Today’s guest is the brilliant Elizabeth Stanley. Elizabeth, who prefers to go by liz, is an associate professor of security studies at Georgetown University. She speaks, teaches, and writes widely on a variety of topics related to resilience, decision-making, political psychology, civil-military relations, and international security.

She is the award-winning author of Paths to Peace and Widen the Window: Training Your Brain and Body to Thrive during Stress and Recover from Trauma. She is the creator of Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training, taught to thousands in civilian and military high-stress environments. Her work has been featured on 60 Minutes, ABC Evening News, NPR, and in Time magazine and many other media outlets.

Liz is also a U.S. Army veteran who served in Asia and Europe, she holds degrees from Yale, Harvard, and MIT, and she’s also a certified practitioner of Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy.

Liz used to be the queen of powering through and burning the midnight oil, until the day she lost her eyesight. It took Liz losing her eyesight to finally understand that there’s an easier way. She spent fifteen years studying the neurobiology of stress, trauma, and resilience—initially as a way to save herself and then to help others heal, too. There’s nothing Liz teaches that she hasn’t learned personally in her own mind and body.

Today, we're chatting about... 

• The difference between stress and trauma
• What determines if an event is stressful or traumatic
• How attachment styles impact our ability to recover from stressful situations
• What a complete recovery looks like after a traumatic or stressful situation
• What it means to experience dysregulation and how dysregulation of the mind-body present itself
• How internal stressors trigger your survival brain to activate
• How you can best support people who live with trauma
• Liz's thoughts on how the stress of COVID will negatively impact people's mental health
• What you can do right now to begin the healing process

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ALL THE GOODIES FROM THIS EPISODE:

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