A lot of times people will be worried that like, do I have to relive my trauma? Or I don't remember my childhood very much. I don't remember anything happening, you know?

And that's okay. I always tell people, you don't have to ever really hurt. That's not a thing. And in fact, the more that you talk about your trauma story, the more it gets concrete inside of you.

It becomes, you know, a living, breathing process inside of you. So that's why I always say talk therapy doesn't really work because you don't want to be doing that, right.

You don't want to keep repeating your story of trauma. So what you do is you can look, you can you can start at the beginning or you can start. I teach a tracking process where I say you track your unresolved trauma from the hurt study that I conducted in 2013, and you can take the behavior in your adulthood that's not serving you.

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Today's episode was previously recorded on the Pain Solutions Summit that I hosted. Hi. Hello. Hello, doctor. Keesha, this is such a major honor to be doing your interview and speaking to you.

How are you today? I'm good. Thank you for having me. It's always. It's always such an honor to be invited. Us and your your background so far. Out of all the interviews I've done, this is the most captivating.

And I really just. Just enjoy everything about your background. And it's so great. So, for everybody to introduce yourself because you were so a larger than life.

And I just want everybody to know who you are. Oh, so I started out as a as a registered nurse at the age of 19. And then when I was about 30, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

And that took me from the sort of high intensity, adrenaline junkie medical world that I was in the intensive care unit and trauma, like all of the things that I did for about ten years, I was a skydiver.

I was a marathon runner and raising four small children. And then, like my patients always say, all of a sudden I woke up one day with ten extra pounds all over my joints and just puffy and red, and it was like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer bunny.

And I went in and saw someone, and she asked me if I had a family history of autoimmune disease, and I said, yeah, I think my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis and in fact was in a wheelchair and died in the 50s at that.

And she said, well, there are two prescriptions, one for methotrexate and one for a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Come back when you are worse, not if and will change your meds.

And unfortunately, that's what still being said today. And you know, so I went home and thought, okay, there must be another way. And I started looking in PubMed for the medical research, you know, on are there other ways of treating autoimmune disease and rheumatoid arthritis?

And I found a compelling article on yoga and autoimmunity and went to my first yoga class the next day. And in the course of that yoga class, as as yoga teachers are wont to do, I, I'm holding a posture with the class and he's wandering around the studio and he's talking about prior Vedic medicine, which he said just enough, you know, it's the sister science of yoga comes from the same place, out of the Vedas, Vedic texts, you know, it's 5 to 10,000 years old.

And he said, enough about this, this medical branch, you know, of, medicine that I thought it was intriguing. And I went home and looked it up and I it was kind of revolutionary, this idea that we're all different, you know, because I was brought up in the Western medical paradigm where you treat the disease, not the person, and the disease has triaging and hierarchal and decision trees and you match, you know, the pharmacological agents in the laboratory testing to the disease, not the person.

And you're Veda take a different look at it and said, well, here we're all different. And you actually treat the imbalance, you know, of the person's constitutional type, which isn't just physical, it's also emotional and mental and spiritual and energetic and, you know, and the punch coaches these five layers of us.

And I thought, gosh, that makes so much sense. And, you know, and a lot of patients came through my mind of ways that we fail, you know, our patients and the way that we do things.

And so I thought, oh, and I started learning about my own constitutional type. And in the course of attending yoga, I started learning to meditate. And one day I was in this in this meditation and this word autoimmune kept splitting forward.

And I thought, oh, no, that means I'm doing this to myself. I'm actually kind of committing suicide in a societally acceptable manner. And I asked my, you know, myself like, when is the first time I wanted to die?

Because that wasn't true in the current moment for me. And that was an interesting way of thinking about it, rather than how do I get out of my suffering as quickly as possible, you know, like, why and how did the start?

And so the other thing I Vedic medicine taught me in that, you know, in that period of time was the autoimmune disease is undigested anger, as I remember thinking, like I'm not an angry person.

And maybe that that does non that aversion to anger and not wanting to be considered angry had something to do with this. Like maybe I didn't feel anger and allow it to express itself and it was getting put into my body.

And so as I was in that meditation that day, I started going backwards, thinking about this undigested anger and dying. And when did I want to die? And and I landed on this ten year old girl version of myself that was being sexually abused by the vice principal of my elementary school.

And I remember looking at her and thinking, oh, she did. She wanted off the planet. You know, there was something happening that she couldn't understand.

I had tried to tell my mom, my dad was out to sea in the Navy, but I didn't have the right words. I didn't understand it. I didn't know what was really going on.

And I just said I didn't want to go to school. Right. And so I thought, I haven't really felt angry about that at the time. I thought something I must be doing wrong because he was telling me that, that I was bad kid. That's why this happened.

And so I thought, I haven't really processed this, and maybe this has something to do with what's going on right now. And so I went straight into therapy doing some deep trauma work, and my rheumatoid arthritis was gone within six months without ever taking any medications.

And so that took me back to school, you know. So I became a nurse practitioner, family practice medicine, specialize in integrative medicine. I had been out of school and had a private practice for about three months when a patient came in and had gastroesophageal reflux disease.

And of course, the American Medical Association's standard of care is to give them a proton pump inhibitors, you know, and I thought then as I started scratching the surface and asking him questions, I started realizing he had some deep underlying anxiety.

And, you know, and I thought, gosh, the model of care that I'm in dictates that I then also like, refer him out for counseling, which he was already in counseling.

And I asked, and, you know, the next step would be to put him on a medication to manage his anxiety and to give him a drug, you know, that has a whole bunch of side effects and isn't really going to take care of the problem.

That's at the base of this. And so I went back to school and I became a therapist, and I'm now certified in five different modalities of trauma, undoing trauma, the effects of trauma, you know, psychotherapy as well as a certified MDMA assisted psychotherapy, practitioner.

And then I also got a master's degree in IRE Veda and board certified in functional medicine. I kind of think about functional medicine as I are in English a little bit and, and have this integrative, you know, medical practice that, that really you cannot separate the mind from the body, from the heart, from the spirit, or from your energy system.

And so it integrates all of that and looks at the person that has the imbalance rather than the disease process. I still get like, even though I've written solving the autoimmune puzzle and its companion textbook, and I stay in there and I do these Facebook Live videos every Wednesday, and I say, I don't treat the disease right.

I still get every week questions what's the what's the right diet for psoriasis? What would you tell me to eat for my EMS? You know, it's like we are so steeped in that way of thinking that there's a modality for the disease that everybody should follow, like, here's the super nutrient, you know, or the and so we, we even bring like our natural medical modalities into the Western way of thinking.

And so that's, that's why I practice integrative medicine is like, let's get to the human that has the imbalance in the context of the environment that they live in.

Right, right. I when I got a PhD in sexology along the way too, that that was very exciting for me when I read that just, just that was very exciting.

Wow, what a journey. What an absolutely, incredible journey that you have. And, and to be able to identify all of this trauma and, I guess you would say that everybody has trauma.

Yeah. Right. So, yeah, that's that's, you know, like, you hear my story and I talk about sexual abuse as a child. Right? And there are a lot of people that have endured that, form of trauma, but it kind of places trauma in the word in the, in the category of the way that we a lot of times think about trauma when we hear it domestic violence, physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological emotional abuse, neglect, lack of nourishment, abandonment and childhood.

You know, attachment disorders, things like that, that we think, oh, those are traumatic, right? Those are you could think of as capital T traumas and they are absolutely.

There's no question. Right. This, this causes has a very high risk of causing post-traumatic stress disorder, of having a shrinkage in the front part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex and the growth, in the volume of the limbic system, particularly the right side of the amygdala, as the person grows up and is very hypervigilant, looking like, am I safe?

Am I respected? Am I going to get my needs met and constantly like looking and and the frequency and the radar is sensing for that constantly that can create that.

That hyper vigilant mind can create a hyper vigilant endocrine system and immune system, which can lead to things like autoimmunity and cancer. And science shows us that.

And I can talk about that. But there's also lowercase t trauma and lowercase t trauma. Everybody has had. And it's the different kinds of experiences that we go through in childhood that we would never classify as traumatic.

You know, sometimes I'll give the example of missing a spelling word in a spelling bee, like, let's say you're in fourth grade, right? And you're everyone's in a line and they're and there's a spelling bee happening, and you miss a word.

And the class laughs, you know. And so there's a moment right there because the, the brain is wired to know that if you're put on the outside of the firelight circle and tribal days, then the sabertooth tiger can eat you.

So to be rejected from the group, from the tribe, from the community to feel rejected or betrayed by it. That's a big trauma. Like a big trauma. But we don't classify that as traumatic.

So in that moment where you, you know, a classroom is laughing because you just didn't show up in, you know, in a way that was expected in that moment.

You have a lot of choices like that. Each child will have a different mind and have a different context and different way of perceiving the world, and they'll come up with a different meaning to go with that event.

But you know, the the sympathetic nervous system that will go into the freeze state. Children don't usually go into fight or flight because we don't have power, we don't have autonomy, we freeze.

And so, you know, some a class lasts it. You know, a teacher laughs at you. Someone in authority. Right. Then there's going to be a freeze moment in your nervous system right then.

And some panic that occurs and embarrassment and shame depending on what your what you're deciding to do in that moment. And then you're going to attach a meaning to it.

Now one child might say, oh, they're laughing. I can get attention through laughter. And so then they they become a class clown, like they do something else to make the class laugh and that then that becomes a sort of shield for them against shame.

Right. And so they make a decision and meaning a belief is created in that moment and just a snap and a behavior gets attached to it. Right then another child might shrink into themselves in humiliation and say, I am never going to have that happen to me again.

And they began studying like crazy, and they become an academic right. And their brain becomes the thing that they shield behind. That was me and then another.

And then of course, that's not any better because it's, you know, it's it's something that you're using the cover up your essence, but who you are really at core, another child might have that moment and then make up a meaning that it's not safe to be in front of people.

And so then they make a decision that their behavior that they have for the rest of their lives is to be invisible. And they don't talk, and they're shy and they begin to stutter.

Right. So these are all ways that we have that are choices in childhood to events that we can't understand what just happened. And there's not a well attached, grounded, well attuned caregiver with us 24 over seven to help us navigate those moments.

And there are literally thousands of them as we're growing up. And so those are not called trauma in the literature or by a therapist. Right. But they are traumatic.

Those moments are very traumatic. They don't ever talk about like, if if parents get divorced and then, a child, I mean, the stereotype, right? A child is sitting on the front porch with his baseball hat on in his baseball glove, and dad never shows up.

You know, that doesn't get listed on the list of traumas, but it's very traumatic for a child who's going to make up a meaning right then and put a behavior to it.

And so each of these, we, you know, that get ingrained into our bodies and into our nervous systems, they create a button that then can be pushed over and over and over again in adulthood.

So adulthood becomes the time where we get to gain the wisdom of our childhood trauma. We get to unpack it and track it in the way that I was just describing and go back and get that little child and and give them a big hug and do some attachment, healing and repair, you know, and then continue to do that over and over and over again for that little part of you until that button no longer has any wires to it, and your brain has now rewired, and you're firing differently so that your nervous system isn't quite so jumpy.

This is, this is very emotional because I'm, I'm I'm actually so much of that child and so many pieces I could see with so much, trauma and and coming from smaller villages and, developing countries who don't have the resources that, the American children have.

And even here in this country, there's so many children with all of those traumas that you have talked about and this, this, this really kind of numb wants me to find out what is the first step, what is the first step in healing this childhood trauma?

A lot of times people will be worried that like, do I have to relive my trauma or I don't remember my childhood very much. I don't remember anything happening, you know?

And that's okay. I always tell people, you don't have to ever really. That's not a thing. And in fact, the more that you talk about your trauma story, the more it gets concrete inside of you.

It becomes, you know, a living, breathing process inside of you. So that's why I always say talk therapy doesn't really work because you don't want to be doing that, right.

The from the hurt study that I conducted in 2013. And you can take the behavior in your adulthood that's not serving you. An example of this is one time I had a woman come to me with, Hashimoto's thyroiditis, and she wanted to reverse her autoimmune disease.

And I always called trauma the missing piece of the autoimmune puzzle. You know, that there's there's a that's the part that hasn't gotten addressed, that people are taking a lot of supplements and they're using a lot of like vagus nerve stimulators and devices, and they're learning how to tap.

And they're they know that trauma has some point there, but they're undoing the effect of their dysregulation rather than getting it at the core so that they don't flare anymore.

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And so she she came in and she was very sophisticated in her knowledge. She listened to me read my book and she wanted to reverse her Hashimoto's. And I said, okay.

And so we, you know, we take it from, like I do, genetic testing on everybody. I do, we look at gut health but food sensitivities it toxic load and, and like all of that for sure.

And I look at how the nervous system is wired and what it fires against. And so when we started, you know, when I asked her a question like this is let our viewers can do right now, is there something in your life that like what makes you angry, what makes you sad?

What makes you anxious? You can start right there. You know, what's the theme that you have? Is it I'm not smart enough or I'm not good enough or I'm not, because one of the things that I do immunity is I always say there are four P's.

You know, perfectionism is always there whether the person knows it or not. People pleasing is always there. Holding on to the poison of past pain is always there.

And then also the pitta dosha and I are Vedic medicine because it's a lot of fire in that person. Right? And so there's going to be some reactivity in a person.

And so usually and the people have a very sharp intelligence. And so usually if I say is there a behavior that's bothering you that triggers you, that gets other people upset with you or that you find that you're reacting against yourself and, you know, sometimes it's not being able to follow a diet, you know, so self-sabotaging behaviors, hers was shopping.

And she said, I really have a hard time like, I, I soothe myself through shopping and I go into deep credit card debt and and it's out of control right now.

And it causes me so much stress and so we went into, her story and, you know, I asked I asked her to go back to the last time that she'd done shopping.

And, you know, we went through this whole process that I do. And it turns out at the root of it, the age that where that started was she was a seven year old little girl, and it was her birthday.

And she got hand-me-down clothes from her older sisters that her mother gave her for her birthday. And she made up a meaning right there that she wasn't worthy or had enough status in the family to warrant new clothes.

Because she was the third of three girls. And so, you know, and the clothes were perfectly good in her mother's eyes, so they should just be passed down that it was her birthday, and she thought she should have gotten something special and so her, her belief system was, I'm not special because my mom doesn't spend money on me and only spends it on my older sisters.

And so the hand-me-down clothes were a big trauma for her, big trauma. And so the decision that she made was that she would spend every penny she had on making sure she felt special.

And so she, you know, once we healed that, then she was able to have more management of like, her funds and, and not get into so much trouble and she didn't constantly go into the triggering of I'm not important enough, I'm not special.

And so then her nervous system wasn't in that space all the time. And sure enough, within about six months her Hashimoto's is gone. Wow, that is such an incredible parental story.

I it's like, I'm just kind of seeing my life go through what you're saying, because, again, living in a country and and I was the middle child, so there was a lot of personalities. And, and this does change.

Trauma does change the way your brain is, the architecture of your brain. Is there a way to change that? Yeah. As soon as you get to that place where, you know, if you feel like you're a zebra being chased by a lion and you're always about to get eaten, you know, and then you're sending you're.

This is all perceptions, right? You don't really have a lion on your tail. Hopefully, a typical person. And so, you know, if you're perceiving like, I'm always struggling, I'm never able to catch up.

I'm always overwhelmed. You see that? That those aren't traumatic thoughts. Those are just kind of normal thoughts in a culture that's very, very oriented toward productivity.

And so, you know, research shows us that even like PTSD and a perceived stress index scale of always perceiving yourself is overwhelmed and unable to keep up is going to make the same changes in your brain.

It's that shrinkage in prefrontal cortex, the growth in the amygdala. And so what? Once you heal the perception, see, this isn't about, going after your vagus nerve or tapping yourself out of it.

Those are fantastic ways of getting you to come down from an an emotional tidal wave. But what you want to do is try and make it so that you don't perceive yourself into the tidal wave.

And so you really get it at the place where you have calm waters, right? And once you have learned how to do that and you can move yourself from sympathetic nervous system arousal to parasympathetic nervous system arousal, and and you're doing it because you believe yourself to be safe, good enough, deserving, worthy, lovable.

All of those things have been repaired. Now you have these calm waters that aren't triggering that immune system, that nervous system, endocrine system.

And sure enough, the architecture of the brain changes. You get a growth in your prefrontal cortex and a shrinkage in your limbic system, the amygdala.

And you're no longer walking around like this right now. You're grounded and stable. You have secure attachment rather than anxious or avoidant. And so that takes time.

It's not a 1 or 1 and done kind of a situation. It's a practice. Right. What what what are some of the tools that somebody can actually use to change this child?

You can't change it. But I guess to make yourself not to have that trigger, you're not gonna be able to think yourself out of it. You know, like the same brain that made up the meanings in early life.

You can't put that same brain in charge of changing, right? Because that that brain is the one that has the thought, you know, and so you have to have a I always say it's borrowing a brain.

So somebody that's skilled at being able to track patterns and track heard and you know, that's that, that's the thing is, is you have to be able to have somebody that can do that.

That isn't just going to say, how are you feeling? And then you tell them your story and then they give you a couple tools and then you go away because you're working with that therapist in that moment from your adult brain.

Right. And then the therapist is giving you an adult brain cognitive kind of a, you know, therapy to work on. And as long as you're in your adult brain, that will work.

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I remember the imagination of the right side of the brain. We can imagine ourselves into catastrophic situations, right? We can imagine ourselves to be unsafe, imagine ourselves to be all kinds of things.

And so you can train the brain to actually imagine itself into safety and, you know, to be able to notice the places that there. If there is a space for gratitude and appreciation and you can actually, you know, really create pathways that are super highways toward that, instead of having your super highways be toward trauma patterns.

So you're you're making the trauma patterns be a little bit more like deer tracks in the forest. They they're there, but they're not as traveled. And you can make your super highway with lots of lights.

And you know that the speed can go really fast towards the other side. Right. And so plant medicine is really good for that. And so I work with that in group, settings and with couples and individuals.

And then I also do several different modalities. And I just pick the one that's right for the person at the time. So a good sort of first step, there's a really nice little, practice that I like to do.

Excuse me. My puppy is barking. So, so one of the things that, a practice that I love to have people do is for 24 hours just and then continue it after 24 hours, but for 24 hours, really start noticing the context and the quality of your speech.

But one of the things that we don't realize is we have a subconscious and an unconscious. Monologue that goes on in the mind all the time. And it's really good to develop what in in meditation practices you call the observer's mind, you know, and you have compassionate curiosity for your inner experience of self-inquiry.

And so you just start with just observing, like the quality of your communication to yourself, about yourself and about everything that you're experiencing in life.

And there's a nice way that you can really take this and, and make it really land for you is you take a, a handful or a little bag of dark pebbles that you gather and another little handful or bag of white pebbles or light pebbles that you gather and you sit on your floor in your room or at a table at the end of each day.

And you go through, like, all the thoughts that you had that were life nourishing, right? Positive, I suppose. But they were they were, as you contemplated where that thought emerged from, where it went, the action that was attached to it, it felt nourishing and supportive to you or to others in your life and to life itself.

And you put a white pebble in the middle, and then you contemplate any places that are the opposite. You know, where it's more resistance to life. You know, life isn't on my side.

I can't ever catch a break. I'm never going to get better. I'm I don't have enough energy. I can't do this. You know, things are so expensive. The world is going to hell in a handbasket.

You know, like, I wish my spouse were different. How come I have all of these issues? You know, you put you put a dark pebble in the middle for each one of those.

And you notice in the very beginning of this practice, you're going to have a lot of black pebbles and and not very many white ones, because there's a pattern of thought, a pattern of mind that you'll start to be able to see.

And as you do this consistently with the white pebbles and the black pebbles, you'll, in the day time start to catch yourself like, oh, that's a dark pebble.

Thought, I'm going to switch it, right? I'm going to change the channel. And then you start realizing you actually do have control over that. You can move from lack of nourishment to nourishment really quickly inside of your own system.

And and, you know, if you're having a thought about, I wish my spouse weren't like that, then you could you could switch it up, and then you could think about something positive about your spouse that you can feel grateful for and appreciate.

And I guarantee there is something. And then you can also do the same about your own body. You know, if you say, oh, I can't believe how much weight I've gained or I can't believe that what's happening here? Where's my hormones?

Oh my gosh, oh my eyes, you know, and whatever it is, like you know, oh I'm bloated. I look like I'm eight months pregnant. You know, you can switch it immediately to oh my gosh, I mean, I have teeth.

I can brush every morning and every day when I get up, my eyes open and I can see this amazingly beautiful world. And I have a voice that I can communicate and I can communicate love to those I love.

And I can be in this present moment with gratitude and appreciation for all that is white, pebble, white pebble, white pebble, white couple. All right.

And when you do that, you're actually undoing a secondary byproduct of a trauma pattern. You're rearranging how you carry all of your life experience with you.

And you can notice it like in your in your face, you know, if you have a downturn mouth and there's a lot of, you know, so like, my shoulders kind of slope forward.

My every yoga teacher, when I became a yoga teacher, my yoga instructors were always like, we need to get that back. You know? And and it's from trauma, my childhood of protecting my heart.

And I work with it, but I don't I don't like pay attention and judge it and get upset by it. I just go, oh, there's compassion there for the protection of the heart in that little one and then move forward, right?

Instead of feeling frustrated by it or whatever else, you know. So it's kind of this serenity prayer comes forward with knowing what you can control and what you can, and knowing that was, you know, having the wisdom to know the difference.

So you start to learn to know that the only control you really have in life is over your own thought process. And the white pebble, dark pebble thing is a really nice way.

And then you can take that bag of black pebbles that show up in the middle. And that's a great, you know, a great way to start with a therapist. Like I, I'm noticing I have this automatic negative thought that I ruminate on and I on my when I conducted the healing unresolved trauma study, it.

What came from that was the hurt model. And what I said is there's this initial trauma pattern that will happen in your nervous system, with your meanings and your beliefs and your feelings that are locked in your body.

Just kind of what we are. You talked about. But then there's on the model, a bifurcation from the initial hurt circle to a choice in adulthood where you can go to the the side of the model.

And it's a trauma looping pattern that I call maladaptive memory processing, looping where you do it just how you've always done it. So you have the automatic negative thought, you have the feeling come up, panic, anxiety, anger, resentment, frustration, whatever it is, sadness.

And there's going to be an automatic negative thought that's deeply ingrained. Now at this point, if you're an adult and some rumination that happens or you keep cycling on it, you know, research says that we all of our thoughts, 94% of them every day or recycled 94%, you know, we don't have news, not really very often because we're so to these these loops, right, that are ruminating all the time.

And what happens is over time that leads to disease because you keep activating your nervous system into the zebra being chased by a lion. And that's not a sustainable way for your body to be able to age appropriately.

So then you get an opportunity to go to the right on the model, which in the middle of it it says a willingness to self confront. It's a point in life where you go every time I'm unhappy or something's going wrong in my life, I'm there.

Maybe, maybe I have something to do with this. And maybe it isn't all of like God or other people or, you know, or that my experiences, you know, my traumas.

And so now you have an opportunity to to shift that and you get into freedom from your automatic negative thought looping. And we call that adaptive memory processing.

That's called post-traumatic growth. It's where you get some wisdom from the trauma that you've went through. So childhood is the place where we have the events.

Adulthood is the place where we can take those events and mine them into gems of wisdom, pearls of wisdom, and you don't do that automatically. You have to have a willingness to self confront, to engage in that compassion, that curiosity, and to get out of the place of blaming and shaming and saying, I didn't have enough or, you know, whatever it was, it's like, oh, okay.

And so that's that's where I start with people. It's it's interesting how childhood trauma can really just kind of take the stage as you go on in life and, and, and probably change not just who you have become, but as you as you go through life, the choices that you make, and it's, it's, it's interesting because as children, we, we look at our parents, so we look at, our surroundings and that's all we know.

And as you say, if the kid laughs at you in school or the teacher says something mean, you know, you forget about that, but you didn't really forget about it.

Somewhere down the road, you might end up with some sort of immune problem, inflammation in your body. Which, by the way, is that opportunity on Joseph Campbell's hero's journey to have to reflect on all of this.

Right. So it's a gift the moment. Right? Right. That's the thing. Yeah. Right. Right. So I guess the the reflection and, for the PMF summit, at least we have PMF to help with some of the inflammation and some of the, the pain, the physical pain that comes with all of this.

Right. So what are some other tools, that people can use other than the, the pebble and and and this, this, this mapping process. What are your thoughts on eMDR?

Yeah. So eMDR is where you take the the black pebbles into a therapist and you say, here's what I'm noticing. Right. And and so then you can like, I'm an eMDR certified therapist and brain spotting.

And I did a two year internship in the Enneagram. I'm in a three and a half year, training for human design. Like the all of these things are helpful modalities, right?

For real. And and I do, heart centered clinical hypnotherapy, like, they're all so useful. The thing that I think people get a little confused about is and I do a lot of speaking from stages to doctors, you know, teaching them the impact of trauma on the endocrine system.

And I'll say, you have to stop telling your patients to get rid of their stress, because that's like telling a mom who has a special needs child or is caregiving an elderly parent.

You know, or going through a promotion at work, you know, like, what are they going to do, throw those things away? You know, no, you have to change your relationship to your stress, right?

I'm one of the busiest people I know, and I don't think of myself as stressed. It doesn't cause me stress. It's like I have so much unbounded gratitude for the time period I live in that I get to do what I do, like I it's just nothing but appreciation.

And so you can shift, you know, the way that you are with that. And so as you just noted, like PMF or for removing pain, it's really hard to do the work of spirit and energy, body and heart and mind when your body is screaming and so right, and so what?

What I always teach my, health coach certification students. I run the Academy for health. If our integrative medicine health coach certification program.

I tell my students like if if your client's adrenals and hormones and gut microbiome are imbalanced, then no amount of therapy is actually going to stick.

So eMDR won't really work over a long period of time. If the physical structure right. If there's over like a ten out of ten pain, it's hard for them to go in and do the things that I was just talking about.

And then on the by the same token, you know, you can't keep chasing the endocrine system imbalances and fixing them if you're not addressing the reasons they're going off in the first place.

So it's it's like you have to do that integration process. Right. And so the tools like, devices and things like that are so important for being able and like tapping, you know, all of those things.

Like I said, when I was talking about the tidal wave of being swamped. Right. They help you get out of from underneath the tidal wave, of being swamped by emotional pain, physical pain, mental pain, spiritual pain, and then you can do the work of cutting the wire that's causing it.

Right? Right. Yeah. Right. So so I guess there's not a one size fits all. There's not. It's going to, you know, like it just isn't. I guess people would really have to reach out to, and, and be comfortable with a therapist because you, you can't you can't open yourself if you don't really feel this, this, this comfort, this comfort from.

Well, the other thing that I talk about on stages to, to, you know, lay people is, you know, I've heard probably at this point thousands of times from people therapy doesn't work for me or I've already worked on that in therapy for years.

I've worked on that. I'm, I'm, I'm good. Right. And yet they're in front of me with a raging autoimmune illness. And so I know that they're not done. In fact, I can say that at the age of 57, I've done years of thought, you know, therapy.

And I will never be done because there's layers and layers and layers and layers. Right. And so what I always tell people is like, if if you walk into a store or a shoe store and you're looking for purple boots and you know you have something in your mind that you want, like these purple boots and you find some purple boots, you try them on and you go, oh, these are so cute.

And you walk down the hall a little bit and you look at them in the mirror, and then you say, gosh, you know, they kind of pinch. I, I don't think I would last very long.

And these purple boots are so cute, but they're not going to work for me. And you put them back on the shelf, and then you leave your shoes on the floor because you say to yourself, shoes don't work for me, and you never wear them again, right?

That's that's the same thing. Like, you can't go to therapy and have a really rotten therapist or someone that doesn't align with you, right or right, because I think a lot of times people have this like magic fairy godmother image in their head that they just have to drop themselves into a chair in a therapist's office.

And it's like, I'm here now, you fix me. And that is not how it works. No, that's not movies. That is all. In the movies where yeah, yeah, it's not and it's not that way.

So you're walking in and saying, I am here to learn to take responsibility for the way that I think and feel and behave in this world. And I'm here to try and see if you're good at tracking my patterns and helping me to undo all of it.

Right. But it's definitely, I'm doing the work, not you. And so, you know, as a client, that's what you need to be saying to yourself. Like, I'm here to do my work.

The therapist is there to help coach you and guide you, you know, and I'm use another metaphor often where I'll say, like a basketball team, the coach doesn't get out and do the three throws.

You know, the free throws, they get you the method and then you go practice. If you're going to be a good player. So they they're never out on the court.

Never. Right. Right right. The work is the work that you have to do. And, and I I've done therapy and I've really gotten to a really good place. But I sent my husband to, therapy in his first therapist, which is just awful for him.

And he when he was coming home, just worse off and just angry every day and, all these childhood trauma. And I said, you know, listen, you don't have to stay.

I said, you're not being forced to relive this stuff. And then don't be angry with somebody who's not helping you to process. Okay? So he did very well with eMDR and I'm actually very nervous to go do it because I feel like I've put a good handle on a good cover on where I am, and I don't know if I necessarily want to open all of this, but I come from a family of five children, the middle child and my sister, who is the oldest.

She has Hashimoto's. She's got autoimmune stuff, but she refused to get therapy. My sister has said the therapy is for people who have given up on and coming testing and coming from the mindset of when I was growing up, only crazy people went to therapy and now I say, you're crazy if you don't go to therapy.

So it's so it's like this. All therapy modalities are not the same, and not all therapists are the same. And what you're looking for, you know, is it's, I think shopping for a therapist is as important as shopping for a spouse.

You know, like, you really want to find the right fit, and you want somebody that is not your buddy, and you actually do want to feel kind of crappy in the beginning.

It's normal to to feel some anger and and sadness. It's as you start noticing like, oh, I had no idea this was running me so badly, you know? And so it get you there will be dark before the dawn.

So just to have correct expectations that that can happen and, and, you know, just making sure that you're seeing someone that holds your feet to the fire, you're not supposed to see people year in and year out.

That's that means that you've over stayed, that you know, that it's time to to do a different modality. And so or with a different person, you really want to be someone that's going to stretch you almost to the point where you can't do it like that's that means that you're you're getting what you need, right?

Right. You're ready to fly out that nest, and go into the big open space and finally be your own. This was, definitely, the eye opening and heart opening for me. And, I really appreciate having this, this, this, this moment with you.

Really? For other people who want to reach out to you, how would somebody find you? Doctor wkyc.com. Dr. ksat.com. And then my book, Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle.

I wrote it so that people would read it ahead of time so that they really understand, like the framework that I use. And in it's you when you come and work with me or you're coming in as a team member, it's not an authoritarian, right.

I expect you to come in saying, I want to take responsibility. Put me in, coach. You know, so, I mean, right, this was, this was wonderful. Thank you so much for taking the time to to do this.

You're such a beautiful spirit. And it really just came through. And, like I said, this is such an honor to be able to do this. Thank you. So thanks for the work you do in the world.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health.

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Healing Hidden Trauma: Transformative Tools for a Healthier You

William Pawluk, MD, MSc

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C

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