Module 4: Stabilizing the Nervous System

INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Laura Anderson, PhD, LMFT

APA CE Credits: 1.5

This program is co-sponsored with Traumastry. Traumastry is approved by the American Psychological Association and NBCC to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Traumastry maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

Learning Objectives 

• Participants will identify and describe four autonomic nervous system responses and assess how these responses manifest in the clinical presentation of clients recovering from high-control religious environments
• Participants will demonstrate effective use of three trauma-informed, body-based techniques to aid in support of clients with religious trauma.

Program Summary and Justification

This program provides psychologists and licensed mental health professionals with an integrated description of autonomic nervous system responses and body-based healing strategies for clients recovering from religious trauma. Using frameworks from polyvagal theory, trauma theory, and somatic psychology, the program describes how fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses may present in individuals raised in or exiting high-control religious systems. This program builds on foundational doctoral training in trauma and clinical psychology by advancing practitioner skill in recognizing and treating body-based trauma responses specifically associated with religious harm.

Participants will be able to describe how these survival states are adaptive physiological responses to chronic fear, shame, or spiritual coercion (Porges, 2017; Dana, 2020; Ogden, 2021). The program highlights the phenomenon of neuroception as a critical lens for assessing how survivors may feel unsafe even in the absence of external danger (Porges & Dana, 2018). Drawing from religious trauma theory, participants will assess how distorted neuroception often stems from internalized messages and how this influences somatic states such as dissociation, hyperarousal, or collapse (Anderson, 2023; Khalsa et al., 2018).

Building on this theoretical foundation, the program explains three trauma-informed, somatic techniques for application: (1) Interoceptive Awareness & Grounding, which helps clients reconnect with bodily sensations and internal cues (Khalsa et al., 2018); (2) Pendulation & Titration, adapted from Somatic Experiencing® to build capacity for navigating activation and safety (Levine, 2018); and (3) Body Relationship Repair, a practice that reframes the body as a partner in healing rather than a site of sin, shame, or disembodiment (Chhabra et al., 2025; Grabbe & Miller-Karas, 2018; Loizzo, 2018). These tools are designed to be proactive interventions for survivors who have learned to suppress or distrust their body’s signals due to religious conditioning (Menakem, 2017; Carlson et al., 2022; Firestone, 2022).

By combining nervous system science with practical, body-based interventions, this program equips clinicians to apply clinical interventions with survivors of religious trauma that create internal safety, autonomy, and embodied recovery. Participants will deepen their ability to integrate somatic and cognitive approaches in culturally responsive, ethically sound trauma treatment, particularly in the context of spiritual abuse and identity-based trauma.