212: The Survive and Thrive Spiral: Combining IFS and Polyvagal Theory w/ Ruth Culver

2026-01-07

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True healing begins when we stop choosing between our nervous system and our inner narrative—and start listening to both.Ruth Culver is a certified IFS practitioner and IFS constellations facilitator who has brought her own innovative contributions to the field, including the Survive and Thrive Spiral and her Drawing into Self approach. Her own trauma healing journey began when serious health issues led her to seek out hypnotherapy - first as a client, and eventually as a certified practitioner herself. She eventually found IFS and realized it o...

True healing begins when we stop choosing between our nervous system and our inner narrative—and start listening to both.

Ruth Culver is a certified IFS practitioner and IFS constellations facilitator who has brought her own innovative contributions to the field, including the Survive and Thrive Spiral and her Drawing into Self approach. Her own trauma healing journey began when serious health issues led her to seek out hypnotherapy - first as a client, and eventually as a certified practitioner herself. She eventually found IFS and realized it offered her a compassionate framework to gently understand and integrate her parts, making it a natural fit for her healing journey.

✨ What this episode explores:

▪️The Survive & Thrive Spiral — How Ruth mapped survival states as a spiral to de-shame your reactions and show the real path from activation to shutdown to regulation.

▪️Freeze Isn’t Collapse — Why “deer-in-headlights” freeze is different from floppy shutdown, and what that distinction reveals about fragmentation and the “reservoir” of unprocessed exile feelings.

▪️Drawing Into Self — How externalizing parts through intuitive scribbling lowers overwhelm, creates instant witnessing, and helps protectors soften without forcing them to “step back” inside your body.

▪️Story Follows State — What changes when you stabilize the body enough to hear your parts clearly, so your nervous system isn’t driving the narrative while your mind tries to explain it after the fact.

▪️Multiple Parts, One Moment — How fawning, fighting, fleeing, and numbing can all cycle in the same trigger, and why mapping the whole cast (instead of picking one) can unlock the stuck “nothing works” exile underneath.

THE SURVIVE / THRIVE SPIRAL

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