Polyvagal Theory is Dead. Now What?

Wayfinding In The Dark

Polyvagal Theory has been the darling of body-mind practitioners in recent years, being taught in everything from yoga teacher trainings to psychology graduate programs—especially those focused on trauma informed care.

However, a recent paper authored by thirty-nine of the world’s leading experts on autonomic nervous system control, physiology, anatomy and evolution of the vagus nerve just dropped a nuclear bomb into the middle of this theory.

Their assessment?

It’s not ambiguous. These experts aren’t debating controversial details or offering suggestions for nitpicky refinement. The conclusion was unanimous.

Polyvagal Theory is untenable.

Meaning: it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny—and that’s important. (More on why below.)

If you’re a practitioner who has built any part of your work around PVT, this probably lands somewhere between disorienting and devastating.

I know, because I’m one of you.

How Polyvagal Theory Changed My Work

PVT gave me a much-craved neurophysiological explanation for the body-mind connection—and the ensuing results I witnessed in my clients from body-based interventions.

I learned about polyvagal theory and the nervous system at a Somatic Experiencing training circa 2017. I’d encountered it before and was familiar with the general ideas. But when it was explained in the context of nervous system regulation and trauma healing, it hit different. PVT mapped cleanly onto what I observed clinically—and not just in my human clients.

I also saw these patterns in my horses.

That was the piece that clinched it for me. Humans can—and do—tell themselves stories about what’s happening. We are prone to psychologically BS-ing ourselves into believing something is going on when it really isn’t. We can play “the good polyvagal client” to please our practitioner.

But animals have no such agenda. Something either works for them, or it doesn’t. And with my horses, PVT seemed to explain their responses perfectly.

As I moved from hands-on work into teaching nervous system regulation, I grounded my teaching in what my own mentors taught me about PVT. I leaned on it as the framework for understanding the mammalian stress response in my own programs, in presentations to students in other programs, and as a speaker.

It was the map I had. And it seemed like a good one with science and citations behind it.

Cracks In the Foundation

A 2021 article titled “RIP Polyvagal Theory” emerged online and rapidly circulated among somatic practitioners. For me, the article caused severe consternation. Was everything that I’d been taught bunk?

I tried to tease apart the arguments but found myself lost in the weeds of scientific jargon. It seemed to me like a lot of in-fighting—one scientist challenging another on the validity of his theory and lifelong work.

After reading the article and much of the commentary, I was left feeling like I didn’t know what was really true. Rather than throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, I continued to use PVT as a framework, but with caveats.

I told my students: this is the map we have right now, but understand that research is still evolving.

Well, the research has evolved. And now we know.

Why didn’t I ditch PVT immediately? Partly because I’ve learned to hold science loosely. It’s one data point in a lived experience.

There is a long history of the scientific community railing against legitimate but novel findings. For example, in the mid-19th century, doctors rejected the idea of washing their hands before delivering babies despite evidence that showed it reduced maternal mortality. They were offended by the idea that they were somehow “dirty” and that their unwashed hands were killing patients.

Science gets things wrong—sometimes catastrophically. And sometimes people dig into their confirmation bias rather than update their frameworks. I figured the truth would out eventually.

But there’s another reason I didn’t immediately abandon PVT, and it’s the more important one.

I’ve Been Here Before

Before I taught body-based nervous system regulation, I spent fifteen years working hands-on with clients in a clinical bodywork practice. I had trained in a modality called “Rolfing” in the early 2000s. At the time, we were taught that applying pressure to the body was “breaking up” adhesions in the fascia, which was why people experienced less pain and greater mobility after a session.

Fast forward a decade or so and we had solid research that in fact we were not breaking up adhesions in fascia. This extremely strong tissue is far too tough to be mechanically altered or “released” through manual therapy or stretching.

And yet, the work worked. I saw it every day. It was a weekly occurrence to hear from clients that I was “working miracles.” (Very kind. I didn’t buy into that.) The intervention was real, but the explanation for how it worked was wrong.

And so I learned. I updated the map as I went—learning about mechanoreceptors in fascia, the nervous system’s response to sensory stimulus, the role of interoception. The updated understanding was richer and more helpful than the original.

My work didn’t die in the light. It was enhanced.

So when PVT started cracking, I recognized the pattern. I was willing to update the map again. I just didn’t know yet what the accurate map looked like.

Now I do. Or at least, I know what it doesn’t look like.

What The Paper Actually Says (And Why It’s Good News)

Here’s the critical distinction, and it’s the thing I want every person reading this to understand:

The states are real. The mechanism is wrong.

Psychological safety, social engagement, co-regulation, emotional freezing, dissociation — these are real phenomena, supported by decades of research that predate PVT. They come from attachment theory, trauma research, and somatic practices. The paper’s authors explicitly state that body-mind therapeutic methods “may confer benefits on their own.”

So the work stands.

What doesn’t is the specific neuroanatomical story Porges constructed to explain these states, i.e. what drives them. This is the now-familiar three-tier hierarchy: dorsal vagal shutdown, ventral vagal social engagement, sympathetic activation.

Porges got the clinical observations right—or rather, he built upon clinical observations that were already well-established. But the mechanism is wrong.

Concerningly, Porges continued to assert that mechanism for thirty years, even as the evidence mounted against it, and apparently misrepresenting and distorting the work of other scientists to support his claims. Rather than engage with criticism of his theory, Porges ignored the overwhelming scientific consensus and instead promoted this inaccurate framework as sound, misleading practitioners and clients alike.

There is good news in all this mess—for clinicians at least. What you observe in your clients is real. Hyper-arousal is real. The need for safety and co-regulation is real. People really do dissociate, numb, and freeze when overwhelmed. Your interventions still work. They just don’t work for the reasons PVT said they did.

What Now?

Where do we go from here? At this point, we need to unravel the threads of PVT and reorient ourselves toward sound science that will continue to guide our heartfelt interventions.

None of us are in this work to mislead our clients—nor ourselves. We genuinely crave an understanding of the mechanisms at play. I know that for myself, understanding why things work the way that they do allows me to be more effective as a practitioner. It gives me confidence in my work—in my ability to actually help people rather than offer just “random release.”

At this point, we need to cultivate a new understanding of the mechanisms behind our clinical observations. I don’t yet know of anyone who has a cohesive map, and that’s okay. We’ll chart one together.

The paper’s final recommendation is that practitioners “reorient and consider other already existing, as well as novel, psychophysiological explanations that are in line with modern conceptions and evidence regarding autonomic regulation of bodily functions.”

That’s what I’m doing. I’m reaching out to researchers in interoception, embodied cognition, and autonomic regulation. I’m updating my curriculum. I’m reading and re-reading the work of people like Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose constructed emotion theory offers a far more nuanced and evidence-based account of how our bodies and minds create emotional experience together.

I’m not going to pretend this isn’t disorienting. Losing an anchoring theory shakes something in your core. It makes you question not just the framework, but also yourself—your credibility, your competence, the validity of your work.

But I’ve been here before. I know the pattern. The intervention is real. The explanation was wrong. We update the map and the work gets better.

Wayfinding In The Dark

Years ago, I studied shamanism with a Lakota medicine woman. She said that the difference between science and shamanism is that a shaman doesn’t care how something works, only that it does. Science often doesn’t believe something works until it understands how.

I live somewhere between those two realities. I know my work works — twenty years of real-world practice have shown me that.

I also want to understand why, and I want that understanding to be honest.

Healing work is at least as much art as science. Being a practitioner means being willing to get lost in the dark.

It means holding your map loosely enough that when it turns out to be wrong, you can set it down and keep walking.

That’s what I’m doing. I’m setting down the old map. And I’m still walking.