“An entirely different human emotion is nothing,” William James wrote in his 1884 original theory of how our bodies affect our emotions — the first major gauntlet thrown at the Cartesian dualism of body versus mind. In the century and a half since then, we have seen how body and mind come together in the treatment of trauma; we have seen consciousness itself as something that pervades the whole body.
Beyond the brain, no part of the body shapes our mental and emotional state more profoundly than the tenth cranial nerve – the longest nerve of the autonomic nervous system that unconsciously governs the inner workings of the body. It's known as the vagus nerve — from the Latin for “wandering,” a shared root a vagabond again which is not clear – it moves from the brain to the gut, affecting all its organs along the way and its muscles, controlling everything from our heartbeat and digestion to our intelligence and mood swings.
During James's lifetime, it was believed that synaptic connections within the brain were electrical. But when the founder of neuroscience Santiago Ramón y Cajal discovered the gap between neurons – the thin electric current could not cross – it became clear that something else must be transmitting signals between neurons. In 1921, the German chemist Otto Loewi confirmed the existence of these chemical messengers with vision by stimulating the frog's nerve and finding in the secreted substance the first known neurotransmitter. Every thought, emotion, and mood that ever crossed the sky of your mind was predicted by your neurotransmitters and executed by your vagus nerve.
A century after James, while working with premature babies, the psychiatrist Stephen Porges revealed two distinct vagal pathways in the nervous system – the very old dorsal vagus, which evolved about 500 million years ago in a now extinct fish to control the fear response and initiate closure, and the ventral vagus, ventral vagus, ventral vagus, ventral vagus, ventral vagus, vagus of old ventral, to control the development of 2 million. communication. This research became the basis of the polyvagal theory – the science of how the interaction of these two systems shapes our sense of safety and danger, shapes our attachment styles and relationship patterns, shapes our ability to tolerate life's risks necessary to be in love with life.
In the decades since, no one has championed the polyvagal theory more passionately than clinical psychologist Deb Dana. In his book Polyvagal Theory in Therapy: Engaging the Rhythm of Regulation (public library), written for therapists, explores how trauma creates our adaptive survival responses that set the fear-based dorsal vagus to cause breakdown and dissociation, and how we can restore our neural pathway to the emotional safety of the ventral vagal state, where our capacity for curiosity, connection, and change thrives.
Dana writes:
Communication is a biological imperative, and at the top of the autonomic layer is the ventral vagal pathway that supports feelings of safety and connection. The ventral vagus (sometimes called the “smart vagus” or “social vagus”) provides the neurobiological basis for health, growth, and recovery. When the ventral vagus is active, our attention is connected. We are looking for co-management opportunities. The ability to soothe and comfort, to speak and to listen, to give and to receive, to enter and exit without communication is centered in this new part of the autonomic nervous system. The repetition, ebb and flow that defines a nurturing relationship, is the function of the ventral vagus. As a result of its myelinated pathways, the ventral vagus provides rapid and systematic responses. In the ventral vagal state, we have access to many responses including calm, happy, meditative, engaged, attentive, active, enthusiastic, happy, enthusiastic, alert, ready, relaxed, fun, and happy.
This biological need to co-ordinate with others is not the same as the concept of limbic review — “the power to adjust the emotional components of the people we love,” and to have our own emotional pathways adjusted by the people we love. This can only happen in a secure relationship, and it is the vagus system that controls our sense of security.
Central to the polyvagal theory is the distinction between cognition and what Porges calls neuroception – the conditioned way in which the autonomic nervous system responds within the body, without our awareness, to signals of safety and danger in the external world. Because our vagal pathways are shaped by our early experiences of mutual control in the child and the parent, a break in that mutual rule – whether through abuse or neglect – puts the dorsal vagus to power and makes the sense of danger an automatic response, a real issue far from safety, nowhere more dangerous than close relationships. Dana writes:
Co-control is at the heart of a good relationship… When we miss opportunities for co-control in childhood, we feel that loss in our adult relationships. Trauma, either through work experience (injurious actions) or inaction (lack of care), makes co-regulation dangerous and interferes with the development of our co-regulation skills. Out of necessity, the autonomous nervous system was developed to regulate independently. Clients will often say they need a connection but no one was safe in their life, so after a while they stop looking. From the polyvagal perspective, we know that even though they stopped looking clearly and found ways to move on their own, their autonomous nervous system did not stop needing, and longing for, cooperative control.
Because we are physiologies first and psychology second, but we are also story-telling and rational beings, our minds naturally create emotional narratives about these empty unconscious states – stories that, if we are not aware enough and aware enough, may become reality. Dana comments:
The mind tells what the nervous system knows. The story follows the situation.
Our early adaptive survival responses to trauma train our autonomic nervous system to automatically perceive danger, replacing the communication and defense patterns of fear-based narrative. And yet these conditions can be reformed by retraining our control mechanisms.
Because the sense of reciprocity is one of the most powerful regulators of the autonomic nervous system, many repairs and rewiring can occur in a winged relationship with true harmony. Dana writes:
Repetitive interpersonal communication is created from back-and-forth communication between two independent sensory systems. It is an experience of listening and responding from the heart. We are nurtured in the experience of reconciliation, feeling the ebb and flow, giving and receiving, reconciliation, and being heard.
But the great irony is that if our early model of communication is characterized by fragmentation and lack of mutual control, our very idea of reconciliation may be distorted, leading us to endure great asymmetries of love and attention, mistaking deeply unequal relationships for reciprocity. The reasons for optimism are in the real opportunity to change the template with a safe and nourishing relationship – which may not be so selective at first, because trauma can spoil our choices with unhealthy patterns, such as the opportunity to enter and choose to feed ourselves. The payoff is a gradual transition from a dorsal vagal state to a ventral vagal one, a gradual willingness to release protective patterns in order to communicate, allowing for the kinds of relationships that Adrienne Rich celebrates as “where two people have the right to use the word 'love.'
Explore the science of how emotions are formed and how love rewires the brain, then revisit Toni Morrison's reclaiming of the body as a tool for happiness, mindfulness, and self-love.
