Managing The Emotional TRAUMA Of Lyme Disease

Everybody. Welcome back to another amazing interview. In the healing from, from Lyme disease, naturally summit. And today I have Doctor Kisha, and she is amazing.

I was reading through her bio. First off, her website is totally cool, but I was reading through her bio and she’s done so many things that I can’t believe that anybody can achieve that much stuff in such a short time on earth.

So she’s been a keynote speaker. She’s done Ted talks, she’s written books, she has a full practice. And why I feel so passionate about the work that she’s doing is because it’s an area that is, well, I think it’s very underserved.

It’s sort of managing the emotional traumas that are associated in our lives. And she has a cool story. I’m hoping that she’ll share some of her backdrop with us today, and mostly just to try to highlight how important managing your emotional, your emotions are in in and how it it it’s integrated in your overall health and health profile.

And so with that, let me bring Doctor Kisha on. Welcome to the summit, doctor. Keisha, thank you so much for joining us. It’s my pleasure and honor to be here.

Thank you. So, give us a little bit of the backdrop. There’s a reason why you you changed the course of your river to get into emotional healing and have made it so much a part of your life and, and your practice and and what I’ve noticed with people, other people that we’ve interviewed and we’ve had on that, oftentimes when they have personal experiences, it seems to change their course and it makes them a lot more authentic in their own practices, in their lives and then and how they work with other people that may have kind of similar experiences of sort.

So if you’d be so kind, grab the audience and, and let us know a little bit about, you know, how you came to be and what you’re what you’re focusing on these days.

It’s true. The the course of my river has changed a few times in my lifetime. So I started out in medicine as a 19 year old nurse, actually, and and for ten years worked in the high intensity side of like balloon pump team, thoracic ICU, those kinds of things like real high adrenaline junkie, kind of a a life.

I was raising four children and a marathon runner and just really couldn’t, couldn’t do enough, you know, and and then one day and this is the way my patients always describe it to.

And I’m just going to put this as a caveat. It’s not really true, but it’s how it’s experience is. One day I woke up woke up overnight sick, you know, and, we know that it can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years to get a full blown autoimmune disease.

But I woke up one morning with ten extra pounds of fluid and puffiness and redness and pain over my joints. And, you know, I was like the Energizer bunny.

According to my friends. And it was as if someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer bunny. So I got in to see a doctor, and in the course of the history taking process, she asked me if I had autoimmunity in my history.

And, you know, I said that my grandfather had it, you know, and he had actually already died by the time I was born. He died at the age I am now at just 56. So, you know, I thought, I believe he had rheumatoid arthritis and was wheelchair bound, you know, with it.

And she said, well, that’s what you have. And so, you know, here are two prescriptions, one for methotrexate and one for a, strong non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug.

Come back when you’re worse than if and will change your meds, you know, and so I, I just remember on the way, you know, out of the of her office door going, well, just hang on just a second.

Like, I’m really, really disciplined. I make my own food. I’m a runner. Is there anything besides these medications? And she said, no, I’m afraid you don’t, you know, kind of join this elite club and had drawn the short end of the genetic, you know, straw.

And so I remember on my way home thinking there had to be a different way of looking at this, that the traditional Western medical framework that I had been trained and, and, practiced and didn’t have any answers for me.

And so I got home and I started looking online for research articles. And in PubMed I found one on yoga and autoimmune disease and went to my first yoga class the next day.

And in the process of that very first class, the the teacher, as he’s wandering through the studio and we’re holding our poses, you know, started saying things about invader and innovative medicine as a sister science of yoga.

Its 10,000 year old framework of medicine that comes out of India and, you know, I it was intriguing enough that when I got home, I went back on the computer and looked it up and what I discovered was all those thousands of years ago, they had said that we are not all the same, which is very contrary to the way that we’re taught in Western medicine.

You know, we have a disease process with an ICD nine. That’s what it was then. Now it’s ICD ten, but an ICD ten code. And then from there, here’s the list of medications that you can choose from.

Here’s the labs right. It’s like a little cookbook of triaging that includes meds and labs. And it doesn’t go into individualization. And this was the first time I’d been confronted with that idea.

And the other thing that they said was that autoimmune diseases and digestive anger. And I remember, you know, really sitting back in my chair with that one and thinking that I’m not an angry person and then thinking, oh, I’m a people pleaser.

I consonant people pleaser, and I wouldn’t I wouldn’t allow myself to be angry because it’s a negative emotion and not allowed. And so I thought that may be a clue.

And so in the course of of taking these yoga classes, I decided to become a yoga teacher and, and learn how to meditate. And one day as I was meditating, this word autoimmune was dancing in front of my my awareness.

And I kind of swatted away and, and I finally started looking at it and, and I thought, oh, auto means I’m attacking myself. And so I’m trying to commit suicide, basically in a societally acceptable manner is the way that I really grasped it.

And I thought, but I don’t want to die right now. So, so time in my life that I did. And that was a really important question for me to ask myself instead of, how do I get out of this as quickly as possible?

What is happening? Well, you know, what is it here to tell me? And so I followed this little question backwards on, and I call it like the golden breadcrumb trail of memories.

And what I was trying to find was, is there a time in my life when I did want to die and I landed on this ten year old girl version of myself who is being sexually abused by the vice principal of the elementary school that I was attending.

And when I looked at her, I thought, oh, she did. She wanted off the planet not necessarily to die, but just didn’t understand what was going on. Had tried to tell if you teachers had tried to tell my mom, I want my dad was out to sea in the Navy and nothing made any sense to me.

And and, you know, it was the vice principal who says publicly that there is a person in authority who’s there to protect children. And then this is happening, and he’s saying it’s because you’re a bad kid, you know?

And so nothing made sense to me. And I just remember getting a very strong connection to the angelic realm at that time. You know, like things in the human world aren’t make sense.

So I make friends with this other dimension and getting very, very key in and tuned in to that frequency. And, you know, and just kind of like, can you just take me home now?

I don’t want to be here. And that’s a really interesting pattern in that bang that set up. I had a couple of near-death experiences through my life. You know, I think it’s very easy for me to step out of this life now because of that time period.

But the other thing that when I landed on that and really witnessed it, I thought, oh, she did want to die. And maybe my cells took on that programing.

And, you know, science tells us it can take 20 years to form a full autoimmune illness. So it was as if a turkey timer went off. And of me, it was 20 years, you know, you’re done.

Here you go. Here’s your pick it out. And so, you know, I thought, okay, so this needs to be healed and went after it with all the voracity, you know, the energy that I had going towards marathon running and everything else in my life, I went towards this and really healed it up.

And my autoimmune disease was gone within six months and it has never returned. And, you know, the power of the messaging, and I don’t want anyone to hear this and say, oh, so you’re saying this is my fault, right?

Because this is a this is an outside of blame and shame. This is a complete there are messages that we give subconsciously and unkind to our physical system.

And now your Vedic medicine says that we’re more than just our physical body. We have this physical system, but then we also have our energy body and then our emotional and mental and higher consciousness and spiritual layers, five layers to us.

And if we’re toxic in any of them, then we don’t get access to that final line, which is this complete relationship with the divine. And, you know, so what what I got was, oh, this emotion layer was toxic.

And so it was affecting through my energy body to my organ systems and my genetics, how they were going to respond and how are they going to express themselves.

And as soon as I changed that, what was going on there through my energy system, this calmed down that. So the mind and the body are more than just a trite mind body medicine link up.

You know they’re, they really are. They can’t be separated. They’re unified. They’re one. So it was a very big fork in my road and change the tributary play the direction of my flow into okay.

This instead of working on acute care and hospice, which I really love, you know, I thought, let’s bring this paradigm of medicine that includes spiritual, emotional, mental, environmental, family, community and solve to the front end of life rather than, you know, like in hospice when we get really good medical care, when all that’s included, we have a terminal illness in order to access that.

So that’s what took me back to school for, a long time. For that reason. Wow. And thank you so much for sharing that, there’s so much I that emotion that that I felt in your story as you were talking.

First, I felt sad that here’s this young child of ten whose childhood was affected in a way that at that moment it was sort of life or death. But you don’t have the intellectual and emotional, support at that age to understand what all that means.

But still those emotions are captured. It makes me feel. And the line people out there listening today can certainly appreciate, because oftentimes in our own counseling, in our own work, in our clinic, we hear, why me? Why now?

And also, you know, they may have been exposed to Lyme and or the co-infections. They’ve been bitten or influenced somehow 20 years ago. But it why did it happen now, 20 years later.

Right. And then there’s often talk about, well, you know, you’ve got all these stressors in your life now and you, you know, did you change your job, did you get divorced, did you get into a physical, you know, like car accident or something.

And that caused was like the tipping point that actually created that emotional, or that way that your immune system was at that point suppressed or compromised, allowing the, imbalances of of, some of these co-infections and the line itself to sort of take over and create havoc on the inside.

And then you become symptomatic. Right? So all that stuff is going on like, I always say I kind of laugh at myself, who invented liquid soap and why? Right.

There’s all this stuff going on and you want some clarity. You want to be able to identify one particular thing, but it isn’t necessarily that everyone wants the smoking gun.

You know, this is where the old saying the bra, the bra, the straw that breaks the camel’s back, right, happens. And I call it the tipping point. Or, you know, the critical mass is always in place when your boat capsizes.

You know, you’ve got a lot of stuff that were that was already piled up over there. And then the one thing dumps it, but it wasn’t about the one thing.

Yeah. So, so, there’s a, there’s like a metaphor that I use a lot. It’s mostly relating to me and my family. It’s like, you, you when you go on a trip, let’s say it’s so, whatever you’re going to be going, you’re leaving town for a little bit, you pack your bag and then you get to your other location.

And then most people I don’t I generally don’t do this, but most people, they unpack their bag, they put their stuff away and all that. And then I thought to myself, well, you know, when you have emotional challenges, you’re basically packing those emotions in your body, right?

Somewhere. It’s it’s, you know, if it’s really, really painful, then it’s usually because the brain doesn’t want you to be in that kind of pain for too long.

It would be hard to function. It’s sort of diminishes the pain. And then but it hasn’t really gone away. It’s just been sort of swept under the carpet.

That’s the emotions that are packed in that bag. Now, if we could, I think a healthier person, when they got to their destination, they would unpack their emotional baggage, leave some room for more emotions to get in there.

If they if they healthy emotions one way or the other. My family, what we used to do is we just when we ran out of room in the bag, we just bought another bag and bought another bag and bought another bag.

So, I think, we, I know that I’ve studied because I’ve had some, some feelings about managing your own emotions and what that how that can express itself.

And there’s, the Louise, Hayes Foundation or that Louise Hayes work. She often has really simple books that that can trigger or at least direct you towards a certain symptom that you’re expressing and what emotion might be tied to that.

And I, I’ve always loved to work because it was just sort of like a coloring book or so simple to read, but it really addressed a very important topic, which you dived really deep into.

You did a study in 2013 that you the acronym is hurt. So tell us a little tell us a little bit about that because I think it’s an important contribution.

Well, let me preface it with the largest study that’s been done is the Adverse Childhood Experiences study done by Kaiser Permanente. And, the CDC. And what they were looking at that, Kaiser had a weight loss clinic.

People were it was a good it was a really good program. People were steadily losing their pounds. But then some people were dropping out before they got there to their goal.

And so luckily, the clinic director was curious and was asking questions like, so what happened? You know, and found that most of the people that dropped out had been sexually abused in their childhood.

And so that triggered the question of, okay, so what’s going on here? And so they they, joined, hands with the CDC and conducted the study that went from 1995 to 1997 of Kaiser Permanente enrollees, over 35,000 participants.

I mean, you know, it’s a huge study. Yeah. And asked before the age of 18, did you experience any of these ten kinds of trauma? And we can call these now capital T trauma, the ones that you think of when you think of trauma, like my story of sexual abuse is up there, right?

Domestic violence, any kind of physical abuse, psychological, spiritual, abuse, neglect of some kind, abandonment, having a parent or a caregiver addicted to, a substance or, or incarcerated or mentally ill or dead.

These are those big traumas. Okay. The more that that you check yes to, that becomes, on a scale of 1 to 3. Right? I have a score of three. What they found is that in the course of, you know, time, as you experience these adverse childhood experiences, that the higher your aces score, the higher the risk is for all of these types of chronic illnesses that we see in our culture.

So Lyme, autoimmunity, cancer, heart disease, also weight issues, behavioral problems, drug addiction, not finishing education, sexual promiscuity, genetic expressions that go awry, all of those things.

And if you have an Ace score of six or more, you are statistically, you know, more likely to die 20 years earlier than somebody that doesn’t have access to life.

So this doesn’t mean that this is true like it’s set in stone. Right? So in my book solving that on the Am puzzle, I have the Aces quiz and I say, okay, so now you have your score.

That doesn’t mean you have to be a statistic. Okay. And so what I did with the Hurt Study the Healing and Resolve Trauma study was in 2013, I was kind of looking for why does this come out to be true?

Right. The more of the aces you have, the more likely you are to get sick and also not engage in self-care. That was the most compelling finding for me.

Less likely had to engage in self-care programs in the lasting way. So what I found was when I when I looked at, I looked at it as a pilot study, 100 women.

I asked questions about past hurt, but what I was looking for was how they hold on to it, and I found that study king this, hurt model hang and resolve trauma model.

And in it you can learn how to track what happened inside your system in response to not just those capital T traumas, but also the lowercase t traumas.

Now, we are biologically wired in our brains to know that if, you know, in tribal times, we’re put on the outside of the fire light circle from our community that we can be eaten by the same tiger.

So any kind of experience of rejection or betrayal, you’re not feeling good enough, fast enough, sweet enough, you know, like smart enough, beautiful enough anyway, you name it, those are those lowercase traumas.

And every single person, every human has had these experiences, right. So what will happen is we don’t have a fully developed brain until we’re 24 to 26 years old in terms of our prefrontal cortex or what’s traditionally called our adult brain or executive function.

So we are operating a lot from our limbic system. And yeah, you know, the amygdala, we’re saying, okay, am I safe? And we’re trying to learn how to become big people in a world governed by big people who are telling us if we’re doing things right or wrong and, you know, imparting their value systems on to us.

So when you’re a child, unless you have a well attuned, well attached, wise caregiver at your side 24/7 to help you navigate through new experiences that you can’t understand, then you’re going to make stuff up with your child brain, okay?

And you’ll make a meaning out of that because you have to you have to figure out what are the berries that are poisonous and what are the ones that are not.

And, you know, that’s how we survive as a species. So the way that you do this as a child and you don’t have a well attuned, well wise caregiver with us 24 seven, some of us don’t have one at all.

Right. And so and as parents, you know, we hope to be that for our children. But we’re not going to be there 24 seven. So every child goes through this process of having a new experience, our first experience as we’re growing up.

But of some time that we may not be able to understand and our meanings that we attach to it will be fraught with emotions that have to do with fear, anger, terror, or, you know, sadness, pain.

And that then gets embedded in the nervous system right along with the cognitive beliefs that we create about it. Now, from that belief, we create a behavior pattern that is an adaptive response to whatever just happened at that time in our lives.

And so I’m just going to give an example of how to track this. So for me, if the intercom would go off in the corner of my classroom in fifth grade, I would go straight into fight, flight or freeze, you know?

And for children, we don’t have power. We’re not autonomous. And so it’s usually freeze. So I would freeze and, you know this, the sexual abuse part doesn’t happen that often.

But every single time the airtime or intercom would crackle to life, I would go into my response. It could be for the Pledge of Allegiance. It could be for the Secretary to make an announcement, or it could be to call me into the vice principal’s office.

So every time, though, like Pavlov’s dog, I went into my panic. And so that freeze right? It would freeze into my system, and the meaning I made up was this person already said what I thought, right?

That’s an authority is can’t be trusted. And so for a child that means all people in authority can’t be trusted. And then the belief system is I have to be perfect to even survive that situation.

And so my adaptive behavior response becomes perfectionism, which I go to 30 years old. I was pretty perfect at doing. I drove myself relentlessly toward perfection.

And of course, it’s not a tenable way to live a life, and I guess my system broke down from it. So then in adulthood, just like the hero’s journey of Joseph Campbell, you get this opportunity to witness something that’s not working that you created when you were a child.

So in the Hurt model, it has two circles that go below your first initial experience emotion that you felt sympathetic nervous system arousal, the meaning you’ve made up, the belief you created and the adaptive behavior response.

Now you get in adulthood an opportunity over here selves to self confront. And over here it says not self confronting. And then you just keep triggering it.

It’s like you have a button that someone can push. And you will go into the rumination of automatic negative thoughts, judgment, whatever it is, it keeps you there and it will make you sit over here.

You get an opportunity to self confront and go, oh, maybe the TSA people are not the vice principal. Maybe your response you have every time you get next to a police officer, you know, is not legitimate.

Or when you crossed the border from Canada and the United States, maybe you don’t have to go into panic rabbit mode anymore, right? So everyone in authority is not bad.

Do you get this opportunity to actually question that early belief system and to look at the adaptive behavior as maladaptive? Now? Oh, perfectionism.

That’s really honestly killing you. So so then you get this opportunity to unhook all of that. And there’s a whole process I use. But you know, it’s healing your trauma in that sense.

But it’s also healing because some people will say to me, well, do you have to know what your trauma was? And I always say, no, like the mind unfolds at the rate it’s willing to unfold, and you can reverse engineer this.

Is there a maladaptive behavior in your life that’s getting you in trouble? You reach for Oreos every time you’re stressed. Do you sit on the couch and binge watch Netflix when you’re stressed?

Do you shop when you’re stressed? At the point that you have credit card debt? Like, you know, what are those kinds of? Are you drinking too much alcohol?

Like, what are the things that are getting in your way? Are you a workaholic? Are you and aholic of any kind, you know? Then you can reverse that and go into, oh, what part of me has decided that that is an adaptive behavior response when it’s actually hurting?

Okay, so that’s the hurt model. Wow. You know, it’s so inspiring. There’s so many things that I’ve heard you just say. And it was sort of brought the energy or the little child in me out.

You know what I experienced as a child and the, the, I just remembered. Well, I’m going to share. So, I grew up in New York, and, I, my parents moved from this from, like, the Bronx to Long Island.

And my grandparents, both sets of grandparents lived in the Bronx. And every weekend, one set of grandparents would come to our house to visit. And I have two sisters, and we had a couple of bedrooms, so my bedroom was always the one that was up for grabs.

So whenever a grandparent came, I moved into the common sister, my sister’s room or whatever. We had bunk beds in there and and my grandparents took one to my room.

Well, one time my father’s father, had was staying over and he had a heart attack in in my bedroom. I didn’t understand it. I was probably 6 or 7 years old.

And after he left, like, within less than a month. And, you know, I’m in my 60s. I’m. I’m a 70. And so now we’re going back like age five. It’s 65 years ago or more or less.

So. So I started having anxiety attacks. Well, 65 years ago for a for a six year old to have anxiety attacks. I didn’t even know what an anxiety attack was.

But I used to say to my mom, I’m having a heart attack. I’m having a heart attack. I could hardly say that, but but that’s what I was. I was articulating it.

So I drove my mother crazy. Probably that was age appropriate. Anyway. And, she would drag me to the GP like that. Then they had the Marcus Welby type doctors that were family practices.

And so every other day I was going to Doctor Miller’s office, Doctor Noah’s office, and finally we had a family member that was my uncle that was also a doctor, and he was up in like kind of upstate New York.

And so we went my mother took me up to my uncle’s office and said, George, I don’t care in front of me. She said, I don’t care what you do, but just find out what’s wrong with her.

And then I’ll come back in and sometime later. Well, I didn’t love my Uncle George to start with. He wasn’t warm and fuzzy, right? So I was immediately. I’m defensive.

I didn’t use those terms then, but I sat. I was a small little guy and I still sat me on this big metal cold examining table with a guy who didn’t love.

And all I felt now as a mature person was that my mother abandoned me. She left me with this guy who I don’t love. And so all of these things were happening because of course, my crazy.

So you can’t you can’t have your your sincere, authentic experience of life, or you might get dumped off with Uncle George. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so I carry that forward.

And it wasn’t until, we had another experience in our family that I actually did some, sort of timeline analysis to try to trace back, which is part of what you were talking about, where there might have been certain crossroads in my own childhood or my own history.

And, and and it’s not always negative things. You think it’s negative stuff, but there are major events, like you get married, you graduate college, you know, or high school.

Like all of these are events on a timeline, but but it’s people that do timeline analysis. And I started to study this. You can see repetitions and patterns.

Like every three years something happens every three years or something happens. Why is that? You know, so that intrigued me. But so I traced myself back to this event.

Right. And I and it was an exercise they had to fill out this spreadsheet, and I thought it was going to be a one day exercise. And the more I looked at it was two days, three days.

Then it became a week and a half, filling out what I thought was going to be one page turned out to be a thesis of like 5 or 6 pages of timeline events.

And then I worked with a very beautiful, comforting therapist, and we kind of look through and analyze things. And then I tied it back to certain events.

So. So what I found so fascinating about this topic, number one, when we think of trauma, we’re always thinking these big traumas, you know, the ones that are the headliners.

But when you’re a child, a is the smallest thing as an adult, what may seem as a small event to a child, that’s a small person. It’s a big event. That’s a big headline and it still sticks with you.

So trauma equals trauma no matter what age you are. It doesn’t matter. It it crosses over age barriers, over economic barriers, like, you know, religion, all that stuff.

It’s trauma is trauma and how we deal with it or process it. But what I love about what you’re saying, and what I experienced myself, is that all the kinds of healing out there, and I don’t believe that anyone listening today, a limitation that has a chronic challenge, even an acute challenge that you can’t truly heal unless you manage the emotional part.

So even though you’re not necessarily feeling about feeling emotional, about being trapped in this Lyme circle of frustrating situations, right? You still it’s still happening.

And so you need to think about addressing it. You might want to consider addressing it, but of all the other kinds of therapies. So we have, you know, medicinal supplemental adjustments, physical, and so forth.

The ones that the emotional healing part, once you can kind of figure where the trigger is that you’re stuck and you release that and you’ve articulated it yourself because you took 20 years to become symptomatic, and then, what, six months or so you said earlier to sort of unwind that coil and bam, you’re complete again.

So, so emotional healing is seems to be the most the quickest one that you can kind of address and get into check. And of course, it’s hard to do it yourself.

It’s really best when you’re working with somebody like yourself that’s skilled at knowing what questions to ask and direct you towards the areas that you might get stuck and then will be stuck and then then unravel that part.

And then, lo and behold, maybe some of the symptoms that you’re experiencing start to diminish, including bringing your immune system back into a more supportive manner so that you’re actually your body is positioned in a much more, vital way to actually create that, imbalance that’s happened in your internal chemistry with all of the different microorganisms, parasites called bacterias.

Correct. You know, call it, parasites and so forth. So, wow, what an amazing area that you’re in. And I just love how you embraced it and and certainly how, you are here today.

I mean, you’re not just passive about it. You’re active in your practice. You you write books about it. You’ve created programs and profiles and studies about it.

And it’s really all for all of us to understand. Even more importantly, how managing your emotional healing process is as important as all the other processes in in your healing journey.

And I think that is that part as well. Underserved, right? I call it the missing piece of the puzzle. You know, that we have to address genetics. We have to address gut health.

We have to address toxic burden and load, which includes lying. But then the trauma piece affects all the other three. So, you know, one of my sayings is, you know, a hypervigilant mind will create a hyper vigilant immune system.

So then a tick bite, you know, that carries a bacteria can lie dormant and then all of a sudden, right, sprout new harvest. The karma of that particular bite.

But it’s in this atmosphere of trauma that has made it come up to the surface. And so that’s why physical and emotional trauma bowls can be triggers for something that happened years and years and years ago.

So yeah, definitely. And for your genetics to express themselves in a certain way. Oh well. Wow, I’m so happy that you were available to share your experiences with us, and certainly your body of work.

And, and time is running out a little bit. So I just want to have you focus with or tell us, like, how people can find you. Your practice, the books that you’re that you’re highlighting, maybe some of the things that you want to bring to people’s attention now so where they can find you.

And, and so because after this interview, I know that people are going to be knocking down your door to figure out how they can unwind and find the root emotional causes of maybe some of the areas that they’re stuck or, solving the autoimmune puzzle goes through the framework I just mentioned.

And my website is, Doctor fisher.com. Dr. j.com. And thanks so much for having me. Oh my pleasure. And thank you for your contribution. Your time doctor. Yours.

I really appreciate you, doctor. Kisha, have an awesome day. Have a great weekend. And, thank you so much for your time today. Bye, everybody. Hey everybody, it’s Robbie Best.

Our thanks so much for joining us today. Please share this content with anyone that you think might benefit from it. And we’re looking forward to having you with us tomorrow for another great interview.