A Polyvagal Reflection
I’ll be honest: when Polyvagal Theory first came up in Trauma and Intervention, my instinct was mild resistance. It felt, at first pass, like a lot of the wellness language that gets flattened into oversimplified self-help content, like “ventral vagal,” “co-regulation,” “neuroception”, terms that start to feel like a new vocabulary layered over old ideas. I had read enough about trauma to feel like I understood fight-or-flight. I think what changed my mind was less the science itself and more what the theory made visible about behaviors I had already been watching in young people that I hadn’t understood yet. Stephen Porges Polyvagal Theory proposes that the autonomic nervous system, which is long understood as a simple two-part system of sympathetic (mobilization) and parasympathetic (rest) responses, is better understood as a three-tiered hierarchy.
The three states, from newest to oldest, are: Ventral vagal: the newest, most distinctly mammalian circuit. When we feel safe, this system is online: we can think, connect, play, learn, and be curious. Sympathetic mobilization: When threat is detected, the older sympathetic system activates fight or flight. Energy surges, the body prepares for action. Dorsal vagal shutdown: The oldest, most primitive circuit, a last-resort survival response when fight/flight is not possible. Immobilization, dissociation, collapse. School settings are, in many ways, nervous-system-hostile environments for children who carry developmental trauma. The structure of a traditional classroom, which comprises of large groups, unpredictable adult moods, performance pressure, noise, transitions can produce chronic low-level threat responses in students whose neuroceptive systems are already calibrated toward danger.
I recently began working with children on the autism spectrum, and this is where Polyvagal Theory stopped being an intellectual framework for me and started feeling genuinely urgent. Porges himself has written extensively about the overlap between Polyvagal Theory and autism, arguing that many of the social and communicative differences seen in autistic individuals may be connected to chronic states of threat activation: a nervous system that is spending so much energy managing sensory input and environmental unpredictability that the social engagement system cannot fully come online.