#the pocket guide to the polyvagal theory

[maaarine]

The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Stephen Porges, 2017)

"If you have severe gastric pain, can you function well on high-level cognitive tasks?

In the case of gastric pain, the feedback from our viscera limits our ability to think and solve complex problems.

Our culture really doesn’t have a place for that, so it tries to deal with this by suggesting, “If you feel pain, take medication so you don’t feel the pain.”

But what if pain is your body’s attempt to help you or to inform you?

In my world, interoception blends into another construct that I frequently use, which I call neuroception.

Neuroception is the nervous system’s evaluation of risk in the environment without conscious awareness.

When neuroception occurs, we try to generate a narrative to explain why we have the feelings that were triggered.

Interestingly, although we are not aware of the cues that trigger neuroception, we are frequently aware, via interoception, of the physiological reactions that were elicited by neuroception.

Neuroception can be illustrated in the following example: You meet someone; the person appears to be bright and physically attractive, but you are not attracted to the person because the person’s voice lacks prosody and their facial affect is flat.

You don’t understand why, but through the process of neuroception, your body has responded, “This is a predator or a person who is not safe,” so you develop a personal narrative to make it fit. (…)

We get the signals, but we do not respect them. I think this strategy of denying our bodily reactions has much to with our culture.

This point is related to my introductory comment on Descartes, which emphasized a subjugation of bodily feelings to cognitive functions.

Our culture’s interdependence on religious views has contributed to dispelling the importance of bodily feelings.

Specifically, bodily feelings were conceptualized as being associated with animals, while cognitions were an attribution more closely linked to spirit."

[storkmuffin]

Once we recognize that the experiences within our societal institutions such as schools, hospitals, and churches are characterized by chronic evaluations that trigger feelings of danger and threat, we can see that these institutions can be as disruptive to health as political unrest, fiscal crisis, or war.

The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory, p 45

[oceanstone]

Self-Help Books

Productivity

Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds by David Goggins

No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline by Brian Tracy

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

Unreasonable Success and How to Achieve It by Richard Koch

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Little Black Book by Otegha Uwagba

Time Management in 20 Minutes a Day by Holly Reisem Hanna

Write it Down and Make It Happen

The 12 Week Year

The 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

How to Begin by Michael Bungay Stainer

Physical Health

WomanCode: Perfect Your Cycle, Amplify Your Fertility, Supercharge Your Sex Drive, and Become a Power Source by Alisa Vitti

Mental Health

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book) by Don Miguel Ruiz

Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach

The Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook

The Inner Child Workbook by Cathryn Taylor

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig

The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves by Curt Thompson

The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor

ADHD

You Mean I'm Not Stupid, Lazy, or Crazy?! A Self-Help Book for Adults with Attention Deficit Disorder by Kate Kelly and Peggy Ramundo

Women with Attention-Deficit Disorder: Embrace Your Differences and Transform Your Life by Sari Salden

What the ADHD Brain Wants—and Why by Dr. Ellen Littman (pdf)

Finally Focused: The Breakthrough Natural Treatment Plan for ADHD That Restores Attention, Minimizes Hyperactivity, and Helps Eliminate Drug Side Effects by Dr. James Greenblatt

* Living with ADHD: Simple Exercises to Change Your Daily Life by Thom Hartmann

Thriving with Adult ADHD: Skills to Strengthen Executive Functioning by Phil Boster

Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You by Jenara Nerenberg

Screwed Up Somehow But Not Stupid, Life with a Learning Disability by Peter Flom

Trauma

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving by Pete Walker

Polyvagal Flip Chart: Understanding the Science of Safety by Deb A. Dana

Taming Your Outer Child: Overcoming Self-Sabotage and Healing from Abandonment by Susan Anderson

My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem

Accessing the Healing Power of the Vagus Nerve by Stanley Rosenberg

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsey Gibson

@complextraumarecovery bookshelf

Healing Developmental Trauma by Lawrence Heller

Waking the Tiger by Peter A. Levine

The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory by Stephen Porges

Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection by Deb Dana

Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power, and Use it for Good by Kimberly Ann Johnson

Trauma and Memory by Peter Levine

Stephen Porges work

Nurturing Resilience by Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell

Relationships

Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood

Break Your Addiction to a Person by Howard Halpern

Addiction to Love: Overcoming Obsession and Dependency in Relationships by Sudan Peabody

Journey from Abandonment to Healing by Susan Anderson

The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships by Patrick Carnes

The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships by Dr. Diane Poole Heller

Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay & Kathlyn Hendricks

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller

Love is a Choice: The Definitive Book on Letting Go of Unhealthy Relationships by Thomas Hemfelt

Strange Situation: A Mother's Journey into the Science of Attachment by Bethany Saltman

Gaslighting by Stephanie Sarkis

Boundaries by Anne Katherine

Models by Mark Manson

Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Tawwab

Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft

I Want This to Work by Elizabeth Earnshaw

The Adult Psychotherapy Homework Planner

Me, You, Us: A Book to Fill Out Together by Lisa Currie

The Will to Change by bell hooks

Getting the Love You Want by Harville Hendricks

Wired for Love by Stan Tatkin

Games People Play by Eric Berne

The Chemistry Between Us by Larry Young

Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray

Cats Don’t Chase Dogs by Kara King

Art of Seduction by Robert Greene

No More Assholes by Chantal Heide

Pussy: A Reclamation by Regena Thomashauer

The Power of the Pussy by Kara King

Why Men Behave Badly by David Buss

Safe People by Henry Cloud and John Townsend

The Deep Life

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks

Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life by John Kaag

The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment by Eckhart Tolle

The Defining Decade by Meg Jay

Authenticity

The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed as You Are by Alicia Menendez

I Thought It Was Just Me (but It Isn’t) by Brené Brown

Career

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith

How Women Rise by Sally Hegelsen

Own It: The Power of Women at Work by Sallie Krawcheck

No-Fail Communication by Michael Hyatt

Leadership on the Line by Ronald Heifetz

Purple Cow

Dream Manager

7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Quantum Success

Influencer

Decide

Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office

Switchers by Dawn Graham

The Seven Minute Productivity Solution by John Brando

Entry Level Boss by Alexa Shoen

Mindfulness

How to Breathe: 25 Simple Practices for Calm, Joy, and Resilience by Ashley Neese

Money

Unfuck Your Finances by Melissa Browne

Broke Millenial

I Will Teach You to Be Rich

Clever Girl Finance

We Should All Be Millionaires

Parenting

Expecting Better by Emily Oster

Cribsheet by Emily Oster

The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years by Emily Oster

Grief

The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift by Steve Leder

[aric04u]

Download PDF The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe -- Stephen W. Porges

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  [*] Download PDF Here => The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe

[*] Read PDF Here => The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe

[jhavelikes]

1. The Neurobiology of Feeling Safe 2. Polyvagal Theory and the Treatment of Trauma 3. Self-Regulation and Social Engagement 4. How Polyvagal Theory Explains the Consequences of Trauma on Brain, Body, and Behavior

The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory | Stephen W Porges | W. W. Norton & Company

[brother-1]

Reading list for February 2021

1. The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel Van der Kolk

2. Protagoras and Meno – Plato

3. The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe – Stephen W. Porges

[parentingforresiliencebookclub]

Alright, here we go....

Book suggestion post. I’m wondering about:

1. The Whole-Brain Child (Not exactly about trauma but a good foundation in how the brain deals with stress, etc)

2. The Body Keeps the Score (Heavier reading for our first book, but a good classic place to start)

3. The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory ( because I’m fascinated)

Thoughts? Other suggestions for a first book? Tag your friends!

[whatwearereading]

The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology)

Stephen W. Porges

Bridging the gap between research, science, and the therapy room. When

The Polyvagal Theory was published in 2011, it took the therapeutic world by storm, bringing Stephen Porges’s insights about the autonomic nervous system to a clinical audience interested in understanding trauma, anxiety, depression and other mental health issues. The book made accessible to clinicians and other professionals a polyvagal perspective that provided new concepts and insights for understanding human behavior. The perspective placed an emphasis on the important link between psychological experiences and physical manifestations in the body. That book was brilliant but also quite challenging to read for some.

Since publication of that book, Stephen Porges has been urged to make these ideas more accessible and The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory is the result. Constructs and concepts embedded in polyvagal theory are explained conversationally in The Pocket Guide and there is an introductory chapter which discusses the science and the scientific culture in which polyvagal theory was originally developed. Publication of this work enables Stephen Porges to expand the meaning and clinical relevance of this groundbreaking theory. ---|

[maaarine]

The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Stephen Porges, 2017)

"Remember that in our contemporary society, technologies for social communication are literally being pushed on us by people who are challenged in terms of their own social communication skills and their ability to co-regulate with others.

We label this new technology social networking. We use computers. We text with a smartphone.

In a sense, we are stripping the essence of human interactions, direct face-to-face experiences, from human interactions.

We’re moving from a synchronous interactive strategy to an asynchronous one in which we leave messages and look at people later.

We are allowing the world to be organized based upon principles of individuals who have difficulty regulating their biobehavioral state in the presence of others but who may regulate well with objects.

In a very global clinical perspective, many of the disorders that therapists are actively requested to treat are about difficulties regulating state with others.

When individuals have difficulty regulating state with others or co-regulating, they adaptively gravitate to regulating state with objects.

Sometimes these tendencies lead to clinical labels. Whether it is labeled autism or social anxieties doesn’t really matter.

What we know is that these individuals’ nervous systems are not enable to engage in reciprocal social interactions.

It is rare for them to feel safe with people and get into that, beneficial physiological states that enable social behavior to support health, growth, and restoration.

For these people, social behavior is disruptive and not supportive.

Individuals may self-select into two different groups that are categorized by either regulating through social interaction or through the use of objects."

[maaarine]

The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe (Stephen Porges, 2017)

"For individuals with autism, PTSD, and various other clinical disorders, the social engagement system and the ability to down-regulate defensive systems are compromised.

However, a compromised social engagement system functionally provides an advantage in detecting predator.

A down-regulated social engagement system enables individuals to know if someone is walking behind them.

In this biobehavioral state, they can hear low-frequency background sounds but now have difficulties in extracting meaning from the higher frequencies associated with human voices. (…)

The careful mode is that you wouldn’t really hear what the person is saying, but you would hear the steps behind you.

When we enter new environments, which are potentially dangerous, we shift to a surveillance vigilance system from a safe social engagement system.

From a cognitive perspective, we use terms like allocation of attention.

But from a neurophysiological model, it is not simply allocation of attention. We have shifted physiological state. (…)

If they are not picking up on danger and they remain focused on human voice, their nervous system has prioritized the social features of vocalizations over the danger features of a potential predator.

You can see variations among people in how the nervous system prioritizes safety and risk factors.

If you are part of a group that enters a novel environment, some people reflexively become hypervigilant and stop participating in the group discussions, while others keep socially talking to each other until someone comes up behind them and something dangerous happens."

[maaarine]

Bibliography: books posted on this blog in 2024

Sara AHMED (2010): The Promise of Happiness

Cat BOHANNON (2023): Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

Holly BRIDGES (2014): Reframe Your Thinking Around Autism: How the Polyvagal Theory and Brain Plasticity Help Us Make Sense of Autism

Johann CHAPOUTOT (2024): The Law of Blood: Thinking and Acting as a Nazi

Caroline CRIADO-PEREZ (2019): Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

Gavin DE BECKER (2000): Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence

Virginie DESPENTES (2006): King Kong Theory

Annie ERNAUX (2000): Happening

Lisa FELDMAN BARRETT (2017): How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain

Shaun GALLAGHER (2012): Phenomenology

David GRAEBER (2015): The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

Yuval Noah HARARI (2024): Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

Sarah HENDRICKX (2015): Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Understanding Life Experiences from Early Childhood to Old Age

Sarah HILL (2019): This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Luke JENNINGS (2017): Killing Eve: Codename Villanelle

Bernardo KASTRUP (2021): Decoding Jung’s Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe

Roman KOTOV, Thomas JOINER, Norman SCHMIDT (2004): Taxometrics: Toward a new diagnostic scheme for psychopathology

Benjamin LIPSCOMB (2021): The Women are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

Dorian LYNSKEY (2024): Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End of the World

Kate MANNE (2024): Unshrinking: How to Fight Fatphobia

Mario MIKULINCER (1994): Human Learned Helplessness: A Coping Perspective

Jenara NERENBERG (2020): Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn’t Designed for

Lucy NEVILLE (2018): Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica

Peggy ORNSTEIN (2020): Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity

Lucile PEYTAVIN (2021): Le coût de la virilité

Lynn PHILLIPS (2000): Flirting with Danger: Young Women’s Reflections on Sexuality and Domination

Stephen PORGES (2017): The Pocket Guide to the Polyvagal Theory: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe

Joëlle PROUST (2013): The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness

John SARLO: The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain

Jessica TAYLOR (2022): Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women’s Trauma Against Them

Manos TSAKIRIS and Helena DE PREESTER (2018): The Interoceptive Mind: From Homeostasis to Awareness