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.