Polyvagal Theory hasn’t been debunked the way the headlines suggest. But the Ladder has limits we could feel inside our own program. Here’s what the debate actually means for your healing.
In early 2026, a group of 39 researchers published a paper in Clinical Neuropsychiatry declaring Polyvagal Theory “untenable.” This caused a quick whirlwind across the internet. Wikipedia was updated, social media spiraled and anyone who has used the Polyvagal Ladder to understand their nervous system is left wondering whether the whole framework just fell apart.
The good news here is that no, it didn’t, and if you’ve used the Polyvagal Theory in your healing journey, it doesn’t discredit your healing or progress made. It’s done quite the opposite by providing the industry with a way to visually simplify a very complex system.
It helps to understand how the theory actually made its way into the healing space. Polyvagal Theory was developed by Stephen Porges. The Polyvagal Ladder, the visual model most people associate with it, was created by therapist Deb Dana as a way to teach the theory’s core ideas. The Ladder became the most popular way to describe and understand Polyvagal Theory, and it’s what most practitioners and programs, including ours, used to help people map their nervous system states. The academic critique published in 2026 targets Porges’ biological claims, not the Ladder directly. But the Ladder has its own limits, ones we could feel inside our own program, inside our own bodies, inside the clinical patterns we were watching every day.
The hierarchy never sat completely right as the idea that calm and connected was the top rung and shutdown was the bottom quietly ranked people’s states, even when we explicitly said it didn’t.
Members would tell us they felt like they were “failing” because they couldn’t get to the top. People with fawning and pleasing patterns would bypass their anger to get to “safe and social” as fast as possible, skipping the very activation their nervous system needed to complete.
This blog post isn’t another recap of the article, there are plenty of those already. My goal here is to break down what we actually do with the information, as a program, as practitioners, and for those on their healing journey.
What the 2026 Polyvagal Theory Critique Actually Says
In February 2026, a researcher named Paul Grossman gathered 38 scientists and published a paper calling Polyvagal Theory “untenable.” Their argument, in plain terms: the way Polyvagal Theory describes how the vagus nerve works and how it evolved doesn’t match what current science actually shows. They’re saying the biology underneath the model is wrong.
That’s worth taking seriously, and should be questioned.
But in the same journal, Stephen Porges, the person who created Polyvagal Theory, published a point-by-point response. His argument: the critics are arguing against things the theory never actually claimed. He points out that these same misreadings have been showing up and getting corrected in the research for nearly twenty years.
This back-and-forth isn’t new. In fact, Grossman first published critiques of Polyvagal Theory in 2007. It’s an ongoing scientific conversation that is important to have but it doesn’t mean we pour out the baby with bath water.
Why We Were Already Moving Beyond the Polyvagal Ladder
Long before this paper, we were teaching beyond the Ladder inside Primal Trust.
We used the Ladder because it has provided our students with a starting point that helped them name what they were feeling in their body. Many of our students have been on a chronic illness journey for many years, often told that they are overreacting or making it up. Having a language and metaphor for their autonomic states was for many, the first step toward trusting their own experience. You cannot argue that it had a real impact on healing.
However, something that limited even our teachings at times was the hierarchy of a ladder. The top automatically looks better than the bottom. Calm and connected at the top. Collapse at the bottom. Activation in the middle. Even when we said there’s no bad state, the image told a different story. Members internalized it as “I’m doing well” versus “I’m failing.” And this is not what healing is supposed to feel like.
Worse, the climbing metaphor encouraged people to bypass states their body actually needed. Anger. Boundary energy. Fight impulses. Grief that wanted to move. For trauma patterns built around fawning, people-pleasing, and going quiet, the work is often not calming down. It’s mobilizing. It’s staying in the intensity long enough for stored survival energy to complete its cycle.
In my own healing, every time I tried to skip ahead to calm and connected, my body stayed inflamed. It wasn’t done processing and what I needed was activation, to feel the anger. I needed to practice saying no and letting fight energy move through me.
I’ve had seasons where my body could hardly function, stuck in bed for weeks and months at a time. It wasn’t until I learned to stop fighting that shutdown state and start to welcome it, to allow it to be there, that things started to shift out of what felt like a prison and into something restorative. It is from that place that I could finally sense what my body actually needed. The clarity came out of letting go of the resistance. That is not a process you can easily describe.
In the process of that learning, there is no better rung than another. There are different needs at different moments. The skill is learning to listen, not learning to climb. That has always been the teaching inside Primal Trust. The Polyvagal Ladder was one tool within it to help simplify naming the states, it was never the foundation.
Does Polyvagal Theory Still Work? What the Evidence Supports
The clinical framework that helped people recognize their autonomic states and build regulation capacity was not what the 2026 critique challenged. The paper targeted specific biological mechanisms underneath the theory. Those are important scientific questions separate from the skills our members have been building.
Our autonomic state changes the physiology in our body. When the nervous system perceives threat, energy shifts toward protection. Inflammation can rise. Digestion can slow. Immune signaling shifts. When the system registers safety, access to connection, repair, and clearer thinking increases. This is documented across neuroscience, immunology, and clinical research well beyond Polyvagal Theory.
State awareness is a trainable, measurable skill. Recognizing whether you’re activated, shut down, connected, or in a blend of those states is called interoception. It’s one of the most important capacities a person can build for long-term nervous system healing. The Ladder gave us a tool to help develop that skill. The skill doesn’t disappear because the anatomical story underneath is being refined.
Activation after shutdown is normal and expected. When a person comes out of a collapsed, shut-down state, activation often rises before it settles. Anxiety, irritability, anger often rise and these aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs of mobilization returning. The body’s energy comes back online. The Ladder helped people visualize and even expect those transitions instead of fearing them.
You don’t need the words “dorsal vagal” or “ventral vagal” for any of this to work. Shut-down state. Activated state. Calm, connected state. There are many ways to label and map what our nervous system is signaling and our bodies are feeling.
Beyond the Polyvagal Ladder: Better Questions for Nervous System Regulation
Instead of “Which rung am I on?” using questions that actually track what the nervous system is doing:
How much energy is in my system right now? Do I feel mobilized, immobilized, or both? Am I oriented internally or externally? How much access do I have to connection?
I prefer this more than a hierarchy anyway. This tracks experience rather than position. Blended states have always been part of Polyvagal Theory, but the Ladder, without explaining that nuance, often made people feel like they needed to pick a rung. In reality, blended states are common and normal in our day to day life. You may feel frozen panic, functional but fried, collapsed but wired inside. The body runs parallel processes, not clean sequential steps.
We will keep teaching the skill of state mapping, keep helping our students build capacity to handle the stressors of life and keep teaching people to increase flexibility and how to be with each state instead of ranking it, the words or labels just may need to be refined.
Nervous System Healing Beyond Polyvagal Theory
Nervous system regulation is not reducible to autonomic states alone . It involves brain prediction, autonomic signaling, belief systems, energy patterns, family systems, trauma imprints, and behavioral conditioning. It’s layered and complex. Good luck trying to capture all of that in one diagram.
Primal Trust’s approach draws on neuroplasticity research, somatic practice, brain retraining, limbic system regulation, vagal toning, mindfulness-based approaches, and relational co-regulation. The Polyvagal Theory was one module inside that broader system.
It’s exciting to see that the foundation is not shaking but It’s growing. The research on neuroplasticity, autonomic flexibility, and the relationship between perceived safety and physiological repair is gathering attention, which is an opportunity for us as professionals to help progress the industry forward.
What This Means If You’re Using Polyvagal-Based Practices Right Now
Keep going. The modules, the practices, the regulation capacity being built, all of it continues to be grounded in the broader science of neuroplasticity, autonomic regulation, and somatic healing.
When Polyvagal language comes up in the program, such as “the Ladder”, it references dorsal or ventral states. Remember that these were always just starting points for awareness, not boxes to fit yourself into.
What you’re feeling in your body is rarely one clean label. The real skill was never about identifying which rung you’re on. It’s about building the awareness to notice what’s actually happening inside you, in all its messiness, and learning to allow it instead of fighting it. That’s interoception and builds your capacity to carry forward, no matter the verbiage used.
Nothing was wasted. The Ladder built interoception. It normalized the bumpy ride out of collapse. It taught that regulation is not a clean climb to safety. Now we describe it with sharper language and we keep going.
A Note to Practitioners: The Case for Sharper Language in Nervous System Education
In all honesty I see this as an opportunity for us to come together as professionals to build credibility and move our industry forward.
The field of nervous system education cannot afford five different metaphors describing the same physiology with five different sets of terminology. It cannot afford loose anatomical claims being taught as settled science. If mind-body and neuroplastic approaches are going to earn credibility in medical and scientific spaces, the language has to hold up under scrutiny.
That means shared terminology across programs. It means distinguishing clearly between clinical observation and neuroanatomical claims.
No single model captures the full complexity of how the nervous system organizes around threat and safety. The more honest and precise practitioners are about the limits of their models , the stronger the field becomes.
The Bottom Line
Polyvagal Theory has not been debunked in the way the headlines suggest. A specific set of biological premises is being challenged, the creator of the theory has published a detailed response, and the conversation is ongoing.
What is changing is the precision of the language. Polyvagal Theory and the Polyvagal Ladder helped millions of people name their experience and now the framework gets an opportunity to grow up, the metaphors to become sharper and the science to keep refining.
