Polyvagal Perspectives

Just as Copernicus challenged the notion that the sun revolves around the earth, and Darwin helped ‘evolve’ our view of the origins of mankind, Porges’s Polyvagal Theory similarly challenges conventional thinking by extending evolutionary concepts to the vagus nerve. While ‘mind-body’ medicine has recently become popular, the mechanisms of how the interactions occur were lacking until the conception of Polyvagal Theory. PTSD, inflammatory diseases, cancer, and even disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease and autism all have vagal links. Porges’s polyvagal heuristic approach gives psychologists and therapists tools to help their patients today, while simultaneously providing a paradigm shift for healthcare professionals across disciplines who are interested in understanding the future of health, stress, and disease.“–Peter S. Staats, MD, MBA, FIPP, ABIPP, chair of The Vagus Nerve Society and founding director of the division of pain medicine, Johns Hopkins University, 1994-2004 Stephen Porges is the exemplar of an outstanding researcher and theorist who has translated his foundational work, Polyvagal Theory, into a transformative perspective on a diverse array of disorders that cause human suffering, as well as developed strategies for dealing with them. In Polyvagal Perspectives, Porges elaborates on the mediating role of the autonomic nervous system and how it provides us with a unifying mechanism for understanding psychotherapy, trauma, sociality, regulation, education, and much more. Indeed, his view that the polyvagal system underlies feelings of safety takes us on a journey from neurophysiology to how we experience the world and make meaning of ourselves within it.–Ed Tronick, PhD, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, and coauthor with Claudia Gold of The Power of Discord Stephen Porges’s masterful theory of the nervous system is one of the most detailed, true to life portraits of the embodied nervous system–something we only had glimpses of, because of huge blind spots that Porges has remediated. Polyvagal Perspectives extends the range of a theory so important that it is painful to think what our understanding of the nervous system and human behavior would be without it. Hence my excitement, among so many, to see where Porges taken it in this latest volume, Polyvagal Perspectives.–Norman Doidge, MD, author of The Brain That Changes Itself and The Brain’s Way of Healing

Stephen W. Porges, PhD, originator of Polyvagal Theory, is a Distinguished University Scientist and founding director of the Kinsey Institute Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at Indiana University, and a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina. He lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida.