Claim OwnershipMastering Change | The trauma, mental health & wellbeing podcast
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Welcome to Mastering Change, a podcast co-hosted by Emma and Araminta, where we engage in meaningful conversations centred around healing. In this series, we bring together leading experts, innovative thinkers, and emerging voices to connect knowledge with real-world impact in the areas of trauma, mental health and wellbeing.
Each episode features insightful discussions with respected figures as well as promising new contributors to the field. We explore a range of topics with a focus on making this knowledge available for anyone interested in supporting their own healing journey or that of others.
At Mastering Change, we understand the significance of conversation as a means of fostering understanding and growth. Our aim is to create a ripple effect, facilitating the transfer of knowledge and establishing a community where impactful voices are heard.
Whether you are a seasoned professional or new to the field, we invite you to engage in thoughtful discussions that can inspire meaningful change in your practice and personal life. Join us as we explore critical insights and perspectives, encouraging a shared commitment to healing trauma.
34 Episodes
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What happens when silence becomes a survival strategy – and healing means finding your voice again? This week on Mastering Change, we speak with therapist, author and founder of the Washington Therapy Fund Foundation Ashley McGirt about the impact of racial and intergenerational trauma. Ashley shares how trauma rooted in racism and injustice can echo through generations, shaping families, relationships and self-worth – and how healing begins when we start to name what was once...
What if healing meant slowing down, softening, and coming back to your body? This week on Mastering Change, we speak with Chen Lizra – somatic practitioner and founder of The Power of Somatic Intelligence – about how trauma pulls us away from ourselves and how presence, movement, and pleasure can guide us back. Chen explains why safety is the foundation for any healing process, how to recognise when we’re overriding our nervous system and why slowing down can be the most coura...
What if healing meant slowing down, softening, and coming home to your body This week on Mastering Change, we speak with Chen Lizra – somatic practitioner and founder of The Power of Somatic Intelligence – about how trauma disconnects us from ourselves, and how movement, pleasure, and presence can guide us back. Chen explains how working with the nervous system, rather than overriding it, creates the conditions for safety and lasting change. She shares how slowing down can be an act of co...
How do we stop working at “the wrong end of the spectrum” – only intervening when it’s too late? This week on Mastering Change, clinical psychologist and Innovating Minds founder Dr. Asha Patel shares her journey from working in forensic services to building trauma-informed systems for schools and community-based organisations. Asha explains how behaviour is always a form of communication, why exclusion punishes pain instead of addressing it, and how compassion, regulated adu...
What happens when silence becomes survival? This week on Mastering Change, sisters Cipriana and TK Quann share their journey of surviving over a decade of childhood abuse – and what it has meant to finally speak the unspeakable. They discuss the long shadow of shame, the healing impact of psychedelic plant medicines, and why sisterhood has been their most powerful form of therapy. With honesty and vulnerability, the Quann sisters open a window into how trauma shapes identity – and how exp...
What does it take to heal after abuse, assault or complex PTSD? This week on Mastering Change, trauma therapist, speaker and author Shari Botwin joins us for a candid conversation about dismantling shame and speaking the unspeakable. She draws on her own journey as a survivor as well as 25 years of clinical work, sharing how shame takes hold and how to recognise and move through it. Compassion and safe relationships are, she says, essential in recovery and she explains w...
We know about the five stages of grief – but did you know there’s a sixth? David Kessler speaks to us in this episode about how finding meaning can become one of the most powerful steps in healing after loss. Kessler is one of the world’s leading grief experts and author of On Grief and Grieving and Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Drawing on decades of experience and his own personal journey with loss, David shares why all trauma carries grief, and why healing requires more t...
Why do we keep falling into the same family roles – even as adults? This week we speak with systems therapist and family recovery coach Jerry Wise about how to break free from emotional enmeshment, codependency and the unspoken rules that keep us stuck. Drawing on decades of clinical and coaching experience, Jerry introduces the concept of self-differentiation – the process of becoming your own person while staying connected to others. He explains why physical distance doesn’t...
Could just a few minutes of intention, presence and energy work change everything? This week on Mastering Change, we speak with Poppy Delbridge – energy psychologist, rapid tapping practitioner and author of TAP – to explore how energy-based practices like EFT (emotional freedom technique) can shift trauma and regulate the nervous system. Poppy explains how belief systems are stored in the body, why affirmations alone don’t work and how trauma can wire us into patterns of fear a...
Before we can speak our pain, our bodies have already carried it – which means, often, talking through trauma isn’t enough. This week on Mastering Change, we sit down with Erica Hornthal, licensed clinical professional counselor, board-certified dance/movement therapist, and author of Body Aware and the brand-new BodyTalk. Known as “The Therapist Who Moves You,” Erica explores how trauma lives not just in memory, but in muscle tone, breath, posture – even stillness. Drawing on yea...
Romance novels aren’t just escapism – they can help process trauma too. Academic, writer and trauma theorist Dr. Alicia Kindleysides invites us to think differently about healing – examining how reading and writing can offer safe spaces for processing pain. Her PhD research explores trauma responses through the world of romance fiction. She has found that romance fiction gives people a place to safely rehearse emotional experiences – connection, desire, safety – that may have been disr...
What if healing didn’t start with words – but simply with presence? This week on the Mastering Change podcast, we speak with Rianne Sibma-de Vries, a trauma-informed counsellor and equine therapist based in the Netherlands. Rianne’s work combines Internal Family Systems (IFS), systemic constellations, somatic techniques and equine-assisted therapy to help people reconnect with themselves in profound, body-based ways. Horses, Rianne explains, are instinctive, non-judgemental and de...
Is traditional talk therapy enough to heal trauma? This week on Mastering Change, we speak with Rathika Marsh – a spiritual psychologist who helps people connect with their inner voice, their bodies, and their soul. “The body doesn’t just hold trauma – it holds wisdom and resilience.” Growing tired of the limitations placed upon her as a psychologist, Rathika developed the Freedom and Expansion Method: a multidimensional approach to healing trauma that bridges embodiment and...
Often what keeps us stuck isn’t the trauma itself but the shame it leaves behind. This week on Mastering Change, we sit down with Annalie Howling – EMDR therapist, performance coach, and author of Unapologetic – to explore shame as one of trauma’s most corrosive legacies. Annalie speaks openly about her own history of violence, self-harm, and the masks she wore to stay hidden. She shares why she refuses to offer a step-by-step guide to healing – and how pulling shame “out by the r...
In Part III of our three-part series with psychology researcher and technology executive Steve Siddals, we explore perhaps the most important and challenging question yet: What happens when people in crisis turn to AI for help – and it gets it wrong? Joined by AI ethicist Catherine Mooney, we dig into the unintended consequences and ethical grey areas emerging as more and more people turn to chatbots for emotional support. In this final episode, we explore: The alarmin...
It’s Part II of our conversation with psychology researcher and technology executive Steve Siddals. Last week, we uncovered surprising insights into how people are using AI chatbots for emotional support. Now in Part II of this three-part series, Steve unpacks the ethical complexities, unintended consequences and extraordinary potential of using AI in therapeutic contexts. We explore the paradox: how something that isn’t human can help us relate more deeply to other humans. And w...
Can a chatbot provide emotional support in moments of crisis? Can AI ever replicate the safety and insight of human connection? These are the questions Steve Siddals – psychology researcher and technology executive – set out to explore in one of the first qualitative studies into AI chatbots and mental health. In this episode of Mastering Change, we dive into Steve’s surprising findings: that 18 out of 19 participants in his study found AI chatbot support helpful – some even described i...
“Why should a child have to fight an adult in a court of law?” This week on Mastering Change, we had a deeply moving conversation Poppy and Miranda Eyre. Poppy is a survivor of child sexual abuse; Miranda, her mother, was the first person she told. Theirs is a story of survival, resistance, reform, and a call for systemic change. They are one of the rare families for whom the legal system worked. But as Miranda says, “We’ve never met another family like us. That’s the problem.”&nb...
We’re joined by acclaimed Hungarian-Canadian physician and one of the world’s foremost voices on trauma and addiction – Dr. Gabor Maté. It’s an illuminating conversation that spans everything from the inner workings of conflict, compassion and self-regulation to media and politics. We touch on polarisation which, Gabor explains, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We also explore: Rupture and repair in relationships The need to consistently recognise our body state How...
As an openly autistic psychotherapist, Dr. Katherine Uher works with those experiencing anxiety, low self-esteem and complex trauma – often shaped by a lifetime of feeling "othered." Her research explores the impact of systemic trauma, especially how institutions often misunderstand, pathologise or erase the needs of neurodivergent people. She speaks from both professional and lived experience, which she shares in the episode. “As a society, our perception of normal is rigid and w...
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