If you’ve been following the news in trauma and neuroscience circles, you may have seen that Polyvagal Theory is under attack. A group of 39 researchers published a paper in 2026 calling the theory “untenable.” Wikipedia has been updated to reflect the criticism. Therapists who have built their clinical practice around this framework are understandably asking: should I still be using this?
The short answer is yes. The debate is worth understanding, because it’s also an invitation to use the framework more wisely moving forward.
It's worth pausing on why this framework became so central to trauma-informed care in the first place.
Developed by neuroscientist Dr. Stephen Porges, Polyvagal Theory gave therapists and clients something they had been missing: biological language for autonomic states.
Before this framework gained traction, people in fight, flight or shutdown may have been told they were overreacting. That they just needed to calm down. They were asked to think their way out of states that are, at their core, physiological. Polyvagal Theory theory changed that conversation. It offered a way of understanding that when someone freezes in a difficult moment, or goes blank mid-session, or can’t feel safe in a safe space, that’s the nervous system doing exactly what it needs to do to survive. Fight, flight, and shutdown are ancient, intelligent adaptations that kept our ancestors alive.
Fight, flight, and shutdown are ancient, intelligent adaptations that kept our ancestors alive.
Polyvagal Theory also brought clinical attention to things that had been underemphasized in trauma work: the regulating effect of safe relationships, the role of tone of voice and facial expression, the importance of co-regulation between therapist and client. According to the theory, these are the mechanisms through which healing becomes possible.
For clients who have spent years feeling broken, the Polyvagal reframe can be genuinely transformative. Your shutdown isn’t weakness and your hypervigilance isn’t craziness. Your nervous system learned, in the face of real threat, how to protect you.
Your shutdown isn't weakness and your hypervigilance isn't craziness. Your nervous system learned, in the face of real threat, how to protect you.
That’s worth holding and acknowledging, even as we work to build more flexibility.
A researcher named Paul Grossman has been publishing critiques of Polyvagal Theory for nearly two decades. His most recent paper, co-signed by 38 colleagues and published in early 2026, calls the theory fundamentally flawed. That’s a strong claim that deserves to be taken seriously, and when you look closely at the actual arguments, a few things stand out.
Some of the criticisms argue against things the theory never purported. Critics point out that reptiles display social behaviors like pair bonding and cooperative hunting, implying this disproves Polyvagal Theory. It doesn't, because the theory never claimed reptiles are antisocial. What it actually suggests is that mammals evolved specific biological wiring connecting the heart to the face, voice, and ears, making a particular kind of safety and co-regulation possible. Reptiles may be social. They just don't do it through that same system. It's a bit like arguing a book about jazz is wrong because classical music also exists.
Some of the criticisms raise real, unresolved scientific questions. Researchers disagree about whether the main measurement Polyvagal research relies on, the way your heart rate naturally speeds up and slows down as you breathe, actually captures what the theory claims it captures. There are also questions about whether two specific pathways in the nervous system are as separate and distinct as the theory describes. These debates are ongoing. Neither side has definitively won the argument, and both have points worth taking seriously.
There is something buried in the critique that clinicians should actually find reassuring. Toward the end of their paper, the critics make an interesting concession. The concepts at the heart of Polyvagal-informed therapy, things like the importance of safety, the power of co-regulation, the role of social connection in healing, those ideas predate Polyvagal Theory by decades. They come from attachment research, trauma work, and relational therapy. The critics’ point is that the therapy doesn’t need the neuroscience to hold. Read another way, this is an acknowledgment that the clinical framework has deep roots that no scientific debate can uproot.
There is also an editorial dimension worth naming. Grossman guest-edited a special issue of a major scientific journal in 2023 that published multiple critiques of Polyvagal Theory without including any responses or rebuttals. Wikipedia then amplified those critiques, presenting them as more definitive than the original papers warranted. A contested scientific debate got flattened into something that looked like a settled verdict. Porges responded in detail in the same 2026 journal issue. The conversation is ongoing, which is not the same as the theory being wrong.
A contested scientific debate got flattened into something that looked like a settled verdict.
Here is what gets lost when this debate gets framed as “Polyvagal Theory: true or false.” The clinical value of a framework does not require the underlying biology to be perfectly mapped.
The three-state model, safe and connected, mobilized, shutdown, is a useful clinical heuristic. It helps clients locate themselves and gives therapists and clients a shared language for what’s happening in the body. It creates a foundation for building capacity and flexibility over time. None of that stops being useful because neuroanatomists are still debating the precise functional role of two brainstem nuclei. You can appreciate the clinical value of a map while knowing the territory is far more complex than any map can capture.
The clients who have found genuine healing through Polyvagal-informed work, who have learned to track their states, to seek co-regulation, to understand their shutdowns as protective rather than broken, didn’t find that healing in a neuroanatomy paper. They found it in a framework that helped them relate to their own nervous systems with more curiosity and less shame.
Use it as a theoretical lens, not fact. The three-state model is a starting point for exploration. When a client recognizes themselves sliding into shutdown, that recognition itself is therapeutic. Offer it as a way of making sense of experience, not as a precise map of what's happening in the brain.
Stay honest about the underlying complexity. The nervous system is in constant conversation with the immune system, the endocrine system, the gut, developmental history, cultural context, and the relational environment. Polyvagal Theory describes one thread in a much larger web. Holding that complexity makes you a more sophisticated clinician.
The critics raising questions about the neuroanatomy and measurement methods are doing the work that science requires. That’s important, and it doesn’t mean we abandon a clinically rich framework while those questions are being worked out. Science and clinical wisdom don’t have to be in competition. The most grounded therapists hold both, staying curious about what the research shows while trusting what they observe in the room.
They found it in a framework that helped them relate to their own nervous systems with more curiosity and less shame.
Porges, S. W. (2026). When a critique becomes untenable: A scholarly response to Grossman et al.’s evaluation of polyvagal theory. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 23(1), 113–128. https://doi.org/10.36131/cnfioritieditore20260111
