Childhood Trauma & Moldy Brain & Immunity

Introduction to Dr. Keesha Ewers 0:00

Welcome to this episode of the Mycotoxins and Chronic Illness Summit. Today I'm so excited to interview Doctor Keesha Ewers. She's board certified in functional medicine and innovative medicine, a doctor of sexology, psychotherapist, family practice, advanced registered nurse practitioner with a specialty in integrative medicine. A Conscious Dying Doula. A mother's up, a masters of Divinity student, and the founder and medical director of the Academy for Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program.

Doctor Keesha has been in the medical field for over 30 years. After conducting the heart study in 2013 healing unresolved trauma, she developed the heart model for understanding how past childhood trauma impacts adult health. This led to the creation of the new unbroken online program for patients to heal their own trauma, and the Mystic Medicine deep immersion healing retreat she leads at her home on San Juan Island, Washington. She's a popular speaker, including at Harvard and from the Stage, and the bestselling author of Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle The Women's Guide to Reclaiming Emotional Freedom, and Vibrant Health.

The Quick and easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook Anti-inflammatory recipes with 77 ingredients or less for busy people and your Libido Story A workbook for women who want to find, fix, and free their sexual desire. You can listen to her Mystic Medicine Radio show and find her programs at Doctor kisha.com. Welcome, doctor Kisha. It's so great to have you here today. No, it's so nice to be here. Thank you. So I'd love to hear about your story. You start by sharing that with everybody. Yeah. So, it's interesting because we're.

You know, this is the mycotoxins summit, right? And and I'm going to be talking about trauma. And, and some people might not be able to make that leap to what does trauma have to do with mold. Right. But it's the reactivity of our bodies and the, you know, the, sensitivity

Personal Autoimmune and Mold Health Crisis 2:25

that we have to our environment that comes from the inside out. And that definitely is, you know, something I've had to explore for myself because I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, had a big problem with mold when I was 30. And when I was diagnosed, it was interesting because it was sort of like overnight is the way my patients describe it. I'm all of a sudden sick, and that's exactly how I experience it. But we know that's not true, that it can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years to develop a full blown auto immune disease, right.

And so, you know, in my 30s, I was running marathons, raising four small children. And then one night overnight, I gained 10 pounds over my joints and like red puffiness. And it was like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer bunny. I was just flattened. And I got myself in to see doctor. And in the process of the history, she asked me if I had any family history of autoimmunity. And I said, you know, I think my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis and was in a wheelchair for part of his life before he died.

And in fact, I realized this year that he died at the age that I am today. Wow. And, you know, at 56 and didn't know anything about what we're about to talk about. Like, I didn't know any of it. Right. And so he was a victim of his genetics, basically. And that's kind of what she set me up to be like when I was in that office that day, she wrote me out two prescriptions. One was for a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug and one was for methotrexate. And she said, here, take these. And when you get worse, not if I come back.

They rise and we'll up your meds or change your medications. And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. You know, like I make my own food. I'm very disciplined. I run, I'm very healthy, like you tell me what to do. I'll do it. Well, what else can they do besides take medications? And she said, I'm afraid you've drawn the short end of the the genetic lottery, you know, and it was basically closed. The book put it on the shelf. There's nothing else to say. Sorry. It's genetic. Right. And that is a lot of what people are hearing these days.

And in fact, I've had patients say to me, so is there a specific genetic snip that makes it so that I'm more, susceptible to mold toxicity and not clearing it, you know, is there? And yeah, there are right, that we do have things in our genetics. But, one of the things I discovered in my own journey was, you know, as I was driving home, I was thinking, there has to be more than methotrexate as a solution to this. And so when I got home, I started looking online and in those days it was a dial up modem. But I had to ask Jeeves, you know, I mean, it's like, really different than it is today.

And I was looking for is there anything else in PubMed? And what I found was some interesting literature about where research had been done for people that were practicing yoga, that had RA. So I went to my first yoga class the next day, and in that yoga class, the the yoga teacher, he started talking about this word ire Veda, which is the sister science of yoga at 10,000 years old, you know, from India. And so I heard just enough that it got me interested that I went home and looked up vino after my yoga class.

And what I discovered as I started researching it made me just like I was riveted, because it was so different from the Western medical model that I had been trained in, you know, of. We're all basically the same. We can have standardized medicine that's evidence based, and that assumes that we're all standardized people, which we know in medicine. That's not true. We know that, you know, and so it's crazy that we keep trying to aim for that when, you know, it's just like so it just made so much sense to me.

And one of the things I, your Vedic medicine, said all those thousands of years ago is that autoimmune disease is undigested anger. And I sort of were sitting back in my chair going, I'm not an angry person, like I don't understand. And as I started thinking about it, I thought, well, maybe that's actually a problem. Maybe I don't allow anger. And so it never gets processed here. So it has to go in my body. And so I started really exploring this and started learning how to meditate. And I one day in my meditation, I saw this word autoimmune dancing in front of my third eyes, face.

And and I was trying to batted away as a new meditator who had it was thinking like, you're not allowed to have thoughts, right? And then finally I started focusing on it and saying autoimmune. Oh, that actually means that I am attacking myself, right?

Trauma, Autoimmunity, and the Heart Model 7:10

Oh, I'm basically killing myself. And and when's the first time I wanted to die? Because I certainly don't. Right now I have four little kids. I have a life I love, like what's happening. And so I started going backwards in my timeline, following what I call like the golden breadcrumb trail of my memories, backwards to asking, like, when is there a time I wanted to die? And I found this ten year old little girl version of myself who is being sexually abused by the vice principal of the elementary school I attended.

Oh sorry, Keesha. Well, you know, today at the age of 56, I look at that event and I think it was probably something that my soul set up before I got here. Right? So that I could actually have to confront through my disease process, all the beautiful things that I have learned today. And so, you know, it's like I don't have any sorrow about it whatsoever, but thank you. And that's the process of healing, right? I don't ever expect someone to get from here to here that quickly. It's been a lot, you know, a lot of processing.

And so as I landed on her and I saw her, I said, oh, she wanted to die. She really did want to off the planet. Her dad was out to sea in the Navy. Her mom was like, I didn't have the right words to tell my mom because I just said I didn't want to go to school. I was afraid I would cry, I'd have headaches, but I didn't have the right words. I didn't even know the word sex in those days. I didn't know the word molestation or abuse. You know, I, I didn't know any of that stuff, so I didn't know how to speak about it.

And he was telling me it was because I was a bad kid. And so I thought that probably I was a bad kid, that, you know, there must be some culpability in myself for it. So I was very confused and upset, and I saw her in my meditation and I went, oh, I'll bet that this event links to my disease process of today, 20 years later. And sure enough, science tells us that that is true. And that's really fascinating, because it's that early trauma that sets up. So, in my doctoral research in 2013, I did a study called the Healing Unresolved Trauma Study.

And what I was looking at was why the Aces study that was done between 1995 and 1997 by Kaiser Permanente and the centers for Disease Control, you know, was the biggest study done of its kind. Over 3500 participants and it was looking at the capital T trauma, you know, the stuff that when we hear trauma, we hear my story, we think about that like, oh yeah, sexual abuse, domestic violence, psychological, emotional abuse, abandonment, neglect. We think about that when we hear the word trauma. Well, they were asking their participants before the age of 18, did you experience any of these, you know, a caregiver that was addicted to a substance or mentally ill or incarcerated or divorced or dead, like, these are the big traumas, right?

And so they said, anyone that you check a yes for is an aces score of 1 or 2 or three. And what they discovered is the higher that aces score, the higher your risk for all of these diseases that we have in adulthood, in our culture, all the chronic illnesses, autoimmunity, cancer, heart disease, you just like it affects our genetic expression. It affects everything, our microbiome and how susceptible we are to mold. Right. And so this was really interesting to me when I, when I thought, well, why does it why does that happen?

And so when I did the Hertz study in 2013, what I looked at was I was looking at at brain scans, and I looked at Pet scans and fMRI and, and I was looking at the parts of brain that are lit up when somebody is experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. And I was seeing that, oh, the same parts of the brain that light up with PTSD are the same ones that are required to light up when a woman has sexual desire. So I was like, wow, no wonder if you're stressed out. You don't have any desire, right?

Because your those parts of your brain have been hijacked. And so I started thinking, well, that's interesting because with PTSD you get a shrinkage of your prefrontal cortex and you get a growth of your amygdala. The part of the brain that's looking to see if you're safe and if you contrast and you know that our our limbic system, right, our reptilian brain and the shrinkage in the adult one that makes good choices and can think things through and understands rational choices and consequences that shrinks.

And I found a study that showed that the changes of the brain, the architecture of the brain that happen with people with PTSD, also happen when people say that they are overwhelmed and stressed, or if they've had feelings of rejection or betrayal, lowercase t traumas that the personal stress index. If you score high on that, you're going to have the same exact changes in your brain. So. So what I found fascinating about that is it's not just capital T trauma that does this. Then I started searching further, and what I found was, oh, so it's actually the mind, the perceptions of the mind, right?

Whether or not you see yourself as overwhelmed, stress, rejected, not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not fast enough, not whatever. Rich enough, not famous enough, whatever they are. That then sends the messenger chemicals, right? The hormones to the adrenals to say, oh, we need to actually fight, right? Or flee or freeze or faint. So our sympathetic nervous system arousal happens, which then breaks down our gut wall, which then causes us to be more susceptible to things like mold, gluten sensitivity, multiple chemicals in the environment, all of it.

Right. We become more sensitive. Absolutely. First of all, I want to thank you for being so intimate with us and sharing your journey with us and and for being such an amazing example for everybody who's been through trauma. And that is each one of us, whether it's the capital T or the smaller T, right. We've all been there. And and so you really bring this home to, to each one of us on the planet, really, in one way or another. And, and I love that you're bringing in the piece about, about about the mind and the spirit and the way we choose to respond to trauma and the way that we that we can.

I think you haven't talked about it yet, but I think you will about about healing

The HURT Model and Childhood Patterning 14:20

how we how we reach that place that we might so want to but just don't know how to. Yeah, I can see you've done it. And, I just love that you bring that piece together that the mind and how it affects the body and then going forward, how we heal. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. This is, this is something we all go through, whether it's capital T or lower KC. Right. Everybody has trauma of some sort. And so the the willingness our culture positively reinforces the trauma of overwhelm. Right, right. We we are positively reinforced for being overachievers.

Overproducing not resting. Right. Not being introspective. Yeah. We're not encouraged to do introspective, contemplative practices. No it's not we don't make money from those. Right. And so that that piece means it's wasted time. We always have to be on the go. And so this is a big problem. And when I did the hurt Study, I came up with the hurt model that tracks tracks what happens when we're children. So when we're children we have undeveloped prefrontal cortex also. So it's not. So you could say that when when we have PTSD, we're going back to a child brain, right?

When we feel like we're overwhelmed and overstressed and over a calendar, we go back to a child brain. Right? So in the hurt model, what I saw was, oh, so when we have an undeveloped prefrontal cortex, which we don't get to where 26 years old, then we first will have an event because we're little humans trying to figure out how to be big humans, but we're not there yet. In a world that's governed by big humans who are telling us what's right and what's wrong, and if we're good enough. And so we're going to have these events that will happen, you know, as we're children in the lunchroom and on the playground and in sports, and when we're when in our academic setting and into relationally that we don't understand.

So maybe one day you had three friends on the playground, and the next day they have turned on you and they're not your friends. Or I always give examples like maybe you screwed up the a spelling the word in front of the entire class, you know, or, tripped when you were running track in front of everybody or, you know, like all of these events, when we're children, it's a jumble, right? Right. Have moments of these kinds that that, you know, we're biologically wired to know that in tribal days, if we were put on the outside of the firelight circle, the sabertooth tiger could eat us.

And so any time where we feel rejected from our community, it's going to be felt as a capital T trauma. Yeah. So, you know, and so in the hurt model, what I, what I saw was okay, so first we have the event then we have a feeling. And the feeling can be panic or anger or sadness or hurt or pain. You know, whatever that is. And it will then be lodged into the body as a felt sense. And then that activates our sympathetic nervous system. And usually with children, instead of fighting or fleeing, we freeze because we're not powerful and autonomous when we're children.

So we just freeze, right? And then we're going to attach a meaning to what just happened. And it's going to be from a very self-centered place because children are self centric. They're supposed to be. And so, you know, we're very narcissistic little beings until we're 26, until we get this full brain, right, you know? And so it's going to always be about us. That's why when parents get divorced, the children make it about them. Right? It's it's always going to be about us. And then we're going to create a meaning, a belief to go with that meaning.

And then an adaptive behavior for that belief and meaning. So the way that I usually help people understand this is we track using mine. So in fifth grade the intercom would go off in the corner of the classroom. And of course, like usually it was to get everybody up to say the Pledge of Allegiance or it was for the Secretary to make announcements and every once in a while was to call me to the vice principal's office. But it didn't matter that that was very infrequent. Every time the intercom would go off, I'd go into my freeze response in a panic, like I would have panic.

I'd start sweating. I would go into that held breath right. I called it the panic, grab it until I would find out what the crackling of the intercom was about. The meaning I attached to all of this was that, I have to actually be perfect to even survive. He's saying it's because I'm a bad kid, right? And I was one of two kids in an all black school, so. Yeah. So tell me I was because I was white trash. And so, so it was something I couldn't control, right? And so it was like, oh, I better be perfect if I'm going to survive this.

So then the belief I put around it was that people who are say that they're in charge and are supposed to be watching after you can't be trusted, because that was true for that ten year old little girl and that person. Right. But so took me a lot of healing to be able to go through TSA without my heart beating too much in the airport. And then the the behavior that I used as an adaptive behavior response was perfectionism. And so if you can, you know, and by the time I was diagnosed with RA, I was really good at perfectionism, I drove myself, I was so hard on myself.

And, you know, of course, I drove myself into the ground with it and got a beautiful little autoimmune disease as my reward for it. Right. Okay, so the healing aspect happens by learning how to track that, not necessarily going into like all the places where you have been hurt in your life, but starting to see scenes of what triggers you, like when you have a feeling of hurt or fear or anxiety or anger. Frustration. Can't really curious about it? Ask yourself like, how well do I feel right now? What's the belief I'm having right now?

What's the meaning I'm attaching to this moment with whatever this is outside of me that is that pushed my button and then look and see what's the behavior that you want to engage in that your child mind very wisely, right. The wise mind of your child created this beautiful adaptation to that moment. But you may not need that anymore, right? An upset four year old governing what your 45 year old is doing right now, right? And so in the hurt model there, there's a bifurcation from there with this initial hurt loop.

Then you have on one side of the model where it says if you're not willing to self confront and you keep going into the same button pushing in the same looping, it's called maladaptive memory processing. Then you're going to be judgmental. You're going to ruminate on your hurts. You're you know, you're going to stay in that soup of feeling and it will eventually make you sick. You know, you'll have a lot of automatic, negative thoughts. How come that person does it this way? I can't believe, you know.

And so you're just going to go into that automatic negative judgment looping. And it's it's really going to cause resentment which makes us get sick over time. And then on the right hand side of the model is another it's called an adaptive memory processing loop. And that's where you have the willingness and the curiosity to engage in self confrontation and inquiry. Like that's interesting. I've been thinking that that my whole life. Is that helping me? Right? Is it really about somebody outside of me, or is it the way that I'm perceiving?

And so it starts getting you into this willingness to get engaged with your small child self and to heal that little one and what their perceptions were repairing that. Right. And, you know, you can say, oh yeah, that was then, but it's not now anymore. So for example, like in I would get fairly confrontational if I but I was not joking when I said at the airport with TSA, if I would see somebody being I remember watching somebody, a TSA agent take a whole bunch of stuff out of someone's bag and then laughing at them and ridiculing them.

And I got really angry. I was very triggered by it. And, remember, I mean, I just remember, like, yelling up to that person and saying, that's disrespectful. You know what? If this were your mother and just really calling them out, you know, and really mad and advocating for that person that was having this happen and, and it was as if I were standing next to my ten year old self. Right. And I didn't have awareness of that. So when I, when I healed it, now I can do that with a lot more skill and not get so angry.

I would probably still do the same thing, but I would do it with a lot more calm

How Trauma Affects Mold Sensitivity 23:50

regulation right inside my system, or I wouldn't go into a fight or flight on behalf of another person. I would go into an advocacy on their behalf that didn't have a lot of like, anger underneath it. I love that you that you're bringing, that you bring up the now who we are in the moment now, as opposed to, who we were in the past in reliving it. Because a lot of times we do when we haven't, when we haven't understood the pattern and I tell my patients and my daughter also that our thought patterns are like, are like raindrops.

When you look at the window and rain falls down the window, there's a pattern that a raindrop makes, and then the rest of the raindrops come and they follow the same pattern. And our our thought processes are like that. And, and they're based on our previous events that were difficult, whether they're in our childhood or even in our adulthood. Yeah. Early in our childhood, I would say that the that they, these, these patterns carry out in our behaviors and our thoughts and our emotional spiritual engagement.

My world, how we hold the world and, To understand that what think what we've experience in the past. It can be our our tool. It can be our gift as opposed to being yoked with the child. So to find the appropriate ways to heal, where we can unlock the trauma from the gift and, and and be able to walk the world, using those tools. And I love that you bring up the way that you, that you felt at the airport and happy with you would have the same care for that person, but you were able to approach the situation with less stress in your body.

And I believe that, one of our ultimate, reasons for being here is to experience joy, to guard our joy, and to guard the joy of of those around us, that it's so easy to fall back into a pattern of stress, so, so important to understand what the patterning is without necessarily hooking it into the past experience. So I think there's a skillfulness that comes, I mean, a skill that is born from your adaptive behavior. Right? Oftentimes. And maybe it's eating Oreo cookies or, you know, shopping a lot or watching Netflix for hours on end as a way of self-soothing and self-medicating or drinking or, you know, but often times there are behaviors that are put in place, like my perfectionism.

Right? I have nobody wants a medical provider that's anything less than perfectionistic. And so I can turn it on when I need it, and then I can let it go. When it comes to parenting and being a spouse, you know, and, and a friend, like, nobody wants that in those arenas. And so it's having the skill to be able to really feel gratitude for all the beautiful gifts that that, that provided that adaptive behavior, and then to be able to not have it run you. So, you know, like, I love that I'll jump.

And when I was in India one time when there was a riot and I saw this policeman pull a woman out of a, rickshaw, you know, and and by the hair, she was pregnant and he had a stick up, and he was about to hit her, and I just ran, and I grabbed it, and I got it right in the middle, and I was screaming at him at the top of my lungs, you know, scared him. And, And I just remember thinking like, oh, the ability to advocate for another person is really a beautiful gift that comes from that. But. Right, it's the energy that it's motivated from, that can destroy you, or it can actually be in a beautiful, compassionate space.

And so it's like, oh, how do I balance those two? How do I keep the gift and not have it destroying me at the same time? Right, exactly. And it's knowing that we can we can be the ones who are running our emotions as opposed to our emotions running us. So. Right. Coming, coming to the place where we're we're the master of ourselves. And I think that we're not taught that. No, we don't get out from special places and special people in the world. Yeah. Otherwise very true. We are. We are when? By our emotions.

Unless we learn how not to hate. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us more about this. And chronic illness. Mold. Yeah. So that sensitivity I always say a hyper vigilant mind where you're always on and you're looking to see if you're safe and you're okay. We'll create a hyper vigilant immune system. Right. And so, you know, leaky boundaries leads to leaky gut. And that inability to manage your emotions and your thoughts can lead to the breakdown of the barriers that are supposed to be protective in your body.

And then also influence how your genetics are expressed, whether or not you can detox the toxins you're exposed to, it doesn't really matter what your genetics are. Honestly, you know, like I said, a lot of my patients want to land on the snip that's responsible for all their ills. And I'm like, well, no, you know, that's the one that got expressed as a result. And people will say, so you're telling me it's my fault? And they say, well, no, no, no, this is out beyond, like Rumi's poem, out beyond the field of wrongdoing and right doing.

Right, right. This is a place where there's no right doing and wrongdoing. It's just natural consequences to actions. Like for every thought, it's going to either be nourishing or it's going to be destructive and it'll be on a spectrum. And so if if you have a lot of thoughts that have a place of, oh, I'm not like this food, you know, we in functional medicine, we often activate an eating disorder and people called orthorexia. However, you make them afraid of their food, right? Right. And now we have everybody afraid of mold.

And one of the things that I'll say is, yeah, it can definitely be the trigger. You know, like, I think about four corners of a puzzle and each of us is a unique puzzle. And the four corners of that puzzle when we're trying to solve your puzzle are your genetics, which are going to be different from anyone else's, your digestive health and how sensitive you are to your foods and to the chemical and chemicals in the environment. And that leads to our toxic burden load. And so we have Lyme and we have Epstein-Barr, we have Covid, we have all these different kinds of toxins.

But then we also have the mental and emotional ones to write our thoughts. And so then that's all the fourth corner pieces of the puzzle. I just went through three of them. The fourth corner piece of the puzzle is past trauma. And you know, we I showed you how we set up our nervous system reactivity pathways from very young.

Healing Approaches and Patient Work 31:40

And so if those nervous system reactivity pathways are creating a breakdown in the protective barriers in your whole system, then of course mold is going to be one of the toxic burdens of of the third puzzle piece. And it's there's never one thing that makes you sick. And so, you know, mold will be one of the things on the scale that just like tipped your your boat over. Right. There are a number of things there before mold can be a problem. We we had to do $1,000 of mold remediation about four years ago in this house.

And and when it was just because we had to replace our furnace, and when they moved the furnace away from the wall and took out the sheetrock, there was this black mold everywhere, you know, going up three stories and every bathroom because the top bathroom was the one with the problem. And, you know, I thought, that's so interesting because I have a history of IRA, I was able to reverse it in six months back when I was in my 30s. It's never come back again. And here I've lived for probably several years with all this mold in this house with not no reactivity, like, no problem, you know.

But in my 30s, had I had this problem, it would have put me under and so it's it's like, can you build a cushion in your emotional world, you know, and down regulate your reactivity of your mind. And then that down regulates the reactivity of your immune system, your genetic expression. Right. All all of that. So it's, it's really important to address all of those pieces at the same time. I think it's so important to a lot of times people will come in to my office and not realize that that's a big piece.

What made me sick was it the mold was at the lime, right? Well, the focus on the physical pieces until they're comfortable enough to talk about. Yeah. The emotional pieces that the traumas in. And then when we talk more, they come to understand that the soup that it all is that it's not it's not a salad like, oh, there was the tomato, there was just the trauma or there was just the mold, but right, all these, all these pieces come together and create a soup of, of toxins in it. And the outside definitely is a reflection of the inside.

So what's happening exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And it, it, you know, healing all of it at the same time. Slowly, slowly layer upon layer and think about it as a spiral, you know, is what gets us to final resilience, right. Where where we have the resilience to navigate big stresses that are emotional and mental and big traumas that are physical and, you know, like the inundation of the of the chemicals that we're exposed to. Right? If they were supporting our system in ways that allows for proper detoxification, then it's not going to be as big of a deal.

So we're having to just like check in with the body, right? With compassionate curiosity. So how are you doing? I see that there are a lot of mycotoxins built up in here. So why don't we like right. And then I always tell my patients, like, we're not going in with all guns blazing right off the bat, right? Because we can make you sicker. And so. Yeah, yeah. So we had to isolate. And I have so many patients that come to me that are really angry because they've spent thousands of dollars on different protocols and functional medicine testing, and their autoimmune disease is not reversed.

And and they're not better. And, you know, they'll they'll hear me talk about trauma and they go, oh, I haven't done that part and I haven't done that part yet. Right. And you know, I'm like, yeah, you kind of have to. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's been the most important pieces of the healing. Yeah. So tell me about about how you approached this piece one on one with your patients. Yeah. So it just depends on where they're at in their own process. A lot of people have done a lot of therapy. Like they'll say, oh, yeah, you know, I've, I had this happen to me, but I've done so much work around it already, you know.

But they still have autoimmunity, you know. And so I'll work with them from the place that they got to in the, their therapeutic process will start there and move forward. That I do something I call it healing trauma through the chakra system where there's a it's really important to, establish a foundation of a felt sense of safety. First. Right. And so I help people establish that within themselves, finding a calm, safe place that they can go to within their own systems and, and practicing how to regulate that.

And then we start working on the belief systems that they, in the beliefs they made up as children in response to different relationships in their lives, and then how they built their ego and the voices of that ego and how they're what those behaviors are. And we just you can't start a behavior like, if you have an addiction to Oreo cookies, you can't just say, I'm going to stop eating Oreo cookies. You have to really get underneath. Like, how old was the one that decided Oreo cookies were the solution, right?

And what was going on for that one? And what was the believes they created and then heal all of that. So we do a lot of, attachment healing. So, you know, working with attachment issues and and internal family systems. And it just depends on like again, where, where people are at with their process, a lot of energy work. And right, I take a very similar approach as well. A lot of energy work. Back in the days I go the office more a lot, a lot of cranial sacral therapy. Yeah. People would talk a lot.

So we get them into a place of safety and understanding their childhood. I call them their childhood decisions. Yeah. It made as a child that this is what I'll do to make myself safe. Example the Oreo cookies. Right. And and how that's serving them now is still or maybe not serving them now. And then of course we get into the, the physical and biochemical pieces at the same time and family. Yeah I love that you're taking a holistic approach as well. Yeah. So important for our patients. It is it's essential.

Yes. Yes. Well thank you so much. It is my pleasure. I really appreciate you know, that you're doing this. I know how much work these summits are, but the information that people can get from them so very important. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for your summits as well. Well it's wonderful.