ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how safe relationships affect the brain and nervous system through attachment and how helping professionals can assist clients in developing resilience following attachment disruptions through regulation of the nervous system. The human brain evolved in a vertical piecemeal fashion, creating a structure that makes recovery from trauma very difficult in the absence of an attuned relationship with another. The peripheral nervous system is outside the brain and spinal cord and connects them with sensory organs, and other organs of the body, muscles, blood vessels, and glands. Nervous system uses nerve pathways to initiate reactions in the body, and the adrenal-cortical system uses the bloodstream. This is a very important distinction to note for the treatment of trauma. Porges uses the term polyvagal to distinguish between the main branches of the vagus nervethe ventral vagal and the dorsal vagal distinctions that are critical to understanding and treating neural states of complex trauma.
