This is Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast, a place to explore spiritual concepts, tools, and practices to deepen your healing and awakening.

I'm your host, Josephine Hartman, a certified intuitive healer and a Kashik Records practitioner and teacher.

I'm honored that you're here and happy to serve as a guide and companion on your path for a little while.

To learn more about how to work with me or study with me, please visit josephinehartman.com.

My special guest for this episode of Inner Work is Mary Catherine MacDonald, a research professor

and life coach who specializes in the psychology and philosophy of trauma. She has been researching,

lecturing, and publishing on the neuroscience, psychology, and lived experience of trauma since

completing her PhD in 2016. So today we're talking about her new book, Unbroken, The Trauma Response is Never Wrong. So welcome to

inner work, Mary Catherine. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited that you're here too. So could we start with just a little bit of

your background and then kind of leading into what

motivated you to write this book?

Yes, absolutely.

So I am someone, I'm an interdisciplinary scholar.

And so I've been looking at grief and loss and mourning and trauma since I started

graduate school all the way back in 2004.

I did my master's degree on grief with Freud and Emerson, which was a really enlightening

experience. And then over the course of writing my master's thesis, both of my parents

suddenly died. And so when I went on to my PhD program, I started studying

trauma, kind of not really seeing the connection between my own experience and the material,

because I was looking at, that might sound crazy, but I was looking at combat trauma and looking

at the way that clinical psychology defines trauma, which is very limited.

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