Conversations with Carolyn Spring

Trauma teaches us that we are helpless to act in the face of danger. But recovery from trauma involves learning to act, learning to take steps, learning to start to find and create the solutions. In this podcast, I talk about the symptoms of trauma and how they drive us towards a solution.

Trauma isn't something we're supposed to get over easily. It's supposed to impact us. It's supposed to change us. That's part of why it's so hard to shift. The problem isn't with us. In this podcast, I talk about the impacts of trauma and how it isn't something that we can get over easily.

Sometimes life doesn't go to plan. In this episode, Carolyn discusses the circumstances that led her back into therapy, the return of dissociative parts of the personality, and how she's rising again after being knocked (and literally falling) down.

Unkindness is rife in our society. Extreme unkindness is, in simplistic terms, called abuse. To heal from abuse, we need an abundance of kindness. But our survival-based back brain preferentially focuses on unkindness, on danger and threat. In this podcast Carolyn talks about how to retrain our front brains to focus on and notice the many kindnesses that are in fact all around us.

Recovering from trauma takes time. In this podcast, Carolyn looks at how we often missed out on developmental stages during childhood, and how we have to learn what we were not in a position to learn as children - not least our ability to regulate our emotions, which isn’t a sign of character deficiency, but simply the loss of opportunity.

When we have suffered trauma and pain, our brains find it hard to experience joy. But we need to put ourselves in the right place to find joy, and we need to cultivate it. In this podcast Carolyn talks about a life-transforming trip from 2012 and how the big breakthroughs are built on the backs of daily small breakthroughs.

Reindeer and suncream?! Life doesn’t always appear as we expect it to. In this podcast, Carolyn Spring talks about how trauma anticipates danger and badness, and how to develop the imagination for life to be different

In this podcast, Carolyn talks about the crippling isolation of shame, and how to move beyond it.

Is recovery from trauma and abuse - resulting in dissociation and even a dissociative disorder - possible? That's the subject of this podcast where Carolyn Spring talks about the vulnerability of hoping for good things, the difference between correlation and causation, and the difference between hoping for and planning for.

Join Carolyn as she talks about how important the relationship between therapist and client is, and what factors go into making a good one.

Featuring quotes from Elizabeth Howell, Bruce Perry and Carolyn Spring, plus a free psychoeducational resource, 'Four Ways to Better Sleep' pdf poster.

Featuring quotes from Elizabeth Howell, Bruce Perry and Carolyn Spring, plus a free psychoeducational resource, 'Four Ways to Better Sleep' pdf poster.

Featuring quotes from Elizabeth Howell, Bruce Perry and Carolyn Spring, plus a free psychoeducational resource, 'Four Ways to Better Sleep' pdf poster.

Recovery from trauma is a journey, an orientation, a direction, not a specific location. Just head north - where you're at is less important than which direction you're headed in. In this podcast, Carolyn discusses why we can feel that recovery is impossible, how recovery perhaps doesn't look as we imagine it to, and how society needs to help with 'public transport' to help us on our way.

Join Carolyn as she talks about how important she found it to discover who she was as an individual, rather than as someone trying to simply 'fit in'.

Carolyn talks about the most important things to focus on for survivors at the start of their journey of recovery.