HPV Recovery: The Role of Stress and Emotional Healing

Hi, I'm so glad you're here. I'm Dr. Donnie and in this video I'm going to be talking about how healing in general and specifically from high risk HPV virus isn't just physical, that your mental and emotional health matters just as much to fending off HPV and preventing health issues overall. So this is such an important topic to me because I think that we're taught that our mind and body are separate. You know, we go to different practitioners for our mental health than for our physical health. When actually what's true, and we know from research, is that there's a mind body connection and actually there's no separation between our mind and our body, that our mental emotional symptoms can show up on a physical level and even our physical symptoms can show up on an emotional level. And of course, medicine back in time, ancient medicine, has known this and has used this throughout time to help people to heal. So I want you to know about it so that you can already be using it in your healing process as well. So what we want to do is to dig into this a little bit more and help you understand how it is that stress and mental emotional health issues can, can show up in the physical body and how that then makes you more susceptible to infections such as high risk HPV and then things you can do already today to help yourself to recover and to heal and to prevent stress and emotional stress from making you more vulnerable to infections and even cancer risk. So let's understand a little bit more what stress is and how it affects us. There's stress that we're exposed to in our day to day lives, right? Our stress from work, from relationships, from financial stress, from helping to take care of others in our lives. Being human is going to involve some stress. That's part of it. There's not. If we can't expect that we're going to have zero stress. Our health today also is influenced by stress from the past, even stress back to our childhood, and even generational stress. So stress can impact throughout our lives, can have an impact on our health today as well as trauma. Trauma is used to.

Refer to when stress is really causing disruptions, especially in the nervous system that haven't had an opportunity to fully heal yet, and that can then make us more susceptible to health issues going forward. I always like to point out when it comes to high risk hpv, being diagnosed with high risk HPV in itself is a stress, as many of you who've been diagnosed can tell, right? It makes you feel stressed, afraid, anxious. That's a stress response caused by that diagnosis. And then sometimes the medical procedures that you go through related to HPV can cause more stress and even medical trauma. So some of you listening may have even more stress and trauma simply because of hpv. And what I'm saying is that the stress that's not been addressed and resolved can actually make you more susceptible to the virus. Now, most often we end up thinking that HPV is all about the exposure to the virus. And certainly and exposure is how the virus ended up in your ecosystem to begin with. So, yes, there's exposure. But if we look at two people who were both exposed to hpv, not everyone is going to end up testing positive and abnormal cells. The person who's been under more stress and has unresolved trauma is more likely to test positive for HPV and abnormal cells than the person who has been able to recover from stress, not have depletions caused by stress. So if you're testing positive, and especially if HPV has not been going away, it's been around for years, or and maybe potentially caused abnormal cells, it tells me that likely there's some, there's some stress and emotional distress that's remaining. And if I can help you to heal that, then I can help you to fend off hpv. So there's hope. I want you to know there's hope and this can be addressed. Even though it's not well addressed in the standard medical system, it's really important to address it because it's going to help you prevent HPV but also prevent so many other health issues. So let's first understand how it is that stress makes us susceptible. Then we're going to go into talking about how to address it. So what happens is when we're exposed to stress and even stress in terms of an infection or stress because of a toxin exposure, stresses affect our bodies in four main systems.

Digestion. We'll come back to these. Okay, so it affects our digestion. Stress affects our immune system, our nervous system, and our hormones. Now, the way it's affecting these four major systems is because of the way stress affects our stress response system and specifically our stress hormone called cortisol. Maybe some of you have heard of cortisol. Cortisol is actually a main manager of these systems in our bodies. Now we count on cortisol. We need it to be higher in the morning to wake us up and get us going and lower at night to help us go to sleep. So it's not that we want zero cortisol. We want an Optimal amount of cortisol. However, when we're exposed to stress and trauma, that's not resolving. What happens is that leaves our cortisol either too high or too low, not at optimal. And when cortisol is either too high or too low, it disrupts our digestion. So that means we're not digesting food as well. We're not absorbing nutrients as well. Our intestinal cells are not healthy and we develop something called leaky gut. Our microbiome is disrupted. So now we don't have our healthy bacteria protecting us, which can also affect the vaginal microbiome. Right. So that unresolved stress and emotional stress affects our digestion. Also it affects our immune system directly. Studies are very clear that humans who are under a large amount of stress or lack of sleep.

For chronic stress over time and trauma are more susceptible to infections and to autoimmunity and cancer. So it's that the stress exposure and the imbalance of cortisol causes our immune system to not protect us as well as it should. It ends up right. Our immune system should be there to protect us from foreign infections and prevent it be from becoming an issue. But when we have unresolved stress and effects of stress, we end up more susceptible to infections and also more susceptible to allergies, autoimmunity and cancer. So we need to get our immune system back on track, protecting us from HPV and cancer. And part of that is in the stress recovery. The stress also affects our nervous system, so we end up more likely to experience anxiety, panic attacks, sleeplessness, as well as depression and other mental health related issues because the stress disrupts our neurotransmitters and our neurotransmitter processing. So we end up depleted in things like serotonin and GABA and dopamine, which affects our our mood and our focus and our sleep and our energy levels. So it makes sense, right? It starts to make sense. Oh, that's why we don't feel good. Because we've been through a lot of stress and trauma and we never had a chance to recover.

I know how scary it is to test positive for HPV virus. And I know it's even more concerning when your gynecologist tells you that all you can do is wait and see if it continues and if it causes abnormal cells. That's exactly why, as a naturopathic doctor and midwife, that I feel so passionate about helping women to be proactive about protecting themselves from HPV virus. I've been helping thousands of women for the past 23 years to do exactly that and to get HPV to negative and stay negative. And that's why I developed the say Goodbye to HPV online program where you can get access to my proven protocol from wherever you are in the world. So I hope you will come check out the say Goodbye to HPV program, review the success cases and see if.

This is going to be a good.

Fit to help you get your life back from hpv.

The other thing gets affected is our other hormones. So the stress and trauma can affect ovarian hormones, so estrogen, progesterone levels, it can affect thyroid, insulin, and any other hormones in the bodies just don't function as well. So if all four systems are affected by stress, we're probably not going to feel good. And HPV could be testing positive. But you might also notice that you have your digestion doesn't feel good. And you might be susceptible to other kinds of infections like bladder infections or sinus infections or skin infections. And also you might find that your hormones are fluctuating, blood sugars imbalance, thyroid's out of balance, and potentially you're feeling anxious and not sleeping as well, or low mood. Right. Does this sound familiar? So it's not that these are all random things that are happening on a physical level. Yes, we want to address them on a physical level, but we also need to help address on a mental, emotional level so that you can understand and you can start taking steps to help yourself heal. We know, for example, that we say butterflies in our stomach when we feel anxious. We know that anxiousness can show up as symptoms in our body. Right. So we can start to learn how do we help to understand what we're feeling and then start to gain awareness for that and start to use different tools to help us to navigate this experience of living in a human body with stresses that we're exposed to. So what can happen overall when we're exposed to stress and trauma is we become depleted in nutrients. We become, our microbiome gets disrupted. And when the gut biome is disrupted, it disrupts the vaginal microbiome. Also, we end up with low antioxidants and we end up with high inflammation. And this just sets us up for susceptibility to high risk HPV as well as other viruses and other infections. So we need to start reversing all of this. Right. And it's completely possible to reverse. We can start start to take steps to restore healthy nutrients and restore healthy hormones and restore neurotransmitters and microbiome, and we can do those steps on a physical level and you'll see other videos from me about that. You're welcome to reach out and I can guide you every step of the way. In this video, I want to especially emphasize how helpful it is to also implement healing on a mental emotional level. And you can do that in many ways. Certainly classical therapy can be helpful as well as I would want to encourage you to explore mindfulness techniques. And I teach this to my patients and my program participants. The say Goodbye to HPV program includes teaching you how to do biofeedback, guided imagery, meditation, because these are mind body tools that help you to gain awareness for what's happening in your body, for feeling your feelings, processing your feelings, and be able to move beyond them. This is one thing we see in psychology and beyond, is that when as humans, we have a feeling that we're not allowing ourselves to fully feel right. Many women who come to me testing positive for high risk HPV express to me that they are feeling anger. When we really sit and we listen and we say, what are you feeling? They talk about how they feel. Anger, shame, embarrassment, about what's happening to them, guilty. Sometimes they feel guilty to themselves, about themselves, that this has happened to them. Sometimes they feel, yes, resentment about what has happened, or potentially anger and resentment toward their partner. And so these are emotions that are important to first recognize and to feel and process with compassion and presence so that the emotion can move through. It's when we can process and really feel an emotion and allow ourselves to feel it, even on a physical level, and to process it, then we can discover the other side of these feelings. Sometimes then women go through a process of feeling forgiveness, feeling gratitude, learning to feel compassion and love for themselves in their body, reconnecting with themselves in their body. And that process only happens through the process of feel, connecting with your body. See what emotions are coming up. Allow yourself to be accepting and acknowledging of those emotions with a very loving presence. And then allow yourself to move through those emotions to where it brings you on the other side. And it's really an amazing process to observe when women go through this and they start to be able to learn how to be present with their own emotions, how to, how to allow themselves to cry or, or whatever emotional feeling needs to come through. And we can also do this again, I mentioned biofeedback meditation and mindfulness of various types. But this can also be very helpful to move through with music and dance. And so another form of healing that we use in my programs is called transcend dance. But you can use different forms of healing, music and dance to help yourself move through emotional feelings and find that level of acceptance and love in your body, to be able to release those stresses, release those traumas, and allow your body to heal. And it's really amazing what can happen sometimes, even with the simplest. And it doesn't even have to take very much time. But it's something we learn to practice each day. And through these recovery activities, I refer to them, these mindfulness techniques and activities that we can choose, including journaling and including time in nature, including communicating with loved ones. You know, ways that we can expand, express ourselves and connect with ourselves so that we can actually move through and really understand what it is that our bodies and trained to tell us and to feel what we haven't felt and to then move through it and beyond it so that our bodies can heal. And so at the same time as you're healing on a physical level, it's really important to do this healing on a mental, emotional level. I also am studying and working with psychedelic assistant therapy because I see that this has been a healing, huge new area of supporting emotional, mental and emotional healing for people and patients in general. So this is something, of course, if you have questions, you can always reach out to me and say, hey, how can I learn how to use these different modalities to help myself to process stress and trauma that I've been through, to heal the relationship with myself and my body? And through that, then to get more connected with yourself, your purpose, your passion, and your body's ability to protect yourself. Because the fact is, is that we live in a, you know, ecosystem of we're going to be exposed to viruses, we're going to be exposed to bacteria, we're going to be exposed to parasites. That's part of the human existence. What we need to be doing is helping to help our inner defenses be able to protect us from anything that might be pathogenic or harmful to us. So the more it's not just about avoidance, it's also about how to support our inner protective abilities, including our immune system, but also our microbiome, our hormones, our stress hormones, and our emotional state can protect us from the things we're exposed to. So I hope this is helpful to give you a sense of why it is that your mental, emotional healing, healing is so important in HPV recovery that, that I really find it makes a huge difference. Women even report to me today that they got a negative Pap smear result and that, yes, they implemented diet changes, supplements, vaginal suppositories, and they also worked on a mental, emotional and spiritual level to help with their healing process. So it's not just about the physical. It also needs to be on these other levels that we really then see the change happen because we're not just looking for temporary results. In terms of getting HPV to negative, I want you to be able to get HPV to negative and keep it negative going forward. And to do that we need to really be looking at what is it that your body's been needing help with that it hasn't gotten help with. And oftentimes there is this component of stress and emotional healing that needs attention. So if this has been helpful to you, I am so glad and I welcome you to reach out. You can always reach out to my office through drdonnie.com you can also reach out to become a patient, a one on one patient. I work with people one on one from around the world and you could also potentially work in one of my group programs including to say Goodbye to HPV group program. In all of these areas, the mental, emotional, mind, body healing is an essential part of the process of guiding you to clear HPV to negative and keep it negative. Thanks again for joining me today. Be sure to subscribe and comment. I'd love to hear from you and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. See you soon.

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