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The following article was published in Your Health Magazine. Our mission is to empower people to live healthier.
Lynn L. West, PhDc, BCETS, LCPC
Applying Neuroscience Polyvagal Theory
Lynn L. West & Associates, LLC

Applying Neuroscience Polyvagal Theory

Buzzy is eight-years old, very intelligent, an unusually quick thinker, exceptionally coordinated in sports, and so seriously competitive with everyone that he has interpersonal problems relating to others. He has already been labeled in his school setting as a behavioral problem.

Buzzy is characterized in school as being overly reactive both physically and verbally. He is combative, defensive, argumentative, puts his hands on other students when they touch him or tease him, and he is recalcitrant when confronted by staff or adults when they try to correct him or manage his behavior and attitude.

Buzzy is going to undergo a full functional behavioral assessment of his psychological and academic functioning to provide additional information about his behavioral problems. While this is occurring, the school staff is seeking permission from the parents to implement a behavioral intervention plan, which will allow the school to forcefully physically dominate and restrain him, as a way to change his attitude and ways and learn he should comply with school regulations.

The public educational system relies on using a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Approach, developed by Aron T. Beck, as a way of dealing with serious emotional problems. The approach attempts to introduce a set of intellectual principles, for the student to use as intellectual coping strategies to deal with emotions and anger which are psychological mental problems, or distracted thinking, not due to anatomical organ damage, through a medical assessment, as the explanation for the anomalies in his behavior.

Buzzy's parents desperately want a solution that works for them and for Buzzy. Instead of using a strict psychological behavioral management approach to address Buzzy's excessive behaviors, they have agreed to employ the perspective of a neurobiological approach of affect regulation and self-regulation. This approach, the Polyvagal Theory, was developed by Steven W. Porges, PhD, and at a simplified level of explanation, it explains how the neural systems in all mammals operate to regulate basic physiological states of behavioral expression related to being calm, going to alert status, and then what is known as fight, flight, cognitive numbing, and death feigning behaviors, and ultimately death from physiological shock.

It is known that when cells are damaged in the brain and central nervous system in particular pathways, (such as those that underpin the sympathetic and parasympathetic pathways related to impairment from trauma response), the behaviors of that mammal will be affected.

Buzzy's personal experience involving his personal relative physiological reactions associated with his biological perception of stimulus/response sensory reactions that evoke in him feelings of safety, threat, or danger, are not governed by intellect and reason. This requires a neurobiological assessment of his cellular functioning, because the regulation of arousal and regulation of affect and emotion is governed by specific circuits of the brain and central nervous system. They are not controlled by other people's perception or opinion of what is rational and what is threatening.

By altering the acoustic range in Buzzy's environment to calm and non-stimulating frequency levels, he is no longer experiencing large shifts in his excitement levels from vigorous wrestling sessions with his older brother and father. There are no more verbal lectures and rational explanations of his need to comport his behavior and attitude. There are no questioning and berating speeches where he is always made to be wrong, but nobody is examining other people who are involved in precipitating his reactions. He can chill out on his own and decompress from his anger and fury, before discussing his situation with his parents in a calm and rational manner.

When his reactions are understood and not arbitrarily criticized, he has started to take responsibility for his inappropriate acting out behavior.

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