Trauma, Autoimmune Disease, & Fibromyalgia

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

I’m delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Well, I know one of your specialties, obviously, because of your book is autoimmune disease. And, you know, the smoking gun is out there. We just can’t really put all the pieces together and say definitively that fibromyalgia is autoimmune disease. But there’s a lot of practitioners that seem to believe that’s kind of where we’re eventually heading, is if fibromyalgia does have some type of autoimmune component.

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

Do you have one of those?

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Okay. So we’ve had a conversation before. I’m not really sure about it, but it does certainly make sense. And I see with my patients, I know you share with your patients, your clients, their loss as we see it run in families. So I think there’s certainly a pattern there. So tell me a little bit about your thoughts in fibromyalgia, an autoimmune disease.

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

Well, autoimmunity is simply us attacking ourselves. And so if we take it out of this realm of disease specific and just say, okay, so why is it that we’re having pain? Why is it that we’re having inflammation? What is the biochemical response? What’s the mechanical response that’s happening? And I find that there are I call it the four PS of autoimmunity, and I find them present in people with fibromyalgia, too. Now, there are some characteristics of autoimmune disease that we can also point to with fibromyalgia that are OC 1010 times more. Autoimmunity is diagnosed in women than men. Yeah, we find this a fibro too, right? Yeah. Yeah. And these four PS that you know, I highlight are the peda notion of your Vedic medicine, which means there’s a lot of fire already present in the personality tends to be type driven, kind of perfectionism is the second I also people pleasing and I find that a lot of times the the people that come to see me that are part of my patient population, that have autoimmunity, fibromyalgia, have put themselves on the back burner of the stove in terms of caregiving. 

And there is a lot in front of them that they’re tending to first, a lot of stuff boiling over, you know, and that it’s like, I will get me if I have to or when I have time. And of course, time never arises until the body has upped the volume right. Amped up like, okay, I can’t do this anymore. Here’s some pain that’s going to be moving around in the body. You’re not going to be old enough. I’m just tired. You need to actually pay attention to me. And the force t is holding on to the poison in the past pain which is past trauma. And so those four are characteristics that I see in everyone with autoimmunity and I definitely see it with fibro too. So I don’t know if, you know, walks like a dog, talks like.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, right.

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

And the other thing, another little statistic about autoimmune disease is that once you have one, all her two statistics, once you have one, you have a 75% chance of having another one. So oftentimes fibro is a co-morbidities. We call it medicine. Right. It’s also present with something like hashes or Raynaud’s nodes or rosacea. People don’t realize, like Ray’s rosacea and their cold hands and B are actually an autoimmune issue. Yeah. So, you know, the second statistic I wanted to kind of bring forward for us to evaluate is that, yeah, in our culture and this is definitely true for me because when I was in my early thirties, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and I reversed it within six months and it’s never been back. But when I was diagnosed it felt like it came on all of a sudden. Like one morning I woke up with ten extra pounds of just red puffiness inflammation all over my joints. Felt like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer Bunny and I was flattened. So there’s, you know, there are these similarities that we think of it as all of a sudden. But actually, science tells us that it takes anywhere from 10 to 30 years to develop a full blown autoimmune issue as well as fibro fibro. It doesn’t just come on overnight, even though it feels like it, it’s just because finally the body has said, look, I’ve been trying to tell you for a year. 

Like when I look back, I had a good 20 years of different things that kept happening, but I was silencing until finally Ira got my attention, you know, and I sort of looked around and said, Oh, is there something I need to go research here? Because my model of medicine that I’ve been born and raised and educated in isn’t isn’t working for this. I got handed two prescriptions when I was diagnosed. Here’s one for methotrexate. Here’s one for a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Come back when you get worse. Not if you get worse and we’ll change your meds. So how often are people with fibro kind of given the same thing? And, you know, and I said, well, hold on, is there anything else I can do besides this? You know, knowing the side effect profile of these drugs, I didn’t want to take them. I’m very dedicated to my health. 

I make my own food. I run marathons. Is there anything else? I’m very disciplined. No, it’s genetic because in the history taking process, she would ask, you have a family history of autoimmunity and my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis. So therefore, this is genetic. This is it. That’s the end of the story here. Your meds come back when you’re worse. And unfortunately, you know, I’m 58 now. It’s almost 30 years since this happened. People are still getting the same messaging. No. Has nothing to do with your diet. No. You know, it’s genetic, therefore.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. Well, what we know with genetics is just not written in stone. I mean, you have the opportunity to change that, you know, that dialog, but you also are vulnerable. That’s your weak link and that fits so well with fibro. Is they’re going along, they’re living their lives, they’re active, they’re full time working full time, they’re doing, you know, they’re really busy. And then something comes along. That’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back. They just can’t re rebound from it. And that’s what we see with autoimmune, just which you’ve shared. I see that with my patients is I had a patient here recently that I treated her years ago with fibromyalgia. It helped her overcome that should be there and great. And then the last two years I’ve been under tremendous amount of stress and lupus. Now she’s diagnosed with lupus. So now we’re starting to work on that. But it was this two years of just agonizing stress. She’d been under drama. What she said is something that kind of weaves this thing together, right?

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

Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

You find that trauma is a common condition that you see with autoimmune. And obviously, I know we agree that it’s a big thing with fibromyalgia.

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

You know, this is the fourth piece that I was talking about holding on to the poison and past pain is trauma. And the thing that people I just want to make a definition clear here, because oftentimes you will think of trauma as what we define as capital T trauma, domestic violence, sexual abuse, psychological, emotional neglect. Having a parent that’s addicted to a substance or incarcerated or mentally ill, you know, or dead like these are these are big capital T trauma. So sometimes people will think, well, I had a great childhood, therefore I don’t have any trauma. But the reality is that every human goes through trauma in their childhood and beyond. And so trauma can be defined as any event that you don’t feel equipped to handle. Now, as children are, you know, there are thousands of those. 

And so in solving the autoimmune puzzle in my book, I talk about the fact that we are all different. There’s no one fibromyalgia diet or massive diet or diet for rheumatoid arthritis, you know, or how she’s diet that doesn’t exist that you say here’s the disease and then here’s a diet that will magically make it disappear. No, we have our own individual cells, which you can look at as an individual puzzle. And the way that I think about it is if you find a puzzle that you want to put together, you take the lid off the box and you dump all the pieces out on the table and you flip them all back over. You’re looking for the four corners to start. 

So the four corners of really any chronic illness, whether we define it as autoimmune or not, is there going to be the same? It can be obesity, it can be fibro, it can be any autoimmunity, it could be cancer. So we flip these corner pieces over that we’re looking for and one of them will be your genetics. We all have unique genetics. They’re not the same. So that’s the first corner piece. The second corner piece is gut health. Everybody with autoimmunity has leaky gut there. And I would say probably the same thing about fibro. Yeah. And so it’s very common, you know, that, I mean, that’s it, right. So then and that will include your microbiome. It’ll include how well you’re doing it, producing your own stomach acid and digestive enzymes, you know, like this is how what kind of foods are you triggering against? What is your immune system getting riled up about? The third point or piece of the puzzle will be toxins. So your toxic burden and your body’s willingness and ability to get rid of those toxins. Now we live in the most toxic environment we’ve ever lived in as humans. We’ve really messed up our nest. And so, you know, and there are tens of thousands of chemicals that we’re exposed to all the time in our air, water and soil, no matter how careful we are. So we have that toxic load that’s there. And then the fourth corner piece of the puzzle is trauma. And I think about trauma always is the missing piece of the puzzle. And it does tie all autoimmunity and chronic illnesses together, because if you think about it, like you were just saying about your, you know, your patient who went through two years of relentless stress. 

Yeah, well, that stress, right. Is actually not what caused the problem. I always you know, I teach for the Institute for Functional Medicine. I teach doctors what we’re talking about here. And I’m always on the stage saying to them, Quit telling your patients to reduce their stress, because here you’re talking to people who maybe have a special needs child or elderly care, you know, elderly parent, they’re caregiving or a job they really love or a divorce they’re going through. But they can’t change those things that I’m mentioning. Right. Or they have a chronic illness, which in and of itself becomes a stress because oftentimes they don’t feel safe in their own bodies. 

And what are they going to do about that? Right. If you just say reduce your stress, that’s not giving them the journey through to feeling safe in their own body. It’s telling them they’re doing something wrong. So what you have to do is they change your relationship to your stress, your perception about your life events and you in them. So the way that we perceive and the way our nervous system patterns go off when we get our buttons pushed that we call stress are developed in childhood. They’re unconscious until we make them conscious. And so something like fibro, something like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis did it for me. 

You know, are these big events that hopefully get our attention, cause us to sit back and go, okay, like something I’m doing is not working here. Now let me really investigate. And part of the investigation isn’t just what I’m eating or what I’m taking as far as supplement protocols, but also the way my own mind works. You know, hopefully people get there, right? Like just because I have this thought does that make it true or worthwhile keeping and repeating? You know, I don’t know who counts this, but apparently 94% of our thoughts that we have every day, we’ve already had them. They’re a pattern, a looping, a rumination. And so we get to go in when we have an adult brain developed, which happens around the age of 26. Up until that time, we don’t have this prefrontal cortex developed yet. We’re operating mostly from that amygdala limbic system. And like, am I going to survive? And, you know, am I accepted in the tribe? So biologically, we know that if we’re not accepted in the tribe in tribal days and we’re put on the outside of the firelight circle for something that we did, said or stood for the sabertooth tiger can eat us. So there’s a very big desire for children all the way through until they start to learn how to become authentic beings, to conform to look like everyone else, to be like everybody else. Right. And so trauma is going to happen in ways where you feel afraid that you’re going to get rejected. Yeah, you’re going to find that in any DSM five manual on psychology and mood disorders and, you know, pathologizing the way that our minds work, that unfortunately that lack of recognition of the patterns we develop in childhood are making us sick. 

Yeah, I do. Immune disease is the highest occurring chronic illness that we have in the world today. Yeah. And the lack of really investigating this is part of it. Like, my goodness, what are the patterns of my own mind that I trigger right. And so what are your Vedic medicine says, which I love because and I learned that it was shortly after my diagnosis, I was looking for answers outside my medical model, and I discovered yoga. And I made in meditation and this 10,000 year old sister science of yoga said, well, oh, the body is the canvas of the mind. 

And so if we’re hypervigilant and hyper reactive mentally, our immune system follows suit, our mast cells follow suit, our micro glia and her brain follow suit. So all of this is activated by our own mental patterns, our own perceptions. If you think that you are going to get rejected, you’re afraid of rejection. Still, as an adult, then you’re activating a very primal response that sends your body off to the circus in a sympathetic nervous system arousal. And it really doesn’t have anything to do probably with what reality is. Yeah. Yeah. So these are the things that are that tie in.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. And this really goes hand in hand with so many other speakers. What we’ve shared, what’s been shared on here already, the lack of neuroplasticity that a lot of folks we’ve talked about this neuroplasticity. We know if I remind you that often times they come from a traumatic childhood. Yeah. And it can be the big T, as you say, but it can be a smaller T, it could be that you had an illness. When you’re an adolescent, you could have been you travel because you were in a military family. I mean, is all.

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

One of mine?

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, that is j of trauma. But this, you know, this, this stays with you. And then it becomes when someone tells you that you need to de-stress. Well, I mean, there’s techniques for that. But really, ideally, everybody needs to realize you’re going to be under stress.

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

That’s sometimes part of life.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

So yeah, stress sometimes is a good thing. It gets you up out of bed and off to work. I mean, it’s not a terrible thing, but it can certainly get out of control. And with fibromyalgia, we know a lot of times that individuals, because they were under a lot of stress as a child as they go through adulthood, they don’t have that ability to rebound from stress. They get under some an illness, a surgery, something comes along. And they started developing these symptoms before you know it, after seeing several doctors and ruling out everything else.

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

Going on, many antidepressants.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

I say you got fibromyalgia and then you just learn to live with it, right?

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

Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. You know, but I say that you brought this up about these personalities. When someone asks me about fibromyalgia, say, well, you know, usually the people that I see are the type-A. So they’re the doers. They, you know, they do and they do and they do and they do. And they do.

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

Often times for others.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

And then they’re done outright or they’re the greater caregiver in memory care. So they give and they give and they give and they give and they give and they give. And then one day they’re just they’re given out. That’s it. They can’t give anymore. And oftentimes they’ve depleted hormones and nutrients that they need to be able to handle stress. Now they become more vulnerable to stress. And that’s a really a vicious cycle that they get on that hamster wheel. It’s hard they are to get off.

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

Yeah, the thing that I think gets missed in that which I think is so important, like let’s define the hamster wheel. It’s a very vicious cycle and it happens with fibro, it happens with everyone with autoimmune ne that I’ve ever met, including myself, is that once you perceive yourself as somehow like overwhelm, not keeping up, not doing, you know, whatever you’ve tied your worth to, if it’s external, like achievement, success in various ways. Good mom, good wife, good, good lawyer, good doctor, you good. You know, whatever it is that you have as this, I’m worthwhile if this happens, you know, those fluctuate like the wind, right? So if you’ve you’ve you’ve externalized your worth and that’s first sign of trouble, you’re going to struggle and there’s going to be suffering in there. 

So then your perceptions that are going off, whether, you know, am I am I worthwhile, am I doing okay and my achieving my goals? Then you’re setting up this activation of what we just were talking about. So you activate your adrenal glands, the release of cortisol gets out into the system so that you can flee from the lion, that you believe is on your tail or fight it or freeze. And then that’s supposed to happen in just a short period of time. You recover, right? We can do it in perpetuity. Right. And that cortisol then starts breaking down the gut, which is, you know, so there’s the trauma. The one corner piece of the puzzle I was talking about, right, that activates your perceptions activated by your perceptions. Now you’re breaking down the gut, which is that second corner piece I talked about. Now you’re becoming intolerant to your foods and your environment, right? More and more intolerant. 

And also people you know, a lot of people that I have fibro are highly sensitive people. You know, they actually take the quiz online. They go, oh, this explains everything for me. I’m a highly sensitive person. Well, of course you are. You know, this is everybody with trauma winds up being p highly intuitive, empathetic, empathic that doesn’t then explain away it says yes this is where you landed because of life experience you’re your particular makeup, your personality structure. And here’s what’s happening as a result. And so you can’t expect the whole world to accommodate your sensitivities, right? So this is where you learn how to build resilience inside of yourself. That’s like the wakeup call. Oh, I am a highly sensitive person. I need to actually build ins and resilience so that as that gut’s breaking down, though, it makes it harder and harder because now your intelligence and the food you’re eating, the environment, you know, and you can’t travel anymore, people are really getting to you. You’re considering a lot of the community or or spouses or parents that you’ve been with are all now you’re labeling narcissistic and you’ve got with them and it’s a toxic relationship. And so there’s like this repetitive cycling that happens in that ruminating thought process, which keeps all of this going. Right. And now the gut leads leaky gut leads to leaky brain. So now there’s mood disorders, insomnia, right? Brain fog. Can’t remember anything for the life of you where you used to have a steel trap mind, because you are the really great driven person that wants to be of service to the world and where is it all going? Right. Well, all that the body and its wisdom knows that if it can’t keep you alive, you’re certainly not allowed to reproduce any in your digestive system is going to shut down so that you can’t be, you know, if you’re being chased by lying, can’t stop and have bowel movements. 

And so your hormones that are supposed to make you feel good and feel resilient are getting co-opted to make cortisol that you keep triggering into your own system. And so now you’re estrogen dominant, whether in male or female. And estrogen dominance is one of the classic risk factors for fibro and autoimmune disease. And cancers, the various sorts. So it just just makes like, as you said, the hamster wheel. But it’s just so vicious, right? It’s this vicious cycle. And then now you’re Permian bull. See the toxins in your environment. They stay put. They go out in front of your nervous system, make everything worse. And so people will say, well, it’s because of mercury or it’s because of my toxic relationship, or it’s because of and it’s actually not. It’s because of our perceptions of all of that. 

So when we really learn how to heal that small part of us that was victimized in some way, and that’s where I really go with my patients. Like, let’s go there quickly and learn how to securely attach to your own inner core that’s so much larger than what’s in your body even, right? It’s like this vast consciousness that you are your own luminous nature, you know? Or we could call it Christ consciousness. You can call your Buddha nature that set in in different ways, in different religions that it’s like, that’s that part of you that can’t be hurt. And so learning how to securely attach to that one, I had insecure attachment disorder, you know, I got with a narcissistic, abusive partner for sure. You know, I had sexual abuse when I was ten years old. 

All of this led to my aura in my healing has been in being able to heal the perceptions that triggered my nervous system responses that were created when I was a child so that I don’t send cortisone in my system, break down my gut wall, have food sensitivities up, regulate genetics that have on them breast cancer and rheumatoid arthritis, both of which I’ve had and been able to reverse without medication doing what we’re talking about. It’s hard work, but it’s so rewarding and you actually learn like compassion for yourself, right? You learn how to put your sense of worth, internal instead of external, which by the way, is one of the developmental stages we’re supposed to achieve in adolescence. Bringing your locus of control from external to internal. But because we’re not really taught that in a conscious way, we kind of stumble around into it when we’re adults by oftentimes getting sick.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, you know, but I think what oftentimes happens is these individuals are just living this busy life. Yes, everything’s going well. And then they get under some type of stress and then they can’t just they can’t get out of it. So and I use I talked about we’re all born with a stress coping savings account and a stress coping savings account. We have certain chemicals, hormones, vitamins, minerals, amino acids that allow us to deal with stress all day long. We’re, you know, exposed to stimuli that is can be conceived as stressful or in real life stress, real or imagined. And so we’re releasing these hormones and chemicals to deal with it. But if we’re not careful, we can bankrupt those chemicals. And now we’re just incredibly vulnerable because the stress becomes so magnified that you always feel that way. And these are this is classic fibromyalgia. We feel wired entire. You just feel overwhelmed. 

And oftentimes, you know, you become kind of a hermit. You don’t even want to go out because you can’t handle any kind of stress or any kind of stimulation. It’s too much. And you shut down. And when that happens, your body’s shutting down. So then that introduces this whole thing, the cell danger theory, survival paradox, where the body feels like it’s under assault and sure enough, everything shuts down and we start to see the classic signs of disease. You know, more stress and stress is the catalyst and inflammation, which is the other catalyst, almost every disease. Right now. So given trauma, we know so many patients and surveys show that 70% of people who get diagnosed with fibromyalgia say that stress was a trigger for the fibromyalgia. They can look back.

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

Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

What do I mean, what are some of the steps we can do to go back and figure out what was it that was traumatic in our life, in our childhood or adolescence? And then what are some of the steps we can take to start to correct that, that stinking thinking pit where you get in the maze and this negativity, you just can’t get out.

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

Yeah. So I’ll give you an easy thing that I usually start people with, and then I’ll also give sort of the overview. In 2013, I conducted a study called The Healing Unresolved Trauma Study, and from that there’s a model called the Hurt Model that goes through and talks about just what we said. So the stinking thinking, right? Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

And Zig Ziglar.

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

Yeah. Starts when, when we, when we’re children with our initial hurt and then we have an emotion that gets attached to it. And then from that, that feeling that’s in the body, it stimulates the sympathetic, nervous system arousal. Now, we always say fight or flight freeze faint, but actually for children it’s always freeze where we don’t have autonomy in childhood. So we’re not fighting. We’re not fleeing. You know, we’re not fainting. We’re usually freezing. So we freeze that feeling into a specific area of the body. We go into that nervous system response and immediately create a meaning. And because we’re kids with minds that aren’t fully developed yet, right? We don’t have that fully developed brain. We don’t have life experience to be and maybe probably not somebody right next to us to help us navigate what just happened. 

We’re going to make up some sort of meaning that makes sense to the child’s mind at the time. Right. So if we take my ten year old sexual abuse, that’s easy to track. So Intercom goes off in the corner in my fifth grade classroom to call all of us to stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance or to make announcements. But I’m like Pavlov’s dog. That’s the same intercom that calls me every once in a while into the vice principal’s office. And, you know, in that sexual abuse piece, he’s telling me it’s because I’m a bad kid. So I go into what I call panic rabbit trees every time the intercom goes off. So that’s really deeply ingrained inside my system. 

And then the meaning of attach to that is because I’m being told this is my fault, I’m a bad kid. I’m going to link a behavior to that really quickly. Also, it’s called an adaptive behavior for whatever your meaning is that you just created in response to those nervous system arousal and this feeling. So for me, it was okay if I’m bad and this is what’s happening, then I need to be perfect if I’m going to survive this. And so there, there goes perfectionism as my adaptive behavior. So that’s what’s called an initial hurt loop. Okay. That’s that’s where it gets created. Your nervous system pathway, tracking what you believe about it and then the model bifurcates. And on one side it says in the middle of the third, the next loop, it’s a maladaptive memory processing loop. It’s where you do the same thing over and over and over again. And at least a disease you have rumination on automatic negative finds you every time you have the same feeling that you had in that initial hurt loop, you make up the same meaning about it and you do the same behavior. And that leads to disease. Yeah. On the other side, when you finally kind of go, oh, the middle of that looping says willingness to self confront with compassionate curiosity, like, that’s what I realized when I was learning how to meditate. I looked at the word autoimmune and said, I don’t means I’m doing this to myself, okay? I’m kind of like killing myself in a societally acceptable way. 

When did I ever want? Is there a time when I wanted to die? And I started going back with some curiosity about that because it certainly wasn’t true in that period of time at all. And I found this ten year old girl and I said, Oh, she did one off the planet. And okay, I remember trying to tell people about this and I didn’t have the right words and I kept getting sent back to school. So yeah, I can see where. Okay, every time I’m upset that my perfectionism is being questioned in some way by myself, I’m going into the same loop process. And so that willingness to confront, say, every time I’m unhappy, I’m present, maybe I have something to do with this. Is that first step, right? Okay. Oh, maybe there’s some responsibility here I need to take for my own way, my mind works.

And so there’s a, there are a few steps on that, that adaptive memory processing. And so that first step, when you say, is there anything that we can do, you don’t have to know what events happened that create your fear. Adaptive behaviors that are now maladaptive often times in adulthood, if you have a bad day, right, and your impulse is to reach for something sugary with dairy, maybe ice cream or, you know, I don’t know, name it, whatever it is, gluten filled chocolate egg, a glass of wine, you know, then there that’s a maladaptive behavior for self-soothing. It’s not healthy. It doesn’t solve anything and is making is that so? Then you look at your behavior without having to go find your trigger. And so you go, okay. So every time I’m reaching for a glass of wine or every time I go online shopping and I have a problem with online shopping, I’m noticing because my credit card’s too high.

So maybe this is a maladaptive behavior. I have to make myself feel good. Or every time I whatever it is, you fill in the blank. It’s not creating peace in my life, this behavior. It’s just some sort of self-medicating I’m doing. Yeah. Or if you’re a workaholic and you spend long hours working right, you eventually do realize, like, this is not a sustainable method of being paid. It definitely doesn’t bring peace. Look at those. Find them in your life. Be really, really courageous about that. You know, this is this is the willingness to compassionately self confront with curiosity, like, okay, where are these behaviors? And so in the hurt model, the behavior is the adaptive linking to a meaning you created. So when you reach for that thing that you’ve just realized is not health promoting, it’s actually making you sick. Go to what is the feeling that’s in your body and the thought in your mind when you do it. Because what happens? Tibetan Buddhism calls this lazy mind. So and what we want to develop is a wake awareness where we stay awake to our thought processes before we actually engage in an activity. So if you find yourself kind of slipping out and you come to awareness and you just down to a whole bag of Doritos while you binge watch four episodes of your favorite Netflix show, and now you feel shame and guilt. And usually I’m just going to go to bed now. You know, you’ve just found yourself in a maladaptive behavior that is linked to something that had a feeling and a meaning before that happened that you went to sleep, too. 

So you’re starting to investigate, not looking for trauma, but looking for the places in your life that you are going to sleep to your own body. You’re disassociating, you’re not behaving in a collaborative camaraderie like your body has a wisdom to tell you when your body hurts is trying to tell you something. It’s part of your team. It’s not against you, right? It’s not unsafe to be in that body. That body is just beautifully conveying a message for you. And so when you want to get into, you know, out of that combative relationship with the body and get into a collaborative one, then you turn toward it and you say, Oh, well, how can I support you better? What do you need from me? And that’s where a lot of our functional medicine testing comes in. 

Genetic testing, looking at some of these things and being super curious with compassion about what is the thought process that you had before you reached for that behavior. And so people are often really anxious about healing trauma because you’re like, I don’t want to go back and feel or re open or I don’t even know. I don’t have a memory of my childhood. That’s okay. You don’t need to. None of that stuff is actually even good to do so. I have a process I use of people depending on where they’re at that you know, it doesn’t require that you go feel a bunch of pain again or that you throw your parents under the bus or that you blame any that be for, you know, where you’re at. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, right, that you’re just really learning how to move into a compassionate, very collaborative relationship with all of you, your parents. Yeah. Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Well, I think that people kind of they get it, like I mentioned earlier, the maze, they just can’t get out. And that yeah, I get in is, as you mentioned, it’s you know, pain’s a warning sign. It’s a symptom that something’s not right. And then ideally you’re trying to figure out, okay, what is it that’s causing this pain? Where’s it’s coming from? What am I doing something that’s causing me to have this pain? My not doing something is causing me to have this pain. Do I need to be taking a supplement? Is or am I need to change my diet? But most people kind of get locked into the feeling of the pain. And with fibromyalgia, they can’t get out. And this is this where they’re just thinking about, I’m in pain and I totally understand. I mean, I’m not.

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

Of.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Any way demeaning there because that’s how most of us are, myself included, when I’m you know, when I feel bad, it’s hard to get out of that. I feel bad mentality. Yeah, but what you’re offering, what you’re sharing here with this, some of this approach to trauma, this past trauma is a way to start to, number one, acknowledge that your thinking could be generating some of your or certainly accelerating some of your symptoms. And by changing your thinking, you can oftentimes see improvement in your symptoms.

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

Like how would I do the freedom framework? Because you can break free of all this. And, you know, people say, sorry, what you’re saying is this is all in my head. And I, you know, and that’s always like.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah, because people, you know, you hear that with fibromyalgia. Oh, you’re glazier crazy. Right?

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

Exactly. And so, you know, hopefully if people are tracking what I’m saying as the topic is the can, right? Yeah. And then this was set up as patterning with genetics that are behind it. And so we learn how to turn off those genetics. We learn how to really. So it’s with this this there’s no blaming and shaming is not your fault. And there is not and it’s all in your head messaging. It’s that everything is always in our heads, you know, like that’s all connected. It’s all connected to the head. When we try and separate, like, Oh, you’re crazy. If it’s because of what’s happening here, that’s totally wrong and abusive. And so you know, the fact of the matter is, our body is not separate from our mind and it’s our mind that actually sets up the body’s response. And so it’s learning how to become the master of your mind rather than your mind being master over you and having all these unconscious things playing out, you know, like, I don’t know, something as simple as stopping drinking caffeine. If your genetics say you can’t process caffeine, you know, that’s I live in Seattle that that’s a big thing. People will you know, will then project on to me that I’m somehow causing them some sort of distress. I’m like, no, this is your body is asking you to not you’re not programed to be able to metabolize caffeine. It’s that simple. And so you can start noticing the gyrating that comes up in your mind of, Oh, I’m deprived my one vice. The good thing that’s in my life, you know, and you start to learn how to reframe and shift that way of thinking. You know, it’s like, Oh, body, I hear you. I love you. And I only get one of you. And if you can’t do caffeine, it’s like driving your car into the filling station and then, you know, saying, why can’t I put diesel in the car? That is not made for diesel. You know, it’s like you don’t do that. You say, okay, my owner’s manual says, this is the kind of I need unleaded gasoline and I need to put that in there. You don’t yell about it. You don’t feel deprived that your car can’t have diesel. And we are actually we have to take that emotion out of it. 

It’s the same. It’s the same. We have DNA that’s programed in a certain way, and we may not contain the enzymes genetically that we can break down gluten that can actually handle sugar, that can handle alcohol, caffeine. All of this can be done with simple genetic testing to find out what is it that is your genetic code for the kind of fuel that your body has been begging you to put in it your entire life. So you start to notice like, Oh, I get really rebellious or resistance against that, and I want to project it outside of myself and feel victimized by that. And it’s like, No, this is just like you getting into a collaborative relationship with your own self. Yeah.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Well, I want to thank you for being so courageous in sharing your story. It’s quite, you know, quite a traumatic childhood. You know, I can’t even imagine that it’s a fortunately, sadly, it’s a common denominator in the patients that I work with. I romanticize and too often, you know, once is too often, but in a lot of this is in your book. So I want to make sure that I mention your book to solving the autoimmune puzzle. And I got it sitting up here on the bookshelf. I meant to have it here, sitting up here. But you go.

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

Over to me right here.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Oh, there it is. Okay, I.

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

Can.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Yeah. So Kiesha does a wonderful job of really kind of sharing this in a way that’s very understandable. It can be. It can be intimidating, overwhelming when you are listening to it. And so many of us, myself included, really focus more on the biochemistry. And we now are realizing, you know, this whole body mind connection is where medicine is really moving towards. I mean, that’s where we’re going have been were being, you know, kicking and screaming. We’re heading that way. Those people like you, they’ve been doing this for over a decade and really putting your mark on this research and this whole new paradigm that we have to look at to really be able to heal ourselves can heal our patients. So now what’s the best website for them to go to? Because I want them to go and learn more about you and your work and definitely check out your book.

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

That took you second D r k SJ dot com. Yeah, their book simple.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

Well, I really enjoyed this and that was for some people this can be a little bit intimidating because you’re thinking, oh my gosh, I need to go back and think about my upbringing and all the trauma that happened and the stress.

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

You don’t, you don’t.

Rodger Murphree, DC, CNS

She just she’s just here, really. So this resonates with you definitely go to the website and Dr. keesha.com and learn more so thank you so much for being part of the summit. This is me.

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

Thank you. Bye everybody.