Post-Traumatic Growth and Neuroplasticity: Healing in Present Time with Colleen Millen
About this episode
Amy Wheeler and Colleen Millen discuss the transformative potential of post-traumatic growth and the role of neuroplasticity in healing.
What happens when we stop treating suffering as a fixed identity and start relating to it as a changeable state? In this conversation, Amy Wheeler is joined by Colleen Millen, a licensed marriage and family therapist and yoga therapist who works at the intersection of somatic psychotherapy, nervous system regulation, and post-traumatic growth. Colleen shares how “healing happens in present time,” why choice and consent are foundational to real change, and how small, repeatable practices can reshape patterns that once felt permanent. Together, they explore neuroplasticity in everyday language (“neurons that fire together wire together”), how somatic tracking restores access to the prefrontal cortex when stress responses take over, and why therapy and yoga therapy can be most effective when they are collaborative—rooted in agency, curiosity, and what is life-affirming for the individual. In This Episode, You’ll Hear Why post-traumatic growth can be a more empowering framework than only focusing on post-traumatic stress How agency and consent orient the healing process (“Do you even want to rewire this?”) A practical, listener-friendly explanation of Dan Siegel’s “hand model of the…
People in this episode
Host: Amy Wheeler
Guest: Colleen Millen
Topics covered
- post-traumatic growth
- neuroplasticity
- somatic psychotherapy
- nervous system regulation
- healing practices
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Dan Siegel
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