Episode 1: Why Am I Like This? (And Why It Actually Makes Sense)

Welcome to The Truth About Healing.

If you've ever found yourself asking:

Why am I like this?

Why do I keep repeating the same relationship patterns?

Why do I understand something logically but still react emotionally?

Why do I feel stuck, overwhelmed, anxious, burned out, or disconnected—even when I'm doing all the "right" things?

This podcast is for you.

In this kickoff episode, Dana Carretta-Stein shares the mission behind The Truth About Healing and introduces the nervous system lens that changes everything about how we understand mental health, trauma, relationships, anxiety, burnout, and healing itself.

Because here's the truth:

Most people aren't broken.

They're operating on a nervous system that adapted to their life experiences.

In this episode, you'll learn:

✨ Why your symptoms are not random

✨ How your nervous system shapes your thoughts, emotions, relationships, and behaviors

✨ The difference between asking "What's wrong with me?" versus "What happened to me?"

✨ Why anxiety, people-pleasing, shutdown, and burnout are often survival responses—not character flaws

✨ How trauma impacts the brain and nervous system

✨ What EMDR therapy is and why it can be such a powerful healing tool

✨ Why healing feels confusing when you don't understand the system underneath your symptoms

✨ What you can expect from future episodes of The Truth About Healing

Dana also shares the vision for the podcast: cutting through misinformation, simplifying complex neuroscience, and having the honest conversations most people are thinking—but few are saying out loud. 

Key Takeaway

Your symptoms are not the problem.

They're the solution your nervous system created to help you survive.

When you understand that, shame starts to fade, clarity starts to grow, and healing finally begins to make sense.

Coming Up Next

In the next episode, Dana dives into:

🔥 Anxiety & Burnout

🔥 Survival Mode

🔥 Why Rest Doesn't Always Feel Safe

🔥 What Your Nervous System Is Actually Trying to Tell You

Plus, you'll get introduced to recurring podcast segments like:

💣 Truth Bombs — quick nervous-system mic drops

⚡ Truth or Bullshit? — where Dana breaks down popular healing myths and internet wellness advice with her signature no-BS approach. 

If you're looking for additional support on your healing journey, Peaceful Living Mental Health Counseling offers trauma-informed therapy and EMDR for adults navigating anxiety, burnout, trauma, and relationship challenges.

📍 In-Person Therapy: Scarsdale, NY

💻 Virtual Therapy: Available for residents of NY, NJ, CT, FL & CO

📅 Learn more or schedule a consultation:
 www.peacefullivingmhc.com

Additional Resources

🧠 EMDR Resources for Clinicians & Clients
www.danacarretta.com/shop

🛠️ Recommended Therapy Tools, Regulation Resources & EMDR Systems for Clinicians
www.danacarretta.com/therapytools

🎁 Free Nervous System Resources
www.danacarretta.com/free

🎥 Watch full episodes and subscribe on YouTube:
 https://www.youtube.com/@TheEMDRCoach

Enjoying The Truth About Healing?

⭐ Follow the show so you never miss an episode.

⭐ Leave a review, it helps more people find accurate, trauma-informed mental health education.

⭐ Share this episode with someone who has ever wondered, "Why am I like this?"

Because the moment healing starts making sense is often the moment everything begins to change.

We repeat what we don't repair.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome to another episode of The Truth About Healing, a podcast that's here to challenge everything you think you knew about therapy. I'm Dana Koretiskine, EMDR and neuroinformed therapist. And I'm on a mission to help 10 million people change their patterns, relationships, and future generations by teaching them how to gain control of their nervous system. Let's go with it. Here we are, everybody, episode one on the Truth About Healing Podcast. Claudio, here we are. So excited to be here with you. So for anyone who knows me, I'm Dana Coretta Stein, and I am an EMDR neuroinformed therapist. I am a super nerd about all things related to the nervous system, all things about how our experiences shape our brain, shape our nervous system. So why why are we here, right? Why are we on this podcast? So here's how we landed here. So I don't know, Claudio, like maybe a few months ago I started doing some of the podcasts with the other guys you do podcasts with here. Um, and I got to talk to Claudio more and more. And he's like, You should do a podcast. And I'm like, nah, I don't know, weird. Like, I don't, I don't know, no one would want to listen to me. Um, but he kept on me and like, oh, you should really think about it. Um, you have like a really good message, the way you communicate, and it felt really good to like have someone see me in that way. And I appreciate you for that, Claudio, very much.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Well, let me say thank you for that. But I gotta be honest, I think you are that person. People do want to hear you. Um, the reason I did stay on is because every time I see you on social media, you speak to me. And so I uh as you're speaking to me, I'm sure there's a ton of people out there that can benefit from the message that you're putting out, the information that you're putting out. And I gotta be honest, you're such a good, good, uh like good person that why wouldn't why wouldn't anyone want to tune in, listen, and just grow for me.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Thank you. I appreciate that so much because that's really at the end of the day, I'm a therapist, and we all kind of say, you know, why did you become a therapist? Most people will say, well, it's because I wanted to help people. And it really is true, right? There's the, you know, nuance to that of like, okay, there's some maybe stuff that we all as therapists had to work through, like, oh, I want to help people because I can't help myself. That's the subtext that's usually there. Um, but at the end of the day, when you zoom out and you see things, kind of the whole picture and see what they are and how that impacts a person. For me, it almost feels wrong to not give them that information and tell them, like, okay, I don't know if you notice this pattern, but I can see it. Um, and that's really what we're going to be doing here on this podcast. We're going to be kind of connecting those dots for everybody. Um, that question we all have of why am I like this? You know, we've all noticed things that, you know, we can understand something logically, but our body doesn't quite get the message and still reacts in that way. Um, why we keep repeating relationships, you know, the same type of person that we're attracted to. Um, keep getting ourselves in that pattern, even though we know it's not the best for us. Um, so we're gonna unpack all of that. We're gonna unpack why we do the things we do. We're gonna talk to some really awesome experts on um the science behind things. I love the science. Claudio knows I love the science. I can nerd out on it all day long. Um, but that's really what we're gonna focus on here. So here we are. Welcome to The Truth About Healing. As I said, I'm Dana Coretta Stein. And at my core, I am an expert. And it makes me laugh saying that word expert because I still feel like I'm 12, but I am an expert in people and the human nervous system. Our experiences shape the way our nervous system operates and how that spills into our emotions, our physical health, our relationships, the patterns we repeat in our lives, in our interactions with everybody. Over the years, I've worked with thousands of people trying to understand the same thing. Why do I feel the way I do? And what can I do about it? Why do I keep repeating the same patterns? Why do I understand things, but still react emotionally in ways I wish I didn't? And what I've learned over and over again is this most people are not broken. We're operating on a nervous system that adapted to our life experiences. And how you understand how that works, healing can feel confusing, frustrating, and sometimes just downright impossible. So this podcast is here to change that. So let me tell you a little bit about the vision that I had for this podcast and why we're here and what you can expect from me. What you can expect from me in this podcast moving forward is honesty, authenticity, all of that. There's a lot of misinformation floating around there, all on the internet, on social media, about mental health, about wellness. A lot of it's oversimplified advice. Some of it is good stuff. Um, there's viral healing tips and so forth. There's quick fixes that sound great, but they ignore how the nervous system actually works. So we're gonna cut through a lot of that here. My vision for this podcast was really just like get to the freaking point and say the things that maybe everybody's thinking, but no one really has the guts to say out loud. Um, so I'm gonna do all of that. You know, I've been told that like my mouth sometimes gets me into trouble, but oh well, it's also why we're here. So welcome. You can definitely expect from me education that makes sense. I love trying to make information as understandable as possible using things like analogies, things like that, so that it makes sense for the experiences that you've lived. So we're gonna talk about things like trauma, that overused word that we hear all the time, but what that actually means. We're gonna talk about nervous system regulation. We're gonna talk about attachment patterns, we're gonna talk about anxiety and burnout, generational trauma. It's something I'm super, super passionate about. And we're gonna talk about them in real language, not clinical jargon. The goal is by the end of an episode, you walk away thinking, oh, that actually makes sense now. So we're gonna be connecting those dots because many people, they know pieces of the puzzle. They know the therapy language, they know the coping strategies, they know self-awareness, but they haven't been shown the bigger picture, that zooming out that I was talking about, of how the nervous system organizes all of those things. That's the conversation we're having here. The biggest thing I want people to understand from this podcast is your symptoms are not random. Symptoms are a solution, they're a strategy. Your anxiety is not random, your shutdown response, not random, your relationship patterns, not random. They're all responses from your nervous system that learned at one time that that response was actually crucial to your survival. Your nervous system's job is actually quite simple. It's constantly asking one question Am I safe? And your experiences teach your nervous system how to answer that question. Your childhood environment, your relationships, stress, trauma, family dynamics. All of those experiences shape the way your nervous system interprets the world. Which means many of the reactions people criticize themselves for were actually brilliant frickin' survival strategies that your body came up with at one point to get through a really challenging situation. When people start to understand that, something shifts. Shame starts to decrease, or shame starts to make sense, clarity starts to increase, and healing finally starts to make sense. So, how did I end up doing this work? I'm a therapist by training and I specialize in trauma therapy. One of the main approaches I use is called EMDR therapy, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. That sounds really technical, but the basic idea is pretty simple. When something happens in our lives, our nervous system can't always fully process that experience in the moment. I kind of picture it like a funnel. And if too much happens at once, that funnel gets jammed and things can't flow through. So that experience doesn't flow through, it doesn't get processed. So the emotions, the sensations that happened at that moment stay stuck in their raw, natural state. The brain doesn't actually get to like digest them and filter them out. So that when that happens, that experience isn't processed, that can continue influencing how we think, feel, and react long after the event is over. EMDR helps the brain reprocess those experiences so they stop triggering the same emotions and sensations in your body present day. But something interesting happens when you work with people long enough. You start to see patterns. You start to see how trauma shows up in relationships. You see how childhood environments shape adult reactions. You see how anxiety, burnout, and people pleasing often come from the nervous system trying to protect someone or themselves. And over time, I became less interested in just treating symptoms and more interested in helping people understand the system underneath those symptoms and how to resolve it. Because when people understand their nervous system, their reactions stop feeling mysterious. They start making sense. And I notice so much in my work as a therapist, we always say insight uh isn't the only part of the equation, but so many people are more willing to do the deeper work once they have that insight. One of the things we're gonna talk about on this podcast is how our experiences shape our mental, emotional, and physical health. Because the nervous system doesn't separate those things, it's constantly influencing how you interpret situations. Anyone who's followed me for a while knows I always say story follows state. So the state of our nervous system in any given moment can absolutely impact how you perceive your environment and how you perceive a situation. That's gonna impact how your body reacts to stress, how you connect with other people, right? Because if you're dysregulated and you're in fight or flight, you're not in a state of connection. You're in a state of protection. And that's going to reinforce all these other narratives that you might have that actually aren't true. How safe or unsafe the world feels absolutely is impacted by the state of our nervous system. And that means that our experiences don't just affect our memories, they affect our biology. They affect our emotional responses, they affect our relationships. You know, when we talk about the mind-body connection, like it's not really woo-woo when we look at the science behind it and we see how our experiences literally impact how our body functions. Things like epigenetics and stuff show give so much information about this. All this affects our health. When people understand that, something really powerful happens. Instead of asking what's wrong with me, they start asking, What happened to me? Why did my nervous system learn to react in this way? That question opens the door to real change. So that's what this podcast is about. It's about understanding how the nervous system works. It's about making sense of the patterns that confuse so many people. Healing's actually a lot simpler than people think. We just as human beings tend to overcomplicate it. If you've ever felt like you're trying really, really hard to heal, but something's missing, you're in the right place. In the upcoming episodes here, we're gonna talk about anxiety and survival mode, burnout, attachment and relationships, and my favorite generational patterns. Because when you really zoom out and you start to look at generations before you, that's when the real patterns emerge. And that shit's just so freaking cool. How the nervous system influences all of this is huge. So if that sounds like a conversation you've been looking for and you want to be a part of, make sure you're following our show. We're gonna start diving into all that in our next episode. Our next episode is gonna focus on anxiety and burnout and how all of that impacts your nervous system and what you can actually do about it with real concrete advice, not just some woo-woo therapy stuff. So we're gonna unpack all of that. We're also gonna have some really cool things like truth bombs. And my favorite thing that we're kind of working on is a segment called Truth or Bullshit. So if anyone knows me, they know my mouth gets me into trouble sometimes. But we're gonna have some things where people kind of write in and ask questions and we'll say, like, yeah, that's true, or no, that's total BS. Um, so that's gonna be kind of fun ways to learn, fun ways to learn about healing. So I am so grateful if you guys are here on episode one. You are our day one peeps, like our ride or dies, and I'm so grateful for you being here. So I'm looking forward to spending more time with you. I'm looking forward to getting to actually connect with you more. And we will see you on the next episode of The Truth About Healing with Dana Correct Stock. Thank you for listening to another episode of the Truth About Healing Podcast. If you know someone who's still stuck, share this episode with them. Because as you know, the truth can set them free. And if you're ready to get started to see what you need to repair, contact us at peacefulliving mental health counseling.com and we will get you started. Until next time, I'm Dana Coretta Stein, reminding you we repeat what we don't repair. This podcast is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional mental health or medical advice. Listening does not create a therapist client relationship. If you need support, contact a licensed professional or your local emergency services.