Hypnotic Interoception ($)

Enhancing our mind-body connection.

“If your mind can affect the way your body functions, and hypnotherapy can affect the way your mind functions, then it stands to reason that hypnotherapy can ultimately affect your body’s responses.”
— Mike Bryant and Peter Mabbutt, from the introduction to Hypnotherapy for Dummies

Polyvagal Theory

Polyvagal Theory (PvT) was proposed 25 years ago by Steven Porges (2018) to provide a deeper explanation of how your nervous system connects your body to your state of mind. It asserts that the vagus nerve, which connects the brain to your central organs, allows communication between our organs and our mind at a subconscious level.

The theory doesn’t have much supporting neurological evidence, but it’s popular among therapists who are looking for a deeper link between body and mind. PvT goes beyond saying brain chemicals affect your organs and says your thoughts have direct but unconscious effects on your metabolism through the vagus nerve. More than that, your metabolism unconsciously affects your thoughts.

This is hard to make precise. It isn’t clear how far this goes or what it means. Certain parts of your brain do connect to organs and various organ functions do affect areas in your brain. These are lower parts of the brain that deal with autonomic functions. These areas are far from the cerebral areas that deal with conscious thought, but they are associated with aspects of conscious thought such as reflex and memory.

The crux of PVT is that our two emergency activating responses, either to fight or to flee, are not only physical states but are also mental configurations. This much is plausible and intuitive since states of panic are supported both in mind and body. But beyond this, PvT says that traumatic experiences imprint in both our minds and bodies.

Going one step further, PvT says that an emergency freeze response can develop into a mental and physical template that becomes one of our familiar, repetitive responses. Trauma erodes our mental landscape creating canyons of repetitive behavior and mountainous obstacles to change in our thoughts.

People who subscribe to PvT—notably therapists who deal with trauma—use the conjectured neural functions as a neurological basis for psychotherapy. According to this, traumatized people carry a neural imprint of their experience which is expressed in their attitudes and actions. Only by relaxing these habitual reactions in the body and mind can traumatized people recover their equilibrium.

The Polyvagal Theory is full of biological, medical, and neurological complexity. If you have experience following theories from conjecture to exploration to confirmation, which I have, then things like the Polyvagal Theory are uncomfortably assertive. PvT draws on conjectures in evolutionary biology, neurology, psychology, and physiology that are unproved and unproveable.

PvT is sold to people in the psychological field through Porges’s website and others (www.stephenporges.com/). Most doctors, psychologists, counselors, and therapists have little scientific training and no scientific experience. They don’t know how to be scientifically discerning but don’t know they don’t know it. The whole field of public health is subject to various fashions and cultural prejudices.

PvT sells to the PTSD crowd, a swelling economic sector that has attracted a number of charismatic characters and cottage industries. On the West Coast, Gabor Maté (drgabormate.com) sells a version of trauma therapy reminiscent of Alice Miller’s work on child trauma. On the East Coast, Peter Levine (www.somaticexperiencing.com) offers a therapist certification program in Somatic Experiencing®, a therapy similar to PvT in basing itself on the fight, flight, and freeze reactions.

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Retraining (EMDR), Havening, and Infra-low Frequency Neurofeedback are four other PTSD therapies that are asserted to be “evidence based” and have little plausible, theoretical, or coherent scientific basis. These methods may be correct, they may work, and they may generate evidence, but there’s no real idea of how or how much they work, and no one seems to care at a fundamental level. The field of trauma therapy is a hot, money-making industry.

Experts