Childhood Trauma & PCOS [Podcast]
“If you’re at war with yourself, there is no winner.” – Dr. Keesha Ewers
Dr. Keesha Ewers understands the connection between childhood trauma PCOS. In her work, she helps women reverse autoimmune disease, heal their childhood trauma, and make friends with the women they see in the mirror. During our interview, she breaks down how to go processing childhood trauma in order to begin healing your chronic illness. Her five step approach helps patients move from batting themselves mentally and physically to finding peace and calm. Listen in (or read the transcript) she shares her process and a helpful tool to get through our most stressful moments.
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Mentioned in this podcast:
PCOS Diva Private Facebook Community
PCOS Diva Podcast episode 59- 5 Root Causes of Low Libido [Podcast]
Ayurveda & PCOS: Balancing Vata
Complete Transcript:
Amy: Today, by popular demand, I have back on the PCOS Diva Podcast, Dr. Keesha Ewers, and she’s the founder of the Academy for Integrated Medicine. She’s an integrated medicine expert, doctor of sexology, psychotherapist, board certified functional medicine provider, Ayurvedic practitioner, medicine woman, and best-selling author, speaker, and mother of four. Wow. Such an accomplished woman.
She was on the PCOS Diva Podcast back in episode 59 and we talked about the five root causes of low libido and PCOS, so definitely check that out. You’ll learn how PCOS can affect your libido and what to do about it, the pill, and its impact on libido, and stress, how that causes low libido, and then, what to do about it.
Today, I am so thrilled that she agreed to come back on the podcast, because we’re going to be talking about childhood trauma and its connection with PCOS. In her work, Dr. Keesha helps women reverse autoimmune disease, heal their childhood trauma and make friends with the women they see in the mirror.
So happy to have you back Dr. Keesha.
Dr. Keesha: Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here again with you. This community is such a rockstar community you built, so, so happy to be here with all of you.
Amy: Oh, thank you. Well, it’s really a hot topic, especially in my private Facebook community. I think that because it’s a safe space to talk about the connection between childhood trauma, whether that includes sexual abuse or not, and how that may have manifested PCOS. And there’s just a lot of women really resonating with that topic, and that’s why I was hoping that you could come on and shed some light for us.
Dr. Keesha: Oh thank you. It’s interesting because the connection between childhood trauma is so clear now between autoimmune disease, cancer, and of course, PCOS has been reclassified as autoimmune in a lot of different places in the literature. Of course, there are several different root causes, but looking at it as it’s a compilation of all of the things that have happened to you and that you’ve experienced to date is being crystallized in your body is one of the wisdom pearls from Ayurvedic medicine that I think is really compelling.
One of the things that this ten-thousand-year old sister science of yoga says is that, “Whatever’s in your mind crystallizes in your body,”. People will say, “So, are you telling me it’s my fault then?”. I say, “Well, no. This isn’t a blame party. This isn’t a thing where we say there is something to blame, or someone to blame, or shame involved in it,”. It’s just like a law of physics. This happens, and then, there’s a consequence; so, therefore, what can we do to alter that reality? If you step from that place, instead of a blaming and chaining place of yourself, like of a god of another person that hurt you and you can actually have true healing, and that’s been my mission and purpose for quite a long time now. Because of course, I had to learn this for myself.
Amy: Can you tell us a little about your story and your healing journey?
Dr. Keesha: Yeah, so like you, Amy, and everybody that has gotten passionate about helping other people is usually because we have a story of our own. I always say the old saying, “Necessity is the mother of invention,” couldn’t be truer. When I was 30 – I’m 54 right now. When I was 30, I was a marathon runner, raising 4 children, worked in a very high-intensity medical environment in the intensive care unit, and was just really this perfectionist that didn’t know she was a perfectionist, and then, an overachiever who didn’t know she was an overachiever and trying to be supermom, bringing home the bacon, frying it up in the pan. I’m trying to look hot at the same time. That’s what I say.
We women drop ourselves in right now and this is what my patients will always say too is, “All of a sudden – I’m going to put that in air quotes – I woke up one morning and I gone from being the peak of physical health and the pinnacle of my life’s energy to flattened. I couldn’t get out of bed. I had gained 10 pounds of puffiness overnight and my joints were red and swollen and inflamed,”. It was just this dramatic thing that happened during the middle of the night. This would sometimes happen to people after childbirth or after a stressful event in their life, and it comes on like a ton of bricks, and you experience it as all of a sudden but it’s not really all of a sudden. It’s sort of like a straw finally broke the camel’s back.
So I wound up, my husband got me into a physician and I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, and when she was taking my history, I let her know that my grandfather had RA also, so she basically closed the book on it, put it on a shelf and ripped off two prescriptions off of her prescription pad for me. One was for methotrexate, which is a strong cancer-fighting drug, with a lot of very bad side effects, and the other was for a very strong non-steroidal inflammatory drug. She said, “Take these and when you get worse, not if you get worse, so when you get worse, come back and we’ll give you stronger medication,”. And I said, “Well, is there anything else I can do? I’m very, very disciplined, and I make all my food from scratch, I eat very healthy. I’ll do whatever it takes,”. She said, “No, food has nothing to do with this and this is all genetic, so I’m afraid you basically got the short-end of the genetic lotto,”. It’s interesting because you and I both know, Amy, that today, that same story is being told unsuspecting people who go in in pain, that food has nothing to do with it and here’s your medication, and come back when you get worse.
I went home thinking there has to be a different way and went to the internet and started looking in the literature, where we keep our science – it’s called PubMed – and looking for other ways of dealing with autoimmunity. I found an article that looked at the positive research for yoga and autoimmune disease, so I went to my first yoga class. From there, my yoga teacher said something about this word “Ayurveda”. As I said the medical arm of yoga. It was enough of an intriguing commentary that he made in this very first yoga class of mine, but I went home and the funny thing is, I ran home because I was a runner. So, I had run to the yoga class, five miles and had run home, five miles, pushing this poor body that had red and inflamed joints. I had taken a bunch of ibuprofen and run to the yoga class and run back. That’s how hard I was on my body and how I really believed “no pain, no gain”. If pain’s there, you just need to take something to get rid of it and push on. That’s the kind of mindset and mentality that I was in those days. My poor body.
I got on the internet and looked up Ayurvedic medicine and, low and behold, this sort of revolutionary concept was presented to me, which is, we’re not all the same. I know that kind of sounds funny, but I worked in a strictly western medical model in that time in the intensive care unit, and we matched symptom to drug and there was no thought entertained about the idea that there could be different body types. It’s why same drug’s given to multiple people and there’s so many different bad things that happen, and we have the litigious society is we have this weird thinking that we can standardize medicine and that we are standardized people. Ayurveda blew that open for me and said, “No, we have these different body types, and you’re supposed to feed and water them and take care of them in different ways. And oh, by the way, autoimmune disease is undigested anger”. I remember reading that and being kind of mad. I’m not an angry person and thinking – I didn’t have these words at the time, but I was definitely the constant people-pleaser, the caregiver, the person that cared about and cared for everybody else besides myself and just ignored all messages from my own body.
This got me onto this path of really becoming what I call getting into a collaborative relationship with my whole being rather than a combative one. That’s one of the things that I try to really stress a lot is if you are at war with yourself, then there’s no winner and that’s a combative relationship. The more we try to force something to happen that’s not wanting to happen, the more that we lose. I got into this very collaborative relationship and started listening to my body in a way that Ayurveda was teaching me. In other words, how to meditate, how to take a rest, how to listen when I was in pain, instead of just taking something to mask it over and slowly, slowly, after a six-month period, doing a lot of different things including learning how to meditate. I was able to reverse my RA within six months, and it’s never been back.
Part of what I discovered in that process was that one day during meditation, I was examining this word “autoimmune”, and I realized “auto-” means I’m attacking myself and that there’s nothing to blame. I was in that blame and shame mentality at that time, and I was looking for something, the reason why I was sick. When I saw the word “auto-” in my mind’s eye, I went, “Oh, that’s me”. So, I started really examining that, and I thought, “Oh gosh. ‘Autoimmune’ means that if I’m attacking myself, that means I’m trying to kill myself. I’m really committing suicide. So, when’s the first time I wanted to die?”. That was a really compelling and life-changing question that I asked at that moment.
I went backwards in my meditation, followed my timeline backwards, and I discovered this ten-year old little girl version of myself who definitely wanted to die. I was being sexually abused by the vice-principal of my elementary school, and I remember just thinking, “Oh, this has to have something to do with my current reality because I certainly don’t want to die right now. I love my life. I love my children, and I love this life that we’ve created for ourselves. This has to have something to do with it. I started immediately on working on this as if this was the root cause for me, in addition to some of the other things I was doing like: changing out my diet, learning my food sensitivities, and learning how to take care of my individual body type. I know that was a big piece to why I was able to reverse it as rapidly as I was because I started into this practice that had to include among other things,
I know this will sound- I’ll try hard not to say this right away because I don’t want people moving instantly into it, but forgiveness is a very inexpensive medical intervention. It’s very difficult to do but to do properly. You don’t move straight from understanding whatever trauma you endured in your childhood to forgiveness. You have quite a few steps you have to do in between, and I teach people how to do that. Forgiveness is the very last thing you do, and it’s not just “I forgive this person”. It’s really finding yourself in them and how you do their ego traits yourself but in different ways. Once you can do that, then you and that poison and toxicity that’s in your body and held onto hurt.
I did this study in 2013 called “The Hurt Study: Healing Unresolved Trauma” and what I discovered is that children, and well, I didn’t discover this. We already know this. Children don’t have fully developed brains. The prefrontal cortex of the brain is not fully developed until you’re 26 years old as a matter of fact. All of those 16- to 25-year olds who think they are adults and know everything, you just have to have compassion for them and say, “Well, I was there once too”. But they definitely still don’t have that executive function fully built in.
What I discovered is that with that undeveloped brain, when you’re going through experiences in childhood and every one of us has them. I don’t care who you are. You have some experience of rejection, some experience that you could not explain and were frightened about, some experience of fear and panic. When those occur with that undeveloped brain, the child state of development is self-centered. It’s supposed to be. We’re trying to figure out how to be little humans in a big human world, and where our place is, and how we function, and what’s right and what’s wrong.
We make stuff up about whatever these experiences are if we don’t have a fully attuned, grounded, very well-developed adult, right there, to help us guide us through. None of us has that 24/7 when we are growing up. In fact, I really believe that in the human experience here on life on planet Earth, we’re not supposed to. We’re actually supposed to go through this kind of stuff so that we gain wisdom in adulthood. When you think about it in that way and say, “In my model, the HURT model, and the study I conducted, I discovered that what happens is that you have that first experience of hurt or rejection or betrayal or discovered you can’t trust somebody”. Then you’re going to have a feeling in the body and that body feeling will be linked to an emotion of whatever it was: anger, fear or mistrust. So, then, that creates what you can call “wiring” or “a button in your nervous system” and then, you make up a meaning about it.
I’ll use myself as an example. So, when I’m in fifth grade, when the intercom would go off in my classroom, I would instantly go into fight-or-flight because every once in a while, it would be calling me to the vice-principal’s office. Every time it went off, it was kind of like Pavlov’s dog and I would go instantly into this fight-or-flight terror space. The meaning I made up about those experiences was because he was telling me it was because I was a bad kid, that I have to be perfect to even survive. That’s the meaning that I made up. The belief that I created then is that if I am perfect then everything will work out. Of course that’s not true, right?
All of these meanings we make up and believe in childhood aren’t true because the brain’s not completely fully developed and we’re in a self-centric space. You have to understand that this is the wise mind of the child doing the best it can. From there, you’re going to create a behavior that is adaptive to your belief and for me, I became a perfectionist. Ayurvedic medicine says that everyone with autoimmune disease is a perfectionist and hardly any of us ever want to acknowledge that in the beginning. We’re always people-pleasers too. When you back that up, then I came into adulthood with this perfectionism, and if anyone comes along and pushes my button, that I’m not good enough, I’m actually going to go into a fight-or-flight, rather than just be like, “Oh, well, that’s a B- on a test. That’s okay,”. No, no, no, no. I’m going to go into this complete meltdown because I don’t have an A+. That’s how bad it was. If I ran a marathon, I had to run my very best time. Of course, that’s not a sustainable model of living.
Of course, rheumatoid arthritis becomes the most important almost event that could happen to me is set me down, make me be quiet, make me be still and start this self-discovery and self-confrontation process that has to happen if you’re going to heal from these old experiences. I know that’s a very long answer to your question.
Amy: Oh gosh. There was so much there, so much. For those that are listening that aren’t familiar with what Ayurveda is, I’m going to post some articles in the show notes so that you can go in and learn more about it. It’s funny. Your story, there are so many parallels with mine and Ayurveda and the discovery of that science of life was a huge aha for me and part of my healing PCOS journey. I’m a Vata and understanding that Ayurvedic dosha, and if you read my articles, you’ll know what that means, was a huge part of my healing. What was- you had a very tweetable comment there and I meant to write it down about fighting yourself. You don’t win the battle.
Dr. Keesha: Yeah. That’s on my website and what I say is, “A body at war – a mind and body at war with itself can never win. Or with yourself, there’s no winner”. I say both of those. You just can’t.
Amy: Yeah. I love that and that’s a huge aha for a lot of women with PCOS and in my book, I write that I think perfectionism – it’s funny that you kind of confirmed that people with autoimmune have issues with perfectionism. That is definitely something that I see. I call myself a recovering perfectionist. That’s something that I think a lot of women listening need to take a hard look at themselves. I really am wondering how do you go about unpacking and processing childhood trauma in order to begin healing your chronic illness, whatever that might be. I think you must have done something through journaling or meditation to come to that aha, that child in you was trying to not be the bad girl anymore and needed to be perfect. How can somebody listening start unpacking that trauma?
Dr. Keesha: This is really a good question. I started to talk about it on stages about stages of development. For example, if everybody’s heard of Joseph Campbell’s, Hero’s Journey, I always say that I’m the “She-ro’s Journey”. I’ve broken it down into five steps. The first step is to first acknowledge that this happened and then to be willing- I always, now, say that the two most important words in the English language are “willingness” and “integration.” You have to be willing first to self-confront. Then, you have to be willing to take whatever you learned in your process and to integrate it into your life. That’s the only way wisdom and growth occurs. First step, then, if we think about the Hero’s Journey, is to accept the call to action, which disease is. If you say, “Okay, I got PCOS. It’s causing all these symptoms and these problems in my life. I can’t get rid of the hair on my face. I can’t get rid of the weight. I can’t get pregnant”. Whatever it is that’s happening, then, instead of feeling victimized – that’s really key – this is the willingness to not feel victimized and not to feel betrayed anymore. That this is being done for me, not being done to me. That’s the first step.
Amy: Amen. I love that.
Dr. Keesha: I’m going to repeat that because it’s so novel that it is a distinction in the way you approach your life and it’s a difference between a resistance to life and not getting into the flow of life. When we resist what is, we lose because it’s sort of like standing in the middle of a rapidly flowing river and trying to put your hands out to stop it. It’s just not going to happen and you’re just going to drown, knock your head on the rocks a few times. You’re going to choke. You’re going to have such a difficult time. Where if you get into the flow, and you go, “Oh, life is handing me this for my growth, not to punish me”.
So, I paused there because I really want people to get this. It’s so huge. If you say, “This is being done for me, not to me,” that’s first step. It’s the only way you can actually heal. As long as it’s being done to you and you’re feeling betrayed by your body, by life, by the government, by your husband, by God, by whatever it is, right? That the persecutor who traumatized you in your life, whatever, the President. There’s so many places people feel victimized. If you can say, “This is being done for me, not to me,” now you can step into the flow and now, life – once you proclaim that you are ready to do this, you can find a mentor.
The mentor teaches you skills you don’t already have. Now everybody that’s listening to my voice can probably get this. Like oh yeah, when I first stopped eating gluten, it was so hard, and I had to have all kinds of mentors. People that were at the time that I did it, of course, there were no bloggers. This world that we have today didn’t exist. I had to figure it out. I had to find some resource of somebody that knew more than I did in order to do this. Now, being away from gluten is no big deal and I consider it rat poison and I don’t even – not even a thing. It doesn’t take any willpower. But in those days, it was really difficult. That’s what I mean. At the time you are presented with a challenge, you don’t have the skills you need, that’s why it’s a challenge. You find a mentor, whatever it is, a book, a podcast, a blog, me, Amy, people that already have been there, done this.
The Chinese have this really beautiful parable that says, “If you want to know where you’re going, ask someone who’s already been there and is coming back”. That’s what you and I are, right? Been there and have come back. That’s how the Hero’s Journey works. You get your mentor. You find out your new skills. You, then, practice those skills. This is another thing that I find my patients get really pissed off about is that they learn those skills and then life has this beautiful way of giving you opportunities to master this skill. They’ll be like, “Can I catch a break?”. I say, “No, no, no. This is your opportunity now to go practice that, right?”.
So, once you have mastery, which only can be obtained through practice, practice, practice, now, you’ve mastered it. Then, the way that this works is that you come back. You can say resurrected, right? You’re in a new level of development. Now you’re stronger, you’ve mastered these new skills, you’re healthier, and now you’re considered what’s an oracle. Now you’re the teacher for people who will be coming along who have to learn what you know. That’s the way it works as life on planet Earth. We as humans are each other’s teachers and we are students. Sometimes, we don’t like our teachers. Teachers that have really hurt us and betrayed our trust and whether it’s sexual abuse, to being lied to or rejected. It doesn’t matter. Any of those things, any form of rejection is experienced as a trauma. Then, that person is also your teacher. Like I said, we don’t always love the teaching.
From that place, that’s where you say, “I need to go find new skills. I’ve got to master those,”. The very first thing is willingness. Now as far as I’m writing a book on trauma right now and what I say in there is, “I’ve just laid down the foundation of how we can talk to each other but then the first step, then, is to feel safe”. Anytime, when I have someone who come and see me that I go, I work in a deep immersion retreat environment for trauma. It’s the most powerful thing I discovered. Sixty- to ninety-minute office visits for EMDR and brain spotting and hypnotherapy for trauma-release are great, but they do not do the same thing as a trauma-release retreat environment care where it’s 24/7.
One of the other things I’ll say in those environments is the first thing – if I hear someone really say that in their life they don’t feel safe, to me, that’s the very first place we go is to establish a ground of safety because if you think about this… if a zebra is being chased by a lion, and it thinks it’s about to get eaten for dinner, then the zebra, very wisely, it’s biochemistry changes and it says, “Okay, it’s not safe for me to go to the bathroom, so all my digestive stuff is going to go to sleep. It’s also not safe for me to reproduce. I can’t even keep myself alive. Why would I try and keep someone else alive? So I’m definitely not going to have sex right now with that lion on my tail”. So there’s your hormones.
What is PCOS? It’s an androgen problem, right? When you think about it in that way and we’re talking specifically about PCOS, we have to establish safety. Because as long as you feel the need for an androgen surge, you’re never going to get those to balance. Does that make sense?
Amy: Yes, that makes perfect sense. I think so many women with PCOS are trying to conceive in this state of feeling like they’re in danger. It might be under the surface and they don’t even realize it.
Dr. Keesha: Right. So I’m going to give you a practice. I don’t want anyone to do this that’s driving, or trying to keep a child from falling underneath the water in a bathtub, or you need to focus and concentrate. This is establishing a calm, safe place. I have this recording on my website if you need it but it’s just easy. You can just do this. Everybody needs to get comfortable. Everybody, I believe, should be taught this so all you mothers that are listening to this, teach this to your children. I think all children should learn this at a very young age. We all need a place, a safe place to go to. I’m not talking about external.
A lot of times, as women, our homes are our safe place but, actually, your home can burn down. It can form black mold. It can be broken into. You can get into a conflict with somebody else who lives in it. I’m talking about inside of yourself. Everybody needs a safe place to go to that’s within that nobody else can come to. It’s just yours. It’s just yours. This is basically your root chakra is in charge of safety. Your root chakra is the place that we sit on the earth with. If you don’t have a piece of Earth that you feel that is stable, that will support you and hold you, then, you’re always going to be in some state of fight-or-flight, and you will not be conceiving, and you won’t be holding a healthy pregnancy. You will be miscarrying if you can conceive and all kinds of other issues.
What I want everybody to do is to close your eyes, if you can, and I want you to put your left hand on your belly and your right hand on your heart. I want you to take a deep breath through your nose, and I want you to feel your left hand move out as if you’re pregnant with your breath. In other words, you are breathing down into your belly. It’s expansive with your inhalation. As you exhale, it goes in towards your spine as you fully empty yourself of that breath. Your right hand over your heart should feel no movement. I don’t want you breathing into your chest. I just want you breathing into your belly. Try that a couple of times until your right hand is still, and your left hand moves out with your in breath and in with your out breath.
It’s called diaphragmatic breathing and if you can do that, just that, you cannot be anxious. You guys try it next time you’re anxious. Hold your breath down into your belly where your chest doesn’t move. It’ll stimulate your vagus nerve in such a way that you cannot be anxious. Good thing to do before you eat, before you get into the car, before you make love with your spouse or yourself.
Now that you’re sort of relaxed, now I want you to think about, in your mind, what is a safe place on the earth that you love to visit or a peaceful place? Is it the ocean? Is it a mountaintop? Is it a meadow? Is it a place in the forest? Is it by a river or a burbling brook? Is it a secret garden that no one else can get into that there’s a beautiful gate, and a key, and a little swing that’s got flowers running up the rope that you can sit on, or a hammock that you can lie in? This doesn’t have to be anywhere that you’ve ever been.
I want you to use the right brain, your imagination side, and I want you to build yourself a place that’s just for you. Once you have it, I want you to put in all the colors. All the rich, vibrant textures. How does it feel? How does it look? What’s the temperature of the air? How does that air feel against your skin? How does the ground feel beneath your feet? What are the sounds? What are the smells? How does it taste? How does the air taste? Is it salty? Is it pine? Floral? Clean? This is only your place. Only you go here. It’s not in-house unless it’s a house you’ve built that’s just for you.
Now ask yourself how you feel being here. Do you feel peaceful? Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel calm? Safe? Whatever that feeling is that you have, repeat that word. Whether it’s calm, say calm three times in your mind. Where do you feel the calm in your body? Is it in your belly, in your jaw, in your heart, in your throat, in your shoulders? Where does it live? What color is it? Is your word freedom? What color is freedom in this body part? What color is calm? What color is peace? Then, repeat your cue word. That’s what that’s called. It’s a cue word. Three more times while you visualize the color, and the place that it lives in your body. Now, when you are ready, go ahead and open your eyes.
That’s the first step in the longer process that I do with all the people that I work with on zoom, or remotely, or in my office or in retreat settings. There’s a lot more to it but what you are doing is, now, you’ve just gotten a new skill. Now, you have to master it. You need to practice it.
What you’re going to do with this is go there several times during the day and in a time when you already feel like you are relaxed enough to engage in it. This is sort of like the old 1980’s campaign, “Just Say No to Drugs”. You’re practicing ahead of time in a time of peace, so that you’re really imprinting it into yourself.
Then, when you have, let’s say, a scale of 0 to 10. Ten is your most tweaked or triggered or angry or upset or anxious. Zero is the calmest that you are. Think about if you have a 1 or a 2 situation in your life, like you keep asking your husband to pick his towel up off the floor when he’s done taking a shower, and you walk in, and there it is lying on the bathroom floor again and you just go, “Ugh”. Practice right then because that’s just a 1 or a 2 – I mean, usually for me. Pick something that’s a 1 or a 2 for you and then do that practice right then. Say your cue word, drop into the place in your body where you feel it. Visualize the place that you’ve created for yourself and hang out there for a couple of minutes. Just breathe into your belly and hang out there.
You’re practicing self-care at the highest form. Getting a massage, going to a float tank, getting a mani-pedi. Those are all fine, but they’re not really teaching you a skill for self-soothing. This teaches you how to move out of zebra being chased by a lion to zebra being able to peacefully graze in a field where it can listen to the birds, and it can feel the air on its fur, and it can understand that the ground underneath it is supporting it. It can take in the information from the rest of the herd, and it’s not in dashing for the horizon for survival mode is where a lot of us live today. That’s first step.
Amy: That’s such a great tool. I call it having tools like essential oils and different supplements and food in your healing PCOS toolkit and Dr. Keesha, you just gave us a powerful new tool for our toolkit, is a beautiful, beautiful visualization. We’re running out of time, and I feel like we just scratched the surface of this huge topic. I know you have so many resources for listeners that are dealing with overcoming trauma and to continue the healing process. Can you share those with us?
Dr. Keesha: Sure. The first thing I always tell everybody and if you go onto my website on drkeesha.com then it says “Apply to Become a Patient” and if you become a patient, the first thing that my office manager will ask me to do and so this is what I always say to people too is to read the autoimmune puzzle. Because it educates you and it gives you a bunch of these kinds of exercises that you can do in a worksheet format. I wrote it to help people help themselves, and so, I would say get that book and read that very, very first.
Then, if you find that you’re just scratching the surface and there’s more that you would like to do to develop into a more emotionally resilient, more powerful being, then emotion resilience is something that’s being talked a lot about in scientific literature nowadays, but not a lot of tools are being given for it.
I have this program that I put together as a result of that for people to help themselves. It’s very inexpensive. It’s called You Unbroken. You can do it from your own computer. It’s based on different stages and levels of learning how to become more and more emotionally resilient. The easiest way to explain what that means is you stay more in the zebra being able to graze in a herd rather than being chased by a lion. It’s parasympathetic nervous system tone over sympathetic nervous system tone – which both of them are important. You can’t be too parasympathetic-dominant also. It teaches you how to tell the difference and how to move with ease from one state to the next in your nervous system where it’s under your control rather than – a lot of people don’t know that for every five minutes you’re upset, it takes your body eight hours to recover and that’s just a staggering number. Staggering. When I first learned that, I was in my thirties and at that point, I remember that sort of crumbling and going, “I’m so sorry body”. If I think of all the five-minute increments I’ve been upset and I was in so much debt to this poor body. It’s really learning how to make that more one-to-one. For every minute I’m upset, it takes me a minute to recover. I’m getting some breakeven space in there. That’s what the program is for.
For people that really want to dive deeply and really get this out and rewire their brains and do it in a really powerful way, I do these deep immersion retreats. We have our next one at the end of this month and then the following will be in September (2019). I only have eight people at a time and it’s just this most remarkable trauma healing technique that I do that works very rapidly and it’s incredible. There’s that.
I teach people at the Academy for Integrative Medicine on how to become health coaches and do lab testing of certain functional medicine kind. Also, emotional work with people, so it’s becoming a lot of times, as I was saying, you and I both, became called once we have learned this for ourselves to go out and help other people. Well, it’s no different from our tribes. We empower people and then everyone’s coming to them for help. I built this program for what I call the “summit junkie”. The person who has learned how to turn their own stuff around and now everybody else is coming to them and they’re just these passionate learners. That’s what this program is for. It’s for you and you can become a Certified Integrative Medicine Health Coach and learn how to do what I do. Those are basically the kind of levels that I work with people at.
Amy: Well, you are such a true healer, Dr. Keesha. I am so grateful that you came on the podcast again and helped women understand what’s going on with the connection between trauma and autoimmune disease. So, thank you for taking the time to talk to us today and to give us that beautiful visualization.
Dr. Keesha: Oh, it was my pleasure. Everybody, make sure you love yourselves.
Amy: Well, I definitely agree with that and thank you everyone for listening. I look forward to being with you all very soon. Buh-bye.
