18/02/2026
Hello friends 😀
This is my first podcast in English — and it had to be with someone where I can feel: this is real. No performance.
No pretending everything is fine.
My guest is Shay Seaborne Cptsd, activist and founder of Trauma Aware America — a platform that grew directly out of her own lived experience of trauma and her anger at the systems that claim to help, yet often cause deeper harm.
Shay speaks openly about something many people feel but rarely dare to say: sometimes the problem is not inside us.
Sometimes the problem is the environment. The culture. The hierarchy. The medical model that turns a human being into a diagnosis, a billing code, a problem to fix.
In this conversation, we enter territory that is raw — and liberating.
We speak about:
🔥 Systemic trauma and institutional harm.
What happens when someone asks for help and is met with dismissal, coercion, hierarchy, or psychiatric reductionism? What does that do to the nervous system?
🔥 “You are not the problem.”
When the body finally understands this, shame begins to drain. Not intellectually — biologically.
🔥 The power of the field.
How we are constantly shaped by the atmosphere around us — like swimming in blue water and thinking we are blue. News, oppression, chronic threat cues, subtle social hierarchies — they continuously inform the nervous system whether it is safe or not.
🔥 Shame as a cultural dynamic.
If we witness someone being put down and stay silent, that energy enters us. And unconsciously, we may pass it on. Our culture often teaches: to be worthy, someone else must be lowered.
🔥 Play, oxytocin, and connection.
We explore how modern life has reduced spontaneous human contact — play, touch, shared presence — and replaced it with performance, productivity, isolation. A gym is not the same as unstructured, embodied play with other humans.
🔥 Relational neuroscience (Interpersonal Neurobiology).
Shay brings a grounded scientific perspective: nervous systems evolved for safe connection. Without enough safe attunement, systems dysregulate. What we call anxiety, depression, chronic illness, or “mental disorders” are often symptoms of unmet relational needs.
🔥 Medical hierarchy and the “hospital smile.”
We talk about the trained professional distance — the fixed smile, the seven-minute appointment, the assumption: “I know better than your body.” What this does to the patient is immediate: freeze, dissociation, loss of access to clear thinking.
🔥 Repair.
One of the most powerful parts of the conversation is about relational repair. A simple apology — spoken with real attunement — can regulate a system more effectively than many interventions. Tone, posture, eye contact — the body knows when it is seen.
🔥 Agency in touch (the Stop protocol).
Shay describes a simple yet radical practice: agreeing beforehand how touch begins, and allowing the client to say “stop” at any moment — with immediate response. This restores agency and safety to the body. Without true consent, even gentle touch can reinforce old harm.
🔥 The ladybug with a sword.
Shay’s symbol is a ladybug — gentle, beloved, almost innocent — yet also a predator that goes after aphids. It’s a powerful metaphor: soft doesn’t mean passive. Safety does not exclude strength. Protection can be embodied without cruelty.
🔥 Activism as a healing wave.
Not activism fueled by hatred, but by regulation. When one person builds safer connection, it ripples outward. Nervous systems co-regulate. Communities slowly shift.
We also speak about:
🍀 Near-death experiences caused by chronic stress and medical trauma.
🍀 The devastating effects of isolation.
🍀 How even one attuned human being can literally help bring someone back to life.
🍀 Power dynamics, rank, race, and hierarchy — and how awareness of these layers changes relational space.
🍀The difference between being “nice” and being embodied.
🍀 The importance of feeling your skin — knowing what is yours and what is not.
This conversation is for:
🤝 People who feel something is deeply off in the way our systems function.
🤝 Trauma survivors.
🤝 Practitioners who work with people and want to be truly attuned, not just professionally correct.
🤝 Anyone who senses that healing is relational, not mechanical.
🤝 At its core, this podcast is about one fundamental truth:
❤️ We are not designed to be alone.
👩❤️👨 Safe connection is not a luxury.
It is a biological necessity.
And when we reclaim it — even in the smallest moments — life begins to return 💪 .
And yes — it’s my first English podcast.
Imperfect language. But real connection.
Here is the link:
https://youtu.be/DaEza17ukHk
Elias Bohunicky
Hello friendsThis is my first podcast in English — and it had to be with someone where I can feel: this is real. No performance. No pretending everything is ...
