Teaching the Perinatal Autonomic Cascade

Saturday August 8, 2026

One of the central features of working directly with the autonomic nervous system, as is done through a variety of modalities including the somatically-informed trauma therapies, is the awareness that overwhelming experience is archived associatively, which is to say rather than chronologically, which is to say by resonance.

This is why people come to our clinic to work on something from the present day, and it turns out to be connected to a pattern that was organized neurologically in childhood. The fundamental templates of many of our responses, which are organized at the level of autonomic physiology, form early in life.

Our recent research in Europe has added another more fundamental layer to this, which has the potency to reconfigure much of our understanding about the origin of autonomic dysregulation. Our lab has identified a series of ten discrete autonomic initializations that happen at birth to facilitate the transformation of the fetus essentially from a neutrally buoyant marine animal to an air-breathing, food-eating terrestrial mammal moving in the field of gravity.

These are essentially ground zero autonomic ignitions, and they are exquisitely contingent on oxytocin in the birthing environment, and interruptible by stress chemistries of various kinds, which is to say that for many modern people they do not successfully initialize at their maximally available depth. Our research suggests that for many kinds of autonomic challenges, and likely for specific classes of pathology, the origin in incomplete perinatal initialization.

If you’d like to geek out about this a little, you can read our new paper on Researchgate, THE PERINATAL AUTONOMIC CASCADE: A Sequential Model of Neonatal Autonomic Initialization. If you’d like to understand the cascade more deeply, get a sense of how it shows up in people, a sense of how you might look for it, a tiny sense of how you might begin to think about working with it (this is not something really teachable in short form), please join me for a 3-hour advanced zoom workshop Saturday August 8 from 8 am to 11 am Pacific time.