Notes from the Edge

You can understand your patterns. You can know where they came from. You can spend years learning the language of trauma and healing, and still find your body reacting as if the danger never ended.In this Edge Note episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with registered somatic movement therapist and educator Katy Slany for a conversation about somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, embodied healing, and why insight alone does not always create lasting change.Katy explains why trauma is a whole-body experience, what people actually mean when they talk about “regulating the nervous system,” and how learning to tolerate and understand our physical sensations can change the way we respond to anxiety, fear, relationships, and the world around us. She also shares her own healing journey and how survival, illness, isolation, and the fear of connection became deeply intertwined.This conversation is ultimately about something bigger than regulation. It is about recovering choice, autonomy, and the ability to listen to the wisdom of your own body.In this episode:• Why understanding trauma intellectually may not change the body’s response• What nervous system regulation actually means and why it is often oversimplified• How somatic work can help us reconnect with sensations we have learned to avoid• Why healing is not a destination, but a changing relationship with our experiences• How inherited beliefs, survival patterns, and conditioning can disconnect us from our autonomy and powerConnect with Katy Slany:Katy Slany | Transformative Somatic EducationConnect with Lisa Lacy Inside the Edge:https://www.lisalacy.com/inside-the-edgeWhat did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when the thing that made you successful, your ability to push through, perform, achieve, and keep going, becomes the very thing your body can no longer sustain?In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with author, transformational coach, and founder of The Rebuild Collective, Kristen Renee Appleby, for a conversation about burnout, autoimmune illness, the mind-body connection, and what it really means to rebuild your life from the foundation up.Kristen spent years searching for answers while navigating autoimmune illness, chronic inflammation, demanding work, financial stress, emotional suppression, and the expectation that she should simply keep functioning. Eventually, she began questioning whether all of those pieces were actually separate.We talk about what happens when achievement becomes intertwined with survival, why changing a protocol without changing the environment may not be enough, and how our relationships with work, money, emotions, purpose, and ourselves can influence the way we experience our lives.This conversation isn’t about abandoning ambition. It’s about asking whether the life you’re building actually has a foundation strong enough to hold it.In this episode:• How burnout and high-achiever survival patterns can hide behind capability and success• Autoimmune illness, chronic inflammation, emotional suppression, and the mind-body connection• Workplace stress, unhealthy environments, and what happens when pushing through stops working• Financial stress, money wounds, limiting beliefs, and the connection between physical and financial wellness• Kristen’s Healthy Foundation approach to rebuilding self-trust, authenticity, purpose, and a life that doesn’t require abandoning ambitionConnect with Kristen Renee Appleby:https://www.kristenreneerebuilding.comConnect with Lisa | Inside the Edge:https://www.lisalacy.com/inside-the-edgeWhat did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when your mind creates a reality so convincing that everyone else can tell you it isn’t real, and you still know what you saw, heard, felt, and lived?In this Special Edition of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy opens up about living with Bipolar I Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, and Complex PTSD, including what psychosis actually felt like from inside of it.“The Psychotic Trifecta” is Lisa’s personal description of the collision of these conditions, not a clinical term. Bipolar I can include psychosis, while BPD and CPTSD can involve dissociation, hypervigilance, emotional dysregulation, and disturbances in how we experience ourselves and other people.This is not a clinical lecture.This is what it feels like to live it.Lisa also talks candidly about spending much of her life running on mania, why mania can masquerade as extraordinary productivity, and what happened when menopause brought a kind of depression she had never experienced before.In this Special Edition:• What Bipolar I mania and psychosis can actually feel like from the inside• Why Bipolar I and Borderline Personality Disorder are often confused, but are fundamentally different• How CPTSD, hypervigilance, dissociation, and trauma responses can overlap with both• Why being highly functional does not necessarily mean someone is mentally well• What Lisa has learned about reality-checking, treatment, self-awareness, and recognizing when her own mind may not be a reliable narratorMental illness does not remove intelligence.Psychosis does not make someone stupid.Trauma does not make someone weak.And a diagnosis does not erase the human being living underneath it.Connect with Lisa Inside the Edge:https://www.lisalacy.com/inside-the-edgeWhat did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the pain you feel and the damage seen on an MRI aren’t always the same thing?Lisa Lacy sits down with neurologist Dr. Eric Anderson, MD, PhD, MBA, Chief Medical Officer at Lin Health, to explore chronic back pain, the nervous system, central sensitization, and what patients should understand before making major decisions about back surgery.Dr. Anderson explains how chronic pain can become a highly sensitized alarm system, why imaging findings don’t always correspond with the intensity of someone’s pain, and how whole-person approaches may help some people retrain the nervous system and regain function.In this conversation:Why pain and structural damage are not necessarily the same thing, and what MRI findings can and cannot tell you.How central sensitization can cause the nervous system’s protective alarm system to become overly sensitive.The connection between stress, trauma, hypervigilance, the limbic system, and persistent pain.How approaches including pain reprocessing therapy, CBT, graded exposure, emotional awareness, coaching, and movement can be incorporated into chronic pain recovery.The questions to ask before back surgery, including expected outcomes, alternatives, recovery time, and when structural problems or progressive nerve damage may require surgical intervention.This is not a conversation about telling people their pain isn’t real. It is about understanding pain more completely so patients can advocate for themselves and make informed decisions about their care.Connect with Dr. Eric AndersonLearn more about Dr. Anderson and Lin Health:https://lin.healthConnect with Lisa LacyLearn more about Lisa, Notes From the Edge, and her work:https://www.lisalacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the answers you’ve spent your whole life searching for aren’t somewhere out there, but waiting for you to finally turn inward?In this Edge Note of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, mentor, and author Rosanne Annoni for a deeply human conversation about spiritual awakening, grief, forgiveness, self-inquiry, and what happens when we stop looking outside ourselves for permission, validation, and truth.After decades as a psychotherapist and years of her own searching, Rosanne shares how therapy, meditation, loss, motherhood, relationships, and the Diamond Approach gradually brought her back to herself. Together, Lisa and Rosanne explore the difference between understanding our patterns and learning not to be ruled by them.In this conversation:Why healing often begins when we stop focusing on everyone else and turn inwardHow victimhood, blame, and self-blame can keep us trapped in old patternsWhat forgiveness can look like without excusing what happenedWhy people-pleasing and doing everything alone can disconnect us from ourselvesHow curiosity, presence, self-inquiry, and accepting support can change the way we move through lifeRosanne’s debut memoir, Unfolding the Heart: One Woman’s Quest for True Nature, explores a lifetime of searching, loss, healing, spirituality, and the courage to keep standing back up.Connect with Rosanne Annonihttps://rosanneannoni.comConnect with Lisa Lacyhttps://www.lisalacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Why a special edition? Because every once in a while, a conversation happens at the Edge that feels too important to wait its turn on the calendar. This is one of those conversations.At 18 years old, Liam Beville pushed a friend out of the path of a stolen car and took the impact himself. Both of his legs were shattered, his right knee was severely damaged, and he was told he might never walk again.He did more than walk again.Liam became an elite powerlifter, Guinness World Record holder, disability advocate, speaker and author. But underneath the records, the weights and four decades of competition was another story.For years, Liam practiced the way he walked so people would not see his limp.Strength became more than something he demonstrated. It became something he performed.In this special edition of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy and Liam talk about what happens when survival becomes identity, when resilience starts looking like a mask, and what it means to finally acknowledge the parts of ourselves we worked so hard to hide.In this conversation:• Why Liam focused on rebuilding his mind before rebuilding his body after catastrophic injury• The depression, PTSD and loss of dignity that accompanied his recovery• How rehabilitation eventually led him into 40 years of competitive powerlifting• Why Liam spent years hiding his disability, including practicing how he walked so others would not see his limp• What changed when he stopped seeing disability as something that diminished his strength and began allowing it to become part of his storyLiam is a Guinness World Record holder, internationally ranked powerlifter, disability advocate and brand ambassador for Active Disability Ireland. His upcoming memoir, Unbroken: The Liam Beville Story, tells the larger story of survival, performance, identity and resilience.Connect with Liam Beville:https://www.liambeville.comConnect with Lisa Lacy:https://www.lisalacy.comListener’s Note:Resilience is not the absence of pain, disability, fear or limitation. Sometimes the strongest thing we can do is stop performing strength long enough to acknowledge what happened to us.Liam’s story is a reminder that adapting is not surrender, asking for help is not weakness, and accepting the parts of yourself that changed does not erase who you were before. Survival may require a performance for a season. Healing often begins when you realize you no longer have to keep performing it.What did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when the roles you learned to play in relationships start costing you yourself?In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with relationship and intimacy coaches Natalie Vartanian and Glenn Nielsen for an honest conversation about marriage, somatic healing, nervous system regulation, inherited relationship roles, and what happens when couples stop blaming each other long enough to look beneath the conflict.Natalie and Glenn share how even after years of personal growth and entering their marriage intentionally, old conditioning began showing up. Natalie found herself becoming a muted version of herself, while Glenn wrestled with the enormous pressure of being the provider after the collapse of a business he had built over decades.Together, they explore why sometimes the intensity of our reaction has more to do with what is happening inside us than what our partner actually did, and how couples can begin creating a relationship based on conscious choice rather than inherited expectations.In this episode:• How the “good wife” and “good husband” roles can quietly create resentment and pressure• Why your nervous system may be reacting to something deeper than the argument in front of you• Somatic awareness and learning to recognize activation in the body• Taking responsibility for your own patterns without turning relationship work into blame• How couples can intentionally create agreements, connection, intimacy, and a relationship that allows both people to fully existConnect with Natalie & Glenn:https://wakeuporbreakup.comConnect with Lisa:https://www.lisalacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive? Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens inside your body in the seconds between a trigger, a craving, and a choice?Dr. Deborah Rozman is a behavioral psychologist and President/Co-CEO of HeartMath. In this episode of Notes From the Edge, she joins Lisa Lacy to explore what happens physiologically when stress activates old patterns, why the familiar can feel safer even when it is destructive, and whether we can train the nervous system to create more space between an urge and our response.They unpack heart-brain communication, heart rate variability, coherence, and real-time biofeedback, while Lisa shares how biofeedback became part of her own recovery experience. Dr. Rozman also walks through a simple heart-focused breathing practice that can be used when stress, overwhelm, or cravings begin to rise.In this episode:Addiction recovery, cravings, triggers, and relapse preventionWhy the brain can reach for familiar patterns during stress and overwhelmHeart-brain coherence, HRV, and nervous system regulationUsing real-time biofeedback to recognize and shift physiological stress patternsHeart-focused breathing and creating space between an urge and a reactionConnect with Dr. Deborah Rozman:HeartMath.comConnect with Lisa Lacy:www.LisaLacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Licensed marriage and family therapist and educator Renée Calhoun joins Lisa Lacy to unpack a deceptively simple question: when does “being strong” stop being resilience and start becoming survival mode?In this conversation, Renée and Lisa explore why highly capable people can look successful on the outside while their nervous systems remain stuck on high alert. They talk about guilt-free rest, people pleasing, overfunctioning, emotional safety, family systems, toxic relationship patterns, and the ways trauma adaptations can become so familiar that we mistake them for personality. Renée also explains why intelligence alone can’t logic us out of relationships or behaviors our nervous systems still associate with connection and safety.In this episode:Trauma and nervous system survival responsesThe difference between resilience and survival modeWhy high-functioning people can still be sufferingPeople pleasing, overfunctioning and emotional laborWhy rest can feel unsafe or uncomfortableWhen trauma adaptations get mistaken for personality traitsInternal Family Systems and parts workEmotional safety versus emotional discomfortToxic relationships and repeated relationship patternsHow family systems shape our earliest ideas about love and belongingBoundaries, self-worth and learning to say noMoving from autopilot into curiosity and conscious choiceWhy healing isn’t becoming someone new, but discovering who you are when you no longer have to surviveConnect with Renée Calhoun:https://reneecalhounlmft.comConnect with Lisa Lacy:https://lisalacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive? Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when something that happened to you starts defining who you are?In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with author and survivor advocate Amy McKiernan for a raw conversation about sexual assault, trauma, identity, addiction, boundaries, consent, and rebuilding a life beyond survival.Amy shares how being raped at fifteen shaped her identity, relationships, coping mechanisms, and sense of self-worth. She and Lisa explore numbing through drugs and alcohol, toxic relationships, motherhood, mental health labels, and the long process of reclaiming agency after choice has been taken away.They also talk about why healing is not linear, how small choices can become acts of recovery, and why trauma can remain part of your story without remaining in control of your life.In this episode:• Sexual assault and trauma identity• Addiction and emotional numbing• Boundaries, self-worth, and toxic relationships• Healing that is messy and nonlinear• Mental health labels and identity• Consent, intoxication, and accountability• Reclaiming agency and choosing yourselfConnect with Amy McKiernan:https://amymckiernan.comConnect with Lisa Lacy:https://www.lisalacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when a pastor trades the pulpit for a 24-year career inside the FBI?Eric Robinson spent 12 years in Christian ministry before becoming an FBI Special Agent, eventually serving 15 years as a SWAT operator and working investigations involving counterterrorism, crimes against children, gangs, drugs, financial crime, civil rights violations, political corruption, and national security.But this conversation isn’t really about badges, guns, or cases.It’s about what happens to your understanding of human beings when you’ve spent decades sitting across from victims, informants, criminals, survivors, and people living through some of the darkest circumstances imaginable.In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy and Eric Robinson talk about:• Going from the pulpit to the FBI• 24 years inside federal law enforcement• What ministry taught Eric about interviewing, trust, and human behavior• Witnessing trauma without losing your humanity• Why context matters when we judge another person’s choices• The relationship between trauma, circumstance, crime, and survival• Why mentorship and nonjudgmental support matter• The psychological weight of believing you have to be perfect• Dropping the mask Eric wore as a pastor• Fear, competence, repetition, and learning to trust yourself• Why making the “wrong” decision doesn’t have to destroy your life• Humanizing people without excusing harmful behavior• Choosing curiosity over judgment• Why Eric believes we need more kindness in difficult conversations• His upcoming book chronicling the unlikely journey from preacher to FBI Special AgentEric’s story is a reminder that people are almost always more complicated than the headline, the crime, the job title, the mistake, or the label we’ve been given.Sometimes understanding another human being starts with getting curious enough to ask what happened before we decide who they are.Connect with Eric Robinson:https://preachertobreacher.comConnect with Lisa Lacy:https://www.lisalacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive?Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Why can peace feel more uncomfortable than the crisis you spent years trying to escape?Lisa Lacy, trauma educator and host of Notes From the Edge, explores one of trauma’s strangest contradictions: the nervous system can mistake what is familiar for what is safe.In this solo episode, Lisa gets personal about becoming extraordinarily good at functioning inside chaos, from building a high-pressure career around competence and crisis management to constantly monitoring the emotional weather around her. She explores what happens when the emergency finally ends, but your body is still waiting for the next one, and why ordinary moments of safety can become part of retraining the nervous system.In this episode:Trauma, hypervigilance and the nervous systemWhy peace can feel boring, suspicious or unsafeWhen competence and productivity become survival strategiesOverfunctioning, caretaking and monitoring other people’s emotionsThe difference between connection and intensityWhy stable relationships can initially feel unfamiliarLearning to tolerate other people’s disappointmentResting without feeling like you have to earn itTeaching the nervous system that calm is safeHow ordinary can eventually begin to feel like freedomConnect with Lisa:www.lisalacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive? Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Writer and memoirist Daniel Sterling spent much of his life chasing achievement, recognition, and the next version of success until he discovered that some of the hardest work a man can do happens in the few inches between his head and his heart.Daniel and Lisa talk about the childhood hunger to be seen that fueled his drive, from becoming a top U.S. alpine ski racer to television, filmmaking, and screenwriting, and what happened when that identity finally stopped sustaining him. They dig into male emotional isolation, the mentor who helped Daniel rebuild his life through self-study and accountability, and why raising emotionally whole boys requires adults willing to examine their own patterns first.In this episode:Male isolation and why emotional connection can be so difficult for menAchievement, validation, and using success as a substitute for feeling seenMidlife emotional collapse and rebuilding identity beyond performancePersonal accountability, self-awareness, and dropping defensivenessCommunication and healthier relationshipsRaising boys into emotionally whole menWhy a meaningful apology requires changed behaviorLetting go of ego and discovering who you are beyond accomplishmentsConnect with Daniel Sterling:https://daniel-sterling.comConnect with Lisa Lacy:https://www.lisalacy.comWhat did you perform in order to survive? Welcome to the Edge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.