What Happened to You? The Neurosequential Model With Diane Vines

In this powerful conversation, Janine sits down with Diane Vines, a seasoned clinician and Neurosequential Model practitioner whose work bridges trauma, brain development, family systems, and real-world healing.

Diane has worked with childhood abuse victims and subsequent developmental trauma since 1988. Her approach is far from prescriptive, and she is an innovator when it comes to creative and specific therapeutic treatment.

At the center of this episode is the Neurosequential Model, developed by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Bruce Perry. Perry’s groundbreaking work helped bring a crucial question into the mainstream: not “What’s wrong with you?” but “What happened to you?” His research and clinical model connect early experience, brain development, stress response, relationships, and healing.

Diane explains why the Neurosequential Model is not a treatment by itself. It is a framework. It helps clinicians understand what parts of the brain and nervous system were shaped by early life, what remains disorganized or underdeveloped, and what kind of support may help create new pathways. For Diane, a once-a-week approach with talk therapy seems like too little time to change your life. So she deeply questions how to keep her patients learning the other 167 hours in a week.

Diane talks about the brainstem, limbic system, cortex, and the importance of working from the bottom up in therapy contexts. She brings new tools to therapy to prevent dysregulation. She also describes how a person’s survival tools may look like symptoms later in life, even though those tools once made perfect sense.

 Janine and Diane also discuss dissociation, psychosis, bipolar disorder, shame, developmental trauma, and the hope of neuroplasticity.

Inside the conversation:

Why the brain is a survival organ

•  How early stress shapes later functioning
•  Why “regulate, relate, reason” matters
•  Why talking may not work until the body feels safe
•  How trauma can affect trust, empathy, connection, and isolation
•  Why relationships are central to healing
•  How therapeutic support can include rocking, rhythm, animals, movement, weighted blankets, occupational therapy, family mapping

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Bipolar She is dedicated to real conversations for women living with mental illness. Hosted by Janine Noel, the majority of episodes give voice to a woman who has lived-life experience with mental illness--or who has experienced the illness of someone close to them. Along the way, I interview experts in the field that address additional mental health concerns.

Frankly, coping with a mental health condition can be exhausting. Here's a place where you can land and find an episode that resonates with you. Some topics we've covered: being a bipolar mom or having a bipolar mom. Anxiety, agoraphobia, chronic depression, ECT, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, a psychiatrist that breaks your trust. A therapist who goes above and beyond to help you. The impact of trauma on your brain. 

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Editor Brandon Moran makes everyone's voice sound both crisper and smarter.

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