Some conversations rewire the way you understand your own body. This is one of them. Hannah sits down with Dr. Lisa Y. Collins — trauma practitioner, author of The Truth About Trauma, TEDx speaker, playwright, medium, and college professor — for a conversation that started with a chance encounter on a plane and became one of the most personal and expansive episodes of Yes You Can to date. If you've ever felt "irritable for no reason," carried a weight you can't quite name, or wondered why your body reacts before your brain catches up — press play. Episode Summary Dr. Lisa Y. Collins didn't set out to write a book about her own healing. She was studying trauma to help other people — until, in the middle of a course, she noticed she'd stopped breathing. Then she took the ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) quiz and, in her words, "failed." That double-take became the beginning of a 20-year journey that turned into The Truth About Trauma: Break Patterns, Build Resilience, and Restore Joy — a part-memoir, part-practical-guide that Hannah calls one of the few books she's ever read that answers "just tell me what to do." In this conversation, Lisa and Hannah go all the way in. They talk about what trauma actually is (a body-based response to danger, real or perceived — not just one catastrophic event), the difference between little-t and big-T trauma, and the six kinds of trauma most of us don't have language for: individual, collective, participatory, historical, cultural, and dignity violations, plus secondary trauma from witnessing someone else's pain. Lisa walks Hannah through her healing framework — body, mind, spirit — and then gets into the specific tools inside the book. They get into hypervigilance — a story about Lisa taking her granddaughter to church that a lot of survivors will recognize immediately. They get into generational trauma through the perfect metaphor of the deep freezer (you'll understand once you listen — and Hannah's own family story about her Oma and Opa escaping Poland during WWII lands right in that thread). And they get into racial trauma, why Lisa deliberately didn't put it in the book — "because you have to heal your foundational traumas first" — and how it ties to gender, sexual identity, and every other identity we carry into rooms not built for us. Toward the end, Hannah opens the floor to listener questions submitted through her DMs: what to do about sudden flashbacks (Hannah shares her own — related to how her mom died in 2014), how to work through dreams, and how to think about therapy when talk therapy hasn't landed. Lisa's answer, again and again, comes back to the body first, then the mind, then the spirit — and the reminder that community, attunement, and a soft gaze can be more healing than any single technique. About Dr. Lisa Y. Collins Dr. Lisa Y. Collins, EdD is a trauma healing coach, racial wellness expert, author, playwright, medium, and Assistant Professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She is a certified STAR (Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience) trauma practitioner and a widely respected voice on healing from personal, generational, and systemic trauma. Her book The Truth About Trauma: Break Patterns, Build Resilience, and Restore Joy (Llewellyn Publications, 2025) is part memoir and part practical guide, laying out her three-step body-mind-spirit framework alongside the specific tools she has used with clients — and on herself — over two decades of practice. Her TEDx talk, Healing from Racial Trauma, has been viewed thousands of times and is widely used in racial-healing curricula. She also writes on Medium and Substack, offers 1:1 coaching, group work, and spiritual sessions, and has recently stepped into playwriting with her work Hwy 8 featured at Portland's Fertile Ground Festival of New Works. Connect with Dr. Lisa Website: lisaycollins.comThe Truth About Trauma on Amazon: amazon.com/Truth-About-Trauma-Patterns-Resilience/dp/0738779296The Truth About Trauma: lisaycollins.com/products/the-truth-about-trauma-bookInstagram: @lisayvettacollinsSubstack: substack.com/@lisaycollinsMedium: medium.com/@lisa.y.collinsYouTube: Love and Light with Dr. LisaFree ebook — Love of Light: A Guide to Peace and Oneness: available at lisaycollins.comBook a free 30-min discovery call: calendly.com/lisaycollins-info/30minTEDx Talk — Healing from Racial Trauma: search YouTube for "Dr. Lisa Collins TEDx Racial Trauma" Resources Mentioned in the Episode The Truth About Trauma by Dr. Lisa Y. CollinsAdverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Study — Dr. Nadine Burke Harris's work on the ACEs quizCyndi Dale — on chakras, neural nets, and energy healing (she wrote the foreword to The Truth About Trauma)Capacitar International (capacitar.org) — free, multilingual body-based tools for stress and trauma resetBonnie Lonsbury — The Map of Abundance (Younger Selves work)Want to level up your coaching abilities? The SPRING SALE is HERE for all Instructor Magic courses, including 1:1 coaching! Get up to 40% off online education with lifetime access in the Instructor Magic Academy and suite of courses for instructors who want to level up, fill classes, and change lives.