Even When Danger Comes, There Is Nothing to Fear

Books: a Korean children’s picture book on how creatures survive; and Stephen W. Porges’s work on polyvagal theory. (The essay’s title is the title of the picture book.)

The roe deer knows how to flee. Two or three days after birth it can already run fast, because for a grazing animal, running is the way to live. The drone fly has no sting, but when threatened it mimics the hornet and drives its predators off. The ladybird tucks its head under its shell and plays dead, motionless — then in an instant unfolds its wings and is gone. The pufferfish swells to look larger; the skunk releases its stench; the hedgehog raises its quills; countless insects survive by going unseen.

These instinctive behaviors are each a creature’s own way of covering a weakness and slipping past danger — an inborn wisdom of nature that lets living things live as they were made to. It is a children’s book, but turning its pages I kept thinking of people who survive by the very same patterns. An evolutionary inheritance, perhaps.

Polyvagal theory is Stephen Porges’s discovery, through comparative anatomy and evolutionary biology, of a new mechanism in the human autonomic nervous system. Rather than explaining autonomic activity as a simple tug-of-war between sympathetic and parasympathetic, he showed that the vagus — the tenth cranial nerve — is organized in a phylogenetically ordered hierarchy. This lets us understand the nervous system’s varied responses to the environment, and it finally explains the freeze response that the trauma field knew from experience but could not account for in theory — a landmark shift that lets us see a trauma survivor’s reactions as the best response available for survival.

The detection of threat happens through what Porges calls neuroception — instinctive, reflexive, below conscious awareness. Depending on what neuroception senses, the body enters one of three defensive states. When it senses safety, the myelinated ventral vagus engages, tuning the muscles of the face and hearing so that social engagement becomes possible; we can connect with others, and health, growth, and repair can follow. When it senses danger, the sympathetic system mobilizes — breath and heartbeat quicken, blood floods the skeletal muscles — readying us to flee or fight. But when it senses inescapable danger or a threat to life, the oldest, unmyelinated dorsal vagus takes over: we freeze, faint, or shut down, body and mind, into immobilization.

People living with trauma and chronic stress have errors in this detection system; they cannot easily sense safety. So they grow depleted, physically and psychologically, and a range of symptoms appears — sometimes alongside harmful ways of trying to regulate, such as alcohol, drugs, or bingeing.

But once we understand that these reactions are not conscious decisions — that the nervous system chose, in that moment, what would most help protect life — we stop judging or blaming what once looked pathological, and come instead to feel gratitude for the responses our nervous system chose on our behalf. We also see how essential relationship is: to move from a survival state back toward safety and health, toward the ventral vagus, the co-regulation between people is indispensable. In clinics, but also in education, welfare, and social life as a whole, we cannot overstate that a felt sense of safety is a necessary condition for growth and recovery.

Polyvagal theory offers a neurobiological bridge between body and brain, and between body and psychological process. A treatment model built on this view works to shift the threshold of shutdown, so that a person can engage and connect more, and to change physiological state itself.

Seen through the polyvagal lens, even when danger comes, there is nothing to fear. Our nervous system will work, instinctively, in whatever way best serves survival in that moment; we will survive; and we have one another.