7 Ways Your Body Keeps You Safe | Jan Winhall

Hi Mind Bod Squad!

This week we're hanging with someone extra special: Jan Winhall — psychotherapist, nervous-system nerd, and (drumroll) Jeff's former therapist. As Jeff puts it, she's the one who helped him dig out of his own mental health sinkhole. Now she's on the other side of the mic.

Jan’s spent 45 years in the trauma and addiction trenches, and along the way she built something super useful: the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, which blends Eugene Gendlin’s “felt sense” (what you notice in your body before you can name it) with Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory (how your nervous system monitors whether you’re safe or not).

She’s written two books on it — Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model and 20 Embodied Practices for Healing Trauma and Addiction — and is deep into a third, this one on couples.

For Jan, assessing trauma starts by asking: what’s actually happening in your body, right now?

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We talk about:

- Trauma as a nervous system stuck in a loop, and addiction as the body’s attempt to regulate itself

- “Fun/Fired up”: how to stay grounded in a heated argument without tipping into fight

- Why growing up unseen is its own quiet trauma, even in a “privileged” home

- Why opposite nervous systems attract… and then drive each other nuts

- Healing as the slow thaw of frozen memories