Dr. Stephen Porges is the creator of the paradigm-shifting polyvagal theory, and he joins me in today's episode for an extended conversation on critiques of and new additions to the polyvagal theory, including the new mixed states of fawn, appeasement, and intimacy. He has a brand new book coming out called Our Polyvagal World, which I do recommend, but I'll do a book review on that in a future episode. And he just released a new paper called The Vagal Paradox, A Polyvagal Solution.
I'll have links to both of those in the description, but we are going to be talking about the new paper and the new book in this episode in a lot of detail. This episode will definitely challenge and deepen your understanding of the polyvagal theory. My name is Justin Sincere. I'm a therapist, a coach, and the creator of the Polyvagal Trauma Relief System.
Welcome to Stuck Not Broken, where I teach you how to live with more calm, confidence, and connection. without the psychobabble. But I know you're not here for me.
So let's get to Dr. Porges. New book, Our Polyvagal World, and a new paper, The Vagal Paradox, A Polyvagal Solution. A couple huge things coming out for you from you currently. Let's start off with the new book, All Right, Our Polyvagal World.
So first off, who's the book for? I'm going to start off kind of light. I have a little more complex, a little more...
uh into the weeds of the theory later on you just want to get you want to get warmed up that's fine that's yeah we're just warming yeah yeah so who's who's the new book for our polyvagal world who's that for okay so the polyvagal theory when it came out it came out of my science roots and was for my colleagues or what i thought my colleagues would be interested in knowing about was for me it was my own journey of discovery and scientists are a little let's say um you I was going to term egocentric, but they're certainly focused about what they do. And they think that their problems are the most important problems. And this is they see the world through their own vision. And polyvagal theory came from that.
And when you go back and read the original theory and also the papers that live up to that, you would know that I was working in obstetrics, basically looking at the high risk babies. And I was confronted with a paradox. And that is how can.
heart rate that creates a pattern of bradycardia, which is too slow and not enough oxygen to the brain, be vagal. And also heart rate variability be vagal. How can the vagus both keep you healthy and kill you? And that was really, yeah, good.
That I actually want to, I want to put a pin on that because I'm going to bring that up later on regarding your paper, which is the vagal paradox. Yeah. So I was looking through, you have a, I didn't realize how much you have written, not just book-wise, but your, the scientific articles. your research it is an incredible amount uh even before i think 1994 was like the year of introducing polyvagal theory to the world right before that there was what 20 to 30 years worth of research on well longevity does help yeah there's a persistence and longevity yeah my first publication is in the late 1960s and it was the first really the first quantification of heart rate variability as a variable that changed under mental effort you But I think your question is, who's the book written for?
So we can get right to that. And I was really saying that everything, my tradition or my history or my training is to write to my colleagues. And so there's always been this kind of disconnect between my writing and when I get on like a podcast with you, where I would talk about things or give talks in public or their YouTubes out there.
where people find me relatable, accessible, and they kind of track it, but they can't really read the articles. So there's a disconnect because what you're seeing in the articles is really my academic history and who I write for. And so I had a real problem. I needed a voice.
I wanted a voice to translate what I see and what I saw, really, in terms of how the nervous system supported health, growth, restoration. or really in a sense of foundational building blocks of humanity. We want to get really to the basic part of it, because polyvagal theory is not about just high-risk babies having bradycardias. It's about trusting others and what our body does when we trust others and what happens to our body when we're in states of threat.
Well, I'm very fortunate because, you know, one of the products of my relationship with my loving wife was a... two wonderful sons. One son is a neuroscientist who is a faculty member at the University of Florida and actually has patents and research on auricular vagal nerve stimulation, the devices on the ear. Yeah, but he's not the one I wrote the book with because he's the academic and he has to stick within his own boundaries. But he's, you know, in a sense, integrating a lot of these ideas into his own creative work.
He's an imager. plus interested in vagal function, plus he integrated neuropeptides, which is what my wife Sue studies, oxytocin. Well, the other son, if we can say that not in any diminutive way, or dismissive way, is Seth. And Seth was a journalist. And then Seth decided that he would start making documentary movies.
And he had a very successful movie out called Class Action Park. And you get a touch of who Seth is if you watch that movie. He's in it. And it's a documentary, of course.
And he's making several others. And he said to me, he said, Dad, I'd like to translate your ideas into something that is readable. And this started this very interesting collaboration.
And. To me, I have to step back from it and actually share my own visceral reaction to it. Seth is extraordinarily bright.
I mean, anyone who knows him or has met him realizes this is a brilliant kid. And I'm a proud father. But here's the issue. When your kid is writing your work, how do you deal with that?
And who tells whom what to do? And it worked out very nicely. It got Seth.
basically start working out the narrative and writing and i would rewrite and he would rewrite it back to what it was because the the strategy was i would start writing it making it too dense and he says we have an agenda here and that is to communicate to people now the paradox of the whole journey not only was that i was now literally a passenger of in a sense carrying a fruit basket of ideas and he was now the great communicator the orator of the theory but the interesting part to me was when i had the book read to me with with uh basically i if you you can use your computer to read your text and i heard my voice i didn't hear seth's i heard my voice and so there was this remarkable thing that seth was able not only to capture the ideas but in many places or in general to capture my voice, but to capture it without the complexity of the scientist. So the book does what it's supposed to do. It's a book for everyone. It's a book to explain this part of our body.
In a sense, what I would say is a metaphor. It's helping us claim our evolutionary heritage. When we know about who we are and the resources that come on board with this remarkable world.
nervous system, we can be a better person. Yeah, absolutely. I do think the book hits the target. It's obviously written for a more general audience.
I mean, if you go from your original deep polyvagal theory book, extremely dense, very difficult to read. I had to have a dictionary right by me and I was just constantly back and forth. But then the other ones you've written since then have been easier, more easily accessible. This one is extremely, I would say, easy to access. And I like how you...
took the theory and applied it to things like solitary confinement in prison. Your section on oxytocin, I think, was probably my favorite. I don't want to ruin it because there's a really beautiful way that you wrote it. I'm assuming you wrote that part.
Well, it does say every now and then it'll say, I, Stephen. So I'm assuming you wrote that section. Well, you have to understand Seth's the writer.
It doesn't mean that the ideas and the storylines and the information aren't mine, but he's creating the voice. And. What makes it unique, there are a lot of these books that are, quote, written by the star with or without the writer. And some of the stars, when you read their books, you wonder, where did they get that skill set to communicate?
In this case, my son was able to truly capture my voice and capture the history of this because he's part of me or I'm part of him. It's really kind of a beautiful journey. But I really want to give him credit for this ability, this wonderful skill set to take ideas and to provide a framework of presentation which becomes accessible. I have now been using another term in my polyvagal world. I talk about the greatest gift that we can give is our own accessibility.
Why? Because it makes other people accessible. Which?
pays us back multiple times. Seth took these ideas and made them accessible. And the beauty of that is it means that tens of thousands, literally, of people will start incorporating these concepts and how they see the world and how they interact with each other.
Oh, absolutely. Take me a step back. I was assuming that you wrote a chunk, he wrote a chunk.
Oh, that's even more impressive because I couldn't tell the difference. In the opening section, it... there were references to the hulk and bruce banner and i think spider-man spider-sense was in there so that's him yeah that felt very i was assuming but then the rest of them like i couldn't tell give him the freedom of that because he is relating to his audience however uh every the the real issue is the content and the how truthful and accurate is the content and that's that's all that's me but when i say it's all my content but it's his ability to artfully put it into let's say palatable it's accessible and i will tell you the the blur for me the own personal mask the veil is that when i hear it i think it's me you And I think that when you realize that your son can basically convey you, it's not only a beautiful gift, it's also a great relief. It means that the ideas are not stuck or locked inside of you.
And I have to actually share this as an academic for decades. The greatest frustration I felt was the frustration of being unable. to communicate what was literally locked inside of me. And so I can sit back and say, wow, here's the voice and what's going to be the next book. Wow.
Amazing. So let's take it a step further here in this book. There's a, there's a section on mixed states, particularly, particularly appease, appease and fawn.
Yeah. So let me qualify this. People have written to me asking, Hey, how does fawn fit into.
the polyhedral theory. And my default response has always been, I've never seen Dr. Portis talk about it, but I conceptualize it as a behavioral adaptation to a stuck defensive state or to a mixed state. I thought it could be any of the states, but in this one, it sounds like you and Seth are qualifying it as-Let me bring you back to the history of that.
So in November, 2019, I was giving a talk in London and someone said, tell me about appeasement. and fawning. And I said, I will need to think about that. And then I, over a decade, I was confronted by a psychologist whose name is Rebecca Bailey, and a survivor of being abducted for over, I think it was 19 years, and that's JC Dugard.
And Rebecca and JC were confronting me because they were very upset with the Stockholm Syndrome. And they thought polyvagal theory would have a different take on Jacey's experience of being abducted. And that is they she's being criticized in the press for being compliant and in a sense, loving the guy that she detested. And the part was so we finally actually got this together in the within the past year. We wrote a paper called Impeachment.
I read that. Yeah. Yeah.
And. And the whole idea, what I started to realize working with them, was appeasement is kind of like a superhero's skill. And here we have to be very careful.
And I have to really give you kind of a basic caveat. This is not something everyone can do. You know, you've always heard that. It's basically, it's like if someone can, you know, is a savant.
We say, oh, wow, what genius savant. But when someone has this capacity to appease a predator, when under the most adverse situations, that is a nervous system that needs to be respected and honored. And it's not a nervous system that needs to be emulated, meaning that if you think that you should become like that, and all you're going to do is be basically, your body may not go for that ride.
It may fall apart. It may shut down. This is a remarkable narrative of a nervous system under the worst conditions.
And it's really a blended state because it has features of all kinds of fear, not just fight-flight, but immobilization. But it still enables a sufficient access to that ventral social engagement system, the face and the voice, so that it's convincing enough to... to basically make the predator think you're on the same team. What a remarkable adaptive reaction. And that is appeasement.
Appeasement is super. It's a super skills set. It's kind of like, almost like I can fly.
So it's something we honor. And when we meet people who have that. Now, fawning is much more reflexive. And fawning in itself is dangerous. because what happens when people fawn is predators lose interest.
And if you have abducted someone and you lose interest in them, what's going to happen? It can end up with someone being murdered or something really catastrophic happening. So it's more like a dorsal vagus shutdown. The body says, I can't fight it. I'm gone.
But fawning and appeasement, to me, are categorically different adaptive reactions. Totally makes sense. And I think with fawning in particular, I had conceptualized it as a heavy mix of...
shut down with some other defensive state activation because it seems to me there's some surrendering of the self yeah as i mean just metaphorically very loosely the self so but that seemed fawning to me always felt like it's there's some behavior or grouping of behaviors that one undergoes in order to reduce the amount of you know shutdown or threat within their system that they're feeling so it's not i'd never thought of it as a state in of itself or a mixed state but it's behavior as a result of other states or mixed states. Yeah, I would also say it has a degree of numbness or dissociation with it. Oh, yeah.
And so it's on the way of not being there totally, but it may still be exhibiting a certain amount of overt behavior. So what's the line between a behavior and a mixed state or a state? Well, the issue is behaviors. I actually was on an email with this where I was trying to use the word phenomenological.
I'm going to use the word observable. Behavior is what you observe. And what we're making a series of inference regarding what we can't observe.
And we're saying this is the neural structure that supports what we can observe. And this has created great confusion because people start thinking of sympathetic nervous system as fight flight. But what happens when you're running and playing? Your face is animated, you're interacting, you know, you're in your body and it's enjoyable.
So that's a mixed state. Play is a mixed state. But running out of fear is not. It's something different.
Likewise, immobilization out of fear is you're gone. But immobilization without fear is shared moments of intimacy, you know, where you're comfortable in the presence and proximity of another. I've also heard you called. So this was a. a nice new wrinkle for me from the book because there's the primary states but there's also mixed states but there's also kind of seems to be these states along with somebody else so immobilization while safe could be called stillness and i've heard you i think it was you though yeah call that but mix uh stillness with somebody now can be called intimacy yeah yeah so it's kind of like a new wrinkles adding is somebody else involved and then yeah if we think about immobilization which normally doesn't have a social component, but intimacy is a social act.
But what's interesting with intimacy is voice proximity and gesture may be more important than basically facial gaze at that point, in a sense, the bodies may be so comfortable, they don't have, they don't need the reassurance of repeated face-to-face interaction. Let me take a step further if I can. It's really important to me to be...
accurate in my concepts and how i'm relaying this information right so couldn't we look at any behavior and make some sort of inferences as to what may be happening on our nervous system level yeah right well let let me deconstruct that question a little bit differently okay please so and then i'm not sure i sent you this paper but there's a paper on the science of safety uh in that paper i talked about psychophysiological parallelism as a literally a false flag so what we're talking about is we have motor behavior observables we have autonomics and we have brain now there's not always one-to-one autonomics are really a foundation upon which there are many behaviors many uh psychological basically your cortex is large and so you have lots of creativity going on there but your brainstem that regulates autonomic nervous system is very small. So it's one to many. And one to many follows a hierarchy because the autonomic states are really pretty limited. That's what makes it interesting to study. Right, right, right.
So that's where, for me, the question is, well, okay, well, what else could be added to this? Because the primary state seemed pretty cut and dry. There's the ventral vagal, dorsal vagal sympathetic, right?
So pretty cut and dry, if I just put it loosely. The mixed states, you mix those together and you get basic mixed states, which I understood to be play, stillness, and freeze. Yeah. But then we can...
Yeah, appeasement also is really a mixed state because it's not... So now appeasement is in there, fawn is in there. Couldn't you continue adding things like exercise?
You're mobile, but alone. Couldn't you? So is exercise now a mixed state?
You can interpret it and you can play with it. And it's really saying you have limited states or circuits and you can mix and match them. And what are the adaptive advantages you get by mixing and matching?
And what you learn when you play that game. is the potency of mixing the social engagement system with the rest of the body. And that tells you something. It says that, yeah, you can go immobile.
You can go and fight flight. And it's all good. It's all pleasurable.
It's all healthy, if and only if you keep those systems out of defense. And how do you do that? You keep the social engagement system on board. So it's a journey.
So remember, the ideas came from... literally a theoretical model. They were informed by the clinic, by listening to therapists and people asking me these questions.
And then we started to figure it out. And then also asking the next level question as a scientist, are there experimental models to test those specific hypotheses? And that we're going to get to that too.
I want to definitely leave some time for that. So it kind of seems to me like there's the primary states and really there's kind of an endless gradients of mixed states potentially, because let's say appeasement is, I don't know, I'm just making this up. I have no idea if this is grounded in reality, but 80% safety is active and 20% of shutdown, completely making this up.
Well, what if it was 90% and 10% or 60-40? It might result in some other sort of-Well, you're asking, another way of looking at it is if you think of appeasement as recruiting all three states, and now you're asking the important inputs from those three states. you're really defining whether or not the nervous system is resilient. Because as the numbers get greater for the sympathetic mobilization or shutdown, then appeasement doesn't work. And it's basically a shift out of it.
So they need, it's the competency of the social engagement system that enables appeasement to be functionally adaptive. Totally makes sense. Yeah. So am I correct in... understanding the mixed states as potentially i mean if we're going to like name them like there could be an unending number of these things yeah so so i got into this um kind of like email exchange this morning because i was with a person who was a dance movement therapist and she was basically saying uh uh her reading of my work was basically uh i would say not acknowledging dance movement therapy and i said well yeah i i do in terms of movement without fear right and and the social movement uh but she was seeing the world through this is really what i i would mind to get this final point across is if you see the world through the polyvagal lens you start understanding these other systems if you see the world through those those lenses like dance movement therapy you're not going to understand polyvagal theory.
It's not going to be. But polyvagal theory will give you a tool, a perspective to understand what you are doing. Yeah, it's really kind of like a paradigm, isn't it?
Yeah, it's a paradigm. But it's an asymmetrical lens. So it gives you insight in one direction and less insight in the other. It's like, this gets into the new paper, if you're a neuroanatomist.
is polyvagal theory going to give you insights into neuroanatomy not necessarily uh but uh with polyvagal theory you can utilize features of of neuroanatomy to understand the mechanisms that you're studying yeah so for like dance therapy that's not uh or dance that's we can understand that in terms of play and co-regulation and safety i assume yeah exactly exactly and and especially you know a lot of people don't like to dance then you would ask them why don't you like to dance of course they feel self-conscious what they really tell you yeah they're telling you their body's in a state of threat yeah right so how can you have mobilization without fear and dance if your body is locked into the state of threat or fight flight it's just not going to work so you start understanding so polyvagal theory is is helpful in explaining accessibility to these different circuits. I really hope you're enjoying the discussion between Dr. Porges and myself so far. I want to take a quick break to tell you about my Stuck Not Broken Total Access Membership.
With the Total Access Membership, you get total access to all of my trauma recovery courses and my private community. All of my courses in the Total Access Membership are built from the ground up on the polyvagal theory. The first one is Polyvagal 101, which teaches you PVT in very simple terms. The second one is Building Safety Anchors, which helps you build the strength of your safety state. And the third one is Unstuck in Defensive States, which teaches you how to actively feel and relieve your stuck defensive state.
I really want you to be able to live with more calm, confidence, and connection. And yeah, I want you to reduce your anxiety, your numbness, and your anger as well. You can learn more about the total access membership through the link in the description.
All right. Enjoy the rest of my discussion with Dr. Porges. Okay.
So let's move on to another thing that's really, I put a lot of wondering into, and this is the popularization of the polyvehicle theory is, I asked you about this the first time we met actually, a couple of years ago, activating the vagus nerve. So first off, let me frame this. This is not typically language that I see you using in...
your academic papers and i have looked i haven't scoured all of them but i've looked i've done a cursory glance at the at the least but in this new book it seems like you're endorsing this type of language or you answer oh oh let's start off by saying polyvagal theory uh considers the vegas as a conduit right it's a wire it is not a uh organ with uh executive functions And when we talk about harnessing the vagus or stimulating the vagus, hacking it, we really have to reframe what we mean. In general, the hacking of it or stimulating it is going up the sensory, the afferent pathway. So it's stimulating those foundational brainstem circuits. And that supports health growth and restoration. And the literature is really getting quite strong on that.
That is... the afferent signals are telling the brainstem you're doing well. That's a good stuff.
The issue, though, is people want to exercise their vagus, and this becomes a hard terminology. I use the term neural exercise primarily when I'm talking about the social engagement system, which basically, I mean, you can even move into the area of yoga or pranayama yoga, which is the nerve. basically the muscles of the face and head and the historic understanding that if you utilize those muscles, you tend to feel better. And people do that in terms of singing or listening or playing wind instruments or even playing the kazoo or humming.
So we find out that there are a lot of very, I would say, primitive or reflexive ways that we behave that have a true neurophysiological validity if you see it through the polyvagal lens. So that makes complete sense. And in your, even in the book, it's not a huge section, but it's something that sticks out to me a lot because I spent a lot of time thinking about these kinds of things. There is a section on stimulating the vagus. And in that section, it's made very clear that there's one topic of vagal stimulators, but that's that invasive surgical kind of thing.
And there's a whole other category of what you just said, which is, you know, social engagement and whatnot. But then there's a TikTok and Instagram stuff. And This section kind of seems like it gives some credence to people claiming that their biggest nerve is being stimulated.
Well, see, I go back and say, actually, I wrote a chapter that's coming out shortly on vagal nerve stimulation through the lens of the polyvagal theory. And basically, you can do the auricular, you can do the implant, you can do a non on the neck that is non-invasive. But you really have to get.
to the whole understanding of the mechanisms of all forms of vagal nerve stimulation. They are functionally stimulating the afferents that lead to the brand stem areas regulating the vagus, the neural exercises. Sociality is a neural exercise. Singing.
And we tend to forget that. And the intervention that I had developed, the safe and sound protocol, is functionally an acoustic vagal nerve stimulant. Yeah. The vocal prosody kind of range, right? So that makes, and that's kind of how I've understood these things is that, let's say someone says that they're doing this thing to hack their bagel nerve.
To me, I've understood it as some sort of sensory input is happening, goes to the brainstem that tells them they're safe. The brainstem sends it to the rest of their body. It's not about the bagel nerve exactly. It's about the brainstem. That really seems to get the center of all this.
Okay. So even when my good friends talk about like Bessel, the body keeps the... score yeah well the body doesn't keep the score the brainstem so the issue is the body is this the brainstem has the surveillance circuits that sends these basically you have sensors to your body but the surveillance is being interpreted at the level of the brainstem and the vagal nerve stimulators are affecting that surveillance system the big owner oh the implanted vagal nerve stimulators all of them all of them and even sociality are basically affecting the surveillance system it's basically shifting the valence from negativity to positivity so so the the vagus we have to think of it as this very large surveillance system of our internal organs and we just tend not to think that way we think of it as a especially with the popularization of vagal stimulation we think of it as an efferent or motor system we forget that the fibers that we're talking about occupy about four percent of the total vagal fibers that are the efferents that are going to the heart and that's basically occupying most of the literature and those fibers are myelinated.
That's very rare. The 80% are sensory and more of the motor fibers are unmyelinated and go to the visceral organs and not to the heart, other than the heart. So it helped me understand them. And when it comes to the book, it seems to feel the way I read it is that the activating or stimulating the vagus nerve is being endorsed.
Like, yes, these TikTok people are onto something. Yeah. You have to say. okay so let's scrape all the philosophies is it doing any harm okay is it stimulating the vagus is it is it when we use the word is it stimulating the vagus is it producing uh the down a down system effects of calm right yes is it supporting reduction of pain uh is it enhancing gut issues yes is it helpful in terms of even going upstream in terms of psychological phenomena yes So the literature is actually coming out very nicely, including like areas of PTSD. The point of my concern had always been that people focus on the nerve without thinking about the circuit.
That's exactly it. So we're kind of like gentle in this world. When I'm on podcasts and I've been on with people who want to hack the nervous system and I basically do this to them.
The reason I do that is. it's kind of like offensive to me because the body in fact we live in this world that if something is wrong we fix it by giving the body something whether it's a drug or implant the nervous system basically regulates meaning that it's a homeostatic system that needs input and it produces output and reads what that output is doing it's a dynamically adjusting system so if we start is as medicating the nervous system adjusts and then it doesn't work as well i i'm with this firm what i want to proliferate in thinking is the concept of neural exercise yeah and it's not a question of muscle tone it's a question of neural flexibility and adaptation i'm with you in that mission all right so the other thing with when it comes to this is let's say there's all these popular you know activating the vagal nerve things let's say there's a really popular one right now which is putting a frozen bag of peas on your chest and someone says it's stimulating my vagus nerve and i was able to go to sleep so when it comes to stuff like this my question is let's just assume well there is there is a signal going to the brainstem but my question is well what's the signal being sent down is it of safety or is it more of immobilization if well in the frame in this framing potentially it's immobilization on that one right um uh the the question is Once your body immobilizes, it's going to start sending up other cues. And what is your narrative of those interoceptive cues? So this is an interesting thing.
And that is, in the world of trauma, it's extremely important to start talking this way. That the interoceptive feedback is the trigger for people who have had experiences of trauma. So we're a signal for you or for me, assuming we haven't had much trauma.
is, ah, that's kind of interesting to them is their body goes. Because the interoception, the bodily feelings are now linked with associations. And those associations then trigger downflow.
And with the frozen peas, it could be triggering a dorsal. And now you're getting immobilization. But if you can get immobilization without fear, you own a different part of your body. Yeah. And for someone who's suffering from insomnia.
that might be the story of it and the experience that it might be better than. Yeah. I haven't heard the frozen piece on it.
Oh yeah. Yeah, that's a big one. That's a big one. They call it bagel nerve icing. I hadn't heard of it.
And through the Polyvagal Institute editorial board, one of the assignments or whatever was, was, do we have any thoughts about this bagel nerve icing? And at first I thought, are people putting icing on their skin or some sort of cream? But no, it's ice.
That's the idea. Well, the Wim Hof has brought a lot of this cold water because those are, in a sense, very primitive. vagal reflexes they exist but they tend to be more linked to a dorsal response and and they had to do with survival and reduction of metabolic activity but as a diving reflex is one of them as we're talking i'm starting to see that they could potentially be tamed through a psychoeducational component and where it's really the study of one's own interoception to now reframe the narrative.
I would also assume that if you're learning these things with the expectation that they help, that would probably help. If you're doing these things in a group setting, that would probably help. So we can go back to one of the pranayama yoga techniques was literally to cut the tongue and then the tongue rolls back into your throat, literally, and gives you a gag reflex.
Okay. And that creates a bradycardia. If you haven't, basically you can't eat.
So there's a whole preparation to go through to do this. And I met a yoga who told me he did this when he was in a car wreck. And basically to slow his heart rate up, to reduce the blood flow and to save his life, which is very possible.
Wow. So the issue is when you gain some of these skills of regulating your body, you might be able to, it might create greater flexibility. But that's the same thing. It's like saying to someone, you know, the gag reflex that we all really detest could be modified through training and through associations. And I'm not suggesting that people do this, but it's kind of like saying there's been these ancient traditions where people took these interceptive cues and said, what can I do with them?
What's the range that I can push? my body on it. And well, I mean, that makes sense. Typically, like you've said many times, full-on shutdown has a role.
It does have a survival function to it. We don't want to maybe induce it day to day. So over the decades, once I started talking about shutdown, I started to realize that for many people, they may have shut down once, but the nervous system doesn't really want to go to that state.
So there have been what I view as adaptive modifications. And I think freeze is one of those. But then I also think dissociation is really the most remarkable one.
So where freeze is also a very physiological response, not this is high sympathetic tone, high dorsal. It's just not healthy to be in it. But dissociation is literally protecting your nervous system. It's really a remarkable adaptive one. So I saw dissociation as this brilliant.
nervous system adaptation. And I thought that maybe we should start, I don't say we need to honor it in what it is doing, as opposed to being afraid of it. I completely agree when it comes to dissociative identity disorder, extreme dissociation, as I understand it, but it's kind of served a function and help that individual to survive, right?
Yep. Let's move on to your new paper. The timing of it was perfect because I had just written to you saying, hey, I have some questions about the current status of polyvagal theory. And you wrote that or you had it ready.
You sent it back to me like the time was perfect. First off, what does the newspaper do that others haven't for those that are more into the more academic stuff here? OK, if we go through the history of polyvagal theory, it was really I'm trying to figure out a problem. This is the paper that shows you that journey. The papers were never written to say what are the basic principles of polyvagal theory.
In fact, those were extracted more in the therapy in the world of clinicians. So in this paper, I try to come up with what are the basic principles of the theory, as to take the narrative back and say, from a science perspective, what has science led to? Where did this come from?
And so it really identifies the basic principles of it. So that was the first part. Well, actually, The real first, the real reason for writing the paper is that there are a lot of people who just don't understand the theory and tend to think they're experts in the theory. And I found this really...
You know, as a scientist, I like to have a degree of humility, and that is, I don't, when I go into an area, I read, and I always think, like, I'd be careful if I make a mistake. I want to make sure that there's nothing incorrect. And in developing the theory, I was extraordinarily careful in the literature and documenting things and going back and making sure that it was consistent.
So there was, in a sense, an inferential progression that led to what is the polyvagal theory. But what happened? I started to see people criticizing the theory based upon points that were never in the theory, just weren't there, and tend to be adamant and start to write papers that said that there was no basis for the theory.
And all they were doing was falsely stating things about the theory. It was really kind of interesting. You know, you think that people who are established in a certain area would be respectful, sufficiently respectful. read the papers to see if their statements were consistent or not. But what happened was that there were basically very few, but a couple of people who made really blatant mistakes in a way to foster their own research.
I mean, want to be blunt about it, they were trying to say they discovered something and polyvagal theory says that that couldn't be done. Polyvagal theory never said anything like that. And the issue was, so I... And actually, this is very, very hard for me as a human being to basically say, I don't like, I don't mind criticizing people's science, but I don't like to go on a offense where saying people are blatantly wrong.
But it's really quite remarkable for over about a 20 year period, a couple people were repeatedly misrepresenting the theory and publishing statements that were creating what is. classically called a straw man argument. And straw man arguments are really kind of brilliant in their sense that they say, well, if you make the false statement about someone's theory that you don't agree with, that theory is now wrong. So they make the false statement. They say, this isn't true. Well, the theory never said that.
And I would agree with them that that's not true either. But then they would go on and on with these things. And it just didn't make any sense to me because it started getting into social media and basically a corruption of Wikipedia.
I can't, nothing on Wikipedia can actually describe polyvagal theory because the same, at least people who have been criticizing have been seeding Wikipedia with the same false information. And it's been very, very unsettling. On the other side is, I felt that there was a responsibility because my own view was that okay these people just don't know what they're talking about and certainly now this is the the misunderstanding that i had i said certainly the community meaning the people who are you know using polyvagal theory will literally defend themselves and articulate what's different what i hadn't realized is that the actual principles were too embedded in the theory for people to actually say you know what you're talking about has nothing to do with polyvagal theory because they were too embedded and they were basically becoming different because they were looking at people's credentials who were writing the papers. And what this paper does, this paper also says that, look, anatomy is important, neurophysiology is important, comparative neuroanatomy, but they have their limitations in what they can tell you about polyvagal theory. And anatomy is really remarkable because you can have wires, literally, neuro-optomical pathways.
But you don't have a clue from anatomy whether those pathways are doing anything. And then from neurophysiology, which is basically being done on anesthetized preparations, you have no idea if those same circuits work the same way in a conscious organism. So there are all these limitations. And the one that really got to me, I would say personally, was the fallacy that if you can find things in reptiles that appear to look like what you can see in mammals, it disproves the theory.
But the whole interesting part was about the evolutionary aspect of the theory was that mammals by the time they evolved around 200 million years ago already had a ventral vagal complex that enabled them to nurse and no reptile can still do that. So regardless of, and the reptiles we're looking at are younger than 100 million years been on thing. And even when I started to build the model, I thought, well, What if I find a reptile that hasn't changed much since the branching between the modern reptiles and mammals came off the old extinct reptiles? The problem is... The molecular, the fossil record doesn't give you a good ordering because it doesn't line up with the molecular time clock.
So in a sense, comparative neuroanatomy, which was a discipline, which really got its basics in place because it's supposed to give you hints about evolution, really can't line up its time clock. So it can't give you the hints that it claimed it could. So there's a lot of limitations of these other disciplines. embryology.
So I'm going to now do what I learned as I started to build this paper. Embryology gives you kind of a mirror of how certain neural structures evolved within the history or phylogenetic history of humans or of mammals. You can actually see their anatomy changing with embryology. And the interesting part is that There is a ventral migration, and this is where the cardioinhibitor, the vagal neurons that become part of it.
This happens in embryology as well? Yes, yes. And that's why the preterm baby was so, in a sense, serendipitously such a spectacular scientific preparation.
Because the preterm baby doesn't have the complete ventral migration, doesn't have a ventral vagal system working. And those are the kids that had, literally. bradycardia.
It was still in process of that ventral migration, and that created that vulnerability for the lethal bradycardia. And the issue is you can actually see this developmentally in terms of looking for manifestations in heart rate patterns as your window to that ventral migration. So as the neurons for cardioinhibitoria neurons move ventrally, they start When they get to the area of the ventral vagal complex, which is the neurons that control the muscles of the face and head, we now have that heart-brain relationship, the face-heart relationship.
And that's sucking, swallowing, and breathing, and vocalizing. And the interesting part on that is that at that point, when that system works, you have these respiratory rhythms in heart rate, and that becomes your window. And this became another kind of... criticism.
People said, well, that's RSA. Yeah. And, but that's a mammalian respiratory heart rate relationship.
And what the critics were saying, well, we see heart rate respiratory relationships in other vertebrates. So the theory's wrong, but you don't see it coming from the ventral vagus because it's not functioning in those organisms, but they then didn't understand why RSA was important. RSA is important in polyvagal theory because it's an index of that ventral vagus.
You can see it working. You can make your predictions of sociality, your predictions of behavior, of stress by watching the system. So it's a portal. And that was the important part. In a sense, respiratory syncytrythymia or vagal tone is not important to the theory, but it's important to measure hypotheses.
that are generated by the theory. And to me, that was totally missed. People miss these. Well, it seems like you covered a lot, right? A lot of this I wanted to ask you about, but we'll try and hit a couple of these pieces here.
When it comes to critiques of the political theory, I've tried to read as much as I can. There's the surface level of people like me where we do the best we can to understand and share this information. And there are people out there who try to do that through a critique lens but it always seems to go back to a couple of people grossman grossman same same people yeah yeah so i don't see any other and they seem like serious scientists to me and i don't hear you saying they're not it just seems like they don't fully understand it they don't understand it they don't understand it at all that's the the tragedy of it and uh they have their own issues with their research i'm not attacking their research i mean if you want me to put my my academic head on, I can do that. You haven't already? Yeah, but that's not the point here.
There's no reason to attack their research. The only reason to attack is to say, listen, you have an obligation as a scientist to be truthful in what you're reporting. And if you think you found something that is inconsistent with what I found, you better know what I found or what I'm saying. If you're saying something different, you know. It sounds, especially to see people like me, it sounds very convincing.
You know, when they bring up lungfish, I'm like, oh, that seems pretty darn significant. And I see your rebuttals to it. And I'm like, well, that sounds like a great rebuttal.
But the reality is there's only so far eyes at therapists. Yeah, but the issue is if you understood. that that's not critical of you no no but the issue is who gives who literally cares about a lung fish and the fact that the lung fish has a respiratory rhythm uh very very slow and has a myelinated vagal fiber what does that mean in terms of polyvagal theory yeah does polyvagal theory make any statement about myelinated vagal fibers from uh fish coming from the dorsal vagus it's irrelevant It's not part of the theory.
You made it really clear in the newspaper just how honed, like the political theory can get applied to many things. Like we talked about the mixed states earlier, but you're very specific when it comes to mammals, humans, as best I understand it. But even more specifically, the myelinated ventral vagus, which seems to be unique to mammals. I don't know if I got that wrong, but it seems like you're very specific. And then also how that relates to the Vegas and the Bagel paradox.
So what's interesting, in 2007, the two of those guys wrote a paper. And it was an issue of which I had a major paper. In fact, the whole issue was probably was about a lot of things, heart rate variability in Bagel.
And I wrote in a, I was asked to write a commentary for the whole issue. And I wrote a statement saying I had no idea where they were. actually the quote is from uh i i basically wrote i said it's extremely perplexing because what they were saying had nothing to do with the polyvagal theory this is not what the theory said and i took a quote which is in this paper from the original 1995 paper which said you know it's all about the ventral vagus and the myeloma fibers and that's what it says don't make it into the argument for me was that this is just oblique to polyvagal theory and if it's another theory let them state their theory but it's not what polyvagal theory says and the interesting part is rather than ask me what i think they're starting to the papers were really telling me that i was wrong not they were not stated as a disagreement or a misunderstanding or a debate they're basically saying things were were were wrong yeah and there's basically no place in science for that type of behavior. You can do that by mistake, but not repeatedly over multiple papers. And in that new paper, it's only a sampling of their statements.
I just, you know. Right. No, no, I know.
Yeah. I believe it was the new paper you said that the intent was, hey, I'm going to share this as a, it sounded like as a hypothesis. Yeah.
In 1994, tell me what you think, science community. You put it out there. Yeah.
Well, that's. nothing was etched in stone i i expected there to be a lot of modifications the issue was the modifications are really been clarifications they haven't been modifications um it's like an interesting things were done very very carefully when i built the model so i've got a couple other which i thought were interesting criticisms like what about the hypoglossal nerve you know the one that regulates the tongue that's also a special viscerally ferned you know so it should be part of the social engagement system so they're saying to me i left that out so it's not saying the theory is wrong they're saying i left that out well i did it wasn't left out it just evolved differently so from our embryology i just took the cranial nerves that regulate the structures that come off the pharyngeal arch which were the ones that are the five cranial nerves that uh define the social engagement system So the theory was true to the embryology and the phylogeny, and the criticisms were, I would say, ignorant of that, even though that's what these people's strengths were in. So it wasn't I got you from their point on me. It was, why didn't you know?
This is your area, not really mine. So it's been kind of an interesting view of how you navigate through other people's disciplines. And my view was I always navigate with. with great respect for people in other disciplines. But the main point is when you go into other people's disciplines, I'm not telling them about their theories, their principles, their practices.
I am taking information from their discipline to work in my defined area. Now, they walked into mine without even accurately reading what I had stated. So I find that, you know, just not comfortable.
Of course, yeah. You. take seems like great care to show as far as literature review like i'm not maybe you're not saying the way i understand it is you're saying you know i'm not an expert in this this and this but i can do a deep dive in literature yeah and then it seems like sort of using that like there's like there's pillars to the theory literature review um evolution yeah like oh then your research as well so like there's things that are it's not just you're saying hey this is my guess yeah there's pillars this is standing on it's not a theory in the way that people come up with a hypothesis or idea yeah it's not the guess it's derived and so from the very beginning i said when people brought up criticism i said read the literature i didn't extract argue with me about my interpretation of the literature don't say i'm wrong say that my interpretations are are wrong never there's never been a article anywhere that said i misinterpret the literature so the issue again in this paper i've been very careful about what i'm presenting and in the new paper what i found really uh on this journey was this notion or I would say, reframing dorsal vagus and getting newer information on that. And that there is dorsal vagus actually affects blood pressure and contractility. And that you can have, and of course, we already know within the world of trauma and mental health that dorsal vagus affects digestion.
I mean, that's where it comes out. But the issue is that it also can reduce blood pressure enough that can produce syncope by reducing... reducing the contractility of the heart so there's not just cardio inhibitor excuse me chronotropic meaning rate there's what's called ionotropic which is contractility so the vagus does two things it affects rate but all also affects contractility and you start seeing again the dynamics of a system that if it wants to mobilize it takes those breaks off if it wants to go quiescent wow it does these other things A couple more concepts I want to make sure we squeeze in, although they're kind of big ones, so we'll see what happens. Something new I haven't seen you talk about before is vagal efficiency.
Oh, this is, okay. So, okay, you're going to go for a ride, Justin, because you're seeing the future. I will spit it out now, and then I'll probably have to process it later because I probably might not be able to catch up with you, but take me for a ride.
Okay, so. concept of vagal tone and vagal break, it's all peripheral. And when we're talking about neural exercises, we're talking about brainstem.
Vagal efficiency is a measure of that brainstem's functioning by looking at heart rate and basically respiratory synesthesia, your indices of vagal activity. When you have an efficient vagal break, if you take it off, your heart rate goes up. If you put it back on, it goes down.
So the... regression line between heart rate and the amplitude of RSA should be linear. But guess what?
In typically normal, healthy people, it's very linear. But now let's do a little mix. Let's talk about people like who have trauma histories, not so tightly coupled. Let's talk about people who have features of what's called dysautonomia, or basically problems with the autonomic nervous system.
A sample of individuals with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. a sample of a population with cyclic vomiting. These are basically from a collaborator in a gastroenterology clinic. The issue is they're basically dissociated.
So what you're seeing is the vagal efficiency is really a mark of dysautonomia. And I think this is really going to be the future. What I don't know is whether it can be rehabilitated.
You see, that's the question that I don't know. But there's... there's also what do you mean that that seems important to me what do you mean if i don't know if it can be rehabilitated like the the vagal like if it can improve is that what you're saying no no no whether you if you have okay let's start with this we were doing a study on kids with gut problems and they were getting auricular vagal nerve stimulation and i asked the question who are the subjects okay so i want to know and i want to know the individual differences i want to know who was benefiting.
Interestingly, if they had a decoupled vagal efficiency, no vagal efficiency virtually at all, the vagal stimulation worked. Now, what that meant was that there was no endogenous competing feedback loop. You're going to have to break this down in simpler terms. Okay.
Basically, the stimulation of reducing pain was getting into the vagal system as long as the vagal system had no organization itself. it was already organized and you would be fighting with it. And so this year, I lost you. The bottom line.
Okay. Okay. The issue is thinking about a prosthesis. And the vagal nerve stimulator functions as a prosthesis to turn off the pain. But if the vagal system is still functioning, but not efficiently, it gets in the way.
It's a confusing signal to that brainstem of it can't interpret it. And so what I'm trying to figure out is whether we can use neural exercises, whether it's like the safe and sound protocol or. whatever I can figure out to will that enhance this metric. But the metric is extremely important because it's telling you about that brainstem circuit. You can use neuroblockade.
You can take drugs and knock out vagal tone, but it doesn't affect that vagal circuit because the vagal tone is peripheral. The brainstem circuit is telling you, I get information from my sensory afferents. What's it going to do with it? If it reliably changes heart rate, then I have a tightly coupled efficient system. If it doesn't, you know, things may on average look good, but they're not really well regulated.
The part that we have to start in a more, let's say, phenomenological behavioral world, we would use the word contingent. Is the behavior contingent? So the issue is, is heart rate contingent on this? heart rate pattern or this vagal tone influence if it's contingent you have vagal efficiency if it lacks contingency it's disorganized it's chaotic what does that have to do with therapy or just day-to-day living or doctor visits what do we do with this okay so we're in the world okay polyvagal theory basically says the body in a state of threat gets manifested on all levels so it's your mental your physiological behavioral you know everything gets messed up Now, the question is, is this a state or is it locked into the nervous system?
Polyvagal has always taken this optimistic viewpoint that we can manipulate or state can be manipulated and more optimistic outcomes come out. What vagal efficiency tells us is that in part of a part of that state, dysfunction is actually manifested in the regulation at the level of the brainstem. It is an atypical brainstem regulation. And what I don't know is the flexibility of that. That's what I don't know.
And that's going to be the future. So in the world that you are in with people who are therapists or interested in polyvagal theory, they're looking at, they see the theory and they're seeing the symptom clusters in individuals, patients, and even in themselves. They're seeing what used to be called psychosomatic, or they're now seeing more in terms with a functional medicine model, that these are functional changes that are occurring, and they tend to all, or many of them, reflect dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, and primarily dysfunction of the vagal regulation. So the question is, we have a marker, but what can you do with that marker?
The marker tells you that there's going to be vulnerabilities. but we want to optimize the individual. So I am really thinking about how can I build model? Well, first of all, I'm going to try to test whether or not this can change. So is vagal efficiency the markers that you're talking about?
Yes. It almost sounds like if one could measure vagal efficiency, sorry if I'm saying that wrong, but there might be actually some predictive kind of quality to it. There's tremendous predictive quality to it because Yes. When we look at it, if we take individuals in a gastroenterology clinic and look at it, we can identify the individuals who have certain other clinical disorders, in a sense, clinical disorders of what one would say dysautonomia and not just gut pain. So we're seeing a more systemic neural dysfunction.
And the part that I find really remarkable is you can take a Looking even at college students and looking at this metric of those who have some trauma history, not necessarily severe versus those that don't, you get separation of the distributions. If you look at individuals who have this cyclic vomiting, nausea chronically, they are distinct, but they look like, in a sense, many of the, it does have specificity because medical diagnosis functionally are. more global than you're led to believe. So that there's a disorder.
It's a collagen disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. It's hypermobility syndrome is the subtype that we'll talk about. The issue with that becomes interesting in the world of psychology and mental health is because the individuals suffer from tremendous amount of anxiety. They have chronic pain, but very few studies on autonomics. And we start doing those.
And we found out that we could identify them with like an 80% confidence in a distribution of kids coming into basically a gut pain clinic based on vagal efficiency. Wow. So, and actually this was picked up in the major gastroenterology journal where they wrote an editorial on what they called the vagal hypothesis as kind of like the future in that area.
Okay. So let's go back to the polyvagal theory. versus polyvagal hypothesis so people are saying it's it's not science um that seems ridiculous to me uh what what's your response to like science should have testable hypotheses right it should be falsifiable it should it should be able to make guesses or as to what should happen and it also should be able to incorporate past knowledge i would assume into the theory so what do you have to say about as far as political theories being a hypothesis or a actual scientific theory?
Well, every, okay, so there was an interesting paper. First of all, in the new paper, I discussed the fact that the impact of the theory is greatly underestimated because it can explain many hypotheses and many studies that have already been published. And there was a paper recently published that's cited in that paper on literally mindfulness and autonomic responses, which...
basically does a meta-analysis through the lens of the polyvagal theory to explain the effect. Although virtually every paper that's included in the meta-analysis didn't even acknowledge that. The other part that is extraordinarily interesting to me is that like even one of the major critics, Paul Grossman, all his research on heart rate variability can be explained by polyvagal theory.
And so it's not like it's out there and it's irrelevant. It's It leads to testable hypothesis. And in this paper. So it has explanatory power.
You can apply this to other people's work and say, yeah, I can explain this. Yeah, but the beauty of it is all you need to do is look at Google Scholar and you start seeing that it's been cited, I don't know, 20,000 times. And in those papers, what are they using it for?
Not to criticize it, but to use it to explain their findings. They're using it as support. And. So it's there and it's structured to set up certain hypotheses. Like even the bit with the vagal efficiency, that's leading to specific hypotheses.
Changes in vagal tone have been around. This is like 50 years, whether we talk about his heart rate variability or respite or vagal tone or the vagal break. Those hypotheses have been around and tested and reliable phenomena.
So this is just ridiculous about it. I did make the statement that the theory wasn't, the theory from my perspective was to throw out to people to provide a different way of seeing things and to structure certain testable hypotheses. It wasn't like it was there and you have to believe it. It's like it's there. Argue with it.
Find alternative hypotheses. Do different explanations. The editorial. ultimately it comes down to hey look we have this issue the vagal paradox this doesn't make sense here's my answer here's my you know yeah that's how sorry that's really at the core of it still that's why i broke the paper that's why it's titled that way yeah and the issue is in that paper i also talk about the heuristic value of the studying of the preterm because there can be no ambiguity in testing let's say the polyvagal hypothesis there of about the two different vagal sources because in the preterm the ventral vagus just isn't there so you can see it there and then i had data in there talk about a rat study where we could see it developmentally because rats are born pretty prenatally uh in terms of vagal regulation i'd say they're born prenatally they're born with an immature vagal system you can see it developing day by day and so the studies are there that test these hypotheses you have to read the theory you have to know what the theory is stating you have to read the supporting literature if you don't want to read the supporting literature you don't want to read the theory and you can say anything you want and someone's going to believe you and it sounds believable it does yeah well i mean it does it does to you it doesn't to me okay so it's like how people present cases how they present it um you have to say where's the evidence uh that you're arguing with what it's like the lung fish the point was he's the guy found a myelinated vagal fiber in a lung fish coming from the drosophagus so what Did it appear in amphibia or reptiles that occurred later? No.
So it's a dead end in the phylogenetic evolutionary tree. So how does that have anything to do with polyvagal theory? It doesn't have anything even to do with evolution unless you think evolution is linear.
Right. And it's not. And it changes and it reinvents itself.
There's just an amazing bit. So like going back on one of the critics'criticisms. I did a study on reptiles because I was very curious about these respiratory rhythms.
And the critics said, well, fatal flaws. There are no fatal flaws in the paper. The issue is basically there was no heart rate.
When we blocked the vagal system in the reptile, it had no effect on its heart rate variability. So the context, basically the statement about these other respiratory rhythms in reptiles They may be there, but they're not, doesn't mean that they are universally regulated through the Vegas. Anyway, enough of that.
More positive things. The theory has great explanatory value and leads to interesting questions. Absolutely. I'd like to share one other one.
And that was one of the other criticism, which is almost hilarious, was a criticism that reptiles are social. And one can say, oh. They do have social behavior, but it all depends on how you define social behavior. And social behavior to any one of us humans is about our interactions with each other, which has a lot to do with facial expressivity, vocalization, gesture, and proximity.
Reptiles have some type of social behavior, but it's not mammalian social behavior. So you have to understand where the theory lives. It lives in the body. in a certain domain and it is not a domain of reptilian social behavior if someone wanted to falsify the polyvagal theory what would that look like it it you can't falsify it in the way that you're thinking okay because the literature because of its explanatory value and it's a i would say decades of data that can be explained the part that i find uh more you Okay, so there are hypotheses that would be generated, like the fact that the ability to document Bradycardia in humans under shutdown, it's a hard experiment to conduct.
That's why the preterm baby is the closest I could get to it and Bradycardia is in babies. But that doesn't disprove it. But what I started to realize as I wrote this last paper is you might not have a dorsal vagal.
heart rate, bradycardia in everyone. It just may not be there in the mature adult or the mature individual. However, you do have dorsal vagal defense reactions in all of them, and they may come up in terms of contractility and blood pressure.
And the literature was showing, as well as gut problems, the literature in other mammals was showing that animals of prey, small animals, tend to freeze and immobilize and have literally bradycardia sometimes drop dead under so-called fright, while animals of prey will have dorsal vagal contractility changes, but not heart rate changes. Now, that becomes extraordinarily interesting in terms of niches of where animals fall. Mammals, they're all mammals we're talking about, fall in terms of these mechanisms. So I think there's a lot of flexibility in understanding that.
the true autonomic signature of immobilized defense in humans. Because it's too hard to set that paradigm. One final question for fun.
I talked with, so I have this in my mind, I've always had this polyvagal trinity, which is yourself and Deb Dana and Peter Levine. And I think of the Justice League trinity. Or the DC Trinity, which is Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.
Which of the three are you? Deb, Dana already picked one. I'm curious what you would pick.
Who are you out of those three? That's a tough one. Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman?
No, I'm not Wonder Woman. I got that one. But I think Peter and I would both feel that we are from another, I would say, from another planet or from individuals whose biological parents may not have been their real parents.
Okay. It's because of our... Peter, have you asked Peter this question? I've never met with him. I would love to meet with him.
I haven't done that yet. Yeah, I don't. And again, I think Batman has an edge.
He's trying to right the wrong. I don't really have that edge. I don't think Peter has that edge.
So I think if you come into the world with a different lens and you try to navigate in that world, I think... you know, the Superman metaphor is, fits more comfortably, but it's also a large responsibility once you take that, that image. So I'm not really happy taking it.
So. I would say you're the more Batman, Peter's obviously brilliant, but the more academic, intellectual, I would, I would lean toward Batman. I would see Peter more as Superman.
He's out there. I mean, Batman's out in the field too, but Superman's out there, you know, doing the direct. kind of work is a bit more how I see it. So I would, I'm going to classify you guys in the, in that.
So that's the way it is. I'm sorry. I'll take it. It's okay. All right.
This has been challenging and delightful. I hope you had a good time and thank you so much for doing this. Oh, you're quite welcome.
And good to see you again. Hey, thank you so much for listening this entire way through. It's a very long discussion and it wasn't all super easy. I know I struggled with. pretty good chunk of it in all honesty, especially the bagel efficiency.
I think there's a lot there that I need to keep coming back to. I really still am kind of struggling with the whole new mixed state thing. I have some questions there still, and I'm going to address those in a future episode. Although I'm super glad that I got some clarification on the whole stimulating the vagus nerve, that has never felt right to me, that kind of language.
And it seems to really not be in the spirit of PVT and really what... we can glean from it, which is not hacks and stimulation of the vagal nerve. That's not what we should be doing here, in my opinion. So it was good, really good for me, at least to get some clarification on that and how I'm talking about this stuff. If you want a deeper understanding of the polyvagal theory, I do have a nifty gifty for you, a freebie.
When you sign up for my email list, I will send you a copy of my ebook, Trauma and the Polyvagal Paradigm. You get a deep dive into what the PVT is and learn how it directly connects to trauma. So again, link in the description.
When you sign up for my email list, I will send you Trauma and the Polyvagal Paradigm, my ebook. Otherwise, fellow stuck nut, I really hope you've enjoyed this conversation between Dr. Portis and I. I hope this episode has been a wonderful resource for you in learning about and applying the polyvagal theory. Bye.
Well, I appreciate you. I was nervous about sending you that email saying, hey, here's the questions I want to ask. I was nervous about it. I think...
For me, it feels, I don't feel like I'm challenging, but I feel like, Hey, I have some questions, like some real, you know, not, not skepticism exactly, but I have questions about this stuff. Where, you know, where are you at with in this process? I take it really seriously. I want to do the best I can to, you know, I talk about it a lot.
And so it's extremely important to me that I represent your work accurately and then translate it for more general audiences. It's extremely important. Now that I'm on the editorial board, it's even more important. So As I'm reading this stuff, I'm asking myself, do I have a deep enough knowledge? And as a therapist, there's only so far I can go.
But do I have a deep enough knowledge to reply to people that are writing to PVI asking for feedback? So I was nervous putting that out there and saying, hey, I have questions about this stuff. I'm open for anything you want to ask me. Seems like you are.
Yeah. And then your response was, Hey, here's a new paper. Boom.
This is going to answer, actually address a lot of my questions. Okay.