Trauma’s Impact On MCAS & Histamine Health

Introduction and Guest Background 0:00

Welcome back to our Reversing Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and Histamine Intolerance Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Meg Mill. And today I'm joined by Alex Howard. Alex is the founder and chairman of The Optimum Health Clinic the creator of the therapeutic and coaching methodology, and as a thought leader in trauma education. And I'm very excited for this conversation today because this piece is so important really when it comes to our overall healing. And we're focusing a lot of on labs and testing and diagnosis, but we also really need to be addressing trauma and the nervous system and everything surrounding that to really get these lasting results.

So I am so excited to talk to Alex. Thank you so much for joining us today. Meg, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Well, I am so excited to get into all of this. But before we get into all the juicy details, I'd love to get your background and have everyone really know what, because I know you have a personal story. Yeah, so I've been working as a clinician now for over 20 years, working with, complex, chronic illnesses. along with many other kind of issues that so people can struggle with, this wasn't my chosen life path.

So my chosen life path, if my, mom and had her way, I probably would have been accountants. I wanted to be a rock star. I became neither, I, suffered from M.E., otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome for seven years from my, mid I mid mid teens to my, early 20s. And that was a very challenging and difficult journey. And I know a lot of people listening to this summit are here because of their own health journeys. And the thing that was so challenging was suffering from what I guess we classify as a medically unexplained illness.

And having all of these completely debilitating, frightening symptoms and not knowing why and going back again and again to, my general medical practitioner and then in time,

Personal Healing Journey and Recovery 2:18

alternative practitioners and, psychology practitioners and consistently being told, really one of two things. The first thing is we can't find anything wrong with you. Therefore there must be nothing wrong with you or there is something wrong with you. But we don't know the pathway to recovery. Therefore, there isn't a pathway to recovery. Now of course, I can look back on this and realize that both of those statements are incredibly arrogant because they're statements that claim that that individual, that practitioner knows everything that there is to know.

It's like we can't find anything wrong, therefore there's nothing wrong or we don't know the path to recovery. Therefore, there isn't a path to recovery. And a couple of years into this, but I was around 18 years old at the time, I reached the point that I wasn't actively planning how I was going to end my life, but I'd lost any sense of hope or engagement in living my life. And I had a conversation with, with my uncle, who basically helped me realize that if I wanted the circumstances of my life and of my of my health journey to change, if I spent my life waiting for someone else to find the answers, I may spend my whole life waiting.

And so this really set me off on a what was a five year healing journey. And there was good news and bad news. I didn't find the answer, but what I did find was many answers. And what I came to realize is that with complex chronic illnesses, I think this is absolutely true when talking about mast cells histamine intolerance and the sort of what particularly this wider area, of immune activation and immune sensitivities is that there are different pieces of the jigsaw for different people. There are also different stages to the recovery process and what became very clear of my own healing journey was often I would go and see a different, different practitioners, and they would have a piece of the jigsaw that they would often think was the jigsaw.

So one of the reasons why I love speaking on, summits like this, because one of the great things that you're doing is hearing from different people that are talking about different pieces of that jigsaw to help people put together their roadmap and their own pathway to, to, to, to healing. But so to finish off my story, I've discovered that a number of different pieces functional medicine wasn't called that back in those days. What we now call functional medicine was was very important part of the jigsaw for me.

psychology and nervous system regulation. I'm sure we'll get into a moment. because that was a very important piece. Again, we didn't use those words back at the time. but also this recognition that I had to become captain of the ship of my own recovery journey, that meant I could have a whole team of people that would be playing different roles. But I had to find that way to to be the kind of the, the navigator or the driver of, that process. And seven years after I first got diagnosed, about five years after I went on this active healing journey, I reached the point that was a full recovery, I think on health charities, people, people have different measures, but I think most people have a way of thinking, well, if I could just do that, then I would know that I'd got through the other side.

And for me, that was not just being able to exercise, but it was being able to exercise without having a delayed fatigue response, without having a reaction on on the other side, when I reached that point, I'd also been doing various training in in psychology and various forms of healthcare. and I basically almost exactly 20 years ago now set up the clinic that I'd wanted to exist in the years that I'd been in which which which is The Optimum Health Clinic, which has a a team of functional medicine, informed and trained nutritional therapists and a team of therapeutic coaching, trained and, very experienced, psychology practitioners.

And so that's really those two pillars have been really the heart of my life's work. That's all I did. And so really empowering. And I think you just said so many things that were wonderful. But one of them is that you had to be the leader of your own ship. And I think that's really key, because you start to feel in these chronic health conditions and, you know, when you're having mast cell activation syndrome, like your body's betraying you and things are happening to you that you can't control when you start to feel out of control.

I think it's a very common thing to feel so near looking and grasping for these straws and these answers. And like you said, people have different ways and different methods, and they all have a piece of the puzzle that help you, but really feeling empowered and being that captain of your own ship. And really, sometimes when I'm working with people, we even have to start on this work and the mindset and the changing before we can even get a response. And some of the other therapeutic ways. Yeah, I think that's right.

And I think it's I always want to make the point to people that we grow up in, in a particularly the Western world of a world where you get ill, you get diagnosed, you take a pill and and you get better. And it's a very passive relationship with those with those health care professionals. And it it's sometimes a tough one to take home.

What Trauma Really Means 7:48

That sense of responsibility. But the point that I always want to make is that it can feel like a burden, but it's also a place which is enormously empowering because then we are the architects of the healing journey that's happening, and we're not passively just waiting for somebody else to, to have or to find the answers. And the captain of the ship doesn't need to know every task on the ship better than all of the other people working on the ship. And so, you know, there's there's the first mate, there's the navigator, there's this, the different roles.

You don't need to know nutrition better than your nutritional nutritionist or functional medicine better than your physician, or you know, psychology better than your, your your therapeutic coach or so, you need to know your body and you need to know the steps of where you are in the process to be empowered to really work with those people. Yes, that's so true. So we're going to talk a little bit about trauma today and the trauma response. But before we get into the dynamics and surrounding the immune system, we talk a little bit about really what traumas, because I think that sounds like a big word.

And some people may think, oh, well, I don't have trauma because I didn't have, you know, something really significant. But the traumas come in and in little ways, it's kind of talking about what trauma is and how that's different from just stress. Yeah. So it's interesting our, our most successful online conferences are, trauma sleep, a conference, which we're just about to release our fourth annual, events of. And so in that conference, I've interviewed literally now hundreds of of the world's experts on trauma and asked them the question, what is trauma?

And so when it came to writing my last book, which is called It's Not Your Fault, which is a book about how childhood trauma shapes us, I felt a certain pressure to answer this question. Well, having asked a lot of people and heard a lot of perspectives, and what I realized is trauma is not just events. And I think that's often the confused peace that people will talk about adverse childhood experiences. And of course, that that research is incredibly important. and what that research basically basically shows us is when we have significant events of trauma, like growing up with a parent who is an addict or a parent leaving, or a parent being incarcerated or experiencing physical abuse or sexual abuse or neglect or so, that has a major impact on the health outcomes we have in our lifetime.

But there are people that go through those experiences that don't have those same impacts. There are people that do have those impacts. Some of the things that shape us the most are not. But as you mentioned, those big dramatic events, they're more subtle experiences. And so what I came to realize is trauma is particularly childhood trauma in the context we're talking about here. Childhood trauma is an echo. It's things that happen that then echo through our life. But the word echo is not just a description, it's also an acronym.

So there are four stages in my thinking of how, trauma impacts us and shapes us. So there's the events, which is the E of echo. And we just touched on that those the what I would call, overt traumas, obviously traumatic things, but also then what I would call covert traumas, much more subtle experiences that shape us in all kinds of ways. You know, perhaps as a child, one day in class, we get super enthusiastic. We put up our hands for a question and we get it wrong. Everyone laughs. teacher laughs as well.

We go home and we feel judged and we feel shamed. What we most need from our caregivers, and maybe our parents, is to be told that we're loved. We're okay as we are, and to be allowed to have the feelings that we have about it. Maybe what we get is rewarded for not feeling those feelings and for hiding how we feel. We have lots of experiences like this, and we learn all kinds of things about ourself, about the world, about our feelings, about our emotions. And so it's not just the obviously big events.

Sometimes the more subtle events shape us more because we get so normalized. Those experiences. So there's the events. And then the sea of echo is the context within which the events happen. But this is the same I can we all have three core emotional needs. These needs are like physical needs for oxygen, for food, for water. They're critical, just like then critical for our physical development. These emotional needs are critical for healthy emotional development so that they need for boundaries the ability to say yes and no, yes or no to other people, but also to be able to say yes or no to ourselves.

The need for safety as a child. This is to have, nervous system co regulation with our caregivers. So that child comes home, gets distressed, they get emotionally held, physically held, the kind of soothing impacts of those caring nervous system teach this their nervous system that they're safe as adults. The core emotional need for safety is our ability to self-regulate, our ability to. So when we get activated or triggered, to be able to self-soothe and to be able to self calm our system. And then the core emotional needs for love, this is not just being loved for what we do and what we achieve.

It's being loved for who we are as we are. So one of the best predictors of healthy self-esteem development is to learn that we are loved as we are. as as a child, as children, we are utterly dependent upon our caregivers to meet these needs for us. How well they do or they don't meet these needs teaches us how well we do or don't meet them for ourselves. So we've got the events. We've got the context, these three core emotional needs of the event overwhelm us. The core emotional needs are not met.

We come to the third step, which is the H of echo, which is homeostasis. The homeostatic balance of our nervous system changes. We become activated. We go into what I call a maladaptive stress response. Healthy stress response. You know, you and I walking along, walking down the street, we don't see we don't hear the electric bus that's coming towards us. We see it last minute. We leap out the way we get ahead of adrenaline and cortisol. We survive. And then we we calm down again. That's acute stress.

Chronic stress is when it's like the bus is chasing us the whole time. To get back to my point earlier about medically unexplained illnesses, when we're suffering from an illness, when we don't know what's wrong with it, why it's wrong with us, you know, should we rest? Should we push through? Should we take this supplement? Should we do that protocol? Why have I still got symptoms? I've stopped eating all the foods that I thought were the problem. And I still have these symptoms, so that alone becomes an ongoing trigger and stimulus and therefore dysregulation, to our system.

And so the homeostasis shifts and we, we, we have a constantly dysregulated, overstimulated nervous system. Which brings us to the echo of echo, which is the outcomes in our lives. Living with a constantly dysregulated nervous system will lead to a whole bunch of things, anxiety, because we're constantly in a state of overstimulation, depression because our system shuts down and one of the trauma responses we become numbed non when we shut down, addictions because we try to self-medicate the discomfort of the dysregulation with alcohol, drugs, food, whatever it may be.

self-esteem, because we've learned that we're not enough and we're not safe. We're not okay as we are, but also health outcomes. And so in the context of this conversation, the context of this conference, one of the major outcomes of a dysregulated nervous system is impacts on our immune system. Immune system can become overactive. It can become underactive. The endless amounts of research that show the impacts of, a dysregulated nervous system on everything from wound healing to natural killer cells to T cells to, also just over, sensitivity in the system.

And so and that's just a long answer to what sounds like a simple question. But to go back to your question around what is trauma? Trauma is really those four steps. It's the events, the context in which they happen. What shift in our nervous system in response, and then the outcomes that come in our lives. Okay. And so that's a great and that was a really thorough answer because it is it's complex. And I think that I do think it's one of those things that get labeled in this way, that there's kind of a lack of understanding of, of what it is, and that it is in a lot of our lives that we need to work through these different things to really start our healing journey.

So can we talk a little bit more in depth about that maladaptive stress response and the impacts on the immune system in particular?

How Nervous System Dysregulation Affects Immunity 17:00

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm going to give a metaphor, and we can come into a bit more of some of the mechanisms in the science. So I remember how many years ago is now probably 18, 20 years ago, something that was, a series of bombings in London, some terrorist attacks that happened in London and riots that people would leave, accidentally leave a bag, which, you know, might be that I don't know, their gym kit or something on the London Underground or subways. It would be called in America. and people go somewhere someone's left, left a bag on their whatever.

After these terrorist attacks, anytime someone left a bag, everyone, it was like, must be a bomb. And so the whole of the network would shut down concert. And now announcements. Please don't leave bags unattended because each time it happened, the whole thing was shut down. in response. So a way to think about it is the letter. The threat has been raised because of what's happened and then things which are not dangerous. And maybe in some cases they could be dangerous, but in most instances they're not dangerous, get reacted to as though they are a danger and they are a threat.

The same thing happens within our own immune system. And effectively what we're talking about with mast cell activation, with autoimmune conditions, we're talking about an immune system that is reacting to things as dangers when they're not actually dangers. One of the things that we've seen consistently over the 20 years that we've been we've been working with people at the Optimum Health Clinic, is that if we work with people using a functional medicine approach and we don't look at the nervous system piece, often those individuals will react to the very interventions that we're using.

And so, for example, someone will have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that have Sibo. And then we'll try to treat the Sibo. And then the treatment for the C by will then cause a reaction. And then it's like, well what do you do. Where do you go. In fact, part of our reputation has been to work with those patients which are so sensitive that they struggle to work with other protocols and other interventions, and with, a lot of the fatigue population being quite the opposite of the perception that those people are lazy, very often they're very driven and, kind of overly kind of forceful people of themselves.

Sometimes we just push through these protocols and go through horrible detox for weeks or for months. And at the end of it, what they thought was detox was actually just their body reacting to the intervention in the first place. And so what we then discovered was that when we did a, a dual approach of working at using a functional medicine based nutritional intervention with an psychology approach to work to reset the nervous system and to calm that maladaptive stress response. What we found was that firstly, people could tolerate protocols.

They previously couldn't, but also that other things that were just day to day things that people reacting to. Often there was a calming of that. One of the ways that I look at it is that the the physical body has a natural capacity towards healing. It's like we get a cut or we break a bone or whatever. There is. No, there's not a there's not like the drug you go to to freak out from your doctor, you know, you've got to get the drug to heal the broken bone. Right. You may get painkillers. you if you get an infection, you may get antibiotics.

but there's not a drug that you take that fixes the bone. It's like, you know, you cut you cut your your hand or whatever. You may get it stitched together. You may have to have the wound cleaned, but there's not like the drug that you get given that makes the skin kind of heal itself. that is the natural capacity of the human body. And when we are in a state of nervous system dysregulation, that natural capacity towards healing is impaired. And so an example of this is there was a really interesting study done where they had a they had two groups.

They had a control group, which is just sort of regular people, but matched up with an intervention group of people that were living with chronic stress. Now, how what's the best way to find a group of people living with chronic stress? It's finding people that are caring. One of the best ways is finding people that are caring for relatives with Alzheimer's, dementia and so on. So people that are living carers of someone that they love, who is in a very difficult situation if they're living with the day to day reality of that.

So have these two groups and they did a 3.5mm, muscle, biopsy, punch biopsy with both of these groups to measure how long the wound took to heal the those that were caring for the, for the relative, the wound took 24% longer than it did in the control group. So what we can see is we have a natural capacity to heal. Again, there's no drug to make that wound heal. It heals itself, the miracle of the human body. But when we're in a state of nervous system dysregulation, that healing time is longer.

And so tracking back to this relationship between, nerve trauma, nervous system dysregulation or maladaptive stress response and our immune system, when we are in a state of dysregulation, our immune system typically can do one of two things. One, it becomes hypersensitive. We react to threats and dangers which are not necessarily threats and dangers, because our immune system is trying to protect us and keep us safe. The second thing that can happen is our immunity gets impaired and we don't react to things that we need to react.

So and that's where you see another group of patients where they get every flu, every cold, every bug that goes around because their immunity is not responding in the way that it needs to, which we would argue is a fatiguing of an overactive system. So it's like it's been two active and then the system has crashed and it's not responding in the way that it needs to. And so this is not to negate the importance of other things I'm sure people will be talking about in terms of looking at things like diet, looking at things like environmental, factors, looking at gut health, looking at, hormones.

All of these pieces, of course, are also go back to my earlier point. There's a jigsaw. There are different pieces. But my observation is often this nervous system piece for many people is the missed piece. And when it's not addressed, a lot of the other interventions don't work in the ways that they need to. And so for some people, learning to regulate their nervous system is the piece that makes the difference. Other times, it's the piece that allows the other pieces to make the difference. I totally agree with you.

I think it's the combination of really looking at the at the labs, getting the right nutrients, doing all the things to calm your nervous system. I mean, all the things that calm your immune system and looking at your nervous system at the same time, where we really can put those pieces together, that we see that success. Now let's jump into where people can start, because I think that's where they've been listening. Now it's like, well, what do I do? I want to I want to know what some things I can do to get started right away.

Yeah. So when it comes to resetting the nervous system, just so we've been talking about jigsaws and puzzles and and pieces.

Where to Begin: The RESET Framework 24:30

There's not one piece that's the biggest part. That's probably not going to surprise people that there are different pieces to that jigsaw. And one of the ways that I look at it is that it's not just having the right pieces, it's having the right pieces in the right sequence. And so one of the things that people can find, kind of talking more broadly before becomes specifics here is you can have the right pieces of your recovery jigsaw in the wrong time, and the things that will help you later in the journey can make you worse.

Earlier in the journey, and again, the things that helped us earlier in the journey, the breakthrough at one stage can become this the limitation, the problem at the next stage. And so I think it's really important to think about sequencing, not just of what I'm about to talk about, but also a physical intervention, as well. So I have a five step framework, a five step five step process. So it's not five puzzle pieces. It's five sequential pieces. the I think captures well what, what what we're talking about here.

And so I like acronyms. So there's the acronym. There's also an acronym of of Reset which is the first thing is we have to recognize that I'm nervous system is dysregulated. One of the problems is that we will typically normalize to the state that our system is in. So I remember back in the day, right in the early years of the clinic, people would come in and I'd explain these elements around the maladaptive stress response and they would say, yeah, that that sounds right, but it doesn't feel true for me.

You know, I feel like I'm in a calm state, and yet they'd be so dysregulated that I'd notice myself having to manage my own dysregulation because they were so, so wired, to be around. So we can very easily normalize and not realize that what we've normalized here is not healthy. And it's not it's not our optimum state. so the first step is to recognize the second step is we need to examine what are the factors that are driving that nervous system dysregulation. Those factors will likely be a combination of things we learned in childhood.

May well be childhood trauma. To unpack where we started off in a in a lot more detail, it may well be having more awareness of how we relate to ourselves in day to day life, which may be what got set up in some of that childhood trauma, how we are triggered, that impacted by the environment, like one of the ways that we've learned to be in the world, which is causing our system to constantly be dysregulated. The more clarity we have on that, the more we can go to the next step. And the next step is to stop those patterns there.

There's various tools and techniques that we can learn to be able to stop, to catch the patterns stop and to calm the system. practices that help nervous system self-regulation like meditation, yoga, tai chi, chee-kong, those kind of things can be helpful that breathing practices, breathwork. But we need to have ways to work to catch those patterns, to stop them, and to try to teach our system into a calmer way of functioning. The next step and getting these two steps in the right order, I find, is really important.

The next step. So that's the second A of reset. So we've got recognize, examine and stop. The second E is emotions. One of the reasons why a nervous system gets activated is to help us stop feeling the overwhelming feelings and emotions that we don't have the support or don't know how to feel. As we calm the system, we often get closer to those feelings. We then need to be able to feel, to process, to metabolize, and to work through that emotional trauma. If we try and work with the emotional side before we work to calm the system, it's often too overwhelming.

We don't have the safety and the grounding that we need to go to those emotions. But if we only so a lot of brain training approaches, we'll focus just on calming the patterns. But they won't address the emotions. And one of the problems of that is as we calm down, we start to feel. And if we can't feel the feelings, we just reactivate again. So what I noticed is people are endlessly feel like it's never ending path. I keep trying to calm the system, but it won't stay calm and it won't stay calm often because of that emotional work that hasn't really been been worked through.

So we work with the emotions, and then the final steps of the T of reset is we need to transform our relationship with ourselves. And what that really means is learning how to meet those three core emotional needs that I talked about earlier. So the core emotional needs of boundaries, of safety and of love, particularly transforming our relationship with ourselves. That means, in a way, learning to repair ourselves and to become the loving, supportive, patient, holding parent that many of us didn't experience in the way that we needed.

It doesn't mean our parents didn't love us, it just means they may not have been skillful as we needed them to be to to meet those needs. and so when we work in that way, when we, we basically are we're building awareness, general awareness that we have a pattern. We're recognizing specific awareness by examining the patterns, learning the stop the patterns, working with the emotions, and then transforming that relationship with ourselves. That's what I find is is the most kind of comprehensive way of then having lasting change and lasting shift in how the nervous system functions.

If we do bits of that jigsaw, or we try and jump ahead in those steps, often what happens is we put a lot of effort and energy in. But though I know that the change doesn't tend to stick in the way that that we hope for. And that's the whole idea is that we're getting the lasting results. And so, you know, when you're looking at it, I know that these we're talking about complex issues here. So we're looking at complex issues when we're talking about the first part and putting the nervous system regulation in.

And then this is also a complex pattern that you're not. So I think the message too is that it is a marathon. It's not a race. And it's really being open to taking all of these steps and then seeing, are you ready to put the work in here? Are you ready to you want to see lasting change, but where are you? Do you find that like where are you on the spectrum of really believing that that's possible and putting the effort in to do it to. Yeah, one of the things that's really hard, as a practitioner, I think, to watch is that people can sometimes avoid doing the work because it feels like too much work.

But the reality is that when we do the work, our life gets better and our life gets easier. And it's a it's a little bit like parents that really skillfully parent in the early years get a much easier ride. And then. Yes. And so parents, they get that real balance of, of of giving the kids the core emotional needs of love and safety. But they also meet that with the need of boundaries, which is they actually teach them the edges and they hold the edges and they have the difficult conversations, but they get the safety that actually comes from that typically get a much easier ride.

Now my my kids are just about a hit teenager, so I take no position of this personally. This is what people tell me. still. Right. So you know the skill. So but the same is also true when it comes to our own, health path. The to become captain of the ship of your own recovery. It is more work in the short term. And we have to sometimes draw up narratives, you know, it's true that we're a victim of the reality that we live in. But if we're over identified with that, with that narrative, often, then we're disempowered to do anything.

But if we can start to commit to do our healing work, life gets easier. Even if we're having to put the work in. We feel a sense often of, of of pride. We feel a sense of direction. We feel, obviously, the improvements and benefits that come. And even if the benefits take a little while to to start to show it's it's showing up to our self in that way is its own act of self-love. Like there's something that feels just feels good about knowing that we are taking this thing that's causing us pain and causing

Consistency, Empowerment, and Resources 33:00

a suffering, and we're owning it and we're moving forwards, and we feel the possibilities that come from that. That's true. And I also think, I wonder if you see this too. Whenever you are having resistance, it snowballs in some ways. So may I always say, if you're taking a even a baby step, you're still taking a step forward. So we inch by inch, but then you start to see it ramp up and ramp up. And once you can get past some of these things, you can sort of feel accelerated in the time it takes.

That's it. You know, one way to look at it is that we often we overestimate what we think should happen in the first month or two of an intervention, but we sometimes underestimate what can happen in 3 to 6 months or 6 to 12 months. And so because people have too big expectations too quickly, they often then quit and they don't follow through. But if we can take those steps, as you say, we can be consistent and we can show up to doing that, but there's nothing more motivating than realizing what we're doing is working.

But sometimes that evidence it's working is a few more steps ahead, and we've got to be consistent in staying with it. And, you know, it is a tricky balance sometimes to know when you've got to stay committed to the same path, even though you're not getting results and it just needs time, or that actually you got to change tack and you're on the wrong path and that that that's a tricky one. But that goes back to, to the earlier point that we made around, if you're captain of the ship of the recovery, you're empowered to make that decision as opposed to just being a passenger on someone else's path.

And I it always makes me uncomfortable when, people come to see us that have given too much power to medical professionals that are not living in their body every day. You know, people are writing nutrition programs that don't have to live with the symptoms. And then people have all kinds of sense of failure. I haven't followed the program that I was given. It's like, well, maybe you haven't followed because it was wrong. So there's something that's really important about, yeah, taking that power and and recognizing that no one knows our body better than us because no one else is living with the day to day felt sense of what it's like to be in it.

That's true. And that's so powerful. Thank you for all of the great information that you share with us today. Can you share where we can find more information about your work? Yeah. Of course. So the best place to go, is my website which is alexhoward.com. And that'll signpost to a few things that are signpost to The Optimum Health Clinic. it'll signpost to a five day free five day video series, which is called Decode Your Trauma, which takes what we've talked about here and goes into it in quite a bit more detail.

but also signpost to our therapeutic coaching practitioner training program. it also signpost towards, my YouTube series, which is where I work with real life people like not actors, not scripted, and work with them on their therapeutic journey. And we film the process. And so if people are wondering what happens in a real world clinical environment, like how do you reset the nervous system, what does that look like? What does that mean? That's a great way to to see what we're talking about. in action.

All right. Well, I encourage everyone to check it out. And thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. And have a great day everyone.