Neurofeedback, Regulation, And The Real Work Of Healing Trauma with Steve Sapourn

Trauma doesn’t just live in the past. It can live in your nervous system, showing up as anxiety, addiction patterns, sleeplessness, shutdown, or that moment when you feel your brain go offline and you don’t know why. We sit down with Steve Sapourn, founder of Neuros Journey, to unpack trauma-informed neuroscience in a way that’s practical, human, and surprisingly hopeful: what if the “settings” you’ve been fighting are adaptations your brain made to survive?

Steve walks us through how neurofeedback works, why seeing your brainwave patterns can dissolve shame, and how tracking change over time can keep you moving when healing isn’t linear. We also dig into the core skill underneath so many approaches: nervous system regulation. When you widen your window of tolerance, you don’t just feel better. You think more clearly, make better choices, and stop letting triggers run your life.

We go beyond personal healing to regulated leadership and relationships, including the common urge to fix rather than listen, and how learning to stay present can transform a partnership and family life. Steve also shares a grounded take on psychedelic-assisted therapy, why facilitator experience matters, and why breathwork and meditation remain the most accessible tools for daily nervous system support.

If you got something out of this conversation, subscribe, share it with someone who needs hope, and leave a review so more people can find the tools to heal and grow.

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From Finance To Trauma Recovery

SPEAKER_00 0:13

Well, hello and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Jill Grumbine, and today we've got a very special guest. His name is Steve Saporn, and he's the founder of Neuros Journey and a speaker on trauma-informed neuroscience and regulated leadership. Following a 30-year executive career in his own recovery journey, he helps people understand trauma as a nervous system injury and apply regulation in real-world ways that strengthen identity, relationships, and decision making. Steve, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on. You know, it's wild. This is a podcast that we talk about healthy living, and it's a giant, you know, spectrum of topics that go from, you know, physiological issues, mental issues, emotional issues. And for whatever reason, in the past couple of months, trauma just keeps coming back and coming back and coming back. And, you know, I've got a series that comes out of Soledad Prison, and I've got an inmate I'm working with, and we're talking about childhood trauma and and ways of dealing with it. I've had, I don't know how many different therapists and different, you know, practitioners of all different modalities, but it seems that trauma is a real thing and it seems to affect just about everybody. So welcome to the show. And why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to this place? Uh sounds like you've been a career man and you've jumped into this really useful and needed field here.

SPEAKER_02 1:45

Thank you. Yeah, the the story of it is I was in finance for 30 years until last year. And I didn't know it for my whole life, but I was dealing with my childhood trauma. I didn't even know what trauma was until five five years ago. And over that five years, I had a lot of healing. And without much of a plan or way to get there, I kind of just through brute force and luck sort of had some healing. And my life outwardly was really changing in ways that people could see. I haven't drank for three or four years, lost a bunch of weight, a lot of things. But I, until last year, had what I called this addict's body or traumatized body. I had these levels of sensation that would rise each day, and eventually they would get untenable. And for a long time I was a drug addict and used. And even as I was healing and I shifted from crack to yoga and that kind of stuff, that's quite interesting. I still felt like the same person in my body. And last year, concurrently to Dewey to getting my brain scan and working with neurofeedback, I had an experience where those sensations just sort of ended. And where I would say now that I have a nervous system that I think regulates appropriately, and of whereas my entire life I had a very narrow window of tolerance for things because of the way that my nervous system was. When you've had some of the experiences that I had, including sexual abuse and domestic violence and gun violence, you can feel broken. You can feel damaged. And especially when they happen young, you think they're you. I felt like I came out of the factory with these settings. And when I felt those settings change, I thought there's probably millions of people out there that have that same feeling. And if my voice could be useful to saying these things are really, it's an injury or an adaptation. Your brain adapts to what is going on. And the beauty of our brains is it's neuroplastic and we can adapt it to something new. And I wanted to tell that story. So I tried to figure it out. I've started a podcast, I'm writing a book, I work with people. And yeah, that's how I kind of am sitting here in front of you today.

Choosing Modalities With A Systems View

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Wow. Wow. So uh tell me about sort of the process of, you know, I I work with a number of practitioners. One of them works or a few of them work with the system they call NSR Neurosystem Reset, nervous system reset, and it's like an energetic work. There's so many different tools, and you know, this guy from Soledad, he's got a number of different tools that he's worked with, and and different therapists and different, you know, practitioners. There's all these different ways to, you know, address the core issue, and then like like you said, kind of rewire your brain to to to adapt and and to turn something that was an injury into maybe a motivation or a challenge or a tool or however you know you end up doing it. So tell me a little bit about your process.

Trauma As Adaptation And Post-Traumatic Growth

SPEAKER_02 5:20

Well, I think what was important for me, and one of the reasons why I wanted to talk is there are so many modalities. And when you have something inside of you, which before I had knew about trauma, I just knew there was a discomfort that I wanted to solve. And you and I'm kind of an aggressive guy. I mean, I have brute force, strength, just going in all kinds of directions, doing all kinds of therapies. And I think it can be helpful to step back from a particular therapy and say, what is the system in which I'm dealing with, and what is my approach to this gonna be? Because you're, if you have trauma and I have trauma, highly likely we're not gonna be, you know, resolved with the same thing. So I look at it more like you have to understand the system in which you're working, your nervous system, your brain, and your mind. And so you have to use modalities that work on the on the actual function. So so neurofeedback is basically operant conditioning for for the brain, where you compare your brainwave patterns to a to a normative database of quote-unquote normal people, and the and the machine sort of gets you to move towards that direction. And I did that and very powerful, but also, you know, given sexual abuse and the kinds of abuse that I suffered, couldn't only do that. I have my psych my psychology, and I think it's beneficial for people to look at it in a totality and honestly use their intuition to be like, what is good for me? Because the, you know, the nature of trauma is if you have a brother, you know, a couple brothers a couple years apart that experience the same thing, because of the age of the brain development and the difference of the persons, one might have full-on, you know, capital T trauma and the other one might have a bad memory. Right. So it's a very unique process. And my sense of it is to orient yourself about what I am dealing with, and then understand that especially if you had the big T traumas, it's gonna take a little while. These things don't don't resolve immediately. And I do agree with you that maybe I, you know, it would not be it would not be accurate to say everybody has trauma, because that's a specific definition, but it is accurate to say that uh this a very similar process happens with all people, right? You come into this world with this light, this brain that's sort of you know evolving and functioning. And I like to look at trauma and just life in death in general as that life be that light of your initial self being dimmed in some way. So maybe with trauma, it's like full-on spray paint, right? It's black, it's covered up. But you could also just live in a house where you know performance is how you get love, or you're slowly told these things why you're wrong. And those are like little drips on that light, right? But eventually we all deal with this process. So I think whether you're dealing with trauma or just being a human, it's a similar path where you say, What is here for me to learn? Because all of our specific ways that that light was covered are specific to us. And the beauty of it, when you look at the studies around it and post-traumatic growth, is people who actually go into their wounds and help to resolve them, they certainly have lower floors for those kinds of behaviors because they've been hurt, but they also have higher ceilings. So you can take your wounds, whatever they were, work through them in multiple ways, and then those will be your blessings. And I really feel that. And for me personally, just one of the examples of it is my sexual abuser told me he was going to kill me if I spoke. And I developed an incredible stutter where I was the kind of kid that stuttered on every syllable, and even kind adults had real difficulty paying attention to me. And now, and I and that lasted the better part of a decade, and now I speak for a living. And and I feel like it's such a blessing. It closed the circle on that, and so I feel that it's a real opportunity for all of us.

Neurofeedback And Seeing The Brain Change

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Yeah, that's powerful though, too. I mean, literally every time you speak, you're reaffirming, you know, your position in that equation. That's wild. You know, you talk about injury. And you know, like you said, we're born generally, in my opinion, kind of pure and perfect in in in our spirit, you know, where we don't I I suppose there's some trauma just coming out going from a nice warm, wet environment to uh a place of having to breathe your own air. I guess that's some kind of a trauma, but everybody, everybody literally goes through that. It must be some kind of an important uh tool. But beyond that, in the beginning, aside from a few, you know, kids who have real issues, you know, being abused from the outset, which unfortunately has happened, but most kids come out and they they they receive love right away, you know, some kind of nourishment, a caress, you know, some combination of those things. And they're as whole as they would ever be in life, probably, as far as maybe not developed in a complex, you know, understanding of things, but certainly like nothing's wrong with you. And then at one point along the way, unfortunately, as I'm learning, more and more it happens at a younger age than I would have ever imagined to a lot of kids, and it generally happens from people who you would need to trust and and look up to. And generally there's sort of a a fear installed of of keeping quiet or else something will happen. So that's just as I'm learning right now from other people that you know, fortunately, I guess I'm one of the few that didn't have that uh experience and I I'm ever so blessed for it. But uh it seems that a huge percentage of people have that, and and you know, that is an injury to your spirit, to your to your nervous system. And it can manifest in so many different ways, you know, some people flat out black it out, they don't even remember it at all, and yet they're triggered by some actions, or maybe they they have some kind of a response. How how do you how do you classify an injury though? Like where do where is it where it goes from like just something that happens that you know you roll through life with it to I've got a I've got an injury that needs to be healed.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

So for me, and injury is is a useful metaphor, but really it's an adaptation. But how I came on the injury thing was you know, the amazing thing about psychiatry is that it's really the only medical speciality that the organ in which they treat is never looked at. You know, and you can just try things and see what happens, and we don't know what's going on. Right. I had been in this, you know, because of my history, I had some, I was doing all the things. I was flying places, I was getting the treatments, and I had to hear it on Instagram from a doctor called Daniel Eamon who said that quote about the and and we and very quickly after that, I I have a neurofeedback practitioner here. And what you do in neurofeedback is essentially they scan your brain and they are looking at the your brainwave function versus a database of people who are quote unquote normal, and they can see where your brain is overactive. And that's kind of shown you have all these different like little pictures of your skull and the different waves. And when it's overactive, it's in red, when it's in the normal zone, it's in green, and when it's underactive, it's in blue. And your brain doesn't develop additional power from trauma, it takes it from places. So the typical experience is your fear centers, your amygdala, your brainstem, that area get overactive and they would show red. And your prefrontal cortex, which makes meaning out of things and impulse control and a lot of things I've had trouble with, um, is underactive. And when I did this, what was amazing for me is the practitioner, the the clinician didn't know my history. And when he looked at it, he said, Well, your brain indicates someone who experienced a lot of trauma. And here's why. And here are some of the behavior patterns addiction, sleeplessness, anxiety, all these things. Uh I was like, have you been living with me, man? Right, right. And and what it really did for me is is make me think of like going to a knee doctor. Okay, when I when I hurt my knee, the doctor took an x-ray. He told me this is a plan. We're gonna get it better and we're gonna we're gonna monitor it. And what didn't happen is I didn't sit there and say, like, well, maybe I was never meant to ski, and all these things that people who've had trauma go, you know, kind of go against themselves. And I thought, that's really what happened. And, you know, I I a more useful term is really adaptation because then we can adapt it back. But the injury thing really seems to hit with people, and I think it makes sense, and it's more about getting this notion of not what who I am, but what happened to me. How did my amazing brain adapt? And now let's learn a little bit about the system and have it adapt back.

Regulation And The Window Of Tolerance

SPEAKER_00 16:44

So it seems that this neurofeedback system is really a useful tool for identifying a problem, for diagnosing your situation and you know, giving you sort of the picture of what you're dealing with. And then you come to, okay, now what? You know I I know part of it is kind of responsibility and ownership. Like you know, like you said, some people go, well, I have this problem, so therefore I can't do these things, or I have to do these things, or whatever it is, like they they are consumed by that. You know, it becomes their identity. But the reality is, is we all have choices, we all have responsibility for what we're doing and thinking in that free frontal frontal cortex becomes pretty important because that's the decision maker. That's the that's the one, like you said, that sorts it out and says, Okay, well, here's here's what I'm gonna do about it. So you get yourself to that point and you say, Okay, well, what are my options? You know, you talk about regulation and tell us a little bit about what that means.

SPEAKER_02 17:57

Yeah, so just to be clear on neurofeedback, what what you do, you don't only diagnose the problem, you scan yourself every 10 sessions and you can see your brain change. And then it's and basically you're using a device that you're not trying to do anything, but it is it is rewarding you if your brain moves in the direction of health. And so what's really cool about that for people who have trauma specifically is you don't have to talk to someone about your experiences. And for me personally, because healing is not linear, you know, you have a lot of good days, and then you kind of oh, I fell back into my patterns that day. Is it working and all that? But I could see the progress on the scans over time, and then I could also see that my behavior was changing. And really, what I have learned about this is the nervous system is essentially if it's regulated well, you have a window of tolerance, right? Where you can experience things that are not actually threatening in that moment, and you don't have to go into your fight or flight or freeze. And what I dedicated myself to was expanding that window of tolerance because it helps me to live life more fully. Because when I get, you know, my I'm a fight or flight guy, so when I got triggered in my nervous system, a lot of my brain goes offline. One, I'm not able to analyze the business situation as well. I'm not able to do a lot of different things. And also for for my personal relationships, as a man, you hear a lot from your woman like, I don't want you to solve this problem, I want you to sit here and hear it. But but oftentimes men's nervous systems are dysregulated and they physiologically can't do that. And so what I decided was to retool the way I thought of myself as a man. And and it was growing up in the generation I grew up in, provide, protect, you know? And now I'm looking at it like I have a duty to control the weather system that is my nervous system that is broadcasting to everybody in my house and my employees and all of it. Because if I take responsibility for my house, it not only allows me to have a richer, fuller life because I'm not going offline because I'm out of that window of tolerance, but I can support my people. So now I can hear my partner ask, you know, just say things. And I can just ask, do you want me to just hear you and support you? Do you want me to help you solve this problem? And it's transformed our relationship. And my kid.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

Sorry to jump in, but that's that's that's a that's a powerful tool right there. And I I really haven't heard anybody bring that up. I I know I I could certainly apply that. I I have you know one of those as well. Yeah. And yeah, sometimes they just want you to hear what they're talking about, and instead of like for my me, I'm like, well, what what do you want me to do about it? Like what and I mean that, like really, I would tell me what to do about it, I'll do it. But if if it a lot of times, I guess that's not it. It's not it's not do anything, but just hear me.

SPEAKER_02 21:31

Yeah, I mean, it it's a very it has transformed my my relationship to be able to do that. And for me, that instinct to solve was often me saying, I can't handle hearing this, so I want to do something to change my state. Yeah. And you know it's very easy to see how that happens as men. We are told not to feel most of our emotions, right? Right. Basically, in my generation, you're allowed to be angry and and fine. And so when we're when we are, you know, given emotional situations, we've been suppressed our whole life, and all of a sudden we can't handle it. And so I remember as I started to get awareness of this, but I wasn't regulated at all, I'd be in couples therapy, and the therapist would say, To do these things that I can now do. We'll just sit in here, don't do this, don't do that. And as I got a little more awareness, I used to say, I really want to say yes to this. Like I'm a yes to this. Yeah. The reality of it is, is I can't really promise this because these are this is just me. This is an instinct that happens that I'm not control of. And what I learned is it's not an instinct, and it's something that you can practice. And so for me, the process has been a variety of things trying to work. With my nervous system, breath, meditation, sauna, cult, you know, whatever. Also, work with my psychology, move between those things, but orient around widening my window of tolerance so I can have a richer life and I can support the people that I love.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Nice. Tell me about the neuros journey.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

So that's my podcast, which is basically a take on the hero's journey and into your own mind. And um, you know, last year in January, when I had this epiphany that this was the direction that I was going in, it just came to me and I said, All right, I'm gonna start doing this. And so I have a podcast where I talk with a lot of different people from, you know, like you therapists, have a big experience with psychedelics. There's a lot of psychedelic content on there. And it's been transforming a bit because really what I thought was my story and what I was going after was healing trauma. And as I've regulated my nervous system more, what I've realized is that's definitely a part of it. But the incredible different life that appears to you after that happens is really the more interesting thing. So now I'm kind of talking about that, but it's an opportunity to weekly talk about these subjects. I focus on men. I mean, this is a it's accessible to all people, but my experience is a guy that was a hard charger, tried success, tried addiction, tried all these things. Right, I know that experience well. And I think that there's many, many men who feel empty after being successful for a long time. And there's an opportunity for them to not feel empty. And I try to put out content as weekly and as often as I can to support that man and really anybody who wants to get more out of life and have a richer experience and not let their childhood or their worst moment determine their current state.

Psychedelics Need Skillful Facilitation

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Interesting. I'm gonna have to take a listen to that. It sounds very it sounds compelling. Recently, within the last, I don't know, I say probably 10 years, psychedelics have become a tool that's becoming more and more mainstream, everything from ketamine to mushrooms to ayahuasca and a number, and I I've worked with a number of these myself in my own journey and watched many people. We have a nonprofit uh botanical garden out here, and we we hold space for all sorts of different uh healing elements. But you know, as it's becoming more and more mainstream, there's still issues with it, and just like everything. And and there really aren't silver bullets in the sense of you know, what might work for one person might cause more problems for the next person. And the different types of uh these uh compounds are so different, you know, from multiple different uh places on the spectrum. And not only this, but there's so many different tools. What would you consider some of the more valuable tools in uh finding your way to regulating your issues or or you know coming to your own healing in in whatever way that manifests?

SPEAKER_02 26:36

Psychedelics have definitely been a huge part of that. And as I got into them early, I was more of the bent of everybody should try this. As I have had more experience with it, that's not exactly what I think now. I do think they're a very powerful tool because you can have these realizations that can change your psychology and they also change change your brain. But as you said, there are difficulties with it in native traditions. People train seven, 15 years to be able to like facilitate, and now they can take a course in four weeks, right?

SPEAKER_00 27:14

It's common, yeah.

Breathwork And Meditation That Actually Works

SPEAKER_02 27:16

And you know, I will tell you I my sexual abuse was buried, and I had been working with somebody who was who was referred to me, and she was very experienced, done it for a long time, and we've been talking about all kinds of other traumas that I knew about, and it literally all the memories came flooding back in hypnosis the night before my uh MDMA journey with her. And I showed up with a long-term history of abuse and really in a really crazy state. And because she's had this experience, she's done this hundreds and hundreds of times. She was like, one, this is my area of expertise. I know just how to roll with this. She took me in, she made me feel comfortable. I don't think a lot of people would have been able to handle it like that if they were kind of newbies. So I really think it's important, especially if you sense that you have trauma, and some of these things come out in the journey, right? So to try to find somebody who is experienced with it and has been doing it a long time, and there are people who've been underground for decades that are out now and you can find them. Yeah. Um, and then the other things that I just think the most the thing that is free and everyone has access to is their breath. Yes. And so breath and meditation. I know people, some people have a hesitance on meditation. It's something that you can do. The thing about it that I think is a misconception is I think people think meditating is when your mind is totally calm and there's nothing happening. Well, that I don't really think that is. My teacher Jack Cornfield told me when I was it frustrated. He said, the meditation is when you realize that you've drifted off and you come back. Yes. You know, and so in that way, we could all do it because eventually you'll remember that you're trying trying to meditate. And with the breath work, you can do five minutes a day. Stan Stanford studied it. Um Andrew Huberman and a few other doctors studied this cyclic sigh, which is just two breaths in and a sigh out. It's basically five cycles is one minute, and five minutes is so. If you can breathe and count to 25, you can do breath work. And in 28 days, there were very noticeable changes in in the people that that that did that. And I think there is something about not a drug, not anything else. I'm impacting my own nervous system. When you start to tell yourself that, you create agency, you realize that I can drive the ship the way that it wants to go. So, breath work meditation, I think would be the foundation of things. But if you've had some really heavy stuff, psychedelics are very powerful and can be very healing. I couldn't agree more.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Well, man, this has been amazing. Uh, it happens almost every time with me. I run out of time before I run out of questions. But is there we've covered a lot of ground, and you've certainly personally covered a lot of ground. Is there a thought that you'd like to leave our listeners with that would sort of encapsulate, you know, the the gist of what you bring?

Hope, A Healing Framework, And Next Steps

SPEAKER_02 30:48

Yeah, I think I would break it into two things is one, if you have behaviors which you feel like you cannot control, addiction, lashing out, getting mopey, whatever, those are very likely the fact that your window of tolerance is smaller and you can expand it and you can change those behaviors. They are not innate to you. You are not broken, you didn't come out of the factory, a damaged model. You can shift that up. And then the second part of that would be I would start to look at that framework if you're engaging in that practice. In to say, I'm not gonna just go, I mean, yes, do these little individual things, but look at it more like what's the system I'm dealing with? How do I impact it? How do I operate here? What are my values around my own healing? What is my approach? And then from that go into all the things because there's gonna be things that work amazingly, the other things that don't land with you, and you don't want to lose your your mojo because you had one thing and then you're not doing anything for six months, right? Those two things, and just the notion that I see people every day who come from the I mean, my story is fairly hard, I mean, just incredibly worse than mine, and have made these changes, and it's a universal story, and they often are coming back to serve. And it's just a real blessing. So I just hope for anybody out there there is hope and you can do it.

SPEAKER_00 32:25

I couldn't agree more. Well, why don't you give us your contact information? Anything else that you'd like to share?

SPEAKER_02 32:32

Yeah, you know, I don't really as of yet, I don't have anything to sell. My my podcast is called The Neuros Journey. And if you're interested in the kind of rap that I've been laying on you, you'll get a lot more of it. That's available, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the places. I am writing a book which is gonna articulate my approach approach to healing. That'll be out some sometime this year. I have a website called The Neuros Journey. I speak at different places and can coach people. So if people want to reach out, love to hear, hear from you, and I'll be of service in any way I can. If you just want to send me some questions, like you're you don't know anything about psychedelics, I'll answer them if I can. And yeah, I mean, I I'd be happy for anybody to follow along.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. And my offer's open. You know, maybe one day we'll get back together and go deep into some of these topics that you got into. I think that you're really on to some good work and helping a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 33:33

Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me on, Joe.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

It's my pleasure. This has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbon, and I want to thank all of our listeners that make the show possible, and we will see you next time.