prairiemary: FAMILY PHOTOS OF ME AS A BABY

The Polyvagal Theory developed by Stephen Porgas over recent decades and now a hot topic being developed by all sorts of people, esp. therapists, is so useful that one must be cautious when talking about it so as to stay out of the weeds, as the saying goes.

The path is the function of the autonomic nervous system in regulating the human body. It is an evolved function that helps us to stay safe by involving others in our welfare. The nerve involved comes out of the brain/spine at neck level and controls mostly the heart, the chest and the face. It makes possible social joining of the individual to other people through empathy and other signings with expressive parts of the body. It's function can be examined medically but is operated as an art, a humanism.

It's fairly well understood by amateur investigators that there are two nervous systems: the voluntary and involuntary, this latter of which is "autonomic" (automatic and unconscious). In terms of the autonomic system we have understood that there are two primary reciprocities between the sympathetic and parasympathetic "modes" of coping with events so as to maintain stability and homeostasis, which is staying within the limits of what will maintain life. We are so in love with binaries, that we've clung to the idea of these two systems as partners so much that we've not realized there is a third autonomic system that develops in early life and is of crucial importance. Porgas calls it "social expressiveness." Many authorities see it as the distinguishing feature of humans that allows them to cooperate and some see it as the growing edge of evolution.

The other ideas that make this system so important are those of first attachment between the caregiver and the infant and the capacity of these two to create a sort of "forcefield" between them, face-to-face. Later in life this is called "liminal" and religious theory explains that it is a "place" that provides security and community belonging. Leaving aside the 3rd vagal nerve system, the object relations thinkers have explored this attachment, producing books with teddy bears -- symbols of attachment -- on the covers.

Now I will indulge myself. I am about as close to my death as I was close to my birth in the following photos. Now, looking back and thinking through my life and present living, I find that I'm relating it to the polyvagal third function, which is protective but supports expansion and exploration. That is, my child attachment was very strong but never really translated into social competence. I was opinionated and a bit of a bully until kindergarten, which I joined a week late and against my will. I've been an outlier ever since.

NE Fifteenth and Alberta in 1939 was built up by European immigrants after WWI. By the time we three sibs were born, there were no other children on the street. My mother stayed at home, as was customary, though she had been a career girl, and we visited only relatives, my father's sibs. Our cousins were about the same age but "culturally" different because of our mothers, who are the carriers of culture. My mother was different from the other two Portland mothers, who were very much bonded between each other and even had had a double marriage in Brandon, Canada. Then those two mothers were separated when one husband had health problems that forced a move to Santa Ana, CA. The remaining two mothers (my mother and my father's sister) were quite different styles. There was always a subterranean riptide, very much hidden, about the "proper" way to regard life. When I was old enough, I escaped to books. Propriety has always been ambiguous to me. I conform in some ways, defy in others.

This helped with making me an outlier and a good student. My father had an MS ag degree and a snobbish Scots idea of the best culture: Scots as he imagined it. This was a middle-class understanding based on small-town prosperity. Victorian values were classical music, chess, playing the piano, photography, subscriptions to slick magazines full of photos and stories, attendance at lectures, and shelves of books of all kinds. My parents went to a major local exhibit of Rodin but closed we kids out because of nudity. In fact, most of the things valued were thought to be adult things.

My father had a secret hoard of books about the just developing scientific understanding of sex. Two sibs were planned, with the help of condoms, and the third pregnancy was unplanned. There was no notion of not going through with it, though it contributed to there never being enough money. My mother had her tubes tied -- not my father. When I suggested this thought about the third child recently (my mother was dead) the storm I got was equivalent to advocating abortion. My usual narcissism, according to the family. Stay unconscious.

Higher education separated me from family twice. NU coincided with the very beginning of the wild '60's and 70's, so that I was attracted and approving, but I backed off to the Blackfeet Rez and allied with a man five years younger than my mother, but an identified artist who enjoyed the Victorian admiration for bronze historical and anthropological subjects celebrating white colony creation. I bonded/attached to him, basically re-inventing my childhood over a decade. It was about safety.

At the end of the marriage (1970) I was way out of kilter. Again, I bonded to a strong man and then to a denomination, feeling it was an ultimate. In fact, the UUA is a Victorian science-centered quasi-Christian context with a lot of group skills and I picked up enough to wish to enter ministry -- misunderstanding it, partly because it was changing. The UU's speak of "learned ministry," but the days of solitary study to support brilliant sermons worth publishing in local newspapers have ended. In my mother's style of stoic responsibility and my father's style of joking and reading, I took outlier UU prairie churches but eventually walked.

I went right into the arms of the new thinking about a true sea change in thought. What are humans when one accepts the existence of hominins, dozens of prototypes? How do we manage the exquisite operation of the hordes of cells and microbes that is a dynamic person? How do we think of the inevitability of time stretching back and back and back, the interdependence of cultures, ecological flow, the artist's ability to re-envision life?

Nothing in my life has been wasted except the skill and effectiveness of my third polyvagal nerve system if it had been understood. It is still plastic, capable of development.