Healing from Complex Illness: Trauma, Nervous System Regulation with Dr. Cathleen King

Foreign. Welcome to the Full Circle Healing Podcast where we merge modern cutting edge science with traditional healing wisdom and everything in between to help you come full circle back to your original natural state of health and well being. I'm your host Michael and over the past 15 years I've helped hundreds of thousands of people find the information, practices, tools, resources and experts they needed to find their way back to optimal health. Our guest in this episode is our friend and one of my absolute favorite people to talk with, Dr. Kathleen King. Dr. Kat's a physical therapist and neuroscience based mind body practitioner. Her professional focus is chronic illness and trauma healing. She's the founder and CEO of the Primal Trust Academy and Community, a rapidly growing worldwide platform helping others unlock their self healing. Her online program combines brain retraining, vagus, nerve toning, somatics and other trauma informed practices to help those with complex chronic illness finally find their way to healing. In this episode you will learn how Dr. Katz own struggles with debilitating chronic illness led her to discover the practices and programs she now teaches. You will learn why we're seeing such a massive surge in people who can't seem to get better struggling with layered complex illness and pain. You'll learn about the cell danger response and a paradigm shifting way to look at chronic disease and why the pathogenic approach is outd and obsolete. And you'll also learn why it's not a lack of tools that often holds us back and the single most important question we can ask ourselves when on a healing journey. This and so much more. She's one of my favorite people to riff with because we have a similar background and focus in our own work and it's a really real discussion. We're going to talk about burnout among health and wellness professionals and other helper professions, which is something that Dr. Kat and I both know very well personally. And if you'd like a resource to start using some of the practices that she talks about in the interview, head over to RebelHealth Co breathing and grab my Breathing for Nervous System ebook where you'll find detailed instructions for some of the breathing practices that Dr. Cat brings up during the interview. Just so happens that we have them in the ebook so it's really synergistic. And now let's head over and talk with Dr. Cat. Hey Dr. Cat, welcome to the podcast.

Hi Michael, Nice to see you.

You too. And it's always so fun. I was excited when I saw you on my schedule for this week to to do an episode. I love having chats with you on and off camera. And I think it's going to be a really valuable conversation for our. For our audience to hear today. And I'd like to just kind of, before we jump all the way in, you have a really inspirational and I think, relatable story for a lot of the people who tune into our podcast. So if we could just talk for a minute about how you got to be doing what you're doing in the area of focus and work that you're in and the great program you've created.

Sure. Well, like many of your listeners, I had a lot of years of chronic illness going from doctor to doctor and racking up all sorts of diagnoses, and also felt very dismissed by the medical system when their answer was an anxiety pill and an antacid. And that was the solution. And over time, I realized that some of the diagnoses I had were things like Lyme disease, mold toxicity, digestive issues, parasites, virus, all of that. And I tried the typical ways of taking lots of supplements, which I couldn't tolerate, and it didn't get very far and eventually ran out of money, ran out of resources. And so what I was left with was me and thinking, well, I guess I just need to learn how to live my best life like this. Fortunately, I had a background as a physical therapist working with mind body syndrome, chronic pain. I did not work with chronic infection and toxicity, but I did start to apply the same tools that I used for chronic pain for my condition. I started working with the brain and the nervous system because nothing else was working. And sure enough, that's what helped me to crawl out of the chronic illness condition. My very real infections and toxicity issues started to. The symptoms started to subside and my function started improving by solely focusing on the brain and nervous system. Over time, I started teaching others what I was doing to heal. And the word spread that I had this process and then eventually created a program and then created a community. And now we have a worldwide platform called Primal Trust, and we help people with chronic illness and trauma to get their function back.

Thank you for sharing that and for accidentally creating that program and community, because I know how those things happen too. It's like one thing leads to another and then all of a sudden I have this big platform and online community. And how did that happen? And so it's interesting that your physical therapy tools for mind body with pain are kind of what led you down that road, because that's what that was. My first toe in the water with like psychosomatic mind body connections for anything is when my wife had her first autoimmune flare, which was terrifying and full body excruciating pain and we were in a panic. The person I reached out to was Dr. Joe Tada. He's someone in my network and he had, I saw one post one time he made about something that was like trauma related to pain. And so I reached out to him, he jumped on a call with me and he suggested I look into somatic experiencing and another different trauma therapy. I'd never heard of these things and now six years later, that stuff is all I've been studying or doing. And it was. He's a physical therapist and, and goes kind of outside the box with mind body stuff as well. So I think in the physical therapy world maybe there's a little bit longer history of mind body practices being used to ease chronic pain than in the functional medicine world with very similar practices being used for insert chronic disease symptom or state. Right. Like it's a little bit longer use.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I was learning this from John Sarno and people who mentored with him back in 2000 and you know, so 20, almost 25 years ago, before the mainstream understood TMS, chronic pain, my body syndrome, because you know, as physical therapists we were working with on resolving chronic pain. Now the chronic illness epidemic wasn't quite, hadn't been surging back then. And so, you know, we, we knew how to work with the brain and nervous system as it related to pain. There was not a lot out there saying, oh, this also affects digestion and infection and toxicity because that just wasn't what people were looking for back then.

Interesting. His book is on my shelf because I had my first experience with nerve pain this year. I had a herniated disc and all of a sudden my whole left arm, shoulder side, excruciating bedridden hospital MRIs, whatever. And somebody told me to order that book. I think it's healing back pain maybe.

Yeah.

But I was able to get myself out of that hole rather quickly, I think, versus normal for a lot of reasons that we're going to talk about here. But small world that you brought him up and that was your first kind of toe in the water for you. So you mentioned this chronic illness wave or epidemic. And I remember about 10 years ago people were starting to talk about mold a little bit. They were kind of starting to talk about these like Lyme mystery symptoms, chronic symptoms, reactivity to everything. I don't think I'd heard of mast cell activation syndrome yet. Ten years ago, histamine issues were kind of on the fringe. And now a lot of people are dealing with not just one of those things, plus new autoimmune conditions that have popped up and then overlapping between infections and sensitivity and autoimmun. And I think if there's any practitioners listening to this, they've probably noticed quite a shift in the people who are walking in their door or calling them. And if there's patients listening to this and people that are struggling with those things, like it's very real to them. And so I guess I'm going to ask you to give a one hour answer and a statement as to why do you think that, what are the main drivers behind that happening? And then I've got a couple follow ups to that.

Yeah, I would summarize it that what's happening is our nervous system is getting so dysregulated we're ending up in what I often call immune confusion, which means the immune system literally doesn't know how to complete its cycle of going after things and then coming back into homeostasis. We're getting stuck in something known as cell danger response. We're not able to go into autophagy and clean up the immune cel that have been released to help the system. And I think taking back another step would be looking at the epigenetic switches that are happening because of stress, because of our fast paced society, because of the toxin exposure, ultimately all points at the autonomic nervous system and that it's going haywire and that we are at our max with what we can process in our body. And yet the world and its pace continues to surge while we are now all, most of us in some type of five alarm fire because we simply can't take anymore. And this does affect our immune system and our ability to regulate and detoxify.

Okay. And so it's, it's a million paper cuts all at one time from a million different directions that we're not kind of physiologically designed to handle. And I love that this is getting brought up. One of our first episodes of this podcast is with Steve Wright, founder of Healthy Gut and SCD Lifestyle, other platforms that I used to learn things on. And he talked about this when he was talking about just leaky gut and digestive problems and how if you're not addressing, he said if you think you can outweigh, and he listed about 60 different things that you were just alluding to that are kind of bombarding us with eating just this one way and one supplement or something, you're going to Have a rough time. And so I think a lot of people have figured that out now that the things we used to be able to do or change or shift or take or whatever, that would probably move the needle from not feeling very well to feeling better. Doesn't work for these folks or alone won't work for these folks. And so it's like playing whack a mole with symptoms like, I'm taking this for this thing or I'm trying this therapy for this problem, or I got diagnosed with this thing, so I'm going to do this diet. Like, why doesn't that stuff. Why doesn't the things that. Why don't the things that used to work work or the things that quote, work for everyone else? These are those people like, oh, it works for them. Or what's the problem there?

Well, I really love the work of Robert Navio, who is the man behind the cell danger response theory. And he describes that what's been happening is that our medical system has been using the pathogenic approach to trying to treat chronic conditions. Meaning what's the pathogen, what's the toxin, and how do we f. So a lot of our treatments are focused on what is that root cause, supposed root cause, which is, you know, the infection, the toxin, the gut, dysbiosis, et cetera, versus what he calls a solugenesis model. Solugenesis, meaning what environment is at play that's keeping the natural healing process from completing its cycle. And because this is now environmental, both inside our body and outside of our body, there's way too many factors for any one pill or one diet to effect. It is a systemic. A systemic issue in that, you know, there is thousands, millions of processes happening inside the body that need to be coordinated by the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system runs everywhere. It's not just the gut that needs to be fixed and it's not just the brain and it's not just the mitochondria. It's so many things, including our relationships, including our. Our circadian rhythms. So many factors. It is a systemic cellugenesis model that I think we need to start looking at to find the solutions for this. This current epidemic of chronic illness.

I've never heard that term cellugenesis.

S A L U G E N E S A S S A L U G E N S Lugenesis.

Yeah. Okay. And we've had a lot of great conversations with folks about Robert Navio. I haven't been able to wrangle him into an interview. He's very diffic to do interviews. Only Dr. Maya can get him. Do you know Dr. Maya Chetreat is a friend of ours?

Yes, she's a friend of mine. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, she gets Dr. Navio to do interviews with her, but they got some sort of friendship that I'm not privy to and I'm jealous of it. But Dr. Eric Gordon has come on a couple times who did the study with Dr. Navio and has talked and it's, it's uber, uber, uber complicated and complex if you get into the physiology of how it all works. But the basic premise of it is pretty simple to, to grasp and understand. If the body and its cells and its mitochondria and its nervous system think it's in danger and think it's under attack and think all these things are going on, it's going to behave in a certain way that we don't necessarily need it to behave in or want it to behave in at that time. So then there's a mismatch with how things are functioning. At least that's been my feeble attempt to grasp all of it and make sense of it. So I guess from there I would like to talk a little bit about practices. And this doesn't have to be super specific, like obviously you have a whole program and membership around this. But I think there's some terms now that people are a little bit more familiar with or have heard once on a podcast or something around nervous system regulation or trauma or brain retraining. I know that was the jam about five years ago that came on the scene big time. So there's brain retraining, nervous system regulation, somatic therapy, trauma healing, like all these terms now that I think when you're talking about this before we came on that for better or worse, a lot of people are semi educated about or they've heard of and then they repeat it. And so there's like this fringy knowledge of these things flying around now. So can you just talk about. I know that's not everything that you guys do with primal trust, but those are some components. And how do a few of those things, if you want to get into a couple of them, really help people move the needle and kind of calm this danger response in the body?

Great question. So if you think about what we were talking about, that the body is literally stuck in a stress response on a cellular level, it's stuck in a protect response. There's danger, there's war going on. The body is looking for cues that the war is over. The cells are looking for cues that the war is over. And when we are in this fast paced lifestyle of messaging all day and our stress levels, we are in sympathetic go, go, go. We might think, oh, I'm just working hard or I'm just busy. But to the body that means the war is not over. You're still out there like a soldier fighting and you might just be rushing around. Use tools like brain retraining, vagus nerve toning, somatic practices to influence the body, to give it messages of safety, of I can relax now, I can go into rest and repair now. So that all the way down on that immune system level, the cellular level, the body also gets the permission to move out of fight mode. And it's a multidisciplinary approach because we have to teach our limbic system to stop being so vigilant and you know, and calm down our dopamine addiction levels and our obsessive researching and all of that. We need to be able to still the body and feel what's going on and be able to feel it with a compassionate witness versus again, that oh my gosh, something's wrong, I need to fix it. That's also giving a war signal versus a safety signal. And so we teach people the science behind what's going on so they understand why these silly little practices actually affect their very real, very intense conditions and why how they live their life. It's a lifestyle change. It's not a tool and it's not a diet and it's not a supplement. It's literally a complete change in how you living your life, how you go through your day. And the tools just strengthen your nervous system almost like a gym, like build the muscles of having a different communication, of building capacity of teaching the vagus nerve and the brain to have healthier, safer signals going back and forth than the stress signals. I don't know if that fully answers your question, but.

No, no, no, it does. And I want to ping a couple of things you mentioned. One is dopamine addiction, if you can extrapolate on that just a little bit. And then the other, you don't need to say anything else. I just want to hit it so everybody hears it again. Is the importance of being a compassionate witness to your own symptoms in your own situation, your own struggles versus becoming kind of an enemy or combative or hostile towards your body. The importance of that and the shift that that really makes. But I don't think dopamine addiction is talked about very much, at least that I've seen in, in chronic disease circles. So I'm curious what you'd have to say about that.

Well, I often say that we're always rewiring our brain and doing brain retraining, whether we realize it or not. Sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. And unfortunately, the setup in our modern society is to have these phones constantly messaging us. You know, now we got to get back to people right away. We have Instagram and scrolling and we have all these ways that literally are giving us short term rewards. That's what a dopamine hit is. It's a short term reward that is now not very long lasting. And within 30 seconds or less, we need it again and again to just get this pseudo feeling of safety, which is just a. When we feel okay just scrolling all the time and messaging all the time. It's not really a deep safety in our nervous system. It's a quick dopamine flood in the brain that gives you a feeling of pleasure. So it's kind of making you feel safe. When we're all, you know, not all, but most of us are having stress responses. Most of us have, you know, an unresolved alarm inside of us in the way that we're trying to fix it is getting these quick dopamine pleasure seeking pathways. And unfortunately it's not attending to the real wounding the alarm, the stress. And in fact it's just building that up and making it worse. All the while our brain doesn't notice that we are. The fire is burning even more because the dopamine creates such a pleasure pathway that we don't realize it until we sit down, slow down, and then start to feel what's going on there. And then that brings in that next stage of, you know, being compassionate to ourselves as we start to feel versus running to the phone and getting away from it and getting a pleasure hit.

I really appreciate the way that you explain that. And I think a lot of people listening might feel called out right now or like judged or not judged, but like called out. Seen or seen would be a positive way to reframe that. And it doesn't have to be the phone. There's lots of ways, right, for this. This can be food, this can be Shopp. This can be like a whole host of different things that people can do. And it's not that they're bad or did something wrong. It's a way that they found to regulate themselves and feel better temporarily. And it's right in front of us. Whatever it is for you, whoever's listening, it's Always right in front of us because we have 80 gazillion things right in front of us all the time. And the people who make those things and sell those things know this. The psychology, this neuroscience, this brain chemistry stuff is no secret to the designers of apps and phones and social media and all of those things. So I want to switch gears just a second. And you mentioned notifications and before we came on, I told you that I just got back from vacation and we're in the middle of launching a new website and a new podcast and a new course. And I knew all these things and I walked into a hellstorm of emails and notifications and things to do and things to fix and problems to solve and answers to give and whatever. And I could immediately feel a shift in my body. And I think and in, in my mental health and my body and my way I was seeing the world like everything shifted. And I don't think this is a foreign concept to entrepreneurs, anybody who's listening out there or any really that works a high stress job. But I want to speak to health practitioners, to coaches, to therapists, to people who are in the healing, helping world, who are trying to help with some of this. We also have to become business people and marketing people and social media people and juggle of family if that's something that you choose to have in your life and hobbies and going on a trip and not feeling guilty or like, oh, I should be working. There's this burnout, for lack of a better term, that it feels like almost everyone that I connect with in this space, the first, how's it going? How are you doing? Their first response is like, 22 reasons why they're overwhelmed in this moment. And we've talked about this, that we've started conversations like this. So what can you speak to those people that are out there trying to do this, this work and are walking this line between, I want to help as many people as possible and I'm running myself ragged into the ground and can't help anyone when I crash.

Opportunity is seductive. Opportunity is seductive. Meaning we are flooded with opportunity now. Opportunity to connect, opportunity to text back, opportunity to go here, opportunity to launch this and it's accessible. Like anyone right now can launch their own business pretty easily and become an entrepreneur. You know, we can, we're, we're getting flooded with, you know, retreats and courses and all the things we can do. And, and while those opportunities are great, when we do not have the ability to feel our body and what our, what is best for our Body. We often say yes to things because it sounds exciting, but it's actually absolutely going against ourselves. And so we're at a time where. And I talk to this, I talk to entrepreneurs about this a lot. Are you. Is your mission becoming more important than your inner child? Is your mission becoming more important? And I know for me, I even struggle with that, that there's constantly something. And by the inner child, I mean the part of us that needs attention, needs tending, has needs, needs rest. Think of a baby. It can't. Like, it's like we're literally taking a baby out there and like having it do all these things in the world. Oh, this is fun. We're going to go to this party and then we're going to launch this thing and then we're going to email and it's a. It's a baby inside of us. Our body has needs that we are not attending to. And so, so what do we all need to be able to do? We all need practices of somatic experiencing type practices so that we can become attuned to our sacred yes. And our sacred no. We're losing that attunement because we're excited to have an opportunity. And I am right there with you, Michael, in overstepping myself all the time. I mean, it's difficult. It's really difficult. And I need to make course corrections every day. I need to be able to like, oh, crap, I scheduled myself out all day today and I don't even have a lunch that's not attending to that baby inside of me. And my body will get my attention. When I, you know, run it over over and over, it will start to do the old things. So we have to find that balance. And that is a daily practice for all of us.

I couldn't relate more to what you're talking about and what you're sharing. And it is a constant daily, like, oh, I booked too many things today, I can't do this, or I want to just give you a shout. I reached out for you to be part of our upcoming hormone masterclass. And for those who haven't attended a masterclass of ours, they involve presentations. So the guests, it's not interviews like this. The guests are experts who give presentations which involve putting together a presentation. And you said, I really want to do that. I love working with you and I can't do that because that's too much. And so I really wanted you to be involved. So we worked out another way for you to participate that doesn't require creating a presentation because It. It. I did. I understand that, and I appreciate that. And you could have definitely said no to that also. But it'll be a fun thing we're deciding to do that requires no prep and no slides and no thing. We're going to show up and teach some. Some cool practices for people to do together, and that'll be fun. And I've noticed making those shifts helps a lot too. Like, what do I enjoy most about my work and my job? And what do I find tedious and tiresome and stressful? And I'm trying to do more of the former and less of the latter and delegate things if I can, because I've learned that there's people who love doing things that we hate doing.

And.

They'Re, like, good at it, and it doesn't make them pull their hair out. So I just want to give you a shout for having that. That boundary and that no. And I'm glad we were able to work out a way for you to participate, but it was, like, inspiring to me that you said no. I was like, man, man, I need to do that more. That was a good lesson.

I had to sit with it, Michael, because I do love doing things with you, and it was a struggle inside of me. The opportunity part of me that loves this work and loves making impact wanted to say yes, but I just tried to start committing to myself. I wrote on the list, what are the things that drain me the most? And it's making presentations. And I've literally said yes to so many recently that I'm like, oh, no, that's way too many presentations. And I don't like the detail of putting slideshows together. I like doing what we're doing right now. This lights me up. Making the slideshow is like. So I'm like, okay, I've got to start saying, here's what I can do and here's what I can't do. And then when I do it now, it gives you permission to do the same because it's been modeled. And that's how this new way of balance is happening, is we teach each other by having boundaries with each other. So there's easier. Now next time someone asks you to do it, you're like, oh, Kat did that with me. I can do that too.

Yeah, it is. I have already used it a couple times, different scenarios, but I've said no to things that I usually would have said yes to since that email. So you did have a little ripple effect there, as I have slide creation tabs open on my computer right now, which I also do not enjoy doing at all. And I love doing this. So thank you for sharing that. And I think a lot of practitioners and professionals out there that are in this space need to hear that. And I think that a lot of people who also aren't in the, in this space and they're just entrepreneurs or they have a stressful job or they're trying to do career advancement, or they're, you know, I think there's a lot of ways that that can be relative to someone. So how saying no can be a big step in starting to shift how your body is feeling and, and creating that space of healing. Like, one of the first books on the, this whole mental, emotional, spiritual, physical disease topic is Dr. Gabor Mate's book When the body says no. And if you don' his whole premise in the book is if you don't start saying no to stuff that don't align with you, your body will do it for you. And I think a lot of people are in that, in that state. So I'd love to maybe share a few of your favorite little. And I know things can get customized and I know where people are at on this journey. It kind of is, this would be more appropriate for somebody who, who's really in it. Or this is more appropriate for somebody who's maybe a little further down the road, but for people listening right now who are really curious about this topic and this conversation around these practices and these kind of new things that might be new to them outside of the supplements and the diets and the protocols and the thing like do you have a few go tos that when put on the spot like this, you can share that are simple, easy little things to either think about or do or try that kind of help people move the needle in a positive direction.

Right before I crashed, there was a voice in my head that would constantly say, just breathe, just breathe. And I was like typing, you know, as a physical therapist and doing all my clinical notes up until the wee hours, and I'm like, oh, as soon as I'm done typing this case, I will breathe. Or as soon as I'm done with this. And it was about two weeks. I kept hearing this voice just, I said, breathe. And I ignored it. And then I'm literally the date of like October 21st in 2007. I crashed so bad. And I never recovered for, until a few years ago that day. I was like, what happened? And I, I just remember I ignored that voice to just breathe. I thought it was like, oh, I'll get to this later. But it was my like 5 alarm fire of saying this is how you start to put out this fire. You don't realize is inside of you. And my One of my biggest regrets of my life is that I didn't listen to that because when that, when that crash happened, something happened so deep inside of me. I was literally bedbound for a long time and I was never the same. And I think that if I could have started a breath practice then something would have opened up inside of me. An awareness of like a, you're working too many hours, B this relationship is super toxic. C, like you don't even take time for lunch. I might have gotten some more messaging to redirect that freight train before it smashed into the wall. And so I would say that it starts with the breath. And I know Michael, you feel very similarly at the that breath practices can reorient us to the present moment and they don't need to be fancy. There are so many. Look, we are not in a day of absence of tools. You can get on Instagram and you'll find a hundred thousand breath practices or Insight Timer or YouTube. But why don't we do them? So I will share with you. I would start with a simple breath practice like box breathing, which is breathing in for five seconds, pausing for five seconds, breathing out for four or five seconds and pausing. Or. Or there's the 4, 7, 8 breath or the physiological sigh. But what I'm finding is that people don't do them. Why aren't we doing them? So I'm going to say to you like yes, a simple box breath is a great way to start. But my bigger concern for those of you listening is why won't you do this for yourself? Why not give yourself that loving attention? And that's the question to start asking yourself what would keep me from doing this? Why do I find that this isn't important enough to instead of messaging or scrolling or rushing or I'm in the car, I try to get in the habit of like getting in the car and before I get out of my car I take 30 seconds and maybe I do a few physiological sighs which that breath practice is a. Is a simple one. I learned it from Andrew Huberman and it's where you breathe in, breathe in a little more and sigh and you repeat that. So simple. Just doing one. I literally felt my energy shift. So just a couple of those as a habit. You're in the line at the grocery store, you're making dinner, you pause. What keeps us from Doing that. That's the question. So that's where I would start. Is breath. The thing I wish I would have done when I got the warning sign.

And I, I couldn't agree more. And I shared a link at the beginning of this episode before we started talking to a little ebook that I put together that's Breathing Practices for Nervous System Regulation. And I think every one of the ones you just mentioned are in it. It. So if somebody wants to go grab that. It's RebelHealth Co backslash breathing. And it's a pretty simple. I think it has five or six practices in it. I'm curious. This is a big rabbit hole. The question of why you don't do the things.

Yeah.

And I am guilty of this to an extent, at least I feel like I am. Because once you learn like, like as many tools as I've learned or as many practices as I've learned, it's like I would need 55 hours in a day to do all the things that I'm quote supposed to do or want to do or think I should be doing or whatever. But then that feels overwhelming. So then I just do like none of them. And then. And do you think I'm just curious in your experience in working with a lot of people and having this huge community of people doing this kind of work. And then I have some opinions on this, but I'm curious, like what, what do you think are some answers to that question of. And this doesn't just apply to breath practices. This was my first lesson when I first started working with clients like 10 years ago when I started working with complex clients, they would run all these labs and we would do these million page intake things and I would figure out all this stuff and I would write them these really detailed programs and protocols and diets and stuff and spend hours and hours and hours on it. And then we'd do a call and we'd go over it and they be super pumped up and excited and then they're going to feel so good or whatever. And then I do the follow up call with them like two weeks later or whatever and they'd say, well, I didn't, I didn't do any of the things. And I was like, why are these people also lazy? I made this great program. Don't they want to feel better? Don't they want to get better? Like I got so agitated because I didn't understand psychology or trauma or beliefs or any of these things. Then I just thought I just hit this patch of lazy sick clients who Wouldn't. Wouldn't do the things I said. And if they would just do all the things I said, they're going to feel better. So what are your. In your experience, what have you learned? Or some answers to that question of why we don't do the things.

You know, I. I actually feel like this is the most important question to ask, and we are I think, still collectively trying to figure out this answer. Like, if there was any book that I'd want to write, it would be to. To be able to answer this question with certainty. But I do have a handful of things. And just like you were saying, I was just teaching a workshop this weekend at the Omega Institute.

Don't write another book right now. Say no.

Yeah, say no. Okay. Just.

Little voice in your head. Go ahead. Sorry to interrupt.

That's okay. And I was just at this workshop teaching at the Omega Institute this weekend, and everybody was on fire by the last day, like, yeah, we're going to do all this. And I just said, you're not, though. And this is. This is. This is like Debbie Downer of the weekend. Like, you're excited right now, but something is going to come up. Maybe not tomorrow, but for sure within two weeks that you're not going to feel like doing this. Even though you've just experienced a huge shift in your symptoms and you actually have the science and the understanding to know that this is what will cause you to heal, you're going to get in your own way. And I've seen this over and over again, including with myself. And so I told them, I want you to be aware of this part that is going to come up and not feel like doing it. And if you can start to have a dialogue and start to learn, why don't I feel like doing it? This is the first step, is becoming aware of the part of us that. That I don't feel like it. Why don't I feel like it? And I think there's a lot of reasons. A, Our identity doesn't like to shift. And when we do anything new, we don't have the neural pathways. It doesn't have all of the rewards. And then the, you know, the rewards of the brain given to us by doing something new long term, after the initial excitement of it has wore off, the initial dopamine of a feeling in control, because that's what it is at first, we get this dopamine hit of hope and control. When we get something new like, oh, this is the thing. Well, eventually that neurochemistry is going to die. Down when it becomes a ritual and we don't like doing things where the chemistry shifts and there's no reward and pleasure. So the first thing is you're going to stop getting pleasure from it. And then you're going to have to make a choice. Do I do this because I know that this is in my highest good even though I don't have pleasure, or do I go look for some other pleasure seeking behavior? So initially it might come down to biochemistry, but we could take that deeper. And why is it that parts of us would rather like Go Surf YouTube than do the thing that we know will heal our gut or whatever? And I think that all of us in some way on this path, if we've gotten into the space, we either A, don't feel like we can recover or B, we don't feel worthy, like we need to fix things about ourself before parts of us will let us recover. C, we're so stuck like trying to please everyone else that that is more of a source of safety to us to show up for others than to show up for ourself. And ultimately we're seeking safety. And so that safety need will always win. And if we're not in a place where we know that our deepest sense of safety is our self respect and our self alignment, we won't choose it. So it's a lot of unconscious things at play here.

I think that's a great answer and I think it gives people a lot to consider and I think that that self awareness is the first step. And I like that you bring that up to people to notice it and explore it and who doesn't want to do it and why and can we have a conversation with that person? But not from a you suck because you don't want to do this thing point of view. But why? What's your concern? Or why don't you want to do it? Or why do you want to do something else? And in my experience of doing parts work that stems like from IFS and the stuff I've done in compassionate inquiry with Gabor, it sounds silly and wild and crazy, but if you ask those questions to parts of yourself, you'll get answers. And so I didn't believe that at first. It took me like eight IFS sessions. IFS is internal family systems for anybody listening to this. And it involves parts of our psyche. And it took me like eight sessions before anything worked. And I didn't believe it. And I was just sitting there annoyed with this guy that everybody recommended that I go work with and then all of a sudden, one session, he said, ask this part of you this. And I could feel a response, like, a real response. And I almost didn't say it because I didn't want him to be right. Like, I didn't want to acknowledge it. I didn't want it to be real, you know, like, because it felt so weird and silly. I'm talking to myself. But, yeah, ask those questions and really get curious. You know, I think. I love that. And I love that you. You dumped that water bucket on them at the end of their. At the end of their weekend. But it. With. With. Without that increased awareness of that, I think it's much easier to fall off the practices without being like, hey, I was warned this was going to happen, and I'm ready for this. And I know this is. Let's explore it and let's look at it and maybe giving them. Remember how good you felt. And I underlined something like that the practices aren't important. And it's like, who's not important? Like, is it the practices? Is it them? And when did they learn? When did they learn that? And that's a whole nother podcast we could get into. But I love that. I love that you bring that up. I love that that's the most important question, because I think that that's way more than these practices, like I mentioned. I think any nutritionist or health coach or doctor or anybody listening to this that helps people can relate to that being the most important question. Because I would guess most of the people that wind up in your program, in your community, on your membership, they've been given things to do, like, and they know the things to do. Like, a lot of them probably come to you with a binder full of things that they know to do. And I tried this, or I did this for a week, or I tried this thing, or I took this supplement for a week, or I did. Like, half of them probably know more than the practitioners that they were seeing by this point. So that is. That's the. What do they call it? The million dollar question. So thank you for bringing that up and shifting the conversation in that direction. I think it's super important. So if somebody listening to this is really curious and they want to learn more about your community there at Primal Trust and what you guys are doing. You showed me your book before we went on. Can you lift that up? How Healing Happens. You can go. And we're setting up a link for you. You can go to Rebel Health. Howhealing Happens. All like, one word as if grammar doesn't exist. How healing. How healing happens. And you can get a free copy of that book in digital format. And if you want to just share a little blurb about what's in the book and what they'll get and learn, I think it's a fantastic resource for people.

Yeah. So I wanted to make a book that was beautiful, but also explained, you know, a lot of the science that I'm teaching. The science of the polyvagal theory of the cell danger response of limbic system retraining, as well as sharing basic practices to get started. So it's basically a free mini program to help convince you as to why this might be important for you, but also to get you started. And to me, it was my attempt of raising awareness. It's about 130 pages, so it's a, it's a decent size book. And I think that a lot of what keeps people from doing these practices is they don't understand the science behind why they work. They're just told they work. At least that was for me. So I wanted to create a book, and this is both for practitioners and patients to understand why these things I'm speaking about make a huge impact when you find that willpower to be able to follow through with them on a regular basis. So. So that's why I created it.

Fantastic. And go check it out again. It's rebelhealth co howhealing happens and you'll love it. And it's a great resource and a little project of Dr. Katz who hates putting together presentations. She just whips up 130 page, beautiful book. So as we talked about taking on projects and doing all kinds of extra stuff, your book about the question of why they don't do the thing sounds fantastic, but you got to put a moratorium on book creations and presentations for a little bit. So. Dr. Kat, thank you so much. Thanks for this conversation, for all the work you're doing, for the time you take to really, like you said, raise awareness. I think that the work you're doing, it's really starting to move the needle. It's a contributing factor to the needle moving in a way that it needs to, to really address this giant elephant in the room of this like multifactorial chronic disease wave of people who aren't getting better even by, you know, pretty previously effective functional medicine approaches. And forget conventional, like they're way off the can be helped by conventional medicine chart. And they're even, you know, past where regular functional medicine is going to get them and that needs to happen, like this information and these practices and these tools and this understanding has to get in the hands of more people or else this is just going to continue down this road and healing is possible. There's people who I'm sure you've seen go through your program that come in the door like you were bedridden and unable to do anything. And it is possible to get from there to what you're doing now and what other people are doing now. So thank you so much for all of that.

Thank you, Michael.