Untangled Mind™, LLC hosted by Piper Harris

Once a foundation of safety is established, many survivors feel ready to face what happened. This is Stage 2 of the triphasic model: Remembrance and Mourning. In this in-depth episode, Piper explores the purpose, science, and careful process of reconstructing the trauma story. You’ll learn why traumatic memories are often stored differently in the brain, how painstaking detail of both facts and fe...

Safety is not a warm-up stage. It is the essential foundation of all trauma recovery. In this deep dive into the first phase of the triphasic model, host Piper explores why genuine safety, both external and internal, must come before any deeper trauma processing. Drawing from Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, she unpacks one of the book’s most powerful passages. You’ll learn:-Why safety is the...

What if your body still believes you’re in danger long after the threat has passed? What happens when “just talk about it” or jumping straight into processing memories actually makes things worse? In the premiere episode of Holding Hope: Trauma, host Piper introduces the foundational realities of trauma and why a clear roadmap is essential for genuine healing. We explore the Adverse Childhood Expe...

What if your body still believes you’re in danger long after the threat has passed? What happens when “just talk about it” or jumping straight into processing memories actually makes things worse? In the premiere episode of Holding Hope: Trauma, host Piper introduces the foundational realities of trauma and why a clear roadmap is essential for genuine healing. We explore the Adverse Childhood Expe...

What if the sting of criticism or feedback wasn’t something to avoid, but your greatest tool for personal growth? In this episode, I share how a single piece of honest feedback from a recent counselor training (that could have derailed me years ago) barely phased me this time, and why that shift matters. I open up about a grad school professor whose constant nitpicking once felt like a personal at...

You like your therapist. The sessions feel safe and supportive. But deep down, you know nothing is really changing. If you’ve ever left therapy thinking “I feel heard… but why am I still stuck?” this next episode is for you. This Friday, Emily Ferrara and I sit down to talk about what happens when therapy becomes comfortable… but not effective. We pull from Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy and get hon...

You've done the deep work in therapy: unpacked trauma, rewired thoughts, set boundaries, and felt real growth. So why do those old, nagging beliefs ("I'm not enough," "I don't belong," "They're just being nice") still sneak in and tint how you see yourself in everyday moments? In this episode, we explore a common experience for people who've committed to serious personal work: the lingering "filte...

What is Good Therapy? This is a candid, standards-based conversation about what effective therapy actually looks like. In this series, I’m joined by Dr. Emily Ferrara of Simplify Life Counseling and Coaching. Our professional dialogue began around a shared concern: the growing gap between what therapy should be and what many clients are experiencing. Together, we explore:• How to identify a compet...

In this episode, I examine a subtle but increasingly common boundary violation: when strangers use moral or spiritual language to create unsolicited intimacy. This conversation is not about faith or intention. It is about psychology. I break down the behavioral pattern behind forced significance, why these interactions often provoke disgust rather than fear, and why women experience them dispropor...

When symptoms resolve, functioning improves, and measurable outcomes indicate success, most people appropriately move on. But for a smaller subset, often those who have resolved trauma and reached psychological stability, progress gives way not to clarity, but to ambiguity. In this episode, Piper Harris, LPC explores the often-unspoken space that can follow symptom resolution. Drawing from develop...

In this episode of the Untangled Mind Podcast, Piper Harris explores a common but often unnoticed cognitive sequence: predictions, presumptions, and assumptions. Rather than treating these as personal flaws, this episode examines them as core functions of how the brain manages uncertainty. Drawing from neuroscience and data-driven CBT, Piper breaks down how the brain uses prediction to reduce cogn...

Part III of the Bearing Reality series examines the spaces between the highlights: the ideas I didn’t mark, the comforts I didn’t select, and the sentiment I instinctively bypassed. Using vacation reading from Peterson and Sapolsky as evidence, I explore how omission reveals worldview, clinical orientation, and personal history. What we overlook is not accidental; it is patterned, and therefore in...

Part II of Bearing Reality: Thinking About Thinking examines what my highlights revealed about how I tend to think. Reading is never passive; what we attend to discloses our values, fears, and assumptions long before we put them into words. In this podcast, I explore patterns of attention around responsibility, coherence, suffering, sentimentality, and the search for meaning. This isn’t about self...

Bearing Reality: Thinking About ThinkingThis episode introduces Bearing Reality: Thinking About Thinking, a short series exploring how we examine our own thinking when certainty is tempting, but truth requires more discipline. Rather than offering conclusions or advice, this episode focuses on orientation: how patterns of attention form, how blind spots emerge, and why examining how we think matte...

As the year comes to a close, many people rush toward New Year’s resolutions without ever pausing to reflect on what actually happened and how they responded to it. In this year-end episode of Untangled Mind, Piper Harris reflects on why honest review matters more than goal-setting and why meaningful growth requires clarity rather than motivation. This conversation explores the balance between sel...

As the world counts down to Christmas, many feel excitement, others feel dread, and most never stop to consider what they could be counting toward instead. In this episode, Piper Harris invites you into a different kind of countdown: thirty-nine days of intentional shifts that move you toward clarity, resilience, and genuine hope. Drawing from cognitive-behavioral principles, neuroscience, and dee...

In this fifth installment of the Empathy Series , Piper Harris turns the focus inward to the counseling profession itself. Our field has long celebrated empathy as its highest virtue, but what happens when feeling becomes the only tool in the box? Through clinical insight, CBT framing, and a touch of Shel Silverstein’s wit, Piper explores how the industry keeps “eating soup with chopsticks”, recyc...

In this pivotal fourth episode of the Empathy Series , Piper Harris takes the conversation beyond emotion into the arena of moral reasoning. From Empathy to Ethics challenges the assumption that feeling deeply is the same as being good and asks what happens when conviction outruns discernment. Through clinical insight, philosophy, and faith, Piper examines how empathy must mature into disciplined...

Therapy isn’t always solemn faces and breakthrough moments. Sometimes it’s awkward silences, accidental “love you’s,” and yes… questionable telehealth decisions. In this episode, Piper Harris, integrative CBT clinician and founder of Untangled Mind, explores the humor and humanity of therapy: what clients say, what therapists hear, and why honesty (even the messy kind) always matters. It’s a candi...

What does it really mean to be seen? In this episode, Piper Harris explores the tension between recognition and transformation, what the Greeks called anagnorisis and epignosis. Drawing from her love of studying Greek and Hebrew (and the words she’s literally tattooed on her body at pivotal points of change), Piper shares how understanding these concepts can reshape the way we think about therapy,...

In Episode 3 of the Empathy Series, I move beyond the emotional and physiological effects of empathy to examine its cognitive distortions, the ways empathy can quietly reshape how we think, reason, and define morality. Empathy feels virtuous, but when it becomes a cognitive reflex, it can lead to emotional reasoning, bias, and identity fusion. In this episode, I unpack how empathy functions like a...

In this episode of the Untangled Mind Podcast, Piper Harris unpacks Carl Jung’s famous quote: “The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.” Drawing from a recent dialogue on LinkedIn, Piper explores how projection shows up in the therapy profession itself through defensiveness, appeals to authority, and circular reasoning that p...

This is Episode 2 in my Empathy Series. In this conversation, I explore what happens when empathy doesn’t just drain us emotionally, but actually hurts the brain and body. We’ll look at what neuroscience reveals about empathic distress: the way empathy lights up pain circuits, activates the stress response, and, when left unchanneled, leads to burnout and exhaustion. I unpack why the phrase “compa...

This is Episode 1 in my new Empathy Series. In this opening conversation, I explore what I call the empathy trap: how unchanneled empathy can paralyze us, reinforce hidden payoffs, and keep both clients and clinicians stuck. We’ll look at where the concept of empathy came from, why it’s been elevated as the highest virtue in therapy and culture, and how it differs from sympathy and compassion. I s...

Too many choices don’t just overwhelm us; they expose hidden patterns that keep us stuck. In this episode, Piper Harris explores the darker side of choice: how blame, ego protection, and even subtle manipulation distort our decision-making. Learn how to spot these biases in yourself, what to do when others use them against you, and practical steps to reclaim clarity and agency. If you’ve ever felt...