Episode 125: The Forgotten Hormone: Why the Mind & Body Can't Heal Without Oxytocin with Dr. Sue Carter

Listen to Episode 125 with Dr. Sue Carter →

When Years of Therapy Aren't Enough

Many people spend years in therapy consistently and diligently every week. And still struggle to feel truly safe in relationships with others. But why is this happening despite all the hard work?

The answer lies in the body, not just the mind. You can understand your trauma cognitively with perfect clarity and insight. But still feel unsafe in your body every single day. Oxytocin helps turn that understanding into actual feelings of safety. In your body where healing must ultimately happen for recovery.

Known as nature's most powerful anti-inflammatory agent in your entire body, oxytocin plays a vital role in regulating the nervous system. Forming secure connections with others. And shifting the body out of survival mode permanently.

In this episode, I'm joined by world-renowned oxytocin expert Dr. Sue Carter, who has studied this hormone for decades, to discuss how this hormone holds the key to healing. Creating genuine safety in your body and nervous system. And forming secure connections with others that support ongoing healing.

Dr. Carter has studied oxytocin for over four decades extensively and reveals why this hormone is essential for moving from survival mode to thriving in life fully.

In this conversation, you'll hear why traditional talk therapy alone fails. How early life experiences program our capacity for connection throughout life. And practical tools for naturally increasing oxytocin in your body to create a felt sense of safety.

Whether you're a practitioner working with clients or someone navigating healing, this episode offers evidence-based insights into how your body creates its own pharmacy of healing hormones naturally. And why safety in relationships is the biological foundation for all healing work you undertake throughout your entire life.

The Gap Between Understanding and Feeling

You can understand your trauma cognitively with complete clarity and awareness. But still feel unsafe in your body every single moment. This is the gap that keeps people stuck for years. Understanding isn't enough for feeling safe in your body consistently.

Oxytocin's role is to help turn understanding into actual feelings of safety in your body and system. This is the bridge between knowing and feeling that matters. Between cognitive awareness and embodied safety that healing requires.

Traditional talk therapy alone often falls short of creating real change. Because it doesn't address oxytocin production and body safety directly. Can't address the biological systems that create felt safety naturally. Without addressing oxytocin, you can talk about safety endlessly. But never actually feel safe in your body consistently.

Oxytocin: Nature's Most Powerful Anti-Inflammatory

Oxytocin is nature's most powerful anti-inflammatory agent in your body. This is critical for healing from trauma and chronic illness. Acts like a fire extinguisher putting out inflammation fires everywhere. Throughout your body where inflammation drives disease and symptoms persistently.

The vital roles oxytocin plays in your body are profound. Regulating nervous system function continuously throughout every moment of life. Forming secure connections with others that feel genuinely safe consistently. Shifting the body out of survival mode into healing mode permanently. All of these functions require adequate oxytocin in your system.

This hormone holds the key to healing trauma at the deepest level. To creating genuine safety in your body that you feel. To forming secure connections that support ongoing healing throughout your life.

Oxytocin is essential for moving from survival to thriving in life. You can't make this transition without adequate oxytocin production. Your body needs this hormone to signal safety and healing.

Dr. Sue Carter's Four Decades of Research

Dr. Sue Carter is a world-renowned oxytocin expert internationally recognized. She has studied oxytocin for over four decades of intensive research. She pioneered our understanding of this hormone's role in healing. In connection. In safety. In survival and thriving.

Her research reveals oxytocin's central role in healing trauma effectively. In creating genuine safety that you can actually feel deeply. In forming secure connections with others that support ongoing healing.

How Early Life Programs Connection Capacity

Early life experiences program our capacity for connection throughout life. This happens through the oxytocin system in your body. How early life affects oxytocin production and bonding with others. This sets the foundation for all future relationships you form.

Your early attachment experiences program your oxytocin system for life. This creates patterns that persist into adulthood without intervention. Early attachment shapes your nervous system's capacity for connection deeply. For safety with others. For trusting relationships that feel secure.

Loving early relationships are important for emotional development throughout life. They program your oxytocin system to function properly over time. Loving relationships early in life teach your body how to feel emotions. How to connect with others. How to be safe in relationships consistently.

Without early love and secure attachment, your oxytocin system suffers. Doesn't develop properly as it should for healthy functioning. Makes all future connection and emotion much harder to access. Makes trusting others feel dangerous instead of safe naturally.

PTSD, Trauma, and Oxytocin Disruption

PTSD and trauma do significant damage to oxytocin levels. They disrupt this system profoundly and persistently over time. The trauma effect is that trauma disrupts your ability to produce adequate oxytocin. And respond to oxytocin appropriately when present in your system.

This disruption maintains feelings of unsafety even when you're safe. Even in loving relationships with partners who care deeply. You can be in a loving relationship with someone wonderful. But still feel unsafe constantly because your oxytocin system is disrupted. Your body can't register the safety that's actually present.

Chronic stress also disrupts oxytocin production and receptor sensitivity significantly. Makes it hard to feel safe even when you are. Your biology can't match the reality of your circumstances safely.

Vasopressin: The Main Stress Hormone in Trauma

Vasopressin, not cortisol, is the main stress hormone in trauma. This changes everything about how we understand trauma responses biologically. The difference between vasopressin and oxytocin in stress response matters. Vasopressin creates vigilance, alertness, and constant defensiveness throughout your system. Oxytocin creates safety, connection, and capacity to rest and heal.

Vasopressin is the defensive hormone that creates constant alertness everywhere. Creates vigilance that never turns off even when safe. Defensiveness toward others even when they're trustworthy and safe. The opposite of what oxytocin creates in your nervous system.

Understanding vasopressin explains why trauma creates constant vigilance that persists. Why you can't relax even when circumstances are perfectly safe. Why you can't trust others even when they're trustworthy consistently. The balance between these two hormones determines your capacity fundamentally for safety and connection in relationships throughout your entire life.

Body Shutdown and Dissociation

How the body shuts down during trauma and dissociation matters. This is a biological response, not a psychological choice. The shutdown response happens when oxytocin isn't enough to help. When connection and safety aren't possible in the moment. The body shuts down completely to survive overwhelming threat that's unbearable.

This is dissociation's biology operating automatically without conscious control. Why it happens is to survive overwhelming threat to life. When connection and safety aren't possible in that moment. Shutdown protects you from what would otherwise destroy you completely.

Fake Safety Versus Real Safety

The difference between fake safety and real safety matters profoundly for growth and healing to occur naturally over time consistently. Only real safety supports healing and growth that lasts permanently.

Fake safety includes avoidance of anything triggering or difficult. Numbing through substances or behaviors that disconnect you from feeling. Control over everything in your environment rigidly and constantly. These feel like safety temporarily but aren't real safety biologically. Don't support growth or healing that lasts beyond the moment.

Real safety is felt in your body through oxytocin production. Allows vulnerability with others who are trustworthy and safe consistently. Allows growth through challenges that stretch you appropriately and gradually. This is what healing needs to happen naturally and sustainably.

Practical Tools to Increase Oxytocin

Simple ways to increase oxytocin naturally are accessible to everyone. These are practical, accessible tools you can implement starting today.

Tool 1: Safe Touch – Physical contact with safe people increases oxytocin in both people. Hugs that feel comfortable and wanted rather than forced. Hand holding with someone you trust completely and feel safe with. Massage from a safe practitioner or partner who respects boundaries. All increase oxytocin production naturally in your body and theirs.

Tool 2: Eye Contact – Gentle, warm eye contact with safe people you trust completely. Increases oxytocin in both people simultaneously during the contact. The eyes are powerful portals for oxytocin release naturally.

Tool 3: Singing – Especially singing with others in groups or choirs together. Singing increases oxytocin production significantly in your body naturally. Choir singing is particularly powerful for oxytocin release collectively.

Tool 4: Pets – Interacting with pets, especially dogs, increases oxytocin significantly and reliably. In both the human and the animal simultaneously together. This mutual oxytocin release explains the healing power of pets.

Tool 5: Warmth – Physical warmth supports oxytocin production in your body naturally. Warm bath or shower that relaxes your entire system. Sauna sessions that warm you deeply throughout your tissues. Being warm physically helps your body feel safe enough internally.

Tool 6: Safe and Sound Protocol – Specific listening protocol that supports the oxytocin system effectively. Through vagus nerve stimulation and nervous system regulation occurring. This therapeutic intervention supports oxytocin production when other methods are insufficient.

The Hypothalamus: Command Center for Safety

The hypothalamus controls oxytocin production and safety feelings throughout. This brain region is the command center for safety. Small region in your brain that produces both hormones. Both oxytocin and vasopressin depending on environmental assessment constantly.

How it works is by reading your environment continuously. For safety signals or danger signals present in surroundings. Releases appropriate hormones based on that ongoing assessment constantly. Based on whether safety or danger seems more present.

Your Body's Pharmacy of Healing

Your body creates its own pharmacy of healing hormones naturally. Oxytocin is the most important hormone for healing and recovery. Creating healing hormones happens through the right conditions being present. The right relationships with safe, attuned people consistently over time. The right experiences that signal safety rather than danger repeatedly.

Your body makes what you need to heal when given the right conditions and relationships that support oxytocin production naturally.

Why Safety in Relationships Is Biological Foundation

Safety in relationships is the biological foundation for all healing. Without oxytocin release from safe connection with others regularly, healing simply can't happen at the deepest biological level. All healing requires felt safety in your body consistently. This requires oxytocin production. This requires safe connection with others who are trustworthy.

The biological foundation for all healing work you undertake is felt safety in relationships that produce oxytocin naturally. Without this foundation, other healing modalities have limited effectiveness.

The Forgotten Hormone in Trauma Treatment

Oxytocin has been forgotten in trauma treatment approaches widely. Yet it's essential for healing to occur at all. You can't heal without adequate oxytocin in your system. The mind can't heal without oxytocin allowing you to feel. You can think about healing endlessly without ever feeling healed. Need oxytocin to bridge that gap between knowing and feeling.

The body can't heal without oxytocin either. The body needs this hormone to come out of survival mode. Into healing mode where repair and recovery become possible finally.

The gap between understanding and healing is bridged by oxytocin. Between knowing cognitively and feeling in your body and system. Oxytocin bridges this gap that keeps people stuck for years.

This Episode Is For: 

✓ People in therapy who still don't feel safe

✓ Anyone struggling with relationships despite healing work

✓ Those with chronic inflammation and trauma history

✓ Practitioners needing biological understanding of safety

✓ People interested in attachment and healing

✓ Anyone wanting to understand oxytocin's role

✓ Those seeking practical tools for creating body safety

✓ People with PTSD or complex trauma

✓ Anyone who understands trauma cognitively but can't feel safe

What You'll Learn

Listen to Dr. Sue Carter's four decades of oxytocin research revealing why you can understand trauma but still feel unsafe. Learning how this "forgotten hormone" acts as nature's most powerful anti-inflammatory agent throughout your entire body and nervous system. Why vasopressin, not cortisol, is the main stress hormone in trauma, creating constant vigilance and defensive responses to others. The difference between fake and real safety for healing. Practical tools to increase oxytocin including safe touch, eye contact, singing with others, interacting with pets, and warmth. And why safety in relationships through oxytocin is the biological foundation all healing requires to occur sustainably over time.

Oxytocin bridges the gap between understanding trauma and actually feeling safe.

Listen to Episode 125 with Dr. Sue Carter →

Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical or mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared reflects my clinical expertise and research, but every person's biology and healing journey is unique. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers before making changes to your treatment plan or starting new interventions. If you're experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact emergency services or a crisis helpline immediately.

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