How Childhood Trauma Hides in Your Body (Dr. Cindy Starke)
Release Date: 05/19/2024
Why Your Nervous System Won't Let You Rest
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired September 6, 2026 Dr. Charleanea Arellano has spent over 30 years as a clinical psychologist and leadership coach, but the framework she's best known for now, the Embodied Narrative Framework, didn't come from a textbook. It came from putting away laundry five years ago and noticing her own body bracing for impact, for no reason at all, at age 55, after decades of actually being safe. Dr. Arellano built her career studying how high-achieving women lead while carrying nervous systems shaped by trauma, and by the added weight of managing how their race, sexuality, or gender is...
info_outline
Why Business Leaders Need Negotiation Skills
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired August 23, 2026 Annette Mullin spent 24 years with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, nine of them as a crisis negotiator, eventually leading one of the busiest negotiation teams in the country — averaging over 100 call-outs a year. She worked patrol, sexual assault, internal affairs, and homicide, becoming LVMPD's first female homicide sergeant, before spending her final years as the department's director of employee wellness in the aftermath of the October 1 Mandalay Bay shooting, the largest mass shooting in U.S. history. Now a negotiation instructor and coach...
info_outline
Why Comedy Might Be the Best Medicine For Mental Health
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
First aired August 16, 2026 For over a decade, Dave Mowry couldn't get out of bed, couldn't shower, and couldn't walk to his own mailbox without waiting until dark so a neighbor wouldn't catch the look in his eyes. In 1994, a psychotic break sent the successful businessman and family man into a depression so deep it cost him his house, his career, and 14 years he calls his "lost years." He slept in his clothes for months at a time. At parties, he'd stand against the wall and pray no one came over to talk to him. Then, at his wife's urging, he walked into a stand-up comedy class for people...
info_outline
Why Imposter Syndrome Keeps Leaders Stuck
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
In this episode, Dana is joined by Kurt Bush, a trauma-informed coach who helps leaders move from imposter syndrome to authentic confidence. Kurt shares his own journey with imposter syndrome, from feeling like a fraud in corporate leadership meetings to realizing his true calling. He explains that to make a change, the pain of staying the same must become greater than the pain of changing, a threshold many of us fear crossing. Kurt introduces the ERT (Encounter + Reflection = Transformation) framework, a practical approach to help you get unstuck. He reveals why the first step to moving...
info_outline
Your Midlife 'Crisis' Might Be Burnout (with Jody Brooks)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
A midlife crisis isn't actually a crisis. That's the challenge Jody Brooks puts to anyone who's ever felt lost, restless, or quietly convinced something's wrong with them somewhere around 40 or 50: what looks like burnout, and what people love to write off as a freakout, is more often a calling. His own arrived at lunchtime at the office, buzzing canteen and all, when he found himself sitting in a restroom cubicle, crying so hard he could barely breathe. No brutal meeting that morning. No disaster. Just the quiet moment his body picked to file its formal complaint: burnout wasn't a "rough...
info_outline
How You Can Find Hope After Rock Bottom (Aaron Ryan)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Two in the morning. Sitting on the toilet, clothed, bawling into a pillow, because a broken PC was the last thing standing between him and the self-employed life he wanted so badly he could feel it in his teeth. That's where my guest this week hit rock bottom: not one dramatic collapse, but months of computer problems piling on top of a dream that felt like it was never going to happen. A client shared one quote with him that day, and Aaron Ryan has carried it in his back pocket for almost twenty years since: "The temptation to quit is always greatest just before your greatest success." Aaron...
info_outline
How Your Body's Intuition Can Heal You (Rebecca Russell)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Four years of chronic pain. A fibromyalgia diagnosis. Muscle relaxers, pain pills, migraines, MRI after MRI. And through all of it, my guest this week kept hearing the same quiet voice: something doesn't fit. Rebecca Russell listened to it anyway, tracked down a neurosurgeon, and asked for one test nobody else had run: a discogram. It found the bulging disc that had been the actual problem the whole time, and eighty-five percent of her symptoms disappeared after surgery. Rebecca is a metabolism and lifestyle coach, certified essential oil specialist, and author who's spent more than three...
info_outline
Why Successful Entrepreneurs Set Boundaries (Chris Shurian)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
My guest this week has a word for himself I'd never heard before: "entrepreholic." Over 39 years, Chris Shurian has built, operated, bought, broken, and resurrected companies in remodeling, construction, manufacturing, real estate development, foreign investment, hospitality, restaurants, and retail. He's also survived cancer and finished two Ironmans. And in 2008, when the economy crashed, he was so extended, so "all in, all in, all in," as he puts it, that he spent the next two years meeting with his banker once a week just to survive it. We talk about what it actually felt like to launch...
info_outline
Why Loneliness Hits the Young Hardest (Dr. Anthony Silard)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Picture a hand-written sign taped to a bus stop in Japan: "I'm 87, I don't have a family. Would some family take me?" No one answered. He died a couple of months later. That story, from my guest this week, is the starkest snapshot I've ever heard of what loneliness researcher Dr. Anthony Silard calls a global epidemic, and the twist is who it's hitting hardest: not the oldest of us, but the youngest. Anthony is a professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology and an internationally recognized authority on relationships, emotional intelligence, and personal transformation, and he's the...
info_outline
Avoiding Failure Guarantees It (with Mark DeCarlo)
Phoenix and Flame Podcast
Picture a high school track meet: a sixteen-pound shot put thrown the wrong direction, a burst spleen, three weeks in a hospital bed. That's how my guest this week learned, at sixteen or seventeen, that avoiding failure is exactly what guarantees it. Mark DeCarlo woke up after three days unconscious to a doctor telling him ten more minutes and he'd have been dead, and he's spent every day since orienting his choices around one question: will this make me more happy or less happy? Mark is an Emmy award-winning comedian, bestselling author, and in-demand corporate speaker and leadership trainer...
info_outlineMy guest today comes from a family of hairdressers and electricians, no doctors anywhere on the tree, and her own brother used to tell her she must have been swapped at birth. That joke was covering for something real: at 14, in a house gone chaotic with her brother's older friends and her parents elsewhere, she was touched in the night by someone in that circle, more than once, and never told a soul. Dr. Cindy Starke didn't call it trauma for another two decades. What she did instead is a masterclass in how childhood trauma hides in the body: she got out, got educated (an MD and a PhD in molecular genetics from Emory, after failing the SAT so many times she stopped counting), and built a 20-year career as a board-certified internal medicine physician without ever looking back.
Until her body made her look. Years of swallowing her own boundaries, in her marriage most of all, scarred her esophagus down from 15 millimeters to one or two: an actual, physical stricture, built one un-said "no" at a time. It took an empty COVID hospital and a year of forced stillness for her to remember what happened at 14 and finally process it. Now Dr. Starke runs "clearings," a trauma-release process she developed to help other women (nurses, mostly, at first) find their literal voice again, the same way she found hers.
We talk about the difference between a physician and a healer, the SAT she took seven times to win a scholarship her parents couldn't afford, and why she says the most uncomfortable thing you'll ever do is easier than living with an unhealed wound for the rest of your life.
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJhthL0ssWk
In this episode
- Why childhood trauma can physically scar your body years later, and the esophageal stricture Dr. Starke traces straight back to a marriage full of unset boundaries
- How growing up in a house of "altered" 19-year-olds at 14 taught her to bury an abuse she wouldn't name for 20 years
- The stubborn kind of grit it takes to fail a board exam twice and take the SAT seven times, and why she calls that resilience, not embarrassment
- What a "clearing" actually looks like, and why one client got her literal voice back within three sessions
- Why she walked away from 30 years of full-time medicine despite $210,000 in scholarships riding on the career, and how she decided she was allowed to
- Dana's football-pads-on-a-golf-course analogy for why the defenses that protected you as a kid can wreck you as an adult
Timestamps
- (00:01) Welcome and guest intro: meet Dr. Cindy Starke, MD/PhD in molecular genetics
- (01:47) Growing up the only "enigma" in a family of hairdressers and electricians
- (02:46) The house full of her brother's older friends, and the abuse she didn't tell anyone about at 14
- (07:09) The board exam she failed twice, and the test anxiety she's not embarrassed to admit
- (09:34) Taking the SAT seven times to win the scholarship her parents couldn't afford
- (12:48) COVID, an empty hospital, and the year-long healing journey that followed
- (14:20) Realizing medicine wasn't helping people heal, just cycling them through a revolving door
- (18:24) Inside a "clearing": what actually gets a client's voice back
- (21:02) The esophageal stricture, unset boundaries in her marriage, and "The Body Keeps the Score"
- (30:44) Dana's football-pads-on-a-golf-course analogy for outgrowing childhood defenses
- (32:59) Walking away from 30 years of full-time medicine to become a boundaries coach
- (36:20) Where to find Dr. Starke: her website, book, free "spark call," and Facebook Lives
About Dr. Cindy Starke
Dr. Cindy Starke holds both an MD and a PhD in molecular genetics from Emory University, and spent over 20 years as a board-certified internal medicine physician, with genetic research published in the Journal of Bacteriology and the Journal of Infectious Diseases. She now works part-time as a hospice medical director and runs an online program helping women process childhood trauma and set boundaries through a process she calls "clearings," built on NLP and trauma-release techniques.
Learn more, book a free 15-minute "spark call," or find her book at drcindystarke.com.
Favorite quotes
"I always say the trauma is not what happened to you. It's what you tell yourself that means about you." —Dr. Cindy Starke
"What's more uncomfortable, living with that for the rest of your life?" —Dr. Cindy Starke, on facing a wound instead of medicating around it
"I am worthy of having a life that I want to design on my own." —Dr. Cindy Starke
Resources mentioned
- DrCindyStarke.com: Dr. Starke's website, with her book, a free 15-minute "spark call," and links to her media appearances
- Dr. Cindy Starke's award-winning book, available via this link
- "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel van der Kolk, referenced by Dana on how trauma lodges in the body
Related episodes
- How Unresolved Trauma Is Ruling Your Life: more on the mechanics of how old wounds keep steering your present-day choices
- Boundaries - Why Can't I Set Them?: a deeper dive into the people-pleasing patterns Dr. Starke describes learning from her own mom
- Getting Pulled Into the Past: Our Shame Response and the Impact of Unprocessed Trauma: the psychology behind why unprocessed trauma resurfaces years later
Subscribe & connect
If this episode gave you something to sit with, follow Phoenix and Flame so you never miss an episode: all apps in one place, or jump straight to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or YouTube. And if it moved you, leave a review; it's the easiest way to help another listener find the show.
Learn more about Phoenix and Flame, connect with Dana, and listen to more episodes here.
Curious where your own boundaries stand? Take my free Work Boundaries Quiz: danaskaggs.com/quiz