“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” - Carl Jung

Working with trauma and the nervous system is a crucial part of addressing chronic disease. In recent years, functional medicine and conventional medicine are getting better at acknowledging that mental and physical health are not separate issues. They're the same thing.

For many people, deep diving into labwork, supplement protocols, and complex nutrition and movement plans doesn’t yield the results they’re going for. It can even sometimes start making people worse if we don’t put these protocols into a context that also addresses the underlying root cause trauma. As practitioners, we have to learn a new skill set to help people heal both mind and body and feel more connected even when they’re hurting.

Today, I’m joined by Michael Roesslein to explore what it means to go beyond functional medicine. Starting his career as a trainer, Michael quickly realized that to help his clients the way he wanted to, he needed to be able to support them in their nutrition and overall health. Later, after years in the functional medicine space, Michael became a big advocate for the need to simultaneously address physical and emotional health.

In this conversation, Michael and I discuss why it’s crucial to address trauma and nervous system regulation in chronic health conditions, the interconnectedness of physical and emotional health, the role of societal and cultural factors in health challenges, the impact of loneliness and isolation, how self-compassion and personalized somatic healing practices can benefit overall health and well-being, and more.

Enjoy the episode, and let's innovate and integrate together!

Register for FREE for Michael Roesslein’s Beyond Functional Medicine: Deep Healing & Advanced Therapies Summit March 25-31, 2024 https://beyondfunctionalmedicine.byhealthmeans.com/?idev_id=26750

Learn more or watch the video version of this conversation at https://integrativewomenshealthinstitute.com/beyond-functional-medicine-with-educator-somatic-facilitator-michael-roesslein/.

Connect with me and access our entire platform at IntegrativeWomensHealthInstitute.com (https://integrativewomenshealthinstitute.com/).

Find and follow us @integrativewomenshealth on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@integrativewomenshealth) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/integrativewomenshealth/).

Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women's Health Podcast.

I'm your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond,

and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today's episode.

As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women's health.

And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode

is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your

medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my

guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your

licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on

your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment

recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode.

Let's innovate and integrate together.

Welcome back to the Integrative Women's Health Podcast.

I'm your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond.

And today I'm excited to introduce you to my friend and

colleague Michael Roslin. And he is going to be introducing

all of us to a fascinating summit called Beyond Functional Medicine.

Now, this conversation is one of my favorites, because what I'm

starting to see in integrative and functional medicine, where we're

really deep diving into labs and supplement protocols and complex

nutrition plans and movement plans and exercise plans and sleep plans,

and all the nitty gritty details, is that none of this works and

actually can sometimes start making people worse if it's not

put into the context that also addresses their root cause trauma,

their underlying trauma, their moment to moment nervous system regulation.

And that trauma includes medical trauma.

We are among medical practitioners so that trauma can simply be triggered

when people are in our presence, unless we are very careful and

mindfully regulating our own nervous systems so that we can help to

align with their nervous systems moment to moment, that's actually

part of the healing experience. That's essential,

and it's foundational to everything else that we do.

The rest of it could actually be of more harm without this piece.

So listen in for this conversation. There are a myriad of amazing tools

that Michael teaches us today, and I'll see you on the other

side for my key takeaways. Hi, Michael, and welcome to the

Integrative Women's Health Podcast. Hi, everyone.

I'm your host, doctor Jessica Drummond.

So Michael, I wanted to hear more about your story to help us

understand how you began to transition to what you're now

calling beyond functional medicine, which I think hopefully we're all

moving in that direction to be truly more whole body, whole person,

maybe even whole community. So what brought you here?

What's your own story? Sure. Thanks, Jessica.

And it's been a long kind of indirect route.

I'll keep it as concise as possible. I started in fitness. Actually.

I have a master's in exercise physiology, so I started as a

very overeducated trainer, and I did a lot of work with rehab

patients and people getting out of back injuries and things to help

people kind of be able to move. And that brought me to nutrition

and some more health coaching type stuff, because I don't know

if anybody out there knows this, but when you're a trainer,

it's kind of like being a barber or I would guess what a hair salon

kind of is like where you got an hour to kill with that person.

So you hear about everything that's going on with them,

sometimes more than you need to. And people were saying, oh,

I have this digestive problem, or I have this skin problem,

or I have headaches, or I can't sleep at night or whatever,

physical health problem, mental health problems.

So I started to try to figure out, I don't know how to help them.

I don't know how to exercise them out of digestive problems

or these things. So I started to study nutrition

and holistic health through the Czech Institute and also at

Functional Diagnostic Nutrition. And I started to work more on

that side of things. And I've spent the last ten years

working with and around functional medicine practitioners and

interviewing, I don't even know probably 2 or 300 of them at this

point. And so that was a huge step. I think functional medicine is a huge

leap when compared to conventional medical care at this point,

especially for people with chronic conditions or chronic

health problems. If my leg is smashed in an accident,

I'm definitely going to the hospital and conventional medicine 100%.

But for chronic health problems, both on the mental, emotional,

spiritual side and on the physical side, I think functional

medicine has done a great job, but there's so many people now,

at least, that come to our platforms that I talk to,

that they try the protocols and they try the lab testing, and they read

the book that the doctor writes the book about the protocol that

fixes everything or whatever. And they've tried the supplements,

they've tried maybe 17 different special diets,

and they get marginally better, a little bit better.

The symptoms are probably less so, but they still kind of relapse

or they regress. And I know you're no stranger to this

with everything that you've been. Through,

and that there are approaches and strategies and treatments and

things that go kind of outside. When we created the event that we're

hosting called Beyond Functional Medicine, the name what we consider

functional medicine is like the standard functional lab testing,

the supplement protocols, the diets, what kind of goes outside that that

I've learned about and witnessed in the last 5 or 6 years,

out of necessity, both for myself and for my wife, who has multiple

autoimmune conditions, and I've suffered with lifelong anxiety and

depression and more on the mental emotional side of things in trauma.

There's the avenue, I guess I would say, of working with

trauma and the nervous system and ways to release things that are

contributing to chronic disease states and do it in a safe way.

And there's a lot more understanding around that now than

there was even 5 or 10 years ago. There was nobody talking about

that in functional medicine when I started paying attention,

maybe Doctor Kesha and maybe Nikki. I think there were two.

And then that was it. And now it's like a pretty hot

buzzword topic. And then on the other side,

there's a lot of advanced therapies and advanced treatments and things,

which you probably know more than I do about at this point because

you've tried them all, but things that would go outside of the box.

So we wanted to bring a lot of things together that people that

find themselves stuck are not responding to the protocols that

they're supposed to. I'll put that in quotes that

they're supposed to respond to. It can get really overwhelming.

People might know that there's trauma is an issue,

but what do I do about it? Or they might hear that, oh,

there's this cool light technology, but what does it do or whatever.

So for the event, we were trying to bring everything together into

one place and introduce them to stuff that might be helpful.

And then for my own practice now I'm focusing and shifting entirely

towards safely releasing trauma and somatic therapy and breathwork

and meditation and things that can address what I believe are the

deepest roots of much chronic disease that I think diets and supplements

and a lot of the treatments really, really help mitigate symptoms.

But if there's psychosomatic or emotional or trauma related roots

of a condition or a disease process in the body, those things

are only going to go so far. And I know for me, doing that

work has radically changed my own experience of life in a way that,

aside from physical things, shifts the way that we can show up

in the world, and we experience life and we experience other people

and other people experience us. And so there's a ripple effect

that takes place. So there's a pretty roundabout

answer to your question, but I think there is something

in there somewhere. Yeah. So, you know,

I think that in many ways we've been on a little bit of a parallel

journey in the last five years. Both of us had a real physical

introduction to the world of healthcare. Right?

I was a physical therapist. You were a fitness trainer,

very embodied experience. And then when that's not quite

enough, we began to learn functional medicine and functional medicine.

Functional nutrition. Lifestyle medicine is about kind

of restoring the imbalances physiologically in the body,

which also helps the mind. And I think functional medicine

and even conventional medicine is getting better at recognizing there's

not a mind health issue and a body health issue. They're the same thing.

It's getting there. They're being dragged. Yes.

And I wouldn't say conventional medicine or any one practitioner's

really going to be able to optimize that because there's too much to

learn at some level. But okay. So we're somewhat integrating

the body and the mind, although that's very hard to do in

conventional medicine I think is alluding to because the conventional

medicine in general is so siloed. You have to see all these

different practitioners. There's the nephrologist and there's

an ologist for every organ or system. And that has its huge advantages too.

If I'm in kidney failure, I'm happy there's nephrologists.

But from a holistic point of view, I think that when you have

blinders on with your one thing, it's very difficult to see.

But yeah, I think you're right. I think they're being dragged

into seeing it now. If they could only get involved.

The teeth. One of the topics we talk about event

is oral health and dental health. And there's a huge upswell now

around awareness around how oral health contributes to heart attacks

and strokes and all these things. But the teeth in our system are

looked at as separate. Also, there's the body, the teeth,

then the brain, and the mind is somewhere else and it just doesn't

work that way. It doesn't. It's really funny when you think

about that. We have separate dental insurance.

We have separate vision insurance like that. These are. Separate.

The eyes are not involved either. So the eyes.

And then I saw a funny meme on the internet the other day that was like,

how do we get our mouth bones covered the rest of our bones.

Right. On the insurance. And when I first, I guess,

switched sides, I'll call it about five years ago,

is when I started training in all of this mental, emotional,

somatic trauma side of things. I still then looked at it like I

was switching sides. I was switching from this physical

health side of things to this other thing the spiritual, the emotional,

the trauma, the mental. I even use the words sides.

I'm moving to another side of healing.

And the more I've trained over there, the more I realized that that whole

concept of sides is ridiculous. It's just as inaccurate as

having siloed focus on organs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, people hear that and they think, how is that true?

But I mean, anyone out there can relate to some time in their life

that they received some sort of really bad or shocking news.

And if they think about that, the first thing that will happen

is they'll feel the sensation that they felt when they heard that.

And usually it's something in the chest or the belly or maybe

the neck or the head. There's a physical reaction to

that event. So that's an emotional mental

thing causing a physical reaction. And that never isn't happening.

It's just different levels of it. That's an extreme example of it,

but it's always happening. So if you're chronically stressed,

there's always some sort of physical response going on to

the external world. And traumas are when most

definitions of it used in the circles that I'm learning in now

include like an external event that creates an internal emotion

or sensation or feeling that's too intense for that individual,

usually a child to be able to be with or there's no holding of it,

there's no support, there's no place for it.

And so it can't be expressed. It can't be felt, it's unsafe.

So then the body's really good at being like, oh, okay,

we're going to put that here. And then that lives in the

nervous system. It lives in the fascia,

it lives in the body. And that may come up as chronically

activated immune reactions. It may come up as tension or pain.

It may come up as a whole lot of different things until there is

the capacity in the space to be with that thing, or that emotion

or that sensation or that feeling. And our culture is really,

really good at rubbing dirt on it. And you're fine. It's fine.

Everything's fine. Be fine. Oh, your partner of 30 years just

died. Here's an ice cream cone. You're fine. Let's go cheer you up.

And so not only do we not have the same level of support and connection

that helps process those things, we have the opposite of it in a

lot of ways. True. Before we get into that,

because I think that that is so important and it's almost hard to

break when you even are aware of it, because I completely see that.

Let me take a couple steps back, and you were talking about how

essentially trauma is when you get shaken up emotionally for any reason

and you feel it physically and then there's nowhere to put it, you can't

shake it off. Almost literally. You could if you knew to,

but you don't know how and you didn't and whatever.

And so it's in your body somewhere. I think also the opposite happens

where let's say you have an infection or you have a broken hip,

or you have a broken leg, and it's your senior year soccer

season and you thought you were going to play D1 soccer or something,

and all of a sudden that injury is also an emotional injury.

What do you think about that? Do you think it's both. Yeah.

And it happens with injuries. It happens with chronic disease.

When my wife's first autoimmune flare came, that's when I wound up

suicidally depressed within six months because it took our life

and it completely ripped it apart. It took away everything that we

thought our life was or was going to be, and I wasn't able to handle it.

And I didn't have support either to handle it.

I didn't have any support or any help.

We've created such like an individualistic culture and society.

That's not how we're wired and that's not how we're meant to be.

And I see it so much in chronic disease circles.

People's then like emotionally identify with, I am Lyme disease,

basically, or I am this. They'll say I have it,

but they identify with it. It becomes part of who they are.

It becomes part of the. Story of who they are in their

mind is the broken leg. And I didn't get to do this and

I didn't get to do that. And then there's this.

Something bad's always going to happen, or I never get to do

this thing I want to do, or I don't deserve it or whatever.

It's unfair or life's out to get me. And then that projects onto

everything else. So I think it definitely works

both ways. I want to highlight one thing

you just said there. So I've seen this a lot in my

practice. I've worked with women with chronic

pelvic pain for 25 years almost now, and a long time ago,

probably almost 20 years ago now, one of my patients was the local

president of the Vulvodynia, which is a painful vulvar condition

chapter, which was great. There were support groups,

there were speakers. I was working with her as a patient,

and she never could get better because her friends,

as you said, usually you have to do this by yourself.

Her friends were people with Vulvodynia.

What do you do if you don't have vulvodynia anymore?

You can't function. And I saw that so personally

when I had long Covid. Well, I still have long.

I think maybe I always have long Covid.

Well, we don't have to talk about that here. That's another discussion.

But when I first was diagnosed with long Covid, I became the

education chair of the long Covid, physical therapy, blah, blah, blah.

Six months later, I was like, nope, because I could see

exactly what you're saying. You have to be careful of identifying

with whatever the thing is. I think that's really important

for our chronic, whether it's depression or a

physical illness or chronic illness. Then you'll find ways to keep it,

and not usually consciously. When people hear that,

a lot of people get really defensive and angry.

And I'm not saying that it's conscious.

I'm not saying that somebody oh, I'm so happy that I have

rheumatoid arthritis. I need to always have these

symptoms so that I can hang out with the rheumatoid arthritis.

No, it's not conscious for sure. Yeah, no.

It's definitely not conscious. But there are communities that

they can become part of. And then there's like a camaraderie

or a rapport or connection around this one thing, and it brings people

together in a way that's supportive and connective, which is what we're

supposed to have all the time. And then that's missing before.

So for a lot of people, this is like a new thing, because

one thing that contributes to a lot of conditions is not having that.

So then people have that and it's like, wow, I have this thing.

I'm part of this. Facebook groups used to be the

best and the worst. Now Facebook makes it so you

never see posts from groups or it's harder to engage.

But 510 years ago you could find a Facebook group for every health,

symptom or condition that existed. I know because I was in a lot of

them, and people didn't get better from those groups because

they needed the group. The group is what they wanted.

The group was the connection. The group was what they

identified with. So the adrenal fatigue group,

people would figure out ways to keep themselves stressed and

never rest and never recover. But not consciously.

People don't realize. I mean, I know there's all these

buzzy things now about the subconscious 90% or I don't know,

whatever percent of the things you do are subconscious or the

subconscious mind is. People are aware now that there

is a subconscious drive to a lot of things that we do,

but I don't think that a lot of people realize how powerful it is

and how completely they call it subconscious, because you have no

idea that it's going on, and it's hard to conceptualize something

that the whole point of it is that you don't know what's going on.

So, Carl Jung, I'm not going to go off on Jungian psychology,

but he has a really famous quote. That is, unless you make the

subconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.

And a lot of the work I'm doing now is to help people realize what

their subconscious programming is and where it came from, and what

purpose is it serving, because it's always trying to help you.

Those people wanting to be in those groups, that's great.

Of course, you want to have friends and be in a group and be

accepted in a social circle. So it's providing something that

you were not having before. Where can you get that?

And people with food. Before I understood any of this,

I was working with complex, chronically ill people,

and I would spend hours reviewing their labs and creating a protocol

for them and mapping out their diet and doing all these things.

And then I'd have a three hour thing with them, and I'd give them

this extremely detailed thing, and then I'd meet with them again

in three weeks and they'd be like, Mike, I didn't do any of the

things I'm like, but you just spent how much money on the labs,

the supplements, the new food, me, etc., etc. and I would leave these

appointments being like, man, these people are so lazy, right? Right.

Why can't they just not eat McDonald's?

They don't actually want to get better.

And the unhealthy food or the unhealthy habits or the.

Whatever thing is that they can't kick.

I've now studied with Doctor Gabor mate quite a bit, who's pretty

famous now around like addiction, especially addiction and trauma

and people here addiction. And they think heroin or alcohol

or whatever. But no. Gabor. The reason he got so into addiction

is because he had a compulsive addiction of buying CDs and then

hiding them from his wife, and at one point, he was spending

$5,000 a month on CDs and then having to embezzle this thing.

And then his office was filled with thousands of compact discs.

No space for it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But then he was lying about it because he knew what was going on.

But that is harmful to him and his finances and his relationship.

But it's just music. But why? What was that?

And so his whole approach around addiction is what is the

unhealthy food doing for you? What is that Facebook group

doing for you? What is binge watching Netflix

for four hours instead of going for a walk doing for you?

And until you understand a that those things you don't want to do anymore,

those patterns you have or those behaviors you have, they're serving

like a very valid, helpful purpose. And B, how can you meet that

need in another way? You're not going to stop doing that,

or you'll do another thing like outside AA meetings.

And this isn't a knock on. I have two really good friends

whose lives were saved by AA, and I know it's also not for everyone,

but outside of an AA meeting, you won't see anyone drinking

alcohol, but you'll see people smoking a ton of cigarettes and

pounding lots of coffee. And not all of them smoked

cigarettes or drank coffee before they went there.

So some of those programs are very good at getting you to stop doing the

thing that you're there to not do. But unless you address the

underlying reason, programming and trauma and stories behind why you

did the thing in the first place, you're going to do another thing.

So that could be sugar, it could be cigarettes, then it could

be coffee, it could be whatever. And they'd be like, well,

I'm not drinking. So this is better than drinking.

And like, sure, probably if you want to compare the two, it's probably

better. But it's not addressing. The real root cause yeah.

Yeah yeah yeah. So that was a little side tangent,

but I think it was relevant. And I think what's so important

about that. And I want to circle back to

this for a minute. In the world of chronic illness and

chronic pain and these conditions, there is a problem with people going

to the doctor like they're going to their doctor over and over.

They're not really listen to their frustrated by functional medicine

because the doctor is just like, well, go take a walk or you need

to lose weight. Or I had a doctor tell me the

other day, well, this will probably just get better

on its own in 5 or 10 years. Like, okay, fine. In 5 or 10 years.

Sure. No problem buddy. That's great. So and it's just like, have a

glass of wine and you'll relax. There's this sense of it's all

in your head. So then they go to functional

medicine and they're like, they get thousands of dollars of

expensive tests. And we deep dive. And that helps because at least

we're starting to get to the physical root causes.

So then people feel better but then they don't fix this piece is

what you're talking about here, which is like even if it was an

injury or a virus, the original trigger was sort of

not your fault, if you will. All of it is random,

whatever that was. But then there's this sense of if

we start talking about this piece at all, the underlying trauma,

the nervous system dysregulation, then it gets a little tricky,

because there's a little bit of defensiveness among people who

have chronic illness. And I understand that completely

because you're just like, no, I really am hurting.

I really do have symptoms. There really is some physical

component of this, which there absolutely is,

and it is in your nervous system. And so I think we have to be careful.

It's not dismissive to say it's in your nervous system.

It's in your mental story, it's in your fascia, in your brain.

But that is social, emotional, psychosomatic.

And I think that what we have to do is destigmatize that because

psychosomatic is still part of your body. Yeah.

And they've been gaslit so much. That's where the reaction comes from

I think, is that there's a huge difference between it's all in your

head and this is related to trauma and nervous system dysregulation.

But if that's not presented in the correct way or if they've

been gaslit so much, they're going to be very sensitive.

It has to be talked about in a very careful way.

And it's never their fault. There's a blame,

I think there with the doctors that don't know how to help them.

It's all in your head, which I think there's probably less

of that now, although even that. Could be gas lady to some people

hearing me say that, but I don't hear it as often from people that

come into our stuff as I used to. But I think younger doctors are more

adept to know that there's better ways to communicate things, but.

I think it's still a huge problem. I'm sure it is. Yeah.

And so it has to be talked about in a certain way.

And I think learning nervous system dysregulation, using terms

like that are more approachable than saying it's in your head,

because yes, the brain is part of the nervous system, but there's

so much more to the nervous system that they're figuring out.

That doesn't have to do with the brain as much.

That causes a lot of dysregulation with the immune system and everything

with the vagus nerve and digestion. And we're learning now that just

like those labs gave them something tangible that they could see

there is something wrong with me. I don't even like to use that

language, but there's something here that can be proven that is causing

the symptoms that I'm experiencing. Because you run a functional AB test,

you'll 95% of the time you'll find the thing that's causing

the symptoms. But even that thing is usually

downstream from something else. And so usually I mean,

there's exceptions to that, like there's toxic exposures and

all kinds of things that don't have anything to do with that.

But it could easily be argued that you're more susceptible to

certain toxic exposures if you have a lot of trauma or nervous

system regulation, too. Like, my wife got really sick two

times with autoimmune flares when we got exposed to mold, I didn't.

So there's huge components across the board.

But yeah, I think that speaking about trauma and fascia and the nervous

system and the ways that these things actually happen and like poly

vagal theory and the vagus nerve and like these kind of more Western

scientifically based languaging, I think is more approachable for

those people and more acceptable, like it lands better.

And it's not gaslighting. It's all in your head.

Because that's just a ridiculous sorry, I get really agitated.

It's really lazy. And instead they should just say,

I don't know what's going on and I don't know how to help you.

That would be way better. Nobody wants to hear that either,

but that would be less harmful. But I know a lot of people in

that profession would never say such a thing.

So well, they can't because of their own subconscious.

Yeah, that's what I mean, because there's overachievers

and type A prover to the world. People flock towards the medical

industry. Because that's the only people

who can get through the barriers. Yeah, because that is an insane

gauntlet of things that they do. Yeah.

I mean, I also think, no, that could be a whole conversation

about how traumatized clinicians and health professionals are.

To get through residency and things after medical school.

It's pure hazing. I didn't know a lot about that until

Mira was in the E.R. as a nurse, and she would tell me some stuff

about some doctors who were there in the E.R. and hadn't been off

work for 36 hours or whatever. And I'm like, if I go to the hospital

with an emergency, the last thing I want is a doctor to be working on me,

who's been awake for 36 hours. Have you ever been awake for 36

hours? You are not in your peak state at

36 hours and they do it for years. So yes, there's and the pressure of

medical school and you have to be in the 1% of the 1% of all the things.

And it's like we could talk for a whole hour about how

traumatized medical students are by the time they get there.

I don't know what you get white coat or your thing.

So let's back up, because I think that's an important conversation.

And it's just important, I think, to acknowledge, because if you're

listening to this as a person with a chronic illness and you're like,

okay, the reality is some of this injury, chronic illness is in.

And I also do kind of like to think of all of these things.

You know, again, I come from a physical therapy background,

a very embodied physical person, and I like to think of almost all

of these things, whether it's mold toxicity or a viral activation or,

you know, autoimmune disease because of an infection or whatever.

They're all kind of injuries. And so the system is out of

whack for whatever reason. It's a physical system, like your

heart is out of whack or your mold titers are too high, or your EBV

titers are too high or whatever. There's some things we can measure.

Sometimes we have relatively simple solutions a medication and acute

medication, especially if it's a newer issue like a more acute issue

for you, something you haven't been dealing with chronically.

You know, we cast your leg and we do some rehab.

There are times when things are more acutely able to be recovered,

but one of the things I think about a lot is our actual conceptualization

of what it means to be ill or injured is not correct. Almost all the time.

What we think happens is someone gets sick and then they get a

treatment that's targeted specific. And they get better within a

socially appropriate amount of time, which is about two weeks max.

I don't think that ever happens. It's almost never happens.

Then what comes in is everything you're talking about.

Your nervous system gets dysregulated because you're

socially now not right. And then that lands in your fascia,

that lands in your brain because it took you too long.

So now, because we have this individualistic society,

it's all your fault. And that's where I think the

real problem comes in. So I would love to talk more about

the individual tools that people can use to help undermine this

mistake in conceptualization. But also, is there anything you

think we can do about this society? Because I feel like ultimately

that's the problem. I definitely think that's the

problem. If I knew how to fix that,

I'd be doing it. But any little sparks, though?

I know we can't do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

I've done a lot of training around grief work specifically,

and there's so much talk there around how it requires a village,

it requires the community, it requires support,

it requires connection. And then we just had a baby six

months ago. And that's another thing that you're

not supposed to do by yourself, that moms are raising kids on

their own and even with a father. But I mean on your own, not with

other people in the community, in the village and things for

99.9% of human history, that's not how it was done.

And that's not how grief was held as an individual.

It's not how any of these things were processed.

If somebody was sick or ill or whatever physical, mental, emotional,

whatever, the village would help them and hold them and like the healer.

But then with the group and it was always a communal thing.

And we're wired for that. There are physiological reactions

that happen in connection with other people that don't happen

when we're not in connection. And I know that there's a lot I can't

name them off the top of my head, but there's a lot of studies and

statistics now that show that loneliness is, I believe,

the number one all cause mortality risk factor for premature death.

I think it exceeds smoking and sedentary lifestyle and whatever

is like a lack of connection. True, because smokers with friends

are less at risk than non-smokers with no friends. Yeah, yeah yeah.

And cultures where I live here, I live in Italy and you come to Italy,

so they smoke way more than Americans and Greece smokes more than Italy.

And when I was part of a film project six years ago now, our filmmakers

went to all these places in the world where people live exceptionally

long and have low chronic disease, etc. they went to Italy and they

went to Greece, and the videographer sent me a message like, dude,

everybody here smokes. This is going to be a weird movie.

We're having to ask them to not smoke on camera because we're

making a movie about health. And they stayed up late at night,

which, oh wow, they ate late here. Dinner is at 9:00. 8:00.

We're going to Spain next month. It's even later there.

And they break a lot of the things that.

Now, if you follow Biohackers and functional health people on

Instagram, you're going to hear that if you do these three things,

stay up late or eat late or smoke is off the charts.

And I'm not advocating smoking, I'm just using this as an example.

These people should be dead when they're 50. Oh for sure.

But they have way more connection to their family, way more

connection to their community. These things are very social.

Are you going any trattoria restaurants at 9:00 at night and

it's packed and everybody's talking to each other.

Everybody knows each other. The elderly people are included in

the society. They're not put aside. You see them everywhere that you

see other people, and they're more self-sufficient and independent.

And there's more movement in the daily life.

But the connection and the community and the support group that exists

still more so in small towns now, the bigger cities are getting

more modernized, but that overrides and the slowness of it.

They eat meals for days. And so the slowness of it and the

connection aspect of it in the community aspect of it, and that

sense of belonging and being needed and all of that overrides the fact

that breakfast in Italy is coffee, pastries and cigarettes. Yeah.

That's it. Yeah. It doesn't exist. There's no breakfast.

If you tell them you eat eggs in the morning, they're like, what?

So it goes a long way. And we don't have that in the States

and in most Western cultures now, like modern cultures,

we don't have that. It's very, very,

very individualistic. So when you get one of these

diagnoses or you don't get better fast enough,

it could be a physical disease. You don't get better fast enough.

It could be a grief situation that you don't get better fast enough.

Nobody likes to be around sad people. So. You should feel better.

It's been three weeks since your husband died. Or it's like, what?

So if you're not getting better fast enough, or you're not

physically able to do the things that you're expected to do,

we also have this thing around, like being productive in this society.

If you're not productive enough. What's the point of view basically,

and we internalize that we grow up in a culture.

Culture forms those stories too, not just trauma and whatever

culture forms it to. I'll bring up Gabor one more time.

His new book is called The Myth of Normal,

and it talks a lot about this. And around what we're experiencing is

a result of all of these things in our society that are missing and

that we're wired to have, like, there's real physiology behind all of

this, you know, from oxytocin and other hormones that are released

to neurotransmitters that happen. And our nervous systems are like

antenna, especially when we're kids. So it tunes to and regulates to

the people around us. And if we don't have the capacity

to regulate our own nervous system or to balance our self out,

somebody else can help with that, or groups can help with that,

even like church. And I'm not religious, but church.

And like the group, the singing together regulates

the nervous system. Group prayers regulate the

nervous system. There's these things that we've done

traditionally forever that nobody was like, oh, we're doing this

to regulate our nervous systems. Even breathing the way that we

breathe, the breath pattern that happens, reciting oh, sorry,

Catholics rosary. Okay. Yeah. Is a certain inhale exhale length

of breath pattern that increases heart rate variability and coherence

from a heart math standpoint or nervous system regulation.

So are a lot of the prayers with mala beads.

So are a lot of the Sanskrit mantras and just the breath

pattern that comes from reciting those things in chains and

balances the nervous system. So we don't do any of those

things anymore. And so that traditional way of

living with those types of activities mixed with the connection

and the community aspect and the support that we received,

balances the nervous system where we're a animal that if it's alone,

it's scared, we should be scared. Traditionally, if you were alone,

that was it. That was the end, right? Because you didn't have your tribe.

Yeah, yeah. So physiologically,

isolation to us is super dangerous. And that is going to happen in the

body whether you mentally are like, oh, I'm isolated.

I'm really scared. Doesn't matter. And this doesn't count. Oh, yes.

Your phone. Just for those on audio. Your phone doesn't count. Exactly.

And it's interesting because of course, what's happened is we've

evolved away from a lot of those community things,

whether it's church. And I think that's even one of the

reasons why we have such polarization in this country is because some

people are still there and they realize how much they need it.

They don't realize it consciously. They realize subconsciously, right?

There's a group, you can't leave the group.

And, you know, it's the same thing as a middle schooler getting

kicked out of her friend group. It's disastrous. Right?

So I think that we're very unaware of that.

So we get attached to instead our diagnoses,

because it's the only place that you get that level of support.

You know, you've lost your sports team.

You've lost even like yesterday, I went to a school thing.

I was the only person wearing a mask. I have to be a little careful because

of my body. It's interesting. I heard a thing like,

why aren't we just wearing masks for people on the train just for

other people to come out? Because that's not our culture.

Our culture is not to support people who are weak in any way, whatever

weakness means to you subconsciously. And then that puts you in that

category once you are sick or don't feel well or whatever.

And then there's this story also that comes along with it,

like something wrong with you. It's like a personal flaw, and then.

You're sort of self kicking yourself out of the group. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Then you're compounding it. Then it'd be like equivalent of that

middle school or having the kids around pointing at them and haha,

whatever. But you're doing it to yourself.

And that stuff is actually kind of amplified now because I watched the

newer version of the Mean Girls movie the other day versus the old

version that was very similar, but one thing they really amplified

was like, if you do anything now, that's not whatever the culture

perceives as perfect. The bad stuff is actually

amplified because immediately everyone's turning a phone on you.

My friends and I have talked

about this how grateful we are that we were the last ones to go

through high school and college without or middle school even,

but phones with cameras that were good and effective really

came after I got out of college. So there was like a kid who had one,

but it wasn't like everyone had them. Not everything was being recorded.

It wasn't 100 phones. No. They still had those little

camcorders or those little paper cameras.

You remember the disposable cameras? Like if you wanted to take

pictures and no one really cared about that because that was like

that person's camera, you're never going to see that.

There wasn't the internet, really. There was. But it wasn't.

Every picture ever taken winds up on the internet.

And so now I can't even imagine, our jokes are like, man,

we'd have got in. So much trouble if everything we

did was videoed or photographed or whatever, but also

embarrassing or social faux pas, or breaking of social norms or

whatever. It's another layer. It's like always being watched,

always being seen, always being whatever.

And then there's that super strong reinforcement of what is the

culturally dominant way to be has this weapon. Now it's like the 1984.

It's like the Thought Police, but it exists. We do it to ourselves.

Yeah. It's fascinating. So this is kind of depressing in

many ways, but I do think that the awareness of it is extremely

important because it begins to help people step back from, oh,

okay, this is why I might keep doing this to myself.

Or this is why when other people say, I'm fine, you're fine,

it's going to be okay. It feels bad even though they

mean well. So where do we begin individually,

since obviously there's a lot of work to do culturally,

where do we begin individually if we're feeling that way,

that we're stuck in a chronic condition, stuck in chronic pain,

we're stuck in depression or anxiety? How do we start on sticking? Well.

You said the person saying it's fine and building awareness.

The thing that I've noticed that super important is the

self-compassion. So the pulling back in,

the letting go of identification with the situation or the it's

more of like a mindfulness or meditation type practices.

That's one aspect I work with people on, is kind of using those

practices to kind of you would observe the symptoms and the illness,

just like you would observe the thoughts in your head,

or you would observe the weather, or you would observe a sound that

you hear and it decides, notifies you with it a little bit to kind of

just witness it instead of I am. It. So like those kind of practices

can help detangle you from identifying with the thing,

whatever the thing would be. But the real key to me in both

not getting angry when somebody says you're fine because they're

saying that they're uncomfortable, so it has nothing to do with you.

It has everything to do with them. They're uncomfortable, like, oh,

cheer up means I don't like being around sad people.

So if you could just not be sad, that would be great for me.

The same thing with people with a chronic illness or some sort

of chronic symptom. This makes me uncomfortable.

This makes me feel something I'm not comfortable feeling.

So you're going to be fine. And that's what I'm going to say

instead, because I can't emotionally handle saying what I actually feel

or I'm not even conscious of it. But if you can have compassion for

those people and realize they're just uncomfortable and it's not

your fault, they're uncomfortable, and that's fine.

So then you're less reactive to other people and outside

influence when you understand it a little bit more. I'll share.

One little anecdotal thing from a client is I worked with this girl

for 8 or 9 sessions, I think, doing breathwork and some other,

the CIA, the Compassionate inquiry. And when I first met with her,

she said, I have a lot of rage. And I was like,

how does this show up in your life? And she said, well,

one of my bosses at work, when she comes in my office, I want

to immediately stab her with a spoon. And I was like, okay, you don't.

And she's like, no, I don't, but I really want to.

And sometimes when she talks like, that's all I can think about,

and then I don't even listen to her talking. I'm just filled with rage.

I was like, okay, thank you. I'm glad we're there doing this

virtually and we're not in the same room by the end, she said.

I feel much more calm and I'm much less reactive.

And I said, how does that show up in your life?

And she said, well, you remember that woman from my work? I said, yeah.

And she goes, well, now when she comes to my office

and starts talking to me, my first reaction is that I feel bad for her

because everyone at work hates her, because she's always complaining at

everybody and making everybody's life miserable. So everyone hates her.

So she doesn't have any friends. So I just saw her as this sad lady

that doesn't have any friends, that then lashes out at everybody.

I still kind of wanted to stab her, but my first reaction was compassion.

Essentially, she didn't use the word compassion, but it was

compassion for her. And she's like. And then I started to think what

had to have happened to her to make her like this?

Because we've learned all these things about what made me like me.

I'm wondering what made her like her. And so when you start to unpack some

of these things and understand, I used to eat a pint of ice

cream when I was really upset. Ben and Jerry's the whole thing.

In my 20s, I got this apartment that was right next to a 7-Eleven,

which was the greatest thing, worst thing that ever happened.

And I'd have, like, a bad day. And I just walked 7-Eleven apartment,

Ben and Jerry's for dinner when I was a kid.

If something bad happened, we'd go get ice cream.

If something good happened, we'd go get ice cream.

I was programmed as a young age that ice cream was like an

emotional salve, essentially. And so the ice cream and then

going in front of the TV, I was raised in front of a TV 80s

sitcoms and comedy movies were like my parents, essentially.

And like Bill Murray, John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, these people I felt for

my family when I was a little kid. And so to this day, if I'm really

dysregulated, if you give me some ice cream and put me in front of a TV,

my body will calm down. Now, I don't do that anymore.

I found other ways to do it, but I used to have a lot of shame

around that, especially when I got into this field and I started

being a trainer and a nutritionist. I can't pound pints of ice cream.

That's a morally bad thing to do. I'm a terrible person because I

do that because I know that's not good for me and I'm still doing it,

and I'm teaching other people not to do it,

which means I'm terrible person. It took learning why I was doing

that, to then have compassion for myself around it,

and then find other ways to regulate my nervous system when I have a

bad day or I'm feeling upset. But you can't do that with shame.

You can't change behaviors with shame. It doesn't work.

It doesn't work. It doesn't work on kids.

To shame them into being different does not work.

It may work temporarily, but in the long run it's going

to make it way worse. And it doesn't work when you do

it to yourself. So having the compassion for

yourself and like forgiving yourself for whatever thing you

think you suck because you did. And then, oh, I ate ice cream

for years. I'm terrible. No, you just didn't know how to

handle anything. And so that's how you did it to

self-compassion. Like. And that comes with that awareness

of understanding your story, why you do the things you do.

So the mindfulness meditation end of things to like pull back from

identifying with it a little bit and observing it and then understanding.

If it's a behavioral thing or a pattern or something else that

you're caught in that contributes to this state, it's really just

having compassion for yourself. There's a reason you started

doing whatever the thing is and it was helpful for you.

The alternative was not okay. For me, it would have been like

I would have been in a panic. And the body won't allow that.

It'll figure out a way to do something.

The mind will figure, okay, this makes me feel better. Do this.

But over time, this makes me feel better.

Makes you feel worse because it's not addressing the thing.

So before you get into the deep dive of actually addressing the thing

that's driving you to the ice cream, you can become more conscious of

the behaviors, you can become less attached to them,

and then you can learn new ways to do that, whether it's a breathing

technique or a grounding practice, or just being in nature, or calling a

friend or connecting with somebody. There's a million different ways

to do it, but it'll feel weird. It'll feel uncomfortable or

awkward at first because it's like a different thing.

Then you usually rewire the pattern. Yeah. It's neuroplasticity.

So then now when I feel that same thing, I don't even think about

going to get a pint of ice cream. I just know, oh,

I need to go breathe for a minute and calm down. And I can do that.

I didn't have those skills before. Nobody taught me that.

We also don't teach any sort of emotional regulation or emotional

anything in to kids in school. There's countries in northern

Europe that do. I was just reading like Denmark

and a couple of countries actually teach like emotional

processing and emotional regulation in schools for kids.

And that is blew my mind to hear that.

But we don't learn those skills. So I don't know.

Does that answer your question? Yeah. So to circle back to the beginning

of the conversation for the health professionals that are

listening to this conversation, essentially what's challenging for

people that have chronic illness that we're working with, chronic pain.

It's not wrong to say you need yoga. You need meditation,

you need breathwork practices. You need other mindfulness practices,

somatic, you know, healing practices. And we should be learning them.

We should be teaching them because the kids aren't learning

them in school. And so adults don't know them mostly.

Yeah. No, no, no, I'm not blaming it

either. You weren't taught either. I wasn't taught.

So we have to learn them. And that's part of what Michael

does and what Michael teaches and his platform teaches.

So as health professionals, we have to learn that we have to practice it.

These are new skills we need to add to our practices.

And how we do it is actually as important as doing it,

because when we just say to people with chronic illness.

These symptoms are really all in your head. You should just do yoga.

Doing yoga is not wrong, but the why has to be understood

has to be explained. We have to take the time in the

space to dig down into that person's version of self-soothing.

I have so many stories I don't have time for getting into on this.

Maybe they hate yoga. Maybe sending them to do yoga is not

the right thing for that person and saying you should or you have to,

or even the languaging around. That to me is triggering because I

don't like to be told what to do. So there can be a different way

to talk about it. It can be, hey, there's some

dysregulation here, probably. And here are a number of things

that can be useful for that. Do any of these feel good to you

when you hear them or see them or whatever? Let's try some of them.

And then the ones that you like have added.

There's the real quick I know we're almost out of time,

but the biodynamic breathwork that I'm trained in,

they also utilize meditations from this spiritual teacher named Osho.

I don't like the meditations. They're like movement based

meditations with sound and people moving around and all this stuff.

I was more formally trained in Buddhist style, exceeded meditation.

So that's almost agitating to me. But I had to do them during the

training. Everyone has to do them,

and for an hour I would just be like, oh man, I just want this to stop.

And so for the whole hour, the hour would seem like eight

hours because I was doing this thing that I hated doing,

and then other people at the end would, oh, I feel so great.

I'm like, what? I'm just agitated. But that's because that wasn't

the right thing for me to do. And there's nothing wrong with

me and there's nothing wrong with those meditations.

That person felt great, so it just wasn't the right tool for me.

So it's part of what I do when I'm helping people is help them

figure out what's their jam, what's their door.

To like that some people is just going outside.

I feel great when I go on a hike. Awesome.

How can we get more hikes into your time and what do you like about it,

and how does it feel when you're on a hike?

Can we cultivate that feeling without you being on a hike,

so that you can use that anytime and then lean into that sensation?

Because what they don't realize is it's not the outside.

That feeling is always accessible and it's always there.

It's just that triggers it. And so there's other ways that you

can learn to access that feeling for them being on a hike or for that

other person that Osho meditation. So it's like helping them pull back

from the identification with the thing, become more aware of their

own patterns and why they have done the things they did and do,

their struggle with what they do with compassion,

and then giving them tools, helping them discover their own

tools of this is how I feel safe. This is how I feel grounded.

Whatever their thing is they're looking for, this is how I feel it.

And there's deeper work that can be done to release trauma and stuff that

I wouldn't recommend people try to do necessarily on their own, and

it can't even be done on your own. But I think those aspects of it

will go a long way for people. No, absolutely. Thank you so much.

I really think this is such important work, because it's the key to

making it much more culturally normal to integrating mind and

physical healing and spiritual healing and community healing.

So everyone should absolutely tune in to Beyond Functional

Medicine and explore your work. We'll share everything in the

show notes and all of that, but thank you for sharing your story

and the work that you're doing. I so appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I always enjoy our chats and I think

I've been on that side for most of them, so it's fun to be on this

side for once. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thanks so much Michael.

Thank you. Bye bye. Well that was a great conversation.

It really helped me to explore my thoughts and feelings about

what's going on in the world of integrative and functional medicine,

and why our patients are so sick now. And is it about our health systems?

Is it about our community systems? And Michael really, really reinforced

a few key takeaways for me. One is that we have to do a lot

of work as health and wellness professionals to optimize and

regulate our own nervous systems, even when we're working with people

who are really upset themselves. And then we have to help them

play with a myriad of tools, which you can learn from Michael

and his new institute, which is coming out soon.

And I'll share all of the details about his Beyond Functional Medicine

Summit and his new institute, or his new training programs,

or his new training. Variances for people in the show

notes. So we have to do a lot of work.

We have to learn a new skill set, and we have to think about what micro

things we can do for our community to simply help people feel more normal,

even if they're hurting. To feel more connected,

even when others feel uncomfortable around their pain.

I think that's part of our work, is healers, is helping to heal

our communities as well. So let me know what you think

about that, what you thought about this interview,

and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for joining me

today for this episode of the Integrative Women's Health Podcast.

Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it,

hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast

streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast

better for you and your clients. Let's innovate and integrate in

the world of women's health.