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Our Polyvagal World: Unlocking the Power of Social Engagement for Mental Well-being
245 Plays2 years ago
Welcome back to The Therapy4Dads Podcast, the show where we dive deep into the world of holistic mental health, education, and fatherhood and explore the various challenges and triumphs that come with it.
Today, we're exploring the fascinating concept of polyvagal theory and how it relates to our everyday lives. Joining us on this journey are two incredible guests. First, we have Seth Porges, a journalist, director, producer, and son of the esteemed Dr. Stephen Porges, the pioneer behind polyvagal theory. In this episode, we delve into our polyvagal world and examine the impact our environment has on our mental, physical, and emotional well-being. We discuss how our bodies and nervous systems respond to different levels of safety, and how this affects our ability to function effectively in today's pragmatic society. We also explore the vital role of social interaction and coregulation in our lives, particularly for fathers and their relationships outside of the immediate home. Our experts shed light on the importance of understanding the impact of trauma on our sense of safety and how it can shape our responses to various events. But that's not all! We'll also dive into how the beliefs and conditioning around emotions, vulnerability, and self-regulation can affect our overall well-being, as well as the way we parent our children. So, grab your headphones, settle in, and get ready to delve into the fascinating world of polyvagal theory. It's time to unpack OUR POLYVAGAL WORLD!
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Transcript
Introduction to Polyvagal Theory and Safety
00:00:00
Speaker
Polyvagal theory is just the idea that how safe we feel, our body feels, is crucial to both our mental and physical health and happiness and ability to live a good life. This is a Therapy for Dads podcast. I am your host. My name is Travis. I'm a therapist, a dad, a husband.
Therapy for Dads Podcast Overview
00:00:19
Speaker
Here at Therapy for Dads, we provide content around the integration of holistic mental health, well-researched, evidence-based education, and parenthood. Welcome.
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome everybody back to this week's episode of the therapy for dad's podcast. I am so very, very excited to have on these two, these two men,
Discussion on 'Our Polyvagal World' Book
00:00:38
Speaker
these two guests. It's very, very excited. Cause I've been reading Dr. Portis' work for some years now. And so coming to this place of being able to talk with him and not only him, but I think I would guess a special guest.
00:00:49
Speaker
for him as well, his son, on their latest book, Our Polyvagal World. And that's going to be our conversation today. But before we jump into that topic, I just want to welcome them. So welcome, Dr. Portis and Seth. How are you guys doing this morning? Well, Travis, thank you for inviting us. It's a pleasure to be here. It's also always a pleasure to be on something with my son and to basically learn from his comments. Yeah. Oh, great to be here. Thanks.
00:01:15
Speaker
Yeah. And I thought it would be such a perfect duo because this is a podcast aimed at men and fathers. And what an amazing thing to have a dad and a son on and talk about this. And I would love to talk about a couple things. One, we're engaging in your new book, which comes out, I believe, at the end of the month in about a week
Making Academic Ideas Accessible to the Public
00:01:35
Speaker
or so, right? Number 26. Yeah. Nine days away. Or how are you guys feeling about that? 11 days away. Sorry.
00:01:40
Speaker
Good. Yeah. It's fun. For me, I kind of look at it as a barometer of how well polyvagal theory is accepted within the general population because the book is really targeted at a consumer and not at a therapist. So I'm, I'm kind of like, to me, it's like looking into this barometer or literally crystal ball of how, how the theory has been embedded within culture. So I'm,
00:02:04
Speaker
I'm curious. Yeah. And reading the book, it is very accessible. It really is. I read some of the work, the more, you know, I guess graduate level work and it's, this is really well done just reading and like, yeah, it makes sense. It was, it reads nicely. You kind of get the concepts. I mean, I obviously had some idea of going in to what polyvagal theory was.
00:02:22
Speaker
but kind of trying to read it with fresh eyes was really just, yeah, it flowed well, we kind of captured all the essence of it, and it just made sense. It was like, okay, I get this concept. If I didn't know anything about this, I'd come in and walk away with a really good understanding of this concept, along with some kind of ideas of engaging in some other big topics like education and other areas like the prison system and things like that. And so I thought that was very fascinating at the end, but what kind of
00:02:47
Speaker
I guess what led to this was it really just we want to make something more accessible that isn't so like heady but something that anyone could pick up and read. I'll start and then I want Seth to kind of carry the ball for a while but I will tell you as an academic what is the most frustrating experience of being an academic and that is the inability
00:03:06
Speaker
you know, an academic is saying there's something they can't do, and that is communicate with the public. So you have ideas that you really believe are important for humanity, but how do you develop a skill set to communicate with the world? And for me, that was the challenge. So I could write, I could write science papers, and well,
00:03:25
Speaker
did very well with that and when i try to do some books based on the science papers they were like science papers in hardcover so they still had the same problem but fortunately i have this remarkable son who has a is a journalist by training and the filmmaker now.
Simplifying Polyvagal Theory for the Masses
00:03:42
Speaker
So actually, I'm going to give it to Seth, who engaged me in terms of the discussion. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what he said, you know, like, like there's been many tomes written about poly-viggo theory, many of them by Dr. Porchis here himself. But for the most part, they're largely impenetrable. They're opaque. They're academic. They're hard to understand or hard to understand for for anybody. And they kind of take on this, I think, almost like mystical Dead Sea scroll quality where people
00:04:06
Speaker
are trying to interpret what his words mean, which is a lot of fun. Or what does he mean by this? Because it's really hard to grasp. And I think he'll be the very first person to say that. And the goal, which it was my specific goal approaching him about this project, was let's write this. I think I understand how to tell this to people in a way that makes sense, just through years of dinner table osmosis.
00:04:34
Speaker
and being a journalist at mainstream magazines. I think I know how to write this in a way that makes sense for people. And when you break down polyvagal to its core, yes, there's a lot of heady academics out of heady neuroscience, but really it's a simple and innate and relatable concept that I think catches on with people because they see it in their own lives. They feel in their own lives and they intuitively
00:04:59
Speaker
understand a lot of what it says. The goal of this book also was to create something where if you just walked away reading the first 10 pages, you'd have something. You'd walk away being able to understand a little bit, enough to maybe help you and send you on your own journey. I think the very first page of the book, we just kind of summarize, here's everything you need to know in one sentence. You can throw away the rest of the book, but all you need to know
00:05:22
Speaker
is really, really simple. If somebody asks you, what is polyvagal theory? If you're asking yourself, what is polyvagal theory?
Nervous System's Role in Health and Safety
00:05:28
Speaker
It's really, really, really simple. Polyvagal theory is just the idea that how safe we feel, our body feels, is crucial to both our mental and physical health and happiness and ability to live a good life.
00:05:41
Speaker
It's really that simple. But polyvagal theory is about how our bodies, our nervous systems, our brains, our ability to experience the world transforms with the level of safety that our body feels. And I think we all innately understand this when you ask people about things like fight or flight. When we feel threatened, different bodily systems turn on that allow you to fight or flee or
00:06:04
Speaker
you know, kick butt or do whatever else you have to do. And I think people, most people's understanding of how our bodies change via safety kind of ends there. What polyvagal theory kind of dives into is all the other ways our bodies change, both for defense in order to deal with moments of threat, but also for safety. And this is key because only when our bodies feel safe
00:06:26
Speaker
Are they able to turn on the systems that allow for health, growth, and restoration? And those are obviously just crucial for our health, for our sanity, our ability to live a good life.
00:06:39
Speaker
Well, thinking about that and another quote that stood out to me was this idea that, you know, and this is from page 14 in the book, our physiological state and how we feel our intervening variables and how we experience the world and can change just about everything related to our experience of being alive. And you talk about in the book too of that, depending on the state you're in, it's kind of, if you're in that kind of green state, yellow state or red state, it shifts all perspective as to what you're picking up,
00:07:05
Speaker
what you're perceiving, what you're kind of, in a way, ignoring, so to speak. And I thought that's so powerful because when you start to, as a clinician, when I work with individuals with trauma and other histories, with their attachment wounds, when they're stuck in these states, you really see how our perspectives shift drastically depending on where are we.
Perception of Safety and Trauma Work
00:07:22
Speaker
I mean, if you've ever encountered a dog, you've seen this, right? If you have a dog who's been abused or at a pound or whatever else,
00:07:29
Speaker
they interpret everything around them as a threat. They will snarl you, they will bark at you even if you're trying to give them a treat. If you encounter a dog that feels safe, that's smiling, that's tails wagging, you can go right up to it and pet it. And it's the same action as being interpreted in different ways because that dog's nervous system is in a state of either safety or threat.
00:07:49
Speaker
And we actually come to dogs a lot in this book because I think it's such a clean example about how our, you know, we, we see it, we visualize it, we innately understand it, how dogs handle these things and humans do the same way as well. Yeah. And yeah, you definitely reading it when you use a dog.
00:08:05
Speaker
An allergy makes six makes so much sense. I've had dogs growing up and and also to when you have like a maybe really well-behaved, you know safe dog who might get injured right how when they're in that state even if you're the owner you have to they could still kind of snip at you if they're like if they like broke a leg or something and
00:08:22
Speaker
because they're in pain and they might even nip at you because they're just trying to survive even if there's like a calm relationship with you and the dog until you come in and soothe that they can still react sometimes and I think that translate to us as humans as well we could be really relatively calm and we could still get triggered in these states and maybe react in ways that we normally wouldn't based upon trying to survive.
00:08:43
Speaker
Yeah, and these are natural responses. They're things that happen to everybody. I think oftentimes, you know, if you come into contact with a loved one or somebody close to you who is in a highly reactive or defensive state, it can be tempting to kind of pass judgment on them or, you know, feel like this is a conscious
00:09:01
Speaker
act on their part, but I think what's crucial to understand is this is outside of our control. This is the body taking charge, right? This is not us deciding to be reactive. This is our nervous system making assessment based on all the information around us, the experience we went through, our past experiences, and kind of choosing a link about what bodily state, and this is really what it comes down to, your body is deciding what bodily state is most likely to allow me to survive is what this is.
00:09:28
Speaker
And if your body has been through a lot of trauma, if your body has been through love experiences that make it predisposed to feel like there could be danger lurking at any moment, it can be, you know, you can you can be in these states a lot more than you would like to be. And this is this is this is the
00:09:46
Speaker
none of these states are in, there's no morality behind this. There's nothing wrong with these states. The problems for us comes when we're in these states that are designed for short-term survival, when we're in them all the time. And I think that's endemic in today's modern society where traffic and deadlines and phone vibrations and, you know, TVs blaring at us and news headlines and all of these things kind of trigger these ancient neural pathways that were designed
00:10:10
Speaker
to put us into states of alert for short periods of time to survive a predator, to survive somebody trying to kill you.
Impact of Chronic Stress on Health
00:10:18
Speaker
When you're in them all the time, your body literally cannot funnel any resources towards the systems that allow it for health, growth, restoration. And on top of that, your sensory experience changes.
00:10:30
Speaker
You know, the way things smell, sound, hear, all these things change. So when you're in a state of defense, things you like, you know, they don't hit you the same way. It's hard to enjoy the world. It's hard to engage people socially. It's hard to think critically and independently. It's just kind of hard to live your best life.
00:10:46
Speaker
Yeah, and with that said, you answered the, this is kind of a two for both, you answered the Y, the kind of part one or part AY is, we wrote the book to take this heady, and I've read some of that, it is, it's more in depth and takes a lot longer to read, it reads more woody, it reads like a science book, and I've read some of it.
00:11:04
Speaker
You answer the part A-Y is we need to make something more accessible. And I think that's always a, like Dr. Porges said, is a challenge of taking this big concept and making it accessible so anyone could read it and use it in their day-to-day life. So the second part of Y, like part B, would be, well, why should we care about this?
00:11:22
Speaker
I'll start on that one because when I created the theory, when I basically wrote the initial paper, it was a science question. It was an explanation of a clinical issue in basically with high-risk preterm babies. Why did certain heart rate patterns represent a threat while other heart rate patterns, what were the mechanisms that were protected? And this was through the vagus and there's a lot of hype on the vagus these days. And this is why polyvagal, meaning different vagal pathways.
00:11:51
Speaker
So it was explanatory, but I, when I wrote the papers and start to give talks about it, I did not anticipate the welcoming reception in the world of trauma.
00:12:02
Speaker
And this to me was literally transformative for me and functionally has been transformative for the community because they taught me that they, those who had been traumatized were experiencing this dissociative shutting down behaviors in their intentional mind. They want to be social. They want to embrace, they want to have relationships, but something happens when they get in proximity with another, their body says no. So I often say that I learned what it is to be a human.
00:12:32
Speaker
from those who have experienced severe trauma. They taught me what they lost. And it had nothing to do with their visualization, their expectation, their intentionality. It had to deal with their body interpreting and detecting social cues as threat to their body.
00:12:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm going to jump on what you're saying, because I think the question he's asking is why should I care about this? And I think it's really simple. We are all humans. We are all struggling to get through this anxious and stressful world that is throwing an ever-ending gauntlet of challenges at us. We all kind of feel like we're drowning sometimes, like we're underwater, like we're overwhelmed.
00:13:12
Speaker
everybody. It's a universal experience. And we all experience the effects of that. We feel the stress hormones. We feel the panic. We feel all of these things. And I think we all seek answers to understand what is going on here. What is this doing to our body? And is there another way to live our life? What polyvagal theory offers is an explanation for what the world around us does to our body.
00:13:35
Speaker
And we all live in, we all have bodies, we all live in the world around us, right? And through understanding that, you can do simple things to both give yourself permission to feel and to live and to not feel like you're doing something wrong, honestly, just by feeling overwhelmed. But also you can do, you can make changes, you can do things differently.
00:13:56
Speaker
Polyvagal theory teaches us that it is important to prioritize feelings of safety. We live in a world that I think is dismissive of that, is dismissive of the idea that our feelings even matter in any way whatsoever. What polyvagal tells us is this matters. Our feelings matter. Our feelings are tied to our health.
00:14:17
Speaker
our feelings are tied to our sanity our feelings are tied to our abilities to you know just for the focus of your podcast to be good fathers to be good family members to take care of other people when the key takeaways from polyvagal theory is how social behavior you know there's a lot of stuff on social
00:14:32
Speaker
media on TikTok about the vagus nerve and how activating it kind of should give you some magical healing powers and all that. Those hacks are great. What polyvagal theory says is really the cleanest, simplest, most effective way of activating the vagus nerve is just being social with people who make you feel safe. What polyvagal theory does is it ties social behavior itself to the health of our body.
00:14:56
Speaker
And it kind of, you know, it goes back looking at the evolution of social behavior and says that social behavior itself evolved as a way for us to both project and receive signs of safety from people around us, from those around us, so that our bodies knew that they could kind of shut down their defense systems and allow themselves to heal. And once you kind of really grok what that is implying, what that means, you begin to look around you and realize
00:15:21
Speaker
that our desire for social behavior, our need for social behavior is nothing less, I think, than the cornerstone of almost every system humanity has ever built. It's why we have cities. It's why we have so many institutions. It's why we like parties. It's why we like hanging out with friends. It's why we like being around people who make us feel good, right? And understanding that it's healthy. It is helpful. It is healing to be in safe social interactions.
00:15:48
Speaker
And when you grow up in a world like I did in the 80s and 90s where social behavior and parties and things like that are viewed as like frivolous or unimportant or whatever it is. And you realize, actually, this is kind of the most important thing is putting yourself in these scenarios where you're around people who make you feel safe and who you can allow to feel safe as well. Yeah. Yeah. Let me kind of add to that. We we have basically have a society that has always treated bodily feelings or emotional feelings as optional.
00:16:14
Speaker
And we want to really emphasize that feeling safe is obligatory for our nervous system and it knows it. And these feelings of safety are really a reflection of whether the nervous system is regulating our inner organs to support health growth and restoration or what's called homeostatic functions. So when we disrupt that neural regulation, our physiology triggers feelings of lack of safety, feelings of threat.
00:16:40
Speaker
And we call, we use words like anxiety or stress. So we overlay and make it more complicated. All we need to say is, wow, my body is, it's disrupting its homeostatic function and that's not good. My body for health, growth, and restoration, my body needs to calm down. And when you, the model, we can start thinking of this as when a baby is crying, why does the mother calm the baby? If someone is ill, why do we use terms like
00:17:08
Speaker
relax, calm down, it'll be better for you if you relax. Because this mobilization of fight-flight behavior in defense gets in the way, it turns off
Importance of Social Interactions for Healing
00:17:18
Speaker
the nervous systems regulation of the organs. I want to make one final, basically repeat the emphasis that Seth made. I talk about health growth and restoration as homeostatic processes or functions, but I also add to its sociality as a homeostatic process, but it creates a circularity because not only does it emerge when our body is in this more homeostatic way, but it supports the homeostatic function.
00:17:43
Speaker
So the the loop or the loop becomes co-rated everything's everything's co-self, you know, these are all there's so many loops here. It's everything, you know, your body, when your body, again, going back to our type of before belly dogs, right, when a dog or a human is in a state of defense,
00:18:00
Speaker
It's all of its sensory inputs, the position of its middle ear muscles, what sounds it's here. It's pupil that everything shifts to so that it is biased towards interpreting everything around it as a threat, which makes it ever harder to kind of break through. And so you want to begin to realize that you see like the changes that occur when we feel safe, we are more predisposed to pick up other signs of safety and to see those and everything around us as safe.
00:18:26
Speaker
When we feel threatened, we are predisposed to pick up signs of threat and to see things around us as threats. And so the impetus becomes, it becomes harder. And when you look at people with trauma histories who might be by nature, almost definitionally predisposed to see things as threats just because of what they've been through, you begin to realize why it can be so difficult to make them feel safe and how important it is to make them feel safe at the same time. The complicated factor, and this I'm not going to reflect
00:18:56
Speaker
to the fathering aspect of the audience, also my fathering history with my sons. And that is the great expectation that the responsibility for regulation relies with the child. And so we use the word self-regulation or get yourself together, regulate your behavior.
00:19:14
Speaker
When in reality, you can't do that. We have a nervous system that really looks for co-regulation, signals of safety from others to enable our bodies to give up its defenses. So yelling at a child who is in a physiological state of threat or defensiveness to begin with,
00:19:34
Speaker
is confirming to their nervous system that they're under threat. So we want to really give them signals of safety so that their bodies calm and then they can regulate. But in reality, we are a major component of their co-regulatory skill set.
00:19:50
Speaker
So think of the crying baby and the mother using the intonation of her voice. She's not yelling at the baby to say, stop crying. She's sending in her prosodic intonation of voice signals of safety that the baby's nervous system unambiguously understands. Think about how you talk to your dogs. Do you yell at your dogs? You do the same thing. So this whole notion is that we have portals that our nervous system has to detect signals of safety.
00:20:17
Speaker
And that's something we should really emphasize in our social life, in our educational life, in our clinical care, whether you talk about mental health care or going to a physician's office. How many people feel safe and comfortable in a medical environment? How many feel safe and comfortable in a hospital?
00:20:34
Speaker
or a school or any of these environments. And this is really important because our brains, the cranial processes that are required for us to think creatively, independently, productively, to be smart people, to come up with ideas, to do all these things that society asks of us, it's much, much more difficult.
00:20:57
Speaker
to access those cranial functions when your body is under threat because all of its resources, all of your body's resources are being pushed towards immediate survival, not solving problems in any real deep creative sense. And so creativity, these things that we seek out as people, right, and society seeks from us, they basically require us to feel safe.
00:21:18
Speaker
And we kind of think about that and the way we design, we have chapters on this in the book, but the way we design schools, the way we design hospitals, workplaces, all of these institutions and just the sensory experience of being in them and what that does to our body. If you're in a school where you're passing through a metal detector and there's guards with guns or you're packed in with a hundred screaming people, you know, your body's not going to feel safe, especially if it's the body of a child that's predisposed.
School Environments and Children's Safety
00:21:45
Speaker
towards seeking danger, towards finding danger in this world, if they come from a perhaps abusive household, or just a dangerous neighborhood, you know, or an environmentally damaged neighborhood, you know, their bodies might be predisposed to feel unsafe, they were put into this environment that's already overwhelming from a sensory point of view, the cards are stacked against them.
00:22:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I would maybe say, would you be safe to see even a kid coming from a safe home who might, who might have a neurodivergent brain could also. Yeah. There's, there's all sorts of reasons a body could be predisposed to towards, towards threat in this world, some biological, some environmental, some, you know, it's a big cocktail of nature and nurture going on in there. Right.
00:22:24
Speaker
And, and absolutely, and, you know, there are people who, you know, if you've all go back to dogs here, you know, I might have a litter of dogs with like seven or eight dogs. And some of them are just naturally very social and friendly. And some are scared cowering in the corner, right? There's there's there's a maintenance to this as well. And and I think that that demands of us empathy and sympathy once you begin to realize that. I'm going to introduce another concept. So during the past, actually, in the past year, we adopted a cat. And we had cats when
00:22:53
Speaker
when our boys were young, but not as when they were gone, we had just had dogs. And dogs are like children. They require the interaction co-regulation. They look at your face, they listen to your voice. A cat is very different. And I had to relearn what it is to be part of a cat's world. In the cat's world, the cat is using you as a co-regulator. You are not using the cat as your co-regulator. It's all on the terms of the cat.
00:23:23
Speaker
So our cat likes to be in proximity with us. And when she doesn't want to be touched, she walks away, but she's in eye.
00:23:31
Speaker
She's still maintaining visual contact. So she, her whole life is about regulating physiological state. So cats spend a lot of time catnapping or light sleeping, but they're not really deep sleeping. They know when you're walking around, they detect that and they're looking for it as a way of feeling safe enough to give up their defenses. And it's really interesting to watch her cat go on her back and put her paws out like this.
00:23:56
Speaker
without any fear of being touched. And you totally understand that her life's goal is to feel safe enough to give up her defenses. And she is in a journey of co-regulating with us, but my needs for her to co-regulate me don't take the highest priority in her life, but they do it with dogs. Dogs are really, they were bred
00:24:23
Speaker
and evolved as a co-evolutionary process with humans to help them regulate and feel safe. Basically, they became the vigilance. While humans could now go to sleep at night, the dog could watch. But it's very interesting to take this notion of co-regulation and see the two different strategies, a dog-human one versus a cat one. They're still co-regulatory.
00:24:48
Speaker
They want cues that their nervous system interprets to be safe. And now I start to suggest that maybe we should look at our children more like cats than dogs. That's what I'm saying. Maybe we should be more accepting and less demanding. So we start understanding that they are using us to regulate themselves.
00:25:09
Speaker
And maybe we should kind of dismiss the fact that we have been using them to regulate us. Yeah. I like that concept shifts because I grew up both with cats and dogs as well. And you see the difference. Very different. Pepsi was our cat who that literally was cochlear dog. No, no. Tasha was our dog. She was a Rottweiler. Great dog, by the way. And Pepsi was they had fun together. But yeah, it's funny because cats, they don't want they either want to do with you or they don't. Right. And they choose. It's like they want to play. You don't want to have enough of that. I'm talking away.
00:25:38
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, I'm good. And they would always always, you're right, always with an eye shot, ear shot, they'd always be in a spot that they can pick up. But a couple things that you mentioned, I'm gonna go back to that, I think, to hear from you both on this, we said, you know, trauma, right? And I think that's such a big term that's tossed around the interweb social media, TikTok, Instagram. So could we, according to Polyvagal theory, how would we define trauma to
Understanding Trauma through Bodily Reactions
00:26:01
Speaker
that lens?
00:26:01
Speaker
Okay, I will start. Basically, the word trauma is creates tremendous ambiguity, because we are a very event oriented culture. So we think trauma is linked to an event. And the event itself causes the trauma. And now we are literally disrespecting the resilience of certain nervous systems who can literally
00:26:23
Speaker
pass through these traumatic events without trauma. And if someone then is traumatized by something that most people aren't, we start saying, I got through that, you know, what about you? The issue is we need to shift the emphasis to how the body reacted. So when we use the word trauma, trauma is really the body's reaction to an event or to a context. And if that
00:26:46
Speaker
reaction is a retuning of the autonomic nervous system, meaning moving it from its resilient states of calmness and homeostasis to now states that support defense, that's trauma. Yeah, I'll build on that and say that, you know, as he was saying, it's not the the problem with defining it by the event itself is that any number of people can experience the exact same event and their nervous systems will come out differently.
00:27:10
Speaker
There are some people who can experience a horrible event and walk away without much impact on them. And there's other people who it can severely impact. And it's important to know that because I think oftentimes we judge people's trauma based on how severe we assume the event to be, not understanding that it really has nothing to do with it. It's just what does the nervous system take away from it?
00:27:31
Speaker
And from there, I'll kind of build on a definition of trauma to say that the way I view it, and trauma is such a big, broad, ambiguous word that means so many things and a million people can offer different and no less accurate definitions of what it is. But to me, it's when an event changes the goalposts for our ability to feel safe, is what I think.
00:27:51
Speaker
It's when you go through something and because of that event, our nervous system is now more inclined to find threat and danger in the world around us. And the implications for that can be massive.
00:28:03
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's through my training through the Institute and some other trainees in trauma. You know, I think Dr. Dan Siegel said that's anything that overwhelms our current capacity to cope. I think a quote he said about trauma. And when you start to think of it through the lens of polyvagal or that you really see that it is so different that you could have 10 people experience the same event and you have eight that walk away.
00:28:25
Speaker
Fine you have two that are have could have you know Post-traumatic stress and I'd say response versus a disorder because that's a whole other topic conversation with disorders the medical profession and how we could change things through the nervous system and and I like how how we approach kind of these adaptive responses and how you guys even talk about addiction and things in here that It really is about our way of trying to regulate our nervous system as best we can with survival Rather than this being this quote-unquote disorder. That's that's stigmatizing and now for a short break
00:28:55
Speaker
So if you're looking for ways to support the show and my youtube channel head on over to buy me a copy.com For therapy for dads there you can make a one-time donation or join the monthly subscription service to support all that I'm doing at the intersection of fatherhood and mental health and
00:29:12
Speaker
and all the proceeds go right back into all the work that I'm doing, into production, and to continue to grow the show to bring on new guests. So again, head on over to buymeacoffee.com forward slash therapy for dads. Thanks, and let's get back to the show.
00:29:27
Speaker
And so this idea of trauma, and then if we think of that of maybe how we've been raised in school, if you're in a school that's chaotic in an environment in these kids or a home that has maybe parents that aren't attuned or parents that are engaged with them emotionally or are yelling a lot and just stop and just feel, don't cry, things like that. Often when I'm thinking of some general ways that men have been socialized around this is stop crying, don't be a baby, don't be a girl.
00:29:52
Speaker
you know, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, don't feel, you're not supposed to feel sad, no crying. And so you have these boys, and we'll focus on this for a second, boys that are raised in the environment, you know, every day, told these messages. And so as you think of it, a boy is raised in that from childhood adolescence, and they're, you know, playing sports, and then sports have certain rules around them.
00:30:13
Speaker
So generally speaking, when he becomes an a father or an adult, a man, you know, he has, I would maybe posit or argue he's got certain survival mechanisms around certain emotions and feelings. So I'm thinking of a father who might be then seeing a kid, his son or daughter having a big emotion, maybe crying or...
00:30:30
Speaker
having a quote unquote tantrum or a behavioral problem, which is really them being dysregulated. And then his first response is to like, no, stop, you know, kind of don't feel and go to your room, just punitive punishment to not feel. And he's kind of repeating it. So if we're, you know, and it's a quick little case study, but if we're looking at that kind of typical guy, what do we think might be going on from a polyvagal perspective of what's happening in this father who's now seeing his kid being dysregulated, now he's yelling.
Emotional Suppression and Health Issues
00:30:57
Speaker
There are multiple things going on here.
00:30:59
Speaker
First of all, let's talk about the father what's going on inside of him and what he's trying to teach his child is to Not listen to the feedback that his body's giving him So he's saying you basically is trying to make use this term that feelings are optional. They're not obligatory
00:31:17
Speaker
Now, what does that do on a neurophysiological level? It starts to turn off the feedback mechanisms, meaning that we start losing the sensations of our body, of our internal organs, and that leads to illness because the feedback loops. Basically, we're turning off the nervous system regulation of our visceral organs.
00:31:36
Speaker
And you find out that many people who suffer from chronic stress, severe anxiety or trauma, this whole package of people have literally predictable symptoms in terms of physiological problems. And they often not get clustered into an area which is called functional disorders or medically unexplained symptoms, meaning that they have problems, but they don't have the identifiable pathology of when the organ is being evaluated. And that's because medicine looks at end organ function
00:32:06
Speaker
and doesn't look at neural regulation of that organ. So when you dampen the feedback, you're in a sense interfering with how that organ is being regulated by the nervous system and the brain, which means whether it's being maintained in a sense, a helpful way. Another way of thinking about it is disrupt the homeostasis or disrupt the neural feedback to the organ. And over time, that organ will become diseased.
00:32:31
Speaker
I think that, again, looking at the father's experience, they are passing on their own learned experience that showing these emotions would have been interpreted as weakness and make them less safe. If they are going to get bullied, if they're going to get beaten, if they're going to get yelled at for showing these emotions, their body is going to associate those emotions with threat, with danger.
00:32:55
Speaker
And so they're passing on that information, even if the world around them has changed, even if now maybe it's okay to cry. If it's okay to have feelings, and in fact necessary for our own health and survival, they're passing on this information that to do so is to show weakness and to put yourself into a threat and to compromise your own safety. And of course, the problem with that is that gives your body no space, no room
00:33:20
Speaker
to ever reach the level of vulnerability that's required for the turn off its defense systems so as to heal, grow and restore. And it's just damaging to the body as a result. Yeah. Well, you know, I didn't always have probably vehicle theory, especially I didn't always have it when I was parenting or fathering my
00:33:38
Speaker
my sons. The issue is I had to learn because I grew up with the notion of you better get control over your own behavior for your own good because you don't want to be targeted. You don't want to you want to navigate through a complex world and you can hear the cues of how or let's say the the instructions of how to navigate and you better learn that because if you can't navigate, you're going to be victimized and it doesn't always work that way because it's not a top down. It's not intentionality.
00:34:05
Speaker
So I kind of, you know, my classical training in psychology was well, rewards, punishments, a typical thing. It wasn't until Seth was about 12 that I really started to embrace polyvagal theory and started to see it in terms of parenting behavior and started to reinterpret my children's responses from a polyvagal perspective. And I started to reinterpret my
00:34:31
Speaker
My father, who was still, actually my mother was alive at that time too, I started to reinterpret their behaviors and my sister's behavior. I started to interpret things by understanding that a lot of the behavior was being driven by physiological state that had nothing to do with intentionality. And this concept that we start to interpret and make meaning out of people's behavior, creating causality, justification, and supporting narratives that are really irrelevant.
00:35:00
Speaker
creates the problems within families and it creates the problems within society that we have to understand. I think Seth's done a real good job. You can hear as he talks about this and Seth is really the primary voice of the book that Seth enables this communication that there's two separate things going on. There's intentionality, which is our conscious intentional brain.
00:35:23
Speaker
And then there's a brainstem lower historically through evolution, older circuits that are survival oriented, but they're not of equal power. And our society assumes that the intentional, the new brain, the mammalian, the neocortex runs the whole world. Forget it. It's the primitive lower brainstem that if it gets a signals of threat, it runs the world. And we can see that literally in our
00:35:48
Speaker
politics in this country now, we can see it going on in the world, that if you sow signals of chaos and threat, what's the physiology of the people in it and what's their acceptance of others? There's a big price to pay. We are a social nervous system. We are a benevolent, compassionate, functionally trusting and loving species. But we can only be that way when our physiology has come.
00:36:13
Speaker
Once and we feel safe, we feel safe. If that physiology gets triggered into threat, we are proximately want to take care of ourselves and those closest to us. We can be a smiling golden retriever or a snarling, you know, I don't want to hate on Rottweilers, but that's the image coming to my head right now. You know, it can be it can be both. We are capable of both. Yeah, but Seth go back and talk about frosting. We had a marvelous dog when when Seth and his brother Eric were growing up and it
00:36:42
Speaker
It would allow the two of them to do anything. They could wrestle with them or anything. But a stranger, someone who was not part of the family, if they got off the couch, it was really dangerous for that person. Yeah. So it was the pack, right? You were part of the pack in safety. Oh, I suppose so. Yeah. Oh, very much so. I watched the kids playing with them. And I also watched him because he was such an attractive dog, people wouldn't believe that he was so, quote, family oriented. That's the magic word. And they described breeds.
00:37:12
Speaker
But it was really quite amazing, this little cute dog. If you got off the couch and you were a stranger, you were a threat. You were a threat to everyone in the family. But if you're in the family, pick me up, throw me around. I don't care. Yeah, you had that earned trust. Well, in going back to what you said, I think with this father, because I see reading research articles on men and all this stuff. I've read a lot of research on this and obviously on every article.
00:37:35
Speaker
but have a big heart and passion to help men and fathers. And going back to this notion of the Kasich study we gave of this dad who was raised in a home, socialized around, you know, lack of vulnerability, emotions aren't safe. And so, in a way, what I would see in his nervous system, it really is emotions, really a threat to his nervous system. This is how I conceptualize it. So if it's a threat, he's going to go into survival, which is why he might get angry, or why he might also numb out and shut down and walk away. I'm going to actually make you clarify some statements.
00:38:05
Speaker
Because you said when someone gets emotional, what you really mean, they're sending signals of dysregulation or which is interpreted by his nervous system as signals of threat. So let's say it's a kind of a binary decision. The emotion is positive, it's welcoming and it basically signals a hug or a smile versus it's something that your nervous system reacts to as you don't want it. You want it out of your world. Right. And that's what he's doing. So he's triggered in a state of threat.
00:38:34
Speaker
The real issue on the clinical model is, does he feel his own body? And this becomes the first question. And that is if he's brought up in a certain way, he becomes numb to his own body. And part of the therapeutic strategy is, before he reacts to his child, can he identify how he feels?
00:38:54
Speaker
And I would say with that, most of the men and women I've worked with in this is that they are very disconnected from their bodily state. It's very, it's head intellect down and they don't really know what's going on. When I ask, often initially when I'm working with them, there's a lot of blank stares of like, and a lot of, I don't know, almost like it's, it's very separate as if it's doesn't exist. They don't, it's all here and like,
00:39:20
Speaker
head it and like everything else below is like, I don't, initially I don't know. I see that. Well, the fact that they can acknowledge that they don't know is really a good sign. And things that can start really is like, do you feel different when you exhale slowly? Can you feel your body? Now these feelings are going to be threatening to them because they are going to be, the feelings of calmness is a signal of vulnerability.
00:39:47
Speaker
So this is the paradox when you come out of that type of developmental experience that your body doesn't welcome signals of safety because signals of safety are where we are talking about lovelies is accessibility to their
Tuning into Bodily Sensations for Well-being
00:40:02
Speaker
nervous system. It's vulnerability.
00:40:03
Speaker
and they don't want to allow that to occur. I think what you're doing here in this book as well, and just the whole theory itself, is really integrating how important listening and paying attention to our body, the cues of our body are saying to us, and almost learning the language of our body. Yeah, the book begins with a chapter on just defining what the autonomic
00:40:23
Speaker
nervous system is. And I think that's a term we all hear, but if I'm in a room and I ask people who can actually define it, you see very few hands go up. And I think that's really important because what the autonomic nervous system is, of course, autonomic
00:40:35
Speaker
word basically means automatic. It's the parts of our body that operate outside our conscious control, which is the vast majority of our body influencing everything. We don't consciously ask our heart to beat. We don't consciously ask our sweat glands to sweat. These things just sort of happen under the hood outside of our control. Consciousness
00:40:55
Speaker
can control a very, very, very small percentage of our bodily functions. And once you begin to realize how much of our body is just sort of ticking along and driven by the anarch nervous system and how being in a state of safety or a state of threat changes how all of those bodily functions operate, you begin to realize just what's actually going on in our body and how little of it is consciously controlled and how important it is to listen to those parts that are ticking along outside of our conscious control
In-person Social Interactions and Physiological Responses
00:41:25
Speaker
because they matter.
00:41:25
Speaker
and it's that kind of conscious unconsciousness and that's I think tuning into the body like what's happening physically physiologically noticing it and almost like practicing paying attention to what's happening in your body to like bring that unconscious to the conscious awareness which I think does take practice especially if you're used to kind of tuning out part of yourself to survive and and I think of what you guys were mentioning earlier is this idea of
00:41:48
Speaker
how we are social beings for co-regulation, how we need that. And you mentioned in the book quite a few times face-to-face contact, like in person, and how important that is. And I think of a lot of men that I work with, and i.e. fathers as well, is how, especially when they're coming in and they're really struggling, how more often than not, how disconnected they are from relationships outside of their initial home.
00:42:12
Speaker
and how they don't have a lot of face-to-face relational, safe contact in that way. Yeah. Again, through the vast, vast majority of human existence, the only way to have social contact was through face-to-face interaction. Internet is a very new
00:42:31
Speaker
thing. The phone from in the grand scheme of things is very new. The written letter in the grand scheme of things is very, very new. Ninety nine point nine percent of humans homo sapien existence. The only way to communicate with somebody was face to face. And so that is how our nervous system sort of baked in the the idea of social interaction into our bodies. The idea that we as species were more likely to survive
00:42:56
Speaker
if we had safe social interactions, so we could defend each other, team up with each other, have each other's backs, go to sleep while somebody else is on guard, raise children together, do all of these things that as a social species we evolved to do, our bodies evolved to compel us to have social interaction.
00:43:15
Speaker
But how does our body clock that we're actually social interaction? We're actually kind of fulfilling this handshake, this ancient contract, this need for social interaction. It's through face to face interaction. And it's through very, very specifically the activation of the muscles and the nerves that allow us to control our voice, our face, our shoulders,
00:43:39
Speaker
All of these things that are involved with actual in-person social interaction, those cranial nerves and those muscles, they actually plug into the same part of the brainstem as the vagus nerve that is activated when we feel safe.
00:43:55
Speaker
So there's a system that Dr. Porteous calls a social engagement system that is activated when we feel safe through the vagus nerve that turns on effectively the cranial nerves and the muscles that allow us to be expressive in a facial way, in a vocal way with people around us. And so these behaviors are intrinsically tied in a kind of bidirectional way with us feeling safe. So when we feel safe, we're better able to socialize. And when we socialize, we're better able to feel safe and it goes back and forth and back and forth.
00:44:25
Speaker
You have to think about it from the evolution of a non-verbal species by species that vocalize. How does a species communicate to another, conspecific of the same species, that they're safe enough to come close to it? They would do it through vocalization.
00:44:41
Speaker
and with primates, especially humans, is facial expressivity and intonation of voice. It's not the words we use, it's our facial expressivity and the intonation of voice that triggers or signals the nervous system that we can be approached. So we have to think about the fact that we are broadcasting our autonomic state in our voice and in our facial expression. And our
00:45:04
Speaker
physiological state also interferes or gives permission for a basically our auditory system in the middle ear structures to filter out background sounds and pull in human voice so we could be at least when you're younger we could be in a bar talking to someone smiling engaging in here everywhere they're saying with lots of background noise but as we get older
00:45:27
Speaker
Or if you have, let's say, a history of trauma history or chronic stress history, you might find environments like restaurants and shopping malls overwhelming you. Let me translate what he's saying a little bit here. So we talked before about how our sensory experience changes based on how safe we feel or perhaps are having a trauma history. What he's talking about specifically are there are tiny muscles in our middle ear, the smallest muscles in the entire body. And their job is to manipulate the ear drum to effectively act as a filter
00:45:56
Speaker
so that we can better pick up the sounds of sociability, the sounds of human speech. I don't think it's a surprise to say to anybody that the sounds of human speech are very special to our brain. We pick them up, we can hear words from people in loud and crowded bars or music venues quite well often.
00:46:14
Speaker
but that's only true when we feel safe. These middle ear muscles transform when we're in a state of threat and they change how your eardrums taughtness so that instead of being primed to pick up the middle frequencies of human speech,
00:46:30
Speaker
you're better able to pick up, say, ultra-low frequencies of a predator. Because when your body feels threatened, it doesn't want to hear people talk. It wants to be on the lookout, on alertness, for something that might hurt it.
Trauma's Broad Impact Beyond Psychology
00:46:42
Speaker
And so as humans, the sounds of human speech are very special to us, but only when we feel safe. And if you, say, never feel safe, as is the case with people who may have suffered trauma or have just different neurologies, you might have a different audiology.
00:46:59
Speaker
signal. I think we all kind of understand that a huge percentage of people with PTSD, folks who come back from war, for example, have difficulty dealing with loud and crowded environments, that loud noises might scare them or frighten them or cause an instinctive emotional reaction. That's sort of a trope in movies, the fact that that happens, right? We see that all the time in television shows. You go to a place and those loud sounds are very overwhelming. Well, this is true, and it's a physiological shift that occurs.
00:47:26
Speaker
It's a change in our middle ear muscles that happens when our bodies feel threatened. It changes the sounds we pick up. And so oftentimes we treat trauma as if it's a purely psychiatric or psychological issue, something that should be dealt exclusively with, let's say talk therapy or medication. But in fact, it's a physiological phenomenon. It changes the way our body and organs and systems operate down to what sounds we pick up in the world around us.
00:47:52
Speaker
Which really changes and revolutionizes everything when you think about it that way. That it really shifts away from, I think, a one-dimensional viewpoint of how, why we might have an anxiety disorder, or depression, or trauma, or, you know, chronic stress, or some of these, you know, disorders I'm putting in quote. Then when you look at it from this kind of polyvagal lens, you could see, actually, it's this adaptive response to dealing with it, but it could also get stuck. It's like a stuck state, I would say, right? If we're in depression, we're stuck in that kind of red zone.
00:48:20
Speaker
I got to survive so I got to shut everything down like play possum play dead to figure it out and immobilize to like don't do anything and so I get and then I get stuck and then if I'm stuck there long enough it could have negative impacts on my life. And this is it's so important to understand that because I think oftentimes these often unexplainable bodily phenomenon that occur when people are traumatized or threatened where suddenly they have auditory processing.
00:48:44
Speaker
issues, which again are extremely common with people with a trauma history. They might have digestion issues, extremely common with people with a trauma history, all sorts of bodily changes that their therapist or their doctor is unable to explain. That inability to explain creates confusion, it creates mystery, it creates shame. It oftentimes creates doubt and it creates the feeling that people might think there's something wrong with me.
00:49:07
Speaker
or what I'm feeling is unique or unnatural, when in fact it's an exceedingly common and exceedingly natural response to whatever it is they've been through. And just understanding that I think is so, so important because I mean, shame is dangerous, right? Like it causes so many problems when people feel like there's no explanation for what's happening to them. And understanding that what they're dealing with is natural and expected, I think gives people permission to feel those things outside of shame. At least I hope it does.
00:49:34
Speaker
Let me just add one point to that is the ability to feel, have those feelings isn't wrong itself. It's the narrative that we put on top of it. So we have to understand that our body is going to react in a very.
00:49:47
Speaker
It's a heroic way to make, to enhance our survival. But our narrative is really where we get into trouble, where we start to explain things and it creates a lot of problems. So we want to, in a sense, embrace the awareness of our own bodily feelings before we create the narrative of why we have those feelings and why we're entitled to be angry at that person or hostile in this environment.
00:50:11
Speaker
Yeah. You mentioned in the book too, these different aspects of maybe being under chronic stress. I'm using that word loosely here for the sake of this point. You know, you have this whole piece on the workplace and how we're so tied to our phone and going off and how that kid, you know, we're activated. I worked with a lot of people that have, you know, the first thing I do is they look at their phone or they're tied to their phone and work emails or they go to bed.
00:50:35
Speaker
And they wake up. Travis, I wake up every day and just already overwhelmed. I'm already stressed. I'm already tired. I'm exhausted. I don't have all this stuff. And they're so tied to this thing and their work. It's not necessarily their fault, but it's like, can you speak more about that, that we live in this world that is while a positive of being interconnected with media and everything, but maybe the possible downside of this?
Modern Stress and Its Health Challenges
00:50:58
Speaker
We're aliens in a war. We evolved for one planet and the one we live in is one that's not only totally different, it's one that is often consciously designed to co-op these ancient mechanisms. Because the mechanisms of threat detection, the mechanisms of survival,
00:51:14
Speaker
Those are mechanisms of engagement. Those are mechanisms of paying attention. Those are mechanisms that if you're an advertiser or a social media company or a news channel or all of these things, it's in your best interest to tap into them because you've all doom scrolled on Twitter or Facebook before. When we feel threatened, we can't stop staring, right?
00:51:35
Speaker
It's not just that we exist now in a world that's very different from the one that our bodies evolved to exist in. We exist in one that is engineered, whether consciously or just through trial and error, engineered into co-opting and taking advantage of these mechanisms because those mechanisms give people something from us that they want.
00:51:58
Speaker
Yeah, I want to build on that. There were these movies. I think there's a trilogy of the Matrix movies and I'm going to say basically they got it partially right. But what is the Matrix? It's threat cues being bombarded 24-7 and that's the making of who we are.
00:52:14
Speaker
And our nervous system will respond. It prioritizes threat cues, but it really is on the quest for cues of safety. Yeah. And we, you know, outrage and anger are extremely easy to manufacture. It's very easy to make somebody feel scared. And when we feel scared, when we feel threatened, again, our ability to access certain cranial functions disappears in favor of immediate survival. We stop asking questions. There's a reason every authoritarian history
00:52:44
Speaker
every dictatorship in history has relied on scaring the populace because when people are scared they're willing to do almost anything if somebody promises to alleviate that threat. Let's even emphasize if you're frightened it limits the creativity and problem-solving ability of the population.
00:52:59
Speaker
Yeah, it narrows the view. It absolutely does, because there's no time to think when you're just like, I'm going to die right now. And if you can make somebody feel overwhelmed. And I think if you're going to be cynical about this, I'm not, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to be very cynical, you're going to begin to realize that maybe some people benefit if people are hungry, don't have adequate needs met. If their bodies are constantly in a state of threat, in a state of fear, in a state of being overwhelmed, it becomes maybe less of a bug than a feature for some folks.
00:53:29
Speaker
You can understand why many employers, especially low-wage hourly jobs, might intentionally want to keep their employees stressed out because they can kind of control it. Okay. Seth, it's not just piecework employees. It's also academics. The academic environment is a 24-7 evaluation model. It's never enough. It's more publications. It's more grant money. It's a sphere of influence.
00:53:56
Speaker
leveraging, it's never saying you've done a good job, smile and take a week off and enjoy yourself. Think about things that you wanted to think about. It's no, there's a next grand proposal has to be another deadline. And it's chronic and, and the environment for all these professions that used to have kind of a
00:54:14
Speaker
I'm going to say almost a monk-like environment where you were isn't safe enough to explore the world on your own terms. They don't exist now because everything in our culture is really monetized and the bottom line for both research and for scientific inquiry is not just solving problems.
00:54:36
Speaker
is whether you can generate the funds to solve the problem. So it's a complicated world we're in that is really quite pragmatic, that gets in the way of many of the positive attributes of our species, which is when we are safe enough, and I used the word enough,
00:54:53
Speaker
We become this wonderful, creative, exploratory, compassionate, benevolent, trusting species. And we have to know what is enough for us to function. And it doesn't mean that 24-7 has to be safe. It just means we need enough safety for us to calm down and regulate our own physiology.
00:55:13
Speaker
Which allows for restoration, right? And healing and connection and everything else. And if we can ever get there, that leads to problems. It leads to burnout. You see it in all the professions. People are saying, I'm burnt out. It's an interesting journey when you see it through a different lens and you say, well, can't we be smarter? We're intelligent species. Can we structure a society that benefits our bodies as well?
00:55:38
Speaker
And he says something, Dr. Porges and Seth, you mentioned it too, this idea of being enough and how we often work in systems that are always wanting and demanding more. Typically I'm generalizing here and that even if you get to that more, you know, they move the goalpost to the next more. And so it's this constant, well, it's not enough. I got to do more. I got to do more. And even typically we get stuck in kind of keeping up with the Joneses of like, well, it can be as simple as accumulating wealth.
00:56:06
Speaker
What's enough? You know, it's like, nothing is enough. And, you know, should I just quote Bruce Springsteen here? Was it a poor man want to be rich, rich man want to be king and the king ain't satisfied till they rule everything, you know, and it's no we it's it's
00:56:30
Speaker
It's a truth, though, that the systems that we live in oftentimes don't really care about us and our health, or they just don't understand what causes us and allows us to be healthy. I'm not trying to be disparaging of everything around us. People just don't know. We, as a society, I think, need to give ourselves permission to prioritize feelings of safety, because feelings of safety lead to health. Health leads to happiness. Period. We have to also prioritize
00:56:59
Speaker
What enough is enough for us? Yeah, well that I think ties into a lot of shame messages here with a lot of people I've worked with is that I just don't I feel like I'm not enough I'm worthless. I feel like I have no value. I feel like who I am is unimportant So we they try ways to kind of fix that and but it's this constant fight for lack of better word or shutting down from if they can't fight
00:57:21
Speaker
fix this belief system and they feel it in their workplace, they can feel it in relationships with their parents and without society. And so if we were to take this down to like a relational level, kind of coming, starting to land the plane for today's conversation, because a big theme throughout the entire book was that we are relational social beings that require kind of social, intimate, vulnerable contact.
00:57:45
Speaker
And so how does that look? If we were to kind of take this and look practically in Dr. Portis and Seth and even your relationship of, okay, what does it look like in the day to day fighting these things of being enough or, you know, safety? How do we do this practically boots on the ground with relationships and how do you guys do that?
00:58:03
Speaker
Okay, I would like to say we in our society, we've acknowledged that physical exercise is necessary that we don't want to be sedentary, but we haven't really acknowledged that social nourishment is a daily requirement as well. That means on some level,
00:58:19
Speaker
interacting with people or even the zoom the pandemic really jolted our nervous systems because sociality became a signal of threat and this really disrupted our nervous systems cause the history of humanity was that whenever we've been under threat we've mitigated through safe social interactions and now safe social interactions became a threat.
00:58:42
Speaker
The bottom line is I think a degree of social nourishment is important.
Social Interaction as a Key to Well-being
00:58:47
Speaker
So it's not just work and accumulate money or even go on the treadmill, but spend a little time with people that you like and trust.
00:58:54
Speaker
Yeah, we're not saying to quit your job or quit your responsibilities, whatever it is. It's just this understanding that we as humans need a break. Sometimes we need the ability to fill our fuel, replenish ourselves, to have moments of safety and sociability, and understanding those, that's the fuel, our tech needs, right? And we're really resilient as a species for the most part. We can handle a lot of this.
00:59:17
Speaker
We just need the things that make us feel safe in order to buffer up against the stresses of the world. And understanding that what makes us feel safe matters. And that maybe for some people different things, a lot of them to calm down, relax, being around people you love, being around friends, all of these things, view them as you said, just as important as exercising for our long-term health. And how do you guys do that in your relationship as father and son?
00:59:40
Speaker
Hey, we hang out all the time. From a father's perspective, not enough. But it's really interesting to actually watch Seth and his creativity and his passions and really the productivity. I just sit back with a smile on my face. So it's not like I'm evaluating Seth. I'm just getting tremendous nourishment whenever he calls and
01:00:04
Speaker
shares with me what he's doing. So share some more stuff. Sure. And I think that's the, what I see what it comes down to is that it is that social engagement and relationship that really is the strongest predictor of, and even the Harvard study, right? The strongest predictor of a successful life or a fulfilled life is the nature of our safe relationships where we can be who we are and seen and accept it.
01:00:28
Speaker
I mean, it's kind of entered the realm of conventional wisdom now. I think we all understand the idea that those with strong social support networks are healthier, live longer, do better against almost every physical or mental malady there is. But I think to a lot of people, the mechanisms and the reasons for that are mysterious. It shouldn't be. It's really simple social behavior. Having access to safe to support social support makes our bodies feel safe and allows them to heal.
01:00:50
Speaker
I think we have to qualify this because people might, and this is actually the whirlwind, people say, well, I guess I have to force myself, even though I don't like to be around people to be with people. And the issue is, we're talking about feeling safe with people and trusting people if you feel safe and trusting of a few.
01:01:08
Speaker
That's fine, but your body needs those experiences. And if your body doesn't feel safe with people, get a dog, get a horse, get a cat even. Because you need some- We can co-regulate with dogs. A lot of people might say, I'm just a loner, whatever it is, and I'm not going to tell you to be something you're not. But dogs and cats, they can make you feel safe too. There's a reason that people love them so much. It's the truth. And it's because those types of social mammals give cues back to our nervous system.
01:01:38
Speaker
that enable us to give up our defenses. So we co-radulate with them, we make them feel safe, and they make us feel safe. And also, I think a lot of times the places that we associate with social behavior might feel overwhelming and stressful to people if, you know, again, loud bars or parties, things like that could make people feel unsafe. So it's about finding scenarios for safe social interaction that make you feel safe and not trying to force yourself into an environment that doesn't make you feel safe.
01:02:07
Speaker
Final question, and I wanted to thank you both for your time, but what's your both of your personal hope for this book?
01:02:14
Speaker
Dad, what's yours? My personal hope is that it does exactly what we've talked about. That's the notion that people who are not therapists or scientists can understand these basic principles. The theory got traction within the therapy community because it was intuitive. Whenever anyone actually read any of it, they said, ah, this makes sense. It doesn't have to be complicated. It makes sense.
01:02:39
Speaker
So it's never have I ever gotten a comment. This doesn't make any sense. So I used to say to people who would come to my workshops and they would say to me, Oh, I learned so much. I said, Come on, be honest. You best just got a validation of your intuitions. So in reading this book, people get a validation of their intuitions of what they think it is to be a human being. And we basically have outlined or provide a map of those experiences.
01:03:03
Speaker
Yeah, for me, it's just giving people the ability to understand that they're not alone when they feel these physiological effects of being anxious or stressed or traumatized. Understanding what's happening, giving yourself permission to feel them, and giving yourself permission to do things that make you feel safe. Giving yourself permission to prioritize feelings of safety, to prioritize sociability, to prioritize your own health and happiness.
Prioritizing Safety for Health and Happiness
01:03:29
Speaker
Through that and understanding
01:03:30
Speaker
that if you are able to prioritize your own health and happiness, you'll be better able to give health and happiness to the people around you who mean something to you. Perhaps your kids, if you're a dad listening to this. Let me just add one other point to what Seth was saying. In a sense, by reading the book, you're going to feel better about what it is that you've experienced. You're going to feel better about yourself. You're going to feel more competent and more resilient.
01:03:54
Speaker
So the book in a way is to kind of inform people of the wonderful, resilient toolkit that they have on board. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you have language too, is that, you know, read through it and you write Dr. Porteous. When I first read polypico theory, being, you know, a therapist and it kind of made sense, but it gave more language. It was like, it just took my initial concept and it connected it more to our physiological states. And it started to kind of be a kind of robust roadmap of what's really going on, like really kind of,
01:04:23
Speaker
having a clearer picture, and I think as people read this too that they'll get a sense of, oh, that's why I do that. Oh, that makes sense. I feel like it might normalize and maybe, you know, bring some confirmation and peace to them knowing that I'm not just messed up or broken or stuck. It's like, oh, no wonder why I'm doing this or no wonder why I'm seeing this. This makes sense now. Okay, I can now do something about it. I don't have to just be kind of succumb to this, these pressures of life or my story, so to speak.
01:04:52
Speaker
I want to thank you both so much for your time, Dr. Porjes and Seth. Dr. Seth, and you both have a wonderful, wonderful day and I cannot wait for this to get out in the world more to people to take this and my hope too as a clinician and as a father is that we can really start to bring more healing when we understand what we're really needing in this world, which is to feel safe enough to create safety in our relationships when we
01:05:16
Speaker
come across people in our workplaces or random people on the street, but to really think through how are we embodying this and generating this to kind of have this co-regulation with the world around us. And so thank you for your time. You guys have a wonderful day. Thank you. Thanks for joining and listening today. Please leave a comment and review the show. Dads are tough, but not tough enough to do this fatherhood thing alone.