Greg Doney

Greg Doney is co-founder of Goodsky Mental Health Retreat on Australia's Sunshine Coast and the author of five books on trauma, the nervous system, family dynamics, and mental health recovery. His work translates current research in cellular biology, metabolic psychiatry and family systems into practical guidance for survivors, families, and the clinicians who support them.

His book Healing Trauma at the Cellular Level carries a foreword by Robert K. Naviaux, MD, PhD — the UC San Diego scientist who proposed the Cell Danger Response (2014) and coined the term salugenesis (2018), and whose research the book translates for therapists and general readers.

1. What is the Cell Danger Response, and why does it matter for trauma recovery?
2. Most trauma frameworks focus on what happened to a person. Your work focuses on what the body is doing now. What changes when you make that shift?
3. You write that "healing can be arrested when the body's danger response gets stuck." How does it unstick?
4. In Help Is Not Partnership, you argue that relationships unravel not from a loss of love but from a slow shift in how cognitive load is shared. What does that look like in practice?
5. Robert Naviaux describes your book as possibly "the first salvo in a revolution in medical care for chronic illness." What does that revolution look like to a guest walking into a retreat next week?
6. What's the most common thing guests have already tried that hasn't worked — and what does that tell us?
7. What's one idea about trauma recovery you wish more clinicians understood?