Hello and

welcome to being well, I'm Forrest Hansen.

If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today, and if you've listened before, welcome back.

Today I'm joined by a true pioneer, the creator of the Polyvago Theory, Dr. Stephen Porges.

Dr. Porges is a distinguished university scientist at Indiana University

where he's the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium.

He's also professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and

professor emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the

University of Maryland. He's published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers across a wide array of

disciplines and is the author of a number of books including his most recent, which he wrote with

his son Seth, Our Polyvagal world, how safety and trauma change us.

Steve, thanks so much for taking the time to do this today.

I've been really looking forward to this.

How are you?

I'm doing fine, and thank you for us for inviting me. I am so

happy that we're doing this again. We've talked on the podcast previously. People

really enjoy that conversation and I'm guessing that most of our listeners probably have at least a

cursory familiarity with polyvagal theory, but for those who don't, it probably makes sense for us to start at the

beginning, and I would love a brief summary here.

So if we were to kind of reduce the complexity of the theory and basically put it into a kind of a couple

of sentences, I really say that it's about understanding that our bodily state

influences how we respond to the world and how we experience the world.

...