Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model

Writing against the current top-down medicalized method to treating addiction, this book presents the Felt Sense/Polyvagal Model (FSPM), a paradigm shifting, bottom-up approach that considers addiction as an adaptive attempt to regulate emotional statesand trauma. Felt Sense/Polyvagal Model draws from the Polyvagal Theory, Embodied Situated Cognition/The Felt Sense, and the Lewis Learning Model of Addiction, to offer a graphically illustrated and deeply embodied way of conceptualizing and treating addiction through supporting autonomic regulation. This model de-pathologizes addiction as it teaches embodied practices through tapping into the felt sense, the body's inner wisdom. Chapters first present a theoretical framework and demonstrate the graphic model in both clinician and client versions and then teach the clinician how to use the model in practice by providing detailed treatment strategies. This text's informed, compassionate approach to understanding and treating trauma and addiction is adaptable to any school of psychotherapy and will appeal to addiction experts, trauma specialists, and clinicians of all sorts--