PODCAST · health
When Depression is in Your Bed℠
by Trish Sanders, LCSW
When Depression Is in Your Bed℠ is a podcast about what happens when life gets hard and how we find our way back to connection. Hosted by Trish Sanders, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Advanced Imago Relationship Therapist and Relationship Coach, each episode explores the complex relationship between our nervous systems, our relationships, and our emotional well-being. Through a blend of personal stories, professional insights, and practical tools, Trish tackles topics such as depression, communication, perfectionism, neurodivergence, self-trust, conflict, repair, empathy, boundaries, attachment, nervous system regulation, and relational healing. With honesty, warmth, and a deep belief in people's capacity to grow, Trish helps listeners understand not only why they get stuck, but how meaningful change becomes possible. Whether you're struggling with depression, feeling disconnected from yo
Episodes
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#91 Conversations That Connect: Creating Emotional & Sexual Intimacy
What if the conversations you've been avoiding could actually bring you closer to the people you love? When something feels difficult in a relationship, we often approach the conversation as a problem to solve, a disagreement to resolve, or something uncomfortable we just need to get through. But...
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#90 The Grief in Growth: When Mourning the Past Comes With Moving Forward
Have you ever finally figured something out about yourself, only to find yourself wishing you'd figured it out years ago? Personal growth can be exciting, empowering, and even life-changing. But what happens when your newfound understanding also makes you more aware of everything that came before...
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#89 When You're So Focused on What's Next That You Miss What's Now Actually Living in Your Life
How often are you so busy thinking about what's next that you barely notice what's happening right now? There are things that need to get done. People we want to care for. Plans to make, responsibilities to manage, and experiences we're working hard to create. But sometimes, even when the moment...
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#88 You Know Better, But Can't Always Do Better: What Makes Change Possible
Have you ever known exactly what you would like to do differently... and still found yourself unable to do it in the moment? Maybe you understand your patterns. You know your triggers. You've done the therapy, read the books, listened to the podcasts, and gained incredible insight into yourself…
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#87 Getting Knocked Down and Finding Your Way Back Up: What Nervous System Flexibility Looks Like
Have you ever been knocked down by something and wondered, “After all the work I’ve done, why is this still so hard?” We sometimes imagine that growth will eventually make us so regulated, resilient, and capable that difficult experiences won’t knock us down anymore. But life doesn’t stop…
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#86 Counting Every Step Along the Way: Receiving Growth Before You've Fully Arrived
What happens when you can see that something is changing, but it still isn’t quite where you want it to be? Growth can be easier to recognize when the results are obvious. The old pattern doesn’t happen. The conversation goes differently. Something that used to be hard suddenly feels easier. But…
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#85 The Real Trajectory of Growth When It Feels Like You're Back Where You Started
Have you ever thought you were finally making progress... only to find yourself right back in a familiar pattern and wonder if anything had really changed at all? Growth can be incredibly encouraging when we can see it happening. But what about the moments that don't look like growth? The…
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#84 You Don't Have to Take My Word for It: Revising Old Stories and Building Trust
What happens when someone you love expects something from you that you truly wish they didn't... and you understand why they expect it? Our relationships are filled with predictions. We anticipate how our partner will respond, how a familiar conversation will unfold, or what will happen when we...
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#83 Capacity Discrepancy: When "I Would" Becomes "You Should"
Have you ever looked at your partner and thought, "But I would never handle it that way"? I would have remembered. I would have asked for help. I would have taken care of it. If I can do it, why can't they? It's an incredibly easy leap to make. What would be available to us becomes what we…
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#82 When the Backslide Doesn't Scare You Trusting the Way Back
What if healing isn't reaching a place where you never struggle again, but trusting yourself when you do? When things finally start feeling better, it can be surprisingly difficult to simply enjoy them. Instead, we may find ourselves waiting. Wondering when the other shoe will drop. When we'll…
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#81 Expanded Capacity: When Life Doesn't Feel as Hard as It Used To
What if one of the clearest signs that you're healing isn't a huge breakthrough, but realizing that something that used to feel hard... just doesn't feel as hard anymore? Growth doesn't always make itself known with a big announcement. There aren't always fireworks or one life-changing moment…
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#80 When Trying Harder Isn't Working: How Your Best Becomes Better
Have you ever felt like you're doing everything you can... and it still doesn't feel like enough? Maybe you've tried harder. Worked harder. Pushed yourself harder. And yet somehow, the things you most want to change still feel just out of reach. In this deeply personal episode, Trish explores one...
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#79 When Caring Feels Like Criticism: How Fear Changes the Conversation
Have you ever tried to help someone you love, only to have your care experienced as criticism? It can be one of the most frustrating and confusing experiences in a relationship. We know our intentions are good. We know we're coming from a place of love. And yet somehow, the conversation leaves…
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#78 The Road to Growth: How Relationships Change Our Expectations
What if the people we love aren't just shaping our memories? What if they're shaping what we come to expect? Whether we realize it or not, every relationship is shaping what becomes familiar. And what becomes familiar gradually becomes what we expect. In this episode, Trish shares a deeply…
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#77 Prediction as Protection: When Disappointment Clouds the Bright Spots
What if your brain isn't expecting the worst because you're pessimistic? What if it's trying to protect you? Have you ever noticed how easy it is to say, "Of course..." when something frustrating happens, but "Can you believe it?" when something wonderful does? In this episode, Trish explores a...
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#76 Connecting Through Struggle: Why It Felt Safe and Kept Me Stuck
What if one of the primary ways you've learned to connect with other people has also been quietly keeping you stuck? In this episode, I explore a realization that completely changed the way I think about empathy, healing, relationships, and nervous system growth. For much of my life, it felt…
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#75 Staying the Course: When Disappointment Doesn't Have to Become Dysregulation
What if healing doesn't mean you stop feeling disappointed, but that disappointment no longer has the power to pull you into the same old stories? In this episode, I share a very ordinary moment with my husband, Ben, that became an unexpected reminder of just how much nervous system healing,...
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#74 Finding My People: The Connection Paradox and the Search for Belonging
What if the thing you've been searching for all along, connection, community, and a sense of belonging, is also the thing you've been protecting yourself from? In this episode, I explore what I call The Connection Paradox: the tension between our deep human need for connection and the fear that…
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#73 When Your Person Doesn't Feel Like Your Person: The Longing Beneath the Hurt
Why can a seemingly small moment with the person you love hurt so much more than a similar moment with almost anyone else? In this episode, I explore what happens when the person who feels like your person doesn't respond in the way you're hoping they will. What began as a conversation with my...
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#72 The Brilliance of Blended States: Nervous System Flexibility & Creativity
What if feeling energized, creative, connected, rested, and even grieving aren't separate experiences, but examples of your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do? In this episode, I explore one of the most important, and least talked about, concepts in nervous system education:...
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#71 Clarity Rooted in the Nervous System: How Safety Helps You See Again
What if clarity is not just a mindset… but a nervous system experience? In this episode, I explore the idea that clarity is deeply rooted in our nervous system state and that when we are living in survival mode, overwhelmed, anxious, shut down, or depressed, clarity can become incredibly…
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#70 Regulation Is Not Calm: The Truth About Nervous System Wellness
What if nervous system regulation has far less to do with staying calm all the time… and much more to do with flexibility, awareness, and repair? In this episode, I unpack some of the biggest myths and misunderstandings I see surrounding nervous system regulation, polyvagal theory, and relational...
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#69 The Space to Come Back: How Relational Safety Changes Family Conflict
What if stepping back during conflict isn’t avoidance… but the very thing that creates space for repair? In this episode, I share two very ordinary but deeply meaningful moments from my own family that highlighted just how much relational safety, nervous system awareness, and repair have changed...
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#68 The Empathy Trap in Relationships: How Understanding Your Partner Can Keep You Both Stuck
What happens when empathy helps your partner feel deeply understood… but quietly keeps both of you stuck? In this episode, I explore what I call The Empathy Trap in Relationships, a dynamic where understanding your partner’s pain can sometimes make it harder to respond to the actual impact that...
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#67 Showing Up Imperfectly: When Perfectionism Looks Like Overachieving
What if perfectionism doesn’t make you shut down… but makes it impossible to stop pushing? In this episode, I explore the overachieving side of perfectionism, the version that looks productive, driven, high-functioning, and constantly in motion. The version that says, “I’ll just try harder,”…
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#66 Showing Up Imperfectly: One Way This Perfectionist Is Learning to Trust Herself
What does it actually look like to build self-trust, not when everything is going well, but when it’s not? In this episode, I share a real-time experience from a physically challenging week and how it brought me back to something I’ve been actively working on: learning to show up imperfectly. As…
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#65 The Empathy Trap: When Feeling Understood Doesn’t Create Change
What if empathy may help you feel seen, but may also be keeping you stuck? In this episode, I explore what I call The Empathy Trap, a subtle but powerful dynamic where empathy focused only on the story can create connection, but not change. We’re often taught that empathy is always helpful. And…
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#64 The Conscious Crash: How Doing the Work Changes the Struggle
What happens when you have the awareness, the tools, and the language, and still find yourself crashing into dysregulation? In this episode, I share a deeply personal experience I came to describe as a conscious crash, a moment where I could see my nervous system becoming overwhelmed in real…
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#63 Relational Safety and Repair: Moving from Dysregulation to Connection
What does it actually take to move from dysregulation to connection, especially in the moments when repair feels hardest to reach? In this episode, I expand the conversation on relational repair by exploring what happens when conflict is more intense, reactive, and harder to navigate. While…
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#62 Repair in Real Life: What We’ve Learned About Creating Relational Safety and Reconnecting
What does repair actually look like in real life and what makes it possible for two people to reconnect, even after years of disconnection? In this episode, my husband Ben joins me for a real, unscripted conversation about what we’ve learned over time about repair and how creating relational…
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#61 Repair in Relationships: How to Do It (and Why It Can Feel So Hard)
Is saying “I’m sorry” difficult for you or for your partner? In this episode, we look at why that can be true, even when you care deeply about your relationship and what repair actually requires. Building on the last two episodes about intention, impact, rupture, and repair, we move more directly...
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#60 Rupture and Repair: Why What Happens After Conflict Matters Most
What if the most important moment in a conflict isn’t when someone gets hurt — but whether repair happens afterward? In this episode, I explore why conflict itself doesn’t determine the health of a relationship. What matters most is what happens after the rupture. While many focus on frequency or...
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#59 “I Didn’t Mean To”: Intention, Impact, and Repair in Relationships
“I didn’t mean to” can be true — and still not be the same as “I’m sorry.” In this episode, a small moment at the breakfast table with my children opens the door to a deeper conversation about the difference between intention and impact — and why that gap matters so much in our closest...
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#58 Communication for Connection Part 3: A Real-Life Imago Dialogue
What if the conflict isn’t the problem — but the speed, the stories, and the nervous system state you’re in while you’re trying to communicate? In this episode, my husband Ben joins me for our first ever real-time, recorded demonstration of the Imago Intentional Dialogue. After the last two...
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#57 Communication for Connection Part 2: How the Imago Intentional Dialogue Changed My Relationship
What if a single conversation could shift the trajectory of your relationship — not because the problem disappeared, but because you finally felt understood? In this episode, I share the personal story of the moment I used the Imago Intentional Dialogue process in my own marriage and experienced…
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#56 Communication for Connection Part 1: The Imago Intentional Dialogue Process
What if the way you’ve been trying to communicate is actually preventing the connection you long for, even when your intentions are loving? In this episode, I introduce the Imago Intentional Dialogue process, a structured communication tool that helped transform my own marriage from separation to...
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#55 Know Your Worth, Know Your Impact: How Embracing Your Relational Power Shapes Social Change
What does it really mean to know that you matter — and how does that shape the impact you have on your relationships and the world? In this episode, I explore how reclaiming a sense of worth can be a powerful source of energy, agency, and relational influence — especially when we’re feeling shut...
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#54 What It Means to Be Relational: Safety, Connection, and the World We Can Create Together
What does it really mean to be relational — beyond simply having relationships? In this episode, I explore what it means to value connection, belonging, and collective safety in a world that often prioritizes hierarchy, control, and individual success. Through an Imago- and…
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#53 Introducing My Husband: From Behind the Scenes to Sharing the Mic
This episode marks a meaningful milestone for the podcast — the first episode of its second year, and the first with my husband, Ben, joining me on the microphone. For the past year, he has been an essential part of this podcast behind the scenes. In this episode, he steps forward — not because…
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#52 Becoming Someone I Can Trust: ADHD, Depression, and One Year of Nervous System Healing
What does it mean to become someone you can trust — especially when living with ADHD and depression? In this one-year anniversary episode, I reflect on how understanding my nervous system changed my relationship with effort, consistency, and self-belief. For much of my life, I didn’t trust myself…
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#51 When Depression Was the Clue: ADHD Misdiagnosed as Bipolar Disorder
A personal story of neurodivergence, school struggles, and how effort was misunderstood at 17. For years, I believed my struggles with focus, energy, and motivation were simply part of my depression — or evidence that I wasn’t trying hard enough. At 17, when I couldn’t read a book for a class...
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#50 This New Year, Stop Striving for a New You: Choosing the Pace That Lets the Real You Bloom
The pressure to reinvent can feel loud in January, but nature tells a different story: winter is for conservation, repair, and preparing the ground for bloom. We explore how to trade the exhausting “on or off” cycle for nervous system flexibility—choosing the speed that actually supports you....
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#49 A Conscious Christmas Story: Choosing Connection When the Holidays Got Me Down
When the holidays don’t match the picture in your head, the gap can feel like grief. This year brought fevers, cancellations, and a quiet house that amplified old patterns of shutdown. I share what helped me move through the heaviness with care: naming the dorsal state of the nervous system,...
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#48 Let It Begin With Me: Embodying Peace Through Nervous System Regulation
We explore how two opposing beliefs—“I have to do everything" and "I can't do anything"—grow from different nervous system states and how peace begins by shifting our state toward safety and connection. Using Polyvagal Theory, we offer practical steps to move from survival into grounded presence...
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#47 Writing New Stories: How My Brain Healed After Holiday Depression and Beyond
The holidays can feel bright for some and unbearably heavy for others. I open up about a Christmas that nearly ended my marriage and trace how those memories slowly softened—not by accident, but because the brain can change and grow when it feels safer. This is a story that starts with depression...
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#46 Grief, Gratitude & ADHD: What’s Been Coming Up for Me This Holiday Season
Holidays have a way of pulling old feelings to the surface. This time, two truths came up at once: the enduring ache of losing my dad five years ago, and a quieter grief I call “ADHD grief”—the gap between the cozy, orderly home I imagine and the real limits of my brain and nervous system. I…
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#45 Ketamine Isn’t the Fix—It’s the Opening: How Intentional Integration Turned Insight Into Healing
We explore how ketamine-assisted psychotherapy can quiet an overactive alarm system, reopen access to rest, and create a window where new habits take hold through integration. We share the science in plain language and the personal practices that helped changes last. • stigma and misconceptions...
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#44 From Cautiously Curious to Confident: What I Learned Before Starting Ketamine Therapy
Healing doesn’t always arrive as a lightning bolt. Sometimes it looks like a short, supported window where defenses soften and your nervous system finally has space to reorganize. That’s the potential of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy: not a shortcut, but a different door into change. We take…
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#43 Signals of Safety: Real Stories of Nervous System Self- and Co-Regulation
The hardest part of a taxing day likely isn’t a thing on the to-do list— our nervous system state that influences how we perceive what needs to be done and if we have on "depression googles," we can expect that even the lightest load may feel like seriously heavy lifting. When depletion hits and...
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#42 My Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) Journey: From Self-Hatred To Self-Care
What if real rest isn’t zoning out, but learning to feel safely still in your own body? Trish takes you inside her year-long journey with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, sharing what KAP actually looks like—from medical screening and at-home setup to music-guided sessions, dosing with lozenges,...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
When Depression Is in Your Bed℠ is a podcast about what happens when life gets hard and how we find our way back to connection.
Hosted by Trish Sanders, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Advanced Imago Relationship Therapist and Relationship Coach, each episode explores the complex relationship between our nervous systems, our relationships, and our emotional well-being.
Through a blend of personal stories, professional insights, and practical tools, Trish tackles topics such as depression, communication, perfectionism, neurodivergence, self-trust, conflict, repair, empathy, boundaries, attachment, nervous system regulation, and relational healing.
With honesty, warmth, and a deep belief in people's capacity to grow, Trish helps listeners understand not only why they get stuck, but how meaningful change becomes possible.
Whether you're struggling with depression, feeling disconnected from yo
HOSTED BY
Trish Sanders, LCSW
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does When Depression is in Your Bed℠ have?
When Depression is in Your Bed℠ currently has 91 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is When Depression is in Your Bed℠ about?
When Depression Is in Your Bed℠ is a podcast about what happens when life gets hard and how we find our way back to connection. Hosted by Trish Sanders, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, Certified Advanced Imago Relationship Therapist and Relationship Coach, each episode explores the complex...
How often does When Depression is in Your Bed℠ release new episodes?
When Depression is in Your Bed℠ has 91 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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You can listen to When Depression is in Your Bed℠ on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts When Depression is in Your Bed℠?
When Depression is in Your Bed℠ is created and hosted by Trish Sanders, LCSW.
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