How Safety and Trauma Change Us with Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. and Seth Porges
October 4, 2023
I am absolutely thrilled to welcome back the esteemed Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D., to the podcast, along with his son and co-author, Seth Porges!
About Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. is a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium. He is 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 lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida.
About Seth Porges
Seth Porges is a journalist and filmmaker. He directed the critically acclaimed documentary Class Action Park (HBO Max). He lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida, and Brooklyn, New York.
Links & Resources
Click here for their new book: Our Polyvagal World How Safety and Trauma Change Us.
Website for Stephen W. Porges: www.Stephenporges.com
Website for the Polyvagal Institute: www.Polyvagalinstitute.org
Website for Integrated Listening: www.Integratedlistening.com
Follow the Polyvagal Institute on Instagram, Facebook, & YouTube.
Follow Along with the Episode Transcript
Dr. Lotte | Intro [00:00:00] Welcome to Dr. Lotte: Science with Soul, the podcast that transcends the boundaries between science and spirituality. I'm Dr. Lotte, your host, Physician, Medical and Psychic Medium, Ancestral Healer, Keynote Speaker and Award Winning Author of Med School After Menopause The Journey of My Soul. This podcast finds its roots in my own extraordinary life experiences through my personal odyssey. I have discovered our profound connection within a divine tapestry of existence. I have traversed the realms of illness, healing and transformation, propelled by two Near-Death Out-of-Body Experiences that bestowed upon me the extraordinary gifts of clairvoyance, clairaudience, and clairsentience. Guided by this sacred calling, I embraced the pursuit of Medical School at the age of 54. Prepare to be uplifted, transformed, and awakened to create a path to healing your own life physically, emotionally and spiritually by bridging the gap between science and soul.
Dr. Lotte [00:01:20] Welcome to Dr. Lotte Science of the Soul. I'm Dr. Lotte and the host of this podcast. Today, I am really honored to have Dr. Stephen Porges back on the podcast, and today he's joining us with his son, Seth. So Stephen Porges, Ph.D., is a distinguished university scientist at Indiana University, where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium. He is a 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 lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida. Seth Porges is a journalist and filmmaker. He directed the critically acclaimed documentary Class Action Park, HBO Max. He lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida, and Brooklyn, New York. How safe we feel is crucial to our physical and mental health and happiness. That is the essence of Polyvagal Theory first proposed in 1994 by Psychologist and Neuroscientist Stephen Porges. And in their new book, Our Polyvagal World How Safety and Trauma Change Us. Stephen Porges, and his son Seth Porges, give general readers an accessible guide to Polyvagal Theory and how this can help anyone looking to live their healthiest and happiest lives. So today, we're going to be discussing their new book, which was released this week, just a few days ago. So first, I want to welcome you back, Stephen, and welcome Seth on the show.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:03:02] Thank you.
Seth Porges [00:03:03] Good to be here.
Dr. Lotte [00:03:03] Yeah. So this this book, Our Polyvagal World How Safety and Trauma Change Us. It was such a great book! I just read it and it is so accessible to anybody because you don't really have to have any prior knowledge of what Polyvagal Theory is, or any kind of medical knowledge. You can just pick up this book and read it and get a really good understanding of how this Polyvagal Nerve is impacting your life and everything that you really do and all all the things that you have experienced in life and why it may be that you react in certain ways, in certain situations. So my first question to you both is now you co-wrote this book and what inspired you to collaborate and write this book together?
Seth Porges [00:03:56] Well, I'll take this, Dad. Laughter. No. I mean, it was really wonderful being able to have this experience and share it with my father, with Dr. Porges. And, I mean, I'll just take the credit for having the idea to do it. I'll just. I'll just do that right now. But it really came from, I think, a realization that I was having. And I think other people that this was really important information I had has the ability to help a lot of people, but there just simply wasn't much out there in a format that the average person could understand. There are books about Polyvagal Theory, including ones Dr. Porges has himself has written that are rather opaque, academic or into clinicians and the idea was how do we take these principles and go straight to the person, straight to the real person out there who's just trying to understand why do I feel the way I do? Why am I stressed? Why am I unhealthy? Why is my brain not working the way it used to? Why am I going through this world and experiencing these things that seem to have no explanation but are dominating my reality, my existence? And um you know, I kind of learned a lot about Polyvagal Theory, I guess, through osmosis you know, dinner table conversations and what not, and just being around my father and I don't think really until I sat down to start writing this with him, did I realize how not only how well I think I understood a lot of his ideas, but how fluently I was able to say them in ways that felt like it was his voice, um you know? And I think he'll be the first to say that it's a really blurred line between, uh you know, who wrote what in this book and I think that's really fun.
Dr. Lotte [00:05:42] That's a great answer. Great answer. go ahead Stephen.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:05:45] I can support this. I think as a scientist and an academic, you know, as Seth used the word opaque, I mean, we're trained to write that way. This is how we function. But it led in my life to great frustrations because I wanted to communicate, get these words out. And fortunately, that, you know, I couldn't say, Seth, please write a book with me. You don't do that with your son. But Seth, you know, saw the opportunity and it was his idea because I was not going to impose something on him because he's a creative individual. The interesting part is really how he captured the voice. And it's not just the information. When I, you know, read through the drafts, I'm hearing my voice and I'm saying, where did this come from? You know, it's remarkable and it is my voice, but it's not my dense voice. It's much more like my podcasting voice where I'm talking to people. Seth got it. And I was just startled, really. I will tell you, I I've always known that my son was very bright, but I just couldn't in a sense comprehend his ability to deconstruct these really basically pretty dense constructs and so what you said in the introduction, like you don't need a medical degree or a Ph.D. to understand it. Well, I would say that many people with medical degrees and PhDs have difficulty in understanding the theory, because they don't carry with them the same history of learning and knowledge that went into building the theory, which basically crossed so many disciplines and is literally an example of a transdisciplinary journey that came up with some very basic principles of what it is to be a human being. Seth captured that. So I, I have the smile because I have the son who is able to give voice to the ideas.
Seth Porges [00:07:45] Yeah. And I think, you know what? I was the way I want to approach this book was that, you know, just by virtue of living in this modern world and everything that comes through it, that's sort of the advanced degree that allow you to understand everything we wrote. The idea was to make make things intuitive and recognizable to the shared experiences and the shared feelings and the shared emotional and bodily experiences that I think we all have just by virtue of living in 2023, right? and everything that comes with that. And I think a lot of people feel overwhelmed, a lot of people feel anxious, a lot of people feel stressed out, and I think a lot of people feel that those feelings are mysterious. They have a hard time understanding what purpose they serve, where they're coming from, what what they can do about them, and making people first off realize that I'm speaking directly to your in your experiences, I hope they're relatable, and I think, I think they are. And from there, I think from there, once people feel simply heard and that and understand like, you know, simply heard about what it what they feel like, I think there's an opportunity to really give people a sense of guidance and explanation because there's nothing worse than dealing with these experiences through a fog of mystery is true.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:09:00] Let me kind of, he basically, Seth, he pulled some more ideas right out of my mind right there, I was listening to you, so it's getting a little scary. But over the years, what I've realized is the most important thing for a human is to be witnessed. What happens is that when things are going right, people go up, they try to fix it. And people want to be heard. They want their feelings to be respected and experience is shared. They don't want to be told what to do. Polyvagal Theory gives you that understanding that we as a species want to be heard, we want to be witnessed, and we don't do a very good job at witnessing each other. The second important point that you were talking about Seth, is this notion of feelings, we live in a society that says feelings optional, behavior obligatory, feelings optional. The issue is what are feelings and when do we feel safe? When do we feel under threat? The answer is really quite simple through the lens of the Polyvagal Theory. We can only feel safe when our Autonomic Nervous System can literally service the body of our bodily needs or homeostatic functions of health growth, restoration, and included in that sociality so that when we feel safe, we are spontaneously social, we're exploratory, we play games, life is optimistic. But when we don't feel safe, everything around us is a cue of danger. And that is really saying that our nervous system is now trying to protect us from those dangers. And of course, when you deal with the world of trauma, you start seeing the impact of traumatic experience on health and social behavior. It just unfolds in front of your eyes whenever you witness someone who has experienced trauma.
Dr. Lotte [00:10:55] That brings me to a question. So I'm going to try and connect some of the dots for our listener base, myself included, that have experienced a Near-Death Experience and people who experience a Near-Death Experience, they're either dead or they're very close to death, typically. And so what comes along with that experience to find yourself in that experience is most likely some traumatic event of some sort. So on the International Association of Near-Death Studies, IANDS, on their website, under physiological changes of an NDE, it says, and I quote: "Sensitivity to light and sound can be a serious issue and may necessitate some lifestyle changes. While most experiencers learn to limit sunshine exposure, others can't get enough. Almost everyone, though, has similar difficulties with loud or discordant sounds, and many can no longer tolerate hard rock music and the vast majority prefer classical, melodic and or natural sounds and become passionate about using music to heal. So, and then I looked in your book and I said, Wow, you know, that's the what led me to go back to IANDS's website to look up the physiological because I remembered it from reading your book and it says on page 22: "Those middle ear muscles are also one reason why a large number of trauma survivors are hypersensitive to sound and suffer from auditory processing disorders that include difficulties understanding human voices in crowded and noisy environments such as shopping malls, restaurants and parties." Now...
Seth Porges [00:12:34] Yes.
Dr. Lotte [00:12:36] Can you explain what most likely is going on for all these Near-Death Experiences and others who have experienced trauma and why it's difficult for them to tolerate loud sounds, you know, after their experience.
Seth Porges [00:12:48] While while Dr. Porges here is the expert on this, I'm just going to jump and English-ify this a little bit here, if it's alright. Laughter. So the essence of Polyvagal Theory, the essence of our autonomic nervous system in general and that term, I'm amazed, you know, I don't think we should take for granted that people understand what the term autonomic nervous system means. Autonomic nervous system is our automatic nervous system, it's all of our bodily functions, all our bodily systems that operate without us consciously thinking about them. Your heart beats, without you telling your heart the beat. Otherwise you say in the book you couldn't go to sleep at night if you had to tell your heart to beat. It'll be really exhausting if you had to make every sweat gland manually operate, right? Most of our body is and you know it operates automatically consciousness and conscious will, control a very small percentage of our functions. Now, the chief role of dynamic nervous system, like most parts of our body, is to keep us alive, right? And in doing so, it shifts how so many, virtually every bodily system or organ function in our body operates based on what is most likely going to keep us alive at any moment, whether we feel safe, whether their nervous system that is, senses safety or whether a nervous system senses danger and the process through which your nervous system will either sense safety or danger is one that Dr. Porges has coined Neuroception. Now, depending on how safe or danger your body's neuroception deems any situation to be, that could be an animal, it could be a person, it could be a noise, it could be anything at all. Your body almost instantly shifts how virtually every process inside of it operates, so that if you are in danger, you're ready for it. We've all heard of the term fight or flight of course, that's what's going on here. And I think what people think about fight or flight, they think about these narrow shifts like your heart rate goes up, maybe your pain tolerance. I don't think people realize how thoroughly this shift changes everything in your body down to, as we're talking about before these tiny muscles in your ears, the littlest smallest muscles in the entire body, and these muscles, their job is to filter the sounds of human speech, the sounds of sociability out of the air. If I'm at a party, I might actually be able to have a conversation, even if the music is loud, because these muscles serve as a filtering device, well their interaction with the eardrum serves as a filtering device that allows you to pull these specific frequencies out of the air, even if there's a lot of music going on. However, these muscles, they shift depending on how safe you feel, depending on how threatened you feel. And when we feel threatened, these muscles shift. So instead of hearing the sounds of human speech, you're now in a position where their goal, being to keep us alive primes them to pick up the sounds of threats, of predators. And whereas the sounds of human speech are kind of middle frequency melodic sounds, the sounds of threats, the sounds of predators, those are perhaps very low frequency rumbling, growling sounds. Imagine saber toothed tiger in the bush, for example. And because your body feels like it is threatened, its alarm system, so to speak, is on right now. You're hearing changes, your audiology profile changes. So instead of hearing the sounds of human speech, you're now hearing very low frequencies and you're hyper tuned to them as well, because if something's going down, you want to be able to hear that instantly. And so people who have experienced Near-Death Experiences or sort of any traumatic instance are very likely to walk away from that, where if they are always feeling threatened, which I think is one possible way of actually defining trauma is the feeling of always being threatened, if they're always feeling threatened. Well, their body is going to operate always as if it's in a state of threat. And with that comes is shifting in how we hear the world around us. So instead of hearing the sounds of people talking, that might be much harder to pick up. You're going to be hyper tuned to very low threatening frequencies. And likewise, your body is expecting threats. So those sounds are filtered through mechanisms that treat them as threats. So it's not just if you're on a party and you're say you're a veteran who's coming back and you're and you're dealing with auditory issues. It's not just that it's loud is that the loudness makes you feel threatened. And that is the thing. It's not just annoying. It changes and reinforces the bodily condition of feeling under threat. And according to Polyvagal Theory, basically the whole book is about, that state of feeling threatened has repercussions throughout everything related to our ability to be healthy, happy, think straight, and basically enjoy our lives. Did I do that right, Dad?
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:17:33] Very good, Seth. I would now simplify and basically say.
Seth Porges [00:17:41] Laughter. Now you simplify.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:17:41] Traumatic events retune our Autonomic Nervous system retune our nervous system in general to be hyper vigilant, to detect the potential of predator, which is what you're describing.
Seth Porges [00:17:55] Yes.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:17:56] And when we're talking about Near-Death, whether it is a medical compromise, which it often comes from or a hypoxic or swimming incident, the body is really has gone into sometimes literally a total shutting down, which means on some level it's given up its fight and flight and basically moved into this very precarious state, which is really preparatory to die, and almost a state of acceptance for some people. But the physiology underneath that is not a physiology of sociality. It's a physiology of, of processing a threat. And if we define threat as threat of survival, then even the concept of a welcoming to a Near-Death through a Near-Death Experience is still saying, my body is giving up its drive for survival.
Seth Porges [00:18:54] Yeah, I think that's one of, I hope the most one of the most important I think things I hope people take away from this book or people just take away from understanding the Autonomic Nervous System or bodies in general, is that we don't always respond to threats through fight or flight. We don't always respond to threats through activation and mobilization, oftentimes, especially after very severe, perhaps Near-Death Experience threats, our bodies shut down. And this is really really important because the way we treat people as a society, whether it's a legal system, a press, juries, just the peanut gallery in general oftentimes is to assume that if somebody was actually endangered, they would have fought or fled. And so you see people who might have endured a horrific instance, but they shut down they froze, there is no sign of a struggle. And oftentimes they are doubted and oftentimes they begin to doubt themselves what the experience actually was. And I think it's really important that people understand that.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:19:49] To continue on that same theme is this whole concept of a re-tuned Autonomic Nervous System, and that in a sense prepares us to now live in a world, so if we've been experienced trauma, meaning our body has gone into this chronic state of threat detection to optimize threat detection, then the world is threatening to us, social events are threatening to us.
Seth Porges [00:20:16] The goalposts of what makes us feel safe has shifted. You know, we respond and we're constantly reconditioned by the world around us. And if we have experienced danger, our body thinks the world is dangerous. And it's and and this is this is really important also, because, you know, the body doesn't have unlimited resources. The reason the Automonic Nervous System exists is because your body has inside. It's going to use finite resources to do something, whether it's to heal itself or whether that's to survive an immediate threat. It really can't do both at the same time. So if your body is always then the immediate threat or the shutdown states it can't funnel resources towards the bodily functions, allow us to heal, grow and restore. And that is a huge takeaway, I think, of Polyvagal Theory, of our book, I hope, is that when we feel safe, our bodies heal, grow and restore better buffered against almost any physical or mental malady you can imagine, better able to think, better able to be creative, better able to be social, better able to live a good life.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:21:18] The point that you're bringing up is that fight and flight is not a free option. It's a very costly one. It's metabolically costly and the body can't maintain that. So even though it's a very effective strategy, it's very time limited. And what happens is when you deplete your resources, the body that goes into this shutting down, and now what happens is that you're in that physiological state. It starts to distort your perspective of the world, and you create a narrative of a world that is now there that can harm you.
Seth Porges [00:21:54] Now, now, now, let's apply, you know, we have these ancient, you know, circuits in our nervous system, in our brain that are designed to survive immediate short term, as you just said, danger. Now, let's imagine a world in which you're in traffic for a couple of hours a day. You're being yelled at by your boss, being monitored and spreadsheets. Maybe there's, you know, a loud noise in your neighborhood. Let's just say that you are constantly overwhelmed. You don't even have a minute of rest, relaxation or anything like that. What's that going to do to you? Right. What does that do? That has real impacts on your body as real impacts on your health is real impacts on your ability to be the best to you in almost every way.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:22:31] There's an interesting part of this whole story, and that is we're a very resilient species so we can move from fight/flight into a more social safe state. That's not the problem. The problem is we didn't evolve with an easy mechanism to get out of shutting down responses. And so what you're talking about, the Near-Death is functionally a shutting down response. So that coming out of it, it's not like, oh, I'm back the person I was before. No, the body's been re-tuned. We're seeing this, of course, in, you know, long COVID. The body won the war. There's no longer a pathogen, but the body didn't, like, get the message it won the war and now can celebrate. It still thinks something's going on. And in the world we live in, we live in a world of a matrix of threat cues. And so what you're talking about, Seth, about people always evaluating or the traffic issues, the nervous system reacts to threat cues with fight/flight and mobilization and what the industry wants is greater productivity. So it will threaten people to work harder, they'll produce more. But the nervous system says I can't maintain this level of output. And so it starts to protect itself and functionally is shutting down and almost going into a state of hibernation. But going out of it, is not an easy neural pathways and easy journey. We didn't have the mechanisms built into our nervous system for that easy pathway.
Dr. Lotte [00:24:08] You were talking about the the pandemic and sitting in traffic, and um, I remember somewhere in the book you were talking about how the pandemic had changed people and how they no longer want to go back to work. So what is the impact there when you look at the Polyvagal Theory? Why? What is that resistance that has been created to rejoin the office with fluorescent light? All those...
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:24:33] Well, I think acutally.
Seth Porges [00:24:34] Laughter. Yeah, you go dad. I got thoughts about this. Laughter.
Seth Porges [00:24:36] Okay. But I think you have the answer, Lotte, that is the nervous system is re-tuned to be in a state of threat and so now the office is too noisy for them. The light flickers. They feel in a sense, people standing behind them, they can't deal with the evaluation. Their body gets overwhelmed and they're basically fatigued all the time. So the issue is, what can we be smarter about regulating our lives? Can we understand what our bodies need? And first and above all, can we literally listen to our body? And what that really saying? Can we infer what our body is telling us about its own autonomic state? And most of us know what it's telling us, but what we have learned to do is just think that that voice of our body is optional. You know, we don't we don't have to listen to it. We have to listen to our boss, our professor, our parents. And it becomes a point in time where the body just gives up and says, You're not listening to me. I'm taking you out of this situation unless and that's the only way you're going to survive.
Seth Porges [00:25:47] And that might manifest as dissociation or some other kinds of things, too. But I think, you know, the post-pandemic office question I think is is a complex one because I think there is a you know, depending on what your office environment is, of course, you know, it could be one that fosters creativity, teamwork is a highly social environment, and I think a lot of people might miss that too. But then there's, of course, offices that are perhaps stressful just to get to. And then once you're there, there's even more stress. And you might just say, I can't I can't subject myself to that again after seeing what it's like to step away from that. And so I think hopefully this is an opportunity for people to reevaluate um, how they treat employees, how they design offices. I think that's one of the big takeaways of Polyvagal Theory is that making people feel safe matters, it matters in offices, it matters in schools, it matters in our homes, it matters in the world, almost every aspect of the world we live in. And if you, you know, care about the things that we as people should care about, then you should care about what it takes to make other people feel safe in the world around us.
Dr. Lotte [00:26:55] Yeah, you also mention schools and the kids in school. So what happens to children that go to school? They don't feel safe, they might be bullied. There are other troublemakers in the class. How does Polyvagal Theory impact that?
Seth Porges [00:27:10] Yeah, so I mean, Polyvagal Theory in its core is this idea that when we feel safe, our bodies and brains operate in a fundamentally different way than when we feel threat. Now, if you're a young person in school who rarely or never feels safe, whether that's because of your home life, your school life, or something in the middle. Good luck succeeding in school. Good luck. Because your body is locked into a state of threat. Very likely the idea of sitting still in a classroom or somebody lectures you come on, you're mobilized, you're going to be fidgety, you're going to be labeled all sorts of things. You're going to be a troublemaker, just like I was when I was a kid. You know what I mean? Like like, good luck. And not only that, from the mobilization perspective and like not saying still the parts of our brain that are required to be creative, to be social, to be, you know, either team players or teachers pets or all the things sort of, you know, value and reward in school. Well, your brain simply can't do that when it's in a state of threat, the parts of our brain that are required from a sociability and creativity require us to feel safe.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:28:13] See, I would even say the ability to even be smart, we're not as smart as we really are because our bodies are in states of threat. We can't access certain areas of our brain because our body is really trying to take care of us. And there's literally a privilege to think, to daydream, and I know you have interest in spirituality, to become spiritual, not in a dissociated way, but in a creative, embodied way, you need to feel safe. And that and we're missing out on all the and so many of the attributes of what it is to be a human. I think this is what is at the core of the book that if our bodies are safe, you know, who knows what we as a species will develop to become.
Dr. Lotte [00:29:05] Yeah. You talk in the book about the green light, yellow light, red light zone. Can you just talk a little bit about the different lights? Because it's such a great analogy. It's like a stoplight, in what zone, I mean you already touched upon it, in what zone do we need to be in order to create healing for all the people out there?
Seth Porges [00:29:25] Yeah. So so we basically took the Autonomic Nervous System, which is this complex system that operates in our bodies, and we broke it down into a metaphor, which is a traffic light. The idea being that our autonomic nervous system, I'll never not have trouble pronouncing that word, our autonomic nervous system, it shifts, as I said, basically all of our bodily functions, depending on how safe we feel. And it shifts them uh, in in pretty massive ways. And so we basically there's we broke down these shifts into three basic states green, yellow, red, just like a traffic light. When you feel safe, green, when you feel threatened, yellow light, when you feel so perhaps threatened that your body is in a state of shutdown, dissociation, fainting, any of those sorts of things, red light. And each of these systems are associated with different bodily functions, different elements of the vagus nerve and changes how our body operates. So when we say the green state or the green zone, we basically mean you feel safe and your body is able to operate systems of health growth and restorations, but also creativity, productivity and sociability. When you feel threatened, well, that's fight or flight, right? That's activation, that's mobilization, that's threat detection, that's when your hearing changes, so you hear those predators. When you're in the red state, that's shut down, as we're talking about dissociation, perhaps fainting, all sorts of other responses that we associate with severe trauma and Near-Death Experiences.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:30:54] So going back to the issue of kids in school, a school refusal is a common feature among younger children, and that doesn't occur independent of what's going on in the Autonomic Nervous System. So our gut problems, so in a sense, the gut or stomach issue, which is very common in children, especially those who are having discomfort in school, is the body going into that red state. That dorsal vagus is what's creating the gut problems and becomes a gut pain, that becomes constipation, becomes diarrhea. It's basically saying that the gut is being dysregulated.
Dr. Lotte [00:31:36] It's fascinating because, Polyvagal Theory is everywhere. When you read this book, you start understanding how impacted we are, I mean, we are run by this nerve. Everything we do, going back all the way back to childhood, what was your school life like? And it's just fascinating. Fascinating. And even you talk about politics and the politicians and how they benefit by acting certain ways and keeping us in that state of fear. So it's, it's absolutely fascinating. And can you talk a little bit about why the politicians and TV and media and everybody wants to keep us in a state of fear?
Seth Porges [00:32:16] Yeah, well, I think it's two different...
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:32:18] I'll let the journalists talk about.
Seth Porges [00:32:20] Laughter. I am a journalist. Yeah, I'm a journalist here. It's two basic things. One is when we feel threatened, we are engaged with things. So if you're a television network or a social media company, you want people to stare at your screen, right? You want that level of engagement. It is uh, and oftentimes, even the biometric tools that analytics companies might use, like the dials, they hook up the people to measure engagement, something called galvanic skin response GSR, which is a measure of sympathetic activity, which is a measure of being in the yellow states, of being threatened. Is what it is. When we feel threatened, we are highly engaged. This is why, this isn't always nefarious you know, it's why we like horror movies, right? This why suspense can be fun if you're watching a movie. But it can also be manipulated. And which brings us to the question about politicians, people in power. There's never been an authoritarian strongman dictator in human history who has not gone there without casting some other group as a source of threat and fear, an other, for example, is never in the course of human history. The path of the road of fascism and dictatorship is paved with fear, and it's for a very simple truth. When we feel threatened, we don't think critically. We don't, we stop asking questions When we feel like our immediate survival is at stake, we just say, Who can get me out of this jam as quickly as possible and don't ask any questions. This is a neurophysiological process that occurs. There is a reason that many people in in politics, media power of all sorts like to scare us. And it's because when you are scared, you don't have time to ask questions. You know? Your body is just an immediate, this person's telling you there's a threat, they said they can get me that of that jam. I'm out kind of mode, and that's the truth.
Dr. Lotte [00:34:22] Yes, it's fascinating.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:34:23] There's there's this there's a switch that goes on. Once we get scared, it becomes about us. It's only when we feel safe in our bodies and in the place we are, that we now exhibit benevolence, generosity, and compassion for others. I shouldn't say for everyone, but for most people, their ability to be compassionate and be benevolent is a function of how safe they feel. I should say it is a function of how safe they feel.
Seth Porges [00:34:50] Absolutely.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:34:50] Because even, you know, there is Viktor Frankl wrote a very interesting book about his experiences in the concentration camps, and what that book taught me was that even in the worst of situations, there are some people who can feel safe enough in their own bodies that they can be compassionate and benevolent to others. And to me, that was a real challenge from thinking of human behavior as basically being caused by external context, versus free will. So the issue is, if we can monitor our own experience, our own bodily state, we have the option of being more mindful and being more benevolent and generous to others.
Seth Porges [00:35:37] Yeah, I like to say that my dad just ruined thousands of years of philosopher's work. You know, like, I mean, how many times been written and debated that the nature of human nature? Are humans innately good, are they selfish, are they bad, what, what are we as people? And I think Polyvagal Theory honestly offers a really simple answer. When we feel safe, we are capable of benevolence, altruism, compassion, sociability. When we feel threatened, we have to be selfish, right? And I don't mean that as a form of judgment, you know. To be threatened means your survival is at stake. When your survival is at stake, your body will do anything you can to survive, right? And I think selfishness comes from a place of threat, almost always.
Dr. Lotte [00:36:21] No, it's quite fascinating because you think of children that grew up in a traumatic household were never seen, never heard, always yelled at. And this is going on for years as chronic trauma for their whole childhood. Then they grow up, how do they get themselves out of this jam? How do they, what can they do to heal that and not feel being in that state of threat?
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:36:44] The answer of course with great difficulty to get out of it. But there's an optimistic part of Polyvagal Theory that says if we can find the portals that change your physiological state, then you have the opportunity to develop literally functionally neural exercises that allow you to experience and to expand your behavior. So the portal of treatment has always been cognitive, to help people to be a better they'll be better. Polyvagal Theory says that's not a very effective or efficient portal, because we all know that when our foundational survival systems are triggered, we're not a very nice species. So the issue is can we get those foundational survival states to be more calm? And so that's why music, modulated music like a mother's lullaby can actually change the physiological sate and that's why I developed the intervention called the Safe and Sound Protocol, because it literally amplifies and mimics what a mother's voice would do to a baby. But you can now use it with adults, and now the body starts to basically open up and become accessible.
Seth Porges [00:37:56] Yeah, I think, you know what Polyvagal Theory tells us that feeling safe matters and people who might experience trauma, particularly childhood trauma, the goalposts have shifted from what makes them feel safe, but they still can feel safe, right? I mean, think about I come back to again and again dogs, right? There are if you if you abuse a dog, that dog will be angry. If you are nice to a dog, for the most part, that dog will be nice, right? Oftentimes, I think people who grew up abused are basically like rescue dogs, they just need a little bit more love, right? In order to kind of come out the other side. And we need to be understanding about what causes people to feel safe, I think as a culture, we oftentimes very dismissive of other people's feelings. We make fun of people when they say things like trigger warning right in front of articles. We don't we say to people, just get over their feelings. But understanding that these feelings come from a place, often a place of threat. And it's not just about getting over them, it's about acknowledging them and allowing people to get over them. That's the key.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:38:59] Yeah the first step is acknowledgment and awareness. So when a person says, you know, I got triggered, that's that's not a bad thing to say. It's really an acknowledgment that they're not numb. Part of the adaptive function in life for many people with these trauma histories is being totally numb. And the issue is being aware that your body is responding to situation is a first good start. And the other part is can you now move that body into a broader range of physiological states through a journey of exploration and discovery of one's own feelings, without being threatened by your own body's feelings? Because the bodily feelings are going to be locked with earlier associations of being abused and traumatized.
Seth Porges [00:39:49] Yeah.
Dr. Lotte [00:39:51] Okay. Oh, we could talk for hours, but I know we're going to have to end this podcast episode at some point! So I'm going to go to my last question, and that is, how is chronic pain and trauma related to Polyvagl Theory?
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:40:07] Okay. I'm going to start with this.
Seth Porges [00:40:09] That's a big question. That's a big question. Laughter.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:40:11] I got to start with that, because about two and a half years ago when the pandemic just started, I was invited to be part of a think tank that was very, they were physicians, primarily pain physicians and psychologists who got interested in Polyvagal Theory. In fact, it was started by a person who was a spinal surgeon, and he discovered that spinal surgery didn't get rid of chronic pain. But group psychotherapy did is as creating sociality did. And then he is has discovered Polyvagal Theory. And so they brought me in and they want me to kind of like deconstruct and explain it. And initially, I said, I know nothing about pain. And then something clicked and I realized that what pain is, is an unambiguous neuroception of threat, unambiguous. And it's chronic pain, not acute pain that this is all about. And there are different processes. Acute pain is in sense, quote, real. There's injury and you can deal with acute pain medications, work preparation and time works. But when acute pain turns into chronic pain, all bets are off because there's now a rewiring through certain levels of learning and association where the body basically says, I'm under threat all the time. And so I start to learn that the actual structure of the Polyvagal Theory was helpful in understanding chronic pain. And then I started to realize that there are a lot of disorders that have chronic pain as a covariant or co-morbidity to it. And I realize that a lot of them are basically situations in which the body has healed, but the nervous system didn't get the message that they were healed. It's kind of this real peculiar bit. You start finding out that people who have certain propensities for certain types of disorders, those disorders of pain and chronic pain, one is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. The symptoms, it's genetic, but the actual symptoms of that tend to be associated with a traumatic event followed by a dysautonomic a dysfunction of atuonomic nervous system, and then the symptoms become prevalent and unmanageable. And we're seeing things like that with Long-Covid, where the person beats the pathogen, but the nervous system still is treating the body as if it's under constant threat. So the message has to get to the body through signals of safety. And that's part of where my research is bringing me, that we need to bring, ah, these signals and they're literally signals to the nervous system to say "everything is okay", and that's why vagal nerve stimulation is becoming very popular as a go to for some of these chronic disorders because it's sending signals to the brainstem. Everything's okay in the body. In my comment about that is you don't need a vagal nerve stimulator because sociality is a very efficient and powerful vagal nerve stimulator.
Seth Porges [00:43:33] Yeah.You know, it's, we joke about how much, you know, social media and Tik Tok talks about, like "hacks and tricks for simulating your Vegas" and that's all well and good, perhaps some of them work, but the most efficient, most effective, most natural, most everything way of stimulating your vagus nerve is to simply have safe social interactions with people who you like. It's really that simple. There's a reason we as humans are drawn to social settings. There's a reason we like parties, there's a reason we like dinner with friends. There's a reason we like hanging out with dogs. There's a reason we like all of these things, and it is triggering our vagus nerve in a positive and healing way to be in such situations.
Dr. Lotte [00:44:14] I love it. That was, that was so great. It was like a perfect wrap up of the whole episode. We just need to have more face to face and loving interactions.
Seth Porges [00:44:23] I mean, how heartwarming is that? To realize you know, what's the big takeaway? Spend more time with people you like, right? It's it's, it's like a Hallmark movie, you know? Oh, like it's great!
Dr. Lotte [00:44:34] Laughter. Your next movie!
Seth Porges [00:44:34] It's great. But it's also it's also I mean, like we these are things that I think society view sometimes is frivolous. We've used social interactions and parties as as frivolous or wasteful. And I think it's important to say this stuff matters. Spending times with friends matter, and I think Polyvagal Theory gives you permission to do these things we are naturally drawn to because our bodies rely on them to heal is the truth.
Dr. Lotte [00:45:02] That's just great. And did you have any wrap up sentences to add to that Stephen?
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:45:09] Well, I guess would say, isn't it wonderful to have the son like Seth?
Seth Porges [00:45:12] Laughter. Isn't it wonderful to have a father like Stephen/Dr. Porges.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:45:18] Laughter. Dad. That that, that's fine for tonight. The the only comment I make on all that is that if we start to seize our social behavior as neural exercise as we now is and start understanding the benefits, it becomes not optional, it's obligatory. And we want rather than, in a sense, forcing children to sit in classrooms. The social aspect of play is important for them to develop the neural resilience to be able to sit in a classroom. It's such a paradox.
Seth Porges [00:45:53] Yeah. I mean, the most important thing you learn in school probably isn't trigonometry, right? It's like it probably is how to be around other people, how to work together, how to cooperate, how to be a decent social person. And we need to value those things. We need to liberalize the value of those, I think, because it is so important.
Dr. Lotte [00:46:11] Yeah. It's not the actual academics. It's it's more about our social...
Seth Porges [00:46:16] No problems for that, I mean, he's a Dr. Porges, he's an academic, right? You know. Laughter.
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:46:19] I want to close with a true story. My high school gave me an award this past year, gave me the elected me to the Wall or Hall of Honor, and so I had to do a talk to their high school assembly, but I did it virtually. And everyone else who gave the talk, talk about the great education they had, all the advanced placement courses. And I basically my talk said that's all irrelevant. The only thing important is the friendships that you make in the last year of a lifetime. They're important. The, in a sense co-regulation. So I still have friends from high school. The answer is don't get, don't get misled by saying it's the grades you get on your GRE's or your SAT's that are the most important. The most important bit is really the moments of shared safety. I'm going to use the word share moments, shared moments of intimacy. But it doesn't mean that they're sexual. It means that you're safe in the presence of another, that you don't need any defensive systems. And we crave that, that ability to feel safe enough to be in the arms of another. And even so, the question of people who come from these really adverse homes where there's such abuse and they feel so unsafe in creating relationships with others, in their mind, their dream state is to be safe in the arms of another, but their body won't let them, in a sense, feel calm enough to be embraced.
Dr. Lotte [00:47:56] Yeah, that's just such good advice for people, and I can't say enough good things about this book. So everybody go and see if you can find this book. Is it available on Amazon and all the different platforms? Bookstores?
Seth Porges [00:48:09] Yeah. Yes. It comes out September 26th from W.W. Norton. Our Polyvagla World How Safety and Trauma Change by Dr. Stephen W. Porges and also his son Seth Porges.
Dr. Lotte [00:48:20] Wonderful. So we'll put the the link in the podcast notes as well so they can go straight to Amazon. But it's a is a great great book. Like I said in the beginning, you don't have to have any medical knowledge and it gives you such great insight to your everyday life and your own reactions to what you have experienced in your life and how you know what to do about that. So I want to thank you both for taking the time to be a guest on the podcast today, and hopefully I'll have you back again in the future.
Seth Porges [00:48:53] Thanks for being here. Thanks for having us!
Stephen W. Porges, Ph.D. [00:48:54] Thank you. Thank you very much for having us.
Dr. Lotte [00:49:00] As we conclude this episode, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude for your presence within our community. If you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe, leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Subscribe to my newsletter in the show notes and receive new podcast episodes delivered right to your inbox. If you resonate with the interconnectedness of mind, body and soul and are motivated to embark on a journey of personal healing, I invite you to connect with me at DrLotte.com. Together, we can pave a path towards transformative healing in your own life.