And Why Play Is One of the Most Powerful Paths to Recovery
People In Treatment Are Often Deeply Self-Aware
Many people enter treatment already deeply self-aware. They have been to therapy, maybe for years, or gone through intensive treatment before. They understand their patterns, their trauma histories, their relapse cycles. They can explain their behaviors with clarity and precision.
Yet insight does not always produce change.
For individuals living in chronic anxiety, collapse, pain, or addiction, the nervous system is often organized around survival. In these states, more reflection can actually increase distress. The body remains mobilized or shut down, even when the mind understands what needs to change. Logic and reason are not sufficient to overcome the fears related to being in danger.
A Polyvagal Lens on Recovery
Healing begins with a different premise here. The nervous system must feel safe enough to receive insight. Without that foundation, advice struggles to land, new behaviors cannot stabilize, and treatment often feels effortful or overwhelming.
Polyvagal Theory, developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, helps explain why safety is not a psychological preference but a physiological requirement.
The autonomic nervous system continuously evaluates risk outside of conscious awareness through a process called neuroception. Based on these evaluations, the body shifts into different physiological states that support connection, mobilization, or shutdown.
When the nervous system is organized around defense, whether through anxiety, agitation, numbness, or withdrawal, the brain prioritizes survival. Learning, flexibility, and relational openness are compromised.
From this perspective, recovery is not about forcing insight into a defensive system. It is about creating the internal conditions where the system can safely reorganize.
Why Safety Must Precede Change
When people feel unsafe, even subtly, their capacity to integrate therapeutic interventions is limited. Feedback can feel threatening. Vulnerability can feel dangerous. Stillness can feel intolerable.
“Lasting healing requires connection” – Jennell Maze. Evidence-based interventions cannot integrate until the nervous system feels anchored and safe.
Safety is not passive. We actively cultivate it through consistent relationships, predictable environments, body-based practices, and attuned care.
But safety alone is not the endpoint. It is the platform from which something essential emerges.
Play.
Play as a Neural Exercise
Play is often misunderstood as leisure or distraction. In clinical contexts, it is sometimes viewed as supplemental rather than essential.
Dr. Porges offers a very different interpretation.
From a Polyvagal perspective, play is a neural exercise. It strengthens the nervous system’s ability to move fluidly between states of activation and calm, without becoming stuck in defense.
In play, cues of uncertainty and safety alternate in a controlled, relational context. The nervous system learns that mobilization does not have to lead to threat, and that connection can rapidly restore regulation.
This capacity is foundational to resilience.
Porges illustrates this through mammalian play, from infants playing peek-a-boo to kittens and dogs engaging in rough-and-tumble interactions. In each case, play simulates elements of fight or flight, but these impulses are actively inhibited through social engagement cues such as facial expression, eye contact, vocal tone, and reciprocity.
The nervous system practices returning to safety.
Without this capacity, activation escalates into aggression, collapse, or withdrawal. With it, the system becomes flexible.
Why Play Matters in Trauma and Addiction Recovery
Trauma and addiction often reflect nervous systems that have lost flexibility. Individuals may live in chronic mobilization or chronic shutdown, with limited access to calm, connected states.
Play provides a corrective experience.
It signals safety without requiring explanation. It engages the body before the intellect. It allows regulation to be learned experientially rather than cognitively.
Importantly, play is relational. It relies on attunement, responsiveness, and shared rhythm. These are the same capacities that support therapeutic change.
This is why play is not separate from treatment at The Pointe Malibu. It is integrated into it.
The Five Pointes: A Practical Framework for Nervous System Regulation
The Pointe Malibu’s Polyvagal-informed care is translated into a simple, embodied clinical framework known as the Five Pointes. Each Pointe supports nervous system regulation through a different access point, recognizing that safety and regulation are not achieved through a single technique, but through repeated, layered experiences of support.
Pointe One: Breath
Breathwork is used to anchor the nervous system and gently shift physiological state. Slow, intentional breathing supports vagal tone and helps down regulate states of anxiety and hyperarousal, creating an immediate sense of internal safety.
Pointe Two: Meditate
Mindfulness practices cultivate awareness without judgment. Rather than forcing calm, meditation supports the capacity to notice internal states as they arise and pass, strengthening emotional flexibility and self-regulation over time.
Pointe Three: Movement
Movement provides a direct pathway to regulation for nervous systems organized around mobilization or shutdown. Physical activity helps restore the connection between body and mind, allowing energy to discharge and reorganize in adaptive ways.
Pointe Four: Thought Management
Cognitive work is introduced only when the nervous system is supported enough to receive it. Clients learn to relate to thoughts with curiosity and self-compassion rather than threat, reducing shame and rigid self-criticism.
Pointe Five: Play
Play integrates all of the above. It allows activation and calm to coexist within a context of safety, connection, and enjoyment. From a Polyvagal perspective, play exercises the nervous system’s ability to move fluidly between states without becoming stuck in defense. It builds resilience, relational capacity, and trust in the body’s ability to recover equilibrium.
Together, the Five Pointes reflect a central clinical truth. Regulation is not achieved through insight alone, but through repeated experiences that teach the nervous system it is safe to engage, move, feel, and connect.
Polyvagal Surf Therapy: Regulation Through Play and Connection
The ocean offers a natural environment for nervous system regulation. Its rhythm, unpredictability, and sensory richness mirror the autonomic nervous system itself.
In The Pointe Malibu’s Polyvagal Surf Program, clients engage in structured, clinically supported play. They are guided to notice how their nervous system responds in real time.
Through attuned facilitation, clients learn to move through these states without judgment. Activation is not avoided. It is followed by connection and regulation.
Through playfulness, we are able to deepen connection and work together in riding the waves toward healing.
This is not exposure for exposure’s sake. It is nervous system training.
When the Nervous System Changes, Everything Changes
In our recently documented case study, a 50-year-old client entered treatment after more than two decades of opioid dependence, chronic pain, and unresolved trauma. He had not experienced sustained sobriety since 2009 and reported persistent lower back pain, sleep disruption, anxiety, and depression at intake.
Treatment centered on nervous system regulation, safety, and co-regulation rather than symptom suppression alone. Clinical care integrated polyvagal-informed practices, somatic tracking, pain reprocessing, paced trauma work, and relational support, allowing the nervous system to stabilize before deeper therapeutic engagement.
As regulation increased, measurable changes followed. Standardized clinical assessments demonstrated significant reductions in anxiety and depression, improved sleep quality, increased neuroception of safety, and a marked decrease in reported pain—outcomes that continued at three-month follow-up. The client maintained sobriety and reported restored capacity for connection, daily functioning, and agency in his recovery.
“Changing the nervous system changes everything,” Dr. Mel Pohl explains.
This is not a theoretical statement. It reflects repeatable clinical patterns observed when treatment honors physiological readiness and addresses the nervous system as central to healing.
The full case study, including outcome data and clinical methodology, is available here: Polyvagal-Informed Healing in Action
Recovery as Nervous System Resilience
Healing is not about eliminating discomfort or controlling behavior through willpower. It is about building the capacity to move through activation and uncertainty without becoming trapped in survival states.
Play strengthens this capacity.
The Pointe’s Polyvagal-informed care is not a philosophy layered onto treatment. It is the organizing principle that informs environment, relationships, and clinical interventions.
Healing begins when the nervous system feels safe enough to engage.
And often, it deepens through play.
