Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.”

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings — the first great gauntlet thrown at the Cartesian dualism of body versus mind. In the century and a half since, we have come to see how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma; we have come to see consciousness itself as a full-body phenomenon.

Beyond the brain, no po...