Dr. Stephen (00:00:00):

The journey in life is literally to connect and to feel safe with others. And then we have to ask, well, how have we dealt with in that journey? Are we safe with others or are we so defensive that we can’t share with others? And it gets into this notion that we have the opportunity to feel safe only under certain very simple foundational conditions and that our physiology needs to be in the state to support our homeostatic functions. If it doesn’t do that, we’re not in a position. We’re not given permission to feel safe.

Dr. Sarah (00:00:43):

Most of you have heard of the term fight, flight or freeze, but what’s actually happening inside the body when your child melts down or shuts down or can’t seem to calm down no matter what you try. Today I am so honored to be joined by Dr. Stephen Porges. He is the neuroscientist best known for developing Polyvagal Theory, which is a framework that has completely transformed how we understand safety, connection, and emotional regulation. In this episode, we explain why our nervous systems automatically scan for cues of safety or danger and how co-regulation not control is the real foundation for helping kids feel calm, connected, and capable of learning. We also talk about simple ways parents can support a sense of safety and repair after moments of stress or disconnection. Dr. Porter’s research bridges, neuroscience, psychology and compassion in such a unique way, and I know that you’re going to walk away from this episode with a deeper understanding of your child and yourself.

(00:01:54):

Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist and mom of two. In this podcast, I’ve taken all of my clinical experience, current research on brain science and child psychology, and the insights I’ve gained on my own parenting journey and distilled everything down into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. So you can tune out the noise and tune into your own authentic parenting voice with confidence and calm. This is Securely Attached.

(00:02:31):

Hello, today, I am very, very honored to welcome Dr. Stephen Porges onto the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Dr. Stephen (00:02:40):

Well, thank you Sarah. Thank you for inviting me into your home.

Dr. Sarah (00:02:44):

Yes, I am thrilled. I am a very big fan of your work. I’ve heard you speak. I think that you have made an enormous impact on the work that I do, but the field that I’m in at large. So if people want to get a sense of the impact, a small sense of the big impact you’ve had, I’m hoping you could talk a little bit about just what is polyvagal theory and how did you even get to this? Where did this idea, how did it spark and how did it emerge for you?

Dr. Stephen (00:03:22):

Well, it emerged through actually my entire research career starting as a graduate student. I was very interested in literally what was going on to the heads of people without having to listen to what they were saying. So I was always interested in whether there are instance tells or signs of intentionality, of behavior, interpretation of context based upon, at that point I would call it physiological responding over time, it’s gotten a little bit more elaborate as we start to understand that our internal physiological state really gets broadcast in our face and our voice. And this is really kind of the message of where you sit as a therapist or as a spouse or as a parent, you are engaging the child or the adult or the other, not merely in terms of the words you’re saying, but you’re engaging in terms of the facial expressivity, the intonation of your voice, and in a sense your bodily presence.

(00:04:21):

And this is kind of one of those soft, vague, mushy words to use, but intuitively we know what it feels like to feel connected to a person in polyvagal theory captures that with a word called neuroception. It’s where the body interprets the signals of safety or threat and you then either become accessible, available to other or you become defensive and withdrawal. And so what polyvagal theory is all about, it’s about this amazing nervous system that we inherited, a nervous system that evolved to trust, to love, and to co-regulate. It’s not a nervous system that evolved to dominate and to exploit. It’s a nervous system that requires co-regulation. And you see this at birth, and of course this is where the roots of attachment theory come from, but what we forget is attachment theory is also based upon a certain biological feature nursing. And the interesting part of nursing is that the nerves in involved in suck, swallow, breathe, and vocalize. That whole texture are the nerves that we use to express our emotional and visceral state to others. And in fact, when we get older, we still use ingestion as that portal to start the relationship. Hey, let’s go out for a drink cup of coffee or lunch. And we distinguished very clearly between ingestive behaviors as being part of a social context and digestive as being very intimate and personal.

Dr. Sarah (00:06:00):

That’s interesting.

Dr. Stephen (00:06:01):

The final take home point is…

Dr. Sarah (00:06:03):

Yes.

Dr. Stephen (00:06:04):

This physiological state that we kind of call our gut feelings about how we react to people, I felt comfortable with this person, or even though the person said the right things, I really felt very uncomfortable.

(00:06:18):

Those gut feelings are physiological shifts through this process that I call neuroception. They’re reflexive in our body to detect safety and threat in our environment. But the take home point is the primary one is our physiological state literally provides a flexible platform for us to respond to stimuli to people and then to make appropriate reactions. If our physiology is in a sense in a state of threat, we’re in chronic pain, we’re highly anxious, whatever psychological label you want to put on it, we’re angry, we’re stressed out, then the stimulus of someone engaging us might be interpreted as a threat behavior. We might be overly reactive. So it’s not the behavior it’s really, or the external behavior in our environment. A lot of it has to do with our own physiological state. And I’ll even go one step further. I’ve been doing research trying to link the relationship between hypersensitivities.

(00:07:21):

A lot of people have auditory, tactile ingestive, visual hypersensitivities. There’s a very strong clear relationship between one’s physiological state and their degree of hypersensitivities. And now this starts to make practical sense. If your body’s in a state of threat, the thresholds to react to ti are lower, so you’re more likely to be defensive. So when a child is like this, it’s not that they’re holding their hands over their ears and they don’t want to hear you. That may be a rare case, but in general, the acoustic environment is painful to them because the nervous system has changed its state. So now the threshold to sounds become much lower.

Dr. Sarah (00:08:08):

So I have a question for you about that, and then I want to sort of summarize what you were saying for parents who are like, okay, I know something important was just described and I don’t fully understand it, so I want to just digest it. But first, just because you peaked a question in me that is very relevant to my own family life, you were saying that when kids have high sensitivity to certain sensory inputs, let’s say sound for example, that are you saying that the sensitivity is the sensitivity to sound chicken or egg? I guess I’m saying is it that because their nervous system is in a state of fight or flight, perhaps chronically so they become more sensitive to sound, or if they have eardrums, they pick up on cues, they just have a lower threshold for pulling in that sensory input that they become more in fight or flight easily. Is there a bi-directional relationship there?

Dr. Stephen (00:09:06):

No. The circularity though. So in a sense, if your body gets into a state of threat, it does that because it feels like a state of threat. So it’s going to interpret signals to maintain that state. The issue is, so the portal of intervention in most models is, well, you go to the behavior, you reward it, you punishment, or you get insight. You explain it from a more polyvagal informal one. You say, look, forget about the behavior, forget about the intentionality. Can you calm the nervous system? And then what do you see when the system calms down and when the system calms down, then the accessibility to whatever treatment model you have or any let’s say social model you have becomes much more accessible. So the body calms down and starts to basically listen. We want to make distinctions between how the sensory systems work with auditory sounds, which is a very frequent one in terms of children.

(00:10:07):

There’s literally a filter between the inner ear, the part that sends the signal to the brain and the outer ear that you can see. And the eardrum, which you can potentially see as well connected to the eardrum are three very small bones and they’re regulated by the two smallest muscles in the body. And when that system is in sense tight, the eardrum gets tense, and then the low frequency background sound drops down and voice comes through. But when the neuro regulation of those muscles become loose, then the eardrum literally is like flopping and it’s picking up all those low frequency sounds. And if we looked at the acoustic environment, most of the energy of the sound is actually at low frequencies. And with the middle, your muscles, those low frequencies are bouncing out of the body away from the ear. But when you’re in a state of threat, you want to be basically tuned to predator. What does that mean? Someone walking up behind you and the real life situations that many people online will know. You’ve all been in strange environments, different, made a wrong turn in a foreign city, you went to a conference with a friend and suddenly you start feeling like you’re in the wrong place and you hear those footsteps behind you, but you don’t understand what the words your friend is saying to you.

Dr. Sarah (00:11:31):

Got it. You’re filtering out and tuning into different frequencies as a safety mechanism.

Dr. Stephen (00:11:38):

As a safety mechanism. So the nervous system is doing what it evolved to do is to keep you alive, but it’s a trade off. So when we’re dealing in educational situations, we really want individuals not to be detecting low frequency sounds. We want them be detecting human speech, but if the body’s in a state of threat, they’re going to have great difficulty in extracting human speech, but they’ll be super in detecting low frequency. Sounds like the mechanicals of the elevators or the air conditioning or someone walking behind them.

Dr. Sarah (00:12:12):

The reason why I was asking is because, so my daughter’s very sensitive to sound and always seems to have been. She’s also highly sensitive in general, and she’s gets into a state of fight or flight very easily, and it takes a long time for her to come back down to baseline. And the way I have sometimes interpreted her experience of the world and why she is so sensitive to going into fight or flight is that she basically, she seems like a super sensor, and so everything is just too big, too loud, too much, and then she gets overstimulated.

Dr. Stephen (00:12:51):

Yeah, and listening to you, you’ve already cast it as a temperamental feature. And a sense, so you say, we need now to live with this or manage it or do something like that. I look at this and say, well, maybe it’s something else. Maybe the nervous system got challenged. It could be the high fever, it could be like chronic ear infections, I don’t know her clinical history. And the system got retuned to be in a more, let’s say fight flight state, a threshold lower. And she can manage it as long as it’s not too overwhelming, but when it gets overwhelming or to her overwhelming, she’s telling you she’s reacting. So the range that she can function would use that term like flexibility or resilience is going to be compromised. And I look at that and say, well, for many people get categorized like this. There’s really an optimistic journey here, and that is if it’s state mediated, and this is a significant portion of the variance, that’s really what I want to really emphasize.

(00:13:54):

A significant portion of the variance of hypersensitivities is linked to autonomic state. And the issue is that merely is telling me that if you have a portal that literally could through neural exercises, retune that system, then the body calms down. And that was that intervention I developed called the Safe and Sound Protocol was basically based upon that I was literally tired or actually of hearing we have to live with this and all those things. But even Seth, who you interviewed, Seth had auditory hypersensitivities and he had a lot of these features and I learned from him and I still learn from him. But the point is that it becomes, when we have, let’s say, a vulnerability, we can learn to manage it and we can learn to exercise it. It’s like if you had very poor muscle tone and you went to a PT and you got to do these things, you got to do these extra, got to lift these weights. In a way, you’re doing the same thing. You are enhancing the neural regulation of muscles that are in our head, C cranial nerves. So it’s kind of like we’re so linked to skeletal motor muscles, the big things down our spine. We forget that there are these muscles in our face and in our head that are involved with expressivity and even reception of intonation of vocalizations and including vocal prosodic features. If your voice is, that’s a neuromuscular control.

Dr. Sarah (00:15:28):

Yeah.

Dr. Stephen (00:15:31):

So actually, I’m going to jump in and ask you one question.

Dr. Sarah (00:15:34):

Yes.

Dr. Stephen (00:15:34):

And at what age were these features observable?

Dr. Sarah (00:15:38):

Oh man. I think at two she started having really intense tantrums.

Dr. Stephen (00:15:43):

Okay, so what about were there chronic ear infections that preceded it?

Dr. Sarah (00:15:49):

She never had chronic ear infections. My mind, I’m trying to scan through and try to figure out what, there was a period of time, I want to say when she started daycare from 10 months old until, let’s see, no, she was five months to 10 months before COVID happened, and she left daycare that five month period from five months to 10 months. She had a chronic cough, she got sick at daycare and never went away. That was one thing. The other variable that I just can’t not go to in my own mom mind is that I had postpartum depression with her, and there was a lot of time where I think I was somewhat flat with her.

Dr. Stephen (00:16:26):

Yeah, well, what you’re really saying is you have two vectors there about restriction with a fever or the illness or the chronic illness. The immunoregulation of those structures is dampened and the normal way that they get rehabilitated or optimized again through social interaction and your accessibility wasn’t there. And so the issue is, and this has a lot to do with now, how you conceptualize it from being causal to being helpful. So things happen, there’s no intentionality that’s wrong, but we can see these features and we know more now than we knew, let’s say 10 years ago, certainly a lot more than 20 years ago. And we know that we have interventions, and this is why it would be helpful for you to look into the safe and sound protocol. In fact, there’s a book we just wrote on it, and actually something like 200,000 people have used it. So it’s like a…

Dr. Sarah (00:17:22):

I’m familiar with it. I’ve never done it myself, and I’ve thought of getting trained in it, interested in it, but maybe that’s a good thing to explore.

Dr. Stephen (00:17:32):

If there’s hypersensitivities, it’s the low hanging fruit. So that becomes try it. How I got into it, I developed it for hypersensitivities, auditory hypersensitivity, and to my surprise, the whole texture of sensitivities, downregulated and autonomic regulation increased. And that was because the neuro regulation of those middle ear muscles talks in the brainstem to the vagal regulation of the heart. So it becomes this bidirectionality, which is really your question. In the state of fight flight, air muscles detect threat behavior, detect threat behavior feeds back and affects my autonomic nervous system, and now I respond. So part of the way conceptualizing these things is not merely in a linear cause and effect, but in some level of a feedback loop that has a degree of circularity. And that circularity is really optimistic. It enables you to, in a sense, engage that circuit from different perspectives.

Dr. Sarah (00:18:35):

Yes, yes. That idea, because you talk a lot about, we were saying it before the state, the physiological state is probably the most important thing to become aware of when we’re trying to help identify what’s the underlying route to what we are seeing outside displayed in behaviors. We know if we can identify that our child is in a state of fight or flight, for example, or a state of dorsal vagal shut down or ventral vagal safety connection, that’s that parasympathetic nervous system.

(00:19:14):

And we could talk a little bit about that. But your son, Seth, was on the podcast last year when you guys came out with the book, our Polyvagal World and explain this beautifully. So I will direct parents to go back to that episode. We’ll put it in the show notes, in the link in the podcast so that you can listen to that. But when if some of these behaviors that we see in our children are state dependent, they’re not engaging in the same behaviors when they’re in ventral vagal safety connection as they do when they are in fight or flight, or if they are it’s…

Dr. Stephen (00:19:56):

We don’t need to use the term fight or flight because that starts, we start to think of intentions and we’re basically saying it’s a physiological state that can support fight or flight, but think of it as a physiological state that supports movement.

Dr. Sarah (00:20:10):

Got it. Sympathetic arousal. I use fight or flight because parents tend not to know what’s sympathetic and parasympathetic always means, but sympathetic arousal. Yeah.

Dr. Stephen (00:20:18):

I use behavioral mobilization. What would your nervous system need to be prepared to mobilize?

Dr. Sarah (00:20:25):

I think parents can really understand when my kid is 10 out of 10, totally losing it, just absolutely melting down. I can understand intellectually, okay, my kid is mobilized, right? They are. They’re in the fight or flight mode, they have. I can make sense of it and I can oftentimes, when I know this model, I can have a little bit more distance and even more empathy for them in that moment, even though what they’re doing might be very threatening to me. But I see a lot of kids, I see this with my own kids, I work with parents. They’ll be like, okay, but my kid is not in fight or flight. My kid is absolutely regulated. They know what they’re doing. They’re totally calm. They’re looking me dead in the eyes as they smack their brother in the face or as they dump my purse out on the floor. So it’s this incongruence between what we perceive on the outside to be a regulated, thoughtful, intentional state, and totally out of control behavior that feels like it’s in a threat mode.

Dr. Stephen (00:21:38):

Okay, so let’s go back to the little psychopath that you described. Okay.

Dr. Sarah (00:21:45):

Becuse that’s the follow up question, is my kid a sociopath?

Dr. Stephen (00:21:47):

Yeah. So let’s play with that for a moment and basically ask the probing question, is the child smiling while doing that in a way that you think the child is enjoying it?

Dr. Sarah (00:21:58):

No. See, they’re smiling is an icky smile. It’s an icky laugh. It’s not joy, it’s not pleasure.

Dr. Stephen (00:22:06):

Okay? So it is not the ventral vagal circuit is not there. They’re using a sympathetic, they’re mimicking a behavior and observable. They’re not in a visceral state of being flexible and regulated. The example I like to use is that if you see a child running, is that child running in fear or is a child playing? And the answer is very simple. Look at their face. And if you see pictures of children running and their faces are smiling, they’re playing. If not, there’s a fire or someone chasing that and something different. But intuitively just looking at the face and the movement where they are. And so what we’re getting in the situation of trying to use terms that capture the global behavior without incorporating the physiological, I’m going to use the term motivator. There’s a physiological system that is literally motivating. So it’s like, okay, I’m an academic. I’ve been an academic for my whole life and I’m married to an academic. And one of the first things that I knew about her, and this goes back to the late 1960s, is that she used anxiety as a motivator.

Dr. Sarah (00:23:22):

Oh, I can resonate with that.

Dr. Stephen (00:23:26):

Basically anxiety I didn’t even want in my life. And I’ve crossed the paths of a lot of people and they’ve shared their system, their inner os thoughts, and I understand what’s going on there. And I started to realize basically that my perspective of my life is different than many other people. And this is important for everyone to kind of understand that we can’t generalize from our own internal states to others. So we often say, well, I can do this. Why can’t you? Well, we’re not in their bodies. We don’t know their physiological states. And over time, I basically start to understand the journey. The journey is that our body is trying to support our health growth and restoration, our homeostatic functions. And it does that only, it can only in a sense effectively do that if we are in safe context. And part of it is a really simple manipulation of our behavior by our physiological state that if people feel unsafe, they’ll work harder to feel what they think will get them safety.

(00:24:41):

And that was acquisition of resources. And now we’re in this kind of wonderful glass dome of seeing how the wealthy live, and we realize that it doesn’t matter how much asset, how much resource you really have in terms of money, so-called prestige, you’re still not going to be successful. You’re not going to feel safe in your own body. So this becomes, this whole issue is the journey in life is literally to connect and to feel safe with others. That’s where the baby comes into the world. And then we have to ask, well, how have we dealt with in that journey? Are we safe with others or are we so defensive that we can’t share with others? And it gets into this notion that we have the opportunity to feel safe only under certain very simple foundational conditions and that our physiology needs to be in the state to support our homeostatic functions. If it doesn’t do that, we’re not in a position, we’re not given permission to feel safe. So it’s a substrate, and this is what polyvagal theory is about. It’s about that substrate upon which our mental health and our behavior sits upon that. If our body is in a state that it is in a sense safe enough to do its own healing and restoration properties, what lies above it, which means above our brainstem is going to be challenged as well.

Dr. Sarah (00:26:21):

Now that you know a bit about polyvagal theory and how this is an essential tool for staying regulated and the first and most important step for helping our child get back to being regulated too, I wanted to share a workshop that I created that I think you’re going to love in my 90 minute on demand video workshop called Be the Calm in Your Child. I will walk you through practical science-backed strategies drawn from polyvagal theory to help you stay grounded and regulated even in your child’s toughest moments so you can share that calm and co-regulate together. These are the same evidence-based tools that I use every day with parents in my practice to help them move from feeling stuck in fight or flight to feeling centered, confident, and more in control. You can get instant access by clicking the link in this episode description, or you can head to dr sarah bren.com and click the workshops tab. Alright, now let’s get back to my conversation with the creator of Polyvagal theory himself, Dr. Steven Porges, right? And for people who are not as familiar with polyvagal theory and they’re just kind of trying to wrap their heads around this, I want to go back to this kind of core idea that you lay out in the theory, which is that there’s sort of 3 parts to our nervous, the vagus nerve and the vagus nerve starts the brainstem and kind of touches everything and including our digestion and our growth motor and all that stuff, all of our respiratory systems are dependent on it.

(00:28:01):

But when we are under threat, and again, you’re talking about, okay, this sort of subtle pervasive sense of lack of safety in perhaps the world that I don’t trust, I can get my basic needs met, or I think of parental stress as a state of chronic threat. On the very basic level, it’s like you have to keep a child alive that is very, seems like a kamikaze pilot. They’re always trying to flip off the changing table, they’re reaching for the outlets. We’re always in that threat mode. And there’s some evolutionary basis to that too. In parenthood of when a woman goes through pregnancy, she actually is more able, there are changes in the brain that allow her to move into the sympathetic arousal system more easily because she needs to be on hyper alert to keep that child alive and to be tuned into all that stuff.

(00:29:02):

But then there’s also just the chronic overstimulation of kids pulling on you and screaming and losing their own. They’re losing it all the time. So we’re kind of overloaded so we can be in a state of sympathetic arousal, threat, defensiveness, you talk a lot about how because these systems are all connected, if you are in these more defensive states of either stress and arousal or shutdown, it’s highly taxing on the body. And so are we worried that parents are going to have chronic health problems because of the stress load of parenthood? And how can we mitigate that a little bit?

Dr. Stephen (00:29:53):

We have to understand who we are as a species, and we have to understand that we deal extraordinarily well with challenges, challenges, and we have to literally throw the word stress out because people think, oh, I deal well with stress. You don’t. So now we’re evaluating our instance of flexibility or resilience. Resilience is a real concept that once we realize that some people can literally walk through fire and then they’re fine while other people’s the site of fire and they’re in another state, we understand that there are variations in it and it’s really a function of that physiological state and that physiological state is not being driven by intentional thoughts. We have to, in a sense, get that out off the table that’s being driven on a reflexive level. And that’s why I coined the term neuroception, that this body meaning you or meaning me, detects threat. Now the other body in the room might not. Now I’m very respectful that your system has reacted and that limits your capacity to be a social organism or even to be a functional organism to do certain work. So we have to understand that individuals change physiological state, we change physiological state usually in a reasonably predictive way, but sometimes not.

(00:31:18):

So my jolt was going into an MR, I wrote about this in something I wrote and I was very curious, a neuroscientist. I wanted to see what my brain looked like, and I was going in for a medical procedure and I went into a panic attack as I got pushed into the tube. And I was basically shocked by my body’s reaction in a sense, I felt that my nervous system betrayed me. A lot of people feel that. And the issue is I had to do that and I couldn’t in a sense, will it or intently do it. And so fortunately there’s reasonably good medication that works. And so the acute level of doing that was fine, and I basically can go in without any duress, but the point was I had to see that vulnerability in myself. And I also have my own sense that too much is going on around me. I can’t focus. Well, that’s really basically lots of people have that same issue, but I try to be respectful of that in myself and in others. So we have to be, in a sense, learned to be more aware of our own body.

(00:32:30):

And the issue is when we deal with kids, we say, don’t play, come in and work or study, and we don’t appreciate the importance of coordinated co-regulation during recess. So when kids played together. And so in a sense, we have grown up through a period of time which is treated literally a cortex as a learning system. Our body’s reregulation of physiological state as optional, and we’ve really created supporting some kind of mess of our own sociality. So when we watch children play, we watch and look for reciprocity in how they play. If you have a pet, you watch to see if your child is playing with a pet in a reciprocal way. Dogs and cats and horses pull this out in people probably even better than other people will. So when I talk to parents who have neurodivergent children, I say, how do they deal with the pet?

(00:33:38):

And if they make the statement, they don’t even know it’s there. We know we have some really important discussions to have, but if they say, oh, he plays with the dog and the dog loves him, you start seeing there’s some reciprocity going on in that relationship and now that can, in a sense be built upon to expand it into human relationships.

Dr. Sarah (00:34:01):

So what you are describing makes me, I’m glad you said built upon, because what I’m thinking as you’re speaking are building blocks. And I think it might be helpful to talk a little bit about, there’s a gradual accumulation construction of capacity. It’s not like when you’re talking about reciprocal play, right? And there’s a moving towards that. It starts out as solo play and then parallel play and then reciprocal play.

Dr. Stephen (00:34:30):

We might want to pull back on this because we always think that we get caught into this term that self-regulation is really the self, self self and really self-regulation and self play are derivative from co-regulation.

Dr. Sarah (00:34:49):

And before we even go there, so many pieces that have to, it’s a symphony, right? In order for a kid to really move through their developmental tasks and evolve into this sort of whole fully developed person, yes, the co-regulation, the safety is the baseline that attachment security, that secure base, and then you see play, develop. But you talk about, we’re talking about moving in and out of different regulatory states, and I feel like some kids can kind of get stuck and not progress to those next layers. I see this because I’ve been doing a lot of work with somatic experiencing with children recently. I’ve been working with Ali Duarte who is, I dunno if you’re familiar with his work, but he’s just brilliant. But he talks a lot about how whether it’s moving in and out of a physiological state or it’s an energetic physiological arousal getting stuck in the system.

(00:36:02):

If you are a child, for example, who could theoretically developmentally engage in reciprocal play with another child, but previously developmentally, every time you tried to do some sort of play or constructing of an idea, you were interrupted or a sibling came in and got in your way or you were constantly told by your parents to stop what you’re doing and share with the sibling. Or there was always this thwarting of that cycle being completely moved through that there’s a stuckness that can happen. And then when we get to the, now this kid is in kindergarten and is able to play reciprocally with peers, but their threat response is still, they don’t now feel safe with sharing territory. They didn’t graduate to the next level because they got stuck in a spot. There was too much threat. Does that make sense to you? Can you organize that for me a bit?

Dr. Stephen (00:37:05):

Very much so. In my world, okay, so that’s somatic experience. And so the movement there is pendulation or titration, the movement, same thing with safe and sound protocol is titration. And this becomes an interesting thing with the safe and sound protocol, which is really ascending signals of safety and to trigger the physiology to be more engaging. But if people have a sense, a history of being violated or injured in basically welcoming people into their lives and being injured, so whether it’s child abuse or spousal abuse or something like that, the signaling of the body to be accessible is now associated with being injured. And so it becomes…

Dr. Sarah (00:37:52):

Could I just throw one other scenario into that mix? Because I think I see this on a very subtle micro level with kids that we’re not talking about trauma, we’re not talking about abuse. Where I see this a lot with sibling dynamics where really like that example I was just giving where I’m a kid playing and my little sibling is constantly in no malicious attempt, just they’re trying to connect with me, their big sibling, but they keep interrupting my play. They keep my need for a sense of territory is constantly being threatened. This isn’t trauma, this isn’t abuse, this is just this natural challenging dynamic that a very small kid is trying to negotiate and in their subjective neuroception that is threatening and they then maybe wired to be more sensitive.

Dr. Stephen (00:38:46):

It’s the same, basically it’s similar to what I was suggesting. It’s a top down association. So what you’re talking about is a conditioned response. And so their body is now being more locked into that physiological state of defensiveness. One of the points that is as the description is that the older of the child, the older sibling is interpreting the younger child’s behavior as intentional, and that may become a portal for the family to work around that. This is where the older child can see it as not intentional, but more of a developmental feature, a baby behavior and babies are allowed to cry and stuff and the siblings don’t get that angry at being disrupted by the crying, but maybe we want to extend it to some other features.

(00:39:41):

The part that you are bringing up really is what SE does with it to get people out of that lock state. And that is through literally a guided experience through memories of that physiological state. What the safe and sound protocol does is it opens up the portal by sending a prosodic signal, which the body wants to be like this. But once it does that, then the learned association of being accessible is often I’m running out of the room because I was really injured when I became that way. And so through titration, the same principle in se, people have been able to appreciate their defensive, visceral feelings and then those, they become less potent. So it’s kind of like you do it and with the sound, it’s really interesting, you can feel your body reacting to the feeling. You have a secondary reaction, you feel this opening, and then you can have a reaction to that feeling, which is been there before, not going to stay there.

Dr. Sarah (00:40:46):

Right.

Dr. Stephen (00:40:46):

And you just do it for a few seconds and suddenly you start saying, wow, a sound did that. Then it becomes a neural exercise that would be with sa, it’s much more of a elaborate, visceral description of the feelings going on.

Dr. Sarah (00:41:04):

Well, but that doesn’t work with kids, right? A five-year-old’s not going to sit with you and say, I have this feeling in my body when my brother took my toy, and I can go into my body and I can identify that feeling. And that’s really hard, which is why the work that LA does is very interesting because it’s all through play. It’s all through creating similar scenarios where a territory is being activated and then not talking about it or going into the body, but…

Dr. Stephen (00:41:36):

Let’s go to what we used the word play. This is really the magic term here because play has a lot of the mobilization behaviors that aggressive behavior could have, but has something organizing it together. And that is a more, we would call ventral vagal, a smile and engagement, a physiological state that keeps play from being aggressive. And so even when you watch kittens play or dogs play, they’re always looking back at each other’s faces to get a signal that the intentionality of the motor behavior is play and not aggression. And so what he’s doing with play is using the, let’s say the veneer of the ventral vagal complex to hold, contain the body from being overly reactive. So it becomes fun.

Dr. Sarah (00:42:29):

Yeah. So can we translate some of this for parents in a way that maybe if they’re seeing these kinds of interactions with their siblings, for example, with their kids or they’re seeing, they have a child who is very sensitive to becoming frustrated or agitated, and we want to try to help them work through some of that aggressive energy through something more containing like play. I think a lot of parents are afraid to bring aggression into play because they see it in the real life and they’re like, I want a break from that. I don’t want to reinforce it, but how do you think about knowing what you know about play being this sort of container and allowing you to be in ventral vagal safety, connection, arousal, while still kind of navigating aggression?

Dr. Stephen (00:43:26):

So things have changed in the past few decades. So we have play therapists, many of ’em are very polyvagal informed, dealing with the same things you’re talking about. So are dance movement therapists. So let’s kind of bring those two together from a polyvagal perspective, both are utilizing movement but keeping movement contained with the sociality, with the ventral vagal. And what that means is it’s interactive face-to-face as reciprocity. It becomes co-regulatory with requiring the client to be sedentary to sit still. The beauty of play in play therapies and dance’s movement is the body’s already in a state of movement. It doesn’t have to inhibit its desire to move. So it’s already moving and you’re really just adjusting the movement into a movement of reciprocity. That’s what dance is.

Dr. Sarah (00:44:24):

And with play, I think a lot of the things that I find most helpful, play therapy, and I do play therapy with kids, but I also do them periodically like parent child and me in a room. My preference is to get the parent in there because I want the parent to, I want the child to associate the parent’s presence with these sort of satisfying, playful experiences. I think parents struggle sometimes knowing how to play with their kids in a way that’s actually sort of therapeutic, that is helping really the function of that play from the parents background, the background noise playing in the parent’s head is actually going to be about co-regulating, getting clued into their nervous system, helping the parent learn how to read the child and have the child have that felt sense of being read by the parent in play.

Dr. Stephen (00:45:27):

I think you’re right on target. However, let’s put a caveat here. Parents are human beings. We have to really acknowledge that. And parents are usually with their children not during the day, but after their stressful day in work where they are in great need of co-regulation to express their frustrations of their day.

(00:45:51):

And they come into a situation of dealing with the schools if the child has acted out or dealing with the spouse. In a sense, most families are, both parents are working, so it’s not like the parent has a lot of emotional resource and accessibility. So we have to start off and we’re basically not going to use the word empathy. We know how they feel. We have to use the word compassion, where we respect that, they feel distressed, and now what can we do to help them? So empathy is kind of like, I share your feelings, but that doesn’t solve any, I’m not helping you solve your problem when I’m compassionate. I acknowledge that your feelings have disrupted me, I feel them, but I’m here for you. So it’s like the second step, it’s like a dance, I react, but I’m really here for you. That’s compassion. And spouses and therapists need to, in a sense, expand what they basically compassion enables us to honor the other person’s reactivity, a type of reactivity that we may not really appreciate at the moment.

Dr. Sarah (00:47:00):

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think just anything understanding that anything we’re seeing in our child, in our spouse, in ourself, there’s a reason for it. It’s not just to piss me off or just because you’re giving me a hard time or just because you don’t want to. There’s always a reason we don’t do things for no reason, and we oftentimes don’t even do things consciously or feel like we’re in our control. I have so many kids in my practice who have really out of control behaviors, and in the moment when they’re losing it, they seem very in control of what they’re doing and very aware of what they’re doing. And it’s confusing for parents. But after, and I always try to help parents kind of notice that different.

(00:47:50):

When does that switch happen? When is your child no longer in that ragey out of control, icky place? And it might be hours later, truthfully where I’m coming to you, I might not be able to say, I’m sorry, but I’m seeking connection from you. I might have to really disconnect from all the crappy stuff that I just did and pretend it didn’t even happen. I have kids who cannot tolerate talking about what just happened, or as soon as the parent tries to bring it up or debrief them, go back to it, they go right back into that yucky place. But there are moments when those kids are soft, they’re seeking connection. And in those moments, which I think would be considered these ventral vagal activation moments, those are moments when those kids will often say, I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why it happened. I didn’t have any control over it. And a lot of parents have a really hard time reconciling that, and they sort of think, oh, the kid just was denying responsibility. But I think there is this sense of a different part of me takes over and I don’t know how to be in control of that.

Dr. Stephen (00:49:03):

Yeah. Okay. So you actually hit on a couple of very important points. One of course is the parent gravitating to intentionality as the narrative, as opposed to kind of understanding. When you’re in physiological state, you act out. It’s just part of the nature, even for the parent themselves. They know when they get angry, they know when they lose it, but when they’re dealing with their child, they have an omnipotent sense themselves that that’s not who they are. So the other point you brought up is parts work. And so it’s whether it’s internal family systems or other derivations or parts, work parts fit very nicely with physiological states. They fit very nicely with polyvagal theory. So the part is really, I’ve moved into this physiological state and this successful state of sympathetic nervous system is mobilization. If it’s not in a sense contained with sociality, it becomes aggression.

(00:50:05):

And the interesting part, if it’s in a sense, even this inability, you have people who freeze, they have both sympathetic on board to maintain the muscle tension, but they also immobilize and you see this, and immobilization is that dorsal vagals shutting down. So it becomes a hybrid. And then you see kids who appear to literally dissociate when being reprimanded. They’re like someplace else. And the reaction by parents or teachers is to yell at them even more, yell at them, be louder, make contact. When in reality, what they have done is that they have literally functionally, let’s use the term abuse. We want to be careful in the use of the word, but they have experienced a type of adversity, and they had passed out potentially at one point in time, totally shut down, but the nervous system was too sophisticated to allow that to occur be at times, because it’s a biological cost to pass out, it’s dangerous. And so what the nervous system does is it adjusts. So again, we’re talking about learned experiences. So over time it learns to freeze, not to pass out. And so there are people that if you yell at them, they’re like this, and you start asking the question, what were the antecedents of that? Because the initial response might have been much more profound than that. They may not even have memory of it.

Dr. Sarah (00:51:36):

These kids that are really reactive, they really do elicit in parents really strong parenting. And again, it’s this bi-directional, reciprocal exchange of the sympathetic systems. If your kid is constantly losing their minds and going into these very aroused states, we as parents are going to also feel that threat. And so there can be this feedback loop between the parent and the child where that parent is losing it more and the kid, and they’re just become, they get stuck in this sort of icky place together. And you’ve been talking about if the child has these experiences of really intense and even scary exchanges with the parent, and again, not because the parent is being abusive, but because the parent is being a human being who’s themselves easily triggered by their kid and they’ve gotten into this sort of chronic dance. I mean, that’s where a lot of people come to me at that point. Can we talk a little bit about repair work and how, because one of the things that is so great about polyvagal theory is that it instills a tremendous amount of hope and optimism because of the flexibility of this nervous system.

Dr. Stephen (00:52:58):

Yeah, it is an optimistic perspective. The repair is critical. Let’s start off by saying we as parents are human. We as parents are going to react to signals of threat when they are voiced without is a deep intention just by the motor behavior of a child screaming at us or potentially flapping or hitting us or doing something, not listening us, violating our rest of our need to have a reciprocal relationship.

(00:53:26):

A need to be listened to, the child is disrupting our sense of the nature of life. We’re really being disrupted. So we feel very, let’s say, disruptive on a defensive side. So we start to honor what we are experiencing. Then we have to step and say back and say, what’s our narrative about the child? And we have to get rid of that narrative of intentionality and understand that it’s really being driven by a physiological state. The child is in, maybe the child didn’t eat enough, and the body now gets into this more reactive level. So you met Seth when he was on your show. Well, I had a basically line when Seth was growing up, and that was feed his viscera, first feed him before we even talked to him. So he’d come back and from school, make sure he eats something, then he would be more resourced, more regulated, and then we could have a relationship, we could talk. And it was a very important breakthrough to see that the fact that even feeding a child will change, their physiological state will calm them down. And in many cases, if they didn’t, they misbehaved, they got detention and they would have to skip lunch, not a good thing for a child. And so is fed into these basically poor behaviors. So the issue was…

Dr. Sarah (00:54:52):

And nowadays they don’t make kids skip lunch, but they do make kids skip recess, which is just as problematic. Also, that kind of basic need of like, yes, they need food, but they also need to move and get that energy out.

Dr. Stephen (00:55:05):

And the part is recess needs, socialization is important. It’s not a distractor of the educational process. And COVID really help things. It really just took kids out of their social interactions and retuned where social interactions can become more of a threat. So we have a lot of things going on, and that is we have homeschooling, we have other things that are minimizing the need for social interaction to support the growth trajectory of being a human.

Dr. Sarah (00:55:40):

Right. Yeah, no, there’s so many things that we’ve moved away from a lot of the core social elements of our society, and I don’t think we really gave much appreciation for how much they were glue. And now without them, we’re seeing things disintegrate a bit. I mean, I think that we can fix it, and I think that we aren’t doomed to live in silos of a screen in a pod somewhere, but we do need to make sure that doesn’t happen. We could go that path. But going back to this idea of this repair.

Dr. Stephen (00:56:22):

It’s very difficult to be a good parent. The best you can literally hope for this was my own view, was to be an adequate parent. As you do, you support your child, you love your child, you help your child. You can’t do the best or most optimal things all the time. And so you talk about what are repairs? And I think repairs with children come through, play scenarios, playfulness with the child. And I think the repair that we’re really talking about is not just a repair, but are parents attuned well enough to see when a child is engaging them or are they locked into the morality of the hurt that the child had imposed on them? So if the child comes in and is insubordinate sweet and doesn’t want to talk about this, the parent shouldn’t really focus on, I want you to remember exactly what you did.

(00:57:21):

Let’s play for a while. Let’s take a game. Let’s create a safety in the relationship. And I think safety is this underlying core where it’s not safety in the way that law, it’s not metal detectors. It’s a visceral feeling of what proximity with another does to you. Do I feel like I want to be hugged or notice my body recoil? So it’s not like in the world of trauma, many people would love to be hugged who have severe adversity histories, but when they get in proximity of another person, the body recoils, the body will not allow, the nervous system will not allow that individual to make that type of conforming hugging. So in a diagnostic way, we learn a lot about people by the types of hugs they’re able to experience and express.

Dr. Sarah (00:58:17):

Right? I’m thinking too though, I think of families, I’m always very mindful of the importance of the subjective experience. It’s not because I don’t want parents to think, okay, my kid doesn’t really like to hug me, therefore my kid has been traumatized. And that’s what they’ve learned. Versus your kid might have their own threshold for what they can tolerate. And they might also have subjectively internalized those connections. Like, oh, when I’m vulnerable, when I am belly up, I’m open to that hug. I’ve also experienced shame or fear, and I’ve paired those things and my body might be just really, really good at making that connection. So it doesn’t need to be a massive traumatic experience where they went for a hug and they got beaten. It’s that they want, they wanted connection, but they felt embarrassed or ashamed at the same time from some type of discipline.

Dr. Stephen (00:59:27):

And felt rejected.

Dr. Sarah (00:59:29):

And so it’s not that I don’t want parents to think, one, I’ve traumatized my kid because my kid is not able to tolerate going back to something problematic.

Dr. Stephen (00:59:44):

Let’s simplify this. And that is the word. Trauma carries a lot of negativity. And the issue is that then forces or triggers in the parent a justification of the history of the behaviors. We want to really say that the nervous system made a faulty interpretation of the intentionality of the parent’s behavior. And the nervous system of the child responded as if the child was vulnerable to being injured. So we want to keep it at the most pragmatic, simple level. We don’t want to, in a sense, corner the parent into justifying their behavior. So once the parent feels that they may have been causal in abusing their child, whatever term we want to use, or traumatizing their child, they’re going to try for many to basically create a narrative in which nothing occurred, it didn’t occur, and what really the narrative should be about the sensitivity of their child, not the intentionality of their child in conveying this to them.

(01:00:52):

The child is vulnerable and dependent upon the parent. There’s an asymmetry in the relationship. And even though at times parents may not feel that, they may feel that the child is running the show, but the part of all this is you’re absolutely right about shame and blame kind of cast people where they don’t want to talk about their past because they feel it being colored. I think the parent has to really step back for a moment in saying, yeah, I’m reacting to this, and how would I feel on the other end if I were as naive as that child really is? So the history of intentionality isn’t the same. So what adults tend to think, and this is in a sense you can see this probably in your practice, is they come up with a justification for everything their child can do or has done. And I’ve actually had discussions even with my son who has two granddaughters now about similar things. He basically, he starts feeling as if it’s too nuance to be just a reaction, there’s an intentionality. And the answer is, it’s how the child is trying to navigate in this complex environment. Don’t make too of it. And what we try to do, we make too much of it.

Dr. Sarah (01:02:23):

Yeah, yeah. I often say, don’t dissect the lava. It’s lava.

Dr. Stephen (01:02:27):

Yeah. And the bottom line on your big question, and that is repair. And I’m saying if you can cast it within a playful setting, you’re shifting the physiological state to foster a hybrid state of movement with co-regulation. And the benefit is the product is co-regulation. And that’s where good parenting or total, let’s say adequate parenting comes through in this capacity to be an effective co-regulation.

Dr. Sarah (01:02:58):

I couldn’t agree more. I feel like that’s the mission. Can you be an effective co-regulation?

Dr. Stephen (01:03:06):

We have our view of ourselves as super parents or want to be super parents, but we really, no one has that kind of resource on board.

Dr. Sarah (01:03:17):

No, no. And I think the best thing we could do is to start with our own sense of safety, our own sense of community support systems outside of the parent child relationship, so that we don’t have, so we can diffuse it a little bit more for ourselves. Thank you so much. Your time and your wisdom is deeply, deeply. I’m thankful for it. And if people want to learn more about your work, if they want to learn more about the Safe and Sound protocol or the books that you’ve written, how can we help them find you and connect with you?

Dr. Stephen (01:03:52):

Sure, for Polyvagal Institute, which is, you can just Google that. And they really keep pretty much online. They have courses and workshops, and they have a listing of my articles and books. And the other thing is the Safe and Sound Protocol. And now there’s a new acoustic intervention called Rest and Restore. They’re basically being distributed by a company called Unyte, U-N-Y-T-E Health. And you can Google that. And as I said, over 2000 people have been influenced or affected by Safe and Sound Protocol, and there’s somewhere around 4,000 therapists using the tool now. So you can Google that and look on the Unite website, and it might be helpful to many individuals, or if their therapists online, you might look at it as a possible tool for your work.

Dr. Sarah (01:04:47):

Yeah. Thank you so much.

Dr. Stephen (01:04:51):

Oh, you’re quite welcome. And thank you. And before I go, I really have to basically, I used to make the statement that it’s very easy to generate ideas. It’s very hard to translate ideas, to practice and to see what therapists like you and others are doing in the trenches is powerful. So keep up the good work.

Dr. Sarah (01:05:12):

Thank you. I appreciate that so much.

(01:05:14):

Thanks for listening. If you’ve been enjoying securely attached and these conversations have helped you feel a little more supported in your parenting journey, make sure to follow the podcast wherever you stream. So new episodes, download right to your queue. And while you’re there, if you could take a moment to rate and review the show, I would be so appreciative. It’s one of the best ways to support the podcast and help other parents discover it too. So until next week, don’t be a stranger.