As a professor whose research career has spanned five decades, I have had ample time to contemplate personal goals. During my career, I have observed the trajectories of my colleagues as they matured and transitioned through the academic ranks. Some welcomed becoming emeritus and continued to be actively involved in their science through research, writings, and presentations. Others seamlessly left the academic world and retired.
Being a professor is a demanding position that includes managing laboratories, teaching undergraduate students, mentoring graduate students and junior colleagues, writing grants and generating resources for research, networking within a discipline, welcoming professional tasks such as reviewing colleagues, manuscripts, and grant proposals, and serving on committees within institutions. Some of us also have served in administrative roles within institutions and professional societies, while others have built liaisons with government agencies and industry.
This complex portfolio of experiences has given me insight into how I developed and accepted the specific benchmarks that define my personal goals. As I observed my colleagues, I realized that many professors were frustrated at the end of their careers. They seemed to feel that they were not successful and had not accomplished anything meaningful. This self-evaluation was often structured by their institutions encouraging them to retire, their sense that they had not received the recognition that they felt that they deserved. They felt that no one remembered them and their contributions. My colleagues had spent decades defining themselves in terms of the structure of academic evaluations, and when they were no longer able to fund their research through federal grants, they felt abused and neglected. Basically, from a Polyvagal perspective, the academic world with its chronic evaluation strategies had triggered the bodies and minds of my colleagues into a chronic state of defense. For many who did not have a positive transition narrative, the experience of being a professor ended up abusive and isolating. Consistent with Polyvagal Theory, these experiences of vulnerability and chronic defense would retune autonomic state, leading to mental and physical health issues. Thus, we see that the experience of being a professor shares many attributes with abusive families and relationships. However, there is an important distinction: the experience of being a professor provides a powerful skillset that may be applied outside the university. Thus, if the professorial experiences are internalized as preparatory—enabling the scientist to deal with the challenges of the world outside of the university—then the personal narrative changes from one of abuse to one of adaptive resilience. This resilience is associated with autonomic states that may lead not only to better mental and physical health, but also to bold expansive thinking and rewarding social interactions.
Metaphorically, professors age out within the university. In professional circles, their peer group starts to disappear due to retirements and health. This change in social interactions marginalizes professors and their narratives become negative. When I was about 50, I started to think about personal transitions within academics. I realized that a passive stance toward what the institution defined as success would lead only to disappointment and frustration as I aged. I started to operationalize what I, personally, needed to accomplish to feel that my journey was successful. I focused on the realization that for me, the translation of my ideas into practice was my personal goal. However, I was ill-prepared to take my research ideas and move them into clinical practice, education, or public awareness. Thus, as an academic, I had structured my narrative to apply the tools that I had and focused on having an opportunity to archive my ideas and methods. I set my personal goals to publish papers that would present an integrative theory and provide the methodology to study the theory.
At the time I was contemplating the dimensions of academic success, I developed the initial formulation of the Polyvagal Theory. The theory stimulated interest in the clinical world and rapidly gained traction in the study and treatment of trauma. This good fortune supported my personal need to move ideas into practice. During the 25 years since the initial presentation of the theory, I have had the good fortune to have the opportunity to support insightful and talented therapists who have embraced Polyvagal Theory as a manual outlining the body’s responses to safe, danger, and life-threat. These bold, passionate, and compassionate therapists have used this information to help their clients organize and make sense of their reactions to danger and life-threat. As therapists embraced Polyvagal Theory, their therapies became Polyvagal-informed.
Deb Dana is one of these special therapists. Her books take the principles of Polyvagal Theory and provide therapists with a toolkit of therapeutic skills designed to enable the client—and often the therapist—to explore their bodily responses; to become reacquainted with a body that may have become numb. Through her clear and brilliant translation of Polyvagal Theory into practice, the client is guided to honor both the adaptive numbness that follows severe trauma, and vulnerabilities that are experienced when the portals to the nervous system are awakened through cues of safety. Through her exercises, the client is able to experience an unacknowledged intelligence of the nervous system as it initially rejects the validity of cues of safety. This skeptical reaction illustrates the disparity of the personal narrative with the narrative of the body (i.e., nervous system). The personal narrative that brings the client into therapy pleads for trusting relationships, while the narrative of the body emphatically screams that it will not be fooled again and will protect the survivor by not trusting that cues are truly well-intentioned cues of safety.
In this book, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection, Polyvagal Theory becomes a living, felt process that can be shared with clinicians and clients. Deb Dana provides exercises that systematically unwrap the adaptive layers of neural regulation of the autonomic nervous system that shift, and at times distort, our perspective of events and others. Through these exercises we shift autonomic state and start to have an understanding that the personal narrative is not a documentary of events, but a documentary of feelings. This does not minimize the importance of events, but it emphasizes the importance of feelings in distorting, amplifying, or buffering the impact of events.
It is through Deb’s creative and compassionate vision and the welcoming, expanding family of Polyvagal-informed therapists that Polyvagal Theory is being translated and embedded into tools that are transforming the practice of trauma-informed therapies. As a witness of this process, I am humbled by the impact that a vision of understanding our evolutionary heritage can, in the hands of Deb Dana and other gifted therapists, have on reducing the burden of personal pain and suffering that survivors of trauma have experienced. I am looking forward to Deb’s continued brilliant insights in translating the principles of Polyvagal Theory into an accessible language and useful toolkit for therapists.
—Stephen W. Porges
Author of The Polyvagal Theory