Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model

Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model is a work by Jan Winhall (2021).

Core claims

• Winhall’s Felt Sense Polyvagal Model reframes addiction not as a disease or moral failure but as the body’s autonomic solution to unbearable affect — a regulatory strategy that operates below the threshold of conscious choice, making it continuous with, rather than opposed to, the self-care systems Kalsched identified in trauma’s archetypal defenses.
• By grafting Eugene Gendlin’s felt sense onto Stephen Porges’s polyvagal hierarchy, Winhall produces a clinical instrument that does what neither framework accomplishes alone: it gives the therapist a somatic map of dissociative states while simultaneously providing the client an experiential method for metabolizing them into meaning — the very body-to-symbol bridge Kalsched warned psychotherapy keeps losing.
• The model quietly dismantles the institutional separation between “trauma treatment” and “addiction treatment,” exposing that separation as a relic of mind-body dualism that depth psychology, from Jung forward, has always contested but never operationalized at the level of clinical protocol.

Related questions

• How does Winhall’s mapping of addictive behavior onto polyvagal autonomic states compare with Kalsched’s account of the “self-care system” in The Inner World of Trauma — are they describing the same defensive structure from different epistemological positions?
• If Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology insists that soul-making proceeds through image and metaphor rather than through physiological mechanism, does Winhall’s grounding of therapeutic transformation in autonomic regulation represent an advance on or a departure from archetypal psychology’s core commitments?
• Tozzi describes using polyvagal theory to “stabilize the Ego” before engaging active imagination in Jungian analysis — how does this clinical sequence illuminate or complicate Winhall’s felt sense model, and what does it suggest about the future relationship between somatic neuroscience and analytical psychology?

See also

• Library page: /library/trauma-and-healing/winhall-treating-trauma-addiction/

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