Module 4: Stabilizing the Nervous System

This module equips clinicians with a framework for understanding and identifying four core nervous system responses—fight, flight, freeze, and fawn—as adaptive survival strategies rather than pathological behaviors. Using Polyvagal Theory and current trauma research, participants will examine how survivors of high-control religion often live in prolonged states of dysregulation due to distorted neuroception and internalized fear-based teachings. These trauma responses may manifest as hypervigilance, appeasement, dissociation, or emotional numbing, shaped by religious conditioning that equates safety with compliance and threat with bodily experience. Clinicians will learn to interpret these patterns through a non-pathologizing, somatically informed lens that validates the nervous system’s efforts to survive coercive spiritual environments.

The second half of the module focuses on three body-based interventions that help clients restore internal safety and regulate their nervous systems after religious trauma. These include Interoceptive Awareness & Grounding to support reconnection with bodily cues; Pendulation & Titration to increase tolerance for distress and reduce dissociation; and Body Relationship Repair, which reframes the body as a source of wisdom rather than shame. Each practice emphasizes curiosity, consent, and pacing, acknowledging how deeply religious trauma can sever one’s relationship with the body. Through guided practice and clinical adaptation, participants will learn how to integrate these somatic tools to support stabilization, embodiment, and trauma recovery in clients navigating the aftermath of high-control religion.

This course is approved by APA and NBCC for 1.5 Continuing Education Credits.