Thomas Hübl: Hello and welcome. Again, my name is Thomas Hübl. I’m the convener of the Collective Healing Conference and I have the pleasure and the honor to be sitting here with you, Dr. Stephen Porges. Stephen Warm welcome. And I’m so happy that you join us again.
Dr. Stephen Porges: Well, thank you Thomas, and thank you for inviting me, looking forward to our discussion.
Thomas: Yeah, me too. We had already multiple discussions in various contexts and I always enjoy them. And recently you gave a beautiful presentation at one of our training programs, which I enjoyed thoroughly. So I thought it was a really great transmission of the deeper understanding of the polyvagal theory. So I think it landed well with our audience. And also it was very interesting for me to hear more of the background details. So that was great. And I think now many people resonate, know about the polyvagal theory. So let’s start first with what’s exciting for you at the moment and when we teach something over and over again. So what stays exciting for you to keep being excited about?
Dr. Porges: Okay, so if you think of the theory as a scaffolding of clearly a model upon which we can craft different strategies of either intervention or understandings, the theory continues to be a guide for me, so let me just put it that way. So it’s not like it’s a pedantic belief system, it’s really a neurophysiological understanding of our evolutionary heritage and kind of understanding who we are helps us literally to manage who we are. And it’s kind of that latter point of being aware and managing. So in the world of trauma and the world of distress, there’s this whole concept of numbness or feelings within one’s body and within contemporary psychology and psychiatry feelings never got, in a sense, were never really acknowledged. So they were always viewed as optional and not obligatory. So polyvagal theory really gives a science to what feelings are. And what I’m dealing with that in terms of my work is being able to focus on this whole issue of what are life’s problems, what accounts for most, let’s say a large percentage or variance of our difficulties.
And they happen to be what I would call biobehavioral state regulation. We get upset and people around us are upset, and when they get upset, they’re not very smart and they’re not very nice because their bodies are shifted into a threat state of self survival. And we can see this politically, we see this around the world, and we think that the human evolved to be this rational species that all we needed to do was tell them what was the right thing to do and they would do it. But we know that when bodies get into states of threat, the right thing to do for that body at that moment is to stay alive. And that we haven’t really, really appreciated, that we don’t solve problems when we’re frightened. We solve problems when we’re safe with others, we cooperate and we then are able to use our brains to solve problems.
So what I’ve been learning, let’s say really learning, because we’re all on literally this complex shared journey, it’s not a shared journey of just living. It’s a shared journey of trying to understand what it is to be a human being. And through that understanding, can we optimize our experiences and the experiences of others? And that’s my journey. And what I’ve come down to is really the basic problem is, the basic problems tend to be associated with biobehavioral state, meaning we react, we lose control ourselves, we disappear, we shut down, we go through various states, and then we see clinical disorders that we call anxiety, which is a physiology and chronic threat. We have sleep disorders, we have gut disorders. In a sense, what we’ve done is that our sense of feelings has disrupted our body’s ability to do its job. So I’m interested in signaling the body, signaling the nervous system. Hey, it’s okay, you can regulate yourself. You don’t have to fight. You can be really the very precious and generative, benevolent human that we all are underneath that veneer of defensiveness.
Thomas: Beautiful, beautiful. So what I hear you also say is that basically one contribution to our world that is, sounds very simple, but is not that simple at all, is feeling safe, feeling safer in oneself with each other. And so how can we, because it seems like that when we feel safe in ourselves and it’s safe and it’s feels lovely and joyful and beautiful and open and regulated, but we very quickly seem to get triggered out of that safe state. So if you think about a collective, when we look at what can contribute to let’s say collective healing, that our societies can feel safer and that we feel safer with each other, what can we contribute to that? How can we learn that and how can we deal also when we affected, when we are not safe.
Dr. Porges: Thomas, we can go in a sense, we can be very concrete about this because we can talk about what’s going on in Israel and we can talk about my interactions with therapists who contacted me after October event and really wanted my help to understand what was going on. And to me, the most insightful experience for me in that interaction was to really understand the state, the biobehavioral state of the therapists who were asking for help. The therapists were in a state of anger and fear, a very interesting hybrid state. And Thomas, you’re in Israel right now and you probably sense that within the country because the sense of feeling safe enough has been compromised. And when that compromise occurs, our whole, we could call it our personality or we call the repertoire of what we have, our resources get changed, and we are become very good defensive organisms.
And what we are very poor at is empathic and generative, benevolent, connective and supportive. And so we know that that’s the other side, but our body moved into the state of threat. And in the state of threat, it does things that we basically have to understand the limitations of. It’s not merely a motivator to survive, it’s a restrictor of our ability to literally be connected with other. And in a sense, your world is about collective relationships. And when we’re under states of threat and fear, it’s going to turn that system off or it’s going to restrict the ability to connect with others. And connection from a polyvagal perspective is this beautiful bi-directional interaction among individuals that enables co-regulation. In a sense, it builds trust, safety, but it doesn’t just do that. It supports our basic health.
Thomas: And so when we stay with that concrete example, so if there is a situation that is not safe, if there’s a reality of non-safety, and at the same time we want to add something positive and meaningful in terms of safety, co-regulation, but our systems might get threatened. So all kinds of influences, news, whatever interactions, stuff that happens. So how do we practice when the environment is also very fragile, fragmented, or polarized?
Dr. Porges: Okay, this is, let’s say the big question in how do we manage our individual lives when the society is in a more, let’s say, chaotic and less predictable. It’s not giving us the safety shield that we’d like. And the answer is we have to identify individuals who are close to us that can help us feel safe with them. So going back to the therapist, when I was on the zoom with them, I realized that the intonation of their voices, their muscle tension, they were really upset. And what I also realized was that they couldn’t be the therapist, they couldn’t be helpful to the clients and to the people that … that was their life. They were therapists. They wanted to be helpful. So with the sense of fear and threat, they had to be there. They wanted to go to the places that needed them and they want to in sense be good therapists.
But what they didn’t understand was in that physiological state, they couldn’t be a good therapist. Now, what they had to understand was that their bodies were broadcasting exactly what they were trying to help in others. So their bodies were broadcasting fear, threat, and anger, and dysregulation. And so the only way of solution, and you’re asking the solution question is you have a colleague that you’re working with in a clinic that colleague and you have to understand that your state, your biobehavioral state, is dysregulated. You have to learn to feel safe enough with your client to give up those defenses to now work with your clients. You have to be able to do that. Now, this may mean that you can’t do as many hours of therapy. You may need to take breaks, you may need to go for a walk with a safe individual, but you need to be aware of the biobehavioral state that you’re in because you have to take responsibility for the fact that that state can be broadcasting signals of threat to others.
So even though your intention is to be helpful, you may not be helpful, not an easy task. The other help is that sometimes people aren’t working in teams, they’re working by themselves. So how do they regulate by themselves? Well, they could have a pet, a dog or a cat. They could go for a walk where there’s a safe place. They may basically have some visualizations, something positive, have a loved one or some sense of safety with another, some sense of co-regulation. A lot of people when they are triggered, visualize something very pleasant in their life or a unconditional relationship where someone is always going to be there.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful because you’re also speaking to a sense of resourcing of a system that is under-resourced in that moment. And even you coming in to speak to them is resourcing them because you’re sitting in a different place in a different environment. And I’m wondering about, because you’re speaking to how to be resource, more crisis zones in the world. So our German NGO is also working a lot with Ukrainian therapists, so there is a resourcing and that really works well already for two and a half years, and you can see how that supports the therapists who ground themselves more and to then be more helpful. Exactly what you said, all of this is happening there. And so I’m wondering if that’s also a forum that in general as a global society, we need to focus more on how the places that are safer support places that are less safe. Maybe you can speak a bit to that.
Dr. Porges: I will. Because I’m going to go back and actually use the same example you’re using, Ukraine. So I’ve given talks in Ukraine and I’ve been literally shocked by the fact that the therapist will come out of the bomb shelter for this podcast or this webinar with me, and I’m now feeling very responsible and wanting concern. So actually they came out for this podcast I was doing with them and I said, what were you doing in the shelter? And they said, we were singing songs together. I said, what kind of songs? They said patriotic songs, but basically, and they start to smile when they were singing, basically they were doing polyvagal exercises, they were vocalizing, using intonation, face-to-face contact. They were doing everything correct intuitively. And so the whole hour that I talked with them was about the intuition that people have to co-regulate each other and to literally leverage that to enable them to be good therapists.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Also that there’s a natural built in intuition what’s right and –
Dr. Porges: Yeah, and to respect that intuition. And remember with therapists and other challenges, we think that people are trained. And what we mean by training is we think they have been given the secret doctrine of how to treat people, and we think physicians get that when they get their medical degree. And what is always missing is the language to treat the body so that the body is accessible and feels safe enough to heal, whether it’s mental or physical illness, that when our bodies are under a state of threat, the resources for healing are basically marginalized. I always like to use the analogy of the spaceship enterprise and basically it’s all about using energy shields and the energy shields are effective, but they’re using resource. And so there’s this compromise. You can use your defenses and what are you giving up? You’re giving up the ability to travel, to engage, and to basically use the resources for other levels of productivity.
Thomas: But that’s also something that I really appreciate in your work and what polyvagal theory contributed to the whole therapeutic community is also that knowledge and understanding and academic knowledge is great, but the embodiment of that knowledge really to live it and transmit it and be in that resonant relationship, that’s another level of professional training, so to speak. And that’s not just given just because you learn and know.
Dr. Porges: The paradox is that this concept of manualized therapy creates this intentional brain that inhibits the intuitive aspect of who we are. So it’s kind of a paradox that if we become too learned, too focused, too knowledgeable, and too much locked into explanation, we kind of turn off the parts of our brain to allow us to feel and to basically connect, to become accessible. It’s an interesting dialectic to be able to feel one’s body and yet be aware of it, to understand what your body is doing at that moment. I think everything starts with an understanding or acknowledgement of an awareness of our own bodily feelings. So if I were to, and I’m not, if I were to structure a therapeutic models, so remember I stepped back from that, the first thing I would deal with is interoception in a sense experiences of feeling and developing a language of feeling one’s own body.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. And then from that’s the basis of being in a resonant relationship and the similar perception of other people’s parts. You described this beautifully. You felt the muscle tension, you felt the stress level. How much our nervous system really feels is amazing, when it’s in that state.
Dr. Porges But remember what a lot of therapists are taught, I should say not as recent, but when I was in a medical school actively teaching that the psychiatrists were taught not to look, in this class, they were not taught to look at their patient’s faces. And I found that really just remarkable because our bodies have great anticipation of someone looking back at us when we look at them.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. That’s beautiful. I am aware that your new book is here and is out, and so it’s Polyvagal Perspectives. So maybe tell me a little bit about that.
Dr. Porges: I will. I really am pleased to talk about it because it is, I would say it is a book that contains lots of attributes of the theory, and I wanted it to be the go-to volume that if people had it on their shelf, they would find the information about the theory, including the neurophysiology, the application. It’s really papers that are quite recent. Most of the papers have been written in the last three years. It’s structured in, it’s a different type of book. The first book that I put together was published in 2011, and it really was very dense and very scientific papers that were edited for a volume. This is much more integrated but much more up to date. So if we think about what the book is providing, it’s providing the pillars of the theory, and the first four chapters are really very theory oriented.
One is basically a chapter on the neurophysiology, including very clear explanations of what criticisms have been made against the theory and basically document that the criticisms haven’t been vetted. They’re not real criticisms, they’re straw man arguments. They’re misrepresentations of the theory. There are arguments that the theory is wrong because of these statements, but the theory never makes those statements. So this is kind of an interesting issue for me, and that is how can a scientist or anyone argue about something and incorrectly reference it or articulate what that theory is? But over time, what I realized was the theory was complex and required a knowledge base across so many disciplines that it made sense to me. Now in retrospect that an anatomist or a neurophysiologist or an evolutionary biologist might not get it, might not even understand what this is about because they have learned their own discipline.
So the first chapter is really all about up to date neurophysiological validation and also understanding what criticisms have been made in the fact that they are not about the theory, they’re about something else. Then it also hits on two other basic themes. One is the importance of social or sociality in the survival of our mammalian species, humans. Trust and social interaction are everything about our society cooperation, and there’s a neurobiology behind that, and that’s what this paper, the second or third chapters on, it’s all about the fact that cooperation and connectedness is not, again, it’s not optional, it’s obligatory. It’s part of our nervous system. And another chapter is on literally the biology or neurophysiology safety, and it’s trying to force the statement that feelings of safety are not optional. They’re obligatory and they’re dependent upon the neuroregulation of our physiology, and that we don’t even have an option of feeling safe when our homeostatic processes, our neurophysiological substrate is disrupted and in defensive states.
So we have to understand that our first job is literally to calm our body, and once we calm our body, the mind does what it’s supposed to do. It becomes very creative, benevolent, and expressive. The fourth chapter is something that I think you would like, Tom. It’s really a chapter on transdisciplinary sciences or transdisciplinary studies. I was invited to give a keynote to an international meeting on transdisciplinary disciplines or transdisciplinary, whatever the next word would be. And what I realized as I started going through writing the paper was how transdisciplinary polyvagal theory was, and that also gave me a better understanding why even though the intuitive aspect of the theory is easy to grasp, the understanding from the science becomes much more complicated. So I use the metaphor of a Rubik’s cube and where each side is a different cluster of sciences that basically there’s a core feature and that’s polyvagal theory and each have to rotate the information to put it together to get the succinct understanding of the core.
Then the book deals with applications like vagal nerve stimulation, and basically I want the book to convey first the basis, but also the applications. The book came from a title from a 2007 paper in which polyvagal perspective in the singular was used for the paper by 2007. I thought it’s not just a theory, it’s a strategy of asking questions and looking at the world. But in retrospective, retrospect, that 2007 paper is quite narrow compared to where that book is. So the book deals with many disorders including senses of anxiety, empathy, compassion, hypermobility syndromes, a lot of things that people have engaged with and ask me, how does it look like through the polyvagal lens? So the book to me is really my most recent or most complete and recent expression of what the theory is and how it can be used. The idea is the theory is that it’s scaffolding for everyone to use.
Thomas: Beautiful. No, first of all, I’m very interested. I will definitely get it and read it. It sounds amazing, and as I said very often to you, I think in the places where I teach and give talks, I think polyvagal theory is always part of the mix because it’s also, as you said, it’s so intuitive just from a human perspective, it’s so intuitive to grasp, and it makes many things with simple, in simple ways understandable because we experience that it’s congruent with how we feel as human beings. So it’s fantastic. I was just thinking, just when you spoke about the anxiety, I was thinking of many patients in hospitals that are, I think often in chronic anxiety states given their health issues or also being sometimes isolated or being in this kind of state of not knowing where life’s going. And then I thought about as you spoke about the healing process. So when you’re in a chronic state of anxiety, so what can be done just in this one sphere for people to activate their self-healing mechanism much better?
Dr. Porges: Yeah. Well, what you’re doing is you’re talking about my passion, okay. My passion is to solve that basic question. Now. Okay, let’s assume now that I’ve solved that. So how is the issue is how do you deliver to the nervous system signals that it can now regulate itself without being locked into a state of threat defense? And so we know that, okay, let’s start talking about medicine, which is part of what you’re leading into. Basically, so much medicine is based upon a belief system that symptoms have an underlying pathophysiology, and that pathophysiology has an underlying genetics, and that the smart people will create drugs that will rectify all the problems. And so with that belief system, how well have we done? And we can start with the initial assumption, and it comes from a term called nosology, which really goes back hundreds of years about how physicians were trained to look at symptom clusters, and it was that belief that there was an underlying pathophysiology.
Now, let’s just take a common internal medicine, subdiscipline, gastroenterology, GI, gut problems. About 50% of the clinical visits don’t have pathophysiology, meaning, meaning that they can’t do any assay that identifies any damage to the end organ. The end organ becomes the target, is their pathology in the organ, they will use blood tests or they’ll use biopsies. Now, the assumption here is that disease is an end organ phenomenon. It’s not the fact that diseases may have a functional characteristic long before they have a pathophysiology, meaning your gut is dysregulated and you call that irritable bowel, but there may be no tissue damage or maybe no neural marker as done now. Polyvagal theory says this is neuroregulation, which is really the first step that might lead to pathophysiology, but medicine doesn’t have many tools to study. Neuroregulation is the only tool that comes close. And I would say even though I really, I was the innovator of it because in the sixties I actually quantified heart rate variability long before it became this popular.
But the whole idea was that you could measure dynamic shifts in neuroregulation. And part of the problem, even with heart rate variability is that it got co-opted as a descriptive statistic implying health or resilience or everything. The important part was that if you were clever with your metrics, you could extract from the heart rate variability and index of the vagal regulation of the heart, so you could start getting more nuanced indices of how the nervous system was working. And that’s where I think the future is in terms of a whole battery of neuroregulatory measures. But in general, polyvagal theory says you could do that, that’s great if you’re a scientist. But if you’re a clinician, you could be smart. You can look at people’s faces, you could listen to their voices, you could look at their muscle tone. So you’re getting that all broadcast to you if you could decode it.
And insightful sensitive human beings, I’m not even going to say therapists, know exactly what’s happening. They know the intonation of voice. When it changes in a person, they know that something’s wrong. And when the voice is melodic and calm, they know, well, I’m enjoying that. And the answer is really simple. The intonation of vocalization is a vagal phenomenon. It’s like heart rate variability, but you need to know how to decode it. So on one side, we can use our intuitions and say, oh, I like that person’s voice. I like what they’re doing. I feel comfortable in their presence. And we can use any level of metaphor. We can talk about energy, or we could say, well, that person is signaling my nervous system that they’re safe to be around. And polyvagal theory would basically lean to that latter explanation now, but where it has led me to is the possibility that if my nervous system calms down to a melodic voice or a baby does to the mother with the melodic voice, can I send signals with certain rhythmicities to the other person’s nervous system and will their nervous system listen to those rhythms?
And that’s what we’re doing. So we’re basically creating an acoustic intervention that basically stimulates or tells the brainstem signals, the brainstem, that everything’s okay out there. So we have to use the metaphor of the vagal nerve stimulator. The vagal nerve stimulator is either implanted or it’s noninvasive on the neck or the ear. And what it does, it’s a signaling system. It signals to the brainstem that the organs are doing their job, but the organs aren’t doing their job. They’re basically sending information up the sensory vagal pathways in a way that’s similar to when the organs are doing their job. So in a sense, the vagal nerve stimulator is not stimulating the vagus. It’s informing the brainstem with let’s say, optimistic information that things are fine. And guess what happens? The brainstem knows that signal and says, yeah, I’ll start sending signals back down to the organs, and then things start normalizing. That’s exactly what we’re doing with this acoustic intervention.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. And most probably that’s also what you’re doing because in a way, teaching polyvagal theory means you need to be polyvagal theory. When your nervous system is able to be in those states, you can transmit them. So that’s actually like a very beautiful correlation to authenticity.
Dr. Porges: One person actually wrote in her book, she says, I’ve heard Steve talk for over a decade and somewhere this book was published over a decade ago, and she said somewhere along the line, somewhere along that, the line between his theory and the person disappeared. And I found that really kind of a remarkable, then I reflected on that and said, as the messenger of these ideas, that’s the only way the ideas could ever get any traction. If they were pedantically presented in an aggressive way, it wouldn’t get any traction. Now, I wouldn’t say that that was the pragmatic, the issue was I like interacting with people, and when I talk, I look at the audience. And so yes, there is this co-regulation occurring, especially when you’re doing quote, a good talk, you’re getting the co-regulation. And that became the rewards or the experience of giving talks.
It was – became so I would say socially nourishing for me that I forgot that people have social anxiety. I didn’t even understand for a while that people don’t like giving talks. And this leads me to an intervention type of question. And this goes back about 15 years ago, I was giving a talk at a lifelong learning conference run by a good friend, Marian Solomon, and it was on, basically I was going to be introduced the next morning and at a party the night before, the person who was going to introduce me comes up to me and says, Steve, I’m really, really anxious about introducing you. And I said, ah, don’t worry about it. I’ll fix it. And then I walked off the night, went on next morning, a few minutes before nine when she had to make the introduction, she comes up to me really anxious and says, Steve, fix this.
And I looked at her and I didn’t say, look, you shouldn’t believe what people tell you at a party. I didn’t say that, but what I did was I looked at her and realized that she was inhaling on every word. And I realized now I was putting on my academic hat and saying, what’s this person doing? This person’s hyperventilating and creating a state of panic. She’s actually through her breathing patterns, creating the panic that she anticipates feeling when she’s on stage. So what I said to her, I said, extend the duration of your phrases. Add another word before you take a breath. And it was hard, really hard in the beginning. Then she started to add words and more words and more words. Her face changed. Her voice changed, and then she went up and did this great introduction, and then she started to use the method for social anxiety. Yeah, the point is that we do have some control, but where does it start? It starts with what we were talking about, a degree of awareness, and sometimes the person who’s in this state of fear and panic loses a sense of awareness. And that’s where sensitive people, friends, spouses, and therapists can be helpful.
Thomas: Stephen, when you speak, I can feel in my body just when you explain it with the voice and the words and the taking a longer breath. So you transmit to me that quality and my nervous system is immediately recognizing that as relaxation. So that’s amazing how much communication is happening below the radar of the words.
Dr. Porges: So visual, where I start to use is vis-arise, meaning feel in your body a rhythmicity, and suddenly the body becomes open. And so we created this using music as the vehicle, the portal, take any simple song, even like twinkle, twinkle little star, but don’t have it, the beat, don’t have it constant, have it progressively slowing, slowing, slowing, slowing up. And then, okay, what you do, even in your mind, you feel it’s magnetic. It’s pulling you in, it’s rocking you. And that’s one of the dimensions we’re dealing with. That’s the simplest one that you can understand that music has always been composed with a fixed speed. The music that we’re actually composing has tempo that is rhythmically changing, and the body goes literally with it, and it gets predictable. So not only do you get the change, but you don’t have any fear of falling into a, let’s see, falling into an abyss or having uncertainty because you know that you’ll come back down. So our nervous systems love dynamic changes, but for fragile nervous systems, they want to be assured that they’ll come back to where they started.
Thomas: That’s beautiful. And so the music that you’re speaking about, just for our listeners that hear this for the first time, how can people get access to …
Dr. Porges: Okay, actually the technology was licensed for a clinical protocol that’s called Rest and Restore, and the company that will be distributing this company called Unite, it’s the same company that distributes the safe and sound protocol, but we’re developing other products. And the one that we’re really focusing on right now, or talking about starting to develop is actually for neurodivergent population, which have, let’s say they have sleep problems, they have difficulty getting out of bed, they have difficulty organizing to go to school or do their work. And so we’re creating different musical patterns that basically are signaling the nervous system to calm and relax, to sleep and restore, and then to organize and move forward to explore. So it is kind of an interesting thing that once you know that the nervous system is really a surveillance system looking for signals both of threat, but also of safety and self-regulation that we can send it this information from a level that you might find of interest is that for most individuals, they can’t or have great difficulty turning off their defense systems.
And what that means is they can’t turn off the sympathetics and they can’t turn off the skeletal motor system. So they can’t literally be immobilized without us being in a state of fear. So immobilization is vulnerability. And what’s interesting about that is if we think more about it, it means that the cortex is inhibiting the brainstem functions, and we are literally vigilant good stuff when we need to be, not good stuff, when our body needs to restore itself. But if you now send signals to say, you can turn this off, what happens to our cortex? The cortex is no longer this inhibitory evaluative system. It turns now into this creative expansive moment. So in a sense, we can, there’s this whole dialectic about consciousness and expanded consciousness. I think so much is missing in that dialogue about understanding that the cortex is basically inhibitory organ.
What it means is it literally keeps our brainstem under control. But if the brainstem is under that tight control, which by the way was the basis of some, I would say western religious viewpoints, was that these intuitive aspects of the body need to be controlled. Where as a culture and a society, we’re still paying the price for those belief systems because our body is unable to restore itself without being hypervigilant of doing something wrong. And the body needs to a sense to kind of say, I don’t need to fight. I just need to heal. So I’m really kind of interested in this notion of what our minds and our brains will do when we are able to turn off our defenses. And the interest in psychedelics, and that’s also probably crosses into your community, is really an attempt to use a psychedelic to turn off the motor inhibitory systems and to literally free the brain to do what it would like to do. I think it can be done more seamlessly with acoustic stimuli. And in fact, it was a meeting that you were on virtually, but you weren’t there, and I thought I was going to get to meet you. It was in Belfast.
So in Belfast, my co-inventor, Anthony and Gory basically played some of this music to the meeting, the action trauma meeting. And in the front row was Dick Schwartz and I think you know Dick, yeah, Internal Family Systems. And Dick says, I know what this is doing. I said, what is it doing, Dick? He says, it’s turning the protectors, it’s putting the protectors to sleep. I said, no, because always kind of in dialogue, I didn’t like what I understood what he meant, but I actually became more internal family than he did. I said, no, it’s not putting them asleep. It’s repurposing them. So in a sense, you’re not turning them off. You’re allowing them to be integrated into that person’s portfolio or tapestry of their behavior. So the interesting thing was he got it. He said that in a sense it’s enabling these things to – these parts, to reorganize themselves.
And I think that is really the experience people will have. And we’re actually setting up a research project in Basel. This is interesting.
Thomas: In Basel?
Dr. Porges: In Basel, yeah. This is next door to your old place. There’s a wonderful research hospital there, and they’re actually trying to create what’s called an oxytocin provocation test. And that is they want to develop the ability to test the release of oxytocin in individuals who have brainstem injuries. So they want a gold standard of how to trigger this system. Oxytocin is really what my wife Sue works on, and she’s the one who discovered a link between oxytocin and social behavior. And so what we think, and this is Sue and I also agree with this, we think that the music, or let’s say the technology can trigger a release of oxytocin in a reliable way. And we are setting that up in Basel to do that. And that would then be literally, right now they’re trying to use psychedelics. And of course the acoustic stimulation is much, let’s say, less controversial, less side effects. And even if you were interested in psychedelics, the acoustic stimulation may prepare the nervous system to be more accessible to the psychedelics.
Thomas: Yeah, I love that. I also felt that when I listened to some of the music that you sent me, I also felt the effect in my system, and I think it’s really powerful. So I think it’s a great way to have the effect that you described. I could feel that very well.
Dr. Porges: It’s quite remarkable because people feel these rhythms percolating down their body. They feel literally rhythms of hugs, basically. It’s quite a full array of experiences. And then you also get these other bits of information like people’s pelvic floors becoming more, less frozen. It’s very interesting. Or a woman who had a hysterectomy saying that when she listened to the music, she went down and basically she felt that there was something missing, but it was okay. It was like the body is getting re in-touch, engaged with itself and lots of things that were getting the feedback of people having experiences that they have never had or hadn’t had in their, let’s say, recent decades.
Thomas: And I also think what you spoke about now that what we call in our work, the relaxing down into our base, and then from the base getting a sense of the land and the soil. I mean, there’s so much built in, even in our language, dualism between humans and nature, if we are separate particles within the natural environment versus we are all biosphere. And for me, this feels like very much also a way to melt the dualism and to …
Dr. Porges: Yeah. Well, it’s also a safe space for me to be in. So what I mean safe space is that I always felt that there were endogenous rhythms that were shared with all forms of life. It was part of life systems, and I was always very careful about how to use the language. And so we can say that we can see these rhythms in people now we can entrain them back, is literally a safe space. But the interesting part, and to share this with you, I can look out in my window, I can see the ocean and I can see the waves. Well, the waves have rhythms that are very similar to what’s in our body. We like instance floating on those rhythms, and we like rocking at that. So we can talk about what it is, but the underlying bit is this dynamic rhythmicity in our own nervous system defines healthy feedback loops.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. And how long evolutionary wise have you watched waves come in?
Dr. Porges: Where did we come from? Where did human life come from? The part that’s also of interest is actually if you measure uterine contractions, and it’s called uterine peristalsis, the uterus has these same rhythms in it with or without a fetus. So what that tells you, again, we can be more deterministic if we like that and say the fetus isn’t trained in utero with this rhythmicity. Or we could say it’s part of the DNA of being a human being.
Thomas: And I think that’s also one of the separations that we created, that we got so hypnotized by individuals that we forgot a bit the context in which we exist. And so I think polyvagal theory puts us in touch with the context and how certain all very old mechanisms are alive in us as we create society. I think that’s really beautiful. I see the time flies with you, Stephen. It’s so interesting and it’s always such a lovely also in the conversation. I feel this lovely rhythm back and forth. And so is there anything else that you feel for our listeners before we conclude here?
Dr. Porges: The only thing I would mention is I would say the readable book that I wrote with my son, Seth, called Our Polyvagal World, and that is a very accessible, readable version of polyvagal theory. It’s an easy read, and if people are interested in that, that’s easily accessible and available. The Polyvagal Perspectives is really, I would say that’s like when it’s like I want to leave a volume that had the essence of what I was writing in a more, remember, I’m an academic at heart, so I don’t mind coming on, and it’s not my day job. Okay, I’m an academic, so I enjoy this. It’s always been a fun and expansive experience for me to step into this other world because I really enjoy it. I enjoy being welcomed, and I enjoy the types of questions that come from it. But my roots and my decades of work have been within the constraints of an academic environment, both the positive constraints and also the negative ones. So this has always been, I would say, a rare privilege for an academic to be so welcomed in this world that you’ve welcomed me into Tom. So thank you very much, Thomas.
Thomas: Yeah, yeah. No, and it’s also, I think you embody the beauty of both. When I listen to you, you embody the depth of the academic knowledge and it’s so rich and it’s like it’s a huge world in itself, but I feel also your relational transmission of your inner states is so deep and profound that it’s a pleasure. And I think that’s also like how you embody the polyvagal theory in the way you present it and you speak, I think is also part of the way it could spread and you embody it. And I think that’s a gift that I see in you all the time, that the deep academic knowledge becomes very relational and digestible, and it really speaks to the guts of our digestion system, that digest information. It’s easy to take it in, and it makes so much sense. And I think that’s why Polyvagal theory also is so in a way successful or widespread already. I think that’s very much also through the way you transmit it.
Dr. Porges: Well, Thomas, thank you very much for that. The part that I yield about is that I literally say I shift hats so I can be the academics academic, and then maybe you don’t want to interact with me so I can get into science. Because I really, when it comes to science, I respect science for what it does and not for what it doesn’t do. So if we’re going to talk science, we have to also understand that science has lots of vulnerabilities, and a lot of it have to do with methodology. And I am a good methodologist. So when we get into the level of science, I can shift hats and I may not be the warm intuitive one, but the other part that I really want to say is that when I talk about my science to the world, we’re talking about it now. I am talking to others with a perspective of what they are hearing from me. So I shift into them or into they, and I really kind of process, and what most of my colleagues do is that they talk from their perspective outward, and it doesn’t have traction that way.
Thomas: Yeah, that’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. Stephen. It’s so amazing. Every time I see you, it warms my heart and it inspires my spirit, and it’s really lovely to share this with you, and I really mean it that I think many people benefit a lot from your work, and it really is a great contribution also to the understanding of trauma, the healing of trauma, and the way we construct society. So thank you very much for all you do.
Dr. Porges: Well, thank you, Thomas, and thank you for being so welcoming.
