There is currently a controversy resurfacing in the trauma healing and neuroscience community regarding Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory (PVT). This debate has been going on for nearly two decades. A recently published paper has brought it back into focus.
Neurophysiologist Paul Grossman, along with 38 researchers, recently published a critique outlining scientific objections to some of PVT’s proposed neuroanatomical mechanisms.
Porges has formally responded. He welcomes empirical challenges and criticism of the theory, and he argues that the published criticism expresses a recurring pattern of misinterpretation, factual inaccuracy, and conceptual errors into both academic discourse and clinical application. All elements that undermine the ability to legitimately critique the theory.
You can read for yourself the opposing viewpoints, which revolve around different understandings of anatomy, evolution, and measurement criteria. The short answer though is no, the Polyvagal Theory has not been debunked, it has been challenged, and that challenge has been responded to, and that is all part of how science normally works.
Given that it has been questioned though, the most concerning factor for practitioners who have been implementing practices related to the theory (and this is the concern for their clients as well) is, should I still be using this framework in my practice? Are the various polyvagal-informed therapies for treating trauma still viable?
I offer a resounding “YES!”
This is from a paper by Pria Alpern, PHD, which deftly sums up why:
“Toward the end of their paper, the critics make an interesting concession. The concepts at the heart of Polyvagal-informed therapy, things like the importance of safety, the power of co-regulation, the role of social connection in healing, those ideas predate Polyvagal Theory by decades. They come from attachment research, trauma work, and relational therapy. The critics’ point is that the therapy doesn’t need the neuroscience to hold. Read another way, this is an acknowledgment that the clinical framework has deep roots that no scientific debate can uproot.”
Polyvagal informed practices applied in education and trauma healing continues to be effective in healing trauma at the nervous system level, as the core principles of safety, co-regulation, attunement and connection predate polyvagal theory and remain a tried and tested effective approach.
Here’s a few links of insightful articles for your own review and explorations:
https://traumajournal.substack.com/p/polyvagal-theory-is-under-fire
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This is my hunch on why we are seeing such a backlash right now
I believe what has happened is that many social media influencers have misunderstood the Polyvagal Theory from the start – thinking it’s something you ‘do,’ or is a method, or practice (which it is not!).
I think some of the misunderstandings may have started when some important tools got popularized (like the VOO or VOO-AHH sound that Peter Levine originally brought to the somatic trauma healing worlds) which then got packaged into biohacks as what you do to work with the vagus nerve, which then translated into, “this is what you do to regulate the nervous system.”
However, one cannot regulate the entire nervous system and all its decades of dysregulation with one toning sound, or even a selection of valid tools that might stimulate parts of the vagus nerve and viscera.
Unfortunately, as time went forward, and more people tried to gain deep regulation and healing from these practices alone, people started to realize that they were still unwell and struggling, therefore, and I generalize here, they might have thought to themselves, “Huh, this PVT stuff doesn’t really work it seems?!” This is just one example that I think has created these misunderstandings.
So back to the PVT theory: it offers an explanation of the physiology behind what we see in clinical practice as Somatic Practitioners. Again, it is not a technique or method.
Again, and yes I’m repeating myself a bit here: the techniques alone and the biohacks that have become popular around the vagus nerve, don’t actually work long-term to heal trauma or create any kind of lasting change, and now the influencers are taking this opportunity brought about by someone in the academic field challenging PVT to hop on a misinformed bandwagon.
To illustrate the kind of oversimplifications and misunderstandings I’m seeing, one of the big confusions is that some people are now saying the phylogenetic (evolutionary) and hierarchical (sequencing) of survival responses doesn’t exist, that it’s always a mixed-state situation.
This is too black and white, because sometimes it IS true.
For example, in an acute, present survival situation a human being who is not already dysregulated will have a predictable, hierarchical series of survival-based responses, that often goes like this:
- Tend and befriend may be the first response (i.e., the social engagement/ventral vagal portion of the parasympathetic nervous system),
- But if that doesn’t work and the threat persists, fight and/or flight will come next (sympathetic nervous system)
- And if that doesn’t work then the freeze response, sometimes known as the ‘deer in the headlights’ response (which is a mixed state of the sympathetic nervous system + high tone dorsal vagal branch of the parasympathetic),
- Followed by the final survival response which would be a collapse and/or shutdown survival strategy to numb out and not feel the threat that is persisting (high tone dorsal branch of the parasympathetic).
Now, if someone is living with unresolved trauma and dysregulation, there will be a mixed state happening most of the time in their baseline physiology, and the predictable series of hierarchical responses may be altered due to the system already having a predisposition to go directly to freeze, or directly to fight, or collapse, etc.
One does not invalidate the other.
What about the polyvagal ladder?
Additionally, terms like the polyvagal ‘ladder’ were created, I think, to simplify Porges’ use of jargony-based words, like the one I just mentioned above, phylogenetic. I personally have never used the term ‘ladder,’ not because it is not a good way to explain what happens physiologically when we are under stress (or safety), but because it is not the actual word used via his original theory.
Additionally, the concept of ‘neuroception’ is also being questioned, but professionally, for me at least, it still holds as a strong word and accurate concept to define a person’s perception of safety (or danger).
Examples and Resources
Here is one Instagram example of a mis-informed post that also ties in elements that are irrelevant to PVT, such as colonialism, speciesism, and fascism.
Here’s another one that mixes elements of accuracy and inaccuracy. For example, it states that Polyvagal Theory is being revised such that it now acknowledges mixed states, when that’s been part of PVT from the beginning, and says the female nervous system is different than the male nervous system (untrue, all human nervous systems share the same basic architecture regardless of gender), while bringing in elements of the hormonal cycle, which is different between men and women.
And finally, a video that highlights my point above about influencers fundamentally misunderstanding PVT. This person thinks that PVT oversimplifies things (which is actually what the influencers did by oversimplifying PVT), and then goes on to state that effective therapy holds space for complexity (and that’s what PVT does as well – provides a physiological framework for that complexity)
However, here is one GOOD example of a post by the Polyvagal Institute (via a carousel slide deck) summarizing some of the points I have above. If you were to share anything, this would be my recommendation to help your followers on social media understand a little bit more of the nuance here.
I’ve also made numerous videos about the Polyvagal theory. If you’d like more in depth education on this subject just copy and paste, ‘irene lyon polyvagal theory’, into your YouTube search bar and you will find many options for further study.
