People First Radio – February 13, 2025People First Radio – February 13, 2025
People First Radio
Kate Walker shares her family’s burn-trauma story, her own healing, and her shift into counselling, while Gene Miller explains his vision for a community centre in Victoria focused on shared purpose and local action. The conversation circles around shame, recovery, and how people and communities can grow after crisis.
0:00•14 Feb 2025
From Kitchen Trauma to Community Change: Stories of Healing and Connection
Episode Overview
- Trauma healing often needs both time and intentional work; as Kate notes, time alone is not enough without actively using it for recovery.
- Sharing experiences of shame in a safe space can reduce its grip and support greater self-acceptance and self-love.
- Families dealing with serious medical events may benefit from multiple layers of support, including individual, couples, and play therapy for children.
- Community support tends to peak during crisis and then fade, leaving people still in pain; ongoing practical and emotional help can make a real difference.
- Gene Miller argues that true community forms when small groups gather around a clear purpose and take collective action, rather than relying solely on institutions.
“There’s this thing called post-traumatic growth… we can actually take a tragedy and we can turn it into a hero’s journey.”
How do people find strength in their journey to sobriety, grief, and big life change? This People First Radio episode brings together two very different stories with a shared thread: what happens after everything falls apart.
First, counsellor and former television writer Kate Walker talks about the kitchen accident that left her preschool-aged son with severe burns and "changed our family's life forever." She shares honestly about overwhelming guilt, PTSD, and the moment she realised she needed to work on her own healing so she could be the parent he needed.
You'll hear her speak about EMDR, couples therapy, mindful self-compassion, movement, and cold-water dips as part of rebuilding her identity as a "good mother" and creating what she calls "post-traumatic growth" rather than a lifelong tragedy. Kate also explains why she retrained as a clinical counsellor and opened her practice in Nanaimo, after seeing a gap in support for burn survivors and their families.
Her reflections on shame are especially powerful: "What actually happens when we share the things that we're most ashamed of… we're freed from the power that that shame has on us." Later, long-time Victoria resident and community-builder Gene Miller shares his idea for a "centre for the co-design of the future" – a physical hub where people in Victoria could come together, define shared purposes, and work on local responses to global challenges.
Drawing on decades of civic involvement, he talks about isolation, the loss of shared purpose, and his belief that geography alone doesn't make community. For anyone interested in recovery, mental health, trauma work, or grassroots change, this episode blends personal story with big-picture questions about how people heal and how communities come back to life. Whose story in this conversation feels closest to your own – the parent rebuilding after trauma, or the elder dreaming up a braver community?
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