Polyvagal Theory: A Science of Safety

Presented by Stephen Porges, PhD

This webinar was presented live on Wednesday April 3rd, 2024 at 4pm US Eastern time. Through the kindness of the presenter, a recording of the webinar is available here.

Stephen W. Porges

This month’s webinar was a fascinating interactive Q&A session with Dr. Stephen Porges, which was facilitated by Lise Johnson. If you were able to participate in the live session you were very fortunate but if you could not attend, the recording will appear here shortly. We encourage you to take a look at the Polyvagal Institute’s website and the resources provided there. The following is a summary of the themes covered by Dr. Porges in the webinar:

Contemporary strategies for health and wellbeing fail our biological needs by not acknowledging that feelings of safety emerge from internal physiological states regulated by the autonomic nervous system.  By respecting our need to feel safe as a biological response, we respect our phylogenetic heritage and elevate sociality as a neuromodulator that functionally provides the scientific validation for a societal focus on promoting opportunities to experience feelings of safety and co-regulation. Polyvagal theory explains how experiences of adversity may retune our nervous system to respond to friends, caregivers, and teachers as if they were enemies. Moreover, the theory explains how signals of safety reverse these challenges by optimizing autonomic state to promote homeostatic processes that support health, growth, restoration, resilience, and sociality.

Professor Stephen W. Porges, PhD is a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He has published more than 400 peer‐reviewed scientific papers that have been cited in more than 50,000 peer-reviewed papers and holds several patents involved in monitoring and regulating autonomic state. He created the Polyvagal Theory and a music-based intervention (Safe and Sound Protocol™), which is currently used by approximately 3,000 therapists to reduce hearing sensitivities, improve language processing, and increase spontaneous social engagement.  He is author of several books including The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation (Norton, 2011), The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Norton, 2017), and Polyvagal Safety (Norton, 2021), as well as co-author with Seth Porges of Our Polyvagal World: How Safety and Trauma Change Us (Norton, 2023), and co-editor with Deb Dana of Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory: The Emergence of Polyvagal-Informed Therapies (Norton, 2018). Dr. Porges is co-creator with Anthony Gorry of Polyvagal Music™, and a founder of the Polyvagal Institute.

A recording of the webinar is available here.