What the Body Inherits: War, Displacement & the Politics of Healing | Featuring: Linda Thai LMSW, EPRTY 200

When Food is How You Survived | Featuring Kristen Zappone, RDN

Kristin Zappone is a registered dietitian nutritionist and co-creator of Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating (TIME), a 20-hour skills-based program developed through CFTE. She joins Jenn Turner for a conversation about what it actually looks like to rebuild a relationship with food when diet culture has been functioning as a form of chronic trauma for most of your life. Kristin starts the episode with a grounding practice — pressure through the feet, movement between heel and ball, no agenda. From there, she and Jenn move into the nine principles of TIME, including interoception, allowing food, building endurance and tolerance, and grief. The conversation is specific in ways that a lot of discussions about food and body image are not: what food scarcity actually looks like (including when there is technically food in the house but you are not allowed to eat it), what it means to work with a client whose goal is still to lose weight, and why Kristin doesn't view food-as-coping as a problem to be eliminated. They also talk about the systemic dimension of all of this — how diet culture embeds itself in family relationships and medical environments, how health messaging for people with less food access often misses the point entirely, and why so many approaches to mindful eating still have an objective hiding inside them. TIME's fall cohort begins September 2026. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Healing Without Causing Harm | Featuring Lama Rod Owens

Lama Rod Owens — Black Buddhist teacher, Harvard Divinity School graduate, and author of Love and Rage and The New Saints — joins Jenn Turner for a conversation about what it actually takes to be in a healing role without causing harm. That question turns out to go deeper than most professional training ever reaches. They start with a practice called the Four Naturals: an opening that moves through natural body, natural breath, natural mind, and natural self — an invitation to arrive without agenda, without performance, without trying to fix what's already present. From there, the conversation goes into Lama Rod's early years as a meditation teacher, when he was regularly activating people in practice and didn't yet have the framework to understand why. He stopped teaching breathwork entirely until he figured out how to offer it in a way that gave people genuine agency. He calls that period a blessing. They talk about what keeps teachers and therapists from causing harm over time — not rules, but the internal structures that make accountability possible. Staying a student. Staying in relationship with peers and elders. Keeping a life outside of the role. They talk about the Calgon dynamic: the way people come to spiritual teachers and therapists wanting to be carried away from their suffering rather than supported in being with it — and why that fantasy is a setup for harm on both sides.  And they talk about truth-telling: what it costs Lama Rod to be as open as he is, why he does it anyway, and what he believes it makes possible for the people who are watching him do it.  Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Embodied Wellbeing as the Foundation of Healing | Elaine Miller-Karas | On Trauma & Power S2 E6

Elaine Miller-Karas, LCSW has spent decades doing trauma work in some of the most difficult places imaginable — post-earthquake China and Haiti, war-affected Turkey and Syria, Covenant House shelters in Atlanta, and now the neighborhoods in Los Angeles leveled by fire. What she's developed from all of it is a biologically grounded, deeply invitational approach to healing that starts with one foundational question: what does your body already know? In this conversation with Jenn Turner, Elaine shares the core frameworks of the Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM) and Community Resiliency Model (CRM), including the wellness skill of gestures — a practice she first observed organically across multiple cultures as people reached for what helped them survive. She and Jenn go deep on what it actually means to work without prescribing, on the difference between a client who isn't ready and a client who is resistant, and on what the research coming out of Rwanda on compassion and forgiveness is telling us about the power of embodied wellbeing. They also get into the word resilience itself — where it gets weaponized, why Elaine has kept it in the name of her models anyway, and what her definition of it requires that most clinical frameworks miss. Plus: why she refuses to call tending and befriending a maladaptive response, and why that reframe matters enormously for the people sitting across from us. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Self Leadership, IFS & Healing School Culture from the Inside Out | Featuring Joanna Curry-Sartori

S2 E5 · Joanna Curry-Sartori Joanna Curry-Sartori, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the founder of the Self Leadership Collaborative, and the creator of the PAWS model — a framework rooted in Internal Family Systems that brings self-awareness, compassion, and relational capacity into schools, organizations, and communities. She is the author of The Self-Led Educator and has spent decades working at the intersection of trauma, systems, and the human beings inside them. In this conversation, Joanna and Jenn begin with a body-based practice before moving into one of the most practically grounded conversations this podcast has had. They explore what it actually looks like to bring IFS outside the therapy room — into classrooms, staff meetings, leadership teams, and communities under stress. Joanna shares the origin of the PAWS model, what happened after Sandy Hook that forced a question she spent years sitting with, and what she witnessed in a Zoom call with 80 teachers in the first months of the pandemic that changed how she understood belonging in professional spaces. Topics covered in this episode: — What unblending actually means, and why it is different from getting rid of a difficult part — Why the body is the portal into finding our parts — not just our thoughts or feelings — The student acting out in the classroom as a protective part with a positive intent nobody is asking about — Parts goggles: how curiosity changes what a teacher sees in a struggling student — The PAWS model — Pause, Aware of myself, Understand, Search for solutions, Experiment — and how it works in organizations — Why mindfulness taught as a tool is not the same as a practitioner who embodies it — 80 teachers on Zoom, the layers underneath "I'm holding it together," and what happened when safety built — What happened at Sandy Hook and the question it forced Joanna to sit with for years — Why the hardest part of working in schools is almost never the children — What becomes possible for a generation of children whose nervous systems wire up around the new C's: collaboration, community, connection, and contribution About Joanna Curry-Sartori, LMFT Founder & President, Self Leadership Collaborative Creator, PAWS Model for Self Leadership Author, The Self-Led Educator selfleadershipcollaborative.com About On Trauma & Power Hosted by Jenn Turner, LMHC, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Trauma and Embodiment. New episodes every other Tuesday. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Learn more about CFTE at healwithcfte.org

What the Body Inherits: War, Displacement & the Politics of Healing | Featuring: Linda Thai LMSW, EPRTY 200

Linda Thai, LMSW, ERYT 200 is a somatic therapist, integrative trauma therapist, and international speaker who understands the wounds of war, refugitude, and military occupation from the inside — as a former child refugee, an adult immigrant, and a non-citizen living in the United States today. Her work focuses on breaking cycles of historical and intergenerational trauma at both the individual and community level. In this conversation, Jenn and Linda begin with the body — specifically, with a practice Linda has been using to move through the last several months. She calls it the turtleneck: a way of intentionally completing the shock trauma response that accumulates at the back of the neck when a nervous system can neither fight nor flee. From there, the conversation moves through what it means to carry ancestral reverberations of military occupation in your body, how authoritarianism registers physiologically, the paradox at the heart of decolonizing our clinical practices, the compartmentalization that makes so many of us good clinicians and the point at which it stops working, why children of color are permitted only a certain degree of upset before that upset becomes a pathology or a pipeline, and why Linda believes affordable, stable, consistent housing may be the single most underestimated factor in trauma healing. This is one of the most honest conversations this podcast has had. Come prepared to feel something. Topics covered in this episode: * Refugitude and the physiology of displacement * Intergenerational and historical trauma in the body * The turtleneck — a somatic practice for completing shock trauma response * Authoritarianism and the nervous system * Decolonizing clinical practice, starting with ourselves * The school-to-prison pipeline and racialized expressions of emotion * Compartmentalization, coherence, and doing our own work as clinicians * Housing as a foundation for trauma healing * Grief, rage, and the body's way home Learn more about Linda Thai: * Website: linda-thai.com * Current offerings: 12-Week Certificate in Somatic Embodiment & Regulation, The Alchemy of Anger, The Missing Pieces of Attachment Theory: A Decolonized Approach On Trauma & Power is hosted by Jenn Turner, LMHC, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Trauma and Embodiment. New episodes drop every other Tuesday. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.