Mind Your Being Podcast
#22 Early Experiences, PTSD & Depression: Emerging Paths to Healing | Mark Baxter
15 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Mind Your Being. Whether you're a returning listener or a new listener, I'm so grateful to have you here. Can you believe it's February already? I feel like this year is flying so fast. Now I know we all get caught up in our crazy schedules at time but I hope you're taking some regular time out just for yourself each week to check in, to care for your well-being and to have some fun.
Now this episode is the longest episode to date. It runs for about an hour 40 minutes which is huge but I want you to know I don't take your time for granted, but this is a really human, beautiful conversation and I think there's bits in here for everyone. So don't feel like you have to listen to the conversation all at once.
You can listen to it over a number of days or you can look at the chapter list. You can skip back and forth between the chapters that you're interested in. And as always, please feel free to provide any comments or feedback, suggestions for future episodes, either on social media, Instagram or Facebook or through our Mind Your Being contact page on the website. I'd love to hear from you.
Thank you again for being here to take time to mind your being. In today's episode, I'm joined by clinical psychologist Mark Baxter, who is the director of the psychology spot here in my local community, Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Mark has spent over two decades helping people heal from trauma, PTSD, depression, and the lasting effects of adverse childhood experiences.
This is a really wide-ranging conversation. It was so relaxed and free-flowing. At times I forgot we were recording a podcast. But together we explore how early life experiences shape the beliefs we carry about ourselves, beliefs about our worth, our safety, our lovability, and how those beliefs quietly influence our behaviors, our coping strategies, and our relationships.
We talk about depression as more than a label. We unpack how trauma can become stuck in the nervous system. We talk about evidence-based treatments like EMDR, but I also asked Mark to come on to talk about the emerging space of psychedelic-assisted therapies, including MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and psilocybin-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant depression.
But at the heart of this conversation is something deeply human, the idea that healing isn't just about fixing yourself, it's about understanding yourself. It's about self-awareness, self-compassion and ultimately self-acceptance. This is a beautiful conversation and I find it really hopeful and I hope you will too. Please enjoy. So welcome to Mind Your Being, Mark.
Thank you for being here today.
Thanks.
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Chapter 2: How do early life experiences shape our beliefs and identities?
And I think it's just really hard for people sometimes when you don't even have the basic understanding, but we're not taught that as a rule. Yeah.
Wouldn't that be so amazing? Emotional literacy at the very core, you know, even in kindy and stuff like that would be For sure. Would be such a preventative tool.
Like, I mean, one of the main contributors to all the different kind of mental health struggles that we'll maybe talk some more about it today is this kind of like capacity of being able to notice what you're feeling and to allow those feelings to show up, to manifest and to complete. And so that's a huge part of the work we do.
There's many different contributors to the different kind of mental health struggles that people have, but that's at the core of something that we're always kind of working on.
People have developed, you know, coping strategies to not feel their feelings, to push them down in ways that they needed to do at the time and developing the kind of confidence and bravery really to feel these and feel them all the way through and feel them fully is a really important skill set. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, if people could do that in primary school and high school and families were more into that, like we would have such an easier run as adults, I think.
for individuals, but for society as well. And for, even if you look at it economically, for the health system, we don't tend to have that preventative lens all the time. But yes, that is something I did want to bring up was one of the things that breaks my heart the most, you talked about people not being able to feel the feelings. Yeah.
So I'm someone who, if I'm feeling something, I just have to express it in a way, even if it's uncomfortable, like I have this internal, I need to express it. But I have grown up with family members who, for whatever reason, they're different, don't feel comfortable. And so, yeah, I did want to talk about it breaks my heart that People feel like they need to suppress things.
And then I think when you suppress something, it's still there. And I think underneath the surface, I think it intensifies.
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Chapter 3: What is the connection between trauma and mental health?
And then that can lead to different things like mental health conditions, but it can lead to emotional dysregulation or people trying to numb the pain that they're feeling. So I guess my question for you is, Is that what you see? People, if they don't have those skills or that awareness to be with the feelings, process the feelings, what does that lead to? What other behaviours can that lead to?
And how can that lead to mental health conditions?
Yeah, I mean, it's a huge area that we work with. And depending on people's kind of early experiences, especially their early childhood experiences, they have a huge range of different relationships to the way that emotions show up in them. For some people, it's a matter of, you know, unexpressed emotions.
And for different reasons, they've had to dissociate, block, numb or move away from difficult feelings. And, you know, later on that can show up in forms like substance abuse or eating disorders or depression. And for some people, we're really trying to help them get in touch with, feel into and express what's going on for them.
And for others, they've kind of got this kind of overexpression in a way. It's almost like whatever shows up in them spills right out into the world. And for people like that, we're kind of helping them with kind of emotion regulation and distress tolerance and helping them.
understand what's coming up not be so confused about the mix of things that are coming up give name to that internally and then be able to kind of you know use different skills to to kind of be with that in a way where their behavior is not automatically affected and therefore their relationships aren't you know ruptured in that way so we're kind of working with this kind of spectrum I guess of under regulation over regulation under expression kind of over expression and
Before we get on to talking about depression and PTSD, you alluded to before that in your practice, you like to help people recovering from traumatic events or adverse life experiences, including events in childhood, and that these experiences can affect our mental health, our nervous system and our physical health. It affects us holistically.
So my question was, when someone has lived through this adversity or trauma, especially in childhood, How can that affect the way they understand themselves and their place in the world? And how might those painful early beliefs influence how they move through life?
Yeah, it's a huge aspect of the work we do, how we're programmed when we're young. So what happens to us and the impact of that and the resources that we have around that time, including the support from others, all play a part in how our belief systems form about who we are, how we trust or distrust other humans in the world. And also our feelings about the world in general. Is it a safe place?
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Chapter 4: How does EMDR therapy help in processing trauma?
So there's these belief systems that form from those early experiences. And those belief systems get kind of encoded in a way where you're not necessarily aware that they're kind of running you. So when you perceive the world, you're kind of looking through these lenses that you're sometimes not aware that you're looking through. So sometimes they might be called schemas or lenses.
Not only do they form belief systems like that, but they also affect the way that our body and our nervous system and our brain kind of interacts with people and the world and challenges that come up. So if I just go back a step, there was a large study called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study and they tracked and followed about 17,000 people over many, many years.
It's a fascinating study because they're looking at the correlation of adverse childhood experiences and later struggles with mental health and physical health. So adverse childhood experiences are things like, you know, did one or more parents have a mental health condition? Was there someone that was coming in and out of jail? Was there any drug or alcohol use in the family?
Was there neglect, emotional neglect? Was there abuse, sexual assault, that kind of thing?
Chapter 5: What is the importance of the therapeutic relationship in healing?
So, you know, things that are difficult for children to go through. The fascinating thing about this long-term study is we'd expect to see, you know, mental health conditions being kind of directly kind of correlated with that which we saw, but it was the physical health conditions that surprised people. Heart conditions, cancer, drug and alcohol use, economic situation,
So it was this range of kind of physical health issues and chronic health issues as well as the mental health issues. And so what we're kind of finding is that what happens in childhood and more importantly, the support or lack of support around that sets us up for not only the way that relate to other people in ourself, but also the way our body works.
gets inflamed by chronic stress and how that inflammation starts to go on to create these chronic health conditions in a number of areas that we thought are just totally physically related. So from a psychological perspective, we have this opportunity, I guess, to go back using different psychological methods and
Not only understanding what happened, but using different tools and techniques to kind of transform our relationship and kind of un-encode or change the patterns emotionally at a nervous system level and the belief system level as well. So that's a lot of what we're doing, especially for people with disabilities.
chronic mental health conditions that they've had for quite a long time and haven't responded to many treatments, we often need to sort of go back to some earlier experiences and make sense of those, but also process them in a way where their current here and now life changes.
Did you read that book, The Body Keeps the Score? Yeah, I just find that so fascinating. And the effects on your nervous system, I find for myself, like I do a lot of practices, I've had therapy and I feel pretty good most of the time, but I feel like compared to some other people, I really have to watch stress.
Like I feel like, you know, based on childhood experiences and how you grow up and stuff, I don't know. Sometimes I just feel like stress might be still in my body and I'm like, what do I got to be stressed about? But I feel like I have a lower tolerance than some people, if that makes sense. So, yeah, it's just interesting how it's holistic. Like it's your body, it's your psyche.
Yeah.
Yeah, and nervous system stress isn't always about what's happening here and now. Often we're looking around, like what's happening in work and life and relationships, and sometimes that makes a lot of sense. But as often, we're being unconsciously activated and triggered by certain conditions in the environment and in what's happening that's bringing up old stuff.
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Chapter 6: How is MDMA-assisted therapy being used for PTSD?
There'll be an intuition and you're like, this is not the right fit. Follow the intuition. But sometimes you're like, this is really uncomfortable. I'm not sure about this. That's different. Yeah. It's like, okay, what's happening here? Because uncomfortability is really where we want. We want support. It's going to be a given, I think. But we want that uncomfortability too.
And if we're getting into adverse childhood experiences and trauma and historical stuff,
it's going to be really painful actually in disturbing destabilizing so that's kind of what people are signing up for but the the therapeutic space and the person you're with there should be so much trust and support and validation and and mutual regard and you know therapeutic kind of like uh spaciousness there that you can you feel like you can you can do that really difficult work yeah and that takes time to develop you know yeah don't give up after the first session
Yeah. Yeah. It's tricky finding a psychologist or any provider that matches you and what you need and has the skills, but also has the kind of the vibe, I guess, that you're looking for. That's, it takes some time. So I would say to people, don't be afraid to kind of like take a bit of an experimental attitude and take some time to find someone that suits them.
So what are the current evidence-based treatment options for the label of depression? As you mentioned, there is a lot of things underlying that. What are the standard treatments on offer at the moment for people?
So this is really tricky as well. It's tricky for psychologists in this because there's politics underneath what gets put forward into clinical trials for evidence. And by the politics, I just mean there's certain practices that are embedded in universities and universities have a lead role in doing clinical trials. So
So some of the therapies that people practice that are really effective and quite powerful aren't sort of embedded in universities, so they don't have clinical trials results, and some are embedded, so they do. So some of the stuff that has a lot of good evidence is cognitive behavioral therapy, as you've talked about in your podcast before.
Things like acceptance and commitment therapy, things like schema therapy, interpersonal therapy, narrative therapy. Things that are really powerful and fantastic treatments too that aren't really embedded in those academic contexts.
The internal family systems therapy, which is something that I practice, which is really great at going back and working with those early experiences and how they're affecting us in our current life and transforming that. imagery re-scripting, which I noticed that your last guest kind of reported back on.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential benefits of psilocybin-assisted therapy?
There's things like sensory motor psychotherapy, which really gets to the core of the nervous system and the body and the posture and how that shows up in some of these patterns. You know, existential psychotherapy.
Another one that I practice that has a lot of evidence in the trauma field and emerging evidence now in the depression field is EMDR or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, which again is very good at targeting belief systems, patterns, early events, and how they show up in everyday experience.
So there's a bunch of therapies I've probably left off there, but there's lots and lots of really interesting stuff. Many of them really coalesce around similar kind of mechanisms of therapeutic treatment. I guess there's a lot of similarities between them. There's also some key differences as well. So yeah, there's quite a lot.
I am interested in that internal family systems. But yeah, I realize we only have a limited amount of time, but that's fascinating.
We can do a whole podcast on internal family systems. If you're open to it, I'd love it. That's a large one. I mean, what's exciting about that just quickly is that It's one of the therapies that acknowledges and brings in the spiritual aspect. So it's kind of a psychospiritual therapy type.
So for some reason, we've left out in our westernized psychotherapies, we've left out the meaning, the existential, the spiritual. By spiritual, I don't mean a deity or a god. I just mean… What is bigger and larger? What's the large container that we're kind of sitting in? And what does that mean to you? And how do you relate to something that's beyond just your everyday experience?
So many people have a sense of that in their own way. And this is a therapy that actually brings that into the therapy room, in addition to all the other bits and pieces that you would regularly do in therapy. So There's different things about IFS that make it unique, but that's one of them that I think is really interesting.
And as we talk about psychedelic-assisted therapy, that's another modality that brings in the spiritual and the existential and these larger transpersonal areas, which is a crucial part. If someone's depressed, what am I here for? Does life have meaning? Why am I waking up in the morning? Why should I be alive? Like these are big questions.
The answers matter. They do. The answers that they're getting matter.
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Chapter 8: How can self-acceptance facilitate healing?
And maybe there's medication types which are a much better fit. So I would just encourage people if they haven't had success in that area and they feel like medication is something for them to look more broadly. Like we were talking about therapy, don't give up because you've, you know, antidepressants in inverted commas haven't worked. There's many different classes of drugs that can be helpful.
And just one other thing about it, just on the downside, there are upsides. I've seen it help so many people. But on the downside, people can get a sense of emotional blunting. they can feel a lot less. So it can take away some of the more difficult aspects of being depressed or anxious, but it can also take away joy and enthusiasm and some of those things as well.
So I just say to people to keep an eye on that sort of stuff. And sometimes depression medication has side effects that you just need to trust yourself and talk to your medical practitioner about
And will the practitioner sort of generally work with you to maybe try and find a balance?
It depends because some of the emotional blunting effects look like more depression. So I'm not feeling joy in anything. It's like, oh, well, you're depressed, of course. But we just have to be a little bit more nuanced and savvy about the medication, how long it's been prescribed for, the impact of it, the side effects. And sometimes, like I said, to see a different psychologist or practitioner,
sometimes it's worthwhile getting a second opinion on that or seeing a psychiatrist, even if you don't think that's something that you would traditionally think about. Sometimes it's worthwhile just looking at that as well.
Because I'm not sure if people know, like the psychiatrist is actually a trained medical practitioner and then they do the psychiatry on top.
That's right.
So they would generally... Can you explain, please, the difference with prescribing medication?
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