Polyvagal Theory for Highly Sensitive People, Explained

Could your hyper-sensitivity, "people pleasing", or sensory overwhelm be rooted in trauma?

I believe it absolutely can be. Polyvagal Theory helps us connect the dots. Our nervous system is what responds to danger or stress, and sometimes in instances of complex PTSD or prolonged distress, our nervous system primarily shifts to sympathetic dominance (fight or flight) or dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze or "fawn") at baseline. This can lead to chronic experiences of profound anxiety, hypervigilance, hyper-sensitivity, "people pleasing", chronic pain and tension, insomnia, profound fatigue, relational insecurity or dissociation. Most of all, clients living with (C)PTSD and/or hyper-sensitivity often feel disconnected from their body, their voice and their innate sense of self.

What I see most in my highly sensitive clients is actually the fawn response. 

“Fawning” is a common stress response for individuals who have survived adverse childhood experiences, especially if they became a “mediator”, “peacemaker”, “manager” or an “appeasor” to strive for safety or to avoid harm in their household. But, it also often shows up in individuals who have faced systemic inequity and barriers to accessing resources or care they need for survival. This happens in healthcare settings, educational institutions, the workplace, and other crucial systems for wellbeing and survival. Fawning can often externally look like “people pleasing”, but its roots run deeper. 

If we look at fawning from a physiological and polyvagal perspective, a person who typically fawns is utilizing their nervous system to scan the room and read social and somatic cues, to detect how they can meet the needs or expectations of others, to assure their own safety. In order to do this, there is a level of self abandonment and an abandonment of one’s own needs or voice, to prioritize and strive for safety by appeasing others. Sometimes that even translates to swallowing one’s own emotions, internalizing gaslighting, self blame, self loathing or self directed anger.

If we get even more specific about the mechanism of fawning, this pattern relies on a circuit of the vagus nerve called the dorsal vagal complex. Fawning is made possible by dorsal vagal shutdown. Dorsal vagal shutdown is a primitive strategy and response to perceived threat; the sympathetic nervous system is engaged and senses danger or stress, then the dorsal vagal complex initiates a shutdown. This leads to dissociation, to disconnect from one’s own feelings and experience of the danger, to create space for the freeze or fawn response.

“Fight” and “flight” responses are rooted in activation and sympathetic dominance that drives launching into action. “Freeze” and “Fawn” are characterized by dissociative deactivation. Essentially, fawning is dissociative compliance.

How do we treat “fawning”, dorsal vagal shutdown, or “dissociative compliance”?

That’s where somatic psychotherapy, guided imagery and internal family systems "parts work" comes in. We can utilize these modalities to help the nervous system connect to an embodied sense of safety again, so a trauma survivor can essentially come home to their own body and being. Once safety is established emotionally, relationally and somatically, we exhale. Then we welcome Self home, and develop polyvagal-informed tools to discern how to stay rooted and in connection to self, and where to enact boundaries that protect that sense of safety. Here, we’ll begin to craft a new baseline of embodied regulation, discernment, trust and self esteem. 

For clients who have endured adverse childhood experiences, medical trauma, sexual assault or relational harm, I see this as a reclamation of one's own body and autonomy. From this new foundation, we'll hone skills for discerning anxiety from intuition, danger from discomfort, and your voice vs. the internalization of the voice of others. We'll break through "fight" responses (i.e. bracing for impact), flight responses (i.e. social withdrawal), freeze responses (i.e. dissociation) and "fawn" responses (i.e. people pleasing), to identify your own wants, needs, boundaries and joys.