How Therapists Like Me Were Duped into Believing Polyvagal Theory

No one is exempt from the marketing game, not even psychotherapists.

So, buyer beware.

Let me begin by admitting that I, too, was under the spell of outdated pseudoscience for a while.

I had completed my required training and my own 10-year psychoanalysis. I was out there in the wilds of private practice, working to acquire clients without joining an insurance company network. 

I think we can all hold hands here and admit that I needed to promote myself. And I do mean myself, not necessarily my professional services. Because in the work I do, I am the instrument that accomplishes the desired effect. 

Yes, the 10 years of psychoanalysis I went through is what makes me good at my job. Ditto for my years of case consultation with seasoned analysts. Double ditto for the ongoing personal work I still do on a regular basis. 

But, at least at the time I started out, training and experience weren’t effective sales pitches. Especially when the therapy I do was—and often still is—the butt of nearly every therapy joke out there.

Psychodynamic psychotherapy, aka psychoanalysis, is generally considered a long-term therapy—even if it doesn’t always last 10 years, like mine did. 

When cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) rose to prominence in the 1970s, long-term, psychodynamic psychotherapy started to fall out of favor. 

All of a sudden, CBT was the cool new popular kid in school, simply because it’s “evidence-based.” This means that, as in any other scientific study, there’s a documented protocol that can be repeated by anybody—even those who aren’t seasoned, experienced professionals. 

CBT is also quick. Completing the protocol (at which point the “problem” is “solved”) only takes 8 to 12 sessions, according to the studies that proved CBT’s efficacy. 

If you’ve ever come across the phrase “evidence-based practice,” that’s what we’re talking about here: Instruction manual therapy that can be performed by any “therapist”. 

When this short-form therapy was popularized by scientific studies and legitimized by science jargon, therapists had to tell everyone that they were providing “evidence-based” therapy to signal that they knew their s**t. 

Truth is, most therapists weren’t following the protocols closely or at all. They just claimed they provided “evidence-based treatment” to market themselves. And there are more than a few still doing this today.

For the past few decades, insurance companies and pharma have been running the show. It’s obvious to anyone in private practice that “science” is the smart way to sell your services.

So there I was back in 2005, building my private psychodynamic psychotherapy practice on a method that was known to change people’s lives. With tons of anecdotal evidence on my side but no formalized research studies on the method, I had no way to signal that my work was legitimate.

It didn’t help that this was the beginning of people finding their therapists through internet searches. To win that game, you need keywords on your team. You have to publicly say the things that will send you to the top of the rankings.

I didn’t actually follow an instruction manual in my practice, so I didn’t feel comfortable saying that I offered CBT. People are more complicated than any list of instructions. Not to mention, people weren’t coming to me to change 1 or 2 symptoms. They wanted their lives to feel better overall, every day. 

I was a prime target for the allure of polyvagal theory and other outdated science like it.

The Seduction

It’s 2009/2010. I’m deep in the throes of learning how to market myself. I’m becoming more and more aware that many people on my couch doing this “talking cure” with me were not accessing the “feeling parts” of therapy that I knew were essential.

I started searching, and ran across ideas like “molecules of emotion” and “the biology of belief.” For a while, I even considered getting licensed as a massage therapist. 

Then I found polyvagal theory. Finally, I had some “science” on which to hang my marketing!

That was great, but I still didn’t have a concrete way to bring the body into therapy. (All the “clinical application of the polyvagal theory” certification courses didn’t exist yet.)

So I kept searching. As luck would have it, in 2013 bioenergetic analysis fell into my lap.

Finally, I had found the therapy modality that brings the body into therapy, exactly as I had wanted to do for years.

Best of all, it was a natural outgrowth of the psychoanalytic tradition I was already practiced in. Bioenergetic analysis was the perfect fit. Plus, I had the polyvagal theory to give me some scientific-sounding marketing language. Then, in my second year of bioenergetic-analysis training, The Body Keeps the Score hit bookshelves. In a few hundred pages, this Harvard psychiatrist legitimized body-based psychotherapy and destigmatized the idea of going to therapy in the first place.

This. Is. Awesome!

I was training in how to bring bodily and energetic awareness into “the talking cure.” The “science” supported what I was doing every day.

Then in 2020, it all came crumbling down.

During the pandemic lockdowns, it seemed like everyone else in the world was discovering The Body Keeps the Score and jumping on the polyvagal bandwagon. 

Meanwhile, I was smacking face-first into information that undermined everything I “knew” about the “science” that validated those ideas.

As 2020 wore on, it slowly dawned on me. I couldn’t reconcile this new information about brain function with the polyvagal idea and with the rational/emotional/primitive brain ideas that are commonplace in the field of psychology. 

Man, was that a blow! Imagine spending the better part of a decade marketing your professional services with the language of outdated pseudoscience. Frankly, I felt like a real dope.

And I was desperate to tell everyone in the body-based therapy world.

But Guess What?

They didn’t want to hear it. Unfortunately, a lot of them still don’t want to hear it. They think the current science is “just a new way to say the same old stuff.”

But the 21st-century science of brain function isn’t just a better framework for understanding your mental health.

It’s a better way of understanding how therapy helps you.  

The updated science empowers you in a way the old frameworks simply do not. In fact, in those frameworks, you’re the victim of a primitive, emotional brain and of a body that’s always “betraying” you. None of that is true.

To add insult to injury, we now know that when you believe these ideas, you’re much more likely to remain a victim in your own life story. Because that’s how brains actually function. They look for evidence proving the beliefs they already have.

So, Client Beware.

Your therapist may be encouraging you to solidify your most unhelpful beliefs. If you don’t want that—and why would you?—stay well away from them and their outdated science.

Find a mental health professional who understands predictive processing. Or find yourself a good old-fashioned, modern-day psychoanalyst. Their method has proven to be effective for 120 years, and this 21st-century science of brain function flawlessly explains how—and why.