Why ‘Reduce Your Stress’ Is Terrible Advice

is, is there are capital T traumas, adverse childhood experiences that are capital T's, and those are the ones that you're mentioning— violence, sexual abuse. But there are also lowercase t traumas that actually have the same exact changes in brain architecture. In other words, shrinkage of prefrontal cortex or adult brain and growth in the volume of the amygdala or our limbic primal reptilian fight, flight.

Fear of sending.

Exactly. And so, you know, that's really interesting. There was a study that was done by Moll and group, and what they found is people that identified as being chronically overwhelmed on a perceived stress index had the same exact brain changes as someone that had PTSD from any of the capital T traumas of abuse, neglect, abandonment in childhood.

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Hello, it's Dr. Ken Holtorf with another episode of the Peptide Summit. Today we are pleased to have Dr. Keesha Ewers. She's going to talk about how to reverse emotional trauma-induced autoimmunity, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder with peptides. It really kind of a full-spectrum program on how to help everyone. So many people have these, you know, past emotional traumas that you may or may not know. And just kind of doing some background research on it, and I was just fascinated. I'm like, man, a lot of people need this help. So I really think it's going to be a really educational time here. And so I'm so happy to have Dr. Kishi with us. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, great, great.

So, um, uh, Ticia Yurta, uh, is a— she's an integrative medical expert. She's a doctor in sexology, family practice, and she does psychotherapy. So psychotherapist and herbologist. She's board certified in functional medicine and Ayurvedic medicine and is founder medical director of the Academy of Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program. So, uh, that's a hot thing right now. And she trains people for that. She's been in the medical field for over 30 years. After conducting the HURT study in 2013, which is Healing Unresolved Trauma, she developed the HURT model for understanding how past childhood trauma impacts health. This led to the creation of the You Unbroken online program for patients to heal their own trauma and the Mystic Medicine deep immersion healing retreats. She leads at her home in San Juan Island, Washington. She's a popular speaker, including at Harvard, from the TED Talk stages, and bestselling author, Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle. And she really put together how, you know, we say psychological and emotional is different than physical. I mean, it's neurons firing.

All the—

everything's a vicious cycle and we'll get into that. She's best-selling author of Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle: The Woman's Guide to Reclaiming Emotional Freedom and Vibrant Health, The Quick and Easy Autoimmune Paleo Cookbook: Anti-Inflammatory Recipes with 7 Ingredients or Less for Busy People, and Your Libido Story, a workbook for women who want to find, fix, and free their sexual desire. Perked up everyone's ears there. You can listen to her Mystic Medicine radio show and find her programs at www.drkeesha.com, D-R-K-E-E-S-H-A dot com.

Well, thank you.

Thanks for having me.

You've done a lot and it sounds like you've helped a lot of people. And again, and we'll get into this, I mentioned I was doing a little background research to look at some of the studies and it's very clear how, you know, childhood trauma just affects future health and emotional well-being, and everything's a vicious cycle. And, you know, breaking these families out of the cycle is such a big problem. How did you get into this? What led to this?

Well, I started out at the age of 19 as an RN in the intensive care unit and was humming along for 10 years doing that, having 4 children, raising them, running marathons. I was, I I was quite a— my friends called me the Energizer Bunny and very busy. And then this is how my patients describe it too. All of a sudden, right, in air quotes, I got sick. And it was one morning I woke up, I had 10 pounds of extra weight over my joints. They were red, they were inflamed, swollen. I was in so much pain and it was like someone had taken the batteries out of the Energizer Bunny. I was just flattened. So I got in. Yeah, got in. And my, my doctor said, so has there any autoimmune disease in your family history? And I said, yeah, I think my grandfather had rheumatoid arthritis. In fact, I'm 55 now and my grandfather died at the age that I am with it, was in a wheelchair. Yeah. And she said, well, rip two prescriptions off her pad. You know, one was for methotrexate, one was for a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. Said when you get worse, not if, 'Come back and we'll change your meds.' I mean, that was it, right? I said, 'Well, hang on, hang on, hang on. I actually, you know, cook my own food. I'm very disciplined. I run. I'm very healthy. What else is there?' 'I'm sorry, dear. You have drawn the short end of the genetic lottery,' right? This is it. And then just kind of closed the book, put it on the shelf. So on my way home, I remember thinking, 'My model of medicine has no answers for me, but there must be There's gotta be something out there. And so I went into PubMed and started looking for research and I found an article on yoga and autoimmune disease and, and, you know, really good outcomes. And so I went to my next, you know, the next day to my first yoga class and the yoga teacher during that class actually said this one word and enough about it that I got curious and went home and looked it up and it was Ayurveda and Ayurvedic medicine is the sister science of yoga. It's 10,000-year-old sister science out of India. And when I went and looked it up, I thought, oh, this explains so much. 'Cause all those years ago, they actually understood that we're not all the same, that every medication that you take is not, you know, that you give is not gonna behave in the same way in every single body, that we can't all be on the same diet. You know, like all this, it started unfolding. And I thought, oh, this is why this person died in the ICU. And this is why this, you know, Like, this makes so much sense. And then I read that Ayurveda says that autoimmune disease is undigested anger. I just remember sitting back in my chair and looking at the computer kind of pissy, like, well, I'm not an angry person.

I was just going to anger management course, a friend of mine, and he makes him too angry to go.

And so, so I, you know, I thought, oh, maybe this is the problem, that I don't allow myself to feel angry. I go running instead. You know, I don't actually digest my feelings. This idea of digesting your emotions, your memories, your feelings, your experiences was completely alien and foreign to my way of thinking. Of course, that's not the way we think in our culture and in our model of medicine. So I thought, huh. And so I learned how to meditate while I was taking yoga. And one day I was sitting there thinking about the word autoimmune and I thought, gosh, you know, autoimmune means I'm attacking myself. I am actually killing myself in a societally acceptable manner.

A lot of people do that. You're making me think. Yeah.

Yeah. And I thought, so, so why do I want to die? Because in this moment I don't. So when's the first time I wanted to die? And this was a very, very important question. Instead of how do I get out of my suffering as quickly as possible? I started asking this question. When is the first time I wanted to die? Why do I want to die? And I started tracing my memories backwards, looking for this undigested anger root cause. And I found this 10-year-old little girl version of myself who was being sexually abused by the vice president, vice principal of my elementary school. And I looked at her sitting in Key West, Florida on this balcony in Navy housing under a palm tree. And she really wanted off the planet, did not understand anything that was going on, had no language to convey what was going on. Just didn't, you know, didn't understand anything. And I remember thinking that has to have something to do with this disease I have right now. And sure enough, science tells us that. And when I started really working at that level, My RA went away within 6 months. I never did go on those medications and it's never been back in 25 years.

What did your rheumatologist say? Well, see, we'll see what these meds do, see how great they are. Just, I'm not good.

Yeah, I never took them.

Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, you go back to her and tell her, hey, no, are you just like moved on?

No, I just moved on. Yeah, because I was already in— I, I signed up and applied for graduate school started learning about Ayurvedic medicine, you know, I, I thought, gosh, you know, I've worked in the intensive care unit and then hospice and, and then these two arenas of medicine, it's actually pretty darn good care, but the average person does not get that kind of integrative model. And so I want to go back to school and bring that so that you're not on a ventilator or in your last 6 months of life, that we can actually address this piece of it and heal it. And so I started on a journey back to several graduate school programs as I learned how the skills to be able to do exactly that. And that's what I do today.

Wow.

Well, that's really neat. And it's kind of a shame at the same time when I talk to so many so-called integrative, I don't know what we call ourselves, you know, and they have to get sick before they realize. Same with me. I don't— it's ingrained in medical school that anything alternative is quackery, it's no evidence. And it's really the opposite. And you said that, hey, everyone's different. The whole system now is getting away from everyone being different, where it's big data, this works.

Evidence-based.

So if it doesn't work for you, then it's your fault.

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

Yeah. Anything that isn't standard dogma for you can't even get it published. Like, see, there's nothing published. Well, because what are the journals funded by? The drug companies. They do the ads. Right.

But yeah.

So in doing a little background, Again, I just became more and more amazed. And I can just picture so many patients that I have and people I know, you know, really having these issues. And I think it's something like two-thirds of kids have had a significant traumatic and one-third like multiple. And it seems to me like that ongoing would be worse. And also it does seem, and which seems to fit in real life for me, like patients that have been sexually assaulted seem to be— have the worst symptoms. Is that true?

Well, that's where the ACEs study, the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, came out of, was Kaiser Permanente had a weight loss clinic and it was a really good program. People were losing their weight and getting, you know, getting what they needed out of it. But a certain percentage of them were dropping out even though they were successfully losing weight before they got to the end. And so the clinic director decided to take a look at that and called call people back in and ask why they'd stop. And a large percentage of them had sexual abuse in their past. And so I, you know, the thing of it is, is there are capital T traumas, adverse childhood experiences that are capital T's, and those are the ones that you're mentioning— violence, sexual abuse. But there are also lowercase t traumas that actually have the same exact changes in brain architecture In other words, shrinkage of prefrontal cortex or adult brain and growth in the volume of the amygdala or our limbic primal reptilian fight-flight. Exactly. And so, you know, that's really interesting. There was a study that was done by Moll and, and group, and what they found is people that identified as being chronically overwhelmed on a perceived stress index had the same exact brain changes and as someone that had PTSD from any of the capital T traumas of abuse, neglect, abandonment in childhood. So that's alarming because I don't have a patient that doesn't identify as chronically overscheduled and overwhelmed and stressed out.

And then I think too, it seems a matter how they perceive it, right?

That's it. It's all about perception.

Yeah. Like you have the worst thing happen to you and you go, well, I'll move on, you know? And again, it's become a vicious cycle. And that actually changes brain, not only chemistry, but architecture, like you're saying.

Yeah, changes the actual brain structure by shrinking and putting holes in the very part of your brain that is in charge of executive decision-making and impulse control.

That's it. And yes, so much for sticks and stones, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

And so, yeah, how does this typically manifest itself as children get older?

Yeah. So according to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which was done by Kaiser and the CDC, or Centers for Disease Control, you know, it was the largest study of its kind, over 17,500 participants that were Kaiser enrollees. They asked about before the age of 18, did you experience any of these 10 capital T traumas? And, you know, if you said yes to one of them, you had an ACE score of 1. If you said yes to 2, you had an ACE score of 2, and so on. And what they discovered is the higher the number of ACEs, the higher your risk of any of the chronic illnesses we see in our culture today, including autoimmune disease, which is now the number one cause of death in the United States. Now, heart disease still holds the prominent position, but now we're starting to relabel some of the parts of heart disease as autoimmune. So it's like, wow, right?

We're finding that so many things, even osteoporosis, autoimmune.

Exactly. Yeah, type 2 diabetes used to not be thought of as autoimmune. Now it is, you know. So, you know, we have over 150 kinds of autoimmune diseases, 80% of which are diagnosed in women. Wow.

And, and that's what we see and I see such a commonality of— and when I was on your summit, we, we talked about this, how, you know, it really shifts the immune system and where normally there's, you know, basically Th1 which gets stuff inside the cell, Th2 gets stuff outside the cell, they're balanced. And when we look at autism, autoimmunity, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic Lyme, really even just aging to some degree, cardiovascular disease, is that it shifts. This Th1 is too low, Th2 is too high, and it's just inflammation, you know. So they go, oh, you got some inflammation. But the key is, so they treat it up here, you know, they treat the endpoint instead of fixing the underlying problem.

Exactly. The thing of it is, is so much of this is about the way that your nervous system is set up to respond to the things that are happening in your external environment, and that happens in childhood. No matter if you have sexual abuse or you have had an experience— and every single human has— of rejection or betrayal or not feeling like you're good enough, which is what my study showed. The Healing Unresolved Trauma study actually went through these distinctions of, you know what, it doesn't matter if it's not sexual abuse or violence. There are these other things that also make a difference because it's about your perceptions. Yeah, some of the people I've done therapy on, like, the very worst thing that happened to— I remember a woman one time who came to me with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. She was the third in three sisters as she was growing up, and she never got anything new in her perception, in her memory. Maybe she did, but she didn't feel like she ever did that. She wore hand-me-downs the entire time she grew up, and that was this major trauma for her. And now, and, and so it— so people do this comparison of, oh well, what, I had a pretty good childhood. And I'm always so glad to hear that, but I always say everyone's had trauma because, you know, we've all had these places where we've been rejected or felt betrayed. And as a biological being, we are programmed to understand that In tribal days, if you were put on the outside of the firelight circle, rejected from the tribe, then that meant the saber-toothed tiger could eat you. And so it was experienced as a very big trauma. So that's the thing is, is really understanding that these moments, these hurts, you know, they actually start the way that your nervous system responds. They're associated with a feeling, a meaning you made up. And here's the thing, Kent, is that we don't have our prefrontal cortex completely formed until we're 24 years old, 24 to 26. So the meaning-making that we're generating when we're small children, we're small humans trying to discover how to be okay in a world dominated by big humans who are telling us how to be a human. And so the meaning-making that we generate as we're growing up is done with a brain that's not fully formed. So it's going to be very self-centered because children are self-centered. They're supposed to be. They're trying to figure out like, how do I fit into all of this? What does this mean about me? And, you know, then we're going to create a belief and then we put a behavior to that that's adaptive for that belief and meaning that we created. So for me, I always track mine because it's easy to track it. You know, I'm sitting in a 5th grade classroom. The speaker goes off in the corner of the classroom several times a day, but that intercom is the one that calls me to the vice principal's office every once in a while, not that often.

It's a—

it doesn't matter if it's the Pledge of Allegiance, the secretary making an announcement, or, you know, the thing crackles to life and I go into the Pavlovian response of freeze, panic, terror.

Right.

And so every single day I'm having this response. And so the meaning I made up is, you know, I'm not safe. And adults who are in authority can't be trusted. Right. Which was true for that little kid. Here's a vice principal saying, I've got your back to the whole school.

And I'm going, what? The person who— Right. Yeah.

And he's telling me I'm a bad kid and that's why it's happening. I was one of two white girls in an all-black school, so he called me white trash and tell me I was a bad kid. And then, and then, so from there, the meaning I made up was, oof, I better actually really be perfect if I'm bad and this is happening. So the behavior that I put to that as an adaptive behavioral response with the wise mind of the child at age 10 was to be a perfectionist. And so I always tell people, like, with, with autoimmune disease, there are 3 Ps in place. You're a people pleaser, you're a perfectionist, and you are holding on to poison of past pain. And so those 3 things, I have never seen them not there in any of the hundreds of people that I've treated at this point with autoimmunity, helping them reverse it.

Wow.

Yeah.

And then that's— I can imagine other people have different methods of coping where that everyone's got, you know, awesome student and smart, like that's right, he's just being good. You know, other people have other behaviors that are considered bad, you know.

Well, and who wants a medical provider who's not a perfectionist? And so, you know, the whole thing around perfectionism actually served me really well until I got sick. There was no reason to change it.

Yeah.

Then I got RA and I had to start really looking at all of this and tracking it and figuring it out. It's not a tenable way to live a life, actually. Turns out.

That's incredible. Now, do you find it? It seems to me like that modern times makes this worse. You know, it's like, you know, growing up, everyone compares themselves to others. But you got this. You get a leeway because it's not, you know, now it seems objective. Well, how many likes do you have on your—

Oh, yeah.

It's so true, and everything moves so fast.

Social media is one of the 4 reasons that deaths of despair are increased in the United States right now. We have a whole division of death in our country that's been called by Princeton researchers deaths of despair that have to do with addiction, cirrhotic livers, and overdoses and suicides. So, you know, this is This is where we've gone steep on the curves for deaths of despair. And as I started looking at these, I started realizing, my gosh, also narcissism has gone up. There's a really great book a couple of researchers have looked at called The Narcissism Epidemic, and it's talking about this very thing that social media, the feeling of being left out, right? Comparing and despairing is one of the reasons we have increase in narcissism, self-centeredness. We're not moving into compassion and empathy. We're actually moving into a competition for resources. So it's doing us damage.

I was just talking to my girlfriend about this, and I'm like, is everyone a narcissist?

Like, yeah. Wow. It's, that's, that's crazy.

Yeah.

And I remember when we were talking before, it's like, you know, and look at the studies, like, you know, you get early childhood trauma, but even the stress of the mother basically plays a part in how that baby's brain develops.

Absolutely. In utero trauma, right? Of a stressed out mother.

And you don't get a chance, you can't even get out yet.

Right.

You know?

Yeah. It's, uh, it sets up microbiome, it sets up like you said, nervous system reactivity pathways already in place, brain.

Everything is epigenetic. And that is, I think, one of the biggest kind of breakthroughs. And we're moving more and more in that direction. And just, you know, we have all these genetic tests which people think are the end-all, but really they play a much smaller part than the epigenetic, the environmental influence, because if you have a particular gene, you can— it can be turned on or turned off.

So I do genetic testing on all my patients and the reason I do that is because genetics are one of the 4 root causes for autoimmune disease along with trauma and how you deal with your stress, along with toxic load and burden, and along with your digestive health. Everyone with autoimmunity has leaky gut. But the reason I look at it, I explain to my patients like your genetic test is kind of like a pirate's treasure map. It's where we can find the SNPs where X marks the spot. When you go to the X on the map, the treasure is not sitting out in the sand. You have to dig to go get it. And so it actually shows us where to dig a little deeper when we look at genetics. We never treat the SNP. We never look at it that way because we're looking at— so what SNP is being expressed when you are eating gluten, which your genetics are saying is actually you have a high intolerance or absolute celiac. We can look at neurotransmitter SNPs and we can say, so when you aren't going to bed by 10 o'clock, you're actually flipping this one on, you know, and this is why you have so much anxiety and this caffeine that you're guzzling down, this SNP is saying that you're not metabolizing it very well. So it really helps us to make those connections between lifestyle lifestyle choices and factors and what the SNPs are that are coming into play that are causing problems.

Yeah.

And I'll tell patients it's really a predisposition.

Yes.

You're more likely to get this because of your genes if you do this. Like, some people can eat all the sugar they want, they won't get diabetes. But sorry, you have the SNP that if you do that, you're gonna get diabetes, you know.

And we see it with so many things.

No SNPs are really good or bad. It depends on the environment, you know. Right, right.

I am loaded in with SNPs for breast cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. And guess who's had both and turned them around naturally with the lifestyle choice thing again? So, you know, it's really fascinating that, that this the trauma component actually generated both of them for me. And being able to do that work flipped them both off. No meds. So—

Wow, that's really neat. And that's what, you know, Peptide Summit is, as we talk about the peptides, they work so much epigenetically. Yeah. And in that, it's much like, you know, the microbiome is such a big deal. And we haven't explored even exponentially bigger is the virome, microvirus. Is it that? You know, million times more of those.

And we're 45% viruses.

So yeah.

Yeah.

And I also think of, and this may be a little crude analogy, but it seems to be like with, let's say you get a feral cat, you bring it in, you love it immediately, it's fine. But if it's out there for more than a month or so like that, it's so hard to get that cat to chill out and calm down. Yeah. It's just basically— but the genes haven't changed, but the expression of those genes have changed.

Well, and when you're perceiving yourself as in danger or not getting your needs met in some way, that perception then says to the adrenals, okay, you know, we've got a lion on our tail. We're about to get eaten. Go. Right? And that cortisol that gets released breaks down the gut wall. There's leaky gut. So it doesn't matter how many supplements you're taking to heal your gut wall, if you keep generating the perception that you're not okay, I don't care how many supplements you take. It's just like a hole in the bottom of the bucket, right?

And I think we're, we're moving past, you know, it's like gut-brain axis, everything here, the gut's affecting the brain, but they forget the loop The brain affects the gut. And in going through with that ACE study, and I— and they mentioned that the children with the adverse childhood experience, they had shorter telomeres.

Yes.

And, and so for the audience, telomere is basically little caps on the end of your cells.

And so they're caps on the ends of the chromosomes that whenever the cell divides, they get shorter and shorter, shorter. And other things will shorten them. Once they kind of get short enough, they can't— cells can't divide, so they basically can't regenerate, and they don't function well and cause a lot of problems. And so it's a way to kind of gauge your cellular age. You know, you could be, you know, 50 years old, but you could have a cellular age of 80 or 30. But it's— and with peptides, there's probably the, like, number one anti-aging peptides are the pineal peptides, which pineal gland basically secretes, you know, melatonin. And we thought, well, it's in charge of sleep, but also a lot to do with, you know, it's right around everything else, amygdala and fear. And also we're finding it seems to control everything else. It's like this little guy that was sitting behind the curtain, and we thought it did one thing, but it's doing a lot more. And so if you take these peptides, which decline as we age or stress or inflammation, all these things makes everything a vicious cycle. You know, one very measurable thing, it brings back your melatonin levels back to youthful levels. And it's one of those things, you know, sleep is so key. And it is basically allows the body to— not only does it bring that up, it's kind of objective measure which helps you sleep, but also affects it differently as, you know, it allows you to get deep sleep. And so we love that. And it's shown to improve sleep, especially when you give it with another peptide called Delta sleep-inducing peptide, But it then affects your thymus gland, which affects it. It stimulates that and rejuvenates it, which declines as we age, which then can fix your immune system, which is causing the autoimmunity and the inflammation. And they're even finding it resets if you have like a low thyroid, it fixes that. Your adrenal problems, fixes that. Your growth hormone deficiency.

Wow.

Your growth hormone levels just went up. And it's kind of this, you know, ultimate anti-aging hormone. They even had rats who were menopausal, they gave it to them, they started menstruating again, 80% of them, and 25% had normal births. And they gave it to humans for 15 years and followed them. They had significant cardiovascular disease. The ones on standard treatment, you know, they got worse. Cardiovascular system basically function got worse. The ones on the epitalion basically the cardiovascular system got better and they lived significantly longer. They lived better, you know, better quality of life and dramatically less cancer and less cardiovascular events. So it's kind of like— and no side effects that have been found, you know, so it's really kind of neat stuff. And but then again, it's not like, oh, here, you've had childhood trauma, here, take this, see ya. You know, I mean, it's so far from that. You know, everything's a piece of the puzzle, you know.

Right. Tool in the toolbox.

And yeah, so it goes along with, you know, you look at people that are, you know, overweight, sedentary. Stress is just such a killer.

Yes, it is.

And I lecture on that and I found, and I just kind of just from, from researching, you're kind of like, oh, stress, of course everyone's stressed, you know, and what are you gonna do about it? You know, it is hard.

What do you do about it?

But it, we—

But it's not stress that's the killer. That's the interesting thing. Like, I teach for the Institute for Functional Medicine and I'm on stage teaching doctors how to do this and I always say, It is— please do not tell your patients they have to reduce their stress. That's not like— what about the person with the special needs child, or the one that's having to care for elderly parents, or the one that has a job they love but it's really stressful? You know, like, you're not throwing away your stress. It's changing your relationship to your stress.

I think that's a much better way of putting it. It's how you deal with that.

It's how you perceive it. It's not actually strapping on your running shoes and going and running it off or running off cortisol. That's what I used to do. Yeah, I used to deal with my stress that way. It does not work. You have to actually look at how you're perceiving your life. What is the meaning you're still making around it?

You know, I think, you know what, I think that that's really helped me going to communicate to patients because it's totally true.

And I see it with my brother.

I hope he doesn't watch this, but it's just kind of like the light bulb goes off every time. Like, he sees everything as the worst thing that ever happened to him. And it's like, look, it happens to everyone. You got— you didn't get the job or something like that, you know? Oh my God, I can't get— you know, I was in bed for a week because of it. And yeah, it's how you deal with that stress.

I think, well, it's the meaning you attach, right? So why do you go to bed? Because you didn't get the job. I'm not good enough. I can't catch a break. Right.

And so he's the worst. No one likes him.

Right.

Jeez.

You know, and so the behavior that he uses, an adaptive strategy, if he goes to bed is to go hide. And so, you know, it's to like go under instead of actually saying something different. Right. And so that's where all of our meanings and our beliefs and our adaptive so-called adaptive behaviors that we had as children are still running us until we get a challenge in life that we get run up against. And then the HURT model, this has two pathways that you get a choice to take as an adult with a fully developed brain. And one of them is over here, you don't self-confront, you keep blaming the outside world, which is what you're demonstrating your brother is, right?

And then It's, yeah, everyone else does it to him, right?

Everybody else is to blame, including God and including life. And so what you do then is you start ruminating on those negative meanings and beliefs that you had when you were a child, and you wind up getting sick. Over here, the other option that you have when life hands you a challenge that you can't deal with is you get an opportunity to finally notice, like, oh, every time I'm upset, I'm present. Hmm. Maybe I have something to do with this. And you start having this willingness to engage in a compassionately curious inquiry of self-confrontation of what your own patterns of thinking are doing. And so what I do is I teach my patients how to track their hurt, how to really look at what implicit and explicit expectations they have of life, their bodies, themselves, God, the people they're in relationship with, medicine, you know, and be able to see which ones are serving them and which ones are unrealistic and that they need to shift. And we start doing that, like how to create a different meaning and then create a different adaptive behavior strategy. This is why just deciding not to eat sugar doesn't work. If there's actually some part of that as an adaptive behavior that gives you comfort because of the meaning you created around trauma. It's not about willpower.

Yeah, if it's about willpower, you might as well forget. I mean, your life's miserable, you know, and it's just a small example. But I think about these things. It's like, like if someone cuts you off, right, and flips you off, you know, oh, screw you, I'm going to follow that person. I swear it would ruin my day. I just think about it and I'd be, you know, just adrenaline is going all day and anxious. And I found that if I wave and go, thank you, you know, and, and it's like, what good did it do trying to chase a guy and look at him bad, give him a bad look?

Right.

It wrecked my day.

Right.

And like, why would I do that?

I learned that in my 20s. I actually got in a race in my Honda Accord with some big white pickup truck in Texas because I got— I was so angry about this road rage he was demonstrating. And I got angry to the point where I was actually trying to keep up with him. You know, I mean, it was ridiculous. And that's when it hit me too. Oh, this is ridiculous.

And you give that other person power.

Yeah.

And it's that meaning that you, you put with it. Like if you're, if that's the worst thing that happens to you all day, hey, it's a great day.

Exactly. This is why the young don't have wisdom, Kent. This is why it takes some life experience to have wisdom.

I know. Well, I'm trying to stay out of the politics of it, but it seems to me that they're making, like, you know, people say, oh, that's offensive. I don't know what that word means. I've never been offended. I don't know. It's either if someone says something, it's either true or it's not. Like, okay, you know, and I think it's like we're making a bunch of victims. It seems to me like, oh, you can't make it because of they're keeping you down, you know, and see there, see what they said right there. That's a—

see, you are offended by that. You're offended by that.

I'm wondering if that's why we're having— do we have concerns over it?

One day during one of the political elections many, many, many years ago, I live in the Seattle area and I was starting to document post-electoral depression. That's what I was calling it. And one day I started talking to my patients about this and I would say, so what's happening for you? Why are you depressed right now? Well, this and this and this and this and this, you know, and, and I said, so you're afraid and you're angry. Yes. And isn't that exactly why you don't like this candidate that just got made president is because of those things? Oh yeah. So I said, every time you become that which you are angry at, when you become angry, like my example, you know, our examples of road rage, right? Chasing someone down, we become the person that we—

That's exactly true.

Yeah.

Right. And so I said, you know, you're actually intolerant of people that are intolerant. And so then you become intolerant.

That is exactly what seems to be happening. I don't think I'm angry about it. I'm like, it's just that it does seem— because I just, I've learned with my brother, he's the ultimate victim. And I've learned the worst thing you can do to someone is make them a victim.

It's bugging you is what I'm pointing out.

Well, it really affects my life because it— I have to hear and take care of them and you can't work because of it, you know.

So I see what it does to somebody to become a victim.

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

But I don't think we make anyone anything, you know. It's just really about being willing to self-confront our own patterns. You see what I mean? Yeah. And that's the work that I do, is helping people really look at what is triggering me, what's, what's getting me bugged, what, what is it that sends my biochemistry off, and then being able to work with that from the inside out. And because nobody makes another person feel anything.

And I think you said a couple of times, and I think that's the key, and I totally agree with you, is self-introspection and looking at yourself and say, wait a minute, what part am I playing in this? And instead of like, hey, it's the environment controlling me. And that's hard. That's stressful. You have no control, right?

You don't. We never did. We never will.

Being done to you.

Yeah, right. Yeah, it's really the only control we have is how we respond. And if we respond with anger and fear and anxiety and depression, then we're gonna get sick. And that's just how it is, right? And so it's, it's your relationship to stress. And it doesn't matter what's going on, like what the presidential election looks like, what the environment looks like, like all of that, it does matter, obviously, on so many different levels, but it's not responsible for how you feel. You are responsible for how you feel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And yeah, that's—

he made, you know, look what you did, you know, and I think it's very true. I— a little trick I use for myself is whatever, you know, I get broken nose and like tooth got knocked out in the scooter accident I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. And so, oh my gosh, I thought, hey, it could always be worse.

Always.

You know, I could have broke my neck. I could have got, you know, basically traumatic brain injury. I could have got—

Sounds like you were very lucky.

No, I got a tooth that is glued in from Amazon.

Yeah.

And I had surgery. I got to go back again. But the other broken 8 places, but wow, it's—

it was stupid of my—

on my part riding this damn scooter.

And, uh, I got lucky.

I did.

Grateful.

Yeah, yeah, I really did.

Yeah.

And, uh, so what are the type of therapies do you—

do you do? So you— you assess them, so you're doing, you know, psychotherapy and—

and just kind of seems like I have a whole program that I do, like, for autoimmunity, where we address genetics, we address toxic burden, we address digestive health and how people are digesting their memories, their feelings, their experiences, and also trauma and your relationship to stress. And, and I just— I work on all 4 of those corners of the puzzle at the same time because they each are interrelated, you know, like, yeah, they're each—

everything's connected—

they're each affecting one another constantly. And you really want it if you're going to move the dial and really reverse autoimmunity, which is totally possible. I'm 25 years free. You know, you have to do it this way. And so that's, that's how I do it. And, and we have different— like, I'll do emotional healing packages if people have really dialed in the other parts of the puzzle and they come to me. A lot of times people hear me on a summit and say, oh my gosh, I heard you and I realized I have not dealt with my trauma. Let's do this, you know. And I'll just do the trauma healing component, and that just dials it in for them.

And I see, like, one patient comes to mind. She even said, she goes, I don't know if I want to get better because I don't know if I'll be able to deal with shit. Horrendous, like, traumatic event. I mean, it's like unbelievable. And she was like, I don't know if I can deal with that.

So you don't have to dig into— this is the really interesting part. A lot of people are afraid of that, and I really appreciate you saying that because I probably wouldn't have remembered to mention it. We don't have to dig up the story. We have to go to the meaning that you created, right? Yeah. That's the most important thing. And then we have to look at the behavior that you used as an adaptive strategy, and then we need to shift those. So, and I have a whole program for doing that, and it's very amazing. It works really well. So that's the thing is you're not having to actually dive and dig into and get into, you know, the, the horrible— so many people have had horrible trauma.

That's why I think people don't make the step because they just want to bury it. I don't want to talk about it.

Exactly. And then the other thing they don't realize is, um, I always think about— I have this on my desk. I always think about everything as a spiral, you know, that that they've— oh, I've worked on that. And yet they're sitting in front of me with an autoimmune disease, you know, and I'll say, well, it's not one and done, you know, it's like we may have to take this a little tighter into the spiral and circle back around again and take it in a little deeper. So, you know, people say, oh, I've been working on that for years in, in talk therapy or with one therapist. And, and I always say, like, if you still have your inflammation, if you still have everything happening, then it's not done. Yeah. So, yeah.

And that's what we do, you know, from the other side is like look at their labs and, hey, I don't know what's causing this, but then we kind of start with looking at the immune system. And right. But, and it really helps people. I'm fine. Doctors check that. Well, why is this off? You know, the doctor will say, well, that's, you know, nothing we can do about it, you know.

And but there's something causing it. So we got to get down to that.

And that's why we really like it. I mentioned Heptalion and the pineal gland, which you can actually take orally, which is nice. It kind of resets. And then because so much has to do with the immune system, fix that immune system.

But if you have this constant, you know, in the brain, the neurologic system is the biggest influence on that.

And also, like, you remember, you know, mast cell activation syndrome is a big, a big deal. We're seeing more and more of that.

And, you know, then these mast cells and histamine intolerance, those are big-time nervous system issues.

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

Exactly.

I'm like, look upstream.

Exactly. Yeah.

But I posted something, I said, you can kick me out, but I'm going to tell you something here, you know. And that's what we love, you know, some of these peptides like, you know, thymosin beta-4 and TB, uh, TB4 fragment with thymic peptides that will modulate that immune system. You know, it, it gives you, uh, you know, kind of a tool, crutch a little bit, you know, to help that. But I agree, you need to fix still the underlying problem, but it gives you a little although in the meantime, and then body bridge compound 157, BPC-157, lowers that Th2, and you'll see the autoantibodies come down. But the key is fixing what's really causing it. Well, this is getting much more at the underlying cause, but it's not getting at the core cause, which takes a long time, right? Whether it's a chronic infection. But I think this whole psychological— I hate saying psychological because it makes it to a lot of people, like, less real or something, which is totally wrong. But there's other stuff underlying it that's driving it. But the way medicine is now, it's just all compartmentalized. Right.

And we aren't little compartments. And that's the thing. When people think, well, are you telling me it's all in my head? I'm like, yeah. Why has that been so demonized? Because how we perceive is exactly what it is, but you're not imagining it. That's not, you know, so, so it doesn't matter if it's there or not. We have to actually work with those things. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that's true. And we like, you know, the big—

I actually have another meeting right now.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's been great.

Yeah.

We'll use just like in terms of brain, you know, cognitive dysfunction, cerebral lice. And I want to mention that now we can take it oral. But yeah, just in, in ending, I, I think you're doing such a great service. And thank you. And again, how people, they'll find, go to just the, uh, drkeisha.com. Drkeisha.com.

Yeah.

Uh, awesome. Thank you for being on. It's enlightening. Uh, enlightening. And it, it, I think like myself, I think everyone will kind of make them think after, after they watch this. So, you did your job. And, uh, I think you really helped some people maybe take a, take a step forward in healing.

Appreciate you.

Great. Thanks a lot.

All right. Take care.

Bye-bye.

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