Show Notes (Episode 9) — Dr. Christine Gibson

In this week’s episode of Routes of Healing, Dr. Siri Chand Khalsa sits down with Dr. Christine Gibson, a family physician, trauma therapist, and author of The Modern Trauma Toolkit. Known online as TikTokTraumaDoc, Dr. Gibson has built a wide-reaching educational platform grounded in nervous system science, practical somatic tools, and a strong commitment to health equity and systems change.

Together, they explore how trauma shows up far beyond the psychiatric labels most clinicians were trained to recognize. From hospital culture and medical apprenticeship models that reward dissociation, to the ways trauma lives in the body through chronic sympathetic activation, inflammation, and functional syndromes, this conversation reframes trauma as both deeply personal and profoundly systemic.

Dr. Gibson shares how the 2015 Nepal earthquakes catalyzed a decade-long immersion into trauma-informed care, somatic therapies, and polyvagal theory, alongside a global lens shaped through her nonprofit work in community-based family medicine training. Dr. Khalsa reflects on her own long COVID autonomic nervous system journey and the clinical implications of persistent nervous system dysregulation for metabolism, sleep, digestion, and behavior change.

This episode is for clinicians, educators, wellness professionals, and anyone who wants a clearer, kinder framework for understanding why symptoms persist, why “compliance” is the wrong frame, and how safety, self-compassion, and practical tools can create a pathway to healing and post-traumatic growth.

If you’re inspired by our exploration on Routes of Healing, a physician-led podcast uplifting the wisdom and lived experience of integrative & lifestyle medicine doctors, subscribe to receive new episodes weekly.

🔑 Key Topics & Takeaways

1. Trauma is ubiquitous: How healthcare settings can unintentionally create trauma through loss of dignity, privacy, and autonomy.
2. Trauma beyond PTSD: Why complex, relational, developmental, and ancestral trauma often go unnamed in conventional frameworks.
3. Trauma as physiology: Trauma as the body’s response, including epigenetic and transmitted trauma across lineages and communities.
4. Dissociation as training: How medical culture normalizes disconnection from basic human needs and emotional processing.
5. Somatic vs cognitive approaches: Why bottom-up tools can be more effective when the thinking brain is offline during threat states.
6. Polyvagal theory in practice: Understanding sympathetic “motion” and parasympathetic “stillness,” and what it means for digestion, immunity, and reproduction.
7. Refugee health and somatic symptoms: How trauma is often expressed culturally through pain, headaches, belly symptoms, and tension.
8. Trauma therapy and chronic disease: Clinical examples of improvements in diabetes and other conditions after trauma processing.
9. Self-compassion + clarity: A practical lens for reducing shame around coping strategies like scrolling, irritability, or stress eating.
10. TikTok as knowledge translation: Why Dr. Gibson chose social media to make nervous system science accessible beyond academia.
11. System barriers to trauma-informed care: A direct look at structural forces that shape care delivery and clinician burnout.
12. Global family medicine systems change: Training models that support rural retention and community-based medical education.
13. What’s next: Courses for clinicians on trauma-informed practice, somatic skills, and climate psychology.

00:00 — Trauma Is Ubiquitous and How Healthcare Can Cause Harm

00:39 — Welcome to Routes of Healing + Disclaimer

01:20 — Introducing Dr. Christine Gibson (TikTokTraumaDoc, Modern Trauma Toolkit)

02:28 — From Hospitalist Culture to Trauma Work: The Turning Point

03:03 — Nepal Earthquakes and the Beginning of Trauma Study

04:53 — Lifelong Learning, Systems Change, and Transdisciplinary Work

05:39 — The Doctor as Teacher and the Evolution of Identity

06:37 — Dissociation, Embodiment, and “Flow”

07:25 — Why Embodiment Matters for Midlife Clinicians

08:54 — Modern Trauma: Hustle Culture, Climate Stress, and Collective Threat

10:55 — Defining Trauma: Body Response, Complex Trauma, and Ancestral Threads

13:40 — First Teachers and First Modalities: Somatic Practices and Neuroscience

18:35 — Intuition, Presence, and Untapped Human Capacities

20:58 — Somatic Techniques Explained: Bottom-Up Regulation and the Window of Tolerance

27:17 — Trauma Therapy Outcomes in Clinical Practice

28:01 — Long COVID, Autonomic Dysregulation, and Allostatic Load

31:29 — Sympathetic vs Parasympathetic: A Practical Framework

36:56 — Why One Size Does Not Fit All in Healing

39:16 — Training Clinicians: What Trauma-Informed Care Can Look Like

41:06 — PTSD in Healthcare Workers and the Gap Between Awareness and Action

42:33 — Solutions at Every Level: Individual, Community, System, Ecosystem

43:40 — TikTok Origin Story: Education, Reach, and Systems Change

47:35 — Health Equity, No-Shows, Dissociation, and Reframing “Noncompliance”

53:03 — Lifestyle Medicine and the Missing Pillar: Nervous System, Grief, Spiritual Health

54:44 — Addiction, Self-Soothing, and “Glasses” of Self-Compassion + Clarity

57:21 — Global Family Med Foundation: Training, Retention, and Community-Based Models

1:00:22 — Agency, Healing, and the Roots of Medicine as Relationship

1:01:58 — Where to Find Dr. Gibson + What’s Coming Next

1:04:43 — Closing

About Today’s Guest

Christine Gibson, MD

Family Medicine • Trauma Therapy • Nervous System Education • Health Equity

Dr. Christine Gibson is a family physician and trauma therapist, and the author of The Modern Trauma Toolkit. She is widely recognized online as TikTokTraumaDoc, where she translates nervous system science and trauma-informed tools for a broad audience. Dr. Gibson has a longstanding commitment to health equity and systems change and has worked internationally in community-based medical education and resource-constrained settings.

She runs the international nonprofit Global Family Med Foundation and leads professional education initiatives focused on psychological safety and trauma-informed workplaces through Safer Spaces Training and the Belong Foundation. Her work emphasizes practical, accessible tools for regulation, emotional processing, and post-traumatic growth, alongside systemic approaches to trauma-aware policy and community resilience.

🌐 Find Dr. Christine Gibson

1. Book + Resources
2. https://www.ModernTrauma.com
3. Professional Website
4. https://www.ChristineGibson.net
5. Training + Workshops
6. https://www.saferspacestraining.com
7. TikTok
8. TikTokTraumaDoc
9. YouTube
10. https://www.youtube.com/@dr.christinegibson
11. Facebook
12. https://www.facebook.com/gibtrotterMD
13. Twitter / X
14. https://x.com/GibtrotterMD
15. LinkedIn
16. https://www.linkedin.com/in/christine-gibson-md/

🌐 Connect with Your Host

Dr. Siri Chand Khalsa, MD MS

Lifestyle & Integrative Medicine Physician • Culinary Medicine • Ayurveda

1. Website: drsirichand.com
2. Instagram: @doctorsirichand
3. Culinary Medicine Blog: drsirichand.com/blog

Community: https://vishuddha.com

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Vishuddha is a media and creative agency dedicated to amplifying the voices of integrative and lifestyle medicine clinicians who are transforming how we understand health and healing.

We provide media representation, book development, public speaking coaching, podcast strategy, content creation, and course development alongside classes and workshops for wellness seekers committed to intentional, conscious living.

Rooted in whole-person healing, Vishuddha helps clinicians translate their wisdom into impact, design offerings that matter, and bring conscious, transformative work into the world.

Ready to share your wisdom? Explore how we can support your vision at Vishuddha.com.

⚠️ Disclaimer

This podcast is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please consult your healthcare provider for personalized guidance.

Keywords

trauma-informed care, somatic therapy, nervous system regulation, polyvagal theory, window of tolerance, complex trauma, ancestral trauma, epigenetics, dissociation, burnout, lifestyle medicine, health equity, refugee health, addiction medicine, chronic pain, functional syndromes, PTSD in healthcare workers, psychological safety, systems change, Global Family Med Foundation, Safer Spaces Training, TikTokTraumaDoc, Modern Trauma Toolkit, Routes of Healing, Dr. Christine Gibson, Dr. Siri Chand Khalsa

Trauma is ubiquitous. We often cause it in clinical settings from an inpatient environment where we take away dignity and privacy and autonomy to even just giving birth. 25 % of women end up with PTSD after a normal birth. mean, obviously, interventional births and other risk factors can happen, but we have...

not really understood just how ubiquitous it is. So we're not really on the lookout for both how we can prevent it and also how we can acknowledge it and manage it sufficiently.

Welcome to Roots of Healing, the podcast where we uncover the stories, insights, and visionary ideas shaping the future of lifestyle and integrative medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Siri Chung-Kalsa, a physician and advocate for holistic healing and embodied living. Before we begin, please note that this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only.

The views expressed by our guests are their own and do not constitute medical advice. Please check in and consult your healthcare provider for personal medical concerns. Each week, I have the privilege of sitting down with trailblazers and thought leaders who are reimagining what it means to heal mind, body, and spirit. Together, we'll explore their journeys, innovative approaches, and the deeper roots of healing that inspire us all. Let's dive in with this week's guest. Dr. Christine Gibson is a family physician

Trauma Therapist and author of the Modern Trauma Toolkit, which I love, frankly. I've already been perusing it. You can find her online on TikTok with the handle TikTok Trauma Doc, which I've also seen for the record with over 130,000 followers, which we definitely want to dive into that a little bit. And her two TEDx talks. really understanding what it's like to have a message that people want to hear and want to...

work on and there's not a lot of resource for them elsewhere. Dr. Gibson has a passion for health equity and systems change. She runs an international nonprofit called the Global Family Med Foundation and a company where she trains professionals on how to manage workplace psychological safety, safer spaces training and the Belong Foundation. Welcome, welcome Dr. Gibson. A long last, we get to have a conversation.

Yes, I'm really thrilled. I'm super excited to be here.

Yeah. So one of the things that I really love doing on the podcast is getting a sort of a deeper picture of how did you, how did you, how did all that happen for you? I imagine like me, you finished, you did, you jumped through the hoops and went to medical school, probably based on expectations of those in around you and a call inside you. But something probably transitioned early in your career where you realized, boy, there's more to healing than

anything I was taught. Tell us a little bit about how you've come to where you are now.

You know, it's interesting, Siri Chand I'm not even sure if it was early enough in my career because I started off doing a lot of hospitalists. like inpatient internal medicine type work. So I'm a family doc, it's in the States, the job I was doing would be internal medicine. And I did 16 years of that. And so I did some family practice on the side, but I think what I got really good at was dissociating. So it wasn't until

Hmm.

This part of my journey kind of started 10 years ago. The equity part, I would say, was kind of baked in from the beginning. I just had always worked in equity denied communities. And I ran our residency program in health equity from about 2007 onwards. And that was both local and international resource poor environments. like a lot of these things kind of came together because once I started studying trauma, I thought,

Wow.

and deeply within me as well. there was like a lot of personal and professional shifts along the way. And I mean, they're still ongoing. I've, I'm also like a really weirdly avid lifelong learner. So I study things like social innovation and design thinking. I just finished a doctorate in transdisciplinary study for fun. Like there's no like academic reason why I needed to do that. But

I was really interested in the interface of complexity theory, trauma, global systems change. And I thought, well, there's one way to learn more. I can study under people who can help me along that path. yeah, lots of reinventing, lots of ongoing learning.

Are you in the 47th grade?

did you know?

Yes, I joke. I say that basically I am a lifelong learner. And I think that this is such a beautiful translation of the Latin term docere or the origins of doctor, which is teacher, right? Because every teacher to be a better teacher has to become an excellent student, right? There's no, am teacher, therefore I am.

this constant itself redefinition, exploration, never really accepting the same river twice, so to speak. And that internal inquiry, I think brings about such a depth of ability to meet patients in new and different and interesting ways. And this is a small Eddie here, but do you ever really just appreciate that no matter where someone met you on the journey, it was just exactly as it had to be, even though

20 years in, you're really a different doctor.

You know, I noticed that the kind of thing way more since the earthquake. Like I have a different level of sensory awareness and like subconscious awareness now that I didn't before. But I believe so much in this concept of flow and like that the things that are meant to come to me are just so obvious to me now. Like I can almost, you know, see what's coming my way and say, that's for me.

in a way that I really wasn't able to before. And I don't know how much of that is just I'm no longer as dissociated and how much of it is just a stronger embodied connection to universal energy. I don't know. I can't explain it in a way that makes sense to a lot of other people, but I know I feel it.

Yeah. Well, this notion of embodied living is something, you know, I am in the midst of creating a community for female clinicians that centers in embodiment. And because I think particularly the Gen Xers, you know, we're in perimenopause, menopause, we've got aging parents if some have kids or responsibilities. And also we have a certain ambition, right?

culminating years of investigation, we're feeling our wisdom emerging, but we can't do that without embodiment because otherwise burnout is the guarantee, as the Cajuns say, guarantee, right? Like burnout and that kind of push through perfectionism, pursuit of the external carrot. I'm curious, how does that help us understand that

Is there a root in that of trauma? So I'm really curious about how your online persona has emerged. Now you, I know are far more complex being than just the lane of trauma, but because this is an area you've thought so much about and written your beautiful book, tell us what, in a few minutes, what do you want the modern, untrauma-informed person to think about and to incorporate

And then we're gonna dive into some concepts that I think you're particularly innovating in.

I mean, I think about my past self too, right? So I was a hospitalist doctor.

So I had learned to ignore the fact that I needed to go to the bathroom or eat some food or drink some water or have some sleep. And I did that job for 16, 17 years. So I had learned to really disconnect from my really foundational human needs. And that was something that we learned through the apprenticeship model. So this is how it's done. You just plow through. The other piece that I hadn't.

sufficiently acknowledged was my psychological needs. There was a lot of suffering that I was witnessing, that I was in relationship with, that I hadn't processed, both because I hadn't acknowledged and validated it, but also because I just had no skills to know how to do that. So it's been like a remarkable journey. I just did a self testing thing for burnout today because I'm going to take a course through my medical association and

That was the prerequisite was to take this test. And I was thinking my answers are so different now than they would have been five years ago in family practice and 10 years ago doing inpatient medicine. And so much of this is me just being more aware of what my needs are because I deliberately suppressed both the psychological and physical needs for so long. And I think a lot of people do that. So.

I mean, it's not the crux of the modern trauma toolkit, but when I used the word modern, I was doing it very deliberately because we are baked into hustle culture. We are so much more hyper aware of, you know, worldwide devastating problems. We are in a time of divisive politics, like the modern traumas are hitting all of us. And so for people to say to me,

Okay.

I've never been through trauma. like, did you survive the pandemic too? have you, what kinds of problems has your region suffered resulting from climate change? You've been through trauma.

I think about this.

really objectively too, So when we think about trauma, there's a subjective quality, there's this element of overwhelming stress, there's a disruption in safety, there can be acute or chronic trauma. I'm curious, when someone asks you, how do you define trauma? What is your, how do you like to explain that to people? Because there's probably a textbook definition and then there's your

lived experience working with clients and patients.

I mean, the textbook definition has certainly changed. We've broadened our view from PTSD, which was the only thing we learned about. I was in medical school probably the exact years you were. So we learned this textbook definition of hypervigilance, avoidance, negative worldview, and intrusive symptoms. So those are what we have come to recognize clinically as trauma. But even now,

that it's been recognized for so long, complex trauma or developmental and attachment trauma really haven't made it into the DSM sufficiently. So if you ask about the majority of trauma that I see clinically, it's complex trauma. It's a series of events and oftentimes relational. So the definition that resonates more with me are the clinicians who are taking a more embodied approach and saying trauma is not an event that happens. It is your body's response to that event.

And I do think that that leaves a fair bit out because I think really important is epigenetic or transmitted trauma and ancestral trauma. And this is something that, you know, the Black American community or First Nations communities are more aware of because that trauma was so overt. But I honestly think all of us hold it. Like a lot of my background is Ukrainian. That was my like main grandparent.

cultural influence. And the more that I've been looking at the history of Ukraine, because I'm writing fiction now, I'm still writing fiction. This is an ongoing saga of me writing this book. But the more that I read about Ukrainian history, I recognize just how much trauma I hold ancestrally as well. Both the Scottish side and the Ukrainian side, there's a lot there. And I think we don't really

Thanks.

examine our whiteness sufficiently sometimes and look at, you know, what kinds of traumas happened within my lineage as well. And that can be things that happen to communities and individuals. And we inherit that. So it makes sense that we might respond in a traumatized way, but not have a story or a narrative that we could give a language to what it is that we're feeling.

That's beautiful. And so, when I hear you, excuse me.

So what I hear you saying is that trauma is in part not always necessarily the event or can be, but also how our physiology changes in response to the event. And I think that probably being in that earthquake in Nepal really gave you such a complicated understanding. I mean, what an incredibly sad and devastating event to be part of.

What was, where did you first look to to understand? Did you do James Gordon's training? I know he does a lot with the MindBody Institute out of GW. I'm just curious, like who did you turn to when you realized like I am not equipped yet to understand how to process, be with, and exist in this situation that I inadvertently found myself in?

You know, it was interesting.

I don't think I took a very direct path, but I do remember when I was finally like day four or five of the earthquakes, I was finally evacuated to Singapore and a friend of mine totally unrelated really to what I was going through, but helping me understand what my path was going to look like. sent me a Ted talk.

of Dr. Lissa Rankin, who's become a good friend of mine since then. And it was talking about placebo and mind over medicine and all of these concepts that I kind of had brewing in the back of my head, but it was really interesting because having experienced this physical and existential shakeup, that Ted talk landed in a really different way. So Lissa's community was actually the first thing that I joined the next like,

mere months later. And some of the people that I met there helped me understand a part of this path. But it was so interesting because I remember being in Goa and doing some mindfulness training and meeting somebody there who had studied tremoring on Kauai, but she was Finnish. And I was like, how is this even happening? Like this constellation of things that are happening to conspire me. three months later, I was on Kauai and studying

yoga line and this trauma releasing therapy that she had described. I had to go to Portland. So I was constantly just being fed. Like I felt like I was this little baby bird and the universe was just dropping little morsels into my mouth. And I was just like, okay, yeah, this is more of what I need. and a lot of the initial things that I took were simply

somatic therapies. So I studied things like tremoring, heavening, tapping, this special form of yoga. And a lot of these somatic practices fell in my lap first. And as I was studying trauma simultaneously, so I did Bessel van der Koek's traumatic stress studies. I did

Pat Ogden, Sensory Motorpsychotherapy Level 1, which is also quite somatic, but she really goes deep into the neuroscience and I'm like, that's the thing. I'm a total neuroscience nerd. It's a lot of what I did in undergrad. And once I started to put the physical exam piece of it, a community health center worker who is one of the smartest people about trauma I ever have met, despite not having

slew of letters behind her name like I do, she was the one who introduced me to Polyvagal theory. While it's not a perfect biological theorem, clinically it's one of the most useful things I've ever studied. In the Modern Trauma Toolkit, it's the entirety of Chapter 3 and interestingly, matches really well to what I've learned as an Ayurvedic counselor within the Gunas.

There is like an ancient knowledge to some of the things that I've been studying. I was drawn to Qigong, but like this more simple version because I work with folks with really low health literacy. So yeah, was really haphazard and some people will say like, did you do extra grad studies? I'm like, well, no, but I studied for eight years and I ended up getting certified in probably a dozen different modalities and

I'm still learning as we talked about in the beginning. So one of the reasons why I pursued the doctorate was to kind of consolidate where I was at at that point because I'd been studying about climate science and collapsology. I'm really interested in what happens when things fall apart and not just the individual, but the system. And I met Margaret Wheatley, who's like a leadership science guru. And she said to me,

you're doing too much, you need to be more discerning. And I'm like, I don't know if that's the thing, but I need to be more organized in my brain about how it's landing with me. And I needed to kind of synthesize and integrate everything I had learned up to that point. So that was kind of the instigation for the doctrine.

That's so fascinating because I often find with the lifelong learners that there's such an internal draw to the universal thread. It's the inquiry and the discovery and the internal awakening that happens with that that allows for more relaxation and self with what is probably a natural intuitive capacity.

When you were in your hospital, this is more of a personal question, so feel free to defer, but in your hospitalist career, did you often find yourself somewhat intuitively in tune in a way that might have surprised your colleagues or nurses when you would take care of patients? Or were you enough sort of disassociated, as you mentioned, that it was harder to be connected to that embodied knowledge?

I feel like I've always been fairly good at being present with the person in front of me. And so having like a empathic awareness of what was happening. I mean, I would honestly say my colleagues were, we were all pretty good. So I don't know that I was any special at that, but I mean, you learn that if a patient says something like, ⁓ something's wrong, you you trust that, you believe them.

And there were certain nurses who also had that kind of spidey sense. I know there were certain situations in my life where I had like a really strong, even telepathic connection. My best friend passed away from a brain tumor not long after residency. And she had been a hospitalist as well. And towards the end of her life, the things that I knew about what was happening to her,

I mean, there's no scientific explanation for the things that I knew, but I do feel like there are some untapped potentials around empathic abilities and synesthesia that we are just so far from understanding. And I think modern Western world encourages us away from those kinds of practices and intuitions. So one of the many routes that I've explored in the last 10 years,

has included psychedelic medicine. And I feel like that's kind of the closest I can come to really understanding what my brain is capable of.

Right? What an amazing, amazing arc it's been for you and to have had such a profound experience to lose such a dear friend and to be so integrated both as a doctor, a healer, a friend, you know, all those pieces. It's always complicated to hold all that in one being. feel like when my dad passed, I was jockeying between doctor and daughter and you

can't help it, you can't turn that brain that's looking for solutions and options and all the possible coping skills that we develop to manage our transitioning between analytical and just the grief and the heaviness and the loss. I'm wondering, you mentioned a couple of things that some of our listeners may not be as familiar with that I think are so important to

at least have a little bit of an understanding of, and you mentioned a lot about somatic techniques in trauma therapy. Can you tell us, like, I know what they are. My husband is a grief coach and he does so much somatic informed therapy. So our household is familiar with a lot of the practitioners you mentioned, but let's say someone, you know, unfortunately, many of us first heard somatic as at our age from

from our clinic preceptors in our family med rotation when the attending would roll the eyes and say, it's a somaticizer, ugh. And so even having to unlearn that. So I want us all as listeners to appreciate that we may have some conditioning around the term that comes from early perceptions of positive review of systems for those of you that aren't clinicians of.

A positive review of systems means that the body is very activated and a lot of systems in the body are impacted by this sympathetic drive. But what happens along the way that now we have this new term somatic techniques?

And one of the reasons why I focused so much on somatic techniques in the Modern Trauma Toolkit is because we don't learn a lot of this. So we're taught in medical school that cognitive behavior therapy or thinking therapy is the solution to everything. Even studying lifestyle medicine, know, they really focus on motivational interviewing and CBT. And so

This was the culture I was baked in for so long and it wasn't until the earthquake when other kinds of modalities started literally coming in my direction and I explored them that I recognized there was this whole other route. So the way that I describe it is cognitive is brain based. So the way the brain influences the mind body system or top down and somatic is body based or the way the body can influence the mind body system or bottom up.

So that's kind of the two different ways to look at it. And from a trauma-informed perspective, bottom-up is actually a more reasonable doorway because when your amygdala or your danger center in your brain is very active in telling you, hey, I think something's threatening, part of its job is to create a reflex around fight, flight, and freeze responses.

that doesn't really allow your connections to your neocortex or your thinking brain to be as active. And we know this based on functional imaging studies. So if people were to do brain scans during these kinds of stressful situations, we know that their thinking brain is less involved than one would hope. So likewise, when somebody is deeply into a severe stress response, sometimes those thinking

mechanisms are not available to them. And those bottom up practices helps them get into what Dan Siegel calls that window of tolerance where you feel like you're coping. And ultimately your nervous system is getting into a state where you can engage again and hopefully start thinking. I mean, my two practices right now are in addiction medicine and refugee health. And my refugees,

will somatize because that's actually the cultural expression of trauma a lot of times is they'll come and say, I have this pain in my belly, or I have this headache, or this neck tension. And they're literally describing a heaviness or the weight of their world on their shoulders because their family is still in a camp in Kenya. And...

It took us a long time as a clinic to recognize that this was actually physical manifestation of trauma. And this is how that it's expressed. there's cultural expressions too, which is yet another reason why the DSM will often miss what's happening. So I think there are these body-based windows that are often more amenable. And it doesn't, it's not for everybody. So like, that's why I wanted to have so many tools in my toolkit, but in

the book, I have a whole chapter on things like tapping or self acupressure, self soothing touch or heavening, this tremoring that I described, which is just like a dog or a horse or any other mammal, we're actually supposed to shake off our stress and release the sympathetic tone that builds that's telling us to fight or flight or run away from our problems. And this is nothing that I learned in medicine. So.

I'm thinking of the Modern Trauma Toolkit as kind of a DIY for people to learn their own nervous system responses and tools to release it, but also for healthcare workers, for teachers, for parents to like figure out how to teach this to other people because I wish this stuff was taught in school because I don't think there's a lot that's more important than this. We're seeing so much emotional dysregulation,

chronic pain and other kind of functional syndromes can be really deeply tied to that because when your trauma center is telling you that the environment is threatening, that includes the internal environment. And so you're just amplifying all of those signals and telling this perception of danger, including what's coming from the inside. sorry, there's one last piece of...

Hmm.

sure, please keep going.

family doctor

and I started doing my first real processing technique was called accelerated resolution therapy and it's a cousin of EMDR and it is wildly effective. So I did it on almost all of my family practice panel that had gone through trauma and their physical health improved dramatically. Things like blood pressure, asthma, diabetes. I had one patient whose diabetic numbers were double what they should be. And then the time we measured

three months after trauma therapy was close to normal. So I had just never seen anything as efficacious as trauma work. And I thought this is probably the root cause of most of what I'm seeing.

I think that what I'm really intrigued by, and perhaps with your deep immersion, you've come across something and maybe we'll find a paper after our conversation, but the link of a persistent sympathetic state and inflammation and with that sort of metabolic mitochondrial derangements that create insulin resistance and disordered sleep and impact circadian rhythm and

impaired gut function and digestive function and then microbiome and intestinal permeability. And I could keep going, but when we think about that, and I know this, unfortunately, I've been pretty forthright about it. I have a long COVID small fiber neuropathy, which is sort of like being persistently activated despite all of your very, very best efforts. And it started after my...

Hmm.

very severe COVID infection in February of 2020. I always say I'm an early responder. I decided to get sick before anybody else did. And I had a bilateral pneumonia and infiltrates and very sick, low SATs. And then I got it two more times. And the residual of that has been very complicated. don't work in the clinic at this point because of all of the myriad. And I think it was tied into

my own trauma history, this, when I went to the Long COVID clinic, I'll, I'll finish with this because I could spend hours on my long COVID journey. But when I went to the Long COVID clinic at Mayo in Rochester, which is very, I'm very lucky to have been able to be seen there because I had trained at Mayo. So there was an ability to make a phone call. It's a very difficult to be seen, but the clinician there actually knew about

small fiber neuropathy. But what was more interesting to me is he said that the group that seems to be the most impacted is the Gen X inherently because he said menopausal type A woman. And when we think about the mitochondrial allostatic load that comes from holding a lot of things as true for the type A Gen X woman, it seems like

it makes some sense that at some point the body just said, okay, we're done here for a bit. And so I've been in a very in-depth and complicated healing journey with the autonomic nervous system. And I think it's important as you're saying to understand that, at least as I understand it, and please correct me from your discoveries, is that part of the trauma

we'll say profile is to have a sort of persistent activation of the sympathetic nervous system. And that is actually a very complicated clinical scenario when we really look at it. So I'm not surprised at all to hear that you found something that actually helps with that body integration piece of this constant activation and the, you know, letting the brain reset itself.

creating this incredible downstream impact, probably even to cancer risks and other things, dementia, things that are much, much further down the road. So I really appreciate you sharing about that. And I think it's so important to acknowledge.

There's so many threads that I could grab from what you just said. mean, first, I really believe that there is so much more long COVID than what we're recognizing as out there. And part of it, I think, is a trauma response because COVID is still circulating in huge numbers. I think we're kind of dissociating from the dangers that are in front of us. I mean, I'm one of the only doctors that I know who is still masking. And I think it's because

I'm more willing to play with my amygdala's and say there is danger. And I think it's really hard for people to admit that there is still danger and the risk of long COVID. In Canada, they just did a study, actually, no, it's not just, it's almost a year ago. People who had three or more infections, more than 30 % of them had chronic symptoms. So it makes sense that you're still facing this. I think...

both the mechanism of how long COVID is affecting the body. mean, there's obviously vascular issues, autoimmune issues, but certainly the nervous system plays a role for the vast majority of people. And if more people were grounded in nervous system science, I think we'd be getting further with long COVID research. And also like in terms of like the kind of the archetype of who is getting it. I spent...

all my hospitalist years deep in sympathetic drive. And for me, it manifested as really severe hypertension. So I did a blood pressure monitor during a night shift, just because I was kind of curious. I knew I'd feel really ill around two to four o'clock in the morning. And sure enough, I'd get this like cortisol hit and my blood pressure was spiking to like 200 on 120. So I could have just dropped from a stroke in the middle of my night shift.

And I knew that something was wrong. Like I get really nauseated. I'd have a headache, but I didn't really understand just how much danger I was putting my body in. And what I now understand about the system and I'll make it quite simple. One of the really important things to me and especially in the modern trauma toolkit and the reason why I joined TikTok is because I think this information should not be gate kept in the academia. I really think that explaining things in simple ways.

and making knowledge accessible is just a part of my mission and it's part of what I do. It's not just studying all the things, it's knowledge translation and sharing all the things. So the way I think of it as your sympathetic system is the system of motion. So it's the one that moves your muscles. So fight and flight needs your muscles and it activates your heart. So it'll speed your heart up.

So this is why when you're feeling anxious or stressed out, you can generally feel your heart pounding. So it's the movement nervous system. And the parasympathetic is the still nervous system. And this is why I find polyvagal theory so interesting is because they talk about two different vagus nerve branches. One that goes up into the face and that's what they call ventral or forward facing vagus nerve. And this one helps you

when you're in your window of tolerance, the one that I mentioned before, when you feel like you're handling things, it's related to social engagement. So this has to do with facial expression, tone of voice. It's one of the reasons why in my TikTok and also when I read my audio book, I really wanted this voice to sound prosodic and safe and calm and not be that person who's kind of screaming at the screen or, know,

giving the audio book really, really quickly. The other vagus nerve is an overwhelm of the parasympathetic system and that kind of, initially in polyvagal theory, they said that it shut the body down, but now they just realize it down regulates or slows down the sympathetic tone. But when you think about that parasympathetic system, it's in charge of your digestive tract, your reproductive organs, your immune system. So all of those things that you're describing,

whether or not we can fight off infections, whether or not we can fight off cancer, which our body is designed to do, whether or not our bowels are doing all the right things and maintaining their microbiome, of course, if we're stuck in sympathetic tone, none of those other systems are functioning properly. So even just when you kind of think of the parts of the body that are regulated by those different nervous systems, it all makes sense. And that's why

I'm a huge proponent of the work of Dr. Judith Herman. She's a psychiatrist who wrote a book called Trauma and Recovery. And she talks about three different phases of healing from trauma and the way that I described the first one that she describes as establishing safety. I call it noticing. And so much of it is just noticing, well, what is happening within me? What is my nervous system state right now? Am I overactive or underactive? And how is that showing up?

How can I catch the early warning signs and then create a pathway that works for me to intervene? So the tagline for my book is, you know, personalize your path to post-traumatic growth with your own solutions, personalized solutions. So I really do think that everyone individually needs to find their own path. There's no one size fits all. And that's why I love that I...

studied so many things and I can explore lots of different options with folks because I love to give a menu and then have them intuitively say, this is what I'd like to take off the menu today.

think what I hear you saying too is just that homeostasis or re-imagining is different for everyone. It depends on cultural background. It depends on budget. It depends on time. It depends on willingness. It depends on perhaps coexisting depression, anxiety. It depends on coexisting health conditions, right? And this is why I love interviewing female clinicians that are

that are in our age range who this is not none of this process is new, but there becomes this integration of both knowledge and intuition to create wisdom in the clinical encounter, which says these things aren't for this person, but my toolkit is big enough that this thing is. And what an incredible resource to feel resourced in.

sitting with someone who you know is suffering when so many of our colleagues don't really have an understanding. If I'm honest, my impression, and I'll just go with that as the concept, my impression of trauma is that there's no treatment, right? This was my take home from my training process and my early career. There's no treatment for trauma.

You might consider certain pharmacologic interventions to help mediate sleep, depression, anxiety that tend to all coexist, but even then limited efficacy and impact. And in a way, even think back and I think we would have a collective sigh and say, how sad for this person that this trauma exists and that we have no intervention or no solution.

when in fact there's actually quite a bit to explore and to think about. And perhaps it isn't for every clinician to do the dive in, but wouldn't you think anyone in medicine would be well-advised to at least take an introductory course on understanding the impact of trauma or picking up your book? I mean, obviously it's a loaded question, but wouldn't that be useful for it to be

Not that mindset.

It's interesting. I created Safer Spaces training to work with employee matters, like to work with organizations about psychological safety, psychological first aid, trauma-informed spaces, all of these concepts of psychology as it relates to trauma and employment. But what I'm getting a lot of in my DMs on all socials is, well, when are you going to teach us? So I do think probably in the next year so I will be launching a course that would just be

the basics for physicians and NPs and DOs, just so we can spread the word and not just so that we can help our patients because I think it's easier than you'd think. Like a lot of these techniques that I do with my practice, I can teach some of these basics in five or 10 minutes. Like it really doesn't take that long to teach them a somatic practice.

that helps them regulate their nervous system or dial down the intensity of emotions. I mean, what human on the planet doesn't need that right now? But I also think it's really important for us to be able to do that for ourselves. I think it's a huge cause of burnout is that we either suppress our emotions or we are kind of expressing them in a way that's not necessarily what we would prefer. I know I was doing a lot of that. So I think this pathway

is kind of starts with self-healing and then it's skills and abilities that we can share as well. But I don't think enough of us are recognizing just how traumatic our training and our job tends to be. Even now, like when I'm seeing one of my therapists, they'll open a door and I'll think.

I did not see what was inside that door. Like now that you've opened it, I think we should explore. But there's a lot of doors that we keep closed just so we can maintain the job because it is so intense.

Yeah. Interestingly, I'll reference it in the show notes. There was a study, of course, I am not one of those like, reference every detail of the study kind of speakers. Brains busy doing lots of things. And that's not one of them. But there was a study that came out maybe 2021 that was looking at PTSD.

in ER workers, and I think it was the entire ER team. So could be a technician, a nurse, a physician, maybe even the therapist. I found it fascinating because they basically did a survey and we all know, all of us know that there's so much stigma around mental health that people probably are not fully honest on surveys that come their way at work, right? They're like, whoa.

If I check this box and it's not fully anonymous, am I going to get flagged or screened for my license or some other ridiculous intervention? But people that were honest, it was one in five who met the clinical criteria for PTSD, one in five. And that to me speaks volumes because unfortunately, this paper also left the impression of what to do, right?

Like, okay, we've identified that it's existing, but now what? And I find that just really sad in a way. Like, there are things we can do.

Yeah, and one of the reasons why I wrote the Modern Trauma Toolkit, well, I mean, there's quite a few, but one was that I felt that there wasn't enough books that were comprehensive about what trauma is, but also very clear on practical solutions. So I talk about solutions that are somatic, creative, cognitive. I have ancestral and preverbal trauma with lots of ideas around that too. But I also talk about systemic solutions. Like how do you run

social innovation lab in your community? What kind of policies are trauma informed? So I really think that we need to be solution focused at all of the levels. I think of it as kind of fractals of the things that happen within the individual body are happening within the family body and the community body, our regional and national bodies, and then this greater ecosystem. And the trauma is very real. mean, the ecosystem is telling us that it's been traumatized. And I think

The more that we learn how to manage trauma at every one of those systems, the faster we're going to get to what I would hope is post-traumatic growth.

⁓ wow. That's so beautifully said. I really appreciate your ability to bring the interconnectedness of all of us. Of course, all the spiritual traditions give us this kind of thread of, we're all connected. But if we think about it as almost ripples through a community when there's been a particular trauma or situation, that it indirectly impacts all of us. And we're starting to understand the

perhaps the quantum physics of that, again, know, little directions that I haven't done the deep dive, but how all these things are interconnected, we certainly can develop an intuitive relationship with. I want to switch gears just for a second because I know some of our listeners are gonna be completely intrigued, but what the heck happened on TikTok? Like, tell us, was there a viral video? Was there a moment where you just kind of...

said something that people just said, OMG, why have I never heard this? Tell us what happened there. We probably didn't go on expecting to become an influencer, or maybe you did. I don't know. Tell us about it.

If I'm totally honest, it wasn't like influencer, but educator that I was really striving for. So my master's was in medical education and I had designed our health equity residency. So I had this like desire to teach at a greater system level than just, you know, my individual patient or a residency cohort. And I was trying to think of like, what are the different mediums that I could leverage my credentials and you know, my privilege.

to start talking about things that people actually care about. And so it wasn't that I was trying to push an agenda on people, but I was like, people want to know this stuff and I love to explain it. if I'm totally honest, there's a young person in my life named Ashwarya. She's been in my life for almost a decade now. She's not my kid, obviously, but I think of her with that maternal energy. And initially she was like a mentee, somebody that I had interacted with when she was in university.

what's happening with my anxiety, what's happening with my, the way that I envision my future. Like you explained it in a way that just makes me feel better. I think you should get on TikTok. And the first few times I really laughed, but then she said, well, you know, think about the numbers of people you can help because so many people can get large audiences. And she said, I need you to start researching. And as soon as she said researching and like learning, I'm like, bing, I'd love to learn that. So I started learning.

Check.

how to TikTok on YouTube. So I watched YouTube for like two or three weeks on like how to do TikToks. And I jumped in with the idea that I wasn't trying to just, you know, reach a small number of people. The idea was to try to give really good, credible information that people wanted to a wider audience. it's definitely not influencer that I want, but I...

I just love the idea of different forms of knowledge translation and sharing what I know so that it reaches more people. So both the book, the Modern Trauma Toolkit and the TikTok came from that desire for systems change, which as physicians, honestly, I think it's a big cause of burnout is because we're thinking, well, I'm just, you know, putting out the same fires every day. It's really hard. And I feel like, no, I'm changing the foundational beliefs of like large communities of people who are now more trauma informed.

That's like to me the pathway to systemic change, which is what I'm really interested in at this stage of my career.

I love that. It seems like a natural extension of the tend and befriend mindset, right? This regulated system has an innate desire to uplift and serve others in a way that's not harmful to self. And I think the social media, my husband went viral on Instagram. He's similar followers as you, and it's really centered around grief and somatic work.

And I think that I have watched that with such curiosity because I think that we really, people want to understand something different than, sorry, there's no treatment for this, or it's just anxiety, or it's all just here up, right? And so this notion of sort of education, he certainly did not seek it. Like I will 100%. So I think he would, you and he would have a great time.

chatting about what has inadvertently arisen, which is this capacity to reach hundreds of thousands of people in one pass with well-thought out, you know, internal work and then, you know, choosing wisely. And I like to have experienced clinicians to be in the mix because some people are really good at messaging and marketing, but they may not have the clinical experience or the internal study.

to have really to speak in a way that's not full. I don't want to deny that someone may be useful in their voice because there's a lot of ways the voices need to be carried and shared. But certainly I love when experienced clinicians find that methodology and voice and expression that allows for a new awareness to emerge and at a...

cultural level and I'm excited for you as to where all that is going to evolve. And kind of segueing from that, your work also emphasizes health equity and systems change. And what do you think are some of the bigger systems barriers to trauma-informed care? And if we had a listener who, we don't know the reach of the podcast yet. It could be a hundred people. It could be large. I don't have no idea, but.

I feel like there'll be people of all different types of backgrounds who might hear this, some of whom may have roles in larger healthcare systems. What do you think are some of those big barriers to trauma-informed care? And maybe tell them what you perceive of is trauma-informed care. That's probably the first problem is not even understanding what the term is.

I mean, if I had to just summarize it in like one sentence, I would say it's colonialism, late stage capitalism and the neoliberal agenda. But to try to frame it in a less...

That's that.

I don't know, in America you guys call it woke way. I really think that trauma is something that can happen.

I'm trying to think of how I should phrase this. Trauma is ubiquitous. We often cause it in clinical settings from an inpatient environment where we take away dignity and privacy and autonomy to even just giving birth. 25 % of women end up with PTSD after a normal birth. mean, obviously, interventional births and other risk factors can happen, but we have...

not really understood just how ubiquitous it is. So we're not really on the lookout for both how we can prevent it and also how we can acknowledge it and manage it sufficiently. And I think part of it is this sense of futility. Like even if we were to do an ACE questionnaire and look for adverse childhood experiences, well, what would I even do with that if somebody had a high score? One of the many reasons I don't recommend the screening. It was never meant to be a screening tool, but...

Even just if all of us had a greater awareness that a person who is yelling and irritable and just really not okay in our presence, it's probably not personal. It's probably that they're stuck in fight and flight and they're trying to fight us because of this, you know, symptom they're experiencing or medical diagnosis they were just handed. If we were to understand that people were generally not

non-adherent, non-compliant, not showing up, the no-shows, a lot of them are dissociated. A lot of them can't get out of bed because they're stuck in that overwhelmed parasympathetic state. If we were able to even just have that understanding, both of ourselves, when we're having a grumpy day or a checked out and numb day, and the people that we work with, I mean, that would just make such a foundational change.

If we then had skills to help people if they were overactive or underactive in their nervous system state, imagine what more we could do for folks beyond just managing a single disease. Because the way I love to think about it, because I love the tenants of lifestyle medicine and flourishing, to me, if you're not stuck in your sympathetic system all the time, then your immune system is working better and our bodies are

natural self-healing machines, like we're great at fighting off anything that hits us if that nervous system state is in homeostasis. So I think of this as really foundational to healing and healthcare is for us to all have some awareness of this.

And such so well said, I mean, really, it's it's it's upon us. It ought to be in the lifestyle medicine pillars in some more. I also think spiritual health should be there, but these are inextricably linked in a way because I think grief, trauma and spiritual spiritual inner peace, you know, this continuum is sort of still a little bit outside the domain of lifestyle medicine. But I think it's a pillar that

It's missing from the pantheon, you will. It's like we're looking at the old Greek structures and there's like a pillar missing to me that, you know, we need to understand that this somatic component to our, how we think and how we're existing actually probably is informing a lot of those lifestyle choices that why is that so hard to change behavior? Why am I always waking up at 2 a.m.?

Why am I nibbling in the kitchen when I argue with my husband? Why am I never exercising and I'm checked out on the sofa scrolling TikTok? mean, you know, like all these pieces of like, huh, maybe the nervous system is a player here for all these lifestyle pillars. So we do a little disservice to the individual when we think we can purely coach them through.

And this is really oriented towards people who are in that persistent, perhaps activated trauma state that may not be applicable for everyone. But if there's that person that's really struggling with lifestyle changes, this seems like a really important component to look at from what you're saying.

for sure. It's one of the reasons why I work in the addiction clinic and I get referred folks for whom, you know, trauma or nervous system states is one of the reasons why they use their substance of choice. So one thing I always one of the early things I say to my patients and I'm sure there's a tick tock somewhere about it is like I always have to wear glasses because I'm of a certain age. And so I always say that my glasses have one lens of self-compassion and one lens of clarity.

So if you were to look at these situations that you just described through the lenses of self-compassion and clarity, you would see things that make sense. It makes sense that I'm doom scrolling on the couch because I just had a super busy day at work and my sympathetic nervous system was jacked. So I need to like calm the system down by finding stillness. It makes sense that when I was working in the hospital, I would come home super irritable and grumpy.

because I'd had to kind of mask all day and pretend I was okay, even though there was a lot of physical and psychological suffering that I was attending to, it makes sense. And so rather than like saying, well, what's wrong with me that I'm doing this? It's such a nicer way to be trauma informed and understand it makes sense that you're doing this. It makes sense that you're self-soothing with baked goods. I've been historically amazing at that.

Hahaha.

You know, there's this awareness that comes first and then if we have the skills to restore our nervous system state balance first, then these tenants of lifestyle medicine become more achievable. And unless we're really looking at our bodies with self-compassion, sometimes we don't really care. Like when I talked to that person who had the instant diabetic control after we did trauma therapy, they said to me,

I didn't really want to acknowledge that I had a physical body because of so much damage that had been done to it. Like it had been so violated that the idea that I was still in that body was horrifying to me. And now that I have a different relationship with my body, I feel like I can look after it again.

⁓ gosh, that's incredible. I love that so much. I actually want this conversation to go for like another hour, but I am so mindful of your busy schedule and your time. I kind of have one more question before we wrap up because I really think I want our listeners to hear about your international nonprofit and what role it's playing in advancing trauma-informed care globally. Can you just, you know...

Tell us a little bit about what you're hoping to see happen in it, or maybe I misunderstand its intention, or tell us about it.

A little bit because the non-profit's actually been around since, I want to say 2011 or 2012. So it's actually been around for a long time. And when I began the trauma journey, I was already working within that foundation in Nepal. So I'd worked doing academic consulting in Myanmar, Nepal, Laos, Ethiopia, and then throughout East Africa for a number of years. Now we've kind of scaled back our activities and certainly my travel because

I just started to recognize that most of our southern partners were extraordinarily good at what they were doing and they didn't necessarily need me to come in and consult. And so our main partners are now in Uganda and we've been paying for the tuition for family medicine training. And we just built a training house at a district hospital site because in so many countries where the urban rural ratio is different than in

the global north, the missing doctors are the ones who work early. And so if they train in smaller environments, they're more likely to be retained there. So we built a home where the family medicine residents can live in Truro, which is quite a smaller city than Kampala. And then they have more comfort, like confidence and competence and a really greater understanding of what community based medicine, the rewards can look like.

So there's just a higher chance of retention. So we love to support the programs. This is what we were doing in Patent, actually. They have a medical school called the Patent Academy of Health Sciences, where they really focus on community-based learning opportunities and social accountability. Like that's baked into their mandate. They literally have the word love in their mission for the hospital. Like we could learn so much from the partners I've worked with. So I've been...

helping promote the development and maintenance of family medicine in a variety of settings. And it's interesting because very recently somebody from Malaysia emailed me. She said she had purchased the book and it was the most straightforward thing she's ever read around trauma. And she said, would you come and teach the physicians in Malaysia? Would you teach the psychiatrists and family docs and pediatricians? Just...

the foundations of trauma, how to assess it and how to manage. I thought this is a great opportunity. I'm gonna go back to all of the places. So I emailed my colleagues in Laos and Nepal and Myanmar and I said, I've been invited to give a workshop in Malaysia, would you like this workshop and I can bring your faculty some books. So while it's not the mandate of Global Family Med Foundation, I do believe that more and more

comprehensive care physicians or anybody who's looking at something holistically is understanding that stress is playing a role in an illness experience. And the more that they can recognize what that is and even have skills to manage it, the better off we'll all be. So yeah, that's my very full circle answer to how it's all kind of coming together.

Well, I think what I really get a sense from our conversation is your appreciation that healing and being well, even within the WHO definition of health, which I think is so valuable to recognize that it is occurring at a community level. It's occurring at a global level.

and that there are drivers that people may have more agency than what they've been taught to believe, to explore and to self-heal and to self-empower because the healthcare systems are overdrawn in a manner of speaking metaphorically, right? The clinicians are tired, they're burnt out, there's not enough time, there's not enough resource. So the onus is on the individual for some...

introspection and discovery and of course where appropriate seek out always clinical support. I'm certainly not advocating for going it alone. If you can get support, I always believe that's the best way. But it's so refreshing to hear of someone who you really embody and you really exemplify what it means to discover the roots of healing on the sort of metaphor that we're using here, both the depth and the

pathways that give society and culture a new lens. And I'm delighted to help get the word out even more about your work. How can people find you and can they work with you? you do any coaching or is it really just through your clinical and or exploring your book and online teaching?

I mean, I can't say what 2025 will bring. I'd say right now, the things I'm focusing on is hopefully more books. I've got like four in my brain that I'd love to write. I just finished studying climate psychology, which I'm very intrigued about. And also like decolonizing, like how we can interrupt.

both psychological and physical healthcare in new ways and be more disruptive around how we're reinforcing colonial constructs. Anyway, my book is through the website moderntrauma.com. The website will kind of give you the vibes of the book, so to speak, as the TikTokers would say. It's just really gentle and nurturing and soft. And I tried to design a really special website, like on one of the pages.

and I won't say which one, the cursor turns into a butterfly. And it just gives me so much pleasure. But that's really what I wanted the book to feel like was something that felt like a giant hug when you were reading it. So my personal, my professional website is christingibson.net. And what I'm really engaging with a lot right now is speaking. So I love to do keynotes and workshops.

Do I think that within the year I'll probably have some kind of offering for physicians and potentially healthcare workers around what a trauma-informed practice looks like and with a solution focus, not just identifying it, but like, what do you actually practically do? Yeah, I think we're probably on path for that. So I think next year I'll be launching online courses, short courses around things like climate psychology, around somatic skills for healing.

and hopefully a longer workshop series for clinicians. now that I've said it out loud, I'll have to hold myself to it. So that is through safer spaces training.com.

Beautiful. Well, I think that knowing that you continue to be engaged in learning and sharing, meaning it's like the integration assimilation pieces are simultaneously moving within you. So as you learn, as you integrate, we all benefit. And I'm excited to hear what the future brings and.

knowing as well that we didn't talk at all about the links between trauma and Arya Veda. We'll have to have another conversation. Once the podcast is, we've gotten all the foundational conversations in, then we may take some dives into less well-recognized sources of healing and understandings that come from the Vedic traditions that I'm extremely passionate about. And you've spent

I'm sure a deep dive in and have really interesting perspectives around. So thank you, Dr. Gibson, so much this conversation, as I suspected, flew right by.

It totally did. And like, please call me Christy. I'd love to be back. And that was really, really fun. Thank you.