The Systemic Way

In this episode of The Systemic Way, we sit down with renowned psychotherapist, author, and educator Jan Winhall to explore the transformative power of the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model (FSPM). With over four decades of clinical experience, Jan invites us into a radically compassionate, body‑based understanding of trauma, addiction, and healing.

Together, we unpack how the body’s survival responses are not signs of pathology but intelligent adaptations—messages that deserve curiosity rather than shame. Jan shares the origins of the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, how it integrates polyvagal theory with focusing-oriented therapy, and why shifting from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened in you?” can reshape therapeutic practice.

We also dive into the practical: embodied exercises, the role of safety and co-regulation, and how therapists can create spaces where clients reconnect with their felt sense and reclaim agency. Whether you’re a clinician, educator, or simply someone interested in the intersection of neuroscience and compassion, this conversation offers a grounded, hopeful reframe of what it means to heal.

A rich, generous dialogue with one of the leading voices in embodied trauma work—this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Jan Winhall, M.S.W., R.S.W., F.O.T., is a psychotherapist, author, and educator with more than 40 years of experience working at the intersection of trauma, addiction, and embodied healing. She is the developer of the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model (FSPM), an innovative framework that integrates polyvagal theory with focusing‑oriented therapy to offer a compassionate, non‑pathologizing understanding of human suffering and resilience.

Jan is an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of Toronto, an Educational Partner with the Polyvagal Institute, and the Founder and Director of the Felt Sense Polyvagal Institute, where she trains practitioners around the world. Her influential book, Treating Trauma and Addiction with the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, has become a touchstone for clinicians seeking embodied, relational approaches to healing.

Across her teaching, writing, and clinical work, Jan invites us to listen to the body’s wisdom, honour survival responses as adaptive, and create therapeutic spaces rooted in safety, curiosity, and connection. She is widely recognised for bridging neuroscience with systemic, relational practice in ways that are accessible, hopeful, and deeply human.

In this episode, we’re turning our attention to the UK drama Adolescence — a series that begins with a single, shocking event but quickly reveals a much wider web of responsibility.
Rather than focusing solely on the actions of one young person, the drama draws us into the interconnected systems surrounding him: family, school, peer culture, mental health services, and the criminal justice system.
Using a systemic psychotherapy lens, we’ll explore how meaning, behaviour, and risk are produced within relationships — and how patterns of communication, power, silence, and inaction shape what unfolds. We’ll look at not just what happens on screen, but what fails to happen: where systems don’t speak to each other, where responsibility is displaced, and where intervention comes too late. Adolescence invites us to move away from simple narratives of blame and instead ask more complex questions about how distress is held — or missed — across the wider system.
We are joined by the regular Systemic Lens Team of Becky Midlane, Anokh Goodman, Danilen Nursigadoo, Nafeesa Nizami (Naz).

In Grandmotherland, Dr Judith Edwards offers an exploration of Grandmotherhood as an intergenerational, relational, and socially constructed position. Drawing on myth, fairy tales, family narratives, and contemporary lived experience, she examines how dominant cultural discourses shape expectations of grandmothers and organise family roles, boundaries, and power across generations. Judith attends to patterns of transmission, alliance, exclusion, and care, situating Grandmotherhood within wider socio-economic and cultural contexts—including the increasing reliance on grandmothers for childcare. Grandmotherland invites systemic practitioners and scholars to rethink grannyhood not as a fixed role, but as a dynamic position shaped by relationships, histories, and social structures.

Judith Edwards is a child and adolescent psychotherapist who has worked for over thirty years at the Tavistock Clinic in London. Love the Wild Swan: The Selected Works of Judith Edwards was published by Routledge in their World Library of Mental Health series, and her edited book, Psychoanalysis and Other Matters: Where Are We Now? was also published by Routledge. From 1996 to 2000, she was joint editor of the Journal of Child Psychotherapy. Apart from her clinical experience, one of her principal interests is in the links between psychoanalysis, culture, and the arts, as well as making psychoanalytic ideas accessible to a wider audience. She has an international academic publishing record and in 2010 was awarded the Jan Lee memorial prize for the best paper linking psychoanalysis and the arts during that year: ‘Teaching & Learning about Psychoanalysis: Film as a teaching tool’.

In this episode of The Systemic Way, we talk about age in the room—listening for it not as decline, but as presence, memory, and becoming. Drawing inspiration from Maya Angelou’s On Aging, where she writes of being “old as the hills, and far from done,” we explore lifecycle transitions, working with older people, and how a therapist’s age is read, misread, and positioned in the therapeutic relationship.
We reflect on age as a cultural and systemic story: how wisdom, power, invisibility, authority, and expectation are shaped across generations and communities. This is a conversation about the assumptions we inherit, the vitality that persists, and what age—spoken and unspoken—brings into systemic practice.

In this episode we speak with no other than Dr. Jaako Seikkula on this latest bookWhy Dialogue Does Cure: Explaining What Makes Dialogue Unprecedentedly Effective in Difficult Crises (2025). The book presents the core principles of Open Dialogue, a system of psychiatric care and dialogic psychotherapy that has spread to over 40 countries. Why Dialogue Does Cure explores the transformative power of Open Dialogue, a radically humanistic approach to mental health care developed in Western Lapland. This episode unpacks why dialogic practice—where clinicians, clients, families, and networks meet in shared conversation—can lead to recoveries unimaginable in conventional psychiatry.
Together we discuss the history, development and discovery of how Open Dialogue redefined care: not by aiming to eliminate symptoms, but by meeting the full human through transparent, team-based dialogue.
Dr. Seikkula argues that the widening gap between humanistic and conventional approaches must be bridged—and that dialogue itself can be curative. This episode is essential listening for psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and anyone interested in meeting the full human in therapeutic practice.
 
Seikkula, J. (2025). Why dialogue does cure: explaining what makes dialogue unprecedentedly effective in difficult crises.