Trauma, Autoimmune Disease, & Fibromyalgia

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Hi. Welcome. I'm doctor Roger Murphy. I'm the host of freedom from fibromyalgia summit. Really happy that you're joining us today. And I'm really excited to have Doctor Kisha, Evers here, who is a board certified in functional medicine, Ayurvedic medicine, doctor sexology, a trauma informed psychotherapist, family practice, advanced registered nurse practitioner with a specialty in integrative medicine. Kisha is is highly sought after as a speaker because her of her background. She's the author of a bestselling book, The Autoimmune Puzzle.

And she's a Ted presenter. She's he's really, as you can tell, with her background, a wealth of information. So I'm really excited that you're joining us here today. And we're going to be talking a little bit about autoimmune disease, its connection with fibromyalgia. And trauma. So thank you so much for being part of the summit. Now I'm delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having me. 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 that seem to believe that's kind of where we're eventually heading, is that fibromyalgia does have some type of autoimmune component. Do you see one of those? Okay. Yeah, I thought so. We had a conversation before. You know, 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 that a lot of times we see it run in families.

So I think there's there's certainly a pattern there. So tell me a little bit about your thoughts on fibromyalgia, an autoimmune disease. 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 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? It's happening. And I find that there are I call it the four P's, of autoimmunity.

And I find them present in people with fibromyalgia, too. Now, there are some characteristics with autoimmune disease that we can also point to as fibromyalgia that are okay, ten, ten times more autoimmunity is diagnosed in women than men. Yeah, we find those for fibro too right? Yeah, yeah. And these four P's that you know I, I highlight are

Fibromyalgia and Autoimmune Connections 2:37

the pitta dosha. Now your Vedic medicine, which means there's a lot of fire already present in the personality tends to be Type-A driven kind of people. Perfectionism is the second p 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 to me if I have to or when I have time.

And of course, time never arises until the body has ups 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 able to, you know, I'm just tired. You need to actually pay attention to me. And the fourth P is holding on to the poison. The past pain, which is past trauma. And so those those four are characteristics that I see in everyone with autoimmunity. And I definitely see it if I wanted to. So I don't know if, you know, walks like a dog, talks like an.

Yeah, right. And the other thing, another little statistic about autoimmune disease is that once you have one well here two statistics, once you have one, you have a 75% chance of having another one. So oftentimes fibro is a comorbidities. We call it medicine right. It's it's also present with something like hashes or Raynaud's or rosacea. People don't realize like rosacea. And their cold hands and feet 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.

In our culture, and this is definitely true for me, because when I was in my early 30s, 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. I felt like someone had taken 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 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 RA got my attention, you know, and I sort of looked around and said, oh, is there like, there's 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. Like, I got handed two prescriptions when I was diagnosed. Here's one for methotrexate, here's one for a non-steroidal 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, 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, see it as. Do you have a family history of autoimmune ity? 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. Yeah. And unfortunate lately you know I'm 58 now. It's been almost 30 years since this happened. People are still getting the same messaging.

No, it has nothing to do with your diet. No. You know, it's genetic. Therefore. 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 my rose. They're going along. They're living their lives.

Trauma, the Four P's, and Chronic Illness 7:10

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 what you've shared I see that with my patients is I had a patient here recently that I treated her years ago with fibromyalgia that had helped her overcome that. She'd been doing great. And then the last two years 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 it it was this two years of just agonizing stress that she'd been under. Yeah. From what she said is something that kind of weaves this thing together. Right. Yeah. But you find that 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. You know, this is the of that fourth P that I was talking about. The holding onto the poison and past pain is trauma.

And the thing that people I just want to make a definition and clear here because oftentimes you will think of trauma as what we define as capital T trauma. Right? 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 traumas. 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, 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 mass diet or or diet for rheumatoid arthritis, you know, or horses diet that and that doesn't exist that 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 if you find a puzzle that you want to fit together, you take the lid off the box and you dump all the pieces out on the table, and you flip them all that over and you're looking for the four corners. Yeah. 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 autoimmune issue. 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. Yeah. So that's the first corner piece. The second corner piece is gut health. Everybody with autoimmunity has leaky gut. Yeah. And I would say probably the same thing about fibro. Yeah. 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 corner 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, there are tens of thousands of chemicals that are being 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 illness 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, yeah, 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. Like they can't change those things that I'm mentioning, right? Where they have a chronic illness, which in and of itself becomes a stress. Yeah. 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, feeling safe in their own body. It's telling them they're doing something wrong. So what you have to do is say, 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 push 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? Yeah. 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 spot, 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 there a pattern, a looping, a rumination. And so we get to go in when we have an adult brain development, 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. Am I okay? Am I going to survive? 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 fire light circle for something that we did, said, or stood for the sabers.

Who 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 are going to find that in any DSM five manual on psychology and mood disorders. And, you know, pathologizing the way that our minds work. But unfortunately, that lack of recognition, one of the patterns we develop in childhood are making us sick.

Yeah. How do I mean, 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 I mean is in cells, which I love because when I learned that it was shortly after my diagnosis, I was looking for answers outside my medical model, and I discovered yoga and aggravated meditation and and this 10,000 year old sister science of yoga said.

Oh, the body is the canvas of the mind. And so if we're hyper vigilant and hyper reactive mentally, our immune system follows suit. Yeah, our mast cells follow suit. Our glia in our 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 the 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. Yeah. And 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 with fibromyalgia that oftentimes they come from a traumatic childhood. Yeah. And it can be the big T, as you said, but it can be a smaller T, it could be that you had an illness when you're an adolescent, it could have been you travel because you were in a military family.

I mean, it's all kind of it's one of mine. Yeah. But you used to have 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 everybody needs to realize you're going to be under stress. And that's sometimes part of life. Yeah. Stress sometimes is a good thing. It gets you up out of bed and off to work. I mean, it is not a terrible thing, but it can certainly get out of control.

And with fibromyalgia, we know a lot of times that individuals become as they were under a lot of stress as a child as they go through adulthood, then they they don't have that ability to rebound from stress. They get under an illness, a surgery, something comes along

The Puzzle Model: Genetics, Gut Health, Toxins, and Trauma 17:20

and they start developing these symptoms before you know it. After seeing several doctors and ruling out everything else going on, many antidepressant, I say you got fibromyalgia and then then you just learn to live with it, right? Yeah, yeah. But you know, but I say that you brought this up about these personalities. So when someone asks me about fibromyalgia, I say, well, you know, usually the people that I see are the types that they're the doers. They, you know, they do and they do and they do and they do and they do oftentimes for others.

And then they're done out. Right. Or they're the great the caregiver. You mentioned the 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 to hard to get off. Yeah.

The thing that I think gets missed and that which I think is so important, like let's, let's define the hamster wheel. It's a very vicious cycle. And it happens with fibro. It happens with everyone with autoimmune 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 mom, good lawyer, good doctor, good.

You know, whatever it is that you you have as this, I'm worthwhile. If this happens, you know, this fluctuate like the wind, right? So if you've you've you've externalized your worth. And that's the 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 and whether you know, am I am I worthwhile? Am I doing okay? Am I achieving my goals? Then you're setting up this activation of what we just we're talking about. So you activate your adrenal glands, 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 and 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 is 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 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 HSP. Highly intuitive, empathetic, empathic. That doesn't then explain away. It says yes, this is where you landed because of life experience. Your 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. It's like the wake up 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 intolerance of 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 spouses or parents that you've been with or all. Now you're labile, narcissistic, and you 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 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 track mind because you are the that 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 it's a wisdom knows that if it can't keep you alive, you're certainly not allowed to reproduce any. And your digestive system is going to shut down so that you can't be, you know, if you're being chased by a lion, you can't stop and have bowel movement. 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 you're a 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 it's vicious cycle. And then now you're permeable to 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 it your Buddha nature. That said, 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 mirror and my healing has been. And 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 cortisol in my system down my gut wall. I have food sensitivities, upregulate 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. Yeah.

Healing Patterns and the Heart Model 24:50

You know, but I think what oftentimes happens is these individuals are just living this busy life. They're their kids. 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 but and I use I talk about we're all born with a stress coping savings account and 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 stim 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 you the stress becomes so magnified that you you're always feel that way. And these are this is classic fibromyalgia. We feel wired and tired. 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 it's too much. And you shut down. And when you when that happens, your body's shutting down. So then that introduces this whole thing, that cell danger theory, survival paradox with 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 callus in most every disease. Right. And then how also get 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. Yeah. How how 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 in our childhood or adolescence? And then what are some of the steps we can take to start to correct that, that that stinking thinking pit where you get an amazing this of this negativity just can't get out? 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 Heart Model that goes through and talks about just what we said. So the, stinking thinking, right. Yeah. The Ziegler. Yeah. Yeah, it 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, flight, freeze, faint. But actually for children it's always freeze or 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. We 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 mind at the time.

Right? So if we take my like ten year old sexual abuse, it'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 panicked rabbit freeze every time the intercom goes off.

So that's really deeply ingrained inside my system. And then the meaning I've attached 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 this 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. Then the model bifurcates. And on one side it says in the middle of the circuit, 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 thoughts. 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 how down means I'm doing this to myself. Okay? I'm kind of like killing myself in a societally acceptable way. When did I ever why 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 and I found this ten year old girl and I said, oh, she did run 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 that willingness to self confront and say, every time I'm unhappy, I'm present, maybe I have something to do with this.

Is that first step, right? Okay. Oh, 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 your adaptive behaviors that are now maladaptive. Oftentimes 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, 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 you yourself. 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 a long, long, long hours working, right, you eventually do realize, like, this is not a sustainable method of being, and it definitely doesn't bring peace. Look at those, but 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 awake awareness, where we stay awake to our thought processes before we actually engage in an activity. So. So if you find yourself kind of blipping out and you, you come to awareness and you just down the whole bag of Doritos while you binge watch four episodes of your favorite Netflix show, and now you feel shame and guilt and you just like, I'm just gonna 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 to.

Reframing Stress, Self-Compassion, and Practical Healing 34:20

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 comraderie like your body has 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. Yeah, right. It's not unsafe to be in that body. That body is just beautifully conveying a message for you. Yeah. 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, wow, can I support you better?

What do you need for 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 often really anxious about healing trauma because you're like, I don't want to go back and refill 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 with 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 of that life, or 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 parts. Yeah, yeah. 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 this, as you mentioned it to, you know, pains or 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 I'm 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 that I'm in pain and and I totally understand. I mean, I'm not. Yeah. Any way demeaning that because that's how most of us are and 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 the some of this approach to trauma, this past trauma is a way to start to, number one, acknowledge that that your thinking could be generating some of your or certainly accelerating some of your, your symptoms.

And by changing your thinking, you can oftentimes see improvement in your symptoms, 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, that's always helpful. Yeah. Because people, you know, you hear that manager? Oh, you're just lazy or crazy, right? Exactly. And so yeah, you know, hopefully if people are tracking what I'm saying as the body is, you can think, right. Yeah.

And that 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 there's 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 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's 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 you're genetics, so you can't process caffeine, you know, that's I live in Seattle. That's a big thing. People will, you know, will then project onto me that I'm somehow causing them some sort of distress and like, no, this is your body's 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 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, like, 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 resistant 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, well, I want to thank you for being so courageous and sharing your story. It's quite, you know, the quite, you know, traumatic childhood. You know, I can't even imagine that. It's a unfortunately, sadly, it's a common denominator in the patients that I work with, fibromyalgia that and too often, you know, once is too often, but and a lot of this is in your book.

So I want to make sure that I mentioned your book to solving the autoimmune puzzle. And I got it sitting up here on a bookshelf. I meant to have it here, sitting up here. But you go over me right here. Oh, there it is. Okay, I can yeah. So Keyshia does a wonderful job of really kind of sharing this in a way that's very understandable. It can be. It could be intimidating, a little overwhelming when you are listening to it. And so many of us, myself included, really focus more on the biochemistry and we and now we're 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, you know, kicking and screaming. We're heading that way. Yes. There's people like you. They've been doing this for over a decade and really putting your mark on this, this, this, research and this, 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, doctor Wkyc.com Dr.

shay.com. Yeah, simple, simple. I really enjoyed this. I know for some people this can be, a little bit intimidating because you're thinking, oh my gosh, I gotta go back and think about my upbringing and all the trauma that happened and the stress you don't. You don't. She just, you know, she's just here with you. So, this resonates with you definitely go, to the website and doctor kisha.com and and learn more. So thank you so much for being part of the summit. Thank you. Bye, everybody.