55: Dr. Janina Fisher - The neurobiology of trauma: how trauma can alter our brain, body and behaviour, and how compassion and mindfulness can help us heal

Our latest guest on The MindHealth360 Show, Dr. Janina Fisher, one of the world’s leading experts on treating trauma, explains the revolution in trauma treatment since Bessel van der Kolk’s work, which showed that trauma is not in the event itself, but rather in the body’s reaction to that event, which is stored in the body, the nervous system and the lower brain regions. This explains why talk therapy and CBT, which engage the brain’s higher prefrontal cortex, so often fail to address the root causes of mental health issues and are blunt tools when it comes to successfully treating trauma. 

She explains that when we have an emotional reaction to an event or a person, we may actually be having a “feeling memory”, reacting to an implicit memory from a childhood trauma rather than to the actual person or event in the present. And this memory can trigger our nervous system’s animalistic response to an earlier threat – whether mammalian (fight/flight) or reptilian (freeze), in the present – dysregulating our nervous system and contributing to mental health symptoms such as depression, anxiety, panic, and lack of focus, memory and concentration.

Dr. Fisher developed the groundbreaking TIST (Trauma Informed Stabilisation Treatment) to help heal trauma and educate and train trauma therapists around the world. Combining Dr. Dick Schwartz’ IFS parts work with mindfulness, clinical hypnosis, and Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy, her approach has proven very successful in sustainably treating trauma. Here she shares some key insights to help us understand the effects of trauma and nervous system dysregulation on our bodies, minds and behaviour, and gives us some top tips for recovery.

Janina Fisher, Ph.D. is a licensed clinical psychologist and a former instructor at Harvard Medical School. An international expert on the treatment of trauma, she is an Advisory Board member of the Trauma Research Foundation and the author of three books, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Self-Alienation (2017), Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma: a Workbook for Survivors and Therapists (2021), and The Living Legacy Instructional Flip Chart (2022). She is best known for her work on integrating mindfulness-based interventions into trauma treatment, and she is also the creator of Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST) therapy.