Hidden Origin Story of the Polyvagal Theory

Interoceptive Epistemology (and an interview excerpt with Stephen W. Porges from 2021)

The strange thing about this past week – my week was properly hijacked by the tumult around the Polyvagal controversy, there’s no other word for it, with which I’ve gotten quite & publicly involved – is that the entire experience, which moved my biology across a pretty full continuum of threat responses, reinforces the immediate phenomenological awareness of the direct primacy of autonomic physiology in constructing our experience.

As I am preparing to teach a class on the autonomic nervous system this morning, having risen early to review the specific ways in which what I’m preparing to say may explicitly or implictly rely on elements of Polyvagal Theory that are under public scrutiny, being called pseudo-science, fringe science, being told that people who have been informed by polyvagal tenets were ‘duped’, being told that Polyvagal Theory ‘misappropriates’ prior physiology (these are among the accusations leveled by the Grossman et al.) I have continued to witness my nervous system shifting across the landscape of the autonomic seeking of affiliation (who is with me & making some kind of sense I can recognize), and moving into defense (why are people saying this? why are these people against me? what is the axe to grind? how have these people been legitimately harmed by PVT? what information is being withheld that explains the vehemence of this reaction? with whom can I get to common ground? with whom do I need to move into very firm boundary setting?) The tracking of this internal landscape of threat response, in realtime – which can shift from one moment to the next reading a hostile comment on a social media post – is the ontological and interoceptive terrain that Porges’ work oriented the world towards, and that set me out on the path of gaining interoceptive and autonomic fluency.

If I take a moment, and a breath, I can remember that this interoceptive ontological stance is not actually at issue. That it is, in fact, unequivocally valid. One of the possible travesties in this whole occurrence, something intimate, in actuality, is that having spent a good deal of time with Stephen Porges (relative to the general population, I should clarify, not in absolute terms), and having collaborated with him on multiple projects and interviewed him multiple times, I know that there is a quieter, more personal origin story to PVT that is largely omitted from the public discourse. This is the story of his experience as a teenager playing the clarinet, which requires a technique called embouchure on the mouthpiece of the instrument, and controlled breath. Something I know from speaking with Steve is that in addition to the public story of the origin of the theory, the paper he wrote on infant bradycardia, the letter from the neonatologist, the formulation of the ‘vagal paradox’, Steve knew from his own direct experience that there was neurology wiring together the face, the voice, and the tuning of the middle ear with the heart and breath, because he had experienced it himself for years. He was aware that his own experience playing clarinet had interoceptively sensitized him to the existence of a certain neurological circuit that he would later come to name ‘the social engagement physiology’ or ‘ventral vagal complex’.

So here we have another paradox of a different order. The publicly told and officially sanctioned origin story of Polyvagal Theory is in a peer-review paper and a specialist’s response, in the carrying around of a letter in Steve’s briefcase. But is that really what happened? Or, better said, is that the only thing that happened? Is it not possible that the search for the scaffolding of Polyvagal Theory was in fact an attempt to find a scientific mechanism to validate an interoceptive experience that Steve was already having? That the thing the theory would articulate was to put plausible science under something that Stephen Porges already knew, phenomenologically, to be true?

You’ve probably never heard that story. And the reason is simple– interoceptive tracking of our inward neurology as a method for inferring connectivity between neural circuits is not a ‘validated’ approach to the construction of medical knowledge. Within the hallways of academe, peer-review journals, professorial politics, science has its empirical methods and standards and consecrated epistemological methods. You are not permitted to write ‘interoceptive self-tracking’ in your methodology section.

Yet let’s take a breath.

Have you ever felt something you couldn’t explain? Have you ever had an intuition that turned out to be correct that you could not cognitively explain how you knew? Have you ever had the urge to connect with someone out of the blue and found yourself astonished to realize that your phone was ringing and that in that very moment they were calling you?

Science– so long after Newtonian mechanics have fallen to quantum mechanics–is still under the archaic sway of a materialist worldview. It still goes around purporting– because the entirety of modern civilization is under the sway of Cartesian dualism (I think, therefore I am)- because modern people largely experience themselves as ambulatory heads on sticks– that in order to know something means that we have to know it in our cognition. Science is stuck in its own head. And so the origin story you know of Polyvagal Theory is the cognitive one. The one that conforms with the requirements of ‘validated medical knowledge creation.’ In airquotes.

Yet what if– and here is where I’m going to make a bold assertion– what if much of science, the actual moments of breakthrough, the actual moments of extraordinary insight– is not cognitive at all? What if – can you feel the hair rising on your neck?- many of the actual moments of breakthrough were orchestrated by an intelligence beneath or beyond cognition altogether? I’ve studied, in depth, the lineage history of modern neuroscience, and I can tell you that from the visionary neuroscience Santiago Ramon y Cajals, to Leopold Auerbach’s discovery of the myenteric plexus, many of the moments of categorical breakthrough happened outside of the hegemony of cognition.

Because cognition is one of the most limited forms of intelligence we have. Deeply constrained, in relation to the oceanic and original intelligence of the body, to use a turn of phrase from my friend and colleague embodiment teacher Philip Shepherd. Your breathing animate body, which is ALIVE, and which FEELS, is home to billions of years of aggregated evolutionary intelligence that pulses with vitality just outside the reach of where most modern people’s thinking (and knowing of themselves) begins.

Indigenous Unangan Elder Kuuyux Ilarion Merculieff says, You modern people believe that intelligence begins in thinking, but we [indigenous people] know it begins the moment thinking stops.

Take a moment to put that in your pipe and smoke it.

So what if the essential origin point of Polyvagal Theory is in one man’s direct, personal, phenomenological and embodied experience, which was aboriginal in its directness first, and was then translated into the language of science. What if the scientific explanation is, in fact, parallel or even secondary. What if the evolutionary claims put in place to back it up, the measurement of RSA that affirmed it, the differentiation of the brainstem source nuclei of the respective neural circuits origin– what if all of these are secondary supporting documents, and not the primary text?

A deeper question– are you willing to believe the phenomenological language of direct experience that lives in your body, or do you want validated proof from experts? Is your knowledge something that accrues to you through direct experience, or are you content to read about it in books? Who are you? From where does your knowing derive?

Because that is part of the deeper strata of this conversation. And it is why I am not an academic.

Let’s be clear. Stephen Porges might read this alternate origin story of the theory and disagree. He might not like it. He might feel I am complicating the issue or the science. I have no idea, partly because I haven’t heard from him. He doesn’t take my calls anymore. He stopped two years ago before I published The Neurobiology of Connection, when I told his team that we had identified a foundational set of errors in PVT. This week the leadership of the Polvyagal Institute called to ask me for advice, and then the next day told me to slow down. But I don’t work for them. I’m not an authorized mouthpiece of their work, I’m not a ‘lieutenant sent by them’ as Grossman has accused me of being. Truth be told, I don’t like the way that they are handling most of this. I work for Nature, capital N. My perspective is not for sale.

Here is an excerpt from my 2021 interview with Stephen W. Porges, PhD, as part of our Connection Masterclass Series that speaks about the dual origins of the theory, both the scientific origin and the more personal origin story.

Of note in the interview:

-The talk begins with the scientific history of the theory

-9 minutes in, Porges begins discussing comparative neuro-anatomy (making inference across species about neural mechanisms- he points out that this is speculative [my comment: the evolutionary origins of PVT are speculative. Grossman et al. disagrees with Porgesian assertions about this.]

-10 minutes 30 seconds as to why the theory was uptaken in trauma therapy: ‘the theory was explaining personal experiences’

-17 minutes - the clarinet story