Creativity, Trauma, and the Nervous System: Why Healing Expands What's Possible

About this episode

The episode explores the connection between creativity, trauma recovery, and the nervous system with insights from Laura Dawn.

What if healing from trauma is not just a psychological process, but a fundamentally creative one? In this episode, Jennifer Wallace and Elisabeth Kristof are joined by Laura Dawn, a psychedelic-informed author, researcher, and mentor who has spent more than two decades exploring how altered states can open creative pathways, support trauma recovery, and reconnect people with vision and possibility. Laura opens by naming something most people carry but rarely say out loud: the moment someone told them they were not creative. Research by Brené Brown suggests that around 80% of people had an experience in childhood that planted a limiting belief about themselves—and for half of them, it was about creativity. From there, the conversation expands into something much bigger: a reframing of creativity itself. Not as a talent or personality trait, but as a fundamental function of being human. Drawing on her graduate research and the Five P's of creativity framework, Laura maps creativity onto the arc of healing. She shows how psychological flexibility—one of the strongest predictors of post-traumatic growth—is also directly linked to creative capacity. The connection between trauma…

People in this episode

Hosts: Elisabeth Kristof, Jennifer Wallace

Guest: Laura Dawn

Topics covered

• creativity
• trauma
• nervous system
• healing
• psychedelics
• psychological flexibility

Keywords

• creativity
• trauma
• nervous system
• healing
• psychedelics
• psychological flexibility
• post-traumatic growth

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