is there are capital T traumas, adverse childhood experiences that are capital T's. And those are the ones that you're mentioning, violence, sexual abuse.

But there are also lower case T traumas that actually have the same exact changes in brain architecture. In other words, shrinkage of prefrontal cortex or adult brain and growth in the volume of the amygdala or our limbic primal reptilian fight, exactly.

And so, you know, that's really interesting. There was a study that was done by mole and, and group. And what they found is people that identified as being chronically overwhelmed on a perceived stress index had the same exact brain changes.

And as someone that had PTSD from any of the capital T traumas of abuse, neglect, abandonment and childhood. Welcome to the Peptides and Longevity podcast.

Each week, we'll dive into groundbreaking science, innovative therapies, and the future of health and longevity. Alongside visionary physicians and experts, we'll explore how peptides, cutting edge medicine, and lifestyle strategies can redefine the way we age.

Get ready to transform your health, optimize your vitality, and unlock the secrets to a longer, healthier life. Let's get started. Hello, it's Dr. Ken Holthorpe with another episode of the Peptide Summit.

Today, we are pleased to have Dr. Kiesha Uers. She's going to talk about how to reverse emotional trauma, induced autoimmunity, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder with peptides.

It's really kind of a full spectrum program on how to help everyone. So many people have these past emotional traumas that You may or may not know and just kind of doing some background research on it.

And I was just fascinated. I'm like, man, a lot of people need this help. So I really think it's going to be a really educational time here. And so I'm so happy to have Dr.

Keisha with us. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Great. Great. So, she's an integrative medical expert, she's a doctor in sexology, family practice, and she does psychotherapies and psychotherapists and herbologists.

She's board certified in punctual medicine and neurovedic medicine, and is founder medical director of the Academy of Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program.

So that's a hot thing right now, and she trains people for that. She's been in medical field for over 30 years. After conducting the HERT study in 2013, which is healing unresolved trauma, She developed the H. E. R. T.

model for understanding how past childhood trauma impacts help. This led to the creation of the You Unbroken online program for patients to heal their own trauma and the Mystic Medicine Deep Immersion Healing Retreat.

She leads at her home in San Juan Island, Washington. She's a popular speaker. Uh, including at Harvard from the Ted talk stages and best-selling author solving the autoimmune puzzle.

And she really put together how, you know, we say like psychological, you know, and you're emotional is different than physical. I mean, it's. It's neurons firing and everything's a vicious cycle and we'll get into that.

She best out there solving the Ottoman puzzle, the women's guide to reclaiming emotional freedom and vibrant health, the quick and easy Ottoman paleo cookbook, anti-inflammatory recipes with seven ingredients or less for busy people, and your libido story, a workbook for women who want to find, fix, and free their sexual desire.

perked up everyone's ears there. You can listen to her Mystic Medicine radio show and find her programs at www.drkesha.com. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me.

You've done a lot. And it sounds like you've helped a lot of people. And again, and we'll get into this. I mentioned, as we go back to the research and look at some of the studies and it's very clear how, you know, childhood trauma just affects future health and emotional well-being and everything's a vicious cycle.

You know, breaking these families out of the cycle is such a big problem. How did you get into this? What led to this? Well, I started out at the age of 19 as an RN in the intensive care unit and was humming along for 10 years doing that, having four children, raising them, running marathons.

My friends called me the Energizer Bunny and very busy. Then, this is how my patients describe it too, all of a sudden, right, in air quotes, I got sick.

And it was one morning I woke up, I had 10 pounds of extra weight over my joints. They were red, they were inflamed, swollen. I was in so much pain. And it was like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer button.

I was just flattened. So I got in. Yeah, got in and my doctor said, so has there any autoimmune disease in your family history? And I said, yeah, I think my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis.

In fact, I'm 55 now and my grandfather died at the age that I am with it. Was in a wheelchair. Yeah. And she said, well, rip two prescriptions off her pad.

You know, one was for methotrexate, one was for a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug, said when you get worse, not if, Come back and we'll change your meds.

I mean, that was it, right? I said, well, hang on, hang on, hang on. I actually, you know, cook my own food. I'm very disciplined. I run. I'm very healthy.

What else is there? I'm sorry, dear. You have drawn the short end of the genetic lottery, right? This is it. And then just kind of close the book, put it on the shelf.

So on my way home, I remember thinking, my model of medicine has no answers for me, but there must be something out there. And so I went into PubMed and started looking for research.

And I found an article on yoga and autoimmune disease. really good outcomes and so I went to my next, you know, the next day to my first yoga class. And the yoga teacher during that class actually said this one word and enough about it that I got curious and went home and looked it up and it was Ayurveda.

And Ayurvedic medicine is the sister science of yoga. It's 10,000 year old sister science out of India. And when I went and looked it up, I thought, oh, this explains so much because all those years ago, they actually understood that we're not all the same, that every medication that you take is not, you know, that you give is not going to behave in the same way in every single body.

that we can't all be on the same diet, you know, like all this, it started unfolding and I thought, oh, this is why this person died in the ICU and this is why this, you know, like this makes so much sense.

And then I read that Ayurveda says that autoimmune disease is undigested anger. I remember sitting back in my chair and looking at the computer, kind of pissy, like, not an angry person.

I think it was just that anger management course. And he makes him too angry to go. And so, so I, you know, I thought, oh, maybe this is the problem that I don't allow myself to feel angry.

I go running instead. You know, I don't actually digest my feelings. This idea of digesting your emotions, your memories, your feelings, your experiences was completely alien and foreign to my way of thinking.

Of course, that's not the way we think in our culture and in our model of medicine. So I thought, huh. And so I learned how to meditate while I was taking yoga.

And one day I was sitting there thinking about the word autoimmune and I thought, gosh, you know, autoimmune means I'm attacking myself. I am actually killing myself in a societally acceptable manner.

A lot of people do that. Is it making you think? Yeah. Yeah. And I thought, so why do I want to die? Because in this moment, I don't. So when's the first time I wanted to die?

And this was a very, very important question. Instead of how do I get out of my suffering as quickly as possible, I started asking this question. When is the first time I wanted to die?

Why do I want to die? And I started tracing my memories backwards, looking for this undigested anger root cause. And I found this 10 year old little girl version of myself who was being sexually abused by the vice president, the vice principal of my elementary school.

And I looked at her sitting in Key West, Florida on this balcony and Navy housing under a palm tree. And she really wanted off the planet. did not understand anything that was going on, had no language to convey what was going on, just didn't understand anything.

And I remember thinking that has to have something to do with this disease I have right now. And sure enough, science tells us that. And when I started really working at that level, my RA went away within six months.

I never did go on those medications. And it's never been back in 25 years. What did your rheumatologist say? Well, see, we'll see what these meds do is they have right there.

I never took them. Yeah. I mean, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. You go back to her and tell her. Hey, I just like moved on. No, I just moved on. Yeah, because I was already in, I signed up and applied for graduate school, started learning about Ayurvedic medicine, you know, I thought, gosh, you know, I've worked in the intensive care unit and then hospice and, and then these two arenas of medicine, it's actually pretty darn good care.

that the average person does not get that kind of integrative model. And so I want to go back to school and bring that so that you're not on a ventilator or in your last six months of life, that we can actually address this piece of it and heal it.

And so I started on a journey back to several graduate school programs as I learned how the skills to be able to do exactly that. And that's what I do today.

Wow. Well, that's really neat. And it's kind of a shame at the same time when I talk to so many so-called integrative, I don't know what we call ourselves, you know, and it, they have to get sick before they realize the same with me.

I don't, you know, it's ingrained in medical school or anything alternative. It's quackery. It's no evidence. And it's really the opposite. And you said, you know that, Hey, everyone's different.

The whole system now is getting away from everyone being different. where it's big data, this works. So if it doesn't work for you, then it's your fault.

And the studies are funded by the pharmaceutical industry. So it's in that, in that model of match pill to ill or, or just symptom management instead of really getting to the root of why the nervous system is firing and causing this breakdown.

Yeah. Yeah. Anything that isn't standard dogma for you can't even get a post like, see it as nothing published. Well, because. that were, what are the journals funded by the drug companies?

They do the ads. Right. Um, but yeah, so in doing a little background, again, I just became more and more amazed and I can just picture some patients that I have, uh, and people I know, you know, really having these issues.

And I think it's on my two thirds of kids that had a significant traumatic and one third, like multiple. And it seems to me like that ongoing would be worse.

And also it does seem, which seems to fit in real life. For me, patients that have been sectionally assaulted seem to have the worst symptoms. Is that true?

Well, that's where the ACEs study, the adverse childhood experiences study came out of was the Kaiser Permanente had a weight loss clinic and it was a really good program.

People were losing their weight and getting, you know, getting what they needed out of it. But a certain percentage of them were dropping out even though they were successfully losing weight before they got to the end.

And so the clinic director decided to take a look at that and call people back in and ask why they had stopped. and a large percentage of them had sexual abuse in their past.

And so, you know, the thing that is, is there are capital T traumas, adverse childhood experiences that are capital T's, and those are the ones that you're mentioning, violence, sexual abuse.

But there are also lower case T traumas that actually have the same exact changes in brain architecture In other words, shrinkage of prefrontal cortex or adult brain and growth in the volume of the amygdala or our limbic primal reptilian.

Exactly. And so, you know, that's really interesting. There was a study that was done by mole and and group and what they found is people that identified as being chronically overwhelmed on a perceived stress index had the same exact brain changes.

And as someone that had PTSD from any of the capital T traumas of abuse, neglect, abandonment and childhood. So that's alarming because I don't have a patient that doesn't identify as chronically over-scheduled and overwhelmed and stressed out.

And then I think too, it seems a matter how they perceive it, right? That's it. It's all about perception. Yeah. Like you have the worst thing happen to you and you go, well, I'll move on.

You know, and again, it's become this cycle and it actually changes brain, not only. Chemistry, but architecture, like you're saying. Yeah. Changes the actual brain structure by shrinking and putting holes in the very part of your brain that is in charge of executive decision-making and impulse control.

So much for sticks and stones, right? Yeah. Wow. How does this typically manifest itself as children get older? According to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which was done by Kaiser and the CDC or Sennacher Disease Control, it was the largest study of its kind.

Over 17,500 participants that were Kaiser enrollees, they asked about before the age of 18, did you experience any of these 10 capital T traumas? And, you know, if you said yes to one of them, you had an A score of one.

If you said yes to two, you had an A score of two and so on. And what they discovered is the higher the number of ACEs, the higher your risk of any of the chronic illnesses we see in our culture today, including autoimmune disease, which is now the number one cause of death in the United States.

Now, heart disease still holds the prominent position, but now we're starting to relabel some of the parts of heart disease as autoimmune. So it's like, wow, right?

We're finding that in so many things, even osteoporosis, autoimmune. Exactly. Yeah, type two diabetes used to not be thought of as autoimmune, now it is.

So we have over 150 kinds of autoimmune diseases, 80% of which are diagnosed in women. Wow. And that's what we see. And I see such a commonality of, and when I was on your summit, we talked about this, how it really shifts the immune system and where normally there's, basically, TH1, which gets up inside the cell, TH2 gets up outside this other balance.

And when we look at autism, autoimmunity, Chronic Lyme, really even just aging to some degree, cardiovascular disease is that it shifts. This TH1 is too low, TH2 is too high, and it's just inflammation.

You know, it's like, oh, you got some inflammation. But the key is so they treat it up here, you know, they treat the end point instead of fixing the underlying problem.

Exactly. The thing of it is, is so much of this is about the way that your nervous system is set up to respond to the things that are happening in your external environment.

And that happens in childhood. No matter if you have sexual abuse or you have had an experience and every single human has, of rejection or betrayal or not feeling like you're good enough, which is what my study showed.

The healing unresolved trauma study actually went through these distinctions of, you know what, it doesn't matter if it's not sexual abuse or violence.

There are these other things that also make a difference because it's about your perceptions. So some of the people I've done therapy on, like the very worst thing that happened to, I remember a woman, One time, who came to me with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, she was the third and three sisters as she was growing up and she never got anything new in her perception, in her memory.

Maybe she did, but she didn't feel like she ever did. She wore hand-me-downs the entire time she grew up and that was this major trauma for her. People do this comparison of, oh, well, I had a pretty good childhood.

And I'm always so glad to hear that. But I always say everyone's had trauma because, you know, we've all had these places where we've been rejected or felt betrayed.

And as a biological being, we are programmed to understand that in tribal days, if you were put on the outside of the firelight circle, rejected from the tribe then that meant the saber-toothed tiger could eat you and so it was experienced as a very big trauma so that's the thing is is really understanding that these moments these hurts you know they actually start the way that your nervous system responds They're associated with a feeling, a meaning you made up.

And here's the thing is that we don't have our prefrontal cortex completely formed until we're 24 years old, 24 to 26. So the meaning making that we're generating when we're small children, we're small humans trying to discover how to be okay in a world dominated by big humans who are telling us how to be a human.

And so the meaning making that we generate as we're growing up is done with a brain that's not fully formed. So it's going to be very self-centered because children are self-centered.

They're supposed to be. They're trying to figure out like, how do I fit into all of this? What does this mean about me? And, you know, then we're going to create a belief and then we put a behavior to that that's adaptive for that belief and meaning that we created.

So for me, I always track mine because it's easy to track it. Now, I'm sitting in a fifth grade classroom. The speaker goes off in the corner of the classroom several times a day.

But that intercom is the one that calls me to the vice principal's office every once in a while, not that often. But it doesn't matter if it's the Pledge of Allegiance, the secretary making an announcement or, you know, the thing crackles to life.

And I go into the Pavlovian response of, freeze, panic, terror, right? And so every single day I'm having this response. And so the meaning I made up is that, you know, I'm not safe and adults who are in authority can't be trusted.

Right. Which was true for that little kid. Here's a vice principal saying, I've got your back to the whole school. And I'm going, what? The person who you are.

Yeah. And he's telling me I'm a bad kid, and that's why it's happening. I was one of two white girls in an all-black school, so he'd call me white trash and tell me I was a bad kid.

And then so from there, the meaning I made up was, oof, I better actually really be perfect if I'm bad and this is happening. So the behavior that I put to that as an adaptive behavioral response with the wise mind of the child at age 10 was to be a perfectionist.

And so I always tell people like with, with autoimmune disease, there are three P's in place. You're a people pleaser, you're a perfectionist, and you are holding on to poison of past pain.

And so those three things, I have never seen them not there in any of the hundreds of people that I've treated at this point with autoimmunity helping them reverse it.

Wow. And then that's, I can imagine other people have different methods of coping where that everyone's guys, it's a, you know, awesome student and smart.

Like that's right. It is being good. You know, other people have other behaviors that are considered bad, you know? Well, and who wants a medical provider who's not a perfectionist?

And so, you know, the whole thing around perfectionism actually served me really well until I got sick. There was no reason to change it. Then I got RA and I had to start really looking at all of this and tracking it and figuring it out.

It's not a tenable way to live a life actually. Turns out. That's that's incredible. Did you find it? It seems to me like that modern times makes this worse.

You know, it's like, you know, growing up, everyone compares themselves to others, but you got this, you get a leeway because it's not, you know, now it seems objective.

Oh, how many likes do you have on your… Oh, yeah. It's so true. And everything moves so fast. Social media has one of the four reasons that deaths of despair are increased in the United States right now.

We have a whole division of death in our country that's been called by Princeton researchers deaths of despair that have to do with addictions, serotic livers and overdoses and suicides.

So, you know, this is where we've gone steep on the curbs for deaths of despair. And as I started looking at these, I started realizing, my gosh, also narcissism has gone up.

There's a really great book, a couple of researchers have looked at called the Narcissism Epidemic. And it's talking about this very thing that social media, the feeling of being left out, right?

Comparing and despairing is one of the reasons we have increase in narcissism. self-centeredness, we're not moving into compassion and empathy. We're actually moving into a competition for resources.

So it's just talking to my girlfriend about and I'm like, is everyone a narcissist? Like, yeah. Wow, it's that that's that's crazy. Yeah. And when we were talking before, it's that, you know, and look at the studies like, you know, you get early childhood trauma, but even the stress of the mother.

basically plays a part in how that baby's brain develops. Absolutely. And utero trauma, right? Of a stressed out mother. You can't even get out yet. It sets up microbiome.

It sets up, like you said, nervous system reactivity pathways already in place. Everything is epigenetic. And that is, I think, one of the biggest kind of breakthroughs and we're moving more and more in that direction.

And just, you know, we have all these genetic tests, which people think are the end all, but really they play a much smaller part than the epigenetic, the environmental influence as if you have a particular gene, you can, it can be turned on or turned off.

So I do genetic testing on all my patients. And the reason I do that is because genetics are one of the four root causes for autoimmune disease, along with trauma and how you deal with your stress, along with toxic load and burden, and along with your digestive health.

Everyone with autoimmunity has leaky gut. But the reason I look at it, I explain to my patients like your genetic test is kind of like a pirate's treasure map.

It's where we can find the snips where X marks the spot. When you go to the X on the map, the treasure's not sitting out in the sand. You have to dig to go get it.

And so it actually shows us where to dig a little deeper when we look at genetics. We never treat the snip. We never look at it that way because we're looking at, so what SNP is being expressed when you are eating gluten, what your genetics are saying is actually you have a high intolerance or absolute celia.

We can look at neurotransmitter SNPs and we can say, so when you aren't going to bed by 10 o'clock, You're actually flipping this one on, you know, and this is why you have so much anxiety and this caffeine that you're guzzling down, this SNP is saying that you're not metabolizing it very well.

So it really helps us to make those connections between lifestyle choices and factors and what the SNPs are that are coming into play that are causing problems.

Yeah. And I'll tell patients, it's really a predisposition. Yeah. You're more likely to get this because of your genes. If you do this, like some people can eat all the sugar they want.

They won't get diabetes, but sorry, you have the snip that if you do that, you're going to get diabetes now. And we see it with so many things and no snips are really good or bad.

It depends on the environment, you know, if. I am loaded and with snips for breast cancer and rheumatoid arthritis and guess who's had both and turn them around naturally with the lifestyle choice thing again.

So, you know, it's really fascinating that, that this, the trauma component actually generated both of them for me and being able to do that work, flip them both off.

No meds. So that's really neat. And that's what peptides, as we talk about the peptides, they work so much epigenetically. Yeah. And in that it's much like, you know, the microbiome is such a big deal.

And we haven't explored even, you know, exponentially bigger is the viral. are 10 million times more of those. We're 45% viruses. I also think, and this may be a little crude analogy, but it seems to be like with, let's say you get a feral cat, you bring it in, you love it, immediately it's fine.

But if it's out there, For more than a month or so like that, it's so hard to get that cat to chill out and calm down. It's just basically, but the genes haven't changed, but the expression of those genes have changed.

Well, and when you're perceiving yourself as in danger or not getting your needs met in some way, the perception then says to the adrenals, okay, you know, we've got a lion on our tail.

We're about to get eaten. go, right? And that cortisol that gets released breaks down the gut wall. There's leaky gut. So it doesn't matter how many supplements you're taking to heal your gut wall.

If you keep generating the perception that you're not okay, I don't care how many supplements you take. It's just like a hole in the bottom of the bucket, right?

And I think we're, we're moving past, you don't say gut brain access, everything here, the guts affecting the brain, but they forget the loop, the brain affects the gut.

And in going through with that ACE study, and they mentioned that the children with the adverse childhood fear, they had shorter telomere. And so for the audience, the telomere is basically caps on the end of your cells.

And so there are caps on the ends of the mesochromosomes that whenever the cell divides, they get shorter and shorter and shorter. and other things will shorten.

And once they kind of get short enough, they can't, cells can't divide, so they basically can't regenerate and they don't function well and cause a lot of problems.

And so it's a way to kind of gauge your cellular age. You know, you could be, you know, 50 years old, but you could have a cellular age of 80 or 30. But with peptides, there's just probably the like number one anti-aging peptides are the pineal peptides, which pineal gland basically secretes melatonin.

And we thought, well, it's in charge of sleep, but also a lot to do with, you know, it's right around everything else, amygdala and fear. And also we're finding it seems to control everything else.

It's like this little guy that was sitting behind the curtain and we thought it did one thing, but it's doing a lot more. And so if you take these peptides, which decline as we age or stress or inflammation, all these things makes everything a vicious cycle.

You know, one very magical thing, it brings back your melatonin levels back to youthful levels. And it's one of those things, you know, sleep is so key and it basically allows the body to, not only does it bring that up, it's kind of objective measure, which helps you sleep, but also affects it differently as, you know, it allows you to get deep sleep.

And so we love that. And it's shown to improve sleep, especially when you give it with another peptide called delta sleep inducing peptide. But it then affects your thymus gland, which affects it.

It stimulates that and rejuvenates it, which declines as we age, which then can fix your immune system, which is causing the autoimmunity and the inflammation.

And they're even finding it resets. If you have like a low thyroid, it fixes that. Your adrenal problems fixes that. Your growth hormone deficiency, wow, your growth hormone levels just went up.

And it's kind of this you know, ultimate anti-aging hormone. They even had rats who were menopausal. They gave it to them. They started menstruating again, 80% of them, and 25% had normal births.

And they gave it to humans for 15 years and followed them. They had significant cardiovascular disease. The ones on standard treatment, you know, they got worse.

Cardiovascular system basically function got worse. The ones on the epithelium, basically the cardiovascular system got better. And they live significantly longer.

They live better, you know, better quality of life and dramatically less cancer and less cardiovascular events. So it's kind of like, and no side effects that have been found, you know, so it's really kind of neat stuff.

And, but then again, it's not like, Oh, you're, you've had childhood right here. Take this. See you. You know, I mean, it's so far from that, you know, everything's a piece of the puzzle, you know, tool in the toolbox.

And yeah, so it goes along with, you know, you look at people that are, you know, overweight, sedentary, stress is just such a killer. Yes, it is. And I lecture on that and I found, and I just kind of, just from researching, you're kind of like, oh, stress, of course everyone's stressed, you know, and what are you going to do about it?

You know, it is hard. What do you do about it? But it's not stress that's the killer. That's the interesting thing. Like I teach for the Institute for Functional Medicine.

I'm on stage teaching doctors how to do this. And I always say, it is, please do not tell your patients they have to reduce their stress. That's not like, what about the person with the special needs child or the one that's having to care give elderly parents or the one that has a job they love, but it's really stressful.

You know, like you're not throwing away your stress. It's changing your relationship to your stress. I think that's a much better way of putting it. It's how you deal with that.

It's how you perceive it. It's not actually strapping on your running shoes and going and running it off, running off cortisol. That's what I used to do.

I used to deal with my stress that way. It does not work. You have to actually look at how you're perceiving your life. What is the meaning you're still making around it?

You know what? That's really helped me going to communicate to patients because it's totally true. And I see it with my brother. I hope he doesn't watch this, but he kind of like the light bulb goes off every time.

Like he sees everything as the worst thing that ever happened to him. And it's like, what happens to everyone? You got, you didn't get the job and I'm like that, you know, Oh my God, I can't get, you know, I was in bed for a week because of it.

And yeah, it's how you deal with that stress. Well, it's the meaning you attached, right? So why do you go to bed? Cause he didn't get the job. I'm not good enough.

I can't catch a break. Right. And so he's the worst. No one likes him. And it's like, geez, you know. And so the behavior that he uses in adaptive strategy if he goes to bed is to go hide.

And so it's to like go under instead of actually saying something different, right? And so that's where all of our meanings and our beliefs and our adaptive so-called adaptive behaviors that we had as children are still running us until we get a challenge in life that we get run up against And then the Hurt model, this has two pathways that you get a choice to take as an adult with a fully developed brain.

And one of them is over here, you don't self-confront. You keep blaming the outside world, which is what you're demonstrating your brother is, right? And then, yeah.

What else does it to him? Right. Everybody else is to blame, including God and including life. And so what you do then is you start ruminating on those negative meanings and beliefs that you had when you were a child and you wind up getting sick.

Over here, the other option that you have when life hands you a challenge that you can't deal with. is you get an opportunity to finally notice like, oh, every time I'm upset, I'm present.

Hmm, maybe I have something to do with this. And you start having this willingness to engage in a compassionately curious inquiry of self-confrontation, of what your own patterns of thinking you're doing.

And so what I do is I teach my patients how to track their hurt, how to really look at what implicit and explicit expectations they have of life, their bodies, themselves, God, the people they're in relationship with, medicine, you know, and be able to see which ones are serving them and which ones are unrealistic and that they need to shift.

And we start doing that, like how to create a different meaning. and then create a different adaptive behavior strategy. This is why just deciding not to eat sugar doesn't work.

If there's actually some part of that as an adaptive behavior that gives you comfort because of the meaning you created around trauma. It's not about willpower.

Yeah, if he has a willpower, you might as well forget. I mean, your life's miserable. You know, just a small example. But I think about these things. It's like I could say someone cuts you off, right?

And flips you off. Yeah. Oh, screw you. I'm going to follow that person. I swear I would ruin my day. I just think about it. And I'd be, you know, just adrenaline is going all day and anxious.

And I found that if I wave and go, thank you, you know, and And it's like, what good did it do trying to chase guy and look at him bad, give him a bad look.

Right. It wrecked my day. Right. And like, why would I do that? I learned that in my 20s. I actually got in a race in my Honda Accord with some big white pickup truck in Texas because I got I was so angry about this road rage he was demonstrating.

And I got angry to the point where I was actually trying to keep up with him. You know, I mean, it was ridiculous. And that's when it hit me, too. Oh, this is ridiculous.

And you just give that other person power. Yeah, and it's that meaning that you put with it. Because if that's the worst thing that happens to you all day, it's a great day.

Exactly. This is why the young don't have wisdom, Ken. This is why it takes some life experience to have wisdom. I don't want to try and steal the politics of it, but it seems to me that they're making, like, you know, people say, oh, that's offensive.

I don't know what that word means. I've never been offended. I don't know. It's either if someone says something, It's either true or it's not like, okay, you know, and I think it's like we're making a bunch of victims.

It seems to me like, oh, you can't make it because of. They're keeping you down, you know, and see there, see what they said right there. That's see you are offended by that.

You're offended by that. I'm wondering if that's why we're having the way you have concerns over it. One day during one of the political elections many, many, many years ago, I live in the Seattle area and I was starting to document post-electoral depression.

That's what I was calling it. And one day, I started talking to my patients about this and I would say, so what's happening for you? Why are you depressed right now?

Well, this and this and this and this and this, you know, and, and I said, so you were afraid and you're angry. Yes. And isn't that exactly why you don't like this candidate that just got made president is because of those things.

Oh, yeah. So I said, every time you become that which you are angry at when you become angry, like my example, you know, our examples of road rage, right, chasing someone down, we become the person.

That's exactly true. Yeah. Right. And so I said, you know, you're actually intolerant of people that are intolerant. And so then you become intolerant.

That is exactly what seems to be happening. I don't think I'm angry about it. I'm like, it's just that it does seem, because I just, I've learned with, like, my brother, like, he's the ultimate victim.

And I've learned the worst thing you can do to someone is make them a victim. It's bugging you is what I'm pointing out. Well, it really affects my life because it, I have to hear them and take care of them and you can't work because of it, you know, so I see what it does to somebody to become a victim.

And it seems like, although it's in like people are doing it out of love and, you know, they're trying to do the right thing, but it seems that it's making the people like doing one of the worst things you can make a person, you know, is then, then that's all they think about.

But. I don't think we make anyone anything. You know, it's just really about being willing to self-confront our own patterns. You see what I mean? And that's the work that I do is helping people really look at what is triggering me?

What's getting me bugged? What is it that sends my biochemistry off? And then being able to work with that from the inside out. And, you know, because nobody makes another person feel anything.

See, and, and I think you said a couple of times, and I think that's, that's the key. I totally agree with you is, uh, you know, self introspection and looking at yourself and say, wait a minute.

What part am I playing in this? And instead of like, hey, it's the environment controlling me. And that's hard. That's stressful. You have no control, right?

You don't. We never did. We never will. It's being done to you. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's really the only control we have is how we respond. And if we respond with anger and fear and anxiety and depression, then we're going to get sick.

And that's just how it is. Right. And so it's, it's your relationship to stress and it doesn't matter what's going on, like what the presidential election looks like, what the environment looks like, like all of that.

It does matter obviously on so many different levels, but it's not responsible for how you feel. You are responsible for how you feel. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, that's he made, you know, look what you did, you know, and.

Uh, I think it's very true. I, uh, the little trick I, I use for myself is whatever I get. broken nose and my tooth got knocked out in the scooter accident I was talking about a couple weeks ago.

And so, oh my gosh, I thought, hey, it could be, always be worse. Always. You know, I could have broke my neck, I could have got, you know, basically traumatic brain injury.

Sounds like you were very lucky. Oh, I got a tooth that is glued in from Amazon. Yeah. And, and it's surgery. I got to go back again, but he has broken eight, eight places, but it's, he was stupid of my, on my part, riding this damn scooter.

And, uh, I got lucky. Yeah. Yeah. You really did. Yeah. And, uh, so what are the type of therapies do you, do you do? So you. You assess them, so you're doing psychotherapy.

I have a whole program that I do for autoimmunity where we address genetics, we address toxic burden, we address digestive health and how people are digesting their memories, their feelings, their experiences.

and also trauma and your relationship to stress. I work on all four of those corners of the puzzle at the same time because they each are interrelated.

They're each affecting one another constantly. If you're going to move the dial and really reverse autoimmunity, which is totally possible, I'm 25 years free.

You know, you have to do it this way. And so that's, that's how I do it. And, and we have different, like I'll do emotional healing packages. If people have really dialed in the other parts of the puzzle and they come to me, a lot of times people are hearing me on a summit and say, Oh my gosh, I heard you.

And I realized I have not dealt with my trauma. Let's do this, you know, and I'll just do the trauma healing component. And that just dials it in for them.

And as you know, one patient comes to mind, she even said, she goes, I don't know if I want to get better because I don't know if I'll be able to deal with her readiness.

Like traumatic event. I mean, it's like unbelievable. And she was like, I can deal with that. So you don't have to dig into this is the really interesting part.

A lot of people are afraid of that. And I really appreciate you saying that because I probably wouldn't have remembered to mention it. We don't have to dig up the story.

We have to go to the meaning that you created. Right. Yeah, that's the, that's the most important thing. And then we have to look at the behavior that you use as an adaptive strategy and then we need to shift those.

So in, and I have a whole program for doing that and it's very amazing. It works really well. So that's the thing is you're not having to actually dive and dig into and get into, you know, the, the horrible, so many people, horrible trauma.

make the step because they just want to bury. I don't want to talk about it. Exactly. And then the other thing they don't realize is I always think I have this on my desk.

I always think about everything as a spiral, you know, that that they've, oh, I've worked on that. And yet they're sitting in front of me with an autoimmune disease, you know, and I'll say, well, it's not one and done, you know, it's like, We may have to take this a little tighter into the spiral and circle back around again and take it in a little deeper.

So, you know, people will say, oh, I've been working on that for years in talk therapy or with one therapist. And I always say, like, if you still have your inflammation, if you still have everything happening, then it's not done.

Yeah. And that's what we do, you know, from the other side is like, look at their labs and, Hey, I don't know what's causing this, but then we kind of start with looking at the immune system and, but, and it really helps people.

I'm fine. Every doctor's check that. Well, why is this off? You know, the doctor would say, well, that's, you know, nothing we can do about it, you know, and, but there's something causing it.

So we got to get down to that. And that's why we really like it. I mentioned epithelium and the pinellium, which you can actually take orally, which is nice.

It kind of resets. And then because so much has to do with the immune system, fix that immune system. But if you have this constant, you know, in the the, you know, in the brain, the neurologic system is the biggest influence on that.

Yeah. And also like, you know, remember, you know, mast cell activation syndrome is a big, a big deal or see more and more of that. And, you know, then these mass cells and histamine intolerance, those are big time nervous system issues.

Oh, totally. And that's, and I'm on these masterminds and they're just the most brilliant, you know, caring, people, they're treating these patients very different, but they're stuck on, look at the mast cell, look at the mast cell.

Exactly. I'm like, look upstream, upstream. Exactly, yeah. But I posted something, I said, you can kick me out, but I'm going to tell you something here.

And that's what we love, some of these peptides like thymus and beta-4 and TB-4-frag with thymic peptides. That will modulate that immune system. You know, it, it gives you, uh, you know, kind of a tool crutch a little bit, you know, to help that.

But I agree. You need to fix still the underlying problem, but it gives you a little, a little, but the meantime, and then, uh, body rich compound, uh, one 57 BPC will like lowers that, you know, that a TH2 and you'll see the auto antibodies come down, but the key is fixing what's really causing it.

Well, this is getting much more at the underlying cause, but it's not getting at the core cause, which takes a long time. Right. You know, whether it's a chronic infection, but I think this whole psych, psychological, and I hate saying psychological because it makes it, you know, to a lot of people like less real or something, but which is totally wrong, but there's other stuff under underlying it that's, that's driving it.

But the way medicine is now, it's just, you know, all compartmentalized. Right. And we aren't, we aren't little compartments, you know, and that's the thing when, when people think, well, are you telling me it's all in my head?

I'm like, yeah. Why has that been so demonized? Because how we perceive is exactly what it is, but you're not imagining it. That's not, you know, so it doesn't matter if it's there or not.

We have to actually work with us. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true. And we like, you know, the big, I actually have another meeting right now. Oh, sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been great. Yeah. We'll use just like in terms of brain, you know, cognitive dysfunction, cerebral lice, and I want to mention that now we can take it oral.

But yeah, just in ending, I think you're doing such a great service. Thank you. And again, how people, they'll think, fine, go to just the doctor. DrKesha.com.

DrKesha.com. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you for being on. It's enlightening. And I think like myself, I think everyone will kind of make them think after they watch this.

Thank you so much. You did your job. And I think you really helped some people maybe take a step forward in healing. Appreciate you. Great. Thanks a lot.

All right. Take care. Bye bye. Thanks for joining us on the Peptides and Longevity podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, share and leave a review.

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Why ‘Reduce Your Stress’ Is Terrible Advice

Kent Holtorf, MD

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

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