On Trauma and Power with Jenn Turner, LMHC

Center for Trauma and Embodiment
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Mental Health
  • Updated Biweekly

Hosted by CFTE Co-Director Jenn Turner, LMHC, On Trauma and Power explores the profound relationship of trauma and healing through the lens of embodied practices and the complex dynamics of power. Featuring survivors, experts, educators, authors, and practitioners of varying disciplines, this podcast dives into how trauma and power intersect in diverse ways in our lives. Join us for trauma-informed conversations that inspire, educate, and empower.

  1. Sep 8

    Building Mindfulness Into Schools From the Inside Out | Featuring: Ben Painter & Sid Babla

    Ben Painter and Sid Babla of Whole School Mindfulness join Jenn Turner for a conversation about what it actually looks like to build a mindfulness program in a school — not as an add-on intervention, not airdropped from the outside, but grown from whoever is already there, already practicing, already a little bit doing it off the side of their desk. Sid opens with the Three Doorways to the Present Moment: a practice moving through sound, breath, and interoceptive sensation that sets the tone for a conversation full of genuine curiosity about how and where these practices actually land. From there, Ben and Sid share their own paths to this work — Ben through a high school in Concord, Massachusetts with a full-time mindfulness director on staff; Sid through growing up in India, working in finance, going to graduate school in Belgium, and arriving at Dartmouth during a pandemic — before walking through how Whole School's model has evolved over seven years of learning from what didn't work. They get into the principle of proximity, the shift away from prescriptive programming toward community-led experimentation, what the two-year mindfulness director cohort actually looks like week to week, and why the biggest thing Whole School does is often just getting out of the way so directors can learn from each other. Jenn shares her own story — training as an opera singer in rural Maine, being told she wasn't in her body, and following that thread into yoga, therapy, and everything that came after. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

    Building Mindfulness Into Schools From the Inside Out | Featuring: Ben Painter & Sid Babla

  2. Aug 25

    Doing This Work Without Causing Harm | Featuring Dr. Jordan Ashley, PhD, MA

    Dr. Jordan Ashley is the founder of Souljourn Yoga Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that creates yoga retreats and teacher training programs to fund girls' education worldwide. She holds a PhD in sociology — her doctoral fieldwork was with adolescent girls at a boarding school in Morocco, and her research sits at the intersection of embodied methodologies, feminist and decolonial frameworks, and girlhood studies. She is also a survivor of violence, and she does not foreground that fact, which tells you something about how she moves through this work. Jordan joins Jenn Turner for a conversation about what trauma-informed work looks like when you cross international borders, work with indigenous communities, and carry significant privilege into spaces that are not yours. She opens with a short breathing and grounding practice — hands to heart and belly, filling the breath in four stages — and from there the conversation covers a lot of ground: placeworld as a research framework, the Pickle story (which is exactly what it sounds like), damage-centered research and why Eve Tuck's critique matters, the Amazigh girls of Morocco and what the 2023 earthquake changed about Jordan's role, and the Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsi survivor community she was invited into through the Savota organization. They also talk about how Souljourn's retreat model changes the donor-recipient relationship, what a one-week yoga teacher training in Rwanda looks like when a 200-hour training is neither accessible nor appropriate, and what the yoga camp Jordan just ran in Watts and Compton showed her about the power of rest as a practice.   Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

    Doing This Work Without Causing Harm | Featuring Dr. Jordan Ashley, PhD, MA

  3. Aug 11

    Grief is Not Something You Get Over | Featuring Edy Nathan, MA, LCSW, CSAT-S

    Edy Nathan is a licensed psychotherapist, AASECT certified sex therapist, and internationally recognized expert on grief, trauma, and sexual healing. She's spent more than 25 years in private practice in New York City, and she's been thinking about grief — really thinking about it — since childhood, when she couldn't understand why she wasn't supposed to bury the goldfish. In this conversation with Jenn Turner, Edy opens with a practice she calls embodied curiosity: a few minutes of soft attention to the breath, a swallow, and the warmth of hands placed on the neck or shoulders — an invitation to be with yourself rather than to calm yourself down. From there, she and Jenn move through Edy's definition of grief (not just the loss of a loved one, but anything we're hungry for that can't be sated), her eleven phases of grief, why she replaced the word "closure" with "grace," and what the Timex watch she still carries tells her about integration. They talk about the hero's journey of grief, the role of emotional armor, the cardinal/mutable/fixed personality framework from her book It's Grief, and the people who've had to perform sadness when what they actually felt was relief. Jenn shares her own experience losing her father — the grief of letting go of hope, and the unexpected liberation that came after. Edy names it: the dance of differentiation. Holding on to yourself without needing the other person to change. This is part one of what became a two-part conversation. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

    Grief is Not Something You Get Over | Featuring Edy Nathan, MA, LCSW, CSAT-S

  4. Jul 28

    The Nervous System in the Timeout | Featuring Martin Ali Simms CPT, PES, CES

    Martin Ali Simms has spent his career asking a question most sports coaches never think to ask: what is the nervous system doing during a 60-second timeout? His answer to that question — worked out over years of practice with athletes, coaches, and kids from kindergarten to college — is the foundation of the Dope Coach Academy and everything he brings to this conversation.  Martin joins Jenn Turner to talk about what it looks like to weave nervous system regulation into the fabric of sports, from warm-ups and workout sets to the charged seconds between a whistle and returning to the floor. He opens the episode with a live demonstration of burst breathing and an arm rotation assessment that shows, in about 15 seconds, how quickly the nervous system responds to a regulatory tool. Then the conversation goes deeper: into the neurosequential model, the corrective exercise parallels that first drew Martin to it, and what it took to translate all of it for a kindergartner using call and response chants and the smell-the-flower cue for breathing. Martin also shares the story that quietly shaped his entire career: watching his 33-year-old neighbor die of a heart attack on the basketball court when Martin was 14. He didn't speak about it for 15 years. By the time he started telling it, he'd already built a career trying to keep people out of that moment without knowing that's what he was doing.   Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

    The Nervous System in the Timeout | Featuring Martin Ali Simms CPT, PES, CES

  5. Jul 7

    When Food is How You Survived | Featuring Kristen Zappone, RDN

    Kristen Zappone is a registered dietitian nutritionist and co-creator of Trauma-Informed Mindful Eating (TIME), a 20-hour skills-based program developed through CFTE. She joins Jenn Turner for a conversation about what it actually looks like to rebuild a relationship with food when diet culture has been functioning as a form of chronic trauma for most of your life. Kristen starts the episode with a grounding practice — pressure through the feet, movement between heel and ball, no agenda. From there, she and Jenn move into the nine principles of TIME, including interoception, allowing food, building endurance and tolerance, and grief. The conversation is specific in ways that a lot of discussions about food and body image are not: what food scarcity actually looks like (including when there is technically food in the house but you are not allowed to eat it), what it means to work with a client whose goal is still to lose weight, and why Kristen doesn't view food-as-coping as a problem to be eliminated. They also talk about the systemic dimension of all of this — how diet culture embeds itself in family relationships and medical environments, how health messaging for people with less food access often misses the point entirely, and why so many approaches to mindful eating still have an objective hiding inside them. TIME's fall cohort begins September 2026. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

    When Food is How You Survived | Featuring Kristen Zappone, RDN

  6. Jun 23

    Healing Without Causing Harm | Featuring Lama Rod Owens

    Lama Rod Owens — Black Buddhist teacher, Harvard Divinity School graduate, and author of Love and Rage and The New Saints — joins Jenn Turner for a conversation about what it actually takes to be in a healing role without causing harm. That question turns out to go deeper than most professional training ever reaches. They start with a practice called the Four Naturals: an opening that moves through natural body, natural breath, natural mind, and natural self — an invitation to arrive without agenda, without performance, without trying to fix what's already present. From there, the conversation goes into Lama Rod's early years as a meditation teacher, when he was regularly activating people in practice and didn't yet have the framework to understand why. He stopped teaching breathwork entirely until he figured out how to offer it in a way that gave people genuine agency. He calls that period a blessing. They talk about what keeps teachers and therapists from causing harm over time — not rules, but the internal structures that make accountability possible. Staying a student. Staying in relationship with peers and elders. Keeping a life outside of the role. They talk about the Calgon dynamic: the way people come to spiritual teachers and therapists wanting to be carried away from their suffering rather than supported in being with it — and why that fantasy is a setup for harm on both sides.  And they talk about truth-telling: what it costs Lama Rod to be as open as he is, why he does it anyway, and what he believes it makes possible for the people who are watching him do it.  Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

    Healing Without Causing Harm | Featuring Lama Rod Owens

  7. Jun 9

    Embodied Wellbeing as the Foundation of Healing | Elaine Miller-Karas | On Trauma & Power S2 E6

    Elaine Miller-Karas, LCSW has spent decades doing trauma work in some of the most difficult places imaginable — post-earthquake China and Haiti, war-affected Turkey and Syria, Covenant House shelters in Atlanta, and now the neighborhoods in Los Angeles leveled by fire. What she's developed from all of it is a biologically grounded, deeply invitational approach to healing that starts with one foundational question: what does your body already know? In this conversation with Jenn Turner, Elaine shares the core frameworks of the Trauma Resiliency Model (TRM) and Community Resiliency Model (CRM), including the wellness skill of gestures — a practice she first observed organically across multiple cultures as people reached for what helped them survive. She and Jenn go deep on what it actually means to work without prescribing, on the difference between a client who isn't ready and a client who is resistant, and on what the research coming out of Rwanda on compassion and forgiveness is telling us about the power of embodied wellbeing. They also get into the word resilience itself — where it gets weaponized, why Elaine has kept it in the name of her models anyway, and what her definition of it requires that most clinical frameworks miss. Plus: why she refuses to call tending and befriending a maladaptive response, and why that reframe matters enormously for the people sitting across from us. Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

    Embodied Wellbeing as the Foundation of Healing | Elaine Miller-Karas | On Trauma & Power S2 E6

  8. May 26

    Self Leadership, IFS & Healing School Culture from the Inside Out | Featuring Joanna Curry-Sartori

    S2 E5 · Joanna Curry-Sartori Joanna Curry-Sartori, LMFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the founder of the Self Leadership Collaborative, and the creator of the PAWS model — a framework rooted in Internal Family Systems that brings self-awareness, compassion, and relational capacity into schools, organizations, and communities. She is the author of The Self-Led Educator and has spent decades working at the intersection of trauma, systems, and the human beings inside them. In this conversation, Joanna and Jenn begin with a body-based practice before moving into one of the most practically grounded conversations this podcast has had. They explore what it actually looks like to bring IFS outside the therapy room — into classrooms, staff meetings, leadership teams, and communities under stress. Joanna shares the origin of the PAWS model, what happened after Sandy Hook that forced a question she spent years sitting with, and what she witnessed in a Zoom call with 80 teachers in the first months of the pandemic that changed how she understood belonging in professional spaces. Topics covered in this episode: — What unblending actually means, and why it is different from getting rid of a difficult part — Why the body is the portal into finding our parts — not just our thoughts or feelings — The student acting out in the classroom as a protective part with a positive intent nobody is asking about — Parts goggles: how curiosity changes what a teacher sees in a struggling student — The PAWS model — Pause, Aware of myself, Understand, Search for solutions, Experiment — and how it works in organizations — Why mindfulness taught as a tool is not the same as a practitioner who embodies it — 80 teachers on Zoom, the layers underneath "I'm holding it together," and what happened when safety built — What happened at Sandy Hook and the question it forced Joanna to sit with for years — Why the hardest part of working in schools is almost never the children — What becomes possible for a generation of children whose nervous systems wire up around the new C's: collaboration, community, connection, and contribution About Joanna Curry-Sartori, LMFT Founder & President, Self Leadership Collaborative Creator, PAWS Model for Self Leadership Author, The Self-Led Educator selfleadershipcollaborative.com About On Trauma & Power Hosted by Jenn Turner, LMHC, Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Center for Trauma and Embodiment. New episodes every other Tuesday. Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Learn more about CFTE at healwithcfte.org

    Self Leadership, IFS & Healing School Culture from the Inside Out | Featuring Joanna Curry-Sartori
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About

Hosted by CFTE Co-Director Jenn Turner, LMHC, On Trauma and Power explores the profound relationship of trauma and healing through the lens of embodied practices and the complex dynamics of power. Featuring survivors, experts, educators, authors, and practitioners of varying disciplines, this podcast dives into how trauma and power intersect in diverse ways in our lives. Join us for trauma-informed conversations that inspire, educate, and empower.

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