What happens inside your body in the seconds between a trigger, a craving, and a choice?

Dr. Deborah Rozman is a behavioral psychologist and President/Co-CEO of HeartMath. In this episode of Notes From the Edge, she joins Lisa Lacy to explore what happens physiologically when stress activates old patterns, why the familiar can feel safer even when it is destructive, and whether we can train the nervous system to create more space between an urge and our response.

They unpack heart-brain communication, heart rate variability, coherence, and real-time biofeedback, while Lisa shares how biofeedback became part of her own recovery experience. Dr. Rozman also walks through a simple heart-focused breathing practice that can be used when stress, overwhelm, or cravings begin to rise.

In this episode:

• Addiction recovery, cravings, triggers, and relapse prevention
• Why the brain can reach for familiar patterns during stress and overwhelm
• Heart-brain coherence, HRV, and nervous system regulation
• Using real-time biofeedback to recognize and shift physiological stress patterns
• Heart-focused breathing and creating space between an urge and a reaction

Connect with Dr. Deborah Rozman:

HeartMath.com

Connect with Lisa Lacy:

www.LisaLacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

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What happens when telling the truth about your mental health could cost you your credibility, your career, or the way people see you forever?

In this solo episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy talks openly about living with Bipolar I, psychosis, borderline personality disorder, addiction, hospitalization, and recovery while simultaneously building businesses, leading teams, earning six figures, and appearing highly functional to the outside world.

This is a conversation about what happens when a psychiatric diagnosis becomes a verdict instead of information. Lisa explores the pressure to hide serious mental illness in professional spaces, the difference between mental health awareness and actual psychological safety, and why people should not have to prove recovery by pretending they were never sick.

In this episode:

• Bipolar I, psychosis and borderline personality disorder stigma

• Mental illness, employment and the fear of professional disclosure

• High-functioning mental illness, leadership and hidden struggles

• Psychiatric hospitalization, addiction, recovery and rebuilding a life

• Why workplaces need real systemic change beyond mental health awareness

Connect with Lisa:

https://lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

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Licensed marriage and family therapist and educator Renée Calhoun joins Lisa Lacy to unpack a deceptively simple question: when does “being strong” stop being resilience and start becoming survival mode?

In this conversation, Renée and Lisa explore why highly capable people can look successful on the outside while their nervous systems remain stuck on high alert. They talk about guilt-free rest, people pleasing, overfunctioning, emotional safety, family systems, toxic relationship patterns, and the ways trauma adaptations can become so familiar that we mistake them for personality. Renée also explains why intelligence alone can’t logic us out of relationships or behaviors our nervous systems still associate with connection and safety.

In this episode:

• Trauma and nervous system survival responses
• The difference between resilience and survival mode
• Why high-functioning people can still be suffering
• People pleasing, overfunctioning and emotional labor
• Why rest can feel unsafe or uncomfortable
• When trauma adaptations get mistaken for personality traits
• Internal Family Systems and parts work
• Emotional safety versus emotional discomfort
• Toxic relationships and repeated relationship patterns
• How family systems shape our earliest ideas about love and belonging
• Boundaries, self-worth and learning to say no
• Moving from autopilot into curiosity and conscious choice
• Why healing isn’t becoming someone new, but discovering who you are when you no longer have to survive

Connect with Renée Calhoun:

https://reneecalhounlmft.com

Connect with Lisa Lacy:

https://lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when being capable becomes the very thing that keeps people from seeing you’re struggling?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with Nigerian-American physician, novelist, and storyteller Dr. Nneka Oluoha for a conversation about high-functioning depression, cultural expectations, motherhood, immigrant identity, and the roles we perform to survive.

Dr. Nneka explores why the person who appears strongest may be carrying the most, why “I’m fine” can become a practiced performance, and how competence, strength, and responsibility can eventually become a prison when we never allow ourselves to put them down.

She also shares her experience moving from Nigeria to the United States, navigating multiple identities as a physician, mother, wife, immigrant, and writer, and finally reclaiming the part of herself that had always wanted to write.

Her novel, Live For Me Nkem, uses fiction to take readers inside depression not only through the person experiencing it, but through the family living beside her.

In this episode:

• High-functioning depression and performing “fine”

• Competence and strength as survival roles

• Immigrant identity and navigating two cultures

• Motherhood, responsibility, and mom guilt

• Why successful people struggle to ask for help

• Depression’s impact on the entire family

• Listening instead of trying to fix someone

• Reclaiming parts of yourself buried beneath responsibility

• The power of storytelling to create empathy around mental health

Sometimes support is not having the perfect advice. Sometimes it is simply being willing to sit beside someone in the dark.

Connect with Dr. Nneka Oluoha:

LinkedIn-Nneka Oluoha

Connect with Lisa Lacy:

https://www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when something that happened to you starts defining who you are?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with author and survivor advocate Amy McKiernan for a raw conversation about sexual assault, trauma, identity, addiction, boundaries, consent, and rebuilding a life beyond survival.

Amy shares how being raped at fifteen shaped her identity, relationships, coping mechanisms, and sense of self-worth. She and Lisa explore numbing through drugs and alcohol, toxic relationships, motherhood, mental health labels, and the long process of reclaiming agency after choice has been taken away.

They also talk about why healing is not linear, how small choices can become acts of recovery, and why trauma can remain part of your story without remaining in control of your life.

In this episode:

• Sexual assault and trauma identity

• Addiction and emotional numbing

• Boundaries, self-worth, and toxic relationships

• Healing that is messy and nonlinear

• Mental health labels and identity

• Consent, intoxication, and accountability

• Reclaiming agency and choosing yourself

Connect with Amy McKiernan:

https://amymckiernan.com

Connect with Lisa Lacy:

https://www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the person you became to survive is no longer the person you want to be?

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy sits down with speaker and leadership consultant Jon Symes to explore the unconscious stories we build around identity, masculinity, success, leadership, and survival.

Jon calls this work Narrative Liberation: recognizing the roles and beliefs we adopted to navigate life, then deciding which ones still belong to us.

They talk about the cost of being “the strong one,” the provider, the good guy, the high performer, or the person who always has it together. Jon also shares how early survival adaptations can begin, including changing the way he walked as a boy to avoid social judgment and carrying that performance for nearly twenty years.

Together, Lisa and Jon explore midlife reinvention, masculinity, people-pleasing, leadership, family roles, authenticity, and what happens when the identity that once protected you starts costing you pieces of yourself.

In this episode:

• Survival performance and identity

• Narrative Liberation

• Masculinity and provider pressure

• Midlife reinvention

• The “good guy” mask

• People-pleasing and self-abandonment

• Leadership and authenticity

• Family roles and inherited stories

• Reclaiming the parts of yourself you learned to hide

Connect with Jon Symes:

https://www.wholeandfree.me

Connect with Lisa Lacy:

https://www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when a pastor trades the pulpit for a 24-year career inside the FBI?

Eric Robinson spent 12 years in Christian ministry before becoming an FBI Special Agent, eventually serving 15 years as a SWAT operator and working investigations involving counterterrorism, crimes against children, gangs, drugs, financial crime, civil rights violations, political corruption, and national security.

But this conversation isn’t really about badges, guns, or cases.

It’s about what happens to your understanding of human beings when you’ve spent decades sitting across from victims, informants, criminals, survivors, and people living through some of the darkest circumstances imaginable.

In this episode of Notes From the Edge, Lisa Lacy and Eric Robinson talk about:

• Going from the pulpit to the FBI

• 24 years inside federal law enforcement

• What ministry taught Eric about interviewing, trust, and human behavior

• Witnessing trauma without losing your humanity

• Why context matters when we judge another person’s choices

• The relationship between trauma, circumstance, crime, and survival

• Why mentorship and nonjudgmental support matter

• The psychological weight of believing you have to be perfect

• Dropping the mask Eric wore as a pastor

• Fear, competence, repetition, and learning to trust yourself

• Why making the “wrong” decision doesn’t have to destroy your life

• Humanizing people without excusing harmful behavior

• Choosing curiosity over judgment

• Why Eric believes we need more kindness in difficult conversations

• His upcoming book chronicling the unlikely journey from preacher to FBI Special Agent

Eric’s story is a reminder that people are almost always more complicated than the headline, the crime, the job title, the mistake, or the label we’ve been given.

Sometimes understanding another human being starts with getting curious enough to ask what happened before we decide who they are.

Connect with Eric Robinson:

https://preachertobreacher.com

Connect with Lisa Lacy:

https://www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What if the behavior we’re trying to stop is actually trying to tell us something?

Bryan Post is a child behavior expert and creator of the Fear to Love Method whose work challenges parents to see difficult behavior not as defiance, but as communication from a nervous system experiencing stress, fear or unmet needs.

In this conversation, Bryan and Lisa explore what changes when adults stop trying to control behavior and start looking underneath it. They unpack why a stressed parent cannot regulate a stressed child, how consistency creates safety, and why the feelings we learned to suppress in childhood can continue driving our reactions decades later. Bryan also shares his “Reflect, Relate and Regulate” approach and a powerful story illustrating what can happen when a parent gets curious about the fear beneath a child’s behavior instead of immediately trying to correct it.

In this episode:

• Childhood trauma and nervous system regulation
• Trauma-informed parenting and difficult behavior
• Adoption, attachment and emotional safety
• Why punishment and control can intensify stress
• Parent self-regulation and co-regulation
• How childhood survival patterns follow us into adulthood
• Grief, emotional healing and unresolved trauma
• Reflect, Relate and Regulate
• Moving from fear-based reactions toward connection
• Why behavior can be an opportunity rather than a problem

Connect with Bryan:

www.feartolove.com

Connect with Lisa:

www.lisalacy.com

What did you perform in order to survive?

Welcome to the Edge.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.