Healing Grief, Trauma & Abuse: Underlying Causes of Chronic Disease

Introduction and Guest Credentials 0:00

Hey, it's Nathan Crane, director of the Health and Healing Club and host of the Conquering Cancers Summit. And today, I am honored and excited to welcome you to a very special interview. Doctor Keesha, yours is board certified in functional medicine. And are you Vedic medicine? A doctor of sexology, which is a new one for me. I should learn more about that. A psychotherapist, a family practice, advanced registered nurse practitioner with a specialty in integrative medicine. She's a conscious dying doula, which we need more of, nowadays, especially with, you know, our culture, at least here in the United States, where death is this topic that is so taboo and, you know, conscious dying.

Oh my gosh, what an amazing thing. Maybe we'll dive into that today. I was even planning on it. But it's such a powerful topic I think worth discussing. She's a master's of Divinity student and the founder and medical director of the Academy for Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program. Doctor Keisha's been in the medical field for over 30 years after conducting the Hurt Heart Study in 2013, which stands for Healing Unresolved Trauma. She developed the heart model for understanding how past childhood trauma impacts adult health.

This led to the creation of the unbroken online program for patients to heal their own trauma, and the Mystic Medicine deep immersion healing retreat she leads at her home in San Juan Island, Washington. Doctor Keisha's, a popular speaker, including at Harvard and from the Ted stage. And she's the bestselling author of Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle The Woman's Guide to Reclaiming Emotional Freedom and Vibrant Health. You can learn more about her great work. Pick up a copy of her books and learn more about her great online programs at Doctor kisha.com as Dr.

K e s doctor kisha.com. All right, doctor Keisha, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Nathan. So something I found out just recently about you was you, went through your own cancer, journey. Why don't we start there? What was your diagnosis? What was your diagnosis? And when exactly was it? Yeah, well, I'm going to start when I. I'm 55 right now. And when I was 30, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and I had four little kids. I was running marathons, I was an ICU nurse, and my life came to this screeching halt.

So I went in with 10 pounds of puffiness all over my body and lots of pain. And I was asked by my physician that I was seeing that day. So do you have autoimmune disease in your family history?

Doctor Keesha's Autoimmune and Trauma Journey 2:50

And I said, yeah, my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis. And actually, Nathan, he died at the age I am today at 55, in a wheelchair. So, you know, I didn't know any of the stuff we're going to be talking about today, right? So she said, okay, well, it looks like you drew the short end of the genetic lottery, my dear. Right. Closes the book, puts it on a shelf and hands me a prescription. You hear this all the time of our methotrexate. And a very strong nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. And as I'm driving home, I'm thinking about the side effect profile of these drugs because I knew them and that I really don't want to do this.

And there must be another answer to this question that I had asked her, which is, hang on, hang on, you know, is there anything else? And she said, no. Right. And unfortunately, people are still being told this, right? Diet has nothing to do with anything, etc., etc. so I started diving in and doing my own research, and I found, and performed a study on yoga and autoimmune. I went to my first yoga class and from there I learned, oh, of your Vedic medicine, which is the sister science of yoga actually says that cancer and autoimmune disease are undigested anger.

And I remember kind of sitting back in my chair as I'm looking at my computer with a dial up modem, you know, way back then and going, But I'm not an angry person. And then thinking to myself at the very next minute, like, oh, that might be a problem, that I don't even allow anger, I don't acknowledge it, you know, and I don't know how to express it for sure. So through a ten year period, I really dove into this. I did a bunch of deep work. I learned that I had been I already knew, but I learned that the sexual abuse that I had had at the age of ten from the vice principal of my elementary school had a great deal to do with my RA.

20 years later, and I went in and I started doing a bunch of deep trauma work around that. Well, within six months, my RA was gone and it's never been back. Okay. So I cleaned up my diet. I found out that I was really, really sensitive to gluten and took that off my menu. I found out that I was a sugar aholic. I took that off my menu. I stopped running marathons and beating the crap up my body. I started really healing the perfectionism and the people pleasing that I had going on in my character style.

So for ten years, everything was really healthy, ten years after that. So I was about 41, my son was home from college. I have four kids, two boys and two girls. And my second son said, I need to talk to you, mom. I said, oh, this sounds serious. And he said, well, it kind of is. And he sat me down at the dining room table and he said, I just want to let you know. And he tells me the story of he and his brother, and probably his youngest, his younger sister being sexually abused by a neighborhood boy, a I had left in his care for as a babysitter a couple of times now with my own history.

Like to hear that was, oh my gosh, anyone that's a parent. It was the worst thing, right? And I just of course lost it completely. And and I was like, oh, you know, and and I said, how come you never told me this? And he said, because of this, like, I didn't want you to think, my child, who was defined by this one event. Wow. And he said, but there are some things happening in my life with relationships. I think I need to do some work around this. And so I called up the the guy that had done this, he would he had been 12 years old at the time.

And I remember distinctly opening the sliding glass door, looking down in our yard at him and my kids, bouncing on the trampoline and going, hey, do you want to stay and babysit while I take the baby to the grocery store? You know, like, I can see that just burned into my mind. That choice point that I made of leaving my kids with him. So I called him up. I found him, and he said when he heard my voice and I identified myself, he said, this is yours. I've been waiting for this call for 15 years.

And I remember thinking like, yeah, like, this is, this isn't just about my children. It's it's this whole like, there's pain in this whole system right here. And so I had a bunch of questions for him, number one being, how could you have done this to my kids when I put them in your care? But, you know, like we went through this whole over a few months period, this whole forgiveness process that I helped facilitate. And I'm going to give your audience like it'll be a purchase bonus for your group because it's an amazing.

And I'll tell you what it did for me. So we went through this whole thing and I had him pay for some of their therapy. And like, we did this really great process right? My kids responded really well. Everything was good. Four months after that I get diagnosed with breast cancer tumor. Where is it? Right over my left breast. Like heartbreak shattered. Right like that is where it was. I was in there and I had an ultrasound. I could feel it. And I went in. I had a diagnostic ultrasound and there's this beautiful blood supply to this tumor is just so alive.

Right. And I looked at it on the screen and I, and I went, oh, I know exactly where that came from. I know exactly where that came from. And I said, give me a month and then I will come back. And, and so if during that month I didn't have a diet to clean up, I didn't have the way that I was dealing with my, you know, my, my world. I wasn't people pleasing. I wasn't a perfectionist anymore. I wasn't I wasn't beating the crap out of my body and marathons any longer. What happened? And I knew it was that I had this shame and this guilt that was so toxic coursing through my body that I had completely sludge, that my lymphatic system, my liver, wasn't filtering anymore.

I was not digesting that shame and that guilt. I had left even the perpetrator off the hook. Right. But not can you blame yourself? Right? Oh, because I was 100% responsible, 100% responsible. And that image. Right. And it would just bring me to my knees with tears of shame and guilt and just like. Oh, and I knew when I saw that tumor that it was do or die. I had to forgive myself or I would die. And it was the hardest thing, Nathan, in my entire life that I have ever had to do was to forgive myself.

And in that month, I did. I set about like going through the process of really doing that self forgiveness. And a month later, I went in, I had another ultrasound and there was like, there were there was this vascular system just hanging there, empty space. There was no tumor. Wow. And of course, this year y'all just I was like, oh, checking a lot. And I said, I it's no, it's I knew why it was there. I knew exactly what I had to do. I don't tell this story very often because I don't want people walking away saying, oh, I can just like, think myself out, right.

Which, which you could say, but but I actually knew like the thing had had guilt and shame written on it. You know, the pictures in my head were directly represented in this tumor. I knew where it was from, and within a month it was gone. And it's never been diagnosed at stage one, is there? You said.

Breast Cancer Diagnosis and Self-Forgiveness 10:20

And here's the other thing is I have these genetics. You know, I do genetic testing on 100% of my patients. And I have these genetics work, my cytochrome P450 1B1 terrible. When I first did my very first estrogen metabolite pathway test and I looked to see like, is that one B1 causing problems for me? Oh yeah, I actually had to call to Nova and talk to their medical director and say, is there some kind of fluke here? Because I've never seen one that's bad. She goes, doctor years. I'm afraid I've never seen one of that.

So this was this, you know, like I have the physicality that is prone to cancer. My dad has cancer currently. He's had it since 2004. Chronic lymphocytic leukemia. My mom has had breast cancer. My grandmother has had breast cancer. So it's not like I don't have the genetics and the biochemistry that's primed for this. But what is it that made that happen four months later? Right? Right. Then. And go away that quickly? So you have to know, like this emotional piece is so strong and how it up regulates your genetics, how it affects your filtration system.

Like it's so important if you're not digesting your emotions, then it can act, they can hang around and they can then have you express this stuff in a disease pathway. Right. You know, what's really fascinating about that is, you know, I did an interview with Otis Wallen, who's not part of this symposium, but it's actually just a free thing that's on YouTube. And it was about his story with kidney cancer. And, you know, he went through, he discovered something similar in himself as he was doing meditation and practicing qigong and, you know, sitting with himself quietly, he discovered that he had a lot of pent up anger, you know, and blame and guilt and all these things as well.

And when he realized that and then he his practice was to go into a practice called wisdom healing qigong, which is a sound healing and a mental emotional healing. And, and, you know, this whole ancient practice. But every time he'd go back in every few months to get it, checked on, it had shrunk. And every time he's doing this practice, it shrunk more and shrunk more, shrunk more. And then it got to a point where he felt he totally resolved the the anger inside of him. And then he was able to do a, cryo blast station, I believe it's called, where they basically just freeze the tumor.

And then it was gone and it had not come back since. And he felt, you know, that as it was shrinking and shrink. And so for him, that was months and even maybe a couple of years process. Right. Where years of boom month it was gone. You got to the root. But yeah, I already been doing so much of that. Right. I had preset my past, you know, I had done this trauma work on my own sexual abuse like I had really. I was pretty clean to that point. Right. And then that drops in and then it was easy to get balance again.

Now I have a woman that is my very best friend in the world, and I only met her three years ago, and it was in a medicine circle. So, I facilitate medicine circles for trauma healing also. And I heard her across the room. I'd never met her before, and she was talking about just being diagnosed with metastatic stage four cancer. It was in her bones and her spine, and she was telling the story of having been caught. And her son and her husband were with her in this medicine circle. She'd had two DUIs and been caught, having an affair.

And she had all this shame and guilt, and I heard her across a circle and I was like, oh. And so I went and I sat down in front of her and I, you know, I put my hand on her heart, which is exactly where hers was. Right? I said, this isn't going away until you can forgive yourself. And she just broke down, so I cannot wow you not right. My son is the one that caught me and has sent her son saying like I have forgiven you and I said, if you don't do this, you will die. And sure enough, like I worked with her every single day for three months on this process every day.

And I took her up in the mountains and we did a vision quest with the Lakota. And when she went and she had her next Pet scan, 50% shrinkage. Wow. And she had not completely forgiven herself yet. And I said, see, you've got to finish this right, 50% shrinkage. And then she then she got really sick of doing the process. And she said, I'm done with this. I'm so damn, that's thinking about myself. You know, it grew. Oh wow. So then she got back on it. She did another Pet scan. It had shrunk. I mean, I was like, okay, this is sort of like the the gas gauge in your car, you know, like right there, right.

It is that powerful. And it was like there's nothing else that had to be done for her. It was just that. And when I say just, it's the hardest thing. Sure. It's the hardest thing I know. And that's the thing like you were talking about earlier, like if your diet is really, you know, you're following the the brightest minds that I've interviewed for this symposium on the most scientifically advanced anti-cancer diet, and you're following that and you're doing, you know, what I call detail. And yeah, I know you're doing what I call medicinal movement every day, which is literally 45 to 60 minutes of different forms of movement, at least 5 to 6 days a week.

And you're doing yoga and qigong and meditating and you're doing the whole package, and yet you're not seeing, you know, tremendous results. What you're talking about is like often the crux of it is getting to the deep emotional wound and healing it. And and would you say that more often than not, the thing that needs to be done is to either forgive yourself or forgive somebody else, or both? The thing I call it the Freedom framework, and it's a puzzle the way I think we're all unique. There's not one way of doing things for anyone, right?

But the four corner pieces of the puzzle are the same, and that's gut health. It's toxic burden and your body's ability to get rid of those toxins. It's, your genetics for sure. Genetics play a part in this, right. And the fourth one, and I call it the missing piece of the puzzle, is how you deal with your stress and your past trauma. And that that is the one that fits in, that actually affects cortisol release. You know, if you're, like you said earlier, if you're always in a sympathetic arousal state, you're releasing cortisol, which is breaking down your gut wall.

You know, it's doing other things too. But, you know, when we're talking about that, that intestinal integrity, if as long as you're in that place of I'm always a victim, I'm not safe, I'm not good enough, I'm I'm not, you know, all of those those self-limiting belief structures that come from trauma and everybody has had trauma 100% of us. It's just that mean might not have had the capital T trauma that's talked about in the Adverse Childhood Experiences study. That is the study actually is the science behind all this that says, yes, the higher those adverse experiences from childhood, the higher the number, the higher the risk for every single chronic illness that we have in our society today, as well as relationship dysfunction and addiction and the lack of self-care.

And like all those things. Right. Something that left. So it becomes really important in the hurt study that I did was, why did the Aces study come up with what it came up with? I wanted to know the why, like, track it, you know, how how does that work? And so I would say, yes, it is. But also if your genetics show like you're in ApoE e4, for example, which means that your liver's not going to metabolize alcohol and, and animal protein and fat very well. And if you continue to eat that then you're going to have trouble.

And so I think that probably most of the people in the forks over night study or AP fours, and that's why we have such conflicting studies. That's why I do genetics. I'm like, let's look and see what's the dietary program your DNA is asking for, right? What's your eye, your vedo balance, what's going on.

Trauma, Resentment, and the Freedom Framework 18:40

And in the trauma piece is the one that actually up regulates all that stuff. And I always think of toxic burden is not just PCBs in the environment, you know, not just Emfs, but also the the toxicity that you have in here. I think of resentment as the most toxic chemical that can ever be manufactured on this planet, and it's not being manufactured by corporations and dumped into air, soil and water. It's being manufactured right here and being dumped into the terrain that our cells are bathing in.

And it's if you're bathing your cells in resentment, you will get sick and die. That is going to happen, you know? Yeah, I mean, it's it's such an important thing, what you're saying for people to understand and it's almost always happening subconsciously. You know, I was what I was kind of getting to earlier about in, in the masterclass I'm teaching, you know, there's an entire module on the subject, that I call parasympathetic mastery, but woven through the entire masterclass because it's so important is this exact topic right here is the stressors in our lives and the emotions that lead to, you know, a constantly inflamed, you know, system that is, toxic because we know that these, intense emotions, these, these emotions that derive from fear, that derive from anxiety, that derive from stress, whether it's the stress of watching the news in the morning and it's just as low grade stress or as the stress of someone cutting you off in traffic and you getting pissed off at home, or the stress of having to get home in time to make dinner to pick up the kids or whatever.

That constant low grade stress is for a lot of women. Not getting through your task list at the end of the day, or not being able to make every single person happy. You know, that's the people I always say that people with cancer and autoimmunity have four P's people pleasing, perfectionism, holding on to the in the past pain. And then the last one is the idea Vedic one, which you know is really interesting because I, your Veda is an elemental science and it's people with more fire, the pit of people.

Those are the people that have the sharp minds. They're very, very intelligent, but they're also very judgmental towards themselves first. And then it can kind of leak out on other people, you know, and there's so quick and and it causes inflammatory mind, which then translates as right. That hypervigilance makes a hyper vigilant immune system. Right, right. So it that's the microcosm of the macrocosm. Whatever's going on up here is happening in the body. So you know and it's I think one of the first steps I know for me, I was just talking with my wife about this the other day, because we were listening to a program.

I don't remember what it is, but we, you know, with my children in the car, we listened to all kinds of, you know, educational, personal development, spiritual growth programs constantly, you know, podcasts on the phones, on the TV. You put on documentaries in the car we put. So utilize all that time to learn and to help ourselves and my own children to learn and grow. And someone said, I can't remember who it was, but someone was on the program and said, you know, do you constantly wake up and have, you know, negative thoughts or have stressful thoughts or have, you know, these these negative thoughts about yourself or about the day or and, you know, they were talking like most people do.

And I thought for a moment and I was like, no, I don't. And I haven't had them for a very long time. And I asked my daughter, I said, do you ever have she's ten years old. Do you ever wake up? What are your thoughts when you first wake up? And so, you know, we've I've trained her basically to wake up with happy thoughts. I always say happy things to her right before bed. Her and my son, I would say, you know, as soon as they wake up, you ready for a great day today? Today is going to be a happy, healthy day.

I was just program that right because I wasn't program that way. I was programed with fear, with anxiety, with negativity, with worry, all these things. As a child, I think like most of us are. So she doesn't ever have negative thoughts. At least. You know, as a ten year old what is right to be negative about. Hopefully she takes that into the rest of her life. But I recognize myself like I stopped having those thoughts years ago because of an awareness and a practice. I was reading the Bhagavad Gita and I was meditating at night and I was reading and meditate and go to sleep.

And this is probably in 2007, maybe. And I remember waking up one morning and I had this first awareness that, oh my God, my thoughts are all negative when I first wake up. And I never realized that before. I never recognized that there was just no awareness. And it was like the worry of my life at the time, which was a pretty, you know, not a very pleasant life for most people. I was living on, you know, a little mattress in someone's living room. I didn't have enough money to even pay for gas to drive, to sell t shirts down on the Embarcadero here in San Diego.

Like, it was a pretty stressful life at that time. And this cat would come and pee on my bed all the time because he didn't want me in their house. And and I remember I wake up with all these negative thoughts and I caught myself for the first time. I said, that's it, no more. And I start waking up and practicing, focusing on things like gratitude and forgiveness and, you know, setting good thoughts in my mind to start the day and all these things. And it turned to a practice since then, and it's been automatic ever since.

Right. And people I think it's so important to, to recognize the power of this, the power heart and mind. Right. I teach healing trauma through the system program. And in every single module there's a picture that I put in every one of them, and it's a picture of a little kid in a grocery store. Like making all the cans go everywhere with one of those styrofoam noodles. Like creating chaos in the grocery store. Right? And what I always say is, like, if you're a shopper in that store and you go around the corner with your cart and you see this kid creating chaos in the grocery store, the first thing you're going to look for is like, where's that kid's parent?

Right? And then if you see, oh, here comes this woman racing around the corner. And she's like, Jenny, you know, and and then you hear her say, don't do that anymore, okay? And then walk away and Johnny keeps doing it. Then you're going to think, oh, but if you see a parent come around the corner and kneel down in front of Johnny and put her hands or his hands on, on their shoulders and look at them in the face and go, Johnny, this is not how you behave in a grocery store right now. We're going to clean this up.

I'm going to show you how you're going to replace your divot. And here are the consequences. If you ever do this again, then you go, okay, right. This child is being trained how to behave in a grocery store. Yeah. People always think their nervous system is sort of this passive thing or their thought patterns. Right? That you just have to watch it, do whatever it's going to do. And that's like the look in the grocery store creating chaos. You actually can intervene and train your mind. You can say, no, that's not what we're thinking right now.

Here's what I want you to think. And it's like a dog that you're training, right? They're chewing on your computer keyboard and you go, no. And you give them the thing you want them to chew on. That's actually what you have to do with your brain. You know, you have to train it. I'm actually a master's of divinity student at a Tibetan Buddhist college, because those guys have got this down better than anyone in the world. And that's exactly what I wanted to learn. Was that right? Like, oh, this is so interesting.

They've got volumes and volumes of volumes called The Dharma of Buddha Psychology that tracks it so much better than anyone else ever has. And I love it. It's like, wow, there are 17 steps to one perception from one of your sense organs, right? We have to call it six minds. You have your one mind and then you have your five sense organs. Something brings some information through a sense organ to your other mind, and you have 17 steps you go through to make a perception of that. But the thing that they say that I love is how you've always done it, is how you will do it into the future unless you intervene in that 17 step process about midway through.

They call it the gateway to karma, meaning if you don't do this, your karma is you're going to keep doing it the same way, right? That that eighth step, you have this little tiny gap and you can actually go in there, but you have to do it intentionally and you can say, oh no, this is not what we're doing, right? This is not what you chew on and you give your mind the two toy you want it to chew on, and then then you reward it, right? Oh, that's really good. And then you keep doing that and that's the process.

And so what you're saying is so important because it isn't an automatic thing. You don't automatically let go at that step. You actually have to train it. And then it's a habit right now you can say, oh yeah, it's automatic. I never have those thoughts any longer. And I'm the same way. And I can, you know, and focus on something negative now, even though I've not done that for, you know, however many. Yeah, it's a habit, but because it's a habit, it's so easy, you know, and it's and I know it's a good thing and, and we know, you know, through the modern science, we now know about neuropeptides.

We know about how these traumas and these, you know, dense emotions. And, you know, not only is it energy as the ancient qigong teachers have taught us, is it's blocked energy, it's stuck energy. We're slowly catching up to them, right? No. Next. Always love. Like, let's say our science is finally starting to catch up to the ancient wisdom, right? They've known for thousands of years. Like, oh, for some reason, modern. We need science to validate us. But, you know, oh, we know neuropeptides. It's a little thing that actually stores in parts of your body from emotional traumas and from this constant stress, and those neuropeptides can turn into cancers and all kinds.

We also know that the architecture of your brain actually changes.

Training the Mind and Nervous System 28:30

Yeah. It's just like we can do a Pet scan. I tracked all these Pet scans when I was in my PhD program for sexology. Everyone always is like death and sex. You take on those subjects. It's awesome. And what I was looking at is like the trauma around female libido that has taken the dive. Like, that's one of the first signs that you're having a stressful problem that you need to get underneath. Right. And there are five root causes to that. But when I was tracking brains, what I saw was, oh, it's not just PTSD that shrinks the prefrontal cortex and raises the volume of the amygdala or your reptilian fight flight or freeze part.

It's actually a study was done that showed that people that report themselves as chronically overwhelmed and high on their perceived stress scale actually have the same exact architectural changes in their brains and biochemical changes with their neuropeptides. I was like, ooh, I don't have a patient ever that doesn't come in. Reporting themselves is overwhelmed. It's just the way our society runs. We actually positively reinforce a frenetic lifestyle. Covid has been great for that because people are starting to kind of look around and go, oh, this is great.

I don't have to travel as much and go do lectures and airplanes. That's mine. I have to get on airplanes very often anymore. That's great. I've never doing that again. I totally feel you on that one. I was going to miss it and I'm like, man, I'm having a break for like a year from flying over. But it's like, oh, nice. It's actually great, I know. So you know, that that idea of just chronic perceived stress. So that's what put me into the hurt model. When I was doing my science, my study was like, oh, it actually is governed by your perceptions, which is what what got me fascinated by the Tibetan Buddhist way of looking at that with these 17 steps, those perceptions, if you're perceiving yourself as in danger, right or not good enough or whatever it is, then that biochemistry that your brain is sending down is so different from if you're in a place of feeling calm and peaceful.

Yeah. So it's not really about the external environment at all. It's about how you're perceiving it. Right? In of, of our reality. Right? I mean, we know the work of my friend and colleague Bruce Lipton. You know, we work in epigenetics. You know, we know through your what the reason I have geeked out about this for hours. You know, we know it through hard math Institute and all the science that I mean we know that with just a few minutes of deep breathing, connecting to feelings of gratitude, to positive emotions of love and compassion, connecting literally your hand and your mind to your heart, and in a few minutes, you can literally turn down your sympathetic response, upregulate your parasympathetic nervous system, and activate your body into a healing mode.

I mean, it can happen that fast. The challenge and the task for everybody dealing with any chronic disease is that you want to activate that as often as possible every single day, which is where I always say that that doesn't do it yet. You have to actually go in and excavate, like all the crap that's underneath your beautiful building you just built and get it off the landfill. You got to go in there and you've got to dig that stuff out. How do people do that? How do people start people dealing with sexual abuse, you know, trauma, you know, childhood, adverse events.

How do people start, doing some of that work? Well, I'm first going to say you do not have to forgive the person that has hurt you in that way. Right? I'm not talking about reconciliation. I'm talking about forgiveness. And so it isn't just about creating that grid of positive feelings, right? It's also about being able to take, the word I'm going to use is going to probably wrinkle a little bit. But the lesson from whatever happened. So like I have a forgiveness process that, I call it freedom to Forgive, that I got downloaded to me in a cave in India many, many years ago, which is a whole different story.

But I used that process to be able to heal my own cancer. It was given to me, and then I used it, and I've been using it with my patients for years, you know, and and what it does is it's a mirror exercise. It's actually in solving the autoimmune puzzle, too. And a shorter version. And what you're doing is you're saying, okay, so like if I use my, my vice principal, Mr. Johnson, and I put him in front of me and I say, so what are the ego traits? Because every human has the exact same personality.

We have the exact same personality traits. We just do them differently. You know, the Cherokees say that, right? In order to be a good person, you feed the white wolf more than the dark wolf, you know? And so. But we all have the same traits. We're all cruel, we're all jealous. We're, you know, for all of it. We're all kind and we're compassionate. And whichever one we feed the most is what burbles to the top. Right? So what? What you have to realize when you're looking at someone that's hurt you as a, you know, as a reflection, you go, okay, so what's the ego trait, the personality trait that drove them to the action.

And everyone's going to come up with different words like, if I were to say, what would you say about Hitler? You would say different things and I would say, and so when I did mine with with my vice principal, I said, so, misuse of power, right? I said, bigot because he was calling me white trash. I was one of two white girls in an all black school. And he was like, you know, you're bad kid. You're white trash. So bigot, and we'll just do those two. So. So when I sat and I had to go, okay, so how do I do those traits?

Because the behavior that I do of those is going to be really different. I don't buy tanks, take over Poland, you know, and kill people. But I still have the same traits as Hitler. I just do them differently. Right. And so when I came up with with misuse of power, I'm like, oh gosh, I'm a mother of four children. That's really easy. And I even called my son when I was doing it. I was like, Camryn, this morning when we were talking, did you experience that as a guilt trip? And he goes, yeah, I think so.

And I said, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. And I would have only seen that if I had, you know, by doing this exercise. Right. It's like there's that you've been so, you know, willing to embrace that part of yourself, that reflection of yourself that's so critical. You have to growth. Otherwise you don't get the abs us out of there. Exactly. Yeah. So so then I did beget and I was like, I am not a bigot. I've lived all over the world. I was a Navy brat. Like I've always been the minority. If when I'm in another place, you know, and then I and then I went, I live in Seattle, and we had just gone through the second election of George W Bush, and everyone in Seattle was really unhappy.

I was calling it post-electoral depression with my patients. And I was like, oh, we are all intolerant of intolerance. We're total bigots. I was like, oh, I'm so intolerant of intolerance. And I went, oh my gosh. And so, so it really is that funny. Our own criticisms and judgments about something that somebody else is doing is exactly usually what we're in the same process. So that was back in that time when I got that and I started teaching on my patients that I'm like, look, there's look towards depression you've got going on.

It's because you're the exact same as the person you're hating on right now. So let's work on this. You know, something, something very relevant for our current time. I'll tell you current time. Right. Which Seattleites are now calling George W Bush Saint Bush? So so, you know, it's really funny because politics brings that up. Religion brings that up right where you get really judgmental and it's us against them. And I'm different from them. And you know, you start finding. So then I'm able to say thank you for being my teacher.

And I'm on equal ground now. Yeah. Now I'm not going to call this person up and say, look, I just figured out where the same and let's go ahead. T that's that's reconciliation. And unless somebody that's hurt you that deeply, I've been doing a lot of laughing and I'm really serious right now. And unless someone that's hurt you, that deeply shows contrition and shows and demonstrates they're safe again, you don't go around them. You can have good boundaries and forgive. And people get confused by that.

You're not forgiving and condoning behavior, right? You're forgiving another being that's also, I call it a fractal or an aspect of God of the divine. They just have gotten clouded with their own shadow.

Forgiveness Practice and Healing Resources 37:10

Him, right. And when you can say, oh, and it clouds me when I behave in that same way, I lose my connection to the luminous. Oh, right. Thank you for showing that to me. And then you can forgive them easier. And again, not reconciling, not condoning. Right. And that is actually taking what I call the plug out of the bath tub of resentment. It can drain that. You can just feel it like, oh, release. I mean, it's so true. I mean, I in the cases where, you know, reconciliation is appropriate, you know, myself with my own mother, we hadn't talked in years.

You know, she kicked me out of the house when I was 15 years old. I went back asking for help, and she said no, and it destroyed me as a teenager. You know, I was went through a lot of addiction challenges and homelessness and all these things. And so we didn't talk for years after that. And I had this deep insight. It was like it was time for me to forgive her. And I was like 18 or 19 years old at this point. And I knew that I was blaming her for all my problems and everything going on. You know, thankfully, I caught it very early.

Yeah. And I did talk to her on the phone. And I remember when I said, I forgive you, and I, I felt it. I heard this pop through the phone into my brain. It was like literally a loud crack, like a lightning crack. And I just felt this incredible sense of freedom. Yeah. And it's. And as you said, you don't have to. I've forgiven lots of people just in my own mind without calling them. This was one example of many where actually it was on the phone. And now our relationship since then has been wonderful, you know, and it was similar with my parents when I did this whole process with my kids.

All of a sudden I got in this rage with my parents because I saw what can happen when you tell your parents there's been sexual abuse. I saw like, no, it's possible. My parents, of course, don't do any of that. And I went into this rage about it and, and wrote this nasty, toxic letter, like all of this stuff. Right. And my best friend called my dad and said, I'm just warning you, there's a little toxic gram on your way to what could you know, so he could get ready. And my parents were amazing as they held that right.

They just said, we're so sorry. And it was the first time in their lives they never apologized to me for anything, and I was able to really have this beautiful closure. People oftentimes don't get what we've had, Nathan, you know, and I'm telling people, don't expect it, but you can do it from your end and not expect something from the other side, because sometimes people are not skillful enough to be able to meet you. Yeah. You know, in that place my dad offered to come out. I said, well, I'm about to be ready to go in the backcountry.

My backpack's packed and I'm going to go scream at the moon and and bathe naked in the ocean. And I just need to get some of this out of me. Yeah. And he said, I'm coming. And I'm like, well, then you have to sit still. If I decide I have to, to like, say some harsh things to you. And he goes, I'm up for it. And he was. And it turns out because just because he said that I didn't have to write, I instantly forgave him for being able to just even come out and sit present. We had we laughed and laughed while he was here.

We had such a good time. It's taken. It's taken that action, right? It's facing your of it. It's it's you know, the stuff is scary. I mean he'll emotional healing is scary, but it's facing it and having support. You know I want to mention here you said that you you've made your, your program. Available for everyone who, you know, orders this symposium. Talk a little bit about that. What people will get inside of your program is it sounds amazing. Yeah. I'm not talking about the big nine module healing talkers or the trauma through the talker system.

It's the freedom to forgive. And it's that process that I just kind of briefly did where you actually find the person that you're upset with that's hurt you deeply. Right. And you go through and I help you figure out, like, how to find those ego traits, those personality characteristics, and then how to do it. This reflection and process where you find them in you, and then what to do with that next. And it guides you through that. And it's you know, I always tell people forgiveness is not something you hop over everything else to, right.

And also doing emotional work. It is scary when you first contemplate it, but you don't have to go back and relive all this stuff. People are always afraid of that. Like, oh, I'm going to have to go open up a whole bunch of boxes I have really carefully shoved in the back of the closet. Problem is, is there emitting toxic gases into your body anyway, but you don't have to go through them. You know, the hurt model. What I do is I take you through, like, what is the belief system in the meaning you created from that, not the event itself.

The most important part of that, like for me, was perfectionism. If I'm a bad kid and that means that I have this happen to me, then I better darn well be Uber perfect, which is not a very tenable way of living a life. I can tell you. And brought on autoimmunity. So the list and I want to say thank you so much, Doctor Keesha. This this interview was truly incredible. I mean, I didn't even know what to expect and where we were going to go. And you covered so much for people. You know, I want to encourage people to, upgrade to this symposium so you can get her Doctor Keisha's program, but go to doctor Wkyc.com, Dr.

Kesha, keisha.com. She has incredible resources for you there. A 21 day quick start guide. Her books, you can work with her. I just want to encourage people to go there who are ready to dive deeper into this process of emotional healing. And Doctor Keisha, thank you so much. This was truly incredible. I really, really enjoyed our time together. So I really appreciate it. Thank you. Virtual hug to everybody. Yeah. Jennifer and I want to thank everyone for tuning in to the Conquering Cancer Summit.

Please share this with friends and family together, we truly can make a difference for the future of humanity in ending the cancer pandemic. Thank you and I wish you ultimate health and happiness. Be well.