This week, we brought back Elizabeth Stanley, PhD. Elizabeth is an associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University and the author of Widen The Window: Training Your Brain and Body To Thrive During Stress and Recover From Trauma. She’s the creator of Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training (MMFT)® – and her research has been featured on 60 Minutes, ABC Evening News, NPR, and in Time magazine, among others. An award-winning author and U.S. Army veteran with service in Asia and Europe, she holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT. She’s also a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy.

In this episode, Elizabeth and I discuss how we can begin to mend fractured relationships due to political choices (or move on from them), the survival brain vs. thinking brain, how the stress of the past year may have triggered or resurfaced past trauma, feeling powerless, and reminding ourselves that we will not have to live this way forever.