EP 130: A Polyvagal Approach to Deepening Resilience | Stephen Porges

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Maul, and I'm really thrilled to bring you an episode today with Stephen Porges, who's become a friend and a colleague and who I've interviewed for many of our summits. He's the well known founder of Polyvagal Theory, which is really an amazing window in to really what makes us tick as human beings, both in terms of our individual neurophysiology and individual resilience and well being, but also in terms of the relational field and our collective well being and resilience. Really helping us understand what it takes to really keep our own social engagement systems online so that we're in a relational responsive mode to life rather than getting pushed back into that fear and survival based reactive mode. And then how to interact with others in a way that invites them to have their social engagement systems online such that we can create connection, intimacy, friendship, resolve disputes, and really understanding as well the nature of trauma. He has a great window into understanding trauma and how parts of our nervous system get locked into a fight, flight or freeze response to trauma that then get retriggered by memories, by associations of the five senses and so forth and our system just locks in again to that position of fight, flight or freeze and so really helping us understand the process of healing, the process of deepening our resilience. So give this one a listen. Stephen Porges, he's really one of the leading thinkers today in understanding our neurophysiology, the neurophysiology of relationship and of trauma and healing trauma. Give it a listen.

Fleet Mall and I'm really excited to be here today with Dr. Stephen Porges, the founder of Polyvagal Theory. Welcome Dr. Porges. How are you?

Well, I'm fine and thank you for inviting me. It's good to see you again.

Oh, good to see you again. It's an honor to have you with us again for the summit. You were with us last year and made an incredible contribution to our conversation there. So I want to share a little of your background with our audience. Many of our audience know you very well, but some may not. So Stephen Porges, Ph.D. is a distinguished university scientist at Indiana University where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium in the Kinsey Institute. He is a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and professor emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. He served as president of the Society Study for Psychophysiological Research and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and is a former recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development Award. He is the originator of the polyvagal theory, a theory that emphasizes the importance of physiological state in the expression of behavioral, mental, and health problems related to traumatic experiences. And you're now based in Florida, and are you involved? I think you've made a shift there that may not be reflected in what I just said.

I have all those affiliations, but now I'm doing it through the Internet, and we live in North Florida Oceanfront. So it's during the pandemic. It's been really, I would say, a reasonable thing to do, and we continue our work through the Internet. So I see. I do the research in Indiana, but.

Through colleagues and collaborations.

I see. So same affiliations. You haven't aligned with a university in Florida. You're still with the same affiliations. Okay, so the bio was accurate.

Can't handle any more affiliations.

Okay, well, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. And again, today is really about not only how can we become more resilient and create resilient relationships that can lead to creating resilient communities and a resilient society, but how do we deal with the trauma that can be a real obstacle to resilience. So to begin with, I'd like to, I guess, ask you more of a personal question. We've been through this incredibly daunting year of, you know, 13, 14 months of lockdowns and all the fear associated with.

The pandemic that affects all of us, the danger of getting infected, the danger of losing our lives. We've had also, you know, tumultuous politics with the end of the Trump administration and how that affected the pandemic and everything else. We've had the reckoning with race and the Black Lives Matter movement. And, I mean, it's been. It's hard to really even get a grip on how daunting and challenging, even kind of crazy these last 14 months have been because we're kind of in the middle of it, adapting to it. So, anyway, I'm wondering how it's been for you personally, for your family, for your community, and just what's it been like for you navigating all this?

Well, I think things are different as you get older. When you're younger, you're really looking at opportunities for yourself and for your family and for resources. And they can be very challenging, especially in whatever profession you're in, assuming you have a job. I think what's happened, I'm going to actually paint it in almost a positive attribute. The pandemic is chronic threat to our bodies. It teaches us a lot about who we are and what it is to be a human or a social mammal. I think we forget that we are basically a porous organism where we detect threat in our environment all the time. And when we start talking about social justice, we tend to neglect or ignore the fact that many people live in cultures, or let's say, even neighborhoods, where their bodies don't have the option to relax. It's just not there because it's dangerous. So the pandemic has kind of almost in a stealth way, and maybe not so stealth come into our lives and has really said, hey, you're under threat. You can't see the threat, but you're under threat, and you're under it all time. And if you acknowledge that, you better be vigilant, you better be protective of your family. You better, in a sense, even have the resources necessary to live through the pandemic. Now, for me, when I said that it's different in different stages of one's life, I was no longer in this academic trajectory of getting more grants or more publications. I still publish, I still generate resources, but it doesn't change who I am. My financial situation, my professional situation is firm and unaffected by transitory little bumps in the road. But if you're going up for tenure as myself, my son will be doing shortly, writing grants, doing research, and having a young baby like he does, it flips back in my life 35 to 40 years ago. And you don't have those options of saying, oh, I better relax. I better reduce the demands on my nervous system. You say basically, just stifle what you're feeling because you have to survive. And I think what the pandemic is doing, it's creating functionally disembodied. A disembodied population. So when you brought up all the chaos, the chaos in the world is really a function of a different type of disembodiment. It's where we see ourselves as not attached or connected to others. We have to really come back to our evolutionary roots when we evolved through mammals. Mammals were social relative to totally asocial reptiles. We are on a journey of sociality, a journey of connectedness, a journey of cooperation. And when we're under chronic Threat, our nervous system disrupts this ability to connect with another and we become defensive and self oriented. And you can see this in terms of the politics, you see this in terms of everything that's going on, people's physiology. So if we are aware of who we are on our own sense of feelings, our bodies don't feel safe. We've gotten into states of threat. Threat can be real. But we also have to understand, we have to, in a sense, be true to the theme of the summit. And that is, if your body's in a state of threat, how do you retune it? To be calmer and to be more, have a greater capacity to connect with others? Because our heritage, our evolutionary heritage, is that we connect with others. That is our mechanism of mitigating our threats. And the pandemic has this inside out because people become threat when there's a pandemic. And so we can't engage people the way we used to. And you asked me a probing question. How did I deal with this? Well, it's been really interesting that the Internet has been my social portal. Not a great one, but certainly better than the telephone. I don't take. I tend not to take phone calls. I will talk to people on Zoom I. Because my nervous system says I need a certain amount of social connectedness.

Our evolutionary history is that we have mitigated threat through social interaction. Now I've gotten my vaccinations and I thought they would be almost a transformative moment. Two weeks after, what do I do? I do two things. I go to Costco, I go to a restaurant, I do three things, and the order is not on real priority. Had to go on proximity. Go to a restaurant, went to Costco's, visited my son and saw my granddaughter because they live 90 miles away. And what I realized was all three events were overwhelming to my nervous system. My nervous system now had retuned, and now proximity of people was, we use a term, a stressor in polyvagal theory. Having had the privilege of naming the theory, I also don't like to use the word stress. I'd like to operationalize what we really mean when we say we're stressed. The operationalization of it is that our nervous system is no longer supporting homeostatic function. Our nervous system has shifted into defense states, which are metabolically costly and disruptive to our organs, but in the short term, very useful. But in long terms, caustic, toxic to. We are. But the pandemic, and this is what I'm saying about myself, obviously has retuned my nervous system so that people now, rather than being what I would reach out to, to, to use as a source of CO regulation and in a sense, resilience for myself have become signals to my body, to my nervous system of threat and they're overwhelming.

I just think it's so important that we're all aware of what you're talking about because we're in this conundrum of where probably our primary source for resilience and safety is through CO regulation. And now we have greater obstacles to that than ever. I mean, as you were talking, I'm thinking of every now and then I go to the grocery store mostly. Well, initially, usually my wife and I were going together. Now she mostly goes. But.

Going down the aisle and avoiding people seeing somebody, oh, that aisle's kind of blocked. I can't get through there quick or even out walking in our neighborhood. And we have, we live in a small New England town, so it's relatively safe to get out and walk outside. But you know, you see people coming. Okay, are they wearing masks? Aren't they wearing masks? I'm going to avoid them. I'm going to go down this side. I'm going to go. I mean, we've seen the average other person on the street or in the store as a potential enemy. I mean, that is huge.

Yeah.

And people, rather than smiling when they walk by, turn their head away. Which triggers to our own physiology of being marginalized and being rejected and our bodies misinterpreted. And there's a whole socialization process. I can't even imagine what's happened in the families who have been since forced to self quarantine. And they don't like each other, they don't get along. And we have to acknowledge that most family units are not the most supportive or warm ones. And a lot of children are under chronic threat in their own homes.

Yes.

And I see that as a second pandemic. The consequences of homeschooling, which is not the homeschooling per se, it's the isolation from being able to co regulate with peers. So all of us on this webinar realized that we didn't necessarily co regulate with our parents. We co regulate with our friends. And that's what friends were for. They had similar experiences or they had a empathy of experiences like we were going through.

Absolutely. And I mean, there's something so much going on, even just the tragic increase in the number of these mass killings. And you know, every time one of those happens now because they're becoming commonplace somewhere in our brain, we're going, that could have been me. I mean, when the one happened in Colorado recently that King Supers, I'd shop there many. I used to live there. I had been in that King Supers many, many, many times. So people are having that kind of vicarious trauma experience or secondary trauma, and it's just everywhere. And what you said before, a lot of people pointed to some of the silver linings, you know, possibly in this pandemic, at least we're all going through this experience together. Although there's a great diversity of its impact that has to do with privilege and a lot of injustices.

What we're learning to do on Zoom is beneficial, and maybe we'll move into some hybrid as we get out of the pandemic things. But hopefully one silver lining might be that those of us who are more privileged could begin to develop some empathy and even just some awareness around the fact that many people in our world and different cultures and here in the US and different zip codes and neighborhoods live like this all the time, under threat all the time.

I think what the pandemic has taught me, it actually enabled me to walk into the world of those who have been traumatized and their nervous systems have been retuned. What has the pandemic taught us? It teaches us the same thing that people who have survived trauma have learned, and that is the most important thing, is your relationships with other. And that's why people who have survived trauma are in therapy or they want. They have the vision of what it is like to be hugged, to be in proximity, to trust. And this is really the core of who we are as humans. Our core is to be passionate, compassionate, benevolent, and to be in proximity of others. We didn't evolve to be isolates. And being an isolate for many mammals, including humans, but not necessarily humans alone, isolation is the worst possible thing. So we learn what's important. We learned that acquiring stuff is nice, having enough resource. But that's not what is hurting during the pandemic. What's hurting is our opportunities to involve other people in our regulation of who we are. In a sense, what we have to acknowledge is during this evolutionary journey in which mammals became a social species, what that really meant was through sociality, they regulate their physiology. Embedded in this summit, you're using the word resilience. Resilience is really that recovery of homeostatic function and resilience, even if you start peeling apart the various layers, resilience is always going to be related to whether a person can be social because Part of the goals of being a resilient individual is that you can be welcoming and accessible to others.

Well, that was my next question. I want to get into polyvagal theory.

And more. Prior to that, I really wanted to ask you, what does resilience mean to you, which is the subject of our summit? And how do we develop the individual, collective, systemic resilience we need to navigate this ever, ever more daunting world that we're in. And so you just gave us a definition of resilience. Can you speak about resilience as an individual capacity? I mean, religion shows up in the relational field, as you were describing, but is it a latent capacity? Can you talk about it as a state of resilience we can access, as well as a trade of resilience that we somehow have or could train up to have more, more of?

I get really concerned when people want to train things.

Especially from a polyvagal perspective, because one of the lessons from a polyvagal perspective is the state your physiology is in creates the, let's say, the neurophysiological platforms for different categories of emerging behaviors. So if your body's mobile, mobilized, it's very easy to become aggressive. If your body is calm and they sense feeling safe, you're accessible. If your body is under eminent danger or imminent life threat, you try to disappear whether you're successful or not. Sometimes you reflexively dissociate. So our nervous system tries to do the best thing it can for who we are. And when we get into this concept of resilience, I would basically, I want to kind of reframe the whole concept for a moment. So we don't, in a sense, force people into thinking they have to learn to be resilient. They really have to learn, I can use that word to experience safety. We can say, can you be calm? Or if a person is as tightly wrapped and mobilized and you tell them, come on, relax. Does it work?

No.

Their body is too smart to listen to you because their body is in a state of threat. So the question is, how do you talk to the body and not to those higher brain structures which are already blaming the body for not, in a sense, doing the right thing, or since I'm feeling things you shouldn't feel, get over those feelings. And most of us have gone through a, essence, a social educational process. We can call it socialization, but it's truly an educational process of not acknowledging our bodily feelings. So in a sense, becoming disembodied. The consequence, of course, is all these.

Visceral problems, primarily gut and cardiovascular. But when the gut is screaming to be acknowledged, it's telling individuals you're in life threats. You know, it's really safe. So when the kid is in gastric pain, doesn't want to go to school, you say, ah, get over it. You know, I'll drive you there. I'll walk you up the steps. If it's in the gut, it's really at this level of, of a nervous system that is detecting life threat. Now, it doesn't mean that you detect life threat. It doesn't even mean that your consciousness or your awareness says this is a frightening place. Your body, I would say metaphorically, has a mind of its own, and it's coming through through different cues. But we, like all other vertebrates, have a nervous system that has this capacity, and I call it neuroception to detect threat. And when it detect threats, it reorganizes or retunes its physiological state to support defensive behaviors. But unlike all other vertebrates, we have a pathway of neuroception to cues of safety. And the model of that comes from what does a good mother or an adequate mother do? When a baby's crying, she uses a prosodic voice with gestures. And so the intonation of voice, the presence of the person, triggers reflexively, in the physiology of a crying baby, calmness. Now, when there are babies that are fussy and difficult and don't respond to that calmness, often parents get really, I would say, disillusioned and upset because the reciprocity is not there. But the model of dealing with a fussy, irritable baby is the same thing of dealing with a client or friend who is experiencing chronic threat. And we have to see that in their body, the nervous system is moving to that state. And how do we provide unconditional cues to support that and not respond to the rigidity, the fussiness, which may, as you get older, turn into irritability and tantrums and basically interpret those behaviors as if they're intentionally being expressed to hurt us. We have this very complicated relationship with other people's behavior, not our own. With other people's behavior. We see everything as being intentional with our own. You know, we can act out because that's what we should be doing. Our narratives will support whatever we do. But our narratives are not always correct. Our narratives create the justification. But we can be like in, during the pandemic, irritable and anxious as hell because everything is disrupted in our lives. And then we'll start saying that it's the Spouse, that's the problem, or the child's the problem, or the people who look at you or don't look at you when you go shopping. So we create a narrative that makes us feel more consistent with who we think we are without understanding these very simple cues that our body interprets, reacts. And then we unfortunately try to make sense of it. That's why concepts like mindfulness and meditation are useful, because they get the evaluation out and we can become better observers of ourselves and especially our own bodily feelings.

Well, I'm glad you pointed to that because you're pointing to this complex landscape, the impact, the very powerful impact of our very early formative years. And then our tendencies to self justify our own narratives and project onto other people our assumptions about intention and motivation and everything. That's a very complex set of things that sets us up for a lot of suffering. But you brought up awareness practices that can help us begin to see that and maybe untangle things a little bit. And so before you said you weren't keen about the idea of training up resilience, but you talked about learning to experience safety, learning perhaps to be calmer. And that sounds like self regulation, learning to self regulate. And I would assume there's something we. I want to get into the territory of CO regulation in a minute, but I would assume, if my logic's not faulty here, that people who have a greater capacity for self regulation are going to do a better job at CO.

Regulation, I would actually reverse it. I think we miss the important maturational fact that the baby is born without really good self regulatory capacity. And so our evolutionary and our maturation mandate is CO regulation precedes self regulation. And in fact, when we are, well, co regulated, it creates this mental template of love and trust in the world we're in. And that creates visualizations that carry us through life. With the tough love model where you try to force even a child to self regulate, you're basically undermining the substrate that will give them the boldness and the security to move on. So in my mind, CO regulation is what it is to be a human and it's at the core. And I'm going to actually unfold this on another level. Let's think about humans as a social species that really want to be CO regulated, want to feel safe in the presence of others, want to be hugged, want to hug others, want to be benevolent, but they have wrappers around them and those wrappers create the defenses because the society is dangerous. So much of the instruction is don't be your true self, you'll be injured. And so if you want to talk about learning, it's taking a sense becoming hyper aware or misreading intentionality of others in the sense that other people are there to exploit you. Therefore you have to take care of yourself. And our core is really saying something else. It's saying that our co regulation, our capacity to connect with others is our strength. I want to flip this into one other point which I kind of missed, but it goes back to your point of the times that we're living in, the times that we're living in are really violations of expectancy at every moment. All the jolts, the issue of the pandemic, it's not the virus, it's the uncertainty about the virus that was so disruptive. And even the messaging from the government about how to deal with the virus. And the messaging is better, but it's still not where it should be. The messaging should be, this is how we do it. This is who we are.

We're around you.

We're going to be in a sense monitoring. And instead what we get is that a reactivity that you take away our rights. And as opposed to you're loving us and you're helping us go through a difficult point in time. So violation of expectancy to our nervous system is a threat.

And in fact, the basis of humor and, let's say, play and positive excitement is often violation of expectancy. Within safe environments. You can think about Peekapoo with the mother and a baby. It's frightening for the baby to lose eye contact and connection with the mother, but it's repaired. And it's a neural exercise saying we can violate this, but you're in a safe environment. And this gets even extrapolated to teenagers and young people who go on roller coasters. So I'm going to jump out of a window, but you can sit next to me and I'm not going to get hurt, but I'll have the visceral feeling of it. It's going to be really exciting and exuberant. So I have guardrails on these biological feelings and they're not driving me nuts. But we, in a sense, create these experiences so that we can live through all the feelings of our body without moving into chronic states of threat. And so if I remove in my language the word stress and talk about bodily reactions to threat, and that bodily reactions to threat on a neurophysiological level interfere with homeostatic functions, meaning health, growth and restoration, then you have the explanation why chronic stress has all These comorbidities, all these issues in the gut and.

The heart and in our body.

And it means that we have to change our view of what it is to be healthy and our view of how to create health. And so medicine has to in a sense, incorporate a mind and a brain in conceptualization. Or I like to say on the simplest level, a unifying nervous system that is both in the head, in the body, that talks, they go, is communicating from body to brain and brain to body. So in a type of co regulation and connectedness within that, then that enables that organism us to co regulate with other people.

Ah, well, that last point you made maybe gives me a doorway into. By the way, I want to read a quote from your colleague, Dr. Vessel Vaniculk, who's also going to, we're going to have a conversation with him today. He said polyvagal theory helped us understand why attuning with another person can shift us out of disorganized and fearful stress states. In short, Porges theory makes us look beyond the effects of fight or flight and put social relationships front and center in our understanding of trauma. It also suggests new approaches to healing and that focus on strengthening the body's system for regulating arousal. So the body system for regulating arousal sounds a lot like resilience to me. And I'm curious so because I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking ultimately my mind is going towards strategies, right, of how do we develop a more resilient society, how do we become more resilient? And clearly there's ways we can do that through CO regulation. And I think there's. Polyvagal theory has so much to add to that conversation. But I'm also thinking of the ways that we can, in self compassionate ways, not through tough love, but in self compassionate ways, learn to self regulate. And in a sense, is there an inner corregulation? Because I'll just have theory I've had. Isolation is not good for human beings, right? I work a lot in the criminal justice system. You put people in isolation, at least in mental illness. But for millennia human beings have voluntarily put themselves in isolation. The yogis, the hermits and so forth, and thrives. And my theory about that has been, you know, we know that even if you isolate a cell of any kind, a plant cell, an animal cell, it will not thrive, it'll actually die by itself. Cells co regulate with other cells, vibrate resident with other cells. We as human beings, so are those yogis or anybody else who can develop that capacity, learning to somehow co regulate within themselves and create some kind of inner coherence that sustains something that normally we sustain or maybe most effectively sustained to our social relationships.

You put a lot into that phrase.

Let's go back to this issue of regulating arousal. The system in the part of our nervous system that regulates all our defenses is what I call in polyvagal theory, the social engagement system. It's the linkage between a newer branch of the vagus, the ventral vagus, and the muscles and nerves that regulate the face and head. So it's our social communication system that sends cues or helps exercise vagal regulation of the heart and vice versa. The vagal regulation of the heart is projected in the intonation of our voice and in our facial expression. So we have this connectedness. So if you want to go into ancient wisdom, well, they talked about chance and breath, so they were creating this inner resonance, the term you were using, or coherence between mental state and physiological state. Now, the other part of this journey, so the journey is we have onboard tools that are there for us to regulate our physiological state. But the social engagement system requires cues from others to be most efficiently used. So it needs a smile, a nod, and engagement. If you're engaging me even on the Internet, and I turn my head and pick up my cell phone, and then I say to you, keep talking. I can hear what you're saying. Does your body feel that I am listening to you, that I'm witnessing you?

No.

Our bodies know, but our society kind of lies to us. It's saying, forget what I'm, you know, forget. Listen to what I am saying, not how I am saying it. How I am saying it is the intonation of my voice, which is physiological. What I am saying are words that you learned. And our nervous system interprets language differently than it does interpret intonation of voice. Intonation of voice is very, very old in the evolution of mammals. Language is very, very new. So we, as we, our primitive system says, talk to me nicely.

And our new system says, it doesn't matter how you talk, Just use the right words. And you start getting this disconnect because our bodies are saying, well, words are nice, but it's how you are engaging in accounts. And we can go back to the issue about the pandemic. And this is part of what we've been stripped from. We've been stripped from this opportunity to be in proximity and feel safe with others.

The part that we're always going to focus on is, can someone be trained to become more resilient? And I would kind of reframe that whole statement by saying we can learn to be more aware of our physiological state. We can learn to honor it. We can learn to understand what these states are good for or what they can help us in including and how to in a sense, constrain them. So we can get our mobilization defense system moving, but we can constrain it with social interaction and we call that play. So if we in a sense exercise without social interaction, we may in fact be exercising our aggression system. But if we exercise or play a team sport, or play with someone in a sporting event, we're making eye contact and using voice, and we're having a wonderful time. And with adults, this movement and facial expression becomes dancing the dance. All the metaphors are still there. It's reciprocity in movement and reciprocity in expression.

So you use a term in terms of talking about having access and being able to bring on our social engagement system for co regulation and safety and connection.

Use a term called vagal tone. And you talk about both the dorsal and ventral branches of the vagus nerve and how one has a lot. I think one has a lot to it to freeze response. One has more to do with our social engagement response. The term vagal tone, when I first heard it, I thought that implies like, oh yeah, good vagal tone. But I guess vagal tone could be the positive or negative. But it's something about physiological response of your vagus nerve. Right?

Well, let's unpack it a little bit. And because the degree that this vagal pathway, where this part of the brain stem that is traveling or providing information through a pathway of the vagus to our heart is often giving us a measure of how much the brain stem is calming us down. And in general, people have more vagal tone, more this ventral vagal activity coming being manifested in the heart rate itself, which can be measured in terms of oscillations or heart rate variability, people who have more of it tend to be more resilient.

It's like, say you have more of a resource.

You can pull the brake off and you can put it back on. And the issue is really a simple metaphor. The metaphor is that if you have high vagal tone, your heart rate, your ambient heart rate is much lower than its intrinsic heart rate. Intrinsic heart rate is, if I cut the nerves off, what's my heart beating? And it's going to be beating much faster than most people's heart rate, because the intrinsic heart rate of our pacemaker on our heart is between 90 and 120 beats. Per minute. Now, if you're walking around with the heart rate of 120, you're going to say something is drastically wrong with you. But there are many people who walk around with heart rates in the high 80s.

And some people walk around in low 60s or high 50s. And the issue is, if you have high vagal inhibition on your pacemaker, you have high vagal tone. And it means I can pull that vagal tone off and my heart rate will go up 20 beats per minute really rapidly, and I'll have all that energy to move. But when I sit down again, the brake can come immediately back on because it's a tightly regulated neural circuit with nerves that are myelinated and work very fast and very efficiently. So when you have high vagal tumor, you tend to have a more regulated autonomic nervous system, meaning that you can take the brake off and you can rapidly put it back on. I developed another measurement called vagal efficiency, which basically tells you how efficiently your heart rate changes. By taking a break off, you can have a powerful break. But it may be.

And what this is saying how efficient does when I lift the brake off, how rapidly does my heart rate change? And when I put it back on, does it immediately slow down? That I think is close to what you mean by resilience. It's the resource to react, but the resource to rapidly recover and to calm. And these words recover, we're saying to calm because we don't calm that physiology. The cues of an activated physiology to.

Our brain is that of mobilization, which.

May mean fight, flight and aggression. And you may already know people that they're great as long as you talk to them in the morning, but by the afternoon, if you interact with them, stay away from that. Or if a person walks up a flight of steps, don't talk to them because they're going to be very reactive. They may be totally unaware that their behavior is being driven by that physiology, but you're seeing that behavior as a reflection that they have little resilience.

There does seem to be a real connection here between bagel tone resilience and either pro social antisocial behaviors and all.

The rest of of it.

So what lends itself.

To high vagal tone other than genetics and early childhood formation? I mean, by the time we're adults, we all, we got what we got genetically and from our childhood. Are there ways that we can develop greater.

I think, okay, let's, let's kind of wipe the slate plume for a moment because what you're in sense espousing is what we've been taught.

And that is we're literally taught.

A less than optimistic portrayal of who we are, A less than optimistic empowerment or giving agency to who we are. We do have certain limitations. But from my perspective, our job is to optimize what we have and not to in a sense say that we're deficient, but to say what can I do with what I have? And to treat the self again in almost a non evaluative model, saying I have been given this, I have this. Even if I were injured or had some disruption in my early development, this is who I am. I'm really proud and grateful for who I am now. My job is how do I optimize it? Not how do I fix it, how do I optimize it? So the narrative is a different narrative. It's not I'm broken, I need to be fit. It's a smile and say this is who I am. How can I make it the best that it could be? How can I in a sense have a successful journey of being in my own body? And when we start looking at it that way, we realize the first thing is to understand that what appears to be a temperament or genetic thing appears is often really a reflection of bodies being in states of chronic threat. So I'm going to flip this all the way back to the social justice movement and also what the pandemic has taught us. It's taught us that racial injustice is a pre existing condition. This is part of what Covid has taught us. So we actually did a study during the pandemic, it's a published study and we asked people about their adversity history. We asked them about mental health symptoms and worry symptoms during the pandemic. We also asked them about their physiological state using what I call the Body Perception Questionnaire, which is a surrogate for putting electrodes on people telling you about how their visceral systems are reacting. Well, the first finding is almost obvious that as great your adversity history and more symptomatology on mental health and psychological teachers are happy during the pandemic. And this fits into the whole issue of social justice because people of diversity are often living in environments that aren't safe. They're environments of adversity. However, the study showed something that I thought was more remarkable and that is first we all the variants, all the predictive variants of adversity history was accounted for by the state that their autonomic nervous system was enduring the pandemic, meaning that the adversity, if it retuned the autonomic nervous system to be more threat oriented, more hypervigilant in the environment. Outcomes were bad. And I think this is really the issue with the higher risk in diversity groups of death and disease. And people say, oh, it's because of obesity, it's because of poor medical care. Well, they can contribute to it as well. But really it's all about bodies in states of threat that results in a retuning of the autonomic nervous system. And the outcomes are extremely predictable because if the body's in chronic states of defense, it can't support health growth and restoration. It can't even fight off the virus.

Well, that makes a lot of sense for a lot of things. And by the way, in my effort to try to evolve, think about how can we become more resilient or learn or treat. I apologize. Now being clear, I'm presupposing we do that in self accepting, self compassionate ways.

But what you're talking about, I work a lot with public safety professionals, corrections, probation and parole police, and the levels of comorbidity in that profession, the incredibly dire health outcomes that because of extremely high stress profession with a lot of trauma, exposure. You could associate some of it with the unhealthy coping mechanisms of, you know, substance abuse or diet or different things, but it doesn't tell the whole story. There's gotta be something underlying that is really creating the extremes of comorbidity. Because actually there's data that shows that correctional officers that work in a medium to high security facilities sort of on the tier with prisoners for 20 years or more, have a life expectancy as low as 59 years, two decades less than a general population.

I think this is a remarkable.

Observation and literally a real life learning platform or experiment. And before we went live, I was telling you that when I was in graduate school I worked as a correctional officer. And there are some things when you talk about what happens to correctional officers, I started to, I was thinking back to when I was in my early 20s and had this job. And it's about your great desire to use co regulation, meaning connectedness, language, relationship with the prisoners. And that's something you should never do and you should never do for multiple reasons. And that is prisoners are often queuing on you to manipulate you to get something brought in for them. Then they own you because you now violate the law. So it's a different game that people who are not, let's say, sophisticated in the prison system know how to deal with. And the issue is when you're talking about lifelong or career correctional officers. They have gone through an adjustment of being a correctional officer which is now to separate themselves, their essence, core capacity to co regulate and to connect with the prisoners, to thinking of them as something distinctly different, literally a different species, how they're reacting to them. They get fed, they get in a sense in safe environments, they're caged. There's a whole variety of things that the prison or correctional officer is doing to ensure that the prisoners are safe, but also ensuring that he doesn't connect with them, doesn't in a sense develop those human bonds. Of course some.

Correctional officers do and some are capable of doing that without violating relationships. But the part that I'm really listening to you on is the fact that if I were in a profession in which my day to day working was not allowing me to connect because in connecting I am literally becoming more vulnerable and also could potentially lose my job. I am creating a set of operational rules to live in this, this quote, lockdown or very narrow environment. And it's changing, it's retuning my autonomic nervous system so that my autonomic nervous system is not accessible, I'm not safe, I'm in a hypervigilant state. And the consequences is that the neuroregulation of my organs is turned off. And we're calling that toxic stress. But it really is saying my body's under a state of chronic threat.

And I think there's a lot of parallels, as you've been saying, between that what we're all experiencing in this pandemic, interestingly among correctional officers, what we see is even in their peer culture where they could have supportive relationships, they may create some support, but they create a lot of toxicity in that peer culture as well. And then late in career they often begin to isolate even from their own peer culture, which then is a real risk, sign of suicidality and so forth, forth. And so, you know, we're, we're kind of all re attuning in that way. So how, how do we begin to shift that, how do we retune ourselves towards co regulation and, and the sense that yes, I can get my needs met through co regulating with my fellow human beings.

Well, I think the first thing is to be a good observer of oneself.

So realizing that if you start to create a justification, a narrative that justifies anything that you're doing, stop, you're already, you're gone. You have to in a sense go back and say how do I feel in this environment? Now you might not feel good, but you might not have options. So in a sense, we can't say, if you don't feel good in this environment, you move to another, you take a different job. Not everyone has that luxury of flexibility. So you start saying, well, I don't feel great in this environment, and this is what's going on in my body. But I do know, and this is the toolkit model that you really were asked for earlier. I know there are certain pathways that will make my body feel better, and that is a certain amount of social interaction with people that I like and I trust. And then even tools like breathing exercises where I learn to exhale slowly or chant. These are literally portals to regulate that vagal circuit, the social engagement circuit. So we start learning that we can literally do some exercises to nourish our nervous system sufficiently that it will have, in your terms, the resilience to spend those six to eight hours in environments.

That may not be nourishing.

Well, you know, actually what we see in our, what we call our mindfulness based wellness and resiliency programs for correctional officers and other public safety officials and first responders, the three things they're saying again and again that they most appreciate in the program. One is simple breath regulation tools for self regulation. The second is we teach a mindful communication module. It helps them understand the dynamics of drama and how we get sucked into it and how we can not, how we can get unhooked from it. So empowering them to not have to be involved in all the pure drama that's around them all the time. And then the third thing that they find probably most valuable at all, because part of the program is being in these small community practice circles with their peers for a period of 10 weeks, groups of about 10 that are facilitated and being able to have genuine conversations with their peers for the first time in their career in a safe environment, it usually takes two or three sessions before they open up with each other. Because it's an environment which there's very little trust between peers, between management line staff, between the offenders or the prisoners. It's a complete environment of distrust. So once they get in there and they realize they can sit in that circle and have genuine safe conversations with their peers, they just find that transformative.

Yeah, well, you can see that that is, it's transformative and it's, of course, therapeutic, but it's also a neural exercise. What's going on is that their physiology is moving out of states of defense. And you can see on the level of interaction, they're becoming accessible, which means that they now become sources of co regulation for others. So they start building the strength of the unit by being able to interact with each other.

I'd like to kind of ask you a question as we begin to bring our conversation to a close about where we are as a society. And we're seeing so much evidence of dysregulation. You know, whether it's, you know, just everything that's going on with the pandemic, but all the social unrest as we try to deal with the difficult legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and racism, the mass shootings, which, you know, we tend to want to isolate and say, well, there must be a bad person, but they're actually just another symptom of social dysregulation. All these, you know, things are out of whack. And how do I, what, where do you feel are the leverage points for us to begin to try to co create.

A safer, more resilient society together going forward in a face of challenges that may not let up anytime soon?

First of all, again, we're learning so much.

Both during the pandemic and during the.

Societal unrest, we learned that really people don't want retribution. They want to have a voice. A voice is meaning that I'm real without a voice, were marginalized and were angry. The Black Lives Matters is really an important point because it's really the product of decades of patience and yet the voice is beginning to be heard. And it's hard to believe, at least from my perspective, because, you know, I've watched the civil rights movement from the very, I would say early in 1960, I was picketing Woolworths lunch counter and you know, that was a northern city in sympathy. What was going on? And that's, you know, 60 years ago. And you start asking your question, why haven't these things changed? And the answer is the voice needs to be heard. And let's hope it continues to be heard. And that it's not the argument. The voice is being heard because we want retribution. The voice is being heard as I want to be a human being, I want the rights of being present. And I think we have a cultural learning process to go through. And that is people want to be acknowledged. It doesn't mean they want our stuff. They want you to say they are human beings and we are so stuff oriented. We think that power is resource. And again, I have learned so much from the pandemic and that is that resource is irrelevant during the pandemic. Resource above a certain level, I think there's a social net that's important for resource during the pandemic. But we realize that our relationships are important. The most important things even in the world. The real quote, real world where everything is kind of graded on eliteness or prestige, whether it's numbers of dollars or numbers of publications, size of grants. All these things are indexes that have nothing to do with what makes us really feel good. We feel good when we are heard and when we co regulate with others. So having a voice is part of who we are. Connecting with others is part of who we are. We have forgotten what our real biological mandate is. It's not survival of the strongest. The fittest is really those who cooperate and collaborate and connect.

Yeah, there's a lot of evidence to show that's why we're such a successful species. As not been because we're the strongest, tallest, fastest, but because we're the most social.

So yeah, from what I'm hearing you say, you know, if. If we all want to create a more sustainable human society on this planet and one that can live in proper relationship with the earth and with each other, we just need as many people as possible just to. To feel heard, to feel felt, to feel seen, to feel valued. The more people that feel that way, the more our whole social structures can calm down and naturally kind of regulate within our social systems.

On a positive level, I think if we find our home back in our body and become more embodied, we become.

Who we really are.

And that is this compassionate, connected species, the social species. That's who we are. We, we're not that type of species. When we're in a state of threat, we basically become more primitive, more defensive. We lose our. The gifts that evolved with us, which was a gift to be cooperative, to connect.

Yeah. I often commented and had been some. You know, when you think of what most human beings do every day around the world, despite all our problems, most human beings are pretty well behaved and cooperative and partnering. As long as we have some confidence, our basic needs can be met and we're not threatened and we behave really quite beautifully as human beings.

Yeah, I think it's remarkable. I mean all we need to do is look in our communities and we're not in a police state and people tend to be extraordinarily respectful for others and those who are not, I mean they don't really. They. Okay, so the pandemic is another point where we can see people who adamantly refuse to wear masks and are actually disruptors and particularly viral spreaders. That is assault. And our bodies should react to those types of people. The same way that we would exclude a person who is physically aggressive to us.

Yeah, well, that's a political note to end on. Well, let's.

Let's end on the positive note. The positive note is that we are really quite a remarkable species that has in. Basically embedded in the species, in ourselves, is this desire to connect and to be benevolent and generous to others.

Absolutely, absolutely. And we actually get all kinds of neurobiological rewards for doing so. If all we have to do is kind of help massage the conditions in.

The right direction, all we have to do is one, be respectful that when our bodies go into states of threat, we have lost our capacity to love and care for others and realize that our bodies are really on this journey, this quest for cues of safety that will enable us to become accessible. And when we take that model, then the world becomes this really beautiful place.

Beautiful.

That's a great place to finish our conversation. Thank you so much, Dr. Ford. This has been fascinating and I know this is going to lead to a lot of really valuable and deep conversations. There's just we could have gone in so many directions with all this. But really rich and very valuable. Thank you so much.

Well, you're quite welcome. Please.

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