“The work you are doing is remarkable because you take individuals who, in our terminology we would say are deeply injured…but you are not responding to the injury you are in a sense triggering strength. So sometimes we think people who are injured we want to fix them, but if we truly understand how our nervous system and our humanity needs cues of engagement with movement, and we facilitate this, the person begins to re-occupy their body, “they become re-embodied.” So, I think the process of Enhanced Resilience Training is this re-embodiment.

I think successful trauma therapy is re-embodiment because the adaptive reaction to great chronic threat, severe trauma, is functionally that we leave our own body and we call that disassociation; and if it is not totally dissociative, we live in our cortex and that means turning off our feedback loops in our body so we start getting illness and in our culture we call that chronic stress; but take the stress away and the body won’t retune because it needs cues of safety; and it forgot what they are or how to get them.

So what you’ve done in your resilience training model is you have brought integration movement and social engagement together and it’s the magic of social engagement, the presence of being with these people and being reciprocal with them (and they with each other) that allows them to become re-embodied, the mind and body become co-regulated“

Dr Porges 

The founder of the Polyvagal Theory