In this conversation, Stacie Spiler discusses the profound effects of trauma and borderline personality disorder (BPD) on the brain and behavior. She shares her personal journey from experiencing abuse to healing, outlining five concrete steps she took to recover. Stacie emphasizes the importance of understanding the impact of personality disorders, the role of relationships in healing, and the necessity of taking radical responsibility for one's actions. She also highlights the significance of intentional solitude for integration and finding wholeness after trauma.

Watch on youtube here

takeaways

• Trauma reshapes how individuals react and attach to others.
• Survival responses can lead to destructive behaviors.
• Healing is a long process that requires responsibility.
• Understanding the brain's response to trauma is crucial for healing.
• Relationships can be both a wound and a source of healing.
• Medication can provide temporary support but is not a solution.
• Intentional solitude is necessary for true integration.
• Healing allows individuals to reclaim their lives and identities.
• Patterns of behavior can be unlearned with time and effort.
• The journey of healing is about living intentionally and responsibly.

Chapters

00:00 Understanding Trauma and Its Lasting Effects

09:55 The Impact of Personality Disorders on the Brain

20:05 Steps to Healing from BPD and CPDSD

27:20 The Role of Relationships in Healing

This Is Why So Many People Quit Their Dreams — not because the dream is wrong, but because the climb demands more of you than anyone tells you.

In this video, I explore the part of growth that rarely gets spoken about: the internal resistance that shows up when you move toward something that actually matters. Not loud fear or doubt, but quiet hesitation, self-sabotage, and the urge to pull back just as things start to change.

Drawing on ideas from The War of Art and lived experience, this conversation looks at why pursuing your dream can feel destabilising, why pushing harder often makes it worse, and what this phase is really asking of you on an identity and nervous system level.

This isn’t motivation, and it isn’t about quitting.

It’s about understanding the cost of becoming someone new — and why feeling this way doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.

If you’re in the middle of the climb and questioning yourself, this video is for you.

Watch on: https://youtu.be/vj3-6wBB_L8

What if the deepest grief of your life doesn’t arrive when the trauma happens—but decades later, when survival is no longer required?

In this episode, Learning the Hardest Path to Walk Leads Straight Back to Me, I share a rarely spoken stage of healing: the grief that surfaced at forty-three, more than twenty years after the original trauma. Not as sadness or despair, but as the collapse of identity, meaning, and every narrative I had used to survive.

I speak openly about grieving what never was—the childhood that couldn’t form safely, the parents who couldn’t show up, and the hope that one day connection or understanding would arrive and make it all make sense. We explore how trauma narratives aren’t erased by insight, but written over, waiting for safety to be felt in the body.

This episode challenges familiar ideas like “everything happens for a reason,” examines responsibility without shame, and names the dark night of the soul as the dismantling of survival identity rather than pathology.

This is a conversation about the hardest path to walk—letting go of meaning, external repair, and familiar suffering—and how that path leads back to self, not as an idea or destination, but as presence.