Polvyagal Saga, Part 4

I spent about a half an hour yesterday afternoon talking to Randall Redfield, the Executive Director of the Polyvagal Institute, about the current situation with Grossman and Porges. We had a really productive call, and I can let those of you who follow their work know to expect some useful guidance and responses coming from them soon.

I also spent about a half an hour back and forth on Substack with Ana Lund, whose article Scientists Vs. Polyvagal Industrial Complex I have found disturbingly inaccurate, and during which I told her so. The conversation was civil, and useful. She was able to hear what I was saying, and I was able to hear her. This is how the back-and-forth of differing viewpoints is supposed to work if there is enough relational safety for us not to attack one another. She explained that she has been unable to find neuroscientists aligned with Dr. Porges. This issue will be rectified publicly soon, which I have communicated to her.

I continue to be somewhat astonished by the degree of churn that this controversy is generating in the field and amongst practitioners. Do a search on Substack for Polyvagal Theory, and you’ll find a raft of articles on both sides, some of them very nuanced, like this thoughtful piece from Dr. Aura Goldman, some of them tainted with the smell of gasoline and the scratch of someone lighting a match. I shudder to open Instagram or TikTok.

This argument between Porges and Grossman has been on-going for 20 years. It will not resolve in the next 24 hours. The places I find it particularly disingenuous are around Grossman’s assertion that Steve is a lonely psychologist, operating in some kind of intellectual void. I have been privileged to attend a trans-disciplinary research consortium with Steve multiple times that included his wife, the renowned behavioral neurobiologist Dr. Sue Carter, Canadian trauma researcher Dr. Ruth Lanius MD PHD, Robert Naviaux MD PhD (one of the founders of mitochondrial medicine), DR Clawson, MD, and Bernie Seigel MD, just to name a few of the regular attendees/ presenters. While I am not part of Dr. Porges inner circle, or privy to his conversations, he has maintained (to my humble and limited knowledge) professional dialog with Dr. Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Dan Siegel, Dr. Allan Schore, Darcia Narvaez, PhD, and numerous other luminaries in the multiple fields where his work has implications and applications. The notion that he is a ‘lonely psychologist’ working in an intellectual void is simply a provocation. The notion that 39 of the world’s leading experts agree with Paul Grossman, while Porges stands alone is categorically false framing.

I am fascinated by how many people are ‘renouncing’ Polvyagal Theory, talking about it suddenly in the past tense. My question is straightforward. Many of these people are saying that they never really understood the theory. So, here’s the thing– Why the f*ck would you teach someone else something that you did not really understand?

I agree that Polvyagal Theory, as articulated by Stephen Porges, is both neuro-anatomically nuanced, conceptually difficult, and linguistically dense. I know this both because I have spent a lot of time translating Polvyagal Theory into language that everyday people can understand, as well as identifying places where it did not match up to my own interoceptive experience, and our clinical experience in working with others at Hearth Science. If people did not understand it, what were they doing teaching it to others in the first place? Where is the rigor folks? Why would you teach something to someone else that you didn’t fully understand yourself? That is not simply a failure of PVT– that is a pedagogical failure of all who took up some easy form of polyvagal-speak because it was the treatment framework du jour.

As for Steve, the growth edge would be in responding to the folks who have been saying, some with courtesy, and some discourteously, that the theory is not complete. Many of us haven’t been saying this because we are angry with Steve, or want to cause reputational damage, but rather because, with the same rigor and intensity with which we were enlightened by the construct, we’ve found places where it needs to evolve.

My sincere hope is that this is the last article I am going to need to write about this whole thing…

I’m gonna have to go do some sort of ritual cleansing ;) before I teach on Saturday, because I really don’t want this to bleed into that space, but I am teaching a class on the foundations of Autonomics Saturday February 28 from 8 to 11 am. And BTW– our work had already identified, responded, and moved beyond the errors Grossman identified in PVT two years ago. It was why we differentiated Autonomics from PVT in the first place.