What happens when an important profession that requires licensing is sold by untrained

unlicensed providers?

Would you want your airline pilot to be unlicensed, your house contractor, your heart

surgeon?

What about your mental health practitioner?

Today we're going to get into the ugly world of what's called coaching, in particular

the world of polyvagal coaching.

That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid, I'm Brian Dunding from Skeptoid.com.

The dark side of polyvagal theory.

Mental health care is important.

Often it is literally a life-saving practice and so the various improvements to the science

of mental health have been vital steps forward.

One of these, which is a fairly recent introduction to the field, is called polyvagal theory.

But its introduction has been neither smooth nor universally well received.

Consequently its practice and its use in therapy has been fragmented, with part of the market

providing it as a framework for conventional psychotherapy and part of the market offering

it for sale by untrained unlicensed providers who call themselves coaches.

As always we'll get started with a quick overview of polyvagal theory, or PVT, which by

necessity is going to be an abbreviated high level view.

Under PVT there are three states your autonomic nervous system might be in.

The first of these is called safe.

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