The Slow Path to Healing Trauma and Attachment Wounds

What if healing your relationships started with learning to slow down?

In this episode of Not Your Ordinary Parts, Dr. Diane Poole Heller joins host Jalon Johnson for a heartfelt conversation about trauma, attachment, and the powerful drive we all share to connect. Together, they explore how early experiences shape our nervous system’s capacity for intimacy, safety, and presence—and how those patterns can be shifted, no matter when or how they began.

Throughout the episode, Diane unpacks the lived experience of different attachment styles, offering language, validation, and a compassionate lens for understanding relational dynamics that can otherwise feel confusing or painful. Whether describing the avoidant partner who pulls away after closeness, or the ambivalent one who can’t fully take in the love that’s already there, she brings clarity to the ways disconnection shows up and how it can begin to mend.

At the core of the conversation is a message of hope: that healing is not about doing more, but about doing less, more gently. When trauma has overwhelmed the system, regulation and repair happen in small doses, in nervous system bites, at a pace we can actually digest.

With warmth, depth, and a deep respect for the human journey, this episode invites listeners to imagine a new kind of connection: one rooted not in perfection, but in presence.