“What if your neurophysiology could support safety and connection?” This is a question I ask my clients as we begin our treatment journey. Although there are many diagnostic possibilities in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), fundamentally clients come to treatment suffering from a compromised ability to regulate their autonomic responses. A polyvagal approach to therapy is based on the knowledge that the autonomic nervous system is shaped by early experience and reshaped with ongoing experience, that habitual response patterns can be interrupted, and that new patterns can be created. Teaching your clients to safely listen to their autonomic stories and shape their systems toward safety and connection is possible.

Learning is a process of both discovery and mastery, and the ways to promote discovery are often different from the ways to encourage mastery (Gopnik, 2005). The therapy hour invites discovery and the time between sessions can be used to encourage mastery. A polyvagal approach begins with helping your clients explore the ways the autonomic nervous system is both creator of, and witness to, their lived experience, and then guiding them to become active operators of this essential system. The therapy session is the time in your clients’ week when they predictably experience co-regulation and connection to your ventral vagal state and can safely explore experiences of mobilization and collapse. The process of autonomic reorganization that starts in therapy is strengthened with practice between sessions. Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection offers you ways to help your clients tune into their nervous systems and begin to reshape their responses through a variety of experiential practices that can be introduced in sessions and implemented between sessions.

Incremental change leads to transformational change. Kok and Fredrickson (2011) identified an upward spiral in which small, and often fleeting, moments of ventral vagal regulation accumulate and compound over time leading to increased autonomic flexibility. These micro-moments, what I call glimmers, build the foundation for your clients’ physiological and psychological well-being. Tipping points happen when a state of equilibrium is disrupted and replaced with a new state of equilibrium. These are the magic moments when a threshold is crossed (Gladwell, 2000). The exercises in this book give you a way to use the time between sessions to support your clients’ progression toward a ventral vagal tipping point.

Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection is organized in two sections and an appendix. Section I presents the organizing principles of Polyvagal Theory. This section is meant to be read first in order to build a theoretical foundation for the exercises presented in Section II. For those of you who have read The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy (2018), you’ll find Section I offers new ways to explain and explore hierarchy, neuroception, and co-regulation. If this is your first introduction to Polyvagal Theory, Chapters 1–3 provide a polyvagal informed understanding of the organization and actions of the autonomic nervous system. Whether you are new to the polyvagal perspective or a seasoned polyvagal guided therapist, take the time to complete the mini exercises that are included in each chapter. These boxed prompts are designed to connect the organizing principles of Polyvagal Theory to your personal experience and create a solid foundation for working with your clients through the lens of the autonomic nervous system.

Research about how people develop habits shows that it takes an average of 66 days of practice for an action to become automatic, missing a day here and there is not a setback, and continued support over this time period is an important ingredient for success (Lally, Van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle, 2010). Studies show that spaced learning produces long-lasting effects and that ongoing experiences spread out over time help learning generalize to new situations (Kang, 2016). Combining this information with the knowledge that enjoyment motivates you to want to learn (Lucardie, 2014), Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection invites you and your clients into the practice of what my colleague, Amber Gray, calls home-play (Gray, 2018). Rather than homework, which can be experienced as a stressor and activate autonomic actions of protection and myriad stories of failure, home-play captures your client’s interest with an open invitation to enter into, and enjoy, gentle practices of autonomic listening and skill building.

Based on this understanding of the ways people learn, Section II offers exercises designed to complement clinical work and keep your clients actively engaged in the process of autonomic reorganization beyond the therapy hour. Section II builds on the basic mapping sequence in The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy (2018) and complements the tracking and toning exercises presented in that text. The introduction offers an overview of the BASIC (Befriend, Attend, Shape, Integrate, Connect) framework and explores how to use the exercises presented in the section to help your clients build the capacity to safely connect to their autonomic responses and navigate their daily experiences in new ways. Chapters 4–8 focus on one element each of the BASIC framework, presenting a variety of exercises to use with your clients to enhance learning between sessions. Each chapter begins with an overview of the research that informs the section, followed by a series of exercises. The exercise format describes the exercise and its intended use, presents a bit of background for clients, describes the steps of the exercise, and includes tips for therapists.

Section II presents the BASIC framework in a sequence that builds from one chapter to the next. Begin with Befriending and go through the sections in order. Each chapter includes a number of different exercises to choose from, with the understanding that clients will be drawn toward some and find others less engaging. For clients new to the polyvagal perspective, the exercises are an invitation to autonomic connection. If you have been working in this way and your clients have a beginning understanding of their autonomic patterns, the exercises will deepen their experience. Whether your clients are novices or polyvagal-informed, the exercises offer a pathway to autonomic reorganization.

The Appendix completes the book, offering personal progress trackers for each of the BASIC components and presenting the exercises in a format that can be copied and shared with your clients. One important predictor of change is the perception of moving toward a goal. Studies show that even when you identify a goal as important and meaningful, you don’t automatically track changes and, when you do, you tend to take in some pieces of information and ignore others (Webb, Chang, & Benn, 2013). Having a way to see and measure progress supports change. The personal progress trackers for Chapters 4–8 are simple evaluation tools designed to help your clients bring explicit attention to the subtle shifts that show their autonomic nervous systems are reorganizing. The trackers are intended to be used at regular intervals, first while working with the exercises in the chapter and later to see how ongoing autonomic change is continuing to impact behaviors and beliefs. Complete them in your sessions, return to them later as an ongoing check-in, and invite your clients to use them at home on their own.

Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection gives you a way to help your clients keep the process of autonomic awareness and reorganization alive outside of the therapy hour. The organizing principles outlined in Section I will help you understand how the autonomic nervous system works and create a platform for teaching the exercises in Section II. The BASIC exercises will help your clients attend to the actions of their autonomic nervous systems between sessions, begin to reshape their autonomic pathways, and strengthen their movement toward safety and connection. “Joy lowers the neural threshold for perceiving life events as being positive and hopeful, while raising the threshold for perceiving events as negative and hopeless” (Lucardie, 2014, p. 440). With this book, you and your clients have a guide to building the autonomic foundation for ventral vagal–inspired joy.