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GXC 2025 Online Virtual Conference - Mental Health Without Borders

From Trauma to Transformation: Reclaiming Your Authenticity

Fritzi Horstman 🇺🇸
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Description

This presentation is designed to deepen our understanding of how childhood trauma impacts identity, behavior, and the nervous system—and how these early wounds often show up in our behavior as violence, addiction, shame, and self-abandonment. Drawing from interviews from trauma experts, incarcerated men and women and Fritzi’s own lived experience, we explore how trauma disrupts the connection between authenticity and attachment and between self and others, leading many of us to make choices rooted in brain-stem fight/flight survival rather than prefrontal cortex wellbeing and wholeness.


Participants will be introduced to Fritzi’s “the Algorithm of Transformation:” a trauma-informed model that centers on three key pillars of healing: vulnerability, accountability, and forgiveness. These principles are part of the Compassion Prison Project’s curriculum and are instrumental tools of transformation used in the prison setting (and arguably, in all settings). The presentation invites all of us to shift from a blaming and punitive perspective (based on our fight/flight instincts) to one rooted in compassion, insight, and personal responsibility (based on using our cortex).


Using real-world examples, including stories from prisons and Fritzi’s own life, the presentation highlights how unaddressed trauma continues to cycle through families, institutions, and society at large. By reclaiming one’s authentic self and supporting others in doing the same, not only will we transform our own lives, we have the potential to transform our society.

Educational Goal

This presentation aims to enhance clinical understanding of how trauma disrupts identity, attachment, and emotional regulation, and to introduce practitioners to a trauma-informed framework rooted in vulnerability, accountability, and forgiveness. Attendees will improve their ability to recognize survival-based behaviors and apply neuroscience-informed strategies that promote authenticity, healing, and compassionate care in future clinical settings.

Learning Objectives

Participants will be able to:

  • List 3 or more ways in which trauma impedes attachment and authenticity in people.

  • Discover two or more ways to provide a trauma-informed prosocial environment that facilitates authenticity and healing.

  • Explain how untreated trauma may show up as internalized or externalized violent behaviors such as shame, addiction, or aggression, leading to incarceration or other forms of social impairment.

  • Describe the “Algorithm of Transformation” (Vulnerability, Accountability, Forgiveness) for self-reflection.

Presenters

Fritzi Horstman 🇺🇸
Fritzi Horstman is the Founder and Executive Director of Compassion Prison Project (CPP), an organization committed to transforming prisons through compassion, trauma awareness, principles of nonviolence and systemic healing. CPP’s groundbreaking curriculum, Trauma Talks, is currently being implemented in prisons across California, throughout the United States, and internationally, reaching thousands of incarcerated individuals in Colombia, Northern Ireland, New Zealand (and soon Mexico, Australia, Argentina, the UK and Ireland), often with minimal funding but maximum impact. With over 30 years in the film industry, Fritzi is a Grammy-winning producer for HBO’s The Defiant Ones. She also directed the viral short film Step Inside the Circle and the documentary short Veterans Behind Bars. Her deep understanding of childhood trauma, shaped by her own experiences, is at the core of her work. Through film, curriculum, and conversation, Fritzi helps others see that trauma often lies at the heart of incarceration — but healing is possible. Fritzi is also the host of the Compassion in Action podcast, where she has powerful conversations with trauma experts like Gabor Maté, Bruce Perry, Bessel van der Kolk and thought leaders including Joe Dispenza and Michael Singer. The podcast is now reaching over 1 million incarcerated people across the U.S. Her work is guided by a rare combination of strategic vision and deep compassion. Fritzi doesn’t just imagine a better world — she takes action to build it, inside the very systems that have caused the most harm. By bringing trauma awareness, emotional healing, and practical tools for transformation into prisons (and communities), she is helping to reimagine what justice can look like: not as punishment, but as possibility. Her mission is not just about reform, it’s about awakening the human spirit in places where it has long been forgotten.

Financially Sponsored By

  • GXC Events - The Global Exchange Conference