Shows
Beyond the Spot“NO CONTACT: When Roles Replace Relationship and Humanity Gets Lost”In this episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, Brainspotting Trainer, reframes no contact as neither rebellion nor rejection, but a relational and nervous-system response to ruptures that were never repaired. Tracy explores how family systems operate through roles instead of relationships, how parents and adult children both lose their humanity within these roles, and why no contact can emerge from deep grief, trauma, or safety needs on either side.The episode further examines no contact within LGBTQIA+ families — naming the grief parents experience when the child they imagined no longer exists, and the grief adult children carry when ac...
2025-12-0739 min
Beyond the Spot“The Sacredness of Anger in a Season of Grief” A nervous-system, spiritual, and decolonized exploration of anger during collective heavinessIn this episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy explores the sacredness of anger during a season marked by grief, loneliness, recession, uncertainty, and collective emotional fatigue. Tracy reframes anger not as pathology, but as a nervous system signal — a spiritual truth-teller, and a decolonized emotional intelligence — a holy flare revealing need, boundary, and truth.Through a hybrid blend of somatic wisdom, decolonized psychology, and ancestral/spiritual grounding, she teaches listeners how anger functions as grief’s bodyguard and as a clarifier in seasons of despair. She reveals how anger often rises in seasons of forced joy, financial pressure, unresolved grief, and cu...
2025-12-0128 min
Beyond the SpotHealing in Community vs. Individualism: The Pathologizing of Connection Reflective InvitationsReflective InvitationsIn this bonus episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy offers a series of embodied, soul-rooted reflective invitations designed to help listeners gently return to themselves and to the communities that hold them. Through nervous-system awareness, ancestral wisdom, and decolonized inquiry, these prompts guide listeners to notice how connection, belonging, and support live in the body. This episode is a soft landing — an invitation to slow down, listen inward, and reconnect with the communal rhythms our ancestors never forgot.Core insight: Reflection is not an intellectual task — it is a practice of remembering your place in the circ...
2025-11-1606 min
Beyond the SpotHealing in Community vs. Individualism: The Pathologizing of Connection Healing in Community vs. Individualism: The Pathologizing of Connection Beyond the Spot: Decolonizing Healing One Brain at a Time with Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, Brainspotting TrainerEpisode Summary: In this episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy dismantles the Western myth that healing is a solo journey. She traces how colonialism, capitalism, and modern psychology severed people from the collective rituals that once held the nervous system in rhythm: circle-work, song, drumming, witnessing, reciprocity. Through a decolonial lens, Tracy reveals how many of the states Western culture labels “pathology”—anxiety, depression, burnout—are often the body grieving the loss of community.She...
2025-11-1649 min
Beyond the SpotThe Spiritual, Science and Soul of Coherence: Bridging HeartMath and Somatic ExperiencingThe Spiritual, Science and Soul of Coherence: Bridging HeartMath and Somatic ExperiencingIn this bonus companion episode to Reclaiming Rhythm: The Nervous System Beyond Hustle, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy takes listeners deeper into the anatomy of coherence — the sacred intersection where science, soul, and somatics meet.Through the lenses of HeartMath and Somatic Experiencing, Tracy explores how coherence is both measurable and felt — the physiological rhythm of the heart and the embodied rhythm of safety.HeartMath describes coherence as heart-brain alignment, a state of psychophysiological harmony where the nervous system communicates in flow. Somatic Experiencing call...
2025-11-0415 min
Beyond the SpotThe Spiritual, Science and Soul of Coherence: Bridging HeartMath and Somatic ExperiencingThe Spiritual, Science and Soul of Coherence: Bridging HeartMath and Somatic ExperiencingIn this bonus companion episode to Reclaiming Rhythm: The Nervous System Beyond Hustle, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy takes listeners deeper into the anatomy of coherence — the sacred intersection where science, soul, and somatics meet.Through the lenses of HeartMath and Somatic Experiencing, Tracy explores how coherence is both measurable and felt — the physiological rhythm of the heart and the embodied rhythm of safety.HeartMath describes coherence as heart-brain alignment, a state of psychophysiological harmony where the nervous system communicates in flow. Somatic Experiencing call...
2025-11-0415 min
Beyond the SpotReclaiming Rhythm — The Nervous System Beyond HustleEpisode 24: Reclaiming Rhythm — The Nervous System Beyond HustleIn this powerful new episode of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy reframes hustle culture as a trauma imprint on the nervous system — not a mindset to overcome.Tracing the historical roots of urgency, exploitation, and performative professionalism, Tracy explores how disconnection from rhythm leads to burnout, limbic countertransference, and loss of internal coherence.Through a Brainspotting and somatic lens, this episode invites listeners to return to the body’s original rhythm — a rhythm built on truth, safety, and liberation.Because healing doesn’t happen in...
2025-11-0232 min
Beyond the SpotThe Soft Life Era: A Collective Reclamation Toward LiberationEpisode 22: The Soft Life Era — A Collective Reclamation Toward LiberationIn this powerful new episode of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy reframes the “soft life” movement through the lens of nervous system healing and decolonized rest; a collective reclamation of safety, rest, and liberation.More than an aesthetic, the soft life is a somatic reclamation — a nervous system remembering safety after generations of survival. Tracy invites listeners, especially women and helpers, to explore how the longing for ease and rest is actually the body’s wisdom calling us back to regulation and liberation.Because th...
2025-10-2518 min
Beyond the SpotWhen the Healer Is Hurting: The Cost of Carrying Others’ Pain and How to Come Home to YourselfIn Episode 22 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy speaks directly to healers, clinicians, caregivers, and helpers—the ones holding the pain of others while quietly carrying their own.Through a trauma-informed, decolonized lens, Tracy explores the cost of compassion fatigue, the historical weight of service in BIPOC communities, and the nervous system’s need for rest and resonance.This episode is a love letter to the helpers—a reminder that healing at the speed of safety begins with you.
2025-10-1950 min
Beyond the SpotSubstance Use and Addiction as Coping: Addiction Reframed as Survival--Criminalization of BIPOC Communities--Somatic ApproachesEpisode 21 of Beyond the Spot reframes addiction as survival—a nervous system strategy for regulation in the absence of safety and connection.Through the historical lens of colonization, systemic oppression, and the criminalization of BIPOC communities, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, LPC (host) invites listeners to view addiction through compassion, curiosity, and embodiment.With Brainspotting and somatic healing insights, this episode challenges both clinicians and communities to move beyond judgment toward resonance—because the body isn’t seeking escape; it’s seeking home.
2025-10-1248 min
Beyond the SpotEpisode 20: AI, Technology, and Mental HealthEpisode 20 of Beyond the Spot explores the impact of technology and AI on mental health and human connection. Tracy Gantlin-Monroy reframes our digital lives through the nervous system—showing how hyperconnectivity breeds disconnection, and how embodied awareness becomes a radical act of resistance.With historical context from the Industrial Revolution to AI bias, this episode calls us back to presence, rhythm, and safety—reminding us that healing doesn’t move at the speed of code, but at the speed of humanity.
2025-10-0534 min
Beyond the SpotParenting and the Nervous System: How our Unhealed Wounds Shape the Next GenerationEpisode 19: Parenting and the Nervous System – How Our Unhealed Wounds Shape the Next GenerationIn Episode 19 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy explores parenting through the nervous system, revealing how unprocessed trauma shows up in family life across BIPOC and dominant-culture contexts.Drawing on intergenerational trauma, race-based stress, the weathering hypothesis, and allostatic load, Tracy unpacks how vigilance, silence, and avoidance shape children’s inheritance.With historical context and invitational reflections, this episode reframes parenting patterns not as pathology but as survival strategies—and calls parents and clinicians to heal their nervous systems as a g...
2025-09-2834 min
Beyond the SpotThe Loneliness Epidemic: Why Disconnection Hurts the Nervous SystemEpisode 18 reframes loneliness as a nervous system wound with deep historical roots—from slavery and Indigenous displacement, to migration and mass incarceration, to the isolation of women carrying households alone.Tracy Gantlin-Monroy explores how loneliness shows up across history and culture, in hyper-connected digital lives, and in the bodies of marginalized caregivers. With Brainspotting insights and invitational reflections, this episode reminds us: community is not optional—it is medicine.
2025-09-2120 min
Beyond the SpotThe Hustle of Healing When Self-Work Becomes PerformanceIn Episode 17 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy explores the hustle of healing—the way self-work has been co-opted into performance and productivity.Drawing from history, culture, and the wisdom of the nervous system, Tracy unpacks how hustle culture shows up in wellness practices, therapy rooms, and BIPOC survival strategies. She challenges clinicians to stop rewarding performance and invites listeners to reclaim healing as presence, rest, and liberation.Because true healing isn’t another hustle. It’s homecoming.
2025-09-1438 min
Beyond the SpotWhen the Therapist Needs Healing Too: Decolonizing the Myth of the Untouchable ClinicianThe myth of the untouchable clinician has cost us all.In Episode 16 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy unpacks how therapists’ unhealed wounds—when left unattended—leak into sessions, burden clients, and reproduce systemic harm.Tracing the history of self-neglect in the helping professions, Tracy explores how clinicians were taught to fix others while denying themselves. For BIPOC clinicians, this has meant carrying double—the burden of community trauma and the pressure to prove legitimacy. For white clinicians, neutrality has too often served as a shield against naming race and power.With invitational reflecti...
2025-09-0625 min
Beyond the SpotWhat’s Stored in the Body Is Bigger Than You (Beyond Epigenetics—Embodiment, Ancestral Memory, and Nervous System Inheritance)The stories our bodies carry didn’t start with us.In Episode 15 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy explores the many ways trauma is transmitted across generations—not just through biology, but through silence, caregiving, systems, and spirit.Epigenetics explains part of the picture, but cultures have always known: grief can live in bones, silence can speak louder than words, and survival patterns can echo through families and communities long after the original harm.This episode weaves neuroscience, historical context, and ancestral wisdom to remind us: if trauma can be inherited, so can heal...
2025-09-0232 min
Beyond the SpotThe Weight of Healing Spaces Why the Therapist’s Body Matters in the RoomThe Weight of Healing SpacesWhy the Therapist’s Body Matters in the Room Host: Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, Brainspotting TrainerTherapy isn’t neutral—because our bodies are not neutral.In Episode 14 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy explores how the therapist’s body, nervous system, and unprocessed history shape healing spaces just as much as the client’s. Drawing on history, lived experience, and Brainspotting, Tracy shows how limbic countertransference and unnoticed survival mode can shift sessions in ways that clients feel deeply—even if it goes unnamed.With invit...
2025-08-2435 min
Beyond the SpotTrauma Work Belongs to All of US: Not Just ClientsHealing spaces are only as safe as the nervous systems holding them.Healing is relational—it flows both ways.In Episode 13 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy speaks to clinicians, healers, and space holders about why trauma work belongs to all of us—not just clients.Through somatic wisdom, Brainspotting, and lived experience, Tracy unpacks how unprocessed trauma and unnoticed limbic countertransference can leak into the therapy room. She offers reflections for both clinicians and clients on how survival mode, silence, or avoidance can block healing—and how awareness, presence, and nervous system work o...
2025-08-171h 08
Beyond the SpotHealing Is Not a Trend: What TikTok Therapists Get WrongIn this episode of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC calls out the rise of viral therapy, toxic positivity, and “manifestation on steroids.” From TikTok therapists to Instagram healers, we explore how modern wellness culture has turned trauma recovery into content—and why that’s a problem.Tracy breaks down the harm of aesthetic-based healing, spiritual bypassing, and one-size-fits-all advice—and offers a return to embodied, lineage-rooted healing. Through Brainspotting, she shares how true transformation doesn’t perform. It resonates.If you’re tired of chasing algorithms and ready for something sacred, this episode is your invita...
2025-08-1034 min
Beyond the SpotNeurodivergence Is Not Defiance: The Pathologizing of Nonlinear Minds in Communities of ColorWhat if the way your brain works was never the problem—but the way it’s been misunderstood?In Episode 11 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy names the racialized misdiagnosis, mislabeling, and masking of neurodivergent people—especially in Black, Brown, and immigrant communities. From ADHD to autism and everything in between, this episode explores how our brilliance was pathologized in systems designed for compliance, not care.Tracy breaks down the history of neurodivergence, the whitewashing of diagnostic criteria, and the harm of labeling nonlinear minds as "defiant." Through the liberatory lens of Brainspotting, she offers a new...
2025-08-0340 min
Beyond the SpotThe Myth of the Model Minority: How “Good Behavior” Became a Trauma ResponseWhat if the pressure to be the “good one” was actually a trauma response?In Episode 10 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy unpacks the origins and impacts of the “model minority” myth—a narrative that has shaped and harmed Asian American, Latinx, and immigrant communities for generations.We explore how survival-based personas like perfectionism, overachievement, and silence are often rooted in collective trauma, assimilation pressure, and intergenerational fear. Through a Brainspotting lens, Tracy reveals how “good behavior” is not always goodness—but a nervous system seeking safety.This episode is a call to deconstruct fals...
2025-07-2738 min
Beyond the Spot"Tending the Sacred Wound"Our emotions were never the problem—our silence was survival. In this episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, Brainspotting Trainer, reclaims the rage and grief of Black, Brown, and Indigenous women—and exposes how those feelings have been pathologized under the white gaze.From the “Angry Black Woman” trope. The “spicy Latina.” The “stoic Native.” To emotional invisibility in the therapy room, Tracy breaks down how Brainspotting supports embodied reclamation—and how healing becomes possible when the full spectrum of expression is welcomed.She also calls in white-bodied clinicians and co-conspirators: Liberation costs comfort. Authenticity requires discomfort. And he...
2025-07-2020 min
Beyond the Spot"Our Emotions Were Never the Problem: Reclaiming Grief, Rage, and Expression Across BIPOC Communities"Summary: For generations, BIPOC communities have been told we’re “too emotional.” Too angry. Too dramatic. Too loud. Too sensitive. Too much.But what if our emotions were never the problem—just the truth?In this episode of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, Brainspotting Trainer, invites us to reclaim the full spectrum of our emotional expression—from ancestral grief to righteous rage.She breaks down how tropes like the “Angry Black Woman,” the “model minority,” and the “stoic Native” suppress embodied truth—and how Brainspotting helps us liberate what the nervous system never forgot....
2025-07-0634 min
Beyond the Spot"Is Spirituality Missing from Therapy? A Call Back to Our Ancestors"Is Spirituality Missing from Therapy?A Call Back to Our Ancestors with Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, Brainspotting TrainerWhat happens when therapy leaves spirit at the door?In this episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy challenges the Western clinical model’s detachment from the sacred and calls for a return to spiritually rooted healing. With reverence and clarity, she explores how ancestral practices, ritual, and embodied spirituality are not only valid in the therapy room—but vital.From Brainspotting as modern soul retrieval to breath as prayer, Tracy shares how therapists and clients alike can...
2025-06-2955 min
Beyond the Spot"From Surviving to Resonance: What Radical Attunement Looks Like"What Radical Attunement Looks Like with Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, Brainspotting TrainerWhat if survival isn’t the goal—but the beginning?In this episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy explores what it means to move beyond surviving into resonance—where the nervous system feels safe enough to be fully seen. With deep grounding in Brainspotting, somatics, and cultural awareness, Tracy names how trauma teaches us to scan and perform, while true healing invites rest, presence, and radical attunement.She calls the roll across BIPOC, Jewish, Queer, and historically silenced communities, honoring the survival strategies that have c...
2025-06-2236 min
Beyond the Spot"Brainspotting in the Hood: Making Neuroscience Accessible"Brainspotting isn’t just for private practice or clinical jargon—it belongs in the barbershop, the community clinic, the classroom, community associations, ancient healing circles, on the corner, on the catamaran, the veranda during the storm, the living room, under the tree, and the hood. Brainspotting is a powerful therapeutic tool—but unlike many modalities rooted in Western clinical systems, it was designed with indigenous communities in mind, given it’s inherent nature towards the dual attunement frame, relational & neurobiological. And, the uncertainty principle.In this episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy breaks down how Brainspotting honors the language of the peop...
2025-06-1539 min
Beyond the Spot"Neutrality Isn't Healing: Naming Whiteness in the Room"What does it mean when therapy claims to be “neutral”? And who does that neutrality actually protect?In this episode, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, challenges the myth of neutrality in clinical spaces—exploring how silence around whiteness, race, power, and culture often reinforces harm. Drawing from her own lived experience as an American Black therapist and her recent training in neuroscience, trauma, and psychotherapy with Dr. Damir del Monte in Poland, Tracy expands the conversation beyond social justice and into the nervous system.She explores how trauma is processed in the brain and body, how “predicti...
2025-06-0843 min
Beyond the Spot"The Algorithm Isn't Your Therapist"Misinformation in Mental Health: What’s Not Being Said Beyond the Spot with Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPCIn this episode, Tracy unpacks the rising tide of mental health misinformation and how it’s reshaping the healing landscape—for better and worse.With the rise of Instagram “therapists,” viral trauma trends, and algorithm-approved narratives, many people are unknowingly absorbing false or harmful beliefs about what healing should look like.Tracy challenges popular myths like:“You have to talk about it to heal.”“If you’re still crying, you’re not healed.”“All therapists are trauma-informed.”...
2025-06-0134 min
Beyond the Spot"Your Nervous System Speaks In Sensation"In Episode 2 of Beyond the Spot, Tracy explores what happens when trauma is not just remembered through thought—but through sensation, posture, stillness, and sound. This episode is an invitation to listen to the wisdom of your body and honor the role culture plays in nervous system healing.Drawing from her clinical background in Somatic Experiencing and Brainspotting, Tracy guides us through the ways the body communicates before words arrive—and how culture offers the rituals, rhythms, and refuge that support regulation. Whether you’ve been disconnected from your body, misunderstood in therapy, or misdiagnosed entirely, this conver...
2025-05-2540 min
Beyond the Spot"The Spot and the Story"In this first episode of Beyond the Spot, Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC, lays the foundation for the journey ahead—unpacking what Brainspotting really is and why it matters.Forget the myths. This isn’t hypnosis, and it’s not just another trauma trend. It’s a body-based, neuroscience-backed, culturally attuned modality that helps your system finish what trauma interrupted.Tracy shares how Brainspotting creates space for silence, resonance, and truth—especially for those who have been misdiagnosed, dismissed, or told to “just talk about it.”This is the episode that sets the tone: honest, ground...
2025-05-1837 min
Beyond the Spot"The Spot and the Story"Trailer for Ep 1. The full episode will drop Sunday, 5/18/2025 @ 4pm ET (officially).
2025-05-1600 min
Beyond the SpotThis Is Not Just A PodcastThis is not just a podcast. This is a space for embodied truth. For nervous system repair. For trauma-informed liberation.Hosted by Tracy Gantlin-Monroy, MDiv, LPC—licensed professional counselor, Somatic Experiencing practitioner, and the first Black woman Brainspotting trainer—Beyond the Spot is here to challenge mental health misinformation and honor the sacred work of healing through body, culture, and spirit.Subscribe for short, potent, weekly episodes exploring trauma, nervous system regulation, somatic healing, and culturally conscious therapy.This is where your story meets science, and your body remembers how to return home.
2025-05-1500 min
Rebel TherapistA Liberated Way To Lead Groups With Tracy Gantlin-MonroyYou want to run a group program? One common question from my participants is: "What skills do I need to learn in order to facilitate a group really well?" I've got someone here on the pod to share her unique process of leading large groups in an expansive, liberated and trauma informed way. Introducing Tracy Gantlin-Monroy. Tracy Gantlin Monroy is a licensed professional counselor and resident therapist at Grace Community Counseling & Social Services in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a brain-wise, body therapist passionate about trauma healing. Tracy is the first Black female Brainspotting...
2023-04-1851 min
Ms. FitOne Lifestyles with Elizabeth ColenEP 117: Healed Looks Good on YouTracy Gantlin-Monroy, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Atlanta, the first Black female Brainspotting trainer in the world, discusses Brainspotting, how trauma impacts you and how it is healed. You hear her passion for healing trauma and mental health with a social justice orientation. She talks about BIPOC, what the acronym stands for and what it means. We talk about how healing shows as con-fidence, her UnBound Black Women Healing series and the re-treat. Connect with Tracy her website www.gracecommunitycounseling.com follow her IG @Monroylpc and let your healing show
2023-02-0939 min