Shows
Pursue Your Spark: Fitness, Confidence & Clarity in Midlife246. When Childhood Trauma Reawakens: Stacey Hettes on Healing After Midlife Have you ever felt like you were finally okay—only to be blindsided by a wave of emotion you didn't see coming? In this episode of Pursue Your Spark, "When Childhood Trauma Reawakens: Stacey Hettes on Healing After Midlife," I sit down with Dr. Stacey Hettes, scientist, college professor, and author of Dispatches from the Couch, to explore how deeply buried childhood trauma can resurface in midlife—and how we begin to heal truly. We dig into the ACEs framework (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and how Dr. Hettes used it to make sense of emotional shutdown, people-pleasing, and her...
2025-10-1641 min
Memoir SnobEpisode 62: Stacey HettesA conversation with the author of Dispatches From The Couch: A Neuroscientist and her Therapist Conspire to Reboot Her Brain.When including flashbacks to childhood sexual abuse, Stacey included questions she had at the time. These questions perfectly captured the confusion of the experiences, while at the same time showed just how young she was. Was I wearing my hair in pigtails? Or did he brush the shimmery strands aside. Was this after my Dorothy Hamill haircut? There’s a fair amount of self-loathing for her childhood self. Rather than tell the reader this...
2025-10-1648 min
The WECAN PodcastDr.Stacey Hettes on how to reboot your brain after traumaWelcome back to SheCan Podcast for an illuminating conversation with Dr. Stacey Hettes about the power of writing and neuroscience. Stacey is a renowned Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at Wofford College. Stacey shares her journey from surviving long-buried childhood sexual abuse to becoming a bestselling memoir author with Dispatches From the Couch: A Neuroscientist and Her Therapist Conspire to Reboot Her Brain. Watch until the end to hear how Stacey combines neuroscience and expressive writing to navigate trauma and reclaim her voice. The transformative power of bringing light to hard stories through memoir and conversation. Insights from her...
2025-09-0931 minThe WECAN PodcastDr.Stacey Hettes on how to reboot your brain after traumaWelcome back to SheCan Podcast for an illuminating conversation with Dr. Stacey Hettes about the power of writing and neuroscience. Stacey is a renowned Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at Wofford College. Stacey shares her journey from surviving long-buried childhood sexual abuse to becoming a bestselling memoir author with Dispatches From the Couch: A Neuroscientist and Her Therapist Conspire to Reboot Her Brain. Watch until the end to hear how Stacey combines neuroscience and expressive writing to navigate trauma and reclaim her voice. The transformative power of bringing light to hard stories through memoir and conversation. Insights from her...
2025-09-0931 min
Aspire: The I Have The Right To PodcastE27: Dispatches from the Couch | Dr. Stacey Hettes on Understanding Trauma - Advocacy in ActionSend us a textIn this heartfelt episode of Aspire, host Katie M. Shipp welcomes co-host Karen Udall and special guest Dr. Stacey Hettes, professor of biology and neuroscience at Wofford College and author of the memoir Dispatches from the Couch.Stacey shares her courageous journey as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and her path to healing through therapy. The discussion touches on critical themes such as the importance of supportive responses to disclosures, understanding trauma triggers, and the role of therapy in the healing process. Stacey also delves into the neuroscience b...
2025-08-021h 21
Settling Is Bullshit48 | Honoring Our LimitationsRather than treating our limitations as problems to be solved or burdens to be borne, what might shift if we treated them with respect and appreciation? Finding our limits means finding our boundaries, and we have the option to view them as useful tools for self-care and safety (instead of cages we’re trying to break out of).If you enjoy this podcast, please consider joining my Patreon to help me cover the production costs and keep this show going. https://www.patreon.com/c/SettlingIsBullshitRead the transcript at: https://settlingisbullshit.com/2025/07/30/honoring-our-limitations/...
2025-07-3022 min
Let’s Talk Memoir184. Writing About Childhood Sexual Abuse without Reliving It featuring Dr. Stacey HettesDr. Stacey Hettes joins Let’s Talk Memoir for a conversation about therapeutic writing and how she crafted a memoir about childhood sexual abuse without revictimizing herself, metabolizing childhood trauma, inviting readers into our physiological response, the role of our limbic systems, deciding whether to share specifics about abuse in our manuscripts, italicizing difficult material for readers so they can decide, approaching a story of child sexual abuse in a protective way, putting therapy into our memoirs, demonstrating our character’s progress in our narrative, remembering we can write beautifully about hard things, and her new memoir Dispatches from the...
2025-07-1545 min
Loblolly Press: In ConversationDispatches from the Couch: Dr. Stacey Hettes on Therapy, Neuroscience, and the Long Work of HealingIn this episode, Andrew Mack sits down with Dr. Stacey Hettes, a professor of biology and neuroscience at Wofford College and the author of Dispatches from the Couch: A Neuroscientist and Her Therapist Conspire to Reboot Her Brain (Apprentice House Press).Stacey’s memoir explores the long and deeply personal process of healing from childhood sexual abuse, blending scientific insight with emotional clarity and vulnerability. We talk about the role of language in reclaiming one’s story, the emotional work of therapy, and what it means to keep going when the story gets hard.The epis...
2025-06-0254 min
Settling Is Bullshit42 | Healing Trauma through Expressive Writing with Author and Neuroscientist Dr. Stacey Hettes, PhDNo matter how much we cognitively “know” about how trauma works, none of us are immune from the grip it can have on our capacity to deal with life. Thankfully, there are ways out, and writing is one of them.Dr. Stacey Hettes knows this firsthand. In spite of her PhD in neuroscience and decades of teaching it to undergraduate students, a tense campus event in 2019 triggered a debilitating post-traumatic stress response tracing all the way back to her childhood experiences of sexual abuse. With the help of her therapist (and eventually a coach), Stacey was able to w...
2025-05-291h 05