How Healing Happens Podcast
by Linnea Butler
I'm a scientist-turned-therapist who bows to mystery. I write about healing complex trauma for the ones who refuse to choose a single path. For people who've done the work and still don't feel whole. Grounded woo. linneabutler.substack.com
Episodes
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We Heal Together: Science, Spirit & the Power of Circle
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit linneabutler.substack.com/subscribe
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Ask Me Anything: Somatic Psychology and Practices
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit linneabutler.substack.com I invited my readers to send me their questions about somatic healing and have answered them here in video format. A list of the questions addressed is below. If, after watching this video, you have further...
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Telling Your Story Isn’t the Same as Being Witnessed
In my first year of graduate school one of our required classes was poetry therapy. As a child I loved writing poetry so you might be surprised that seeing this class on my schedule make me break out in a cold sweat. There have always been two things with the ability to break me open: music and...
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Ask Me Anything: Healing Trauma Edition
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit linneabutler.substack.com I invited my readers to send me their questions about healing trauma and have answered them here in video format. A list of the questions addressed is below. If, after watching this video, you have further...
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The Fourth Role
I read constantly as a child. It was how I “left” the house (and my body) without actually leaving it. What I reached for were fairytales and myths, which in hindsight I don't think was an accident. I was looking for the part of the story when a savior arrives. In 1968 a psychiatrist named…
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The Only Way Out Is Through: Grief as Transformation
Welcome %%first_name%%, I’m Linnea and I write about healing at the intersection of science and spirituality, and embracing the Both-And. I’m so glad you’re here. There’s a moment in the therapy room that is both painful and beautiful, and it always wakes up a sense of reverence in me. A client...
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The Obstacle IS the Path
“The obstacle is the path” is one of those Zen sayings we nod at and move past. Just like the way we respond “fine” when someone asks how we are. It’s reflexive. But what happens when we really contemplate what this saying means, and then begin to live it? Our world expands. The Comfort Trap We...
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When Women Speak about Patriarchy
Something is shifting. You can feel it if you’re paying attention. Women are breaking the silence and speaking up in ways they haven’t before. Calling for accountability from a culture that has normalized oppression of, and brutality against feminine bodies, wisdom and strength. Thousands of us...
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We're All Just Walking Each Other Home
The title is a famous quote by Ram Dass that spoke to me deeply the first time I heard it, resonating in a way that has taken me years to fully appreciate. These words would surface during difficult moments, land softly in quiet ones, echo through my work with clients. But I couldn’t have told…
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We Cannot Hold This Alone
Years ago, I sat in a circle at a psychedelic psychotherapy training retreat. The kind of space where medicines move through bodies and truth lands differently. One of the leaders, someone who’d worked with Indigenous communities across continents, said something that stopped my in my mental...
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Enough
At the beginning of every year, I choose a word to contemplate. This year, I struggled… until I realized my word had already found me through persistent whispers in the back of my mind. Enough. There is so much held within that little word. So much overlooked and skimmed. It’s a word that works…
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You're Not Living Your Values — You're Living Theirs
“You can play when the work is done.” My mother’s voice. Always my mother’s voice. I grew up on a farm where productivity was the measure of worth, which meant the work was never done and play was wasteful. (Even though play is essential for a child’s development, but that’s an essay for another...
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Sometimes You Have to Burn it All Down
For the last several years I've been feeling like we are living through "a tower moment" where everything is collapsing around us. In tarot, The Tower card depicts a structure struck by lightning, everything crumbling. It’s the most frightening card because it indicates total destruction. But…
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Beyond EMDR: Why Chronic Trauma Requires a Different Approach Than We've Been Taught
Years ago I was sitting in a training room when Bessel van der Kolk said the words that caught me off guard, but also gave me hope. “I was wrong about EMDR for chronic childhood trauma.” My heart skipped a beat. This was the man who wrote The Body Keeps the Score, standing at the front of a…
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The Longing and the Terror of Being Seen
She sits across from me with her feet angled toward the door, body positioned as though she might bolt at any moment. We’ve been talking for twenty minutes, and while her words say one thing, her nervous system screams another. I can see it in the way she holds her breath between sentences. The…
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When Healing Gets Messy with Linnea Butler and Daniel Rosenberg
Thank you for tuning into my live video with Daniel Rosenberg! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit linneabutler.substack.com/subscribe
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Science & Mysticism: How We Really Heal Trauma with Linnea Butler and Amy Scott Rooker
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit linneabutler.substack.com/subscribe
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Beauty as Nervous System Medicine
My husband once told me that beauty matters. That it’s important. I don’t remember exactly where we were or what prompted him to say it, but I remember the quality of his voice… quiet, assured, like he was offering me something he knew I needed. My response was minimal at best. A murmur of...
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The Medicine We're Missing: Why Healing Happens in Community
It began with a message… one that felt less like a thought and more like a remembering: Community As Medicine. I've learned to recognize messages that come through me, but are not from me. This was one. Community is the only way to heal the growing pandemic of isolation and loneliness. As a…
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Abandonment Wound Wisdom: The Science & Spirit of the Attach Response
She speaks softly from the corner of the therapy room, with eyes that are full of need and seem too large for her face. She learned early on that survival meant making others care enough to stay. The attach defense is both emotional and neurobiological. Our infant brains literally develop around...
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The Submit Response - Why Some of Us Learned to Survive by Disappearing
There's a moment in nature documentaries that can be hard to watch, when the gazelle goes limp in the lion's jaws. Its eyes remain open but distant, as if the essential self has left its body. It’s survival through surrender, protection through collapse. This is feigned death, or Submit — the…
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The Freeze Response - Why Your Body's "Failure" Was Actually Wisdom
She hears a voice that reminds her of a time long past. Her breathing quiets as her pulse races. Her voice has disappeared to somewhere unreachable as her nervous system screams but her body won't move. This is the freeze response → the deer caught in headlights, the rabbit motionless beneath the...
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The Fight Response - Guardian of Boundaries, Builder of Walls
The room falls silent after her words cut like glass. She watches faces turn away, sees her partner flinch, feels the familiar shame that follows her anger like a black shadow. If you've ever felt the sudden “whoosh” of rage that seems to come from nowhere, if you've caught yourself speaking with…
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The Fragmented Self: How Trauma Creates Parts and Why Integration Heals
Have you ever felt outside of yourself, watching your actions and hearing your words but feeling like they aren’t yours? Maybe there’s a bite in your voice, harsh and shocking. Or the cold wash of numbness as you sit in a meeting, smiling, while inside everything has gone cold. Sometimes it’s...
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Nature as Medicine
The soft rustle of leaves in the breeze carries a message older than words, an invitation to remember that healing rarely happens in isolation. What if the natural world isn't just a pretty backdrop for our inner work but an active participant, a wise elder in the process of becoming whole again?...
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What If "Woo" Is Just Science We Don't Understand Yet?
The line between science and spirituality is thinner than we think. It’s more like a veil than a wall. As someone trained first in molecular biology, and then in evidence-based psychotherapy, my professional life was built on measurable outcomes and replicable results. The scientific method was…
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The Space Between Science and Spirit - Start Here
In a world that often forces us to choose between evidence and intuition, between scientific rigor and spiritual wisdom, there exists a fertile middle ground. A space where seemingly opposite truths can both be held, where the unexplainable and the empirical dance together in service of our…
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About this show
I'm a scientist-turned-therapist who bows to mystery. I write about healing complex trauma for the ones who refuse to choose a single path. For people who've done the work and still don't feel whole. Grounded woo.
linneabutler.substack.com
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Linnea Butler
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