trauma neuroscience
Trauma-Informed Addiction Recovery
The relationship between trauma and addiction is not correlational — it is causal, bidirectional, and deeply embedded in neurobiology. The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) study, conducted by Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda with over 17,000 participants, demonstrated a dose-response...
Caregiving and Caregiver Health
The act of caring for an aging, ill, or disabled family member is one of the most demanding and least recognized forms of labor in modern society. An estimated 53 million Americans serve as unpaid family caregivers — a workforce whose economic value exceeds $470 billion annually, surpassing...
Box Breathing: How Navy SEALs Hack the Autonomic Nervous System
On a rooftop in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006, a Navy SEAL sniper adjusted his scope. His heart rate was elevated — the result of sprinting up four flights of stairs under fire.
Case Study: The Warrior's Return — PTSD, Intergenerational Trauma, and the Four Directions of Healing
Category: Case Studies | All Four Directions | Composite Clinical Case
Post-Conflict Community Healing
When wars end, the silence that follows is not peace. Communities that have survived armed conflict, genocide, mass displacement, or systematic oppression carry wounds that persist for generations — fractured social networks, destroyed infrastructure, shattered trust, and pervasive psychological...
Restorative Justice Principles
Restorative justice represents a fundamental paradigm shift in how societies understand and respond to harm. Rather than asking "What law was broken?
The Default Mode Network: The Brain's Operating System UI and What Happens When You Minimize It
In 2001, Marcus Raichle and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis published a paper that would fundamentally reshape neuroscience's understanding of the brain — and, by extension, of consciousness, ego, and the self.
Heart Rate Variability: The Science of Your Body's Master Biomarker
Your heart does not beat like a metronome. Even when you feel your pulse and count a steady 60 beats per minute, the intervals between those beats are subtly but constantly changing.
Interoception The Science of Internal Sensing
Welcome to the Deep Dive, where we take your complex sources, the foundational research,
The Default Mode Network: How Psychedelics, Meditation, and Shamanic States Dissolve the Ego
You have a storyteller living inside your skull. It runs constantly — narrating your life, reminding you who you are, comparing the present to the past, worrying about the future, maintaining the continuous narrative thread that you experience as "me." This storyteller is not a metaphor.
Sandra Ingerman and Soul Retrieval: Healing the Fragmented Self
Sandra Ingerman is one of the most important figures in the modern shamanic renaissance, a woman who has spent over four decades building a bridge between the ancient wisdom of shamanic healing and the insights of modern psychology. She holds an MA in counseling psychology from the California...
Nightmares and Trauma Processing: Clinical Approaches to Disturbed Dreaming
Nightmares occupy a clinical territory that bridges sleep medicine, psychiatry, and trauma psychology. Far from being trivial nocturnal disturbances, chronic nightmares affect 4-8% of the general adult population and up to 80% of individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),...
EMDR Protocol: Mechanism, Evidence, and Clinical Application
Category: Emotional Healing | Level: Jaguar (West) — Medicine Wheel
Emotional Regulation Mastery: From Neuroscience to Practice
Jaak Panksepp spent his career doing something most neuroscientists considered scientifically taboo: he studied emotions in animals. The Estonian-American neuroscientist, working at Bowling Green State University and later at Washington State University, argued that emotions are not uniquely...
Tremor Release Exercises (TRE): The Body's Built-In Shaking Medicine
David Berceli was working in war zones. Not in a research lab, not in a therapy office, but in bomb shelters in the Middle East and Africa.
Walking Meditation and Bilateral Stimulation: The Neuroscience of Contemplative Locomotion
Before seated meditation, before mantras, before monasteries and cushions and incense — there was walking. Homo sapiens emerged approximately 300,000 years ago as a bipedal endurance walker, covering ten to twenty miles daily across the African savanna.
Post-Traumatic Growth After Loss
The idea that suffering can lead to growth is ancient — present in virtually every philosophical and spiritual tradition — but its systematic scientific study is relatively recent. Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun's model of post-traumatic growth (PTG), developed in the mid-1990s at the...
Skullcap — Scutellaria lateriflora
Common names: American skullcap, Blue skullcap, Mad dog skullcap, Helmet flower, Hoodwort Latin name: Scutellaria lateriflora L. Note: Must be distinguished from Chinese skullcap (Scutellaria baicalensis / Huang Qin), which is a different species with different clinical applications.
Men's Mental Health: Breaking the Silence
Men build fortresses. Emotional walls, stoic facades, the quiet agreement to never talk about what hurts.
PTSD & Trauma: The Functional Medicine Approach
Trauma is not a psychological event. It is a full-body recalibration — a rewiring of the nervous system that changes how you breathe, digest, sleep, and relate to other humans.
Heartbeat Detection and Intuition: How Your Heart Shapes What You See, Feel, and Decide
You probably think of your heart as a pump. It contracts approximately 100,000 times per day, circulating roughly 7,500 liters of blood through 100,000 kilometers of blood vessels, delivering oxygen and nutrients to every cell in your body and carrying waste products away.
COMPREHENSIVE MEDICAL TRAINING DATA
Document Version: 1.0 Last Updated: February 2026 Intended Audience: Healthcare workers, clinic staff, hospital administrators in resource-limited and post-disaster settings Classification: Training Material
Epigenetic Inheritance and Ancestral Trauma: How Trauma Is Encoded in DNA Across Generations
In 2015, Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai published a study in Biological Psychiatry that sent tremors through both the scientific and cultural worlds. They found that the adult children of Holocaust survivors — people born after the war, who had...
MDMA-Assisted Therapy
MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), commonly known as ecstasy or molly in recreational contexts, occupies a unique position in the psychedelic therapy landscape. Pharmacologically classified as an entactogen or empathogen rather than a classic psychedelic, MDMA produces its therapeutic...
The Psychedelic Renaissance in 2025: A Complete Map of the Field
The psychedelic renaissance — the resurgence of scientific and clinical interest in psychedelic compounds after decades of prohibition — has by 2025 matured from a fringe movement into a legitimate biomedical field with billion-dollar valuations, FDA breakthrough therapy designations, published...
Sleep and Mental Health: The Bidirectional Bridge Between Rest and Resilience
The relationship between sleep and mental health is not merely correlational — it is deeply, mechanistically bidirectional. Every major psychiatric disorder involves sleep disruption as a core feature, and sleep disturbance is now recognized not just as a symptom of mental illness but as a...
Breathwork as Somatic Therapy: From Pranayama to Polyvagal Regulation
Category: Somatic Therapy / Breathwork | Level: Serpent (South) to Eagle (East) — Medicine Wheel
EMDR for Complex Trauma: Modified Protocols for Dissociation, Developmental Wounds, and the Fragmented Self
Category: Somatic Therapy / EMDR | Level: Jaguar (West) to Hummingbird (North) — Medicine Wheel
EMDR and the Neuroscience of Bilateral Stimulation: How Eye Movements Rewire Trauma
Category: Somatic Therapy / EMDR | Level: Serpent (South) to Jaguar (West) — Medicine Wheel
Somatic Experiencing Clinical Protocols: Session Structure, Techniques, and the Art of Tracking the Nervous System
Category: Somatic Therapy / SE | Level: Serpent (South) to Jaguar (West) — Medicine Wheel
Somatic Experiencing: Peter Levine's Body-Based Trauma Resolution
Category: Somatic Therapy / SE | Level: Serpent (South) — Medicine Wheel
The Science of Compassion and Loving-Kindness
When you see someone suffering, your brain offers two distinct responses. The first is empathy — you feel what they feel.
Service, Reciprocity, and Karma Yoga: The Spiritual Practice of Giving
Here is the paradox that every spiritual tradition eventually articulates: the fastest path to your own healing is to help someone else heal. The most direct route to abundance is to give something away.
EMDR: How Rapid Eye Movements Reprogram Traumatic Memory
In 1987, Francine Shapiro, a psychology doctoral student at the Professional School of Psychology in San Francisco, was walking through a park when she noticed something peculiar about her own mind. She had been ruminating on disturbing thoughts — the kind of repetitive, intrusive cognitions...
Internal Family Systems: The Neuroscience of Your Inner Committee
In 1990, a family therapist named Richard Schwartz made an observation that would redirect his entire career and eventually produce one of the most transformative psychotherapy models of the modern era. He was working with clients who had eating disorders, and he noticed something that the...
Somatic Experiencing: Peter Levine and the Wisdom of the Animal Body
In the African savanna, an impala is chased by a cheetah. The impala runs.
Yoga as Medicine: A Clinical Framework for Yoga Therapy
Yoga therapy is not yoga class. It is the targeted application of yoga practices — asana, pranayama, meditation, philosophical inquiry — as therapeutic interventions for specific health conditions, delivered by trained professionals within a clinical framework.
Yoga for Depression: The GABA Hypothesis and Mechanisms of Action
Depression is not sadness. It is a systemic condition that affects every organ system — brain, gut, immune, endocrine, musculoskeletal, cardiovascular — through interconnected pathways of inflammation, autonomic dysregulation, neurotransmitter imbalance, and hormonal disruption.
Yoga Nidra: Clinical Protocols and Applications
Yoga Nidra — literally "yogic sleep" — is a systematic method of inducing complete physical, mental, and emotional relaxation while maintaining conscious awareness. The practitioner lies in Shavasana (Corpse Pose) and follows a guided protocol that moves awareness through the body, breath,...
Yoga for PTSD: The Trauma-Sensitive Approach
Post-traumatic stress disorder is, at its core, a disorder of the body. The traumatic event may be over — sometimes decades in the past — but the body continues to respond as if it is still happening.