We took The Systemic Way to EFTA-RELATES 2025 Congress in Lyon and stepped into a space shaped by change, tension, and possibility.

Across four days, we spoke with therapists, researchers, and practitioners working at the edges of systemic practice. You hear their reflections, their challenges, and the moments that stayed with them. From conversations on migration, trauma, and social justice, to explorations of family therapy, organisational work, and community resilience, this episode captures what it felt like to be in the room.

This congress brought together voices from across the European Family Therapy Association and Red Europea y Latinoamericana de Escuelas Sistémicas. It created dialogue across difference. It held both innovation and uncertainty. It asked what systemic practice can offer in a world shaped by rapid scientific change and ongoing violence.

In this episode, you hear how people are responding. How they are working with complexity. How they are holding onto hope.

Real conversations. Lived experiences. Systemic thinking in action.

A massive thank you to Umberta Telfener, Parveen Kaur, Yvonne Rose, Ana Draper, Poppy Thorn, Karen Elisabeth Franco, Matej Vajra, Carol Jolliffe, Jeniffer McKinney, Francesca Balestra, Laura Borghi, Tere and Luis Maria W.

A special thank you to Julien Besse for all of his help and creative support!

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).