This is a 3-hour zoom course designed to rapidly bring you up to speed on the Autonomics model. Over the past several years we have published a new foundation model of autonomic physiology that goes back to first principles.

It re-architects the neuroanatomical boundaries of the primary autonomic systems, differentiates neurology from neurochemistry, and builds a three-variable model of autonomic state that has much greater nuance and descriptive specification (both qualitatively and quantitatively) than any extant model.

In this 3-hour Zoom session I will explicitly differentiate our work from Polyvagal Theory, which you will find interesting not merely pedagogically but because I worked closely with Dr. Stephen Porges for a number of years (authoring and art directing the only authorized complete visual depiction of his work) and have been very publicly active in the Polyvagal controversy that began last January when Paul Grossman published the untenability paper. You can read my new essay about it in the Psychotherapy Networker here.

I will also briefly seed some of the themes were going to dive deeper into later this fall in the Florentine Lecture series, including a brief look at predictive coding and Bayesian inference.

Among other things, this training will give you a much deeper experiential understanding of why I regularly say that the autonomic nervous system is not a ladder and why I say that the sympathetic nervous system does not exist. The clinical reality of autonomic state is a 3-variable reality, and this has fundamental implications for how we understand our own experience, and how we view others through an autonomic lens.