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Transcript
- 02:25 About Niki Gratrix
- 05:20 Stress and Emotional Trauma
- 11:28 Mechanisms of Stress and Trauma
- 17:08 Addressing Emotional Trauma
- 30:38 Optimizing Energy
- 34:01 Body and Mind
- 36:43 Final Tips for Unburdening Trauma and Improving Energy Levels
- 37:19 The Most Pressing Health Issue in the World Today
- 39:59 Where to Find Niki Gratrix
Wendy Myers: Hello. My name is Wendy Myers. Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. I have to say, I really love doing this podcast. I’m just so thankful to be able to help you guys. And I’m so thankful for all the listeners who tune in every week. It’s really a joy to wake up every morning and do what I do, so I just wanted to thank you for that.
I just wrapped up a Memorial Day weekend. I had a wonderful weekend with my daughter. We went to the Los Angeles Zoo. She said her favorite animals were the amphibian, the snakes, and the reptile exhibits, which I thought was really interesting. I just had a wonderful weekend bike-riding in Venice Beach, and then going hiking in […] Park. We made a lot of healthy foods. I’m feeling very rejuvenated and relaxed from my weekend.
Today, we’re going to be talking to my friend, Niki Gratrix. She has a really, really interesting approach to why many people have chronic fatigue, health issues, et cetera. This is a very interesting podcast. She’s going to be talking about one of the underlying causes of chronic fatigue, which is emotional stress, trauma in childhood, and a lot of tips how we can overcome our childhood trauma, and any kind of trauma that you’ve suffered in your lifetime.
We’re going to be talking about how stress and trauma, emotional trauma affect your health, how you can act to address the effects of emotional trauma, and how to attain abundant energy.
Before we do the podcast, I have to let you know that this podcast is for informational purposes only. Please consult your health care practitioner before engaging in any of the suggestions that we suggest today on the podcast. The Live to 110 Podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health conditions.
Wendy Myers: Now, our guest, Niki Gratrix, she is an award-winning, internationally-renowned registered nutritionist, mind-body expert, and health writer, helping people to optimize their energy. In 2005 she co-founded one of the largest mind-body clinics in integrative medicine in the UK with patients in 35 countries, where she worked as Direction of Nutrition until 2001. The clinic specialized in treating chronic fatigue syndrome, won the award for Outstanding Practice in 2009, and later published a preliminary study in 2012 on its results with patients in the British Medical Journal Open.
After finishing her degree in economics and international politics at the University of Warwick, Niki started her working career as a Chartered accountant. After a seven-year career in financial services, she left to work in an environment with more heart and meaning, and in a way, she could more directly help and serve others.
Niki, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Niki Gratrix: Thank you so much for having me, Wendy. I’m glad to be here.
Wendy Myers: Yes, I’m happy to have you. Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your story?
Niki Gratrix: So, I originally co-founded a clinic that specialized in working with people with fatigue. It was back in 2005. It was a mind-body clinic. So we had a psychology division and had a nutrition division. And I headed up the nutrition side.
In the end, we had 10 practitioners. It was quite big, and we had patients in 35 different countries. Actually, we ended up doing a published study in the British Medical Journal Open, taking a multifactorial approach to optimizing fatigue.
So, I’ve always approached all chronic illnesses from a psychological, as well as physiological approach because I think anything less than that is a disservice to the patient, and you’re likely to get less results doing that.
So, I did that back up to about 2010. And then I ran a large summit online, which is called the Abundant Energy Summit, again, specializing in how to optimize energy, well-being and overcome chronic fatigue. And I was interviewing about 29 world-leading experts, and had 30,000 people on the summit.
I think it’s the biggest fatigue summit so far that’s been online. And now, I have a busy online engaged audience where I cover all these aspects to having amazing energy.
Wendy Myers: What is the website to your summit?
Niki Gratrix: The summit website is AbundantEnergySummit.com.
Wendy Myers: Great. So for anyone, you can still look at the summit and benefit from it as well if you go to that URL, that web address.
Wendy Myers: So let’s talk about how important is stress and emotional trauma in attaining and maintaining abundant energy and health. As you know, a lot of people have emotional issues that are very, very stressful physically on their body. How does that relate to their energy production?
Niki Gratrix: Trauma, especially early life trauma, is such a huge topic. It’s so important. I think it’s probably the most underexposed risk factor for health conditions. Trauma or emotional stress throughout a lifetime has a major impact on health. But just to give you an idea about how important it is—and most people don’t realize this—there are some statistics around an adverse childhood event, specifically looking at early life stress, and there are huge studies done by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente looking at a cohort of over 17,500 adults.
They studied all these studies in about the mid-1990s. First of all, they measured how many people had adverse childhood events. As they came out, 67% of everybody had adverse childhood events. When you consider that gluten is about 20%, gluten sensitivity is about 20% of the population, adverse childhood events is up to 70%, and that was an underestimate.
The sort of things, it just clarifies well what we’re talking about. And we talk about adverse childhood events and trauma and so on. They actually specified about 10 different things, and they say it’s parents separating or divorced, physical, sexual or emotional abuse, physical and emotional neglect, domestic violence, mental illness in the family, substance abuse or incarceration by a family member.
But that was an underestimate because the researches—and I’ll tell you the statistics in just a minute—the correlation between the number of adverse childhood events, we call them ACEs, and illness onset in later life is just absolutely mind-blowing.
But just to say right away, they actually underestimated that. They missed out things like being a victim of homophobia, racism, and death of a caregiver, problems with homelessness in childhood or financial stress that hits childhood as well.
They missed many things. But just to explain to people, if people had a high number of ACEs in childhood, they had an increased risk of 7 out of 10 of the top 10 causes of death. If you had 4 ACEs, your relative risk of things like chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder is two-and-a-half times higher than people with no ACEs, hepatitis, two-and-a-half times higher, depression, four-and-a-half times higher. Cancer is two-and-a-half times high. Diabetes is two times higher. Stroke is the same. Being suicidal was 12 times higher. Alzheimer’s is four times higher. If you had eight ACEs, your risk of lung cancer and heart disease would triple.
They did the same huge studies with autoimmune disease. The correlation of a woman who has ACEs in childhood, she has a strong correlation to having autoimmune in childhood, is smoking and lung cancer. The correlation there is strong.
And if you have six ACEs, you have a reduced lifespan of 20 years.
These were CDC, Kaiser Permanente studies. The list goes on. They started these studies in the mid-1990s.
The researchers were shocked with the results. They weren’t expecting it. The studies originally came out to the obesity clinic, running at Kaiser Permanente. And they couldn’t work out why people were dropping out. They were doing really well with people losing weight. And it was Dr. Felitti and Dr. Anda who were the lead researchers at Kaiser Permanente. They wanted to discovery why they were doing so well, and then suddenly, people who are just starting to lose the weight, and they had about a 55% dropout rate.
By mistake, they started to interview people. One woman summed up, which she basically said that she started to get panic attacks the thinner that she got and the better that she was, and the more anxious the thinner that she was getting. In the end, she just said, “Look, I was sexually abused as a child, and I realize now that the weight I’m carrying was protection. It’s, ‘I don’t want to be seen. I’m going to get less attention if I’m bigger.’”
So it summed up. That was an example. So they investigated that and then found this shocking results that just show this hidden crisis, I suppose.
Niki Gratrix: And also, if you think just something else as well, they missed certain ACEs and they also ignored things like inter-generationally-inherited trauma. So this is now coming through the research studies that are clearly showing that trauma, for example, third generation survivors of the Holocaust victims have the same physiological and psychological symptoms as their parents. And that’s being shown in various different countries where there are being destructive acts of war or famine. That’s being shown. Basically, we’ll talk more about this when we talk about mechanisms, but early life stress and emotional trauma, in general, has an epigenetic impact. So, of course, that can be inherited.
So it’s huge. It’s the biggest factor, and I’m on a mission to talk about it and try to get it out to a wide audience.
Wendy Myers: That is so interesting because I do hair mineral analysis, and I can see trauma patterns in the hair mineral analysis. People who have really, really high calcium levels, calcium deadens nerve impulses. It numbs you emotionally and physically, so I know when people have really high calcium, they’ve had some sort of trauma, I don’t know what kind, but some sort of trauma that physiologically affects them and it affects their health and their metabolism and their body, et cetera.
Wendy Myers: Let’s talk about some of the mechanisms. How does trauma and stress affect our biology?
Niki Gratrix: This is a really interesting area, and whether the same mechanism are at work with you, it’s an early life childhood event or it happened in adulthood, the mechanisms are the same. The impact of adverse childhood events or trauma during childhood has a particularly powerful effect because the child’s brain is still developing, and they’re much more, if you like, imprintable. But in essence, the mechanisms are the same.
So one of the things that they found, effective, you’ve got three areas that trauma affects. It basically affects behavior, biology and beliefs and emotions. So the early study showed that if you have early life stress, it’s going to affect your behavior, and it’s going to impact health behaviors. So you’re much more likely, if you have ACEs in childhood, say four or more ACEs, you’re, for example, 7 times more likely to become an alcoholic, 11 times more likely to use injection drugs, you’re more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, eat bad food, binge, drink, all of those things.
So obviously, that’s going to have some explanation for that correlation with the high increase risk of all those diseases.
But the original cohort showed that it wasn’t enough to explain because most of the people who had normal cholesterol, normal weight, didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, weren’t diabetic, if they had seven ACEs, they still had a 360% increased risk of heart disease.
So effectively, what’s going on—because it’s obviously not enough to explain just by behavior. So this is the key thing. It’s basically the biochemistry of stress. Essentially, we’re getting into a bit of what we call the science of psychoneuroimmunology, this connection between the neuroendocrine system and how the brain speaks to the immune system.
And effectively, what’s happening, especially happening in early childhood, is epigenetically, we’re resetting the brain’s response to stress to a lower threshold where epigenetically things are changing, where this hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, this HPA access, which is the hub of the stress system in the body, this becomes a lowered threshold for this system to become activated. And we have cortisol pumping out longer.
So this is what actually changes.
And essentially, you’re basically marinating in cortisol, and eventually, inflammatory cytokines. So chronic, unpredictable stress, either a one-off shock or intermittent overtime, kindles the brain, kindles this HPA access, changes epigenetically. So it does reset the system permanently and lets you intervene. And we can talk about you can intervene, and it just can be reversed. But unless you intervene, it will stay that way.
And so the researchers really turned these big, huge studies. This has generated a lot of research, obviously, the whole ACEs work. And there are a lot of researchers now getting very interested in how this trauma is affecting people epigenetically, and through the stress mechanism.
Really, depending on which list that you get, it depends if you like your genetic weight link, and your exposure to epigenetically-inherited and current life stresses. Some people would go on, and if it affects their brain, for example, chronic stress that goes crazy in the brain, will cause the little microglia, which the immune system in the cell to go berserk, the immune system cells in the brain to go crazy, and that they start pruning nerves in the brain, which that leads to Alzheimer’s. They’re thinking that’s leading to other psychiatric problems.
Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, that range of illnesses, they are like the poster children for adverse childhood events. If you have adverse childhood events, you have a six-fold increased risk of chronic fatigue syndrome in later life. So the sexual abuse in childhood is very highly strongly correlated with the onset of fibromyalgia.
That’s why it was my case study to study that illness. In those cases, the HPA access is going out of balance, and ultimately, causing chronic fatigue problems with mitochondrial function. And in fibromyalgia, it can be how people are processing serotonin and so on, and pain receptors.
Just depending on your genetics, those stressors will all affect the core systems of the HPA access, and the immune system to lead to a chronic shift that’s going to stay there. And it’s a bit of a smoking gun because you’re just going to have this stress all that time. Your whole system is reset, so it only takes another few other stressors later in life, a trigger, and you fall into full-blown illness.
But really, the illness started 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and people don’t realize that their whole system had already shifted from a long time ago. So it takes a long time for chronic illness to appear. It just doesn’t happen overnight.
Wendy Myers: That’s an amazing explanation. All the research is showing all the diseases, cancer, autoimmune disease, et cetera. They all are beginning 20 or 30 years prior to manifesting symptoms and stress.
Wendy Myers: So we know that you’ve established that people that had suffered abuse and trauma, it affects their biology. They’re not able to produce energy. They were suffering from chronic fatigue or severe health issues, autoimmune, et cetera. What are the steps that people can take to begin addressing emotional trauma and healing it? Where do they start?
Niki Gratrix: The good news, there are things like neurogenesis, neuron synaptogenesis. The good news is you can reverse the impact of all kinds of trauma. I have five steps that I normally share with people. And the first thing to do is, the step one, it’s not too expensive to do either, firs of all, you might just want to start by, what I call, exploring. Maybe if you have an illness now, for example, go and get your ACE score. Go and take the original questionnaire and start tossing up the number that you may have.
So I have a completely freely available, the questionnaire from the original research on my website, which is at NikiGratrix.com/acescore. All one word, lower case. So that’s N-I-K-I-G-R-A-T-R-I-X dot com acescore. And start the exploration process.
The other thing is, it’s shown, for example, that journaling has also scientifically been shown to really help to start to resolve the trauma. We’ll talk about this more, but you’ll want to reverse its biochemical impacts, but you’ll also want to actually resolve the trauma at the emotional level as well. So we talked about changing beliefs and so on.
So journaling is fantastic. It’s just asking questions that you may not have questioned before like, “Could there have been some kind of trauma either childhood or adulthood, or even on the onset of the illness that was stress-related or emotional trauma-related?”
“When that trauma happened, was it much more emotionally, so they tend to be the more sensitized? Can you feel energy in a room? Can you read emotions in a room?”
And the more sensitized, need to have more boundaries and so on. And the time when the trauma happened, was there anybody you could talk to because the research shows that if you did have just one […] it can dramatically […] long-term impact.
And also, was it one ACE or trauma, or was it many over time? Was it covert trauma? Was it not something so advert like alcoholism or anything like that? Was it more verbal and emotional abuse?
Did it lead on to destructive health patterns? Can you correlate that with any kind of binge drink or anything like that?
The other big thing the ACEs do in trauma is it shapes up personalities. So if we tend to be an overachiever, workaholism, overgiving to others, a tendency for lack of self-care, did it impact that as well? Can you see personality traits being impacted by an event that happened? Ever since that event happened, you felt the need of either worthless or you had to prove yourself all the time.
One of the things that we used a lot in our clinic to help establish the impact on personality and so on, there’s a personality core test called the enneagram. It’s a system with nine different personality types. It includes things like the […] type, the giver, the overachiever, the perfectionist.
We actually identify those four have, if you like, the most energy-depleting psychology, as we called it, because they seem to be the ones that show up most prevalently with things like chronic fatigue, for example.
So the reason I just read out the enneagram, if you go to Enneagram Institute, that’s E-N-N-E-A-G-R-A-M Institute dot com, there’s a completely free, little questionnaire that you can do online there, and just start to investigate. And that will lead you down another kind of road as well.
The first thing is, yes, you might never even thought about trauma as a factor for some chronic illness that you may have now. So just start by exploring, and maybe talk to somebody. You may have never talked to anybody about it before.
That’s step one. That’s an easy, straightforward thing to do.
Another thing, at step two, which is again, it’s doable, everybody can do this, certain lifestyle factors and practices, eastern practices, where there are nice, plenty amounts of research showing that they reduce inflammation, reduce the stress response, change things even epigenetically, and the big four, I call them, things like tai chi, medication, yoga and qigong.
I’m bringing that as a regular practice. It has to be regular practice done over time. It’s been scientifically shown to do all kinds of things, even increased […] We love […] We like long […] This is a sign of anti-aging.
Those are some of the big ones shown to reduce inflammation, things like that. So regular practice, so that you can start to reduce this overactive stress response.
Another key area, step three, is actually looking at your relationships and the culture that you’re in. A lot of people completely overlook this, but it’s actually a huge factor.
When I was in clinical practice, if somebody was in a relationship and spending a lot of time with people, either family, friends or partner, who is a negative person or has a lot of emotional trauma themselves and is not proactive about resolving it and so on, it affects you majorly. We would also find that people could do all kinds of things for themselves to improve their health, resolve emotional trauma for themselves, but if they were stuck in some kind of relationship with somebody who wasn’t supportive and was in a very negative place, your energy will be directly affected by that.
The research at Heartmath shows that we all have this electromagnetic field around our hearts, and the recent [HEART Score] research has shown that our fields tend to synchronize. They go into a coherent state with one another. And also, your field and how coherent it is, is directly correlating with emotions. That’s the other thing that Heartmath showed to have a 75% correlation with what they call heart rate variability, which is a brilliant test to stress.
So if you have a low HRV, heart rate variability, because you’re in a chronic state of stress all the time, and you’re hanging around that all the time, or someone else’s energy field like that, it will impact you.
There are huge studies like [Landmark] studies showing that social isolation or lack of social support is a huge factor for increased inflammation, and it’s a bigger risk factor than thing like smoking. Basically, you’re smoking 15 cigarettes a day if you don’t have [support]. And that was a study of 300,000 people. It’s [Landmark] study.
This is really important. Who you hang out with is who you become. And that was a Tony Robbins comment. He was probably right. I studied it many years ago.
Two final factors, if you’re considering professional help, obviously, there are plenty of different types of professional help for resolving trauma out there. Some of the best things that you can do, I must say, what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. We have biochemical individuality. We have psychological individuality.
Somebody can go into hypnotherapy on an even that happened with them and have amazing results. And someone else does it, and it doesn’t work
But some of the things that do work, just like therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy helps some. Not everybody is a fan of them, but it does work for some. Neuro feedback is showing promising results. It’s a little bit more expensive. You’d have to look that up online and find a practitioner who’s got a system you could sign with.
Another one is NLP. That’s neurolinguistic programming. That’s being found to be great. A lot of clinics that specialize in things like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome and those related illnesses are using NLP to help reverse what we call maladaptive stress response, which is both an increased stress response to general things in life, but also to the symptoms and of being ill, and the trauma of being ill. That can be a fundamental factor because maladaptive stress towards your own illness is a perpetuating factor.
So NLP is great. Another one is EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization reprocessing. EFT and TFT, you can find tons of resources online and for tapping all kinds of emotional trauma, just YouTube, EFT for everything, plenty of research online for that and support online.
A couple others that are worth mentioning, Semantic Experiencing. That’s the work of Dr. Peter Levine, who wrote the book called Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. He’s a world-leading expert. It’s a more body-focused trauma because trauma doesn’t just exist in the brain, in the mind, the body remembers of the trauma. And so actually, you also need to clear through the body as well.
It’s very feeling-focused experiential type of therapy.
The last one worth mentioning is family constellations therapy that Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt is a big fan of. That one is actually really good for inter-generational trauma. So if you want to actually resolve the trauma that might be impacting you that happened two generations ago, it’s a kind of group therapy.
But the key thing is about all these different types of professional support out there. Really, what people need to do and go and investigate the different types. If they’ve got free 15-minute chats that you can get, so you can talk to the practitioner, get a feel for it, look at other people’s patient stories, their patient success stories. There will be books available on all of those different topics and information online.
And you’ve got to really see what resonates with you. And also, sometimes synchronistically, we get pretty in touch with the particular practitioner. And so trust that. Sometimes it’s worth trusting and to just explore that.
So you’ve got to find out what’s the right thing for you and what resonates with you. There’s no fixed protocol. It’s just finding out what you’re most comfortable doing.
But the good news is that all of those types of things have shown results with reversing emotional trauma and improving health conditions.
The final point five that I always stress in my little five-point plan here for recovery from emotional trauma is not throughout the biochemistry work that you would do on the biology directly because once we’ve had emotional trauma, it’s changed our body epigenetically and it changes things like the gut. It causes leaky gut. The research has shown that. It changes the HPA access, as we’ve mentioned, and so on. And all that does is actually increases the toxic load that we now carry around, which perpetuates the whole stress response because the body doesn’t differentiate between emotional stress and HPA access. It doesn’t differentiate between emotional stress and chemical or electrical stress for example.
So once we have trauma, we have potentially just increased toxic load on the body coming from things like leaky gut, not detoxifying properly, will often not sleep properly and so on. So we do need to stop this vicious cycle and actually intervene.
So if we have leaky gut, heal it. If we think we have food sensitivities, get the diet under control. If we think we’ve got a buildup of toxicity, do the cleansing, get the good minerals in. And also, you can do things like HPA access modulation with things like adaptogenic herbs and things as we know.
And then maybe the SNPs or the genetic testing we could do. We might need to bypass certain genetic propensities nutritionally, which will all clear the toxins out and reduce the overall toxic load and the burden, which in turn, reduces the stress effects.
The body doesn’t differentiate. We need to intervene somewhere and reduce that side as well. What we found is if you just do biochemical work and you don’t do any psychology work, you might not get as good a result. You might get great results and the patient didn’t need anything else, or you may get partial results, or not results that get so far but it doesn’t take the patient the whole way.
So if you bring in the psychology, you’ll get in a full healing state, and when you work concurrently, it makes everything you do on the biochemistry work better.
I’ve also found that vice versa, if all you do is psychology, and you don’t do any biochemistry, you can get a fast result, and may you get a full result, but there’s an increased risk of relapse. So people may do really well for a month, and then their bodies are just not freeing them enough. They needed to get their diet sorted out. They needed to get the inflammation down in other areas.
So really a concurrent approach is what we use in the clinic, and we definitely found that the best way, and the patient has to find their personal journey in that. And it will be different. People will need to do different things. it’s all personalized, obviously.
Wendy Myers: What else do people need to consider when they’re trying to optimize their energy?
Niki Gratrix: Wow! That’s a huge topic, so I kind of covered them in my summit. Specifically, just talking about energy, it’s actually a lot of what we’ve covered. We want to look at emotional stressors, childhood stressors, impact of trauma in adulthood. We want to see, is the trauma that we have, are we traumatized by being ill? And do we need to have extra support around the fact that we’re actually dealing with something that’s traumatic in our life time and currently right now? Maybe we’re dealing with disability, all of a sudden, because we suddenly have an illness onset, and it’s caused a change in lifestyle.
Also, it is good to look at things like personality typing. Are we doing behaviors that are actually depleting our energy? Are we a workaholic and a total overachiever?
No amount of vegetable juicing or supplements is going to fix the fact that you don’t get enough rest. People forget pacing, sleep and rest, these are actually huge. If you are suffering from fatigue, maybe you just need to get more sleep, maybe you just need more breaks, holidays and things. We can all probably […] overworking sometimes, so those kinds of things.
And also, your exercise regime is huge and those practices I talked about, the eastern practices are all very important. A couple of other factors that tend to get overlooked, the electromagnetic side of things. We run on the sun.
Sunlight is so important. And it’s not just vitamin D. It actually charges the water in our body and makes the whole flow of our water system better. It’s called structured water, if anybody wants to look into it. It’s Professor Gerald Pollack’s work, who is an amazing expert on water.
So things like that and earth, being connected to the earth. If you ever walked down a beach for half-an-hour by foot, and you just feel a little bouncy, happy and floating, the earth is massive. It’s like when you plug in your phone and recharge your phone, when we connect barefoot to the earth, it’s just like that. We’re recharging our system. So it’s something like earthing our Circadian rhythm.
And the whole EMF thing, if the electromagnetic frequency is too much blue light at night that’s coming from screens, having Wi-Fi on all the time and your cell phone on, not only are they stressors, they fatigue as well.
So I have a whole set of sleep hygiene. I do an EMF home cleanup where you turn off your Wi-Fi at night, you turn your cell phone on airplane mode, as much as you can, and things like that.
I also some psychology, energetics and many of those things I mentioned on the biochemistry side. I’ve done some work with mitochondrial function there as well, specifically with energy.
But again, multifactorial approach, you have more than one body to consider, so I always say to people, think about your biochemistry, think about energetics and electromagnetics, and think about psychology. And if you’re doing that, that’s truly holistic. You’re truly taking the holistic approach.
I think that’s everything I covered on my summit as well, the whole shebang.
Wendy Myers: So how do people deal with this extra level of complexity now that they need to consider both body and their mind?
Niki Gratrix: Well, it’s very interesting because it might seem like a lot to people. Candace Pert, she was one of the mind-body expert. She wrote The Molecules and Emotion. She was one of the leading experts out there. She said that everything that happens, you can’t differentiate between the mind and the body. The two things are connected. Healing impulse from any side, the physical body or the psychological body, can actually correct the whole system.
It’s not a bilinear thing. If you have loads on the boat and those are stressors, and it might be toxic, it might be emotional, it might be electromagnetic, and that’s weighing the boat down. And as we get ill, that’s the boat sinking.
What we want to do is unload the boat. So the idea is let’s optimize. Don’t even think about focusing on causes. Optimize the physical, everything you could do environmentally and physiologically. Optimize the electromagnetic body, optimize what you’re doing psychologically.
If you do all that, you’re unloading enough things off the boat, but eventually, it will come back up. But because we’re talking about systems here, we’re talking about systems, […] where everything affects everything, and its complexity and complex adaptive systems, we’re often waiting for a tipping point. So you can do a lot of work over a long period, and not see much return, and then all of a sudden, you take that last thing off all in one go.
And I call that the scales effect of recovery, so there’s a whole balanced scale that turn where the heavy weights are on one side causing the weight to be out of balance, in an ill state, or you take one weight off, the weights aren’t going to change. That thing’s not going to balance until you take the last weight off the balance scales.
Sometimes, I think the message for people, don’t give up. Your body knows how to heal itself if you just unload over time and think about—go wider. Don’t just think about biochemistry. Think about all these other things, especially if you’re in a chronic complex illness state, and you think you’ve done everything, you probably haven’t.
I’ve probably just listed some things you haven’t done yet. So consider all of that. Don’t give up. The body knows how to heal itself, and just optimize and consider all those things. It might be just that one last thing that you need to do, and before that last tipping point hits.
Don’t give up, and everyone can recover and have brilliant energy and feel fantastic.
Wendy Myers: Are there any other last few tips that you have for the listeners who are trying to unburden themselves from their emotional trauma and improve their energy levels?
Niki Gratrix: Just so I’d reiterate what I said about the body knows how to heal itself. When you get a cast, the body knows how to heal itself. You don’t have to do anything. Even if you break a leg, if you think about that, which is how people think about that, you go to a hospital, but it’s not the doctors putting the thing together. They just put it in the right position.
What does the healing is […]
Wendy Myers: I have a question that I like to ask all of my guests. What do you think is the most pressing health issue in the world today?
Niki Gratrix: I think it goes back to what I started to talk about, which is I think it’s how we look after our children. And it’s parents not being neglectful. It’s understanding that even divorce or separation is having a traumatic impact on our children. It’s the social care and attention and how well we’re looking after children.
Based on the statistics, I think it really is the number one biggest factor, and it sets so many things up for later life that really, the downstream things that happen like diet or a trigger and exposure to a bug or something, the system has already been weakened by what happened in childhood.
So I think this hidden crisis of sexual, emotional neglect, emotional abuse, especially covert emotional abuse, I think, unfortunately, we live in an emotionally dumb society. If you think about the average Joe, what they know about diets, and they say, “My diet is great. There’s no problem with my diet. I’m healthy.”
And then as a practitioner, you’ll sit down with them for three days. “Let’s just look at your diet for three days. Let me talk you through why this may be isn’t so healthy.”
Well, people say, “Yes, I had a great childhood. Fantastic. There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m all good.”
And really, when you sit down and you find out what they’ve been through, and you talk to them, the covert trauma is epidemic level. So that’s not even including things like having alcoholic parents or mental illness. Those things are overt. It’s the cover as well, which is just a huge, hidden crisis going on.
So I think that’s definitely number one.
Wendy Myers: Yes, I think that’s so true, the statistics you talked about earlier that’s almost 70% of people, or at least have some sort of ACEs or adverse childhood events. I know I have several friends that were abused as children, or sexually abused, or whatnot. They really have a tough time, and you can see that someone constantly trying to cover up the stuff down their negative emotions with alcohol or drugs, or whatever their choice is, to reduce their anxiety dramatically impacts their health.
It’s sad to watch. And a lot of people are suffering in silence from their childhood trauma.
Wendy Myers: Why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit more about you and where they can get in touch with you and learn more about what you do and how they can benefit from it?
Niki Gratrix: So my website is NikiGratrix.com. That’s N-I-K-I-G-R-A-T-R-I-X dot com. And on there, I’ve got some freebies. I’ve got some e-books that you can get on there, access to reports, steps for abundant energy, and also steps to healing emotional trauma as well. So I have a lot of resources in that free e-book as well, if you want to sign up to that.
And if people are interested in the summit, there’s a link there for my website as well. So basically, everything that everybody needs to know is on my website.
Wendy Myers: Well, Niki, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really, really appreciate it.
Niki Gratrix: Thank you so much for having me, Wendy. And thank you for all the work you’re doing as well. You’re getting so much important information out there.
Wendy Myers: Listeners, if you want to learn more about me, you can go to myersdetox.com. You can learn more about my healing and detox program at MineralPower.com. I have nice, new website up for my mineral power program. Go check that out.
Thank you for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
