Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

This podcast is brought to you by LMNT, which is a company that I have had the chance to invest in and have loved since day one. They just released brand new grapefruit flavor on top of all of their other flavors that I absolutely love, including watermelon which is a kid’s favorite in my house, as well as citrus, raspberry, orange, and a couple of ones that I really like, like mango and lemon habanero as well. As you know, summer brings warmth and sunshine, and with it, energizing opportunities to all of us to move and play and be outside. But it also brings a fair amount of sweat. And if you are a regular sauna user like me, you know that sweat is part of it, as well as if you exercise regularly. And this is why optimal hydration is the key with the right fluid to electrolyte balance, because it isn’t just about getting enough water and fluid, but also making sure our electrolytes are dialed in and you feel the difference when you get it right. So when summer brings the heat, LMNT brings the grapefruit salt flavor to help you enjoy that balance all summer long. You can consider grapefruit or any of their flavors, your ultimate summer salt companion. And I love that they combine sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the clinically studied ratios to make sure that you can stay optimally hydrated even if you are saunaing or exercising or just spending time outside in the summer. Find out more about LMNT by going to drinklmnt.com/wellnessmama. And this is a one time flavor so when it’s gone, it’s gone for good. I highly recommend that you try it. I also would suggest trying watermelon and mango chili if you like a little bit of a spicy kick. But watermelon, like I said, is the kid favorite at my house and you can find those and all of their flavors at drinklmnt.com/wellnessmama.

This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse, the company I co-founded to create truly safe and natural personal care products that are safe for the whole family. Our products use EWG verified safe ingredients and go beyond just avoiding harmful ingredients, including herbs and botanicals that benefit your oral health, skin and hair from the outside in. We believe that it isn’t enough just to avoid the harmful ingredients… that natural products should work as well as their conventional counterparts and that since the skin is the largest organ, adding beneficial ingredients is an extra way to benefit the body naturally. I’ve been fascinated by oral health since reading Weston A Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration years ago, and we now have a whole line of oral care products focused on supporting and nourishing the oral microbiome while naturally whitening and strengthening teeth. With three options of toothpaste (mint, charcoal and kids strawberry), natural floss, biodegradable flossers, and new probiotic mints designed to support the oral microbiome, our products help you have whiter, heathier teeth naturally. Check out all our Wellnesse products at Wellnesse.com.

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama Podcast. I’m Katie from WellnessMama.com, and this episode is about how to do an emotional detox and achieve limitless energy with Dr. Wendy Myers, who is a repeat guest. She’s a naturopathic doctor and founder of MyersDetox.com. She specializes in heavy metal detox and is a bioenergetics expert, which is the piece we go deep on today. She’s also the best selling author of Limitless Energy: How to Detox Toxic Metals to End Exhaustion and Chronic Fatigue. She’s the host of the top-rated podcast, the Myers Detox Podcast, about protecting your health with detoxification.

But in this episode, we go deep on emotional trauma, including what the research is showing about how physical health can be directly impacted by emotional trauma and how many health issues are directly linked to emotional things that are going on within a person. Including up to 65% of physical health issues can stem from what are called adverse childhood events, or ACEs. She talks about the science of how these traumas impact our biology so strongly and why talk therapy doesn’t necessarily resolve trauma because of this other piece that many people don’t necessarily understand or address. We talk about how we can’t change the past, but we can change our interpretation of the past or our emotions surrounding that and how this can impact even our biology. She goes deep on what bioenergetics are and how they can be used therapeutically, how emotional trauma impacts the vagus nerve, and then various therapies that can be used to address this emotional piece, even if these are like preconscious memories. So we go in a lot of directions in this one. Dr. Wendy always has lots of advice, and without further ado, let’s jump in. Dr. Wendy, welcome back.

Wendy: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Katie: Well, I am excited to get to go deep in this episode because ever since sharing my own story with this side of health, I’ve gotten so many incredible stories from other listeners and readers and from the women who have listened to past podcasts. And I’m always looking for resources to share, especially really delving deep on this topic of how emotional health really does drastically impact our physical health. And I think for background, I know a lot of people are now familiar with this concept, and many people have read things like the Body Keeps the Score, but I feel like this is also still a new and emerging area within medicine. So for background, can you kind of walk us through what the research is actually showing about how physical health can be so deeply impacted by mental and emotional health?

Wendy: Yes. Well, there’s some really interesting research by Kaiser Permanente, and this is conventional medical research where they studied 17,000 people and they studied what are called adverse childhood events. And they only studied about ten of them, but just from those ten different types of adverse childhood events maybe abuse or a parent in jail or something of absent parents, something of that nature, they found that 65% of people’s physical health issues were stemming from these emotional traumas or adverse childhood events.

And I think there’s a lot of people out there that maybe think, oh, I had a relatively good childhood and I wasn’t abused in any way. And so they can very easily kind of brush it off that they really didn’t suffer from emotional trauma, which sounds like this harsh word, but really people can suffer from the kind of the effects of emotional trauma if they just had a child where their needs weren’t met, maybe their parent wasn’t emotionally attuned to them. A child not being really cared for by a parent, a child not feeling safe or protected by their parent, a parent neglecting, not spending time with their child. And I really think emotional neglect is an epidemic. Kids are just being put in front of the electronic babysitter, just having a parent with mood swings, a child who needs to take over the parenting role. Certainly my case for sure, parent not growing up with a parent, so from divorce or loss, and enduring physical and mental abuse. So that covers almost everyone. And so there’s a lot of different repercussions stemming from this emotional trauma that we can get into soon.

Katie: Absolutely. And some people may have heard me explain little parts of my story related to this, where I was doing everything I knew how to do on the physical side to help my thyroid to be able to lose weight after having babies, and nothing seemed to be getting better. And then when I, without even intending to, inadvertently kind of delved into the emotional side and had a therapy experience that I wasn’t expecting that kind of opened up that side, as I worked through it, all the physical stuff started resolving without me changing anything else. And this was coming from the paradigm of my diet was so dialed in. I had worked with literally dozens of different practitioners. I had spreadsheets of all the supplements I was taking. And it wasn’t until I really tapped into that emotional side that even the physical side started resolving. And even since sharing that, I think it took a while for me to believe that was actually what was happening, even seeing it happen in my own life. And I feel like many people might still be resistant to just how profoundly their emotional experiences can impact their physiology. But do we have any understanding of what’s happening here and why those emotions are able to impact our physiology so strongly?

Wendy: Yes. Well, what’s happening is that these traumas that we have, they are a frequency. So just stay with me here a second. So they have an energetic frequency, and those frequencies lie in our energy fields. Okay. And this is why talk therapy doesn’t resolve emotional trauma, because, one, it’s not addressing it at that energetic level, and number two, because many traumas we’re not consciously aware of, we’re not aware that we had them or that they’re affecting us. So you can only talk about things you’re consciously aware of in therapy. And I had ten years of talk therapy because I’m just really into self improvement and whatnot, and I still had a lot of emotional trauma stuff that was really impacting me a lot. And so I was just like you, where I was doing everything for my health, and I would just wake up just feeling like meh, just gray and blah. Like, why am I not happy? I have everything to be happy about. I had an amazing life and everything to be grateful for. But why do I just feel like that, why do I have this negative self-talk? For me, it just set me on this journey to figure out what was going on.

And so I ended up meeting Harry Massey, who, you know, who’s the CEO of NES Health, and did this bioenergetic scan, and soon after that, maybe a couple of months later, of kind of doing this energetic protocol, my bulimia resolved. It’s something that I’d struggle with my whole life. I’d had eating disorder therapist and just done all these things, and it just not 100% disappeared. But for the most part, it just wasn’t a part of my life anymore. And that really took me by surprise by doing this energetic protocol. And I’m like, okay, you have my attention now.

These emotional traumas reside in our energy field, and it’s scientifically proven. We have an energy field. It’s about 3 meters in diameter, 10ft in diameter around our body. And this is like an information superhighway. It’s where our brain waves have information that sends information to our body. Our heart sends out waves that have information on them, much like the Internet, you have WiFi waves that have all this data that’s being sent to your phone and radio waves. Your body works the same way.

And so we can get these energetic blocks from emotional traumas, from heavy metals, from chemicals, from many, many different ways. EMF, WiFi, cellular things like that can cause energetic blocks in our body, but emotional trauma is one of them, and it interferes in our body’s physical functioning. If you have, say, you have isolation, so that affects the kidneys. So if you spend many, many years isolated, event, and that causes an energetic block on your kidneys. Over time, you could have physical impairment of your kidney functioning because the information, the messages that your body is sending to that area are not reaching it or the information is getting scrambled.

And so to resolve emotional trauma, you need to have an energetic approach or using sound therapy, any kind of energy medicine or what have you. There’s lots of different ways you can address this, but that’s really where you’re going to fairly easily tune these emotional traumas out of your energy field and have resolution of that issue. And so it’s much easier than people think and certainly much cheaper and easier than going to therapy for ten years.

Katie: I had a similar experience with therapy in that I even could cognate the various parts of what were happening. And it was like, okay, I get it. We’re talking to my inner child now, and this is what I’m supposed to say. But I was able to keep up the walls that prevented me from ever having to actually address those things. And like you mentioned, there can be things that aren’t even within our conscious awareness necessarily that maybe happened pre-memory or in other ways that we’ve repressed. I know many people who have very severe traumas actually repress the memories entirely, which means they’re not able to access them and talk therapy because they just don’t have memory around them at that point.

And it seems like there’s also maybe like a resilience component to this when we have some sort of energetic block that can actually make us less energetically resilient to things like EMFs or to things like toxins and that that can sort of compound the physical problem, or at least it seems like that, anecdotally. Is that what you see in practice as well?

Wendy: Yeah, I mean, that’s a really good observation. Absolutely. Because there are so many different things that can cause energetic blocks. And there’s a really interesting research by Dr. Hamer, and he developed German New Medicine, and he worked with 60,000 cancer patients and found exactly where their cancer was, what organ, what body part, and what emotional trauma they had. He also did 400,000 CT scans of the brain, and he found that where, say, your pancreas, you have a pancreatic cancer. And he found that the area in your brain where your pancreas is functioning, there would be a calcification that could be seen on a CT scan. And then there was a correlating emotional trauma that was the underlying trigger for that pancreatic cancer.

So for him, he had a really interesting thing happen to him. When his son was 18 years old, his son was murdered, and a year later, Dr. Hamer developed testicular cancer. And this is kind of the genesis of his life’s work. And he felt like these two these events were linked in some way. He didn’t know how, but he started studying the emotional trauma and its role in cancer. And I have several colleagues that are cancer doctors, and they focus primarily on emotional trauma and just working in that realm, seeing dramatic resolution of cancers and other health issues that they work with. And there’s a lot of conventional medical research to support emotional trauma promoting physical health issues.

And I have some statistics that I can read you here. So like the use of antidepressants. And this is going back to that Kaiser Permanente study. So people, if they’ve had five or more adverse childhood events, they have double the use of antidepressants as compared to someone that has zero. And then also, if you’re a smoker, if people have had four or more adverse childhood events, they’re 16% more likely to be a smoker. They’re 18% more likely to have attempted suicide. They are 50% more likely to have experienced depression in the past year. They’re 28% more likely to use illegal drugs. They’re 12% more likely to be overweight or obese. They’re 16% more likely to be an alcoholic. They have two times more likelihood of having cancer, four and a half times the rate of heart disease, three times the rate of financial problems. Because your emotional life certainly corresponds to how you spend money and save it. You’re two times more likely to have a stroke, four times more likely to have lung disease. And it just goes on and on and on and on. It’s really fascinating research, and there’s a lot more research where that came from.

Katie: That is so fascinating. And it seems like also not accepted completely at wide scale within conventional medicine yet. Like you mentioned, there are certainly cancer doctors who are aware of this. And I feel like they’re playing with the very high stakes scenarios with their patients and are willing to try a lot of these things that still seem more cutting edge or not commonly part of the mainstream knowledge. But would you say this could also be linked to probably people have heard of these instances of people having spontaneous remission or sort of like miraculous sounding cures from different really severe diseases? Do you think that there was likely an element of them addressing the emotional trauma or releasing it, even if it was through just the extreme scenario of facing death, sort of, and then learning the emotional shifts through that lens?

Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you hear of that so many times, you’re like, well, how did that happen? How did the tumor just disappear? And then my friend, his name is Dr. Michael Rankin, he focuses on emotional trauma, and he’s seen that so many times, or the tumor just dramatically reduces. But that’s just one example. I mean, we’re talking immune system issues, blood sugar issues, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, other types of dementia. I mean, any type of health issue or symptom, there can be an emotional trauma root cause component to that.

Katie: And it would seem like there’s a positive feedback loop, or at least an interplay in that. For instance, people who are only thinking to address the physical side, they might be addressing giving themselves more emotional or mental resilience through improving their physical health, which might also give them more bandwidth to be able to address the emotional side. So they may think they’re addressing the physical side, but also there’s like, touching on the emotional side as well. And then by being able to have more bandwidth in dealing with the emotional side, they’re also improving physical health as well. So kind of just like these could create a negative feedback loop where these negative emotional experiences can lead to physical problems. It would seem like there’s also a potential positive feedback loop when we’re able to start addressing them.

Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. Because there’s three ways we address emotional trauma. So number one is energetically using bioenergetics, which we’ll get into, your mindset and psychology and kind of understanding the issue, changing your mindset, and then the physical health, because if you have, like, your blood sugar is out of control, you’re going to have anxiety. You’re not going to be able to sleep very well. If you don’t get light on almost a daily basis, you’re going to have trouble with your circadian rhythm, and that’s going to cause hormonal issues and sleep issues and things like that and cause mood swings. So you have to address your physical health. You have to have good physical health and diet and lifestyle habits to have good emotional health as well. But that is certainly one component that there’s many benefits, not just physically.

Katie: It makes sense. And you touched on something else that was really pivotal for me, which was in kind of my journey through reading classics and reading through stoicism, beginning to understand the difference between what happens to us, which we don’t necessarily have control over, and our interpretation of it, which we actually do have much more control than I think many of us realize, over. And that to your point, like shifting the emotions and dealing with the energetic side, you are able to, even without changing the past, change your interpretation of the past, which can make a drastic difference in your emotional and physical health.

Wendy: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, everything is perception. I mean, that’s like the majority of life, but some people that say their mother was really stressed when they were in utero when they were in their mom’s belly before they were born. If your mom was really stressed and you’re just bathing all those stress hormones, you may be born with a higher stress set point and have more sensitivity to stressors than say, the next person. Everyone has that friend that just falls apart at the littlest thing, a bank payment doesn’t go through or whatever and they’re having a meltdown and the next person is not even bothered by that. You can reduce your stress set point and improve your resiliency to stress. So that in part is toning your vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve is this nerve that innervates all your different organs, part of your nervous system as well. So you have to kind of tone your vagus nerve and reduce your stress set point. There’s a lot of different ways that you can go about that, but that’s another very important way to address kind of the physical response you have when you are stressed or when you are kind of reacting from your emotional trauma without even being aware of it. There’s a lot of different strategies to address your biggest tone.

Katie: And you’ve mentioned the term bioenergetics a couple of times and I think that could be a new term to at least some of the people listening. So can you give us some context and explain what bioenergetics is and what’s happening when someone is using bioenergetics?

Wendy: Yeah, so bioenergetics is one of the main, in sound therapy, which is just frequencies. These are all frequencies. And these are just different ways that we can kind of tune emotional traumas out of our energy field. And I’m not debunking talk therapy. Talk therapy is so helpful. I’ve gotten a tremendous benefit from talk therapy, getting to know myself and how to relate to other people and becoming an expert in my neuroses and things like that.

But if you really want to go to the root cause of your emotional trauma and get rid of a lot of things that are, what is the goal of getting rid of your emotional trauma? It’s to allow self love to bloom. Because when you have a lot of these different emotional traumas, it’s really difficult to get past your health issues, to get past this negative self talk, to kind of overcome hurdles, how you react in your romantic relationships and problems that can be caused because of your not trusting in your trauma and things like that. And in work as well. So doing this type of work, it really allows your self love to bloom, which positively impacts every area of your life. So that’s the goal.

So as far as bioenergetics, there’s amazingly sophisticated software out there like NES Health, it’s NES Health, and it’s something that I personally use for about seven years. And I put 4000 people through this program. It’s something I recommend to everyone. Because this software will detect 800 different data points in your body, because everything on the planet, everything in your body, every health issue, everything has a frequency which can be measured. All your essential oils and supplements and things like that, they all have frequencies that can be measured. And so this software measures your emotional traumas and what organs it’s affecting, what toxins you have, what EMF you’re sensitive to, what food sensitivities that you have, what energetic blocks you have on your meridians and your chakras. There’s just a tremendous amount of information. It also can measure what positive and negative emotions are resonating for you at the time of the scan. It’s really, really interesting.

And that is the basis from which to give you healing frequencies or healing remedies that help to clear the emotional traumas that you have, but also to correct your body’s overall functioning and improve your physical functioning and mental functioning as well. And so part of that is like this miHealth device, this is a device that just sends correct operating instructions, so to speak, to your body. Whatever it is that comes up in your scan that needs to be addressed. And there’s lots of other softwares out there. There’s the Biomeridians and there’s so many other products out there. They’re also amazing. CNR and different things. All of them are good. They’re all operating under the same principle, which is sending frequencies to your body and doing a scan on you.

And so after that is sound therapy. So sound therapy can be you can go to a sound bath where they’re rubbing the Tibetan sound bowls or you can do something like biofield tuning, which I highly recommend, I think biofield tuning forks. And that’s just like a fork that you will hit on something and it vibrates and there’s a frequency. And then your body picks up on that frequency and resonates at that same frequency or that same sound. And your body responds to that. And you almost kind of tune out the emotional traumas out of your energy field by doing that. It takes time. This is not an overnight process. People doing biofield tuning fork therapy need to do on average about 400 hours of that. So that’s about an hour a day for two years. Okay? So this is not a super simple thing to do, but it’s almost like the new meditation, because meditation actually doesn’t address your emotional trauma. It has lots of benefits and I love meditation, but doing biofield tuning fork therapy is kind of like an active meditation that you can do. And you hit the biofield tuning fork and you place it on your heart, which is kind of the genesis of where a lot of your heartbeat sends out a wave that’s kind of the main communicator in your body, so sending information to your body. So you put this biofield tuning fork right on your sternum, right where your heart is, and it kind of just reverberates through the edges of your biofield and tunes out your emotional traumas over time.

And you can really start feeling it when you start doing this kind of protocol or any kind of like energy medicine protocol or sound therapy or frequency energy medicine, when say, a negative emotion is coming up, coming up and out, you’ll kind of have an intensification of that emotion before it releases. So it’s not always a comfortable process, but it’s a necessary evil to kind of move through these emotions and release them. So people can have anxiety or they can have feelings of shame come up, or they can have sleepless nights sometimes when they’re really having something come up and out. But it’s a really simple thing to do. It’s inexpensive and you can do it at home and it’s something that it’s very affordable, like a biofield tuning fork is $85. And so it’s a really good thing for a lot of people that really don’t have access to therapy or can’t afford going to therapy for ten freaking years like I did.

But it’s really a simple thing to do and highly effective. And there’s a lot of conventional medical research that shows that sound therapy is really effective for emotional trauma. And even the world’s foremost expert on emotional trauma who’s done 40 years of research, his name is Professor Bessel van der Kolk, and he’s the one that said that yapping doesn’t work, that doing talk therapy doesn’t work. You need to address things using sound therapy or an energetic level to release trauma.

Katie: That’s fascinating. And I would guess a new concept, the biofield tuning, to a lot of people. I know I only learned of this pretty recently, but it sounds like people have had some incredible breakthrough experiences with that and seen massive shifts within their emotions after doing that regularly. You also mentioned the term about vagus nerve stimulation and about the vagus nerve. I would guess a lot of people have at least heard of the vagus nerve, but can you explain what it is, what it does and why addressing that can be helpful as well?

Wendy: Yes, so when you’re addressing emotional trauma, it’s really important to address the vagus nerve because emotional trauma causes maybe poor vagus nerve tone where it’s just not working very well and that affects your digestion. That can cause small intestinal bowel overgrowth, that can cause poor motility of food through your digestive tract. It can cause a lot of different issues because this vagus nerve innervates all of your organs. And so this vagus nerve is really important to stimulate it to have better vagus nerve tone.

And so how you go about that is using a vagus nerve stimulator. The strongest one on the market is the Modius. And so I think the website is modiushealth.com, I believe, and I don’t have any affiliation with them, but that’s like the strongest one that there is. There’s some weaker ones out there, like maybe the Apollo is good for some people, but for people with really complex chronic illness or chronic fatigue or severe health issues, they’re going to need something like the Modius because it’s much stronger and you just take these little pads and put them on this vestibular nook right here. And you can control kind of the intensity with an app. And it’s like a little headband you put around your forehead and it’s very simple to use. You can use it 20 minutes or even an hour a day. Some people need it 2 hours a day. And that is one of the best ways to directly stimulate the vagus nerve. It’s the strongest way to do it.

You can also gargle water, you can do coffee enemas that also does it. You can jump into ice water like the ice baths also do the same thing. I’m not going to be doing those. I much prefer just putting on my little headband, my Modius and just letting it stimulate my vagus nerve. But there’s a lot of different ways to do that and a lot of people have health issues and digestive issues and SIBO the small intestinal bowel overgrowth or pyroluria because of their emotional trauma. And you’ve got to do things to stimulate that, to innervate that vagus nerve to get it going. And that in and of itself can resolve a lot of different health issues, bring people’s stress levels down, help them to sleep better, a lot of really positive benefits. And so we do have to do some things physically to correct some of the issues that the emotional trauma causes.

Katie: And I know I’ve had guests before that mentioned, like you said, gargling things like gargling or singing loudly can also kind of with the body, stimulate the vagus nerve as well. But then now we have these tools that can take it a step further, especially for people who have seemingly like a big impact there. And to your point, I know a lot of people have seen a big difference when they take the vagus nerve into account.

This podcast is brought to you by LMNT, which is a company that I have had the chance to invest in and have loved since day one. They just released brand new grapefruit flavor on top of all of their other flavors that I absolutely love, including watermelon which is a kid’s favorite in my house, as well as citrus, raspberry, orange, and a couple of ones that I really like, like mango and lemon habanero as well. As you know, summer brings warmth and sunshine, and with it, energizing opportunities to all of us to move and play and be outside. But it also brings a fair amount of sweat. And if you are a regular sauna user like me, you know that sweat is part of it, as well as if you exercise regularly. And this is why optimal hydration is the key with the right fluid to electrolyte balance, because it isn’t just about getting enough water and fluid, but also making sure our electrolytes are dialed in and you feel the difference when you get it right. So when summer brings the heat, LMNT brings the grapefruit salt flavor to help you enjoy that balance all summer long. You can consider grapefruit or any of their flavors, your ultimate summer salt companion. And I love that they combine sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the clinically studied ratios to make sure that you can stay optimally hydrated even if you are saunaing or exercising or just spending time outside in the summer. Find out more about LMNT by going to drinklmnt.com/wellnessmama. And this is a one time flavor so when it’s gone, it’s gone for good. I highly recommend that you try it. I also would suggest trying watermelon and mango chili if you like a little bit of a spicy kick. But watermelon, like I said, is the kid favorite at my house and you can find those and all of their flavors at drinklmnt.com/wellnessmama.

This podcast is brought to you by Wellnesse, the company I co-founded to create truly safe and natural personal care products that are safe for the whole family. Our products use EWG verified safe ingredients and go beyond just avoiding harmful ingredients, including herbs and botanicals that benefit your oral health, skin and hair from the outside in. We believe that it isn’t enough just to avoid the harmful ingredients… that natural products should work as well as their conventional counterparts and that since the skin is the largest organ, adding beneficial ingredients is an extra way to benefit the body naturally. I’ve been fascinated by oral health since reading Weston A Price’s Nutrition and Physical Degeneration years ago, and we now have a whole line of oral care products focused on supporting and nourishing the oral microbiome while naturally whitening and strengthening teeth. With three options of toothpaste (mint, charcoal and kids strawberry), natural floss, biodegradable flossers, and new probiotic mints designed to support the oral microbiome, our products help you have whiter, heathier teeth naturally. Check out all our Wellnesse products at Wellnesse.com.

And you also mentioned the idea of self-love, which I know this is talked about a little bit more now, which I love. Seems like our generation in general is more aware of the emotional impact of these things and how that affects our physical health. But it seems like this is still elusive for a lot of people or that many people have sort of loops of thoughts that make it difficult to have self-love or patterns they get stuck in. So, I would love to start going deep on this topic because I think if this alone is the only thing people could take away from this podcast episode and our listeners could move to a place of greater self-love that that would have a tremendous impact on so many people. And I also want to delve into that from the parent side, but first I want to address the self-love component.

Wendy: Yes. And so that’s really what everyone is after, right? When it really boils down to it, people want to love themselves. Because when you have that capacity to truly love yourself and develop that self-love, you have the capacity to love your children, to be more present with your children, with your family, to be more present with your romantic partner. Without all of these things that people tend to fight about that’s jealousy or not trusting them or there’s a lot of stuff from childhood abandonment issues and our wounds from childhood development trauma that really interfere a lot in our relationships. Our ability to achieve what we want in our work, our ability to believe in ourselves, to quit that job and start that business, or the confidence levels that people have in themselves, it affects every area of your life.

And so for me, that’s something that I’ve always been on pursuit of and it just always eluded me and I just could never really figure out why because I was being so proactive trying to do everything to love myself. And you can’t just look at yourself and be like I love you. Some people say, look yourself in the mirror and I love you or just think positive thoughts and it just doesn’t work. Because there are so many deep-rooted issues that people have from their attachment kind of styles that develop their enneagram personality types that are coping mechanisms in response to stress that we develop that just stand in the way of that self-love and those good feelings, joy and gratitude and love, these high frequency emotions that people are after in their life.

And so when you’re doing, there are certain emotions everyone has that they can work on with biofield tuning, for instance. And so the top emotions that everyone deals with, these are called like the five core emotions are self-hatred, worthlessness, powerlessness, self-deprivation and survival fear. And we all certainly felt a lot of that in the past few years. Correct? And there’s 60 other emotions as well that people can have. Like these stuck emotions. Like for right now I’m working on shame and I’m also working on loneliness. Those are things that are resonating for me right now that I’m working on with the biofield tuning forks.

But these other five emotions, just working on those saying maybe hitting your biofield tuning fork and putting it on your chest and say I intend to transmute powerlessness. Hit the tuning fork, put on your chest, I intend to transmute powerlessness. In doing this in a very intentional way helps to kind of release those negative stuck emotions. And it’s interesting because when I had a certain point in my life where I started having success in my health coaching practice and I finally felt like I had achieved what I wanted, I had this business that I’d always wanted, I was helping people. I was finally making money, I was finally not struggling and I was just feeling so good. And I did not identify at all with having self-hatred. It just didn’t resonate with me at all.

But looking back and having worked on self-hatred, I realized how much that I had and how that made me choose. My ex-husband who really didn’t really treat me that great, would ignore me when we get in fights and was this person that was just not I was maybe choosing someone that was not operating at the same level that I was. And it was kind of a safety, like a thing I would do for safety. And I didn’t realize that my self-hatred was keeping me in that relationship or my feelings of powerlessness or my just feelings of worthlessness made me choose this partner and continue choosing them.

And when I started working on self-hatred, it was really profound. Like I was at the beach one day with this person and I was looking in the mirror and I had been working on the biofield tuning. Remember these emotions will come up and intensify when they’re releasing. And I looked in the mirror and I just was disgusted by my body and I was just thinking who is going to love this? And I went out to my partner and I just was clinging to him thinking I need to stay with this person because who is going to want me? And these are ridiculous thoughts from anyone looking on the outside, looking in, they’re ridiculous thoughts. But that was just my internal reality and it was a really profound lesson for me because I realized very profoundly why I was staying with this person. And very shortly thereafter I had the courage to leave them. When I started working all these five core emotions that were keeping me in that relationship that I was not treated well at all.

And now I’m with an amazing partner that treats me great because I have been able to develop this self-love where I feel worthy, I love myself, I deserve this, I have power in my relationship and so I attracted a much different partner. And so that’s just an example. I’m sure it resonates with a lot of people that are staying in relationships. They just don’t know why and they want to leave, but they just don’t know how to do that. It all starts with working on these emotions, working on your emotional trauma so that you can really step into your life purpose in the life that you deserve.

Katie: And it seems like there’s also a theme of so many of these things going back to childhood and you mentioned even specifically these adverse childhood experiences and how important these core emotions are that often seem to develop very early on. So for all the parents listening, I also then wonder are there any steps that you know of that we can take to help our children have a solid foundation in this and to help them have better emotional resiliency and fewer childhood adverse childhood experiences to begin with. Because anytime, whether it’s physical health, emotional health, anytime I’m working through something as an adult, it comes top of mind of how can I help this be a different journey for my children?

Wendy: Yes, well, it all boils down to working on yourself so that you’re more available for your children and your family also having more awareness of your own emotions, your own trauma. You can talk to your children and your spouse about what you’re going through and how you’re addressing your stuff and really thinking about being more emotionally attuned to your child, asking them more about their emotions, doing exercises to teach them about their emotions, spending more time with them. I think it’s so easy for and certainly this is the case for me as well, it’s so easy to just give your child the phone and so that you can do your work or your stuff that you need to do. And it’s really important to take time out for your child and spend quality time with them and really talk about deep subjects, not kind of more shallow things.

Also, I have my daughter I have her in therapy as well, just so that she can because I think a lot of times kids, there’s things they want to talk about and things they want to learn about, and they just don’t want to talk about it with their parents. So I have my daughter in therapy just so she can get to know herself better and learn how to relate to other people. And just she doesn’t want to talk to me about certain things. So I think that can be important as well for a child’s growth. And you can also do all these types of therapies like the NES Health. You can do that with your child as well to help them address certain emotional and traumas that they have.

And so you can even do something like this, miHealth device to just very simply, I can put this on my daughter, put it on her heart, and it just sends all these healing messages and frequencies to release emotional traumas and correct other imbalances in the body. And anyone can do this, babies, children, grandpa, anyone, dogs, pets. And so anyone can use this device to very easily address emotional trauma. And so it’s something you can use with the whole family. So those are the things that I do. There’s obviously many, many other things that you can do, but those are maybe the top four.

Katie: That’s awesome. And I know that this has become so important for you and you’ve seen the effect so strongly in your own life, that you’ve actually created a whole course to help people specifically address the emotional side. So I want to make sure we have time to talk about that as well and the idea of emotional detox. So can you walk us through what led to this course and how you work with people through this?

Wendy: Yes. So I have a master class. People can, if they want to explore this subject a little bit deeper. And I go into all the research as well that I kind of touched on. You can go to emo-detox.com, so emo-detox.com. And it’s a little bit over an hour masterclass.

But I created a course called the Emotional Detox Program, and it was really born of what we talked about, doing all the physical stuff, just really physical health, being like for me, my full-time job and my passion and my interest even since I was a teen, and just realizing, what is it that I have to do to feel good? I’m doing all this stuff and the exercise and the meditation and the Pilates and this huge bag of supplements and eating this unbelievable organic diet, and I just wake up and I feel like crap. Not every day, but there are just a lot of days. There just has to be more to life than this. And it just kind of sent me on this journey. And then I end up meeting Harry Massey. And I’ve just done a lot, many years of research on this topic to figure out how do we address emotional trauma.

And in this course, I go over the bioenergetic side and all the research behind bioenergetics, a lot of really amazing conventional medical research even, that shows how bioenergetics works to release emotional trauma and to reduce stress and things like that. And then there’s another module on the psychology and mindset how I mentioned before, we develop kind of coping mechanisms to trauma. Like, there’s something called the Enneagram Personality Typing System where some people in response to trauma, become perfectionists. Workaholics. That was certainly my case, trying to prove themselves to Daddy. Whatnot. Some people become people pleasers. That was certainly me as well, where you just will just give everything away, give your life away, your finances and everything away just to please another person in your life, and then you end up feeling resentful and things like that. But it was you. It was you not having boundaries because you don’t have that self-love in place and that ability, or you don’t feel safe to say no because you’re so afraid of people leaving you or abandoning you. And it’s totally irrational, but it’s a coping mechanism.

Other people become bullies. Other people become just aggressively pursue wealth or addictions. Some people are like party animals and super social people. The enneagram personality type seven, they’re the comedians and they love going out and partying and just surrounding them with all these people that distract them from their feelings because they don’t want to feel those. So there’s just a lot of different things I talk about in relation to that. And you can do biofield tuning to kind of address your enneagram personality type. And then I go into the module three is the physical where if you want to address anxiety and depression and insomnia and other negative feelings that people have, you have to have a healthy diet and lifestyle and circadian rhythms and blood sugar control and things like that. And so I go into all those aspects in depth and tips and things people can do. And of course the physical module we go into vagus nerve stimulation, how you go about doing that.

But yeah, very comprehensive program for anyone looking to successfully address their emotional trauma in a holistic way. Because a lot of different programs do it very piecemeal, where they might have the energetic component but not the physical. Or a lot of things are just they do it piecemeal. And that’s why people don’t have successful resolution or the results they’re looking for, because you have to address it in these three areas to have it be successful.

Katie: That makes sense. And like we talked a little bit about, I do believe very strongly that this is a positive feedback loop situation when you start delving into this. And I noticed that in myself as I started actually being able to release some of that emotional trauma and move into a much different emotional state as a baseline that my physical resiliency improved. And that whereas for a while I was on this very restrictive diet to even to feel baseline physically good. There’s very few things I can’t eat and still things I choose not to eat often, but I am much less restricted. And I think that’s also, from a mindset perspective, a great place to be able to move into. Because I realized to me, the definition of being healthy long term wasn’t that as long as I had this extremely strict range of variables exactly right I felt good. It was that whatever the inputs I was faced with I still felt at a baseline really good.

And it seems like the emotional piece is a really big win for a lot of people and that as that improves, your physical health improves which then lets you continue to feel better even emotionally, which then improves the physical side even more. So it’s very much a compounding effect. And I love people like Naval who talk about all of the benefits in life come from compounding, whether it’s financial, whether it’s relationships that compound over time, what things we devote our time to. And so I just encourage people, if you are feeling the effects of some of those negative emotional experiences, realize that just how those things can negatively compound to make you feel not great, they also can be very much used to your advantage as you continue to improve in a positive feedback loop that lets you feel even better and better over time.

Wendy: Yeah, I mean, for me, doing the emotional trauma component was so huge and it’s a really simple process, it’s amazingly simple. Some of these things that people can do can be so simple to address something that so profoundly affects your health and your entire life. After people do this work, I think it’s such a beautiful process because people can really truly become their authentic self. They can really step into their life purpose and how they’re meant to serve other people here on this planet. And they can have better relationships and improve their relationship or find the partner they’re really looking for because they’re being their authentic self without the masks, without the people pleasing, without the kind of exterior things that people look for for distraction. And so it’s a really beautiful process and I think it’s really important. It’s just so much bigger than just working on the supplements and the diet and things like that, which I think a lot of people look to. It’s kind of the low-hanging fruit, but everyone has to do this work as well. I think there’s very few people that don’t have some form of emotional trauma.

Katie: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that you’re a very busy person as well. So in the interest of time, a couple of questions I love to ask for the end of interviews. The first being if there’s a book or number of books that have had a profound impact on you personally and if so, what they are and why.

Wendy: Yeah, I like the book The Body Keeps the Score by Professor Bessel van der Kolk, just an amazing book and his kind of 40 years of research and how emotional trauma affects us physically. That’s hands down one of my favorite books.

Katie: Me too. That was a pair paradigm shifter for me. I’ll link to that in the show notes as well as, of course, to your course and to your website so people can find more information about all the things we’ve talked about. And lastly, do you have any parting advice for the listeners today that could be related to everything we’ve talked about or unrelated life advice?

Wendy: Yeah, for me I like to talk to people about information they’re not going to get if they’re a conventional medical doctor or even functional medical doctor. And these things are, what I focus on in my practice is heavy metal detoxification and chemicals is a huge underlying root cause of obesity, diabetes, dementia, hormone issues and a lot of the physical issues people are dealing with. So really important to address that.

Then the next thing is that emotional trauma component, another huge underlying root cause of people’s health issues. And I love to talk about different ways people can address their health with energy medicine because I think energy medicine is a medicine of the future and I encourage people to try different things. For me. I love NES Health. I love Spooky2 Rife (R-I-F-E). That’s another type of light and frequency emitting device that has profound implications. Different protocols, something for Candida and then something for parasites and then something for this virus and then something for what have you. All of these things can very simply be addressed with just frequencies. And then, like I said, the biofield tuning fork therapy is very inexpensive and very easy to do. And that’s really been the pioneering work of Eileen McKusick. And so she’s got a tremendous body of work and practitioner programs and things of that nature. So for me, that’s my passion is introducing people to things they’re not going to get, solutions are not going to get at their conventional medical doctor.

Katie: Yeah, I love that because like you said, that these are things that very much seem like they are the future of medicine and there’s still a little resistance in mainstream medicine to acknowledge them. But the beauty is they don’t have to be even an either or. If you have a functional medicine doctor that you love, you can do these things too. And if anything, they can help each other. And so I love that you are spreading the word about these things and you have so many resources available. So like I said, I’ll link to your site so people can continue to learn from you as well as to all the places that you exist on the online world. And Dr. Wendy, it’s always such a pleasure to get to chat with you. I wish we lived geographically a little closer so we could chat in person more often. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing your wisdom today.

Wendy: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Katie: And thanks as always to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama Podcast.

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.