Claim OwnershipMastering Change | The trauma, mental health & wellbeing podcast
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Description
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.
60 Episodes
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On this episode of Mastering Change, we explore one of the most rapidly evolving and widely discussed areas in mental health: psychedelic-assisted therapy. Neuropsychopharmacologist Rayyan Zafar joins us to explain how new treatments – particularly psychedelics – are changing how we understand trauma and addiction. Rayyan’s work focuses on neuroplasticity – and he challenges a common assumption: more plasticity isn’t always better. In addiction and trauma, the brain can become stu...
Anxiety doesn’t begin in your thoughts – it begins in your nervous system. In this episode of Mastering Change, breathwork educator Jamie Clements explains how conscious breathing can directly regulate the autonomic nervous system and help shift anxiety at its root. Jamie shares how breathwork became central to his own recovery from panic attacks, and why he now teaches a structured approach that distinguishes between micro regulation practices and macro transformational work, inc...
Trauma doesn’t only create fear – it often creates isolation. In this episode of Mastering Change, Lucas Casanova explores trauma as a fundamental rupture in safety and belonging. A Buddhist and transpersonal therapist, Lucas integrates secular Buddhist practices with neuroscience and embodied therapy to help people reconnect – not just cognitively, but physically and relationally. He explains that belonging and safety are biological needs. When trauma disrupts them, thinking alon...
When trauma takes you out of your body, rebuilding safety and connection can take years. In this episode of Mastering Change, Karen Whelan shares her lived experience of sexual abuse and the long, gradual journey of healing that followed. She speaks openly about self-hate, disconnection and the profound loss of safety in her own body – and how therapy, spirituality and embodied practice helped her slowly rebuild trust in herself. Karen reflects on a powerful moment of forgiveness ...
Many of us weren’t optimally seen, held or supported as children – and the adaptations we made to survive can quietly shape how we relate, connect and protect ourselves as adults. This week on Mastering Change, Maya Vaughan, Director of the Trauma Training Institute (TTI), explains the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) – a non-pathologising, relational approach to healing developmental trauma. Rather than focusing on diagnosis or “what’s wrong,” Maya describes NARM as “profou...
Many of the behaviours we label as “dysfunctional” may actually be attempts to survive. In this episode of Mastering Change, we’re joined by Mike Niconchuk, whose work is shaped by personal and intergenerational trauma linked to his family’s experience during the Guatemalan civil war, as well as years of humanitarian work in active conflict zones. Mike did not enter this field through clinical training. Instead, his questions emerged through lived experience and direct exposure to overwhelmin...
For people living with trauma or chronic stress, the brain can feel like it’s working against them. In this episode of Mastering Change, Dr Kate Truitt introduces brain partnership – a trauma-informed approach that reframes the brain as a protector rather than a problem. She explains how fast threat pathways in the amygdala and hippocampus form to keep us safe, and why those same pathways can later drive hypervigilance, dissociation or shutdown. Kate explores how chronic stress reduces access...
For many people, healing can feel stuck. Symptoms persist, patterns repeat and change itself can begin to feel unsafe. In this episode of Mastering Change, Raoul Goldberg, founder of the PATH Method, explores why what we often describe as “chronic” may not be purely medical – but psychosocial and spiritual in nature. He shares how his work helps people reconnect with a sense of wholeness by strengthening the parts of themselves that are capable of change. Raoul walks through the c...
How do you rebuild a life when your earliest memories are of profound and extreme loss? That’s what Richard McCann explores in this episode. When he was just five years old, his mother was murdered – an event that later became national news and that influenced every part of his childhood. Richard describes how this grief showed up in ways he didn’t have words for at the time – hypervigilance, fear, constantly scanning for threats – and how teachers were among the first adults to r...
So much of what happens in healthcare is shaped by trauma – yet most clinicians are never taught what trauma is or how to recognise it in themselves or their patients. This week on Mastering Change, we speak with Susanna Petche, a GP with 25 years’ experience, who shares how her own misdiagnosed depression eventually revealed an underlying trauma response. That realisation changed her life – and her medical practice. Susanna reflects on the reality that trauma is everywhere in the...
What makes someone feel so bonded to a group that they’d sacrifice almost anything for it – and how does that same force help us heal? In this episode of Mastering Change, cognitive anthropologist Dr. Martha Newson unpacks ‘identity fusion’ – an extreme form of social bonding where self and group identities merge, creating family-like ties and powerful loyalty. Drawing on years of research with football fans, prisoners and festival communities, Martha explores how ritual, shared ...
Therapists, clinicians and helpers often tell themselves they’re “fine” – even as the work wears down their nervous system. In this conversation, palliative care doctor Dr. Rosie Weir offers a compassionate guide to trauma stewardship: the practice of staying present to other people’s pain without losing yourself in it. Drawing from her years on the frontline of end-of-life care, Rosie explains how practitioners can unconsciously carry the emotional burden of others long after a s...
For people who have spent years in survival mode, joy can feel uncomfortable. Here, Melita Stancil explains why (as well as how we can experience joy more readily). She is the creator of Anthelum, a framework designed to help people move out of survival mode by looking at families, schools, workplaces and communities as interconnected parts of healing. A central theme in her work is joy. She shares how hypervigilance and stress can make exposure to joy difficult, and why practici...
Have you ever noticed how some stress seems to not just dictate your mood, but your whole sense of presence? That’s because, according to craniosacral therapist Lulu Ferrand, we’re operating on a spectrum of vibrational frequency. On this week’s episode, Lulu speaks to us about how what we engage with, moment to moment, can raise or lower our sense of freedom, safety and connection. She explains how she understands craniosacral therapy (CST) as working not only with the nervous sy...
Sometimes, talking therapy isn’t enough. This week on Mastering Change, we speak with neurofeedback specialist Stuart Black, whose work focuses on trauma, PTSD and the patterns the nervous system can’t shift through traditional talking therapy alone. Stuart explains how neurofeedback helps a dysregulated nervous system re-regulate, especially when trauma has left people stuck in survival mode. He describes how it can support the processing of traumatic memories stored in the emoti...
Christmas can intensify grief. Familiar rituals, memories and traditions can exacerbate the feelings of absence and bring more emotional pain to the surface. In this episode of Mastering Change, psychotherapist Julia Samuel shares what years of supporting grieving individuals have taught her about love, loss and the support people need most. She explains how grief is held in the body, how the brain struggles to catch up with the reality of loss, and why “pain is the agent of change” in ...
Why are so many women only discovering their ADHD in adulthood? In this episode of Mastering Change, Dr. Samantha Hiew, founder of ADHD Girls, explores the gender bias in psychiatry and the ways in which hormones, stress and trauma intersect with neurodivergent experience. Through her own story and research, Samantha reveals how hormonal shifts and perimenopause can alter stress tolerance, why diagnosis can be a powerful act of self-recognition, and how understanding our neurobiol...
Perimenopause is often described as a hormonal shift – but what if it’s also a neurological and emotional one? In this episode of Mastering Change, Paula Rastrick, founder of The Brain-Body Method, explores how trauma, stress sensitivity and hormonal health are intricately linked. Paula explains how our stress profiles begin developing in the womb, shaped by our mother’s nervous system and early attachment experiences. Through her neuro-bio-psycho-social lens, she shows how unreso...
What happens when the part of us that wants to heal becomes the thing that gets in the way? In this episode, we speak with Laura Patryas, a nondual IFS practitioner who sees our inner parts as expressions of awareness rather than problems to fix. Laura explains how trauma disconnects us from presence and how, in both therapy and life, healing begins when we can rest in awareness rather than try to control it. She describes how nondual IFS expands traditional IFS by integrating spi...
How do we talk about trauma without retraumatising? Through animation might be one answer. In this episode, we speak with Quint Boa, founder of Synima, a production company creating short-form animation for mental health communication and education. Quint shares how metaphor in animation allows us to explore emotional and traumatic experiences safely, helping people engage with difficult material without being re-exposed to distressing imagery. He discusses the practical benefits ...
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