A practitioner asks: “Source Creator, the Polyvagal Theory is becoming popular among trauma therapists, as a be-all and end-all, theory to explain trauma and how to heal it. Healing is prescribed through a rather arcane technique of return to homeostasis that calls for “somatic experiencing” to release nervous system charge. Does the theory have merit? Is it worth spending time on by sincere healers, or is the emphasis and investment being placed on it a deliberate misdirection to create make-work for potential trauma healers?”

It is worth checking on all such things because the field of energy medicine is in some ways a misdirection, believing it is the best and, in some cases, only path to the more complete healing people are yearning to achieve but medicine cannot provide, still. This theory is well-intended but it is more a tool to obtain some minor symptomatic relief than deep changes that will be long-lasting and there are, indeed, other ways to accomplish the same thing more expeditiously than by the practitioners you are looking into. This is still a kind of stopgap measure that does not achieve deep healing of the true origin of energy blockages and misalignments that turn into diagnosable maladies. That requires deep karmic repair, not an energetic manipulation of any sort that will affect the flow of energy via the meridians, and so on. So we would say that the approach, as described here, has some, but minimal, benefits.