Season 4

Diagnosed with an autoimmune disease at three, Lizzie grew up not feeling safe within her own body. A volatile home meant she didn’t feel safe outside it either. This candid conversation traces a decades long journey from a childhood marked by chronic illness and family instability, through disordered eating and compulsive exercise to a liver transplant at 31, the long work of making a stranger’s organ her own, and what it takes to keep finding, again and again, a small enough foothold to trust she can balance.

What do birth and grief have in common? For Anouk, they are different sides of the same coin; threshold moments where our bodies already know what to do, if our minds allow us to trust the process. Anouk’s life has so many facets, layers, and redirects that it would have been easy for her to overlook the consistent theme, which is simply: “Everything was meant to happen.”

Some healing journeys begin with a single crisis. This deeply moving conversation tracks a healing journey that spans more than 5 decades; from infant medical trauma, to being sent to a children’s home, to losing her first husband to cancer, the sudden suicide of her second husband, myelitis-induced paralysis and incontinence, the esophageal cancer that followed years of dexamethasone treatment, and a near-death experience during chemotherapy.

What if the part of yourself you’ve been taught to suppress is actually the doorway to being fully alive? Charon has spent a lifetime exploring that question, as a somatic therapist, a shamanic bodyworker, through her training in Compassionate Inquiry® and her new book, Sovereign in Love: The Nervous System Path to Holding Desire, Power and Intimacy. (2026)

What happens when you look back at a hundred conversations, a hundred faces, and a hundred stories? We’re celebrating two years of The Gifts of Trauma with a taster menu; twenty-five small bites pulled from our most listened to episodes. An astonishing range of topics have been covered; from math anxiety to menopause, to addiction and neurodiversity, war and racism to colonization/invasion, grief and wounds to diseases, relationships, masculinity and fatherhood, to adoption and childhood trauma, and so much more. We’d also like to acknowledge Diana Gharib for participating in an interview from the frontlines in Beirut, while drones were flying overhead.

Authenticity isn’t something we build, but something we’ve always carried and spend our lifetimes learning to trust. Sat Dharam defines authenticity as fidelity to one’s own personality, spirit and character, and traces hers back to early childhood where she showed up as; the leader, the organiser, the person who ‘got things done’. But her path to trusting led her on a healing journey through shame and the fear of rejection. That healing, she says, is what Compassionate Inquiry offers at its core.