This was a new one on me, and if any of the SI editors are reading this, I hope you might consider doing an article on this. It’s called “Polyvagal Theory” (with a practitioner side called “polyvagal coaching”), and it sounds to me like chakra-tuning with a little real physiology thrown in. Check it out at The Dark Side of Polyvagal Theory
It sounds like the “theory” part was developed by a qualified psychiatrist and neuroscientist with solid credentials, but went off the rails when it started being applied by so-called “coaches”. I see that the theory dates back to the mid 1990s, but was surprised to see that neither CTI/SI or my other “go-to” (RationalWiki) had ever covered it. Is anyone else out there familiar with the subject? Any chance of seeing an article on it sometime soon?
Thanks for the reply, and the link to the article. Its author (S. Porges) is the one I refer to in my original post as the qualified and credentialed developer of the theory, and I think the theory is more or less sound (at least from my non-neuro-scientist point of view). The “out there” part is what some people are doing with it. While there appear to be some qualified neuro-psych types practitioners using it as a valid tool, there are others calling themselves “polyvagal coaches”, some of whom appear to be treating it as kind of a fix-all body-mind tuning approach (akin to “chakra” tuning). I’ll continue to dig into it for better examples, but the whole area (esp. the “coaching”) bears scrutiny.
