see representation of what this interfacing between sensory integrative work and polyvagal theory looks like, and how people can have detailed discussion around the coming together of these two things, because, as you said in your talk, they complement each other beautifully, which is not surprising, because it is all just neurology. The brain is the brain. So it would be great to hear your thoughts around those three pillars. We have talked about neuroception, safety and threat, activation and deactivation, but I know you said you got new revelations about co-regulation, which blows my mind, that you of all people got new revelations about co-regulation. I would love to hear what new things you put together.
Tracy: So here we are thinking about co-regulation, and I feel like in my clinical work, and just in who I am as a person, I co-regulate people all the time, and mindfully so in clinical situations. I am often helping parents deepen their capacity to co-regulate, and helping educators meet kids where they are. So it is a thing I understand, and yet here I am at this conference. There was a beautiful session Deb Dana did, a live demonstration of co-regulating a beautiful soul, Leah, who works for the Polyvagal Institute and is finishing her training as a somatic experiencing practitioner. Somatic experiencing is a polyvagal-informed, trauma-based approach that deeply requires awareness on the part of the practitioner, and takes a long time, about three years of full-on training, to get certified, where you build a lot of self-awareness. So this is a woman with a lot of self-awareness working with Deb Dana, the most exquisite clinician on the planet, who is taking her on a journey of envisioning, because she is an adult who can do that, what is your ventral state, your dorsal state, your sympathetic state. Within that visualisation journey, Deb was intentionally going with her, patiently, but continually offering a ventral state. It was magnificent to behold. What happened in my body co-experiencing that was a funny aha: when I think about co-regulation, I think of it as an ongoing thing, but so often, I notice, therapists think about co-regulation when the child is dysregulated, bringing them back to regulation, rather than a continual presence of connectedness that fosters the best in you and the best in me continually. So there is a minor shift, often when I notice OTs thinking about co-regulation, it is, I am going to co-regulate you in this moment, and then go back to we are together, rather than thinking that being together is also co-regulation. Do you see the difference? There is a little shift in the temporal and spatial nature of the container of co-regulation that happened for me, an interesting moment of broadening it.
Cory: This is weird, but I wanted to say, I am married to Lindsay, who is also a paediatric OT, a strange but wonderful thing, and sometimes, mostly we try not to, we have discussions around these concepts. Interestingly, he and I were disagreeing about what co-regulation was as a definition. I was like, if you and I cannot agree on this, what is going on in our profession, and how are we defining this, do we all define it the same way? He was picturing co-regulation as not necessarily one person being the anchor, that sometimes parents co-regulate children into a dysregulated place. I was always saying co-regulation is, I am the point of anchor trying to pull them into more regulation, greater access to a ventral vagal state, into a space where they have more capacity. But he was saying that even clinicians sometimes co-regulate a child into a dysregulated place, or miss the mark. I had never thought about co-regulation not being regulating.
Michelle: I will add my thing, because it is along the same line. I see it as a relationship, not an on-off button, not a one-way thing where I am down-regulating or up-regulating to optimum. But I do not perceive that I am an anchor. I often can be, but by nature I am not actually that playful, and I tend to be in my head. I feel I can attune to people, but I will sometimes want to get on with the business, and so kids often co-regulate me to a more playful state than I would go to. They take me out of my cognitive, this is going to happen next and then I will do that. And if it tips too far, then maybe I go, oh, what do we do? So I am kind of with Lindsay on that.
Cory: I was not disagreeing with him. Once he said it I was like, yeah, that is totally true, I just never thought about co-regulation being dysregulating. But it is true, because it is a co-constructed thing. It is co-regulation, not I am regulating you.
Michelle: And it is not just to optimum, it can be out of optimum, in a way. Can it, Trace?
Tracy: Yes, all of that. What I love is that we feel like we understand co-regulation, but there is so much more to unpack. In the deepness of relationship and the way humans are with each other, we are going to travel to the state we are pulled into. If you are at the playground and the affordances around the child invite playfulness and exploration, that essence is shared to the adults around them and might bring about more playfulness. If the child has vulnerability in the activation of that joyful exploration, they might become sympathetically activated and tip away from an organised, safe space, the activation can tip them into franticness and loss. So we are often co-regulating parents to understand that when that happens, we need to bring the child to a place that is safer. But sometimes when I see therapists try to coach this, instead of shifting into safety, they shift into down-regulation. What is really important, and we get this deeply from polyvagal theory, is that the place you are anchoring is not a lower state, the place you are anchoring them is into safety, no matter what state they are in.
Cory: That is what the gap was with Lindsay and me, we were lacking the terminology from polyvagal theory to explain what we were trying to say. I was trying to say, when a child goes into a state that is trickier for them to stay engaged in what they want to do, maybe they wanted to play on the playground and then something happens and their state changes and they cannot stay in the play, my job is to help them get back to the place where they can do the playing. And you are right, it is just offering that safety, what Deb Dana was doing, continually, therapeutically, mindfully offering ventral vagal state.
Michelle: Can I break down what you said, Tracy, because I had not thought about it. If I had to describe it, I would say, oh yeah, then I co-regulated them, when they moved into a more dorsal state, I moved them back toward a regulated state. But the nuance you are saying is that in co-regulating them, you are offering them a felt sense of safety so the ventral vagal tone turns back on.
Tracy: Right, or that you activate the vagal brake, and the vagal brake is not always a total down-regulation. Let’s stay on the playground. The child is vibrantly, exploratorily playing, and maybe something tips them into so much activation, they want to get on the slide, another child is trying to get on the slide, they get competitive and push out in space, and that aggressive tone takes over and turns into full-blown aggression, pushing the kid, ramping up, language getting aggressive, body tone elevated, into sympathetic activation that is not a safe space. What we do as an adult depends on our relationship with the child, but a parent who gets triggered is now sympathetically activated too, and the child is, and the whole thing snowballs, because the child cannot feel the safety signal from the limit-setting if the adult is too intense and aggressive. We know this situation, it happens to our kids all the time. So the idea is that in your own self you realise the intensity here is intense, and what I am going to do is offer this child, in their body, in their own self, in the space around them, and in my relationship and interaction with them, in all three of those, I am going to continually offer signals of safety, and offer my own ventral, warm, welcome space as a place for them to reference and draw from, so they know a different state is possible. That is the conduit of shift, because as soon as they access, oh wait, I do not need to push out, their ability to regulate will be different than if they stay in a state that is not safe.
Michelle: So they will see you, Trace. I am imagining you, or me, working out, gosh, he or she is activated and energised. I am going to suspend my theories about why, go to the child, get down to their level, have a soft face, catch them in a really soft way so they tune into me, and by seeing my eyes and soft face I am doing things that signal safety, so their neuroception perceives me as safe, and that shifts their state. Is that right?
Cory: There is a piece I had not thought about, Tracy. I listened to Dr Nikki’s presentation too, and she talked about safety in their own body, safety between interactions, not just between the individual and the other person but between the individuals around them, and then the environment itself, the playground itself. I am thinking of the classic school example, one child steals another’s ball because they think it is funny and playful, and the other child is just gone, you can see it in their face, it is not on for them, they get so sympathetically activated you can tell that if they get close enough they are going to hit that kid, and neuroceptively you feel it straight away, you know something is going to happen. So I can intervene there, and often, if they have not gone too far into their own sympathetic activation, you can offer that child a ventral vagal opportunity, a co-regulation point of your own safety, so they can hold it together enough to help mediate the problem and find a solution, or at least hold it together enough to ask for the ball back.
Michelle: You see that in adults, you do not have to go very far.
Michelle: So it is the safety that shifts the state. But when we are talking about co-regulation, Trace, Cory’s question was, what did Deb Dana do to stay in that space and offer co-regulation that you felt? In our work I can list some, you get down lower, you are softer, your tone, your rhythm, things we would cue safety with. Was Deb doing things differently, or did you just witness it and it resonated differently? Why did it feel different?
Tracy: A couple of things. First, very often in a situation with a child, kids do not have the internal resources to just draw from my safety cues, so you have to have more active ways of having the vagal brake activated. I might be offering breath, my body as a container, an opportunity to push hard on here, your body needs that push, joining them and acknowledging and letting them know I understand the state they are in is the state they are in, and I am going to stay with them. There was this profound nature of Deb staying with her, so actively and subtly continuing to offer that she was never not present, in exactly the way the receiver needed her to be present. What happens when kids dysregulate is that it can trigger us, even when we think we are being good at staying regulated, but truthfully we are making a judgment about that kid’s dysregulation, seeing them as naughty or out of control or scary. Those things could be true, but at the end of the day the hedonic tone, the signal, the valence of safety or threat is an evaluation, and if we evaluate, we pull ourselves away for a minute instead of maintaining the continuity. The woman receiving the support was visualising that it never went away, there was always a constant presence of support. Sometimes we shift our state ourselves, and the kid starts to feel scared, and that only makes regulation harder. It is profound, but subtle.
Cory: It is amazing, because we are describing the process of what has happened for me as a therapist. Improving is this skill of suspending judgment in the moment and not taking things personally, which I have to work on all the time, because I am human. But my ability to suspend the cognitive part, the what’s next, to be that present co-person, when I can do that, doors open up in the session and you can go, ooh, we can go there together. If I am too in my head, I miss them. It still happens. But if I can stay present, ventrally vagally activated more frequently, I match a child better and allow function more often than before.
Michelle: Cory, your example is the knowing of self, knowing about the areas where we might be triggered or less able to catch ourselves in the moment. You and I, with Tracy’s facilitation, have worked over time to get out of our heads and be present and attune. I have had a really interesting little guy I am working with at the moment, where the perception is there are some attachment issues, and I think he is acting them out with me in sessions. Some of his themes are around being the boss, he says a lot, you are not the boss of me, and he is driven to win and be better than others, so it has been tricky. I have started recording each session. In one session I was mind-blown. We were playing a game of hide and seek, a really basic safety, am I safe, are you going to find me, are you reliable and dependable. Somewhere along the line he picked up a noodle and started slapping it, making a loud noise, and kept moving in my direction. In the moment, I was scared he was going to hit me, but I was thinking, stay safe, he is testing you out, Michelle, just be with it. So I tried not to say anything, and he did not hit me, he kept slapping it. I felt I was working hard to stay safe and regulate myself and not give off the vibe that I was not feeling safe. When I look back at the video, he was a long way from me, it was loud, he did move it in my direction, but he was never going to hit me. It was only away from the situation, safe, that I could view that interaction as, oh, Michelle, he was playing, and testing you out. But my perception, I neurocepted threat and felt threatened, I would have withdrawn. It is a side angle of my face on the video, but there was no way my body would not have felt so threatened and activated that I could cover all of that. I am sure he neurocepted that I felt unsafe, and it got wobbly, my state shifted and I was not able to keep co-regulating him, so he kept getting activated, and then I moved away and started another game with the noodle, turning it into hitting the balls, to manoeuvre away from him threatening me with the noodle. When I look back, I am sure that was not lost on him. So I know I did not manage it, and I need to keep working on that, the activation, the loud noise, the threatening thing I perceived wrongly in that moment. It goes both ways, Trace, in him slapping that noodle close to me, my state shifted, and that went back to him, and it unfolded and we unravelled a bit, and then I gathered myself and turned it into something else, so I kind of got away with it. But that would have all been lost on me if I had not recorded the session and watched back.
Cory: You were describing my own inner experience in many sessions. When physical violence pops up, it is very, very hard to stay ventral, and when you said, I had to work hard, I was like, yes, it is hard work to stay ventral and offer ventral when that is the presentation. Each of us has their own trigger, and I find that one harder too. If that happened again, Michelle, how would you have liked it to be worked through?
Tracy: Before you answer, I want to add a layer: this little guy has an attachment issue, so it is likely this mismatch has been his lived experience. We are not going to be 100 per cent, we will struggle to stay in ventral, and we will need ventral and sympathetic states co-activated to get through that moment, because there is no way, as a human, that if you feel a threat you do not feel a threat, your neuroception tells you that. The misattunement, the mismatch, is actually part of the pendulation and the healing, helping him build his capacity. Because you were mindfully working hard, that is the whole thing in therapy, mindfully working hard to come back around and create a different opportunity for adaptation, which is precisely what you did. There will be those mismatches, but watching the mismatch was the profound thing, you could not see it in the moment because it was too intense, only on the video. And what an important thing for this little boy that you could see it, because that has probably been his lived experience, that people do not get his intensity, they misread it, push him off, and then he has to figure out how to rope you back in, which is tricky for a little guy.
Michelle: Because I have kept working with him weekly, it keeps presenting in different iterations. I need to say I am activated now even thinking back, which is what happens to us, I feel charged.
Cory: We are here with you, Michelle.
Michelle: Thanks for holding me. Can I say to the audience, this is really organic, live-time stuff, we do not prep our podcast, so it is real. Thanks for co-regulating me. What I in the moment thought was a lost opportunity is exactly what you said, Tracy, that it is his lived experience, and at the very least I wonder that his experience is that everybody tries to shut that down and turn it into something else really quickly. What I have been able to do, and it is fascinating, is not hurry so fast around it. At the time I did say, oh my goodness, that is so loud, that gave me a shock, so I did a bit of that, but as it got closer and more threatening I did not really narrate it. So when it turned up again, it was, whoa, that was so close to me, I felt like that was going to hit me in the face, I need a minute now. I tried to model and share what was happening for me, wow, I just got so scared, I am going to have to step away for a minute, that made my body tingle and go electric, because I really thought you were going to hit me. Then I took a breath and said, oh, I think I am ready for that again, do you mind if I get a noodle too? And a session later I asked him, hey, were you really going to hit me with that, or were you telling me you were really mad, or playing around with the sound? I was trying to understand it. Fascinatingly, he was not ready to have a conversation about his intention, and to be honest I do not think he knew what it was. My wondering is that things unfold for him really quickly and then he does something. When I tried to explore, how did that go from a playful game to feeling threatening for me, he did not want to know about it, sometimes saying, stop talking so much, let’s just noodle. So he does not want to hear me narrating my feelings yet, but that is where he is at. What I was trying to do is not be so fast to signal, that is not okay, we are not going to noodle-slap, but to be like, oh, you want to explore noodle-slapping, I can go there with you, I can explore big intensity. I wanted to unpack that emotionally with him and what underlies it, and he is not quite ready. I need some mentoring around that, Tracy.
Tracy: When we think about those valence tipping points at the higher level, away from just safety and threat, we get to levels of felt experience that include, we are in this together, we are having fun, we have a shared agenda, a shared level of trust. When trust is violated for kids like this, the sense they get is either, I have lost control, so now my only way to control is with aggression, or they get a sense of shame that becomes very big. It sounds like in the past people would have set a limit, and he may not have graded control, he may move into sympathetic activation without volitional control over that big intensity, but then people respond as if he does have control, and that triggers shame. So for you to venture into processing it, help me understand what is going on here, he is like, well, I do not want to talk about that because I feel bad. But he did not feel bad, he was kind of, this is interesting, but I do not know that I want to do it. What a beautiful opening to deepening his understanding of his humanity you have created. It takes lots of iteration of trusting that when we talk about this, it is not because I did something that means you do not like me anymore, that I have lost your trust or our connection, that our secure reliance on each other varies based on my state, which has been his difficulty. He can securely rely on you to be authentic, and it is okay to authentically share your experience. So you are doing the work there, and it sounds fantastic.
Michelle: What that case has highlighted is that I am finding it really challenging. Since then there was another thing we were doing, a sock-wrestle game, putting a sock on each other’s foot and trying to pull it off. In the video I perceived he stopped the game pretty quickly, and I wondered what happened. When I looked back, I was very physically, I got down in a puppy-dog position, and then I was like, ready, and I see that I look very physically agile and strong, like I was going to win, I look threatening. I did not mean to, my intention was, okay, I am ready to go, and I probably pounced, but he perceived that as a threat and was like, I am not playing with you, because you are going to win and I like to win. There was a menacing component in how I moved my shoulders that was not my intention. He is really teaching me so much around my capacity to co-regulate when it looks different, when he does not respond reliably, so that catches me and I am like, oh, what am I going to do next, and I know I am pulling away to buy some time, which he is perceiving. So it is interesting that knowing thyself just never stops. We have worked hard to stop being so cognitive and planning, and it is like, oh, thanks, kiddo, obviously I have to go to the next level, of trying to receive being regulated.
Cory: Michelle, seriously, you will have validated so many people in that unveiling of wonderful vulnerability you just gave around your experience with this child, because I sat here shaking my head at how amazing that was. This work pulls us apart down the middle, explore all your own junk, and I honestly think I have become a whole different human being since I started this journey, and I have no doubt it just keeps unfolding. It is only in these discussions, and your willingness to video yourself on your hard child, that was me too, I was like, I do not get this, something is not right, I am going to video it, and it gave me the space to look from a distance without the intensity of the moment. We talk about children misperceiving sensation and intent, but we do too. Early in my career, Tracy, I showed you a video of a child, I was playing with a big Nemo fish, going brrr, and went to eat his foot or shoulder, and he got so sympathetically activated, the angriest face, he stood up and looked at me and said, do not do that, so angry, and I was thrown off, like, I have no idea what just happened, we were playing and suddenly he is off-the-charts mad. I showed it to you saying, I still do not understand what is going on here, and you said, can you see the speed at which you used the fish, the angle you came at him from, it was behind space, he does not get behind space, he is tactilely defensive, these things could play into his perception. That was his truth, and I got it, but in the moment, if I had not videoed, I would never have understood that. So thanks, Michelle, thank you for being Michelle, it is really amazing.
Tracy: Beautiful, generous sharing, and this discussion, like you said, Cory, is going to help so many people feel like, oh wow, I am working at getting this right, and it is a lot of work to move in the direction of deepening our practice. That was beautiful. Thank you.
And that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Spirited Conversations. We hope this sparks something for you, whether it’s a new clinical idea, a fresh perspective, or just the reminder that you are definitely not alone in this work. If this conversation resonated, we would love for you to share it with anyone on their own learning journey. You can find information about the podcast on our website, and you can join us in the courses and communities the Developmental FX team have put together at developmentalfx.org. And if you’re enjoying listening, please subscribe or leave a review, it genuinely helps more people find us. Until next time, keep the conversations spirited!