Dr. Stephen Porges on the Vagal System: An Interview

Much of what we carry from trauma, particularly the kind formed in early childhood, sits locked away in diffuse body memories that never became explicit. When somatic therapists and body psychotherapists do their work, they're drawing those implicit memories out in a deliberate, step-by-step way, and they help the person build a narrative that lets them meet the feeling head on. The process moves back and forth, repeatedly, until the charge drains out of sensations a person may have spent an entire lifetime guarding. Someone feels something without knowing where it came from, so they protect it. The body psychotherapist's premise is that once you make contact with that feeling, you take away its potency.

Eric: That's wonderful. Before we close out the call, I wanted to ask one more time about a few techniques people might try at home to explore and play with their own vagal system.

Dr. Porges: Sure. People love asking me this, partly because I enjoy designing interventions and testing ideas out. The simplest and also the most powerful tool is breath. Plenty of practitioners teach breathing methods, some of them quite potent and widely used. If you'd rather not go through formal training in that, pick up a wind instrument or sing, because either one pushes you into the same mechanism. Singing or playing a wind instrument also does something beyond the breathing itself: it engages the neural control of the facial muscles, and it makes you listen.

Listening is another doorway into regulating your physiological state. When we listen, and especially when we listen to the human voice, female voices in particular, the sound of a baby or the sing-song cadence a parent uses with an infant, the neural regulation of the striated muscles in the face starts working harder. We smile. We grow more alert. The small muscles of the middle ear tighten the eardrum, and that tightening pushes background noise into the distance. What's left is the modulated voice coming through clearly, and hearing it shifts the vagal regulation of the heart toward calm.

That's why people have long gravitated toward folk music and certain melodic sounds. Think about how specific kinds of music get used in social situations, dating among them. For a very long time there has been a recognized repertoire people reach for when they want to seduce someone or simply make them feel safe and at ease. The physical signature of that music tends to obey the same rule every time: a prosodic intonation with plenty of melodic vocalization. No heavy bass, since the body treats bass the way it treats a predator. And no high, shrill tones either, because the body reads those as a signal of danger.