The Jan Broberg Show

Lisa Arrigo's Story • Epigenetics, the Body, and Breaking Cycles of Trauma

Lisa Arrigo · August 28, 2026

Author · Wellness · Life Coach

Interview with Lisa Arrigo

Lisa Arrigo's Story • Epigenetics, the Body, and Breaking Cycles of Trauma

Podcast: The Jan Broberg Show

August 28, 2026 · 1 hr 10 min

[Content Warning]: discussions of childhood sexual abuse, addiction and substance use, and generational family trauma. What if the trauma you're carrying didn't start with you? In this episode of Trauma Interrupted, host Jan Broberg sits down with Lisa Arrigo, a licensed clinical social worker with 30 years in private practice, to unpack the science and lived experience of intergenerational trauma.

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Lisa Arrigo's Story • Epigenetics, the Body, and Breaking Cycles of Trauma

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The Jan Broberg Show

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Key topicsWhy you keep folding, fighting, or disappearing in relationships you care aboutA lot of relationship advice assumes people are making calm, conscious choices in the moments that matter most, when often their nervous system has already taken over. This topic explores why people shut down, submit, lash out, or emotionally leave even inside relationships they deeply value. Lisa brings a trauma-informed lens that helps listeners understand those reactions as patterned survival responses, while still making space for accountability and change. What gets passed down in families is not just appearance, but biology and survival strategyFamilies pass down far more than habits and eye colour; they also pass down ways of bracing for danger, managing emotion, and relating to the world. This topic explores how intergenerational trauma can live in the body through inherited stress responses, attachment patterns, and survival strategies that quietly shape family dynamics. Lisa brings this to life through both clinical understanding and lived experience, making a big subject feel personal, practical, and deeply relevant. Relapse makes more sense when you understand the part of you that is trying to helpRelapse is often treated as proof that someone failed, when in reality it can reveal a part of the person that still believes addiction is the safest available strategy. Lisa can speak to recovery in a way that moves beyond shame and willpower, showing how addictive behaviors often serve a protective function long after they begin causing harm. That makes this a powerful conversation for listeners who are tired of black-and-white recovery narratives and want a more honest understanding of what healing actually requires. View all topics →

About Lisa Arrigo

Psychotherapist and Clinical Social Worker Specializing in Trauma, Attachment, and Addiction

25+ years Experience serving LGBTQ clients2 University degrees: BS & MSW4 Specialist certifications & training milestonesLicensed Clinical Social Worker New York

Lisa Arrigo has spent more than three decades helping people understand what trauma leaves behind long after the original danger has passed. A New York Licensed Clinical Social Worker and psychotherapist, her work sits at the intersection of trauma, attachment, addiction, neurobiology, shame, and the deeply human ways people learn to survive.

Her perspective is powerful because it comes from both sides of the therapeutic relationship. Lisa has devoted her career to helping others heal, while also confronting the impact of trauma, addiction, relapse, and recovery in her own life. After more than 17 years of sobriety, she experienced a cocaine relapse that nearly cost her life and left her waking in a Manhattan hospital unable to remember how she had arrived there. That experience challenged everything she thought she understood about healing and forced her to confront a difficult truth: we can have insight, language, and years of recovery behind us and still carry survival patterns that remain active beneath the surface.

That lived experience now sits alongside decades of clinical training. Lisa earned her BS from Trinity University and her MSW from Fordham University School of Social Work, followed by post-graduate study at the Westchester Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

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About this episode

Lisa explains how trauma can leave measurable marks on our biology, pointing to Dr. Rachel Yehuda's research on Holocaust survivors and their descendants, and why understanding epigenetics offers real hope, not just theory, for breaking painful family cycles. She and Jan talk about why talk therapy alone often isn't enough, how the body holds what the mind can't always name, and why modalities like EMDR, somatic experiencing, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) exist alongside traditional talk therapy.

Drawing on her own family history and decades treating trauma and addiction, Lisa walks through the window of tolerance, why addiction is almost always a trauma response rather than a character flaw, and how complex PTSD can fragment a person into different “parts.” She and Jan also talk candidly about shame, vulnerability, and why curiosity, not perfection, is the real doorway to healing.

This conversation is equal parts science lesson and permission slip: permission to feel what's in your body, to ask for help, and to believe that whatever was passed down to you doesn't have to be passed any further.

Where To Find Lisa:

LisaArrigo.com

Insta: @lisa.arrigo.therapy

Keep Your Eyes Peeled for Lisa’s upcoming book Fall Risk

Mentioned Resources:

Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma - Janina Fisher (psychoeducational flip chart)

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute (Therapist Directory)

The Window of Tolerance (via NICABM)

If you or someone you know is experiencing emotional distress or suicidal ideation, please access the resources below:

National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call/Text 988

National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN) : 1-800-656-HOPE (4673)

National Alliance for Mental Illness: 1-800-950-6264