Using the Polyvagal Theory for Trauma | Dr. Stephen Porges, Being Well Podcast
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- Опубліковано 29 тра 2024
- Dr. Stephen Porges, the creator of the polyvagal theory, joins the podcast to walk us through how its lessons can be applied to recovering from traumatic experiences. We start by simplifying the polyvagal theory, discussing the three key states our body can rest in, and exploring some of polyvagal's key take-aways. Dr. Porges then explains why there are common responses to traumatic events, and finishes by sharing some polyvagal-informed practices we can use to to heal old wounds and feel safer.
About our Guest: Dr. Porges is a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, and Professor Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He’s published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and is the author of a number of books, including his recently released Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us.
0:00 Introduction
1:00 A brief overview of Polyvagal Theory (PVT)
5:05 Ventral, sympathetic, and dorsal vagal states
12:00 Relating PVT to trauma, and processing cognitively vs. in the body
19:30 Creating enough safety and co-regulation for healing work
23:30 What helps people gain awareness, safety, and regulation
27:20 Contextualizing a freeze response both psychologically and medically
30:55 Distinguishing feeling safe vs. being safe
33:20 Where to start when you don’t have a secure base in another person
36:40 How our physiology has evolved to detect psychosocial cues
38:45 How healing practices change our perception of the world
40:45 The calming effect of slow exhalation and top-down visualization
42:25 Other tools to calm the nervous system, and the need for social nourishment
46:25 Recap
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Who Am I: I'm Forrest, the co-author of Resilient (amzn.to/3iXLerD) and host of the Being Well Podcast (apple.co/38ufGG0). I'm making videos focused on simplifying psychology, mental health, and personal growth.
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Forrest, your way of interacting with and reacting to people makes me feel safe. Your presence has regulated me many times
I am a survivor of trauma that fits complex ptsd. I was placed on psychiatric medications after becoming disregulated and misdiagnosed. That happened to many. I got off after 16 years and into therapy. I learned to meditate, yoga, and qigong. Then I was referred to a trauma therapist that helped me understand that I was dissociating. I did some EMDR which was helpful and the relationship with the therapist grew into safety as I did. But what helped me the most was neurofeedback. Understanding trauma has come a very long ways! I recently had bypass and repair for A-fib. Blockages were bypassed and A-fib quieted. I know these were in direct reflection of what I experienced during my life. Neurofeedback gave me a new brain and therapy a new heart along with open heart surgery! I hope to live many years in a regulated and safe mind, body, and spirit! 🙏 ❤❤❤🙏
Can you please share how neurofeedback works and how it helped you?
I was so excited to see Dr. Porges being your guest!!! I've listened to more interviews with him than I can count, yet I still learned something new! Everyone needs to know about the Polyvagal Theory! ❤❤❤
Forrest, thank you for this content. And you have a gift of accurate summarization ❤
yes.! It is Forrest's summaries that make all this deep mental wellness ..safe!
Good interview. Sometimes I struggle with watching Porges' social interactions, but this one was ok.
This was wonderful and you did a terrific job summarizing complex information. Thank you!!!
Wow, great job. I really appreciate how you actually listen to the people you are interviewing.
I love that this kind of information is accessible without spending a ton of money. I am on this journey of healing and have been researching techniques to calm the body. The idea that safety can be a trigger is something I hadn't heard before and is a real eye opener! Thank you. A technique I am using is called having. Rubbing around the occipital bone, down the arms and rubbing hands together. Keep doing it until a yawn or sigh is produced. Can take 20 minutes, but it signals the nervous system that it's safe.
Thank you, Forrest, and Dr. Porges for a really marvelous conversation!
It was a nice balance among physiology, experience, and recovery (healing and re-harmonizing). As a coach (not as a therapist like Dr. Rick) who aids professional folks who have more 'mild' traumas (if there is such a thing) or relational distresses in their history, I really appreciate PVT and its practical, everyday implications regarding safety, baseline calm, and awareness of arrousal.
And thank you also, Forrest, for handling the overview of PVT in the recap (well done, too!), rather than asking Stephen to explain it for the n^nth time (LOL).
Cheers!
"Tomorrow's mastery begins with mental calm today."
Loved this episode! Both polyvagal theory and your podcast have helped me so much over the last few years! I'm thankful for everything that you and your father do to make the world a better place.🙂
Thank you!
Forest your podcast is my favorite listen on my daily walks. So much wonderful content. This episode with Dr.Porges is a gem! Thank you for all the wellness goodness! ✨🖤
Thanks for making us your walk companion :D
Forrest, this was one of the best interviews with Stephen Porges I've heard. excellent work!! and thanks for the end piece.
Glad you enjoyed it!
@@ForrestHanson How do you evaluate RO-DBT in relation to polyvagal theory?
Brilliant. Parts of this talk helped me decode why a recent interaction was so upsetting: anticipating a bonding time with a new group, and it totally went sideways. Subterfuge, masked sabotage, queen bees, agitated acting out by one person, no moderation from leader, followed by denial by some and others seemingly not aware at all. I think those claiming to be unaware may have been the wisest attendees! Thank you for so many connections between systems. More to learn, definitely.
When you have adverse experiences with a person or a group of people, you no.longer trust them. Its very difficult to continue any relationship with people that enjoy hurting you. Once you realize that, its time to.move on. Its not about winning or losing. Its about getting your point across and moving on. Moving on can be very difficult without any real closure. An apology usually seals the whole issue. But you have to realize one thing about human nature. Your aggressors can be feeling shame. That never occurred to me. I have to realize that ill never figure out every single event thats ever happened to me and the reasons why. I just have to.learn how to accept unfavorable things that have happened to me. Thats extrememly tough, but ive always been up to the challenge!
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Thank you for this interesting episode, I got a lot of insights from it. I had numerours adverse experiences and was "dysregulated" most of my life. The very last one was the death of my little sister, who passed away from an aggressive cancer in the age of 18 two years ago. It was an immensely difficult time for our family, and left me, unsurprisingly, even more dysregulated. I have developed an illness anxiety disorder and a somatization disorder while she was still alive, but already ill. After her death, my disorder persisted and shifted to a chronic pain disorder. I have extremely tight muscles all over my body which contribute to pain and anxiety. I never felt safe in my home and no longer feel safe in my own body. This episode once again made me realize how important the work with the nervous system is, and gives me hope that change is possible.
Wishing you peace and healing
This interview is very helpful thank you. It touches on questions I've been having about my meditation practice.
We are often introduced to this mind/body complex system in a somewhat oversimplified manner I believe. Being that our body has reacted to trauma in the past, that it is scarred into us, and that we need to learn to dissociate from it through the sitting meditation practice.
Though this proves effective on the moment, a questioning of this explanation at large has arisen from my experience. Which is the following: is it a good idea to see our mind as needing separation from our nervous system, is that not dangerous on the long term. Especially given that I do not aspire to a monastic life of enlightenment...
Dr Porges' description of the intertwined mechanics involved between the mind and nervous system helps me understand that shutting off that connection through meditation is not enough. That a deeper understanding of this two way system is what is needed, in order, if I understand correctly, to let the nervous system look after our organs efficiently. And to learn to love this system rather than see it as a burden we need to shut off from.
Things in life are rarely simple, and many schools of thought will oversimplify in my opinion. Which though it may help on the moment, and also attract followers, is not enough to get the big picture. I'll try to understand Dr Porges' work better with the hope of widening my perspective on meditation and stress management.
Very curious to hear whether others have had the same sort of questions relating to whatever it is they do to try and care for themselves.
Forrest ..you are such a pleasant interviewer…lovely to witness. Dr.Porges is a genius. TY!❤
Omg this is SO GOOD. There are insights Dr. Porges said in here that unlocked so much for me - and I am not new to polyvagal theory but this really, really helped to integrate some stuff that I wasn't getting before. You did such a top notch job guiding this conversation and asking him questions to guide it effectively. Thank you!
Some wonderful new perspectives - gold nuggets - you unearthed with Dr Porges Forrest! Terrific summary (of the summary too) !
We love a summary of a summary around here.
I really enjoyed this video. Having people you can feel safe with goes a long way to shifting our current state and inducing a healthy measure of relaxation. However, the benefit of a safe relational experience will be limited if we are carrying unresolved (unexpressed) trauma. Let me try to give an example. I’m going to give an example of someone who as a child felt touched in a way that made them feel uncomfortable but at the time
we’re not powerful enough to deal with it. Now it’s years later and you are aware that you have tension in your body even in a situation where you would expect to be more at ease. Potentially, the tension is a symptom of a discomfort which is real but has no identifiable source. In other words, you don’t know why it’s there. The discomfort you experienced would have been too much for you to fully feel or process as a child. So, in a sense the feeling was buffered or contained in your system. Rather than experiencing the pain of your discomfort, you began to live with a higher level of tension. For healing to take place, you may need to reach a point in your life where you feel safe enough, or you feel strong enough, to lower your guard and allow your feelings to come through. If you are able to finally experience the trauma in a state of awareness, to recall just how uncomfortable you actually were in the situation, to actually - finally - just feel or allow yourself to feel your discomfort, or pain, then the tension will transmute into conscious suffering and your tension level will reduce. I’m using being touched in an unconscious manner as an example that I think is easy to relate to, because people generally understand this not only as children but also as adults. Yet there are many possible situations where as a child you may have felt discomfort or fear or pain which was too much for your developing psyche to give in to. Fear of being abandoned or a sense of not being loved are prime examples of situations that are too big for us to fully allow ourselves to experience (feel) as children. Often what happens instead is that we are left with tension in our body and a lack of awareness or understanding of its origin. However, the more we can surround ourself with people and places where we are more likely to experience safety, the more we become willing to let in our feelings and experience healing. It may take time, but when it finally happens we end up with a greater understanding of the trauma we experienced and how our unconscious responses affected our experiencing the world and people around us as a being a source of safety.
Wonderful episode, thank you to both of you!
Hi Forest, this is great and you have a very calming presence which is a nice cue of safety. I like Stephen but I didn’t feel he answered your question on how to help yourself if you don’t have a good person to regulate with. Pets can help but that’s not appropriate for all people either - and if you are very dysregulated you may not have the resources to take care of a pet well which can cause further problems I think there’s a part missing here and that is self regulation with your higher self, intuition, source, spirit, god or whatever you want to call it. I think Stephen follows Buddhism (I’ve heard him talk in other talks about it) and I was hoping he might go into that but he didn’t. I am on a journey and dealt with difficult depression etc. after many years I finally found that accessing a higher self part (intuition) has started to help me feel cues of safety. I sit in a church and I now find that a wonderful cue of safety. Over time, finding that in myself has started to help me start to visualise that cue when I’m with people. It’s slow and a long journey but I would like to hear that part bought into this conversations
Very good point. Our spiritual self/higher self can be a source of comfort. It’s helped me a lot personally.
Great interview!
Thank you ❤
What an insightful gem of a podcast!! I've been pausing to digest because there's so much that I can relate to, and so much to learn from Mr Porges' work. Thanks so much for this interview Forest
Fantastic session .
Lovely to see Forrest became so confident yet open to the wisdom of Dr porges .
I could feel the the secure attachment and ventral vagal stage of both ..🎉
Anxiety & stress. I feel that the world is extremely dangerous. I do feel more safe with animals, humans, No. Om gosh. This doctor is 💯🎯. Thank you. I really needed this. Subbed.
Thank you Forrest. This was an especially excellent discussion and dive into a subject I would like to know more about.
I really appreciate the differant aspects and have received quite a bit more to help me understand and especially compare with my whole life trauma. Would like to talk more on a private manner if at all possible?!
Forrest, I just discovered your channel while searching for Terry Real videos. I am now a subscriber. You are a brilliant, knowledgeable interviewer. Your presence is so calming! Your personality is like a warm hug! Thank you. And I really appreciated you summarizing this interview at the end.
Thank you, I really appreciate it.
And I loved that conversation with Terry, one of my favorites.
Great guest... 😊
He's fantastic.
Thanks this was great. But what are antisocial autistic people supposed to do? Pets help and so do spouses but a lot of mental health seems to boil down to "be more social" when that's almost impossible for some of us.
And why is it impossible? Unless you mean "antisocial" as in sociopath?
People who are neurodiverse often have difficulty socializing. Managing anxiety and overwhelm may feel impossible. Often this is a trigger response from previously feeling judged and rejected.
Ideas that help me
1.Taking slow small baby steps towards the goal.
2. Giving yourself permission to leave at any time.
I think that’s what this is all about. Take things slow. Titrate (small steps). I am doing some of Irene Lyons stuff that helps heal nervous system. Deb Dana also has free UA-cam on anchoring in the ventral vagal (social engagement). I struggle too but this kind of work is hopeful and optimistic not forcing yourself to be social which is just retraumarising. Keep looking on you tube, listen to what draws you and see if anything helps regulate your system and follow that. Good luck to you xx
I understand and have the same issues (neurodivergent and C-PTSD). I found polyvagal theory in 2018 and it's taken years, but I'm not locked into hypervigilance any longer. I was in a freeze state for years.
Honestly, social media friendships have helped. I'm in a group with other women who have had similar life experiences. Knowing that people understand has been helpful. Even though they're virtual, I truly do feel a bond.
Also, a trauma informed therapist, with a regulated nervous system (who actually understands about co-regulation and the impacts of trauma on the nervous system) has made a difference.
There are safe, non-judgmental people out there.
I still struggle with social engagement. Thanksgiving took 3 days to recover from. But, when I look back to where I was 5 years ago, I'm light years ahead of where I once was.
Be gentle and patient with yourself. Work on checking in with your body and being safe with yourself.
A really good resource for me is Tara Brach's RAIN meditation (Recognize, Allow, Inquire, Nurture). UA-cam has several of them.
Lately, I've been working with my breath and teaching myself how to breathe deeply again.
But just having awareness is huge. I lived in a traumatized, hypervigilent body for years and didn't even know. Learning about childhood trauma, and especially how my body responded, was like turning on a light. I truly believe that understanding opens the door for compassion, which is what we need most.
Sending prayers and intentions that you find a gentle path that brings you back home to yourself. 🙏💗
Many autistic people socialize differently. And maybe you should be doing a group activity where you don't have to talk to one another like a dance class or yoga
Awesome ❤
Hi, thank you for the video, it's very interesting! Also what about autogenic training? I did that for some years and it really helped me to feel more relaxed and energized (but it is not a social thing, so yes I think it lacks something. Also sometimes I am too stressed to even be able to start that practice, but generally it can feel deeply relaxing).
I am only part way through this podcast and all w can say is wow. I freeze, at different points it was flop or passing out.
I'm wondering the same thing that Forrest was wondering in the episode: Who ARE the trustworthy creators of UA-cam videos leading viewers through vagus nerve stimulation exercises?
Fascinating episode Forrest!! Where can we listen to the music?
Here's a link to Dr. Porges' Safe and Sound protocol: integratedlistening.com/products/ssp-safe-sound-protocol/
The discussion of prosodic speech and of mirroring with a YT video about vagal stimulation sounds to me a lot like ASMR videos. Those are all whispered or soft-spoken and usually a bit tuneful, and the face of the person in the video is usually sending soft, safe signals. Is ASMR a particularly direct form of social vagal stimulation?
I'm not sure whether it technically stimulates the vagus nerve, but I think your overall take here about those factors having a lot to do with the appeal of ASMR is probably right on.
So what do we do if we don't have any safe people or pets?
Open up to your spiritual self! You will find empowerment from within.
Imagine a compassionate being looking out for you, helping you, caring about you. It’s helped me sometimes.
I didn't really find a solution to cases of immobilizational reaction to threat, except the general sentence 'make the client feel safe'. It there any structure method of helping such cases?
Try Tara Brach’s RAIN meditations. I found them very helpful
I think i just stopped all nervous system regulation because at a certain point it became depressingly obvious that, although certain practices would calm stuff down, it would always pendulate back to it's default state of trauma , anxiety, etc. Nothing would really shift. I think what i have just said is an extremely important point, and i am really hoping somebody can respond. I would love to ask stephen porges directly, but that is not an option. Guess that's a no then.
I havent listened to the whole interview yet, so im not sure if what im typing is off topic or obviously tried already for years. But, have you always tried methods to calm yourself down or have you been searching for the root of the trauma and heal the inner child? Family system therapy or body therapy could solve trauma blockages in your body. I find when im practicing to calm myself down (tip of iceberg solving) it takes hard work every day, and my emotions dont change, i just learn how to respond responsibly, its not taking away my trauma that is settled in your dna.
Maybe its completely off topic as i havent listened to his solutions yet, but ADD here and felt the urge to respond already 😅
I love dogs but I can't even allow myself the closeness to a pet. The thought of being responsible for another living life again sends me into a state of panic.
I want my partner to talk as softly, empathically and smartly as Forrest.
You know anyone in New York for traumas
Anorexia is shrink and disappear. Reduce metabolic......wowee
Everything he said are abstract. Only few practical things. You spent almost all your talks about abstract information and just little practical at the end whereas the entire video should be practical. We already have these videos everywhere where he talked numerous times about concepts. At least BV says some practical ideas.