Meet Dr. Stephen Porges, the man behind the transformative Polyvagal Theory. Not only does his work reshape our understanding of safety and trauma, but it also brings a groundbreaking perspective on mental health. With this episode, you are about to unravel the intricacies of the human mind and its responses to the world.
https://www.stephenporges.com
https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org
The journey we take with Dr. Porges delves into the complexities of hypersensitivity and hyper vigilance on our pursuit of becoming our best selves. We also unravel the struggles of dissociative spirituality and its impact on our ability to connect with the physical world. Our exploration transitions seamlessly into the power of presence, compassion, trust, and the significance of prosodic intonation in vocalizations. We also delve into the intriguing research behind the Safe and Sound Protocol, the role of acoustic stimulation, and the importance of creating a safe environment through meaningful relationships.
Beyond the insights on the human experience, we delve into Polyvagal Theory's application in healing trauma and building self-trust. We reflect on how self-healing is essential to our ability to offer presence to others and how our physiology reacts to our environment. We also discuss the significance of trust, safety, and co-regulation in relationships. And as we wrap up our conversation, we'll discuss the importance of accessibility, connection, and self-regulation. This conversation with Dr. Porges promises to challenge you, inspire you and deepen your understanding of your own experiences and those of others. You don't want to miss it!
https://www.stephenporges.com/
https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org/
Our Polyvagal World: Dr Porges new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Polyvagal-World-Safety-Trauma/dp/1324030259
Angie Shockley mindfulangie@gmail.com
Dave Gold dave@davegold.com
Meet Dr. Stephen Porges, the man behind the transformative Polyvagal Theory. Not only does his work reshape our understanding of safety and trauma, but it also brings a groundbreaking perspective on mental health. With this episode, you are about to unravel the intricacies of the human mind and its responses to the world.
https://www.stephenporges.com
https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org
The journey we take with Dr. Porges delves into the complexities of hypersensitivity and hyper vigilance on our pursuit of becoming our best selves. We also unravel the struggles of dissociative spirituality and its impact on our ability to connect with the physical world. Our exploration transitions seamlessly into the power of presence, compassion, trust, and the significance of prosodic intonation in vocalizations. We also delve into the intriguing research behind the Safe and Sound Protocol, the role of acoustic stimulation, and the importance of creating a safe environment through meaningful relationships.
Beyond the insights on the human experience, we delve into Polyvagal Theory's application in healing trauma and building self-trust. We reflect on how self-healing is essential to our ability to offer presence to others and how our physiology reacts to our environment. We also discuss the significance of trust, safety, and co-regulation in relationships. And as we wrap up our conversation, we'll discuss the importance of accessibility, connection, and self-regulation. This conversation with Dr. Porges promises to challenge you, inspire you and deepen your understanding of your own experiences and those of others. You don't want to miss it!
https://www.stephenporges.com/
https://www.polyvagalinstitute.org/
Our Polyvagal World: Dr Porges new book:
https://www.amazon.com/Our-Polyvagal-World-Safety-Trauma/dp/1324030259
Angie Shockley mindfulangie@gmail.com
Dave Gold dave@davegold.com
Hi everybody, welcome to Embrace the Journey podcast. We have a very special guest today. No, I'm not talking about Dave. Dave's always my special guest, but I'm going to let Dave introduce our guest today. We're super excited about this podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So our guest today is Dr Stephen Porges and I'll read. I can read a little bit more about his bio later, but before we get into the bio, all I could say is that to say it's an honor to have him and a privilege and we're excited. It might sound hyperbolic but it's absolutely true and just in the five minutes we had to connect beforehand he's definitely one of us or we're one of him. We're all off on the same planet, whatever it is, and for as accomplished as he is and renowned as he is, he's just a very real guy and I guess I will.
Speaker 2:I'll read his bio first and then I want to give just a couple minutes of kind of the creation myth of how Stephen came into our world. But his bio is that he's a distinguished university scientist at Indiana University and founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium, professor of Psychiatry at UNC, my hometown here, and Professor Emeritus at both University of Illinois, at Chicago, and the University of Maryland. He is a renowned author and can I say, are you the founder under a polyvagal theory? Are you the mad scientist behind what would we call you in?
Speaker 3:relation. I am the mad scientist who created polyvagal theory.
Speaker 2:I'm going to make sure that Chris puts as that to your bio. Okay. So he can and right now he is the author which is soon to be released. Or is our polyvagal world? Has it been released? When I looked, it looked like it was on Amazon.
Speaker 3:No. September 26 is the launch date.
Speaker 2:So by the time you hear this podcast, it will be there and it's our polyvagal world, how safety and trauma changes. Without taking too much of the airtime here, I would like to account how Steve came into our world. My, there's an educational consultant here that lives very close to me who is a colon. Educational consultant really doesn't help. She's quite connected deep into the world of world and when I showed her the Omnicube, which is an automated wellness system that uses physical and challenges you physically and mentally and creates a safe and accomplished space, she said, oh, this is polyvagal you, this is so in line with polyvagal. And she said Dr Porges. And I said no, and she said you'll never get to see him, he's just so busy, Forget about him. He's six levels up, Maybe you could get with some of his underlings. And I I footnoted that because I thought, okay, I love a challenge.
Speaker 2:And then the next thing that happened was when we read in the polyvagal and saw the beauty and the simplicity and just the power of it, the transformative power of it. We got interested and one of my partners signed up for a seminar given by one of your colleagues, Michael Allison, and we, Michael and I, became friends and Michael appeared on Jules and mine, Angie's and my podcast the previous iteration of this podcast and just became more and more into our world. And then, when your book came out, you came here and without again I don't want to spend too much time talking about this what I could feel, besides your brilliant mind and your beautiful heart, is just how much what you have I don't want to say dedicated your life to, because you've just been following your passion but how much that which you have in live as you and the beauty and brilliance you brought to polyvagal informs what, what Angie and I are doing as well. So when we talk to you as we interview you today and get into this theory in your life and in your book, we're going to be referring time to the context of what we're doing as well. So it'll be more like a conversation among friends than an interview between a renowned mad scientist and a couple of podcasters.
Speaker 2:So, Angie, I don't know if that made any sense, I just drifted. I'll put it over. So you start. What we came here to do was to click this guy, Scott, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:I just want to say, also officially on the podcast, that I'm just excited to meet you in this format and have you on really appreciate it, and I we were talking about giving you some context for what we do. So I have where many different hats I work with young adults with various challenges ASB one of those challenges, other mental health challenges. I have three residential programs in West Virginia where we work with a variety on on that huge spectrum, a variety of young people, and I also am a certified shamanic practitioner trained in the Inca tradition of indigenous healing, and so I utilize those, those trainings and those skills in various areas of my life. So I do a lot of coaching with parents of young adults who are having challenges. In fact, that's how Dave and I actually met, and I also operate a nonprofit equine program utilizing the natural life'smanship approach, and so when I first read about learned about polyvagal theory, I was like it was like a big spotlight come on. I'm like, oh my gosh, I've been working on the safety thing for so long but not having that information, and so for me it was just this huge light bulb of going okay, now I can understand a little bit more, and I say a very little bit more about that safety piece and trauma, because most of the people that I work with are coming from significant trauma in their lives and having access to this information just was a huge boost for me in what I was doing.
Speaker 1:And Dave does a lot of spiritual work and he does a lot of. Dave, I can let you talk about what you do, but we work in a lot of the same realms and that having that safe container is really, in my mind, the only way for any of the populations that I work with, from a five year old in the horse barn to a 54 year old parent who's trying to figure out what to do with their young adult, who has some challenges but is a young adult. And now what do you do? That safe container seems to be the launching point for any forward movement. So I personally am very interested to hear your thoughts about how Polyvagal Theory and everything that you learn you're still learning and still growing the information, and how that could apply in any one of those fields. So that's a broad one, but I'll lay it out there and see what you think.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay, so let me try to kind of deconstruct what you're saying. You're really asking how does Polyvagal Theory help you be a human being? It's as simple as that, and I start using terms like claiming our evolutionary heritage, because we have the neural structures to have, and literally the onboard toolkit to be a much more compassionate, passionate and compassionate, benevolent, creative, spiritual species. So, if you want to get down to it, what is hampering us from being what we could be? And what I like often to say is when we feel safe enough, who do we become? So if we thought about a world where we gave up our hyper vigilance, about being defensive, meaning being concerned about others, being watching out for stimuli?
Speaker 3:So you mentioned autistic spectrum. So what are the kids on autistic spectrum or ADD? They're hyper vigilant because the cues of danger all around them, they're hypersensitive. Who are they? What comes out when their bodies feel safe enough? What comes out in all of us? I was basically taken by the shamanic tradition and asking in your own trainings, what would you take from all that? That your ability to have types of self experience or spirituality or self healing is all dependent upon feeling, feeling safe enough? Would you say that?
Speaker 1:I would yes, in my experience.
Speaker 3:So I even have played with this. What does physiological state, how does it interact with spirituality, and what happens if we try to become spiritual? But our bodies are great states of threat and I basically I think that there are two different paths of spirituality that people take, that they take a path of spirituality in which they're embodied. It's part of being a human being, part of being a physical. Reality becomes a spiritual. You get connected with not just other people, but with your pets, with the ocean breeze, with the trees. You become connected with the reality, the physical and living reality of our world.
Speaker 3:But there's another spirituality and that is much more dissociative and where it has nothing to do with anything around you. It has to do with something that you, I could say, conjure up or have been taught to believe, is distant from you, disparate from your own toolkit, and that enables you. That pathway doesn't seem to be very helpful in creating compassion and benevolence to others. It's part of a pathway of fear and trying to I call it proximity. When our bodies are under great state of fear, what do we do?
Speaker 3:We try to protect ourselves, and the spirituality of protecting oneself is to create a bond or contract with a literally an existential deity and not a deity that's an embodied with our bodies and with other people. So we have a ambiguity when we use the word spirituality, and I like to think of a spirituality that is predicated on a body that is safe enough to travel, literally travel into the spiritual realms, meditation realms, without the fear of being lost. And when you get into the practices that the Inca practices, you get into the any of the ancient or indigenous practices, there's a degree of dissociation with is not truly a pathological dissociation that one sees with trauma, but a dissociation of a blending or a permeability of boundary that does not create panic. So when you're safe enough, basically, that you don't have to protect, you don't have to maintain your boundary, who do we become? And I think that's the boundary when that boundary becomes voluntarily permeable as part of our state of feeling safe with ourselves, we embrace many of the attributes of what it is to be a living human being.
Speaker 2:Stephen it's all I could say to keep my life, even to see here. But there's two points I wanted to just confirm, and the first is that my I have 40 some years of intense spirituality and it was what I heard someone call was a spiritual bypassing. I didn't feel safe in my body. I wanted to bypass the experience so that I could feel safe, which was just not. It's insane, but we can get into that later. I've run that experiment.
Speaker 3:No, but I think you're confirming what I was saying. You're just putting a different experiential level on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the other piece was just back of the book. You talk about that disassociation, that despite all that time that I spent yearning for altered stage transcendence, every time I got close I freaked out, I panicked, and the one time I didn't panic was because I found myself more curious. I felt safe enough to be more curious about the state that awaited me than I was about the ego I was leaving behind, and I just think I think that's a wonderful example.
Speaker 3:It's a wonderful example. You're saying and this is part of what we're, in a sense, even dealing with the issues of trauma it's the physiological states that people get into that trigger their defenses and they can't literally stop and experience that physiological state with a sense of curiosity. And this is what you're saying If you're curious and you want to experience it, it doesn't carry on, it doesn't have its labels or its top-down associations. I like to use the roller coasters because I used to take my kids on roller coasters when they were young and I would basically treat a roller coaster as if it were a spiritual experience, because how can you jump out of a 10-story window and explore it without the fear of being injured? And a roller coaster gives you that opportunity to explore a visceral feeling. That is a reflex to be defensive and now say, oh, it's not defensive, it's just an expansion of the feelings that a body can have.
Speaker 3:Now I will tell you my wife does not agree with me on that.
Speaker 1:I could argue that a little bit now that I'm older, when I was younger, yeah, but I love that idea and I think it's a great metaphor and it seems that, and I'm sure it's because it's ordained. This is what it's been my whole life. But I end up working with a lot of people who have significant trauma, and so that specific aspect of it is very interesting to me as well. And I know working in the shamanic realm, in the spiritual realm, with trauma. One of the things that I've explored and discovered with a dear friend of mine, diane Costow, is combining neurofeedback with shamanic work and targeting trauma, and we've had incredible success doing that. But it's so interesting that we do a four day experience, but that first day, 100% of what I do, it's focusing on creating that safe relationship, that safe place for that launching, so that they can explore that trauma and let it come to the surface. So how, I'm sorry, go ahead.
Speaker 3:No, I was going to say I'm going to deconstruct what you said in a very simple way, and that is that Pablo Vega theory emphasizes that the physiological state that you're in is what I call intervening variable, but basically it biases how we react to stimuli and creates responses. So we think we live in a cause and effect world. If something affects me, it will affect you, but we know enough that there are great ranges of individual differences and even ranges in how we feel from time to time. So the issue is that our reactivity varies as a function of our physiological state. And what you were talking about with your colleague was that, using neural feedback, she was changing the physiological state of the client in a sense, re-tuning it or getting it out of, let's say, more acute defenses, giving it more resilience, so it could now experience the shamanic experiences. So I think the secret of, let's say, the greatest impact the polyvagal theory has is that it's stretching out into areas of education, explaining to the educators that the physiological state of your students affects how they learn. And it says also, the physiological state of the teacher broadcasts either signals of safety or signals of threat to the students, and these are reacted to.
Speaker 3:And then the other, I think, important part is the medical community that we've basically structured in our society, all the features of our society, whether we talk about education, medical care or work environment, as environments with chronic threat. They're evaluated. Evaluation to our nervous system is threat. We do fine with transitory threats. We have a great nervous system. We react to it, but our environment is really on all dimensions evaluating us and that is a threat. And so we don't have enough. Let's say downtime, but it's not merely downtime, it's the opportunity to feel safe enough with another, trusted. So we are a social species and that's the other part. We, again from early childhood, are taught that we need to take regulate ourselves. Self-regulation becomes the mantra. But really we're a species that can only self-regulate if it has good experiences of co -regulation. Our whole society, whether we talk about business or social relationships, is all based upon trust. And what is trust? It's feeling safe with another. And as you disrupt that and we're seeing this being disrupted in our politics and our day to day politics that if we watch cable news, that's all this disruptiveness of lack of trust of other, and we're a species that craves trust with other.
Speaker 3:I want to read, go back for a moment and talk a little bit about those who've experienced severe trauma. Bottom line is we tend to operationalize trauma as events and we tend to evaluate other people's disruptions based upon how we think we might have responded in that setting. Not necessarily that we would, but we say, oh, that's nothing, you're not physically injured, what does it matter? The issue is, we're so disrespectful of the other's experience because we tend to believe that intentional top-down brain functions, that's all the world's about. It's our intentions.
Speaker 3:But when our lower brainstem survival mechanisms that's what we're talking about very primitive systems, when they get triggered into defense, it doesn't matter what the top-down signals are, you're basically going to lose it and it's an unfair battle between intentionality and primitive survival mechanisms. So when we yell at kids to calm down, we're sending them signals of threat that will make them more reactive. If we say to someone that we care about who lost, who's grieving, we say, hey, you have nothing, everything's fine, you have everything to live for, we're not respecting or listening to them and we're basically threatening their own sense of who they are, their desire to share something with another.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I often say to parents when they're dealing, when they have a child that has trauma whether it was a child that was adopted and there was trauma prior to adoption that they don't know about, or all but I will say to parents, you can't put your map, your mind map, on their experience because it's not the same. And the co-regulation piece to me is just critical. With horses, that's a huge thing. With horses, that a horse will, a horse will help a young adult who's who's struggling to calm down without anybody saying anything because, yeah, saying it is never gonna make a difference.
Speaker 1:And I was really. I was reading in the your pocket guidebook and something that really struck me and I, of course, I have conversations with my kids all the time about the medical world and science and what they think versus what I think and all of that, but the frequency levels in hospitals. That really struck me as, oh my goodness, not only is it a threat situation just going into a hospital, but now we have all these underlying frequencies that just cause that anxiety to be, and so I was just curious if you would talk a little bit more about those frequencies and what are your thoughts about? How do we shift that in our society okay, so sound.
Speaker 3:Let's talk about neonatal intensive care units, where I had a lot of experience in and the answer to that you're dealing now with often with a preterm or highly challenged newborn whose nervous system is in the state of constant threat. That means that low frequency sounds are not being buffered out. So when we feel safe, there's neural muscular control of our middle ear structures and our ears are tightens up so we can hear human voices and background sound bounces off the ear. And we know that when we're younger and go to bars and look at someone, we talk to them, we understand what they're saying and we realize that as we get older it becomes more and more difficult because the neural regulation starts to deteriorate. But now we have to understand that what is loud to us in a neonatal intensive care unit is excruciatingly painful to the preterm. But our culture is set is really okay.
Speaker 3:This it has a lot to do with the two factors in its cleanliness and surveillance, and this is really where menace basically start to design its spaces with. You can see what's going on with cameras and with autonomic monitoring heart rate monitoring's, breathing monitors and you can clean the place up. It had nothing to do with what did the body need to feel safe enough to recruit its own neural mechanisms to support healing? So the concept of recruiting neural mechanisms to support healing tend to be lost because physicians don't think that way, they're not taught that way, and about 20 years ago I interviewed for a major administrative position at the National Institutes of Health and I was in this interview with the director and I said basically we know too much about medicine, about the human body, to allow medicine to be practiced the way it is. We should be really focused on recruiting the patient's nervous system as a collaborator in the process of healing. Of course he had no idea what I meant, and so we start understanding that you can have a vision of what healing is about. But it doesn't mean that the structures that our society has used for healing are helpful. We are healing model is we can assess it and we can fix it. It's not. We can assess it and we can stimulate the nervous system to work as a collaborator in healing.
Speaker 3:But parents and loved ones always said calm down, your body needs to rest. We have all these insensitive secrets and we also know that when a baby is crying, what does the mother do? She uses a prosodic, a voice with intonation how do you talk to your horse? How do you talk to your dog, how do you talk to your cat? That intonation of vocalization is a signal of safety to the nervous system and I actually developed the intervention called the safe and sound protocol that literally amplified those frequency characteristics and what we've actually done.
Speaker 3:A study where a mother basically freezes her face is called the still face paradigm. It was developed by a good friend of mine at Tronic but we looked at basically a mother plays with her baby, then freezes her face. It's two minutes play, two minutes freeze, then she reengages. And then we recorded the vocalizations the mother did when she reengaged and mounted to the heart rate of the baby and its behavior. If the mother's voice was prosodic and intonation changes, heart rate dropped over 10 beats per minute. If she engaged but her voice was not very prosodic, heart rate didn't go down at all. Likewise, the same pattern was seen for distressed for behaviors.
Speaker 3:So we know that, an empirical level intonations of voices, and I would also say that we know historically with certain composers like Mozart. Mozart uses basically mother's lullabies, nothing very secret about that or complex, yet he's basically the voice of angels. That's what Mozart's called, and the issue is because he, his vision of acoustic sounds enable the body to feel safe enough to calm down. And it's interesting with classical music like Mozart, because they use the frequency band relatively narrow to get the melody on board. The body starts to relax and then the melody gets moved to lower and lower instruments and now those low frequencies which evolve to be predator signals are now welcomed with great curiosity and interest so it's like we create the portal of safety through acoustic stimulation.
Speaker 3:Now flip that into medical environments which are just lots of noise, high frequency and low frequency. Think about schools with ventilation systems, lots of mechanicals or highways disruptive to our physiology, and we use words like saying, oh, I'm so stressed out, but if you worked in an environment and a lot of background noise it's physiologically disruptive, it's getting in the way of your normal homeostatic functions. I don't like the word stress and I don't like the word anxiety because we tend to think of it as outside of us. Get the stress away will be fine. That person's making me feel anxious, get that or that work, get that out of the way. And we need to start understanding that those feelings are representing a reflection of the physiological state we're in and sometimes taking away those stimuli have nothing to do. And of course, we all know anxious people what happens if we try to take away the things that make them anxious they find something else the Stephen.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love going upstream, I love going up to the source and as I think about what Angie does and had an opportunity to collaborate with her and see what she does with my daughter and with others, and what I do, what you do, it's presence and I could just feel that that's what we're giving. I don't know what they. I just put that out as a question to you.
Speaker 3:Maybe just are you asking me what if I were to, if someone said that to me like you? Do you want me to deconstruct and tell you what it means from my view, my lens?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that, but I do. And let me put a second thing, because I was trying to get these two together and I know if they fit in my own life. The transfer amount was 62, so I wasted, wasted. I had a lot of time, but I realized that at one point my trust outweighed my fear. I trusted more. I didn't have to stop being a fearful person, I just had to trust more than I feared.
Speaker 3:Basically, all you're saying is it's one of the truths of living is that you don't need to be safe all the time, but you need some trusting relationships and that you can leverage into going into surgery or doing other things because your love, you have presence. You're not going to disappear. The word presence is very interesting. It's like saying it's when I would deconstruct it. I would really say when you're present. You've already created that co-regulation. Your signals from you have triggered in the other person and now have reflected back to signals that you're picking up and now you feel safe in that safe and giving, safe in supporting.
Speaker 3:But if a person turns their head away, if they start reaching for their phone, your reaction even though you are trying to give yourself, be present with the other person's behaviors of neglecting or basically opposing your signals of engagement, are interpreted by your nervous system as being literally threatening to you or uncomfortable.
Speaker 3:Now this is where compassion comes in your actual reaction, and I use terms like neuroception, which is not evaluating signals but just saying my body reacted to them and I can now interpret them. If I react to certain signals with certain physiological or behavioral bits, it's a signal of threat. I now understand my nervous system detected as threat and now I can take that literally empathic reaction and explore it before I literally use it as a motivator. So I often say that, like when a person's in a, let's say, bad physiological state, not a calm one, and they're talking to you and literally broadcasting cues that are not welcoming and your face goes flat because you're not getting the cues to engage. That person sees you as dismissing them and then they get mad at you and you probably have had a lawyer, obviously you've had some of those experiences and you're trying to figure this one out.
Speaker 3:You're saying, hey, I'm only trying to be there for you and why are you trying to treat me as if I'm trying to hurt you? Even with parents or friends, you start getting into these issues. So we have to move from the respect that we often have that our body reacts. Therefore, we are entitled to take that physiological state as justification and create meaning out of it at the next behavior.
Speaker 3:We have to just step back and say for a moment wow that's interesting, but my role in this setting is not to react to you. My role in this setting is to be understanding and to be more flexible and to have compassion, which is to understand that someone else is in pain and I don't have to fix it, I just have to allow that person to express it. I have a totally different take on compassion. I think a lot of people in the compassion space want to fix the person who's in pain and I'm saying that's not really. This is my I'm going to say my interpretation.
Speaker 3:I think many people in pain want to have their voice heard and once you jump in and try to fix it, you haven't listened to them and all they really want is to be heard, and that's we'll go back. David, being present is also the capacity to witness another, and I think we as a culture are horrible when it comes to witnessing another. We immediately jumped to the next step and we try to interpret it and fix it, and then we create our own internal justification of how important I would say how good we are because we want to fix it, as opposed to how patient we are and compassionate we are with others, that we want to allow them to express themselves.
Speaker 1:Yeah, spiritually it's holding space, and I love the neuroception because that takes the judgment piece out of holding space. And every experience is what it is it's the experience. You can't change another person's experience and trying to jump in and fix it, and the work that I do is never the right thing, and what you're saying is the exact reason why because that it needs to be honored. It needs to be honored. A wound must be honored to become a gift shamanically, and for it to be honored, there has to be compassion, there has to be presence and you have to hold space in a way that is not connected to my ego as the one holding space or my need to jump in and fix something, and that's something I had to learn. It's something I had to conquer because I'm a fixer. I lived a big part of my life being the fixer and that's you're not fixing anything, and learning about this from your perspective is just really opened my eyes and given me more language for teaching this to others, which I really love.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the issue of fixing. Again, it's a culture. If you view the world as causing an effect, then something's broken and you see it broken. Of course you want to fix it. So the narrative gets very complex and justification is always there, and so the victim becomes victimized and justified in being victimized. It's an interesting journey, it's, given that we all come from this evolved culture. To me there's such a paradox, because there's such, I would say, beauty, embedded compassion and the intuitive insights into how it would be a, let's say, a helpful human being. It's all there, it's all in our nervous system, and the issue is that as we peel it back by keeping the nervous system in threat, it basically goes on hiatus. It's not available anymore. So if we keep our the people, keep our colleagues, keep our community under states of threat, they're not going to be present for us, they're not going to have the resource to be with us when we need them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so what do we do about all this? How do we shift it? How do we change it?
Speaker 3:Oh, okay, the scientist in me when I start. Let me start off by saying I am not a therapist. I started all this because of my science and I was trying to figure out how the system of the Vegas, which had been presented as a healing and health maintaining system, how to be lethal, so how you could in a sense have to do with preterm babies. How can you have heart rate patterns that were vagal, be protective, but then you have another heart rate pattern which could kill the kid at the embryo cartus, where they stopped breathing and heart rate gets extraordinarily slow. How could they both be vagal? And the answer was quite simple there were two different pathways coming through the same wire and the issues. They were coming from different parts of the brain and they followed a evolutionary story. And that evolutionary story is remarkable because it was a ventral migration of cells in the brainstem that slowed the heart rate up and they move ventrally to basically be integrated in the muscles of the face and head so that when we had our intonation of our voice, it was broadcasting that our vagal control of the heart was calm. We were in a constant state. So it enabled vocalizations in early mammals to signal other species that they were safe to come close to. It was the intonation of voice. Now, when it made that migration to create this, what I call a social engagement system, that becomes seen in integration of succsual breathing, vocalize, and of course every parent or every pet owner knows this ingestion is a portal of calming. But it's a portal of calming because it integrates this neural regulation of this newer calming vagal circuit. But we still had some of these older fibers coming from the back of the brainstem that could be used for threat reactions and this resulted. When this gets triggered, like in reptiles and small mammals or mammals of prey, they immobilize, they basically look like they're dead, they get death, fainting or even mammals, predator mammals, like dogs and cats. They don't have the bradycardia but their contractility, the heart contractility, gets greatly reduced. The blood pressure drops and the dropping of blood pressure can trigger that bradycardia and also that older dorsal vagus under threat triggers defecation. So guess what, if you have trauma histories, frequently irritable bowel syndrome, or we don't even have to use the word trauma history because it may have a bad connotation to those who are listening let's say if you're under chronic stress, meaning your body has retuned to be in defensive states, meaning the autonomic nervous system is no longer servicing the welfare of the organs but basically trying to keep you safe under in a threatening world. So this privilege of servicing your organs is really the privilege of feeling safe enough not to be in a state of threat.
Speaker 3:The only thing I basically a summary statement I would like to share and that, coming from science into trying to discovering these systems didn't prepare me for what the science was able to provide to the consumer or the therapist. I was welcomed when I had to create the model. I got welcomed into the world of trauma and I took this extremely. I took it as a very privileged position to be in, because people were sharing with me that their personal journeys were really mapped out in the polyvagal theory that they were, I sense, lost their sociality, became hypervigilant and defensive and then also frequently went into shutting down with all the disastrous or complications of subdiaphragmatic disorders, basically often called comorbidities, but really a same system.
Speaker 3:But what I learned from the trauma world is I learned what it is to be a human.
Speaker 3:So I so, in going to these meanings and meeting many people with severe trauma histories, I learned what was taken from them.
Speaker 3:What did trauma take from them.
Speaker 3:It took from them the ability to feel safe enough to be embraced with another.
Speaker 3:And I have all these kind of personal examples of talking to people at meetings and they will tell me what their trauma history was and I'll look at them and I'll say how well you're doing.
Speaker 3:And then I'll look at them again and I said would you like a hug? And they'll say yes, and then I'll get an email back and say you're the first male that has hugged me in 20 years. And that was that I started to play a different role in people's lives as a safe white male. It was really quite interesting to do this, but they taught me what it is. What is their dream? What did they want out of life? They wanted to feel safe enough to be embraced in the arms of another, and I've actually modified that statement to say the arms of another appropriate mammal, because other people will take horses and dogs and cats because their associative memories of being injured are not with those mammals. So they basically get a degree of co-regulation, as you've probably have learned with the equine work that they feel safe with the horse, but not necessarily a person.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have seen that. Yes, you had a question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's beautiful with that and it goes back to saying you can't fix somebody, it can't be done and you're not coming from the right place because you're assuming there's something problematic about them, and then what you do have to give is the presence. And I think of course people will hear this and I'd like to be able to work with my child, I'd like to go work with my spouse, but really I've always believed I can't ask someone to trust more than I trust myself, that it seems like the ceiling is in my own, and so it all comes back to position.
Speaker 2:Heal myself, or whatever you want to say it that for us, this is really the implication of this, and the beauty of this is for us to be able to take this in my own perspective. You'll deconstruct it, I'm sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, David, sorry to interrupt, but the issue is healing oneself. Is that possible without a trusted other?
Speaker 2:No, in mine it was not, and it was mine and it's discovered. It's an iterative problem for what it's worth, and it was an iterative process that I trusted another enough to then start trusting life enough to be able to start trusting myself around me, and there was this virtuous circle that started to move up where I could come to a point and heal brotherhood or whatever you want to call it, or just personhood with another. So it's there I think it's not necessarily in my own perspective where you start as much as recognizing that it really comes back down to our presence or being in our own capacity to trust, or whatever we get there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think okay. So I would emphasize this need to give up our defenses, and we do that through a degree of co-regulation with another, and this is really the normal developmental process of social mammals. Whether it's a kitten or a kid, it's the same thing you learn to feel safe in the presence of the caregiver. The issue is and this is part of the problem in our society what if the caregiver is not providing the cues of safety to the offspring or is not co-regulating and is basically reprimanding and creating other forms of fear, with the narrative saying that it's a tough world. Kids need to survive. They have to learn tough love. I mean, we hear this all the time. The point that I'm starting to figure out is that is not the right narrative. The narrative is that its unconditional safety leads to the ability to self-regulate, meaning unconditional co-regulatory safety leads to self-regulatory curiosity, expansion and boldness.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I 100% agree with that and it's interesting, working with such a wide range of ages of people in my world and knowing that trauma can live in that central nervous system and, from the energetic perspective, oftentimes releasing it energetically is directly from the central nervous system and when it's released at that level, then that's when I begin to see a shift in the client and outside of being in my treatment space. But that that trusting piece has to be there for sure and I I have so many questions and we're gonna be coming to the end of so way more questions than I've time for. But one of my questions for you be I would love to hear your thoughts about when. So, for example, I have a client that I've worked with for about eight years now and she is in her upper 20s, had significant trauma as a child in an orphanage in Russia sexual trauma, physical trauma, neglect trauma and Was adopted, was brought to the United States, was raised in a privileged home and really had Some major struggles several suicide attempts was diagnosed, borderline personality disorder, which I know you discuss in some of your writings and Addiction.
Speaker 1:Now is doing well, has, I wouldn't say, transcended all of that, but has Come to a place of feeling comfortable and safe in her world Enough so that she is a functioning adult living on her own, keeping a job. And I've watched the progression of what she's done Really some of the best therapy in the United States, some of the best clinical programs in the United States, all the way to doing shamanic work with me and One of the things that I saw be a, I guess, a trigger for stepping across that line was having a safe Group of people around that she considered chosen family and so, no matter all of the therapy, all of the things, all of the places, everything that happened, when there was that family unit of safety, that's when things started to shift for her. And just if taking that example of someone who has had a lifetime Really of trauma because then there was sexual trauma as a teen would just continue to on and on, what would your thought be about that progression and that chosen family unit?
Speaker 3:my thought is that the elements are it's trust and safety with other human beings and it's different. It's not the same bond as a marriage. It's not the same bond as a parent and a child. It's something different. It has a degree of symmetry and in the symmetry Relationships and one's presence is defined, that if there's asymmetry, then the presence of the individual gets compromised.
Speaker 3:I think what you're describing is almost a prototype of a pathway forward, because the person you're describing, the antecedent experiences, are really adverse. They're adverse to a nervous system that is attempting, literally, as a child, to figure things out. And you see these repetitions of cycle where close family wasn't supportive, caregivers weren't supportive, relationships weren't supportive and finally, as an adult, through a different lens of evaluation of others, has found people that she trusts and, if we think of it literally as a developmental sequence that was just never developed, she's going through the sequence and You're seeing the product that is coming out. You're seeing the emergence of a quality, of a person who feels safe enough and what you'll see probably is greater exploration, greater curiosity and variations in life, maybe desires to travel, to experience things and and, but also maybe a tentative. This still about creating a personal relationship. So there's one thing about a social relationships of trusting group, but not necessarily a intimate relationship with a significant other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's a hundred percent accurate and and I've watched some a little bit of exploration in that realm. But there are almost familial relationships being created, but not the personal. So I think that's a great point and I think that's going to take a lot longer.
Speaker 3:It was. But one thing I've learned over it's now Over 30 years that have been tutored by the trauma world and by those who have been traumatized Is that the dream of that intimate relationship just persists, it doesn't matter how adverse if the history was. They taught me. That dream is there and that dream becomes a Motivator for many of them that someday, somewhere, they will have this opportunity. It will occur, and so I would treat it in a sense, a as an optimistic endpoint. But I would also say that a lifestyle with good, safe friends and not an intimate partner is not an uncomfortable lifestyle. It's not something that it, in a sense, we need to refine what we call as a successful life. So we already, in our culture, many people don't have children, but if we move that back 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, that would not be viewed as a successful marriage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, correct. Yeah, we have to evolve, dave. I have more, but I'm gonna see what you've got.
Speaker 2:I want to talk about your books, since that's why we're here.
Speaker 3:Okay typically.
Speaker 2:I know it's great, we can keep them what the heck? But I want also. There's a lot here and I'm wondering if I'm thinking about our listeners, and a lot of them are. You know, it's kind of this. The root of this is a lot of this is parents with challenging children, and we're talking about embracing. The current theme of our podcast is the fact of how we transition into the unknown Right. How we transition without knowing where it is we're going gets back to what we started with, about being able to trust enough that we don't need to actually know what it where it is we're going and but just practically as people are listening, is what is they? What does this mean for their lives? What does it mean for just? How do I take the brilliance and beauty of what you have here and apply this in my life, in addition to buying a book, of course?
Speaker 3:Okay, so I'll talk as a father and the issue is I had when I start to, when the public they will see we start to evolve. My kids were teenagers or Becoming teenagers and I would say that if I had the theory and the model before that, it would be a lot more helpful, because I was not I'll use this term I wasn't appropriately respectful of their physiological states. I was much more focused on the observable behaviors and, in a sense, how other people would respond to their behavior and I wasn't respectful enough of the physiological state they were in. That was creating the, in a sense, the neuro physiological platform which these behaviors, which I saw as inappropriate, where is that spontaneously emerging? So, going to your question, the parent now Can become a better, basically can gain better understanding of the state that their child is in. By being more attentive to the intonation of their child's voice, the facial expressivity, the muscle tone, they will see whether their child is in a state of calmness or physiological threat, and the issue is when their bodies are under threat. The portal of communication, the portal of compliance let's use parent words. The child's not going to comply if their body is in a defensive state. They're not going to process the information, they're not going to truly understand the intention. And, as the parent gets more and more Irritable when the child is now not responding to them, the parent now is broadcasting Increase levels of threat cues to the child. So you're losing opportunities when the opportunity might be a calmer parent who is in sense, accepting the bodily state of the child and trying to talk slowly with a more modulated voice.
Speaker 3:Or in my home, what I used to say is Before will you talk to the children, give them some food, because I was realizing that in a sense the kids physiology Was in need of food and if they ate they'd be calmer. So give them a snack when they come in the door. Don't engage in about what went wrong today. Or you know where. You call to the office. Don't go through that. Say what would you like? Would you like this kind of stack? Let's, or let's go out and get something. Let's say you know, make it positive, and then we talk about things. So in a sense, delay the the debriefing parent. We used to debrief the kids, what went on. So the issue is be sensitive to them, be aware of them and, as you start to read their physiological state, learn the tool kits that are on board, like ingesting of food, walking or relaxing. Don't go into interrogation. They've been under that all day long, so try to understand.
Speaker 3:Also, movement isn't bad. So when our bodies are really wired, sometimes there's a need to move and this is really a problem with children or problem with parents with their children. Let's not say it's a problem with children, that is, parents would like their kids to sit still. They don't want to chase them running around the room, but maybe kids need to, in a sense, mobilize. Mobilization is is a Acceptable way of expressing a physiological state that could become fight or flight. So we have to understand. We want to transition the need to move from fight or flight into play, and what makes play Different than fight or flight is that the face and voice are involved as this contingency and it becomes playful. But they both can have movement and at times or children are saying look, I haven't moved enough, I need to move. Can we do something that enables me to move? Can we be playful? Those would be my suggestion.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, no. I'd like to continue talking, but we will wrap it up.
Speaker 3:I have one more, and that is many people are very aware of breathing now, slow exhalations as calming mechanisms, but they would might lawn. How do you deal with a child? Let me say take a deep breath and blow out slowly. Now by the maca zoo, play a kazoo with them music with them. So they are basically or sing with them. Singing has all these miraculous Neuro regulatory components and it's all exhalation, so do things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, play it's wonderful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think we did not get enough of you, but no, I think all of our watchers, our listeners, pick one of the books, pick a book and read a book, get more information about this it's it really does help to understand a lot of the work that I've been doing for 30 plus years. It really helped me to gain a better understanding of my own journey and the work that I do with others, and for that I am just so very grateful. For all the work that you've done, steven, and all that you've brought to the world. I think it's really an important part of our growth as a society. So I want to say thank you for that and I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with Dave and me today. We certainly have a fun time on our podcast, so we're glad to have you here today and Dave, of course, go for the last word.
Speaker 2:I think it might have been before we started. But in addition to all the wisdom, it's just to me to just see a beautiful human being who talks from it, not about it. That's what you are, and I just want to thank you. We have a word and my people say it's a mensch.
Speaker 2:You probably heard that because, you're busy, but you're just a mansion. So in addition to the wisdom They'll get from buying your books, I think just any contact director peripheral they can have with you is just a blessing for everyone. So thank you for who you are and for what you bring it to all of us and for being with us today.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you, dave, and thank you, angie, the. I would close with one kind of simple statement, and this is really what I've learned along my personal journey this is literally only one gift you can give another, and that is your own accessibility. And this goes back to your statement about presence, and it's also for me if I weren't accessible as a human being, the theory wouldn't have any traction, it would be like oblique to the guy trying to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a great point. Well, thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 3:I'm going to do one thing, though I am going to hold up.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you, yay. Yeah, by the time this podcast is out for the world to hear, so will this book be out for the world to access? I'm excited. I'll be ordering it, for sure, and add it to my list. Thank you again, dave. I'll catch you on the next one.