Laying the Foundation of Polyvagal Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	3
How Neuroception Works: Feeling Threatened or Feeling Safe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	6
How the Vagus Affects the Social Engagement System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	8
The Vagal Paradox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	10
How Vagal Nerves Relate to Trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	10
Novel Events: Mammalian vs. Reptilian Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	13
The Vagus and Dissociative Styles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	17
Single-State Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	21
About the Speakers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	23

Dr. Buczynski: Hello everyone and welcome. We have a really special person with us, and we’re going to dive deep into the whole concept of polyvagal theory.

This is relatively new and very, very important when it comes to thinking about trauma and its treatment.

It’s really important to get these ideas because they shed a lot of light on the issues and the doorways to treating those issues.

My guest is Dr. Stephen Porges. He is a good friend by now; he has been part of several series – if you were just part of the Brain Series, you saw him there, and he was with us for that last year and the year before.

But each time we have more and more to talk about, so I always look forward to these webinars with you, Stephen.

Stephen is Professor Emeritus now as well as director of the Brain Body Center in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He’s also the author of The Polyvagal Theory. So, Stephen, welcome – and thanks for being here.

Dr. Porges:Thank you, Ruth. It’s a pleasure to be back again and I look forward to a very interesting evening.

Laying the Foundation of Polyvagal Theory

Dr. Buczynski: Great. Even though we have many people on the call who were with us last time, I think we should start with just a little bit of foundation for the people who are new – and, by the way, many, many people on the Comment Board last time said that the webinar helped clarify so much.

Hopefully, we’ll do the same this time as well as we get into a lot of new ideas to help clarify even more.

For the listeners who might not be familiar with your work, let’s do a recap, starting with what is the primary function of the vagus nerve in the brain and the body – maybe include where the vagus nerve is located.

Dr. Porges: The vagus is a cranial nerve that exits from the brainstem and goes to many, many organs in our body.

But the way of conceptualizing this in terms of either trauma or brain-body sciences is not to think of a nerve that is running in the periphery, but to think of a conduit, a cable that connects our body with our brain.

The vagus is really the largest nerve that travels throughout the body and about eighty percent of its fibers are sensory.

It is the portal to the brain from the periphery, and it tells our brain the state of our body.

The vagus also has a whole series of other fibers. Some of them are myelinated, which means they’re very efficient in communicating; some are unmyelinated, and they regulate organs that are both above our diaphragm and below our diaphragm.

The vagus is this very critical nerve that deals with all or most of our primary internal organs and it communicates to our brain their status.

When you feel good, your vagus is telling your brain that it is in a good state; when you are not feeling good or you are feeling nauseous, it is conveying that information as well.

Dr. Buczynski: Why is your theory called polyvagal theory?

Dr. Porges: It is called polyvagal theory because there is an underlying principle here, and that is the principle of evolution in our phylogenetic history – where mammals come from.

Mammals came from reptiles and we have literally a family heritage of neural circuits, and those neural circuits, as they evolve, change and start doing different things.

With the mammal – and we are mammals – the polyvagal theory identifies a uniquely mammalian vagal pathway, and that vagal pathway is myelinated and goes to the heart and bronchi – the organs above the diaphragm.

But that is not the interesting part or the critical part of the theory; the critical part of the theory is that it is linked to the nerves that regulate the striated muscles of the face and head.

Facial expressions literally become a portal that tells you exactly how the vagus is influencing your heart and bronchi.

When people are stressed out, how do their faces look? The muscle tone gets flat, especially the neural tone to the orbital muscle called the orbicularis oculi, which gets flat.

All clinicians know that when people have flat affect, there is something to be concerned about.

The window to our autonomic state becomes our face. That is one of the primary principles of the polyvagal theory.

The other primary principle is that we functionally have three autonomic nervous systems or circuits that follow a phylogenetic or evolutionary history, and these circuits provide a response hierarchy.

When we’re challenged, we use new circuits, and when they don’t help us get into safe and appropriate situations, we regress – we use older and older circuits.

Our newest uniquely mammalian circuit is that face-heart connection, and we use this to literally convey to others that we’re safe to come close to. When people convey to us that they are safe, we feel comfortable – social support has literally a polyvagal correlate.

However, when we’re challenged, which can be due to normal life demands or threat, we can mobilize. To mobilize we need our parasympathetic nervous system and we have to turn off the vagus because the vagus is a calming circuit.

But fight/flight doesn’t always work for us – and this is the whole story underlying trauma.

Trauma is normally associated with unsuccessful attempts to get away. When we can’t get away, we can’t use fight/flight; we resort to our most primitive neural circuit, and that, functionally, is a shutdown circuit.

That shutdown circuit is also vagal, but it’s the old vagus; it’s the vagus that we share with reptiles, like turtles. When this circuit goes, we just reduce our cardiac output and we reduce our mobilization.

Again, one of the critical things that we find when we talk to clients who have experienced trauma is this immobilization feature. Part of what I want to get into later this evening is how that’s associated with dissociative states and hypoxia.

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