In this excerpt, the podcast’s two years and 100 episodes are celebrated through 25 moments, along with a tribute to two beloved voices lost along the way. Hear the full conversation on The Gifts of Trauma Podcast.
Last week, we aired our 100th episode of The Gifts of Trauma podcast. This milestone caught us all by surprise. We’re two years in, but it feels like we’re just getting started.
To mark this occasion, we’re offering a taster menu: Twenty-five small bites, pulled from 100 episodes.
We’ve compared this podcast journey to a train ride, each guest pausing their own journey to hop aboard and share their wisdom. Some are widely known… Others are unsung heroes doing extraordinary work in their own corners of the world.
Our train has visited: Math anxiety. Menopause. Childhood trauma. Addiction. War. Racism. Motherhood. Fatherhood. Adoption. The therapist’s wound, the healer’s wound, the teacher’s wound. One hundred episodes. It’s not nearly enough, and yet it’s so much… and we are grateful.
Remembering Two Voices We Lost
Before introducing the taster menu, we’ll pause to remember two guests who passed away shortly after speaking with us. Efu Nyaki, a powerhouse in the somatic experiencing world, recorded her episode on May 20; the news of her passing came ten days later. Some in her community said she’d ‘graduated,’ which is completely fitting for her luminous soul. We lost a beloved Compassionate Inquiry® community member, Maria de los Angeles Estrada, on April 21. When she joined us in March to speak about disenfranchised grief, her spirit was so vibrant and alive. There is nothing like hearing a beloved voice again, so shortly after they’ve gone.
Our Taster Menu: In Order of Appearance
Episode 1: Dr. Gabor Maté “There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with anybody… the wounds that you carry can be healed.”
Episode 2: Rhonda Nelson “I had this ability to drop the cane when I was around my family.”
Episode 3: Luke Sniewski “I didn’t even know what an emotion was until I turned 30.”
Episode 5: Stephen Brown “I knew I was in the wrong place,” on walking into a Protestant enclave in Belfast as a teenager during the Troubles.
Episode 10: Sat Dharam Kaur ND “I’m allowing something bigger to carry this whole ship… to make the impossible possible.”
Episode 11: Jordan Decker “Shame is a shortcut to change with long-term consequences, whereas love is a long road that ends in resilience.”
Episode 13: Sara Easterly “We live in a culture that tells us adoption is beautiful. And yes, it can be. But I also have a lot of really hard parts of my story. There’s grief, there’s loss that doesn’t get acknowledged.”
Episode 16: Allison Creech “I have a visceral, felt-sense awareness of that presence… I love that space.”
Episode 18: Vimalasara Mason-John “When did you lose your play? When did you lose your aliveness? When did you stop being enchanted by your own story?”
Episode 22: Matthew Green “The real edge of this is asking what role journalists can play in recognizing the role of trauma underneath the crises that we see in the news.”
Episode 25: Sat Dharam Kaur ND “What happened to you… what happened to your ancestors… you’re not what happened to you.”
Episode 28: Dr. Louise Taylor “That would have possibly been quite handy to know prior.” [On being diagnosed dyslexic in the final stretch of her PhD.]
Episode 29: Gordon Neufeld “We’ve never had more books… and we’ve never been so dumbed down.”
Episode 35: Fredrick Wretman A client, mid-session, said, “You are a copy of my abuser.” And six months later: “Being able to feel safe with you has made my relationship to men in general much better.”
Episode 36: Wen Harper Harris While sitting at a stoplight in LA, scrolling, “There was no time to stop and pause and do nothing and be.”
Episode 50: Inés Zabalaga “We’ve got you, honey bunny, we’ve got you… you don’t have to do it alone.”
Episode 55: Reggie Hubbard “I grew up in a land that saw me as a threat when all I wanted to do was be a blessing.”
Episode 63: Juliano Innocenti “Most of humanity is our tribe. We are just taught to see difference and separate. We’re not different. We’ve just been pulled apart.”
Episode 66: Kate Hazlitt, Inés Zabalaga “I’m pruning not just for myself, but for everyone that is coming up before me and after me.”
Episode 72: Silva Neves, Diana Safta “There are so many things about sex that people believe to be true [that] are just constructs that have [their] origins in religion.”
Episode 77: Zach Bush, MD, Eva Dalak “More so than the victim or the perpetrator, the saviour is actually the one going in to poison the system and see who can survive.”
Episode 85: Dr. Kenneth Doka, Maria Estrada, Ellie Davis “Acknowledge life even with grief. There’s lots to live for, lots to learn, lots to know.”
Episode 86: Rosemary Wanganeen “I had to empty my physical body of all that grief energy for my spirit to feel safe enough to come home. And between my physical body and my spirit, we’ve been able to sustain that connection.”
Episode 89: Joe Baldock, Bret Hunt, MD “There are no ‘others.’ These violent or traumatized men aren’t ‘other’ from us. And that is not a very popular line of thought.”
Episode 96: Efu Nyaki, Rennet Wong Gates “I’m not going to fix you. I’m sitting here with you so that you can learn something from me as I learn something from you.” – Efu Nyaki
And… We’re Just Getting Started
While reflecting on our past episodes, we all agreed that, two years in and a hundred episodes deep, we’re still just starting this adventure, still discovering, exploring, and definitely still loving the journey.
If something we’ve offered as a taster lingers, please follow the link to the full entrée. And if this podcast has ever made our chaotic world make a little more sense, even for an hour… we’d love your help finding other people whom it could lift and ease. So please subscribe, rate and share—small actions that help so much as we carry this work out to the world, engaging the hearts of listeners, one episode at a time.
Thank you for two years. Thank you for a hundred episodes. We’ll see you down the tracks.
The Gifts of Trauma is a weekly podcast that features personal stories of trauma, transformation, healing, and the gifts revealed on the path to authenticity. Listen to the full conversation, and if it resonates, please subscribe, rate, review, and share.
