How Therapy Changes the Brain: Neuroplasticity, Trauma & Lasting Healing

Therapy is everywhere right now, but the most important question is easy to miss: does talking about our past actually change how we live in the present? We open the season by getting specific about what neuroscience is revealing about healing, including how therapy can help rewire the brain and regulate the nervous system, not just name old wounds. If you’ve ever been told you’re stuck with a “chemical imbalance” or doomed to repeat your family patterns, this conversation offers a more accurate and more hopeful frame. 

We unpack neuroplasticity in plain language and connect it to the real work of change: building new beliefs and responses that can finally compete with the ones installed early in life. We also talk about why therapy concepts have gone mainstream, how words like trauma, boundaries, attachment, and burnout now show up in influencer feeds, and why insight alone is not the finish line. The goal is integration, where a new thought or emotion is practiced enough to become your nervous system’s new default, the same way driving goes from terrifying to automatic with time and support. 

One of the most compelling takeaways is relational: research suggests the therapeutic relationship itself may be a biological mechanism for change. We dig into why the quality of connection, safety, and attunement between therapist and client can predict outcomes, and how that can make healing more efficient and sustainable in a world of high costs and insurance red tape. Subscribe, share this with someone who’s ready for a more grounded view of healing, and leave a review with your biggest question about neuroplasticity and change.

Thank you for tuning into And Still WE Rise! If you would like to learn more about me or the work our practice is doing, feel free to follow us on Instagram at:

@atltherapygirl and @risetherapycenter

Or check us out at www.risetherapycenter.com

Disclaimer: And Still We Rise is meant to provide perspective and meaningful conversations around mental health topics. It is not meant to provide specific therapeutic advise to individuals. If anything in these podcasts resonates, ASWR recommends consulting with your individual therapist or seeking a referral from your primary care physician.

Transcript

Season Kickoff And Why Neuroscience

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello and welcome to In Still We Rise. I'm your host, Christine Seidel, and welcome to joining our fifth season here on the podcast. We're so excited to have you with us, and we're really excited about the conversations that are going to be had over the course of the next several episodes. To start, I really am nerding out a little bit on a lot of the conversations we're going to have over the next year with the neuroscience that's emerging and the understanding that things are shifting and changing with what we thought therapy was. I'm really excited to start thinking that healing may just not be for the woo-woo anymore. Maybe it's meant for all of us. So let's get ready, get comfortable, and jump in in today's episode.

Therapy As Brain And Nervous System Change

SPEAKER_00 0:50

All right, to start, let's talk about therapy in general. So, you know, therapy has always been kind of perceived as something we use to talk about the things of the past. But what neuroscience research is showing is that therapy is not necessarily just talking about the things of the past. It can be a vehicle that we use to change the brain and the nervous system and reprogram it to believe new things. And that's pretty amazing since we used to think that the brain was fixed or static. Maybe some of you yourselves have been told, you know, it's just a chemical imbalance in your brain, or it's what your mom or your dad had. So you're unfortunately going to have the same thing. Well, exciting news, that's not necessarily the truth anymore. We know so much more about inherited traits versus epigenetics. And this season is really going to talk about a lot of the discoveries that are occurring now. So let's start with the concept of therapy and healing. It's so mainstream now. Literally, if you go on your social media feed, if you're watching

Mainstream Therapy Talk And Real Risks

SPEAKER_00 2:04

this podcast, you probably have a feed that's filled with a lot of these same concepts. Therapy is kind of like common sense now, or it's mainstream, meaning words like trauma or boundaries or attachment or burnout are really just common narratives, you know, and not necessarily used by licensed professionals. You know, it's it's kind of an influencer's game right now, which I get it. I'm so excited that we're having these conversations. And I also want to recognize that there's harm we can do when we're not being really um knowledgeable about what we're putting out there to the collective. But we do want to acknowledge that it is becoming so much more mainstream and so many more people are talking about it. And we have to come to the realization that therapy and talking about it and understanding it from a logical perspective is just not going to cut it anymore. And it probably never did fully. That was never the finish line to just get to this place of understanding, to be aware of what was patterned in your childhood. That's just the doorway for us to move into a deeper level of understanding.

Integration And The Driving Analogy

SPEAKER_00 3:20

And that's what we call integration. And integration is where we introduce a new belief, a new thought, a new emotion alongside the old. And we allow that new belief to take residence. So the way I kind of explain it is that when you're learning to drive a car, I remember not the best driver when I was first learning. But do you remember the fear you probably had when you first started learning to drive a car? In your mind, you were like, there was no way you were going to be able to get your license. And that fear and that panic going in and then sitting with a parent or another adult that guided you, that reassured you, that pointed out things for you. Slowly and surely you would drive another day and another day and another day to the point now where you probably drive and you're like, yeah, I actually forgot how I got from A to B. I forgot how I got to work. I forgot how I, you know, are picking I'm picking up my kids from school. I didn't even flinch. I went into my own thoughts and my own trance. That's what neuroplasticity is. It's the evidence to support that we can train our brains into new ways of thinking and believing that has lasting change. We can literally reprogram the beliefs we had early in childhood, which, to be honest with you, is really what our brain and our nervous system is running on is old thoughts, old beliefs that we've never actually introduced a new way of

Repairing The Brain Through Neuroplasticity

SPEAKER_00 5:04

believing. And neuroplasticity says not only can we reprogram it, but this is where it gets really exciting, we can actually maybe repair parts of the brain, which as academy and assisted therapist, I'm finding fascinating in some of my case studies. Watching reparative brain structures occur with clients who have fetal alcohol syndrome or presenting traumatic brain injuries, it's fascinating to see that the brain actually, when given an opportunity to heal itself, it will take that chance. It'll take that opportunity. And what we thought was a lost cause, or just the way it is, or that's just the way your brain is, or your chemical imbalance, no longer is the case. And it's very exciting to understand what that means for us as a collective, as individuals. And I have to say, it's a real privilege to be in the therapeutic world and be a companion with other people as they do this work. And I continue to do my own. What a privilege to be with souls that are learning that they can shift their lives, they can shift their relationships, they can shift their sense of self with the right work and with the correct guidance. What a privilege to be able to step into those spaces.

Why The Therapy Relationship Works

SPEAKER_00 6:34

So much so that in the narrow research, we're finding out that the therapeutic relationship might actually be a biological mechanism to that change. What that means is that the quality of the client therapist relationship is one of the most predetermined indicators of change. Just like that analogy of driving a car. I mean, actually, I think if you drove with one of your parents or another adult, you knew which one you wanted to ride with you, which one you didn't, right? You were so aware, like, I'm not riding with that parent, they are freaking me out, it's not gonna work. It's the same thing with the therapeutic relationship. It is the indicator of change. In a 2022 research on Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, they actually found that the therapeutic relationship was one of the most influential parts of change. So much so that it created the synchronous relationship between the therapist and the client, and it became this vessel of change where clients who are in a very cathartic therapeutic relationship had several layers of change happen in a more efficient and effective way. That's amazing. That means that we can have healing through different layers in a faster, less costly way. In a world of insurance red tape, I think that's amazing. And I take that privilege and that responsibility really, really seriously, as I know the other therapists at RISE do too. It's a privilege to be able to be in this place with our clients. And now we understand the neuroscience is backing us up to bring that to the therapeutic relationship.

What This Season Will Explore

SPEAKER_00 8:29

So this season is really going to be about learning more about that relationship, more about ourselves, our belief patterns, and what neuroplasticity is showing us we can do. I can't wait to have you along with us, and I really am excited to nerd out over the next year. Thank you for joining us. I'll talk to you soon. Bye for now.