Dr. Joe Tatta:
Welcome to this edition of the Healing Pain Summit. I’m excited to have our guest today. Her name is Niki Gratrix. She is an award-winning and internationally renowned nutritionist and health writer specializing in stress and mind-body medicine. In 2005 she co-founded one of the largest mind-body clinics and integrative medicine in the UK where she worked as director of nutrition until 2010 the clinic published a successful and preliminary study in the British Journal of Open, and she also hosted the largest ever free online health summit, including how to overcome fatigue with 29 of the world’s leading experts that had 30,000 attendees. It’s called the Abundant Energy Summit. She has a great free gift for you today and just as a reminder, if you’d like her interview to share it on Facebook, there’s links below for Facebook as well as Twitter, so make sure I share it with your friends and family until they are going to be talking about the role of emotional trauma in chronic pain conditions. Niki, welcome to the Healing Pain Summit.
Nikki Gratrix:
Thank you so much for having me. Joe. It’s a great pleasure to be here, as always, sharing such important information.
Dr. Tatta:
It’s a great bio. You’ve done everything to have a clinical practice. You’ve obviously done some research. You’ve done your own summit called the abundant energy summit, which I’m sure you have lots to talk about as far as that’s concerned. But let’s talk about, you know, we’re talking about chronic pain on this summit and there’s many causes of chronic pain. But I’m, I’m really excited, you know, as a nutritionist to hear you talk about some of the emotional influences of chronic pain. So let’s start with, you know, how do emotions tie into trauma and the pain that people experience?
Nikki:
You know, I think that emotional trauma, especially early life trauma, so trauma experience sort of below the age of 18 and sort of in our young years is probably the most underexposed risk factor actually for all chronic complex illness, but has a huge role to play in all the pain conditions. Whether that’s pain related to fibromyalgia type pain or it’s a pain related to arthritis or inflammation or even sort of tension in the muscles and those, that type of pain. So I can actually share that. I always share some of the studies that have been done because people don’t realize, but there are enormous studies that have been done that started around the mid-1990s and actually completed by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente and they surveyed 17 and a half thousand adults. And um, just to give you a few statistics, first of all, 67% of all those in that survey set, they’d had adverse childhood events, which are, we call them ACEs, adverse childhood events.
And the, the research has said that we mean by ACEs we mean things like, um, parents separating or divorce, physical, sexual or emotional abuse, physical and neglect, domestic violence, mental illness in the family, substance, substance abuse or incarceration by a family member. That list wasn’t exhaustive, but these kinds of things, um, I have such a huge impact on our health in later life. So just to give you an idea, if you have a sort of like four ACEs for example, um, you have, uh, sort of, let’s see here. Some of statistics. See if you have four ACEs, you’re two and a half times higher to have things like chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Um, hepatitis risk is two and a half times higher cancers, two and a half times higher. Being suicidal is 12 times higher. Um, outsiders is over four times higher and things like, um, if you have eight or more ACS, you’ve got a sort of trickle the risk of lung cancer and three and a half times the risk of heart disease.
So it’s really across the board. And interestingly one of the, if you like poster child of, of uh, adverse child events and emotional trauma, um, is fibromyalgia. So if, and kind of fatigue syndrome as well. So if you have, for example six, you have ACEs in childhood, you have a six-fold increased risk of things like um, chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia in later life. So it also, there’s a huge correlation between early life stress and all the alternating conditions. In fact, early life stress is strongly correlated in women as smoking is for lung cancer. So it’s absolutely a huge thing. I’m talking about early life stress cause that’s just where I sort of used it as a door opener cause the statistics are so big, so stunning and they’ve been sort of studied done by the CDC and people like that, you know, groups like that.
But of course, adult trauma and emotional trauma is very important as well and can be an onset and a trigger for the pain conditions as well. Um, it’s very important things that go on in childhood because our brains are still developing. So we, our brains are more in principle when we’re younger. So it’s even more important to kind of consider actually how was your childhood and it could there be a link between something that happened to you in childhood that’s actually could have been, could be the source or something that triggered 20 years later, 30 years later. Um, so yeah, I just thought I would share some of the statistics cause it’s a pretty big deal.
Dr. Tatta:
No, I think it’s a, it’s a great way to open your, your interview today. I thank you for sharing those, those stats. I mean, you know, obviously you mentioned fibromyalgia, which is known to have, um, you know, a highly correlated history of some kind of, you know, trauma in the past. Can you talk a little bit about some of the statistics of women versus men with some of those ACEs mean it’s really actually as far as an ACE coast, cause I, I listened to the, to the list that you articulated and I can’t think, uh, you know, most of us have at least one if not two of those ACEs at some point in our childhood from the time where let’s say two to 18.
Nikki:
Absolutely. And they missed the, the researchers came out said, listen, we missed off a says that we were just, we didn’t know the results were going to come out like this and we missed off like bullying and being, you know, experiencing bullying in childhood or, um, you know, racism or, um, there was sort of a multiple of observing or seeing abuse happening to another person in the family. So that list certainly wasn’t, um, you know, exhausted. And by the way, children is also, uh, intergenerationally inherited. So that’s another thing to consider. And the research is definitely starting to confirm that as well. So it’s passed through both the maternal and the paternal line. So you might actually be carrying, uh, epigenetic changes that occurred to your mother or grandmother that’s been passed down and inherited. So that’s another factor sort of at the end of the day. The bottom line is that probably no one is unaffected by ACEs.
Um, it also, there’s a group that are more sensitive as well, so they’re more likely to be affected by ACEs. And that’s why we look at things like genetics. So there’s certain genes that um, affect how serotonin is processed and also, um, genes that affect how cortisol is processed as well, both, which if you have a certain gene snip this single nucleotide polymorphisms actually will make you more likely to react to stress as well. So, um, yeah, it’s really prevalent and this is one of the thing, we have an additional thing. Emotional trauma is a very difficult thing to, for a person to express, they may have experienced. So if I’m asking you to self report, did you have any emotional trauma in childhood? How can you really know, uh, whether you did or not. It’s a bit like asking somebody, uh, how’s your diets?
And they go fantastic. Like I, it’s great. And they were saying, let’s have a look at your diet and can you keep a diary for three days? And then you look at the diet and you go, okay, there’s a lot of stuff we need to talk about here. And then it’s an education process that’s exactly the same with emotional trauma in childhood as well. So you, how can you have known how an adult or caretaker was sort of meant to behave or to behave appropriately. So, um, yeah, it’s everyone’s affected by ACS. This is much bigger than the number of people affected by gluten sensitivity. It’s really the hidden crisis. And if you have a pain condition, you really, it’s highly recommended that you look into this side effects previous ASIS, look at parental stuff of either grandparents and look at what’s happened in adults as well. And see if you can see any sort of correlation. And we’ll talk more about what people can do about that, um, later. Um, but yes, I mean we can, we can talk about mechanisms like sort of how those things happen or whatever you want to ask me next.
Dr. Tatta:
Yeah. I love that you brought up the snips. I have, I’m a good friend of mine, Dr. Suzanne Bennett. She’s going to talk about snips a little bit in one of her, her interviews. But let’s talk about some of the mechanisms that, cause I think when people, when they first hear that stress or trauma can change their genes or change their biochemistry, a lot of people are, don’t quite make the connection, but how does it change, let’s say your personality and your chemistry, your behavior, do all those things kind of start to play in?
Nikki: Okay, well, obviously, you know, uh, emotional trauma and stress and early life stress, it definitely affects behavior and it leads to destructive behavioral patterns that would lead to things like increased autoimmunity, leaky guts, um, and kind of conditions that would lead onto pain conditions. So they know, for example, again, if you’ve had, I think it’s four ACEs, you’re seven times more likely to be uh, an alcoholic. Uh, if, if you’re, if you have four ACEs, you’re 11 times more likely, for example, to use injection drugs, you’re more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior. You’re more likely to binge drink. So obviously early life stress does lead to behavioral changes that would lead on onto sort of, you know, increased chronic complex illness and later life. But the original study that one of 17 and a half thousand people, they actually found that you could have a normal cholesterol, not be a diabetic, have, you know, exercise, have a normal healthy lifestyle.
And yet if you had seven ACEs, you still had a 360% increased risk of heart disease. So this is where we really have to say there’s something going on with the biochemistry. And this is, those original studies were so big that there’s plenty of people who started to study, you know, how is this happening? How can something that’s just happening in childhood shape? How does childhood biography become adult biology? And that’s where we had some major researchers’ needs a landmark studies showing. They originally were searching researching rats and mice and then they sort of confirmed their findings in humans. Um, but what’s happening is when we have a stressor and emotional stressor, the change changes the epigenetics of the glucocorticoid receptors, which essentially means that you have a lower threshold in response to a stress that stays basically for the rest of your life unless you intervene to reverse that.
So we have a change in a threshold, which means basically you need less of a stress or to have a much higher response. And essentially from a young age, that means you’re much more easily set off into a chronic stress response. You’re basically the researchers and the people who wrote books about this said basically you’re marinading in inflammatory cytokines from a young age and an easily triggerable. So a more easily triggered. So that was one part of the studies and they’re the major researchers. It was landmark studies that showed that the epigenetics in the brain and the neurons is changing the glucocorticoid receptors. The other side is that the research is, it was the Yale school of medicine said, Oh, this is this early life stress changes the epidemic genetics across the entire genome and can change the way.
Okay, well thing. So, um, yeah, so it’s not only affecting us epigenetically across the board, uh, the chronic stress, like the glucocorticoid receptors are very important because they’re linked with the obviously the stress response. Um, but also another thing to mention is that, you know, it also changes the brain neurologically so that we know the brain is plastic. There’s neuro-plasticity of things we can, the brain can change for the good, which is the good news, but it can also change for the bad. So if you have a conditioned response to a constant, say, uh, toxic, um, kind of stressor that’s coming from your environment, whether it’s bullying or it’s a parent that’s angry and out of control, your brain actually built new neural pathways to increase the stress response. So in other words, we’re talking about being wired for stress. So this a neuro response.
This is how humans learn anything like this is the brain will learn to respond to build neural pathways in response to external stresses. The problem is if they’re negative, you can then increase the neural pathways that Y or somebody to be increased, you know, kind of have an increased stress response. So the good news is that neuroplasticity means you can also reverse that, which is great news. Um, so that’s, that’s some of the mechanics I should also mention as well. You know, adverse childhood events do affect our beliefs and our personality. So if we have something that happens that we, we’ve never really dealt with, often this trauma happens and it, it, it stays in the unconscious belief systems. Um, and the point of trauma is often that it becomes disassociated, which means we can’t, we can’t feel the pain anymore. We can’t feel that we’re angry or upset or depressed about this event that has, that happened many years ago.
But here’s the thing, the body doesn’t forget and neither does your unconscious. Mine’s so, um, one of the, the leading experts controller, his book is called the body keeps the school. Um, so it literally, the body and mind keeps the school from things that are happening at a young age. Even if your, um, you don’t think, you know, you can’t remember it. But the thing is, and this is, if you think about the placebo effect, I think it’s something like six 33% of all healing now occurs due to the placebo effect in these drug trials. And I think it’s getting higher. So if you had a negative event that happens, it often affects your beliefs unconsciously. If you have a big system that say you don’t deserve how that you on one level deserve pain and suffering at some level because you have shame or something associated with something that happened to you or you’ve even inherited that belief, which can happen from a parent as well. Everything you do on the biochemistry to correct, you know, an epigenetic change and that kind of thing can be sabotaged by these unconscious belief systems. And it affects personality as well. So we could become in response to emotional trauma, it affects our personality. We can become chronic achievers, uh, chronic over givers. Um, injury. And this is where we get into behavior, again, this time based on personality. So it’s, it’s by chemistry, behavior and beliefs that, uh, impacted all levels. Um, and the good news is they can all be reversed and corrected, but the research is very strongly that now, um, since this is such a huge area.
Dr. Tatta:
Excellent. I love that you’re talking about the role of emotions and the brain with pain because from what we know now is that pain is an output from the brain. So it’s not from your body up, it’s from your, your brain down basically. And that people who are in chronic pain often have that kind of maladaptive or negative, um, bio plasticity as, as you, you spoke about. So as we continue on this kind of, you know, pathway and transition of our talking about our emotions, what are the stages of trying to cure our emotional trauma in our life so that our pain is better?
Nikki:
Yes. So this is obviously a really important area. So you know, if you haven’t sort of really explored this yet, um, I have like, I have my five steps. So my step one is like start with an exploration. So if you’ve not sort of thought about emotional trauma, you don’t, don’t just think about what happened in childhood but you know, things are happening. Adulthood, um, adjust as important, have just as much of an impact as well. So one of the things that you can do, um, I have to have a completely free questionnaire. There’s no Optune required on my website where you can talk to your ACE score. So it’s just Niki gratrix.com/ace score or lower case. So you can actually just go and it’s the original questionnaire from the original researchers by the CDC. I’ve added additional questions they missed off and more to think about things like the intergenerational trauma.
So, so you can start just to explore, just, just to get the ball rolling. But ultimately remember that’s just, that’s a bit of an intellectual, you know, um, way of doing it. Trauma, you know, trauma affects everybody differently. And so what a trauma that may affect you. I might not be traumatized by that. So it needs to be led by more of a feeling thing rather than just a thinking thing. So I have a lot of people say to me, you know, does this count as an ACE? Does that count as an nice, quite often you have to work out well, you know, how did I feel about that thing that happened and how did I change as a result of it? So don’t just, you don’t just do it as an intellectual thing but also explore. So and look through your childhood. It’s so journaling by the way, is it just writing about experiences?
It’s also scientifically shown to be therapeutic. So there’s the sort of things you can do at home, um, that you could start exploring and doesn’t cost you very much at all. There is a really good book that’s been written called childhood disrupted by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. She wrote that in 2015 and that’s got all the sites references in there, but she follows patients’ stories as well and often helps people to hear other stories and it will trigger things in you to kind of consider as well. So that’s a good resource. Um, but things like journaling, like, so asking yourself, how did, how were you affected in childhood? Um, was there one single event though? Was it a multitude of events that happened over a period? Was there anyone you could talk to about it? Because having a trustworthy person that you can talk to about it is shown to dramatically reduce the impact of trauma.
Um, and really, you know, it, did you just have one big thing that happened or many? So, and are you a sensitive person? You know, are you more sensitive? Can you read energy in a room? Uh, are you emotionally sensitive? Are you an empath? Because that might’ve meant you’re a little bit more of a sensitive type and were more impacted by it. And by the way, that’s not a weakness. It’s actually a strength being an impact, but you have to have better boundaries as well. So, uh, did it, did UACs, did you notice how it affected your personality? Did it affect, did it cause destructive behavior patterns? Start to think all of that through a tool that we use. It’s completely free. That we used a lot in the clinic that I cofounded when we were looking at these kinds of things is something called the Enneagram personality type.
So it’s a Enneagram system of nine different personality types. It’s just a tool for self knowledge. It’s not trying to categorize your box you in is just starting to notice patterns because just noticing patterns can help release them. So the impact of trauma that could have affected your personality could be resolved by just sort of starting to look at, you know, how, what drives you. Um, the Enneagram institute.com as an E double N E H E R a an institute.com have a free questionnaire that you can do on there. They have books they’ve written as well, but that’s just one tool. Again, something you could start kind of doing at home and um, and starting to explore how things could have affected you. And by the way, just having a person, let’s say you’ve had something and you’ve never talked to anybody about it, just speaking to somebody who is a nonjudgmental safe person, could be a counselor or could just be a very trusted family friend just talking about it.
As long as the person is trustworthy and, and judgemental or if you know they’re just a natural healer, um, that can help resolve. So it’s brings things out into the open and talking to it about talking about it with somebody can also dramatically reduce the impact in the pain and the, the kind of issues that may have been set up around that. So that’s something that you can just do straight away at home. I have to step two, I have to talk about some of the things. The great news is there’s some Eastern practices that are scientifically shown to, you know, reduce inflammation from in the brain that has been caused by what I call this kind of limbic kindling. Limbic kindling is the idea that the brain gets overstimulated by stresses, like emotional stresses, things like the big four. I call them that Qigong yoga, Tai Chi and meditation.
Now these are practices that are all shown to support and reduce the impact of the emotional trauma that may have happened in earlier life. Um, and start to calm and rebalance the body, get the body back into what I call a healing state and start to reduce naturally it will help to retrain the brain. Um, so Daphne, good science shows that that all works instead of having a regular practice just to live in. And having a regular practice in this day and age with all the stresses that we have is probably a really good thing to do. So integrating some form of practice is fantastic. It’s also relatively low cost. You know, make sure you do something which is enjoyable. Um, what I would also say, I’ll touch on this more, but for some there may be some more professional help needed. So to resolve some core emotional trauma, it may, there may be sort of an, uh, a professional intervention needed some extra support.
And I’ll talk about what you can do with that in a second. So sometimes, you know, I just have to say some people who like, they know they’ve had a lot of trauma going on, they start meditation and they just don’t seem to be able to do it at all or can’t seem to calm down or it makes them more anxious. Don’t worry. If you’re in that group, that just means that you probably will need a little bit extra how, which is there’s tons of health available out there. So, um, be aware that, that, you know, what works for one person doesn’t work for another. So like we have biochemical individuality. You also have psychological, independent individuality as well. So I’ll, I’ll talk about professional help in a second. But the other thing, I must still go as my step three in resolving trauma. And it’s something that often just gets overlooked.
Um, it’s about cleaning up your relationships and being aware of the cultural impact. So if you start to resolve trauma and you’ve say you’ve had trauma in the past and it’s affected you, maybe there’s parts of you that have been depressed or a tendency to anxiety or tendency to anger. And so on, and you, you truly start to work on that and resolve it. Quite often if the people that you’re hanging out with are still stuck in those States and they’re in a negative state pace about it, like they don’t want to deal with it. I just want to stay exactly as they are, they will track you down. So each the, the research part, math has shown that we have energy fields around our hearts that scientifically shown and that when we are in close proximity with other people, our energy fields will synchronize.
Now our energy field has a 75% correlation with our emotional States. So heart math can look at your heart rate variability and even look at the patterns and tell you what mood you’re in today. So if you’re constantly around somebody who is in a negative state or frankly if your even like kind of married to somebody who’s abusing you now or is it always a victim of abuse and doesn’t want to deal with it? In my clinic experience, one of the biggest blocks to people recovering is who they hang out with. Who you hang out with is who you become. And there’s also tons of research now or like sociogenomics showing that you know, social support has been shown to be a greater indicator of survival than it was then. Your level of activity, your alcohol intake, um, your BMI and even smoking 15 cigarettes a day, that was a 300,000 person matter study done.
So and, and the BMJ have shown that people who um, become happy, you’re more likely for people within one mile to become happy if you become happy in their friends. And it’s in the conclusion of that study was health. Like happiness is a collective phenomenon. Okay. So relationships, culture, really important to address. Um, the other thing is just touching on here, some of these professional professional help, you know, site, there’s lots of different stuff out that, like I said, what works for one does work for another. And I could say like hidden therapies being found to really help some people dealing with trauma in the past and other people say it didn’t work from the tool. So you have to really explore, explore some of these things. Like your Lindquist stick programming and LP Daphne works for a group, um, EMDR which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
Um, neurofeedback psychotherapy, uh, CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy, EFT and TFT that both energy psychology like um, emotional freedom technique, thought field therapy, these things of, there’s some plenty of sort of support online. And what I recommend people do is go and explore those different modalities and see what resonates and listen to patient stories using those things. And if it, if it resonates with you, explore it further and you know, follow that, maybe have a free chat with, with them practitioner. It very important to get a good practitioner as well. A couple of others to mention, somatic experiencing by Dr. Peter Levine, highly recommended dr Pete and vine is a world leading expert on trauma. You wrote the book waking the tiger, all about healing trauma. So that’s more of a body based work worth reading into looking into that if you’re more interested in it.
And also lastly, family constellations. That’s the intergeneration inherited trauma. So it’s often a doctor Dietrich Klinghardt is a big fan of family constellations work is group therapy specifically for that sort of intergenerational aspect. So I’ve given you quite a lot. They will have to sort of have a look at this later and have a, just have a look online. There’s so much material on there, but those are the ones that all have either clinician or science clinic, clinical backing showing they work with a subgroup. But you’ve got to find the path that works for you personally. Um, I’m 0.5, my last point on kind of what to do about kind of the emotional trauma side is don’t fill out the biochemistry work. That’s really important because you will, you know, the role of going to see a nutritionist like new Joe or um, you know, doing the work like healing leaky gut.
You’ll want to reverse the impact of the trauma. So, you know, dealing with chemical sensitivities, maybe you’ve got food sensitivities, leaky gut, I’m doing a chemical cleanup at home, cleaning up EMS, electromagnetic stress. All of those things will add to the load on the body. And some of it, it’s the body is a complex adaptive system. So the original stresses that may have started emotionally would have changed the body and the body itself. Getting things like leaky gut and metabolic changes as a response to the stress response and trauma will feed back to the and increasing anxiety and increase this stress response. So you do need to reduce like take all the loads off the boats if you like and do consider and address by chemistry as well. So I recommend a multifactorial approach required. Um, that’s, we’ve found that as the sort of the best results. Um, we can talk a bit more about that if you’d like as well.
Dr. Tatta:
Awesome. So I think that’s a great five point framework you provide. So people obviously have access to these recordings that can kind of rewind and you know, reduce them that you gave us a ton of strategies. I think obviously the leaky gut and the nutritional aspect is a, is a great place. And is that a lot of times it’s an easy place for people to start cause it’s um, you know, easy for them to kinda, you know, venture into but have to say, I want to thank you for talking about social support and kind of relationships. Cause I think I, I’ve seen it, you know, in the clinic, patients kind of latch onto each other, they can kind of give each other support. And that’s also another reason why I’ve created a support group with this, um, summit called the healing pain support group. So I wanna make sure that people go in there and communicate with each other. Send me an email. Some of the speakers will be in there to talk about, um, some of the strategies they’re talking about on the summit. So make sure you check that out. But as you’re talking, I’m, you know, my mind is expanding rapidly and I really, two thoughts in two questions, I guess. You know, the first one is we have both clinicians and patients on, on the summit. And you’re a nutritionist from training, but you’re talking a lot about the emotional aspect that I think is incredible. But if you’re a clinician, let’s say like a nutritionist who has traditionally just done the nutritional part of it, or let’s say some other practitioner with physical therapist or physician who was just on the more, you know, biomedical model, how do you start to integrate some really easy ways to talk to people about emotional trauma? Because sometimes it can be really difficult to, you know, break that kind of chasm with them.
Nikki:
Great question. So what I tend to say to practitioners is, um, well first of all, if you’re a practitioner, do your own ACE score. Start exploring it for yourself. Um, so if you can learn to articulate your own, sit your own experience and you know, we can only take our patients as far as we’ve gone, you know, so, so that’s a big thing. It’s a huge thing. I just wish, you know, chap practitioners don’t need to train in all modalities. They don’t now need to do a three year degree in psychology. And I have to get that, Oh my God, how do I cope with that? So you don’t need to do that. Um, that your awareness is what matters. So the best thing is like do your own trauma, do, do your own clearing, and then you can start to do things like integrate like an ACE score.
You can take the ACE score and, and integrate that into your questionnaire that you’re doing with your, you know, for biochemical stuff as well. So integrate a questionnaire and you know, there’s, it was interesting cause a lot of doctors were afraid to sort of start broaching the subject and it turns out people want to talk about it, people actually want to share. And actually if they had more time to discuss it, you know, as long as you know, it’s obviously doing that in an empathic and nonjudgmental way. And you would learn how to do that by passion, working with a, maybe a practitioner who you talk to stuff about and learn how to deep talk about these things. Um, but the key thing is building this, there’s many different things a practitioner can do. But just starting the conversation, but learning your own stuff, it makes you a much more, you can influence your patients much better to say and get them to do a referral.
So part of your service to a patient can be having a referral network. So you know, some great NLP practitioners you deal with say chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia type issues when they need to do NLP to clear a maladaptive stress response. Um, so, and you can then work concurrently. So you’re building that kind of network. Um, but I, you know, I must say like I always mentioned this to practitioners as well. You know, if you do resolve your own trauma, just think about your own energy field is in the really clear healing state that is healing to the patient before you’ve recommended a single supplement or a single diet recommendation, that practitioner patient interaction. It can be profound, profoundly healing. And the patient won’t know that. It’s just because you spoke from a, from your heart and clearly, and you had a, you were speaking coherently, people with trauma kind of a, mostly, you know, they have more than one personality carrying on.
You’ll become a more effective communicator marketer as well. If you integrate this site in, I think all practitioners should integrate much more psychology. I think it’s the future. Um, I think it’s going to be the future more and more. And the functional medicine movement and nutrition movement is fantastic, but it’s a partial truth. Um, and I would also say by the way, energy medicine is, there’s a big door opener for energy medicine because of the psychology side. And there actually think you could do, as a nutritionist, I started to do sort of energy testing, energy medicine testing, and I started using things like kind of what you could call emphases, calls, even homeopathy even was, was actually designed to work on psychology. So, and even essential oils work on the mind and the brain. So if you’re used to prescribing things, there’s actually plenty to do. There’s loads that you could do as a, as a kind of nutrition-focused practitioner. But awareness is, it starts with awareness. And don’t be overwhelmed. You don’t have to go and do a three-year degree like college.
Dr. Tatta:
It’s true. I mean, I look at the functional medicine matrix tree and the one thing they talk about is the mind in there. But I think as switch, the medicine practice should be focused so much on the gun, so much on nutrition and so much on what are you eating or what do you not eating or what should you not eat. And there’s that one kind of sphere hanging out there that I think, okay, a lot of people need to rapidly move toward that one sphere of mind, body or mind and brain if you will. And that’s really their pathway to kinda, you know, sometimes you need that to get to the very later phases of your healing. You’ve done the exercise, you’ve done the nutrition. What’s really missing is that one part. And a lot of times I’ll just tell new practitioners, I tell them just off the what’s called the stress and anxiety scale.
It’s a really simple scale. You can fill it out yourself, you can have your patient filled out and you still have to look at that scale and you see the kind of questions that pop out and you said, okay, there’s obviously a work issue here. That work is the work relationships are really affecting my pain or the relationship with my mother that I had Harvard for many years is really affecting my current pains. I think they’re all really, really valid points. I mean, my other question just from a personal known as how did you get so interested in kind of the mind body aspect of yourself? Obviously your background is kind of more in nutrition, but you’ve rapidly moved into this area.
Nikki:
Yes, so what happened with me is I’ve always been Ash Ashley always interested in consciousness itself and I had that interest well before I even trained as a nutritionist. So when I did train, I was at a trend at the Institute for Optune nutrition in London. And as I was training that, I met my business partner who I cofounded the clinic with and he was a psychology practitioner, but he’d had chronic fatigue for seven years. He’d been bed bound for two of those years and had done everything, I mean he’d done everything on the nutrition side and had found that he needed to integrate psychology and then became a psychology practitioner. So kind of when the two of us got together, I was director of nutrition. I took care of that side because he’d already done the psychology. So it was re really just like one of us has gotta do nutrition and the pod chemistry.
So you’ve done the psychology, I’ll do this side. But I was always right in the beginning with chronic fatigue and we had a lot of fibromyalgia patients as well because there’s some, some similarities. Not saying this as a tool, but some similarities. Um, we knew this wasn’t going to be resolvable with the bulk of patients with less. You did a multifactorial approach and yes, I think in the, in the functional medicine side, we still tend to say, Oh, stress is a bit like reduce your stress as a bit like saying go and eat food. I mean our level of understanding about stress, about personality types, about what types of stresses have impacted us, whether it’s from childhood or now it’s we need to sort of deepen our own standing about it. So, um, I sort of did, I’m very much into the psychoneural immunology of things.
So, because I was always, I, I, every patient I was working with was getting psychology and it was quite humbling. So we think we can get so far doing gut stuff and then all of a sudden that, you know, patient would do a psychology session and July, I don’t need to see you anymore. Okay. You know? So it was that powerful. So it was always there writing my mind and I started to sort of understand how important it is. I mean, it’s not, it’s not even just what’s going on in the subjective state of the patient, not just in childhood, but also, you know, getting a chronic complex illness. If it’s affected your social life, maybe you’ve lost your job, maybe your marriage is at risk because of the chronic complex illness that’s traumatizing. So there’s trauma going on at the time. Uh, practice a patient could be coming to see you as well. So, um, this, there’s a lady I’ve interviewed on my summit and she, she’s done a whole section of, um, tons of research showing that people be all full stack any full stages of trauma during the chronic complex illness. So we, we can’t afford not to ask about the subjective state of our patient. If you’re a [inaudible], whatever your modality, you need to know about the subjective state to the patients. So I think the future, so I can hear immunology and it’s kind of that side of things. So yeah, that was how I got into it.
Dr. Tatta:
Yeah. And I think one of the interesting parts of that psychoneuroimmunology is that high cortisol really is what drives your memories. And if you are in a constant hypervigilant state around a pain experience, your cortisol is typically high for a period of time. Then obviously you know, drops right and low. But it’s very important to get your cortisol checked and just to make that connection between what cortisol is doing in your body and how it’s affecting your brain and your memory.
Nikki:
Absolutely. And you know, if, if your, your neural pathways of sort of designed to have this chronic stress response, it can go and see, I’ve seen it go into a chronic fair response or chronic pain response, a chronic chemical response that’s multiple chemical sensitivity. That’s five Roger, that’s chronic fatigue right there. And so this kind of the limbic kindling aspect of it is huge. So it’s not just you want to do like intervene at the gut level and, and so on that the kind of the brain, some of this can be perpetuated in the brain because the brain is making conditioned now to respond in that way. So I’ve done this work where I’ve done the gut, the gut perfect. You know, we cleared the parasites, we healed all this and the person is still having a massive stress response. So sometimes that’s when you need to go in and do the psychology side and it comes to the whole thing down.
And then what you do on the biochemistry works better. So, and you sometimes you switched between the two as well. So I think that’s the direction that we’re all ends up going in as practitioners as a lot more as well. And we start to see like we’ll get so far and then get stuck. And I have also seen a kit if all you do is psychology, I’ve seen that too. Do just what you do. Psychology, I’ve seen more likely to have a faster response but more risk of relapse later. So if somebody is not cleared up, they’ve got, they haven’t sorted out green sensitives, they haven’t sorted that chemical stuff in the environment and so on. And they just do psychology. It, it can sometimes not stick. So that’s kind of why it kind of this multi-factored approach, um, is, is what I’ve seen to work best.
Dr. Tatta:
Yeah, that’s a beautiful point to bring up cause I, I refer a lot of patients to what’s called act therapy, acceptance and acceptance and commitment therapy, which is a form of cognitive behavior therapy. It’s wonderful and it oftentimes does a great job of lowering people’s fear, especially related to fear avoidance activities related to pain. So it drops their fear very quickly, which is wonderful. They feel better. But I always tell them, well now that your fear is gone, you realize that your fear is the cause of your pain and not the actual activity. Now you actually have to go do that activity that used to cause you fear to try to be pattern the memories in your brain so that the next time you go to pick up laundry or you know, sit for too long or walk for too long, then it’s not actually the movement itself. But it’s that few mechanisms in your brain. So, you know, I think it’s so key how all the therapies kind of start to intertwine themselves after a while. The psychotherapy, the nutritional therapy, the physical therapy though, you know, I think the therapies are really the wave of the future actually.
Nikki:
Yes. That’s so true. What you just said, that it goes across the board as well. So I’m about, it’s the fear of that the event that might trigger the pain or the chemical reaction or a class. So chronic fatigue, we would see people scared to do activity because they were afraid of collapsing. And actually we found that it was the fear and the trigger in the brain that caused the claps. Not the activity, exactly what you just said there about the pain. Exactly the same thing. The fear of the pain instigates it, not the activity. And that’s where the NIMBY Pitt piece comes into this. Um, it, this is really in the UK. We’ve got this gone a lot farther in terms of understanding that we have in the US yet on this for some reason. I don’t know why because you guys like invented NLP and EFT and all this stuff.
So, um, but if more patients knew about this, that they have this other route to consider, there’s a lot of unnecessary pain and suffering occurring because of it. And it’s unconscious programming. So we’re not saying patients are making this up. We’re not saying that, that, you know, they’re doing this, not saying it’s all in their head in any way. This is unconscious programs, neurological issue. It’s not, we’re not sort of saying you to see the big thing with our pain groups in the chronic degree as far as like, you know, they’ve been told this is all in their head. It kind of is, but it’s at the neurological level that’s very different than just saying this is like a deviant psychiatric behavior to get attention or something so, so fortunate. There’s so much pain out there. I mean that we just pain. It’s unfortunate there’s so much suffering going on cause people aren’t aware about this information. So it’s great. The work that you’re doing with this summit as well, Joe, just to give you kudos there for doing this and helping so many people.
Dr. Tatta:
Thank you. I mean, like you said, you know, our, our, the United States of America is such a large country and you know, we have kind of pockets of things that occur in this country. Um, what happens in New York where I live is actually very different than what goes on in California. California tends to be a little bit more open than the East coast is with kind of embracing some of the NLP and some of the kind of mind-body therapies. But there’s definitely a, a rapid chain of thing happening everywhere, especially in the pain world. We’re really starting to see that there is really a, you know, a big kind of psychological aspect to chronic pain and pain syndrome. So I really appreciate your interviews. I think it’s been, been excellent. And if you can tell everyone where they can find you and some of the, the, the gifts you have for us today on the summit.
Nikki:
Yeah. So you can check out my website. It’s a Niki gratrix.com that’s [inaudible], G R a T I x.com. And I’ve got loads of free stuff with that. Everything from doing a chemical cleanup relationship cleanups. And so let plenty of information and I’ve got my an ebook, which is the seven steps to healing emotional trauma and rebuilding resilience, and there’s tons of resources in the back, especially around all those psychologists and things that I mentioned, so are like, ah, can’t remember it all. It’s actually all of that reference with links to where you can find the resources all in the free ebook. It’s part of your summit.
Dr. Tatta:
Excellent. So I want to thank Nkki for being on the Healing Pain Summit. It’s been a great interview. Please check out her website nikigratrix.com as well as you have a question for Niki. Please hop into the healing pain support group and post a question. We’ll be happy to get back to you. And if you’d like to, it’s you, which I’m sure you did. Please hit the like button share with your friends and family on Facebook as well as Twitter. And we will see you in the next interview.
