Modern Attachment Meets Polyvagal Theory: How Providers Can Support Clients in Building Secure Relationships

Understanding how we connect, heal and relate through relationships is at the heart of both modern attachment theory and Polyvagal Theory. 

These topics were explored in our most recent Clinical Conversations webinar, Attachment and Polyvagal Theory: The Nervous System’s Role in Secure Relationship, featuring Dr. Stephen Porges, Dr. Ann Kelley, and Sue Marriott, LCSW, CGP. 

In this insightful discussion, the experts provide powerful insights into how providers can support their clients in developing secure relationships — both with others and within themselves by applying these principles in practice.

The Evolution of Attachment: From Fixed Categories to Fluid States

Traditional attachment theory has often been understood as a set of discrete categories — secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganized — formed in early childhood and persisting into adulthood. Modern attachment theory shifts away from this static view and recognizes attachment as a dynamic, moment-to-moment process shaped by nervous system states, rather than fixed personality traits.

Instead of asking, “What’s my attachment style?” modern attachment theory asks, “How am I relating right now?” This perspective helps clients recognize that attachment responses can fluctuate depending on safety cues in their environment, and that by understanding our nervous system states, we can increase our capacity for secure relating. Additionally, attachment security can be cultivated over time, regardless of early experiences.

The Nervous System’s Role in Secure Relating

According to Polyvagal Theory, our ability to connect and form secure relationships depends on our autonomic nervous system state. When we feel safe, our ventral vagal system (part of the parasympathetic nervous system) supports social engagement, allowing us to experience connection, trust and co-regulation.

However, when the nervous system perceives threat, it shifts into states that enable defense:

• Fight-or-flight (sympathetic activation) → Hypervigilance, emotional reactivity, anxiety.
• Shutdown (dorsal vagal activation) → Withdrawal, numbness, disconnection.

Recognizing these shifts in both ourselves and our clients is crucial for therapy. As Marriott explains, “It’s not about ‘fixing’ attachment but expanding the capacity for security in real-time.” This means helping clients understand what it may feel like or look like to be in each state so they can regulate their nervous system states to increase their access to secure, engaged relationships.

Expanding the “Green Zone” of Secure Relating

Marriott and Dr. Kelley introduce the Modern Attachment-Regulation Spectrum (MARS), a helpful model informed by Polyvagal Theory that uses a color-coded system to describe nervous system states in the context of attachment:

• Green (secure, regulated) → Open, connected, flexible responses.
• Red (activated, anxious) → High emotional intensity, seeking reassurance or control.
• Blue (deactivated, avoidant) → Detached, withdrawn, internally shutdown.

By naming these states non-judgmentally, providers can help clients identify and shift their attachment responses rather than feel stuck in them. Dr. Porges also emphasizes that co-regulation is key — a nervous system in distress needs another regulated system to guide it back to safety.

Implementing These Insights in Practice

How can therapists apply modern attachment and Polyvagal insights in sessions? Here are three key strategies:

1. Support Interoceptive Awareness

Helping clients tune into their bodily cues, such as heart rate, breath and muscle tension, increases their ability to recognize when they are shifting into a blue or red state. Gentle mindfulness, grounding techniques and reflective questions like “What do you notice in your body right now?” also help build this skill.

2. Use Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) to Facilitate Engagement

The Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), developed by Dr. Porges, uses specially filtered music to stimulate the ventral vagal system, making social engagement more accessible. For clients who struggle with connection due to trauma or neurodivergence, SSP can help create the physiological foundation for safety before diving into deeper relational work.

3. Reframe “Attachment Issues” as Nervous System Adaptations

Rather than seeing attachment struggles as personality flaws, providers can normalize them as adaptive responses to past experiences. Dr. Kelley and Marriott emphasize that secure relating is a skill that can be built, not a fixed trait. Therapy becomes about widening the capacity for safety, not diagnosing attachment “disorders.”