Episode Summary
In this episode, we delve into the intricate relationship between the nervous system, trauma, and overall gut health with psychotherapist Michelle White. We explore how understanding and addressing the root causes of chronic stress can lead to long-lasting healing. Michelle explains how embodied psychotherapy can calm the mind, emotions, and body, highlighting the often-overlooked impact of stress on gut health. She emphasizes that when stress triggers physical symptoms, traditional talk therapy alone is insufficient. Instead, Michelle shares insights on her therapeutic approach, which combines relaxation and embodied techniques with deeper self-exploration to effectively resolve symptoms and promote healing.
Episode Highlights
- Understanding the Nervous System: The importance of identifying and addressing what activates the nervous system, particularly in the context of trauma and chronic stress.
- Therapeutic Process: Michelle outlines her approach, including weekly sessions, embodied work, and the significance of homework for continued practice outside of therapy.
- Tools for Healing: Discussion on using apps and vagus nerve devices, and the necessity of addressing underlying issues rather than relying solely on technological solutions.
- Safety and Healing: The fundamental human desire for safety and how true healing involves feeling secure within oneself.
Resources Mentioned
- Podcast: Happy Inside – Available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
- Website: happyinside.com.au – For more information on Michelle’s practice and resources.
- Social Media: IG: @sohappyinside | Facebook: Happy Inside
- iPhone App: Offers gut-directed imagery and other relaxation tools for personal use.
Connect with Us
- Visit our website for more episodes and information.
- Follow us on social media for updates and health tips.
- Subscribe to our podcast and leave a review!
Ready to dive in? Listen here.
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You guys, I just subscribed to a new podcast, updated my auto text to recommend everybody work with this practitioner. Saved the website. Two favorites. I so excited for you to hear more from Michelle White in this episode where we talk about what I see as the true root, root cause of digestive symptoms in the vast majority of cases. Traditional healthcare being what it is upstream from that being what I would typically do, which is gut protocols working on dysbiosis, working on gut health. And then Michelle White in this episode talks about the predisposing factors that will cause one person to have more severe digestive symptoms related to gut health imbalances than than other people. And, and in about a decade of doing this work now, I’ve really come to be a strong believer that that what we talk about in this episode is, is really the root, root cause of gut health imbalances for the majority of people.
And it doesn’t mean that gut health isn’t important, but what it means is that sustaining those improvements over time really depends on doing this work we talked about. So let me introduce Michelle White. She renews hope and freedom for people lost in gut disorders and chronic illness by resolving the contributing stress and anxiety that puts the nervous system and body into a state of imbalance using embodied psychotherapy. We calm the whole farm, mind, emotions, and body. Michelle also shared more about her philosophy, and it’s that we really underestimate the catastrophic effects of stress on the body and the gut regulating anxiety, stress, and the nervous system is critical in overcoming gut imbalances, disorders and chronic ill health. When stress is activating physical symptoms, talk therapy is no longer enough. We must come into the body to resolve symptoms, which is achieved through embodied psychotherapy and gut directed imagery. So enjoy this episode. I was absolutely enraptured with her and again, she, I’m in her new top fan. And at the end of course, we’ll share ways to get in touch with Michelle. And I hope you do and I hope you enjoy the episode. Take care.
Hi, Michelle, welcome to the Empower Nutrition podcast.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Erin. I’m excited to be here.
So thrilled to have you. I have about a million questions for you, but I know I only get an hour, so I’m gonna, I’ll, I’ll try to hold back, but I’m just, I can’t wait to talk about this topic.
Me too. Tell me.
Yeah, so your, your story is very interesting. It sounds like you, I I’m gonna, I wanna learn more about exactly what it is, but you help people with who have digestive problems, which so do I, but we do very different things. Yes. So I’m fascinated, and there’s so many different, like, realms of your work that you could be doing. So tell me how you got into this specifically. How, how is it digestive health that is your specialty and then the specialized like work that you do within that?
Yeah. Yeah. So you’re right, I, I do about 95% of my clients, I suppose, have gut disorders of some sort. Yeah. Because I, you know, I guess that’s, that’s the niche field, you know, that I work in. Yeah. And it came about because a long, long time ago when I had some digestive problems myself, and I got quite unwell. I got pretty, yeah. Pretty seriously unwell. And, and it was just by chance actually that I was referred to a particular dietetic practice in Australia. And, and they were doing, they’re actually the part of Monash University that developed,
I was there was it little bar map? Was it Monash? And it was,
Yeah, it was way back before they had developed the low FODMAP diet and Wow. But they were just dead testing around fructose malabsorption. And so I, so I went and consulted with them. And so the gastroenterologist referred me to them. He said, I think you’ve got this fructose malabsorption. It’s a new thing, and you should, you should go and chat to these, you know, this practice down in, in Melbourne. And so I had a chat to them and, and I remember talking to the dietician and saying, I’m just so sick, but I am, I am really stressed. I’m so anxious, you know, my health is just so bad. And, and my whole body, I’d lost a lot of weight. I’d lost 13 kilos, you know, in nine months. And, and I was quite skeletal. And I, and so I was struggling in many ways with, with being so unwell.
And what had happened was I ended up in the emergency room because I had, my heart was being affected by, as it turns out, very low potassium. Wow. And so that’s how it all kind of came about. And, and that’s when, you know, they, they referred me to the gastroenterologist and off we went and did those things. So yeah, I arrived at this kind of, with this dietician and, and I was telling her about how stressed I was, you know, and the anxiety, you know, from feeling so unwell and not knowing what it was and not being able to fix it. And my health just plummeting. And she had this pamphlet, she held up to me and she said, I don’t really know anything about it, but I’ve got this pamphlet from the Australian Hypnotherapist Association that says that hypnotherapy is good for IBS. And I said, just send it my way.
Right. I won’t do anything, anything, anything. Yeah. I don’t care. If you don’t understand it, I’ll try anything. And I went off, I actually, I traveled to see this particular hypnotherapist, and I went off there and I remember the very first appointment where she did some relaxation with me that immediately my body relaxed. And immediately I started to feel better. And I was so struck by how quickly that could happen. And I was also acutely aware that, that there was no magic in that, that it was just by relaxation. And I thought, my god, the power that my mind has on my body is really profound. Yeah. Really profound. And so I was already working in mental health back then. And anyway, off I went and did some studies, some, some more studies, and that’s when I decided I was going to develop this, you know, gut focused therapy.
And that’s what I did. ’cause I couldn’t find it anywhere. Nobody was doing it. Yeah. And I thought, well, it’s, it’s definitely, you know, helped me. And so I wanna help other people. I don’t want other people to be experiencing these same difficulties. And that was now, that’d be almost 14 years ago now. Long time. Yeah. Yeah. So now I just see people, you know, who come from clinics like yours, you know, who have, who are kind of seeking treatment and protocols for different gut symptoms that they have. Or it might be from gastroenterologists. Yeah. Functional doctors, you know, where there is a, an acknowledgement that stress heightened anxiety, trauma, you know, those aspects are, are a large contributing factor to symptoms. And it can just be, you know, that you don’t have to have trauma in your life. It can be that the symptoms themselves created, you know, so much disturbance in your life that now they’re, you know, causing you stress or anxiety. And then, so then you end up in this terrible feedback loop where now stress and anxious about the symptoms. So that creates more symptoms. And then you’re just stressed and anxious about that again.
Absolutely. Like if you’re, yeah. If you can’t trust that you can make it through a meeting without like pooping your pants.
Exactly.
If you weren’t stressed before, now you sure are.
You’re very stressed. Yes. If you didn’t have diarrhea by now, you definitely will.
Yeah. I think this is such an interesting thing because, so I’m from the, like you suggested, like I’m from the very classic kind. It’s not classic. The classic thing when I started this work, gosh, maybe nine years ago, was people with IBS would be told, like, this is in your head, you, they would be offered like mental health related medications, like, or anti-anxiety medications. So like, that was sort of like the toxic like backstory that I, I kind of came into this in, and then it was like, I’m in this camp of sort of, no, actually there’s a physical problem that’s happening in the gut. So we’re looking at like dysbiosis and infections and like, yes, the incorrect location of bacteria, so sibo, like, which I saw you work with, and like all these things, which are very real. But I think it’s funny how the pendulum swings because through the years of doing this work, what I’ve come to realize is that yes, these gut health imbalances are very real and they’re very much causing symptoms. However,
You can have two people that have the same, maybe a result on their SIBO breath test, and one person feels fine and the other person can’t even get through their workday. And often that is related to imbalances in the nervous system and like maybe their brain chemistry. I don’t, I don’t fully understand it, but I’m so on board with what you do, because I find that, that there is a neurologic component to this that’s highly related to maybe some anxiety. And like, I love how you brought up trauma, because I feel like that has been like a huge pattern of seeing that, like past traumas tends to be something that predisposes to this, where it’s like, look, everybody has some dysbiosis. Why is it that 20% of people have IBS and not a hundred percent. Yes. I think what you’re talking about is a huge part of that.
Yes. Yeah, I agree. And it comes back to the nervous system. That’s what it is. You know, so whether the original cause was some dysbiosis, like you said, or if it was from trauma or stress or anxiety, you know, the, all of those still affect the nervous system. And then especially in my work, I mean, there’s head down anxiety, you know, that comes from thinking, comes from the mind and there’s, you know, and then there’s bottom up anxiety. So that’s affected, you know, anxiety is created by, you know, physiological imbalances that are happening in, in the body, you know, often described to women. You know, that one of the things that we know well about that is around the hormones. Yeah. You know, that is just, you can have a person who doesn’t have anxiety, but if the hormones are outta balance and they end up with this big swing in their hormones, you know, can turn you into some other version of yourself that you don’t normally experience. And no amount of thinking, you know, sitting down and meditating if someone has really bad PMS and the anxiety is just outta control. Yeah. No amount of thinking differently, or sitting down and doing meditation helps that, because it’s come from the body up.
Mm. Up. Yeah.
Mm.
Tell me more about, yeah, like that’s, that’s such an interesting point of like, this can be bidirectional. ’cause I think the other kind of like almost myth around all this is that people only think about the top down. They’re like, okay, so somebody’s anxious, it gives them digestive problems. But I think even that could be better fleshed out. But tell me about the other direction.
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Because that is the crux of my work really, you know, is around how people’s thoughts and emotions and behaviors, the histories, you know, in their life, how they’re living their life, the alignment or misalignments, you know, the relationships that they’re in. All of those circumstances are then affecting their physical body. And, and it’s basic, you know, in the sense that if you have stress is an overarching theme. So if we think of it stress as an umbrella, and underneath you might have trauma, anxiety, you know, fear all kinds of things underneath. But we just kind of give it an umbrella term of stress because stress is the physiological response that happens in the body. And so stress is when there is a stress response that’s been activated in the nervous system. So, you know, we, we ideally wanna sit in our parasympathetic rest and digest state, so in nice and relaxed, but of course, modern life doesn’t provide the greatest opportunities for that. We have to really carve that out. Yeah. And so we spend the majority of our time over in the sympathetic stress response, which means that our nervous system is activated as if there is some kind of threat.
And so that of course has an effect very briefly, biologically, our gut is designed to be affected by stress is meant to happen. You know, when we are in a life or death circumstance, the body arranges itself to save our life. And so in that arrangement, it starts reprioritizing the functions of the body. And so it says, well, right now, digesting yesterday’s lunch is not important. What is important is that I save your life, which means I need all the blood flow that I can get up to the heart so that I can pump that around the body to allow you to fight or flight. Right. And so, because that’s the priority, it says, well, because I need all that blood flow. I’m gonna take blood flow from parts of the body that don’t need it. And I’m also going to deprioritize and stop functions of the body that don’t need to be working right now.
And a really large organ in the body that uses a lot of blood flow is the digestive tract. It’s huge. And of course it does the migrating motor complex about every 90 minutes. So it’s a downward wave of contraction through the digestive tract about every 90 minutes. And so that uses blood flow for that to happen. So when you are, life is under threat, real threat, we’re talking about, this is extreme circumstance. If you were actually under a, a life-threatening event Yeah. Then your body’s gonna go, well, my only job right now is to save your life. Everything else doesn’t matter. So, a, I can’t afford for the migrating motor complex to come on board right now while I’m trying to save your life. And b, I also need all that blood flow. So I’m gonna do one of two things to your digestive tract.
I’m either gonna empty the contents as fast as I can and give you symptoms like cramping, diarrhea and nausea, vomiting, or I’m just gonna paralyze the digestive tract temporarily and give symptoms of constipation. So it’s quite clever that the body does that. And so that’s really the first point to understand, you know Yeah. Is to really let land and to honor, which is okay, wow, my body still knows how to save my life. Yes. My body can still put that into practice when it needs to. But the problem is, we no longer live in tribes, you know, where there’s wild lions, you know, putting our life at risk. We live in the modern world. And so the things that we perceive as threatening are different now. You know, and we live lives that are high in stress generally, you know, that are misaligned, you know, that we’re trying to keep up with everything. And so what happens is that stress. And so we perceive that as stress, and therefore our nervous system does. It goes, oh, well, this, oh, I, I, I’m on. It’s my job, it’s my job. You know? Right.
It’s like the tiger never stops chasing you. You’re just constantly in that mode. Yeah.
That’s exactly it. And it doesn’t have to be at a hundred percent and then it drops back down like it should do. Our body can cope with that. You know, we coast along here, our stress levels peak up like this when there’s a lion, we get away with it, it’s fine. And then they drop straight back down. That’s how our body’s meant to function. Yeah. And, and our body can physiologically cope with, with those small, those irregular peaks of stress. But now we don’t do that. Our stress levels aren’t down here. They’re up here. Right. And our ceiling is here, you know, so we don’t have far to go before we hit that ceiling and we just coast along up here all the time. It’s like someone’s left the hose on.
Right.
Very bad for our body. And when it comes to osis, that stress response alters our microbiome. It makes our microbiome hostile. So that’s something that you would know more about, but of course when you make the microbiome hostile things either reduce or grow more, that shouldn’t be. Yeah.
We see that all the time. And then even if you get out of your stress state, you’re now left with this sort of like damaged microbiome that on its own can cause symptoms. But stress was a part of the story. And often it’s never, it’s not gone for good. For sure. And then I find that it’s so interesting because I find that people tend to be able to buy in on, like, let’s say we get a SIBO breath test, and it’s like, okay, there’s clearly a bacteria in your small bowel. The story makes sense. This bacteria gets a hold of fiber, FODMAPs, it makes gas, the gas is bloating you, it’s causing your diarrhea. We can kill this bacteria. Like that’s an easy train to get on. But I find that, that the stress story is a little bit tougher for people. Yes.
Yes.
It’s a little bit less direct. Yeah. And I, I, I almost think it’s a little bit challenging ’cause we’re kind of trapped in the world we’re in. It’s like, I don’t know if you have kids, but I can’t just like dump my kids off and like be done with them, or if I didn’t go to jail and I don’t want to anyway, but they, it’s stressful, right? Yeah. To like have, you know, and live in our world, we get on in social media and like, I was just actually watching a YouTube video and the first, it was a mom that was making it, she said, she was talking about like a trad wife channel, and she’s like, you know, I don’t like to watch this content because it makes me feel very stressed. And it’s meant to be like a relaxing video of a woman cooking, but you feel challenged by it because you are comparing yourself like, well, I let my kids eat cereal for breakfast, and this lady is over here, you know, making everything from scratch. So like there’s, they’re stressed around every corner that you can’t escape. So I think, I think this story, I’m curious how, if you get this, but I get where it’s like, it happens a lot in like an encounter where they’re like, you wanna gimme anti-microbial herbs? Tell me where to buy it. Take my money gun. Like take my credit card. Let’s do it. But if it’s like, Hey, you know, let’s talk about stress or like, past trauma may be a factor in this. They’re really, they’re not interested in that conversation. Like, do you encounter
That? I’ve heard of that, obviously. I mean, I yes. Practitioners that I work with, you know, in your position right. Where you are the one broaching this subject with your clients.
Yeah. Maybe they’re like, you’re just not qualified.
Yeah. Well it’s, well, it’s more that, which is true. Once they come to me, they’re already on board. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. You’re getting a, we’re both getting a bias selection of like the people that want what we do.
Yeah, exactly. And so I have heard of this, you know, through the practitioners that I work alongside, you know, that it’s a delicate kind of subject Yeah. You know, to broach, you know, with the client. And Yeah. It is interesting. You know, I think what I’ve discovered is that there’s, there’s a couple of things. One, it’s, it’s how it less so how it’s, it’s the confidence of the, of the practitioner that delivers it. You know, meaning if you are dead set, that this is what I see. I’m noticing that this is happening in you, and this is definitely a factor that we need to attend to. Because the truth is, if you don’t, all the work and the money and the effort and the protocols that they are doing with you Yep.
It’s gonna all come back. That’s
Right. Three, six
Months with it all back again. Yep.
That’s right. And that’s, that’s desperately sad. Yeah. Because it takes so much emotional energy, phy physical energy, you know, finances, all of those things Yes. To move through those protocols. Absolutely. It’s not just a breed, it’s not just, you know, taking a b vitamin every day.
Oh, absolutely. It, and it does tend to work less well each time as well. So,
Oh, there you go. Yeah. It
Really is important to, we’re already doing something that’s upstream compared to their traditional care. But we’re, you’re more upstream and like, you’ve gotta go as upstream as you possibly can if you wanna help keeping it at bay.
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And so if you have the ability to really deliver that and help people understand that actually this is really important, then obviously they’re gonna have a better outcome for themselves. And, and that’s what they want. Right? They want that good outcome. They don’t want these symptoms anymore. But you’re right, it is difficult. I’m lucky that I don’t have to be, be the one to do the convincing, you know, I’m just here for when they are convinced and they arrive. Yeah. Right. But look, some people are not convinced we know when they arrive to me, you know? Sure. Over the years, there’s some clients that are tentative and they will tell me that they’re tentative about that. And, and it’s only through having the experience, I suppose, you know, through exploring that and understanding, you know, what’s connected and how it’s affecting them, you know, that some people are just ready and some people aren’t. And, and that’s okay. You know, it’s not a problem. Right. The people that are ready, then we’re here for that. Yeah. And some people, the readiness is I’ve been on this journey for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 30 years I’ve been to every practitioner under sun and nothing’s helping me. Okay. Time to do something different, right? Yeah. Yep.
How often do you feel like, and I don’t mean you can gimme an exact number, but like, give me a guesstimate around like of the people you work with, how much of them, how, what percentage of them do you feel like it’s probably just like the chronic ongoing stress of daily life versus people where it’s also just early life trauma? That’s a big factor in their, their digestive problems.
Yeah. They go hand in hand. Mostly because somebody who grew up in an environment that was not safe for them, in whichever way, it means that their nervous system is already geared to be in a stress response. Right. So they have a really finely tuned nervous system that likes to sit in its stress response. And so fast forward 20, 30, 40, 50 years, you know, into those people’s lives. And it means that they tend to experience stress more so than people who grow up in a safe environment. Yeah.
Yeah. Who’s, whose nervous systems felt safe. And so there’s a lot more resilience in those nervous systems. So, you know, when I’m working with clients, it’s not that everybody has trauma, definitely. You know, there are people that, you know, describe having fine childhoods and et cetera, but they’ve found that there’s just been circumstances. And it might be that when they went to university, they found that the study was really stressful, you know, or they had a relationship breakup or something, you know, when they’re a bit older and that, that created a stress. Yeah. And then, and usually it’s not that we can’t cope with stress in our lives. Right. It’s actually when it’s unresolved. So stress is okay. Unresolved stress, not
Yeah,
Yeah, yeah. Unresolved bit.
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s so good. I, I I describe it to them sort of as like, you, you put, most people I think can relate to, like, if you’re riding a bike and you try to like, change the gears of the bikes, like, I have an old bike, it’s like 15 years old, and a lot of times the gear, it won’t change. Like you’ve gotta kind of be in the right conditions for it. Like, you can’t be on a hill, like you’ve gotta do it the right way. Like, nobody else can ride my bike because they’ll get stuck in the gear. And that’s kind of how I describe it. It’s like, it’s not that the bike’s incap of changing gears for some changes. It’s difficult and it really tends to stay in this setting. And for, for them it’s, it’s a setting that is having these downstream effects like you described on like, my understanding is like primarily through the vagus nerve and like the adrenal hormone pathways. It’s slowing motility, contributing dysbiosis, possibly changing the way the immune system reacts in the gut. And that’s, I think what you’re talking about with how is it that you would develop a dysbiosis or like an imbalanced bacterial colony in your gut related to stress? Well, your immune system is constantly sort of curating that colony of bacteria. And if the, by definition cortisol will is an immune suppressant, it will increase immune function in the everywhere, which the largest area of your immune system is in the gut. It’s like 70%
Of
Your immune cells. So if, if that whole 70% of your immune system in the gut is, is downregulated, you’re not gonna be able to, well defend in the gut against the bad things that are trying to overgrow. And then, kind of like what we’re saying is now you, you do have dysbiosis that can be found on a test, but what you’re just talking about is so valuable because it’s like if you, you, you don’t wanna miss where that originally started. Yes. And it can, like you said, be chronic stress and early life stress and acute stressor. Like another other times I’ve seen it have been like, there was a loss of like a close family member. There was, you know, it’s a big common one or a divorce is another one where it’s like, after that I had my IBS start and yes, it, you can, you can test for it on the lab, but, and that feels like the end of the story, but I think it’s just so few people realize that like, that’s not the whole story. It’s what you’re talking about.
Yep. That’s right. And like, if we just talk about that for a moment, whether it’s stress, whether it’s anxiety, whether it’s trauma, what we think about up here in our mind activates a neurochemical response in the brain. So if we think about our favorite holiday, our favorite person, our favorite pet, we get these beautiful neurochemicals that get activated in the brain and that we feel in the body as an emotion, and we start feeling things like happiness and joy and love and it’s immediate, right? We can activate that straight away. We can have a neutral thought. I can look at the wall in front of me. Nothing, it doesn’t activate anything. It’s just nothing. I can have it, you know, you can think about something that is distressing, you know, a really difficult time in life, something that was really hard. And that will also activate a neurochemical response that has a very different feeling to love and joy and happiness.
You know, it’ll be sadness and despair, anger, all kinds of things. And so what we think about, we feel as an emotion because it’s a, it’s a biological response in the body. If we don’t have some way to acknowledge, attend to resolve, move through that emotion, especially if it’s intense or painful, it stays in the body. And then that’s when the body starts getting affected. So we might have, like, we have a really acute event, you know, say someone does a public speaking event and they’re afraid to public speak. And so, you know, they’ll be, they don’t sleep the night before they feel sick, you know, they, they have diarrhea the next morning, they’re feeling really unwell. Their, their stomach’s gripping like this. Right. That’s an acute event. But once that talk is over, it’s fine. It’s gone. No problem.
Those are, you know, tend to be okay, there’s a resolution there because I don’t have to do it again. Right. But if, if you then, you know, have these happening in the body, especially if they’re long term and there isn’t a resolution, they just stay in the body. And so talk therapy doesn’t access the body talk therapy only functions up here in the mind. But now this, now the symptoms have developed down in the body. So when people do have those big life events, like, like a divorce or a death, they’ll might have an acute response. You know, they’ll feel those symptoms immediately. But actually the flow on effect where it affects their dysbiosis may not be for 3, 6, 12 months. Yes. Takes a while. It does, yeah. Yeah. Because the body’s in a stress response for all that times, pumping adrenaline, cortisol, norepinephrine into the system the whole time for all that time. Eventually, when that has an opportunity to to die down, that’s when things start to shift. You know, the body’s no longer in the acute state of stress, but that wears off. Yeah. And then those effects happen. So it does take time. And that’s, I think, important. People don’t know that readily, like it’s on my intake form set my intake form. One of the questions is what was happening in your life three to 12 months before the onset of symptoms? And it’s amazing the information you get in there. Yes.
And so funny,
I ask the same question. It’s so telling. Yeah.
It’s so telling. But what we look for, you know, when we don’t know that is, well no, that can’t be the effect. ’cause that happened to me six months ago, but I
Now we’re
Looking for this immediate, like, it, they’re butting up against each other. Right.
Like some kind of like scratch on your arm. It’s like it happens, you know, it’s there instead. Yes. Yeah. Not quite like that. Yeah.
But if we can see that actually, if it’s been a, you know, quite a severe stress all, and we can see that symptoms have come after that, that can also help a lot. Because there’s some cues there that say, okay, well yes, I might go off and get some testing and, and help that dysbiosis to rebalance. But also if I can honor in myself that I had a really stressful period in my life that needs some attention in me, that needs some healing, then you’ve got the right balance. Yeah. Because if you go and you do the protocols and you only do the protocols and you give all your attention there and all your focus there and all your emphasis there, and you don’t give some emphasis to the other event that happened in your life that’s still unresolved, it’s devastating. We talked about it briefly before, or touched on it, that another six months on or 12 months on when your symptoms return it, what can happen is there’s a real, people kick themselves. They say, it didn’t work. There’s something wrong with me. My body’s this, my body’s, you know, doesn’t work properly. Then there’s this attacking your own body. Yeah. You know, and, and wagging your finger at yourself and being really self-critical and or I mustn’t have done enough, you know, perfectionist, I mustn’t have done enough. I didn’t do it right. Yeah. I didn’t, oh, I only took three of those a day rather than four. And it’s all my fault now.
Yeah. Or like a despairing loss of hope. Like I’m running outta things, ideas like, because, you know, I’ve ran one, one, there’s more, one more thing that doesn’t work and I’m feeling hopeless.
Yes. Horrible feeling that, hopeless feeling that that is a real hallmark of the clients that I see. Yeah. It’s actually one of the questions also in my intake form, how do you feel about symptoms? Yeah, yeah. Hopeless, helpless, you know, distraught. Yeah. All of those things. Yeah. But that hopeless, you know, that is a horrible, and ’cause you know, if, if, if a client you know, sees you and it’s the first time they’ve ever seen anybody, then you know there’s more hope there. Great. Right. But of course, that’s not always the story. The story can be, I’ve been seeing some people for five years, 10 years, 20 years, and exactly what you described, it’s just builds on this hopelessness of why isn’t it working? And so that’s the my slice of the pie. You know, when we’re talking about gut disorders, that can come from so many places. There’s so many causes. You have to look at all the slices of the pie. Yeah. And my slice is the emotional, behavioral, and psychological aspects. Actually, I did this one time maybe in another talk, and I remember the practitioner that I was talking to said, no, you’ve got that wrong. That is not your slice. This is
Your slice. Yeah. Yes, exactly. You got the whole pie girl.
Yes. Like it’s at least half for sure. And on that, yeah, on that point, I think as a society we underestimate the effect of stress on us. Right. Because we’ve normalized this level of stress.
I just had somebody in my office this week that said, you know, I’ve got this horrible digestive problems, all these symptoms. It’s so horrible, so horrible. And like we did, I introduced a topic of stress and she’s like, yeah, I have a ton of stress. Like, you know, I’m in business, small children, super stressful, but obviously that can’t really be contributing. So we’ve gotta figure out what’s really causing it. It was just like a complete steamroll of that topic. Like, there’s no way that could be doing it. Oh, I’m with you. Like, they just don’t, I think it’s like, because the mechanisms of it are not well understood. It, it’s not like within our common like collective understanding that it’s just hard for them to kind of make that connection, I think
Very hard. Yeah. And that’s why it’s so wonderful to have practitioners like yourself who understand that concept, who can build that education, you know, as you are working with, you know, client after client year after year. That’s part of the education, you know, is talking about that. So that we start to have a greater understanding and acknowledgement and therefore options. Yeah. You know, for tending to those things.
Yeah. So tell me this, I, I mean, I’ve seen a ton of research on hypnotherapy for digestive symptoms and I, but I saw very clearly on your website you do, that’s not what you do. So I wrote down a couple of things. So like you do embodied psychotherapy, gut directed imagery. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about your actual, like tell me about your process.
Yeah, definitely. The reason I move away from, yeah, I’ll explain this. I, one of my studies was in hypnotherapy, clinical hypnotherapy. But I discovered very early on in the study in studying it, being, in becoming qualified, that it actually wasn’t embodied enough. Actually takes things outside of people to see them and feel them experience them outside of themselves. And that is precisely one of the problems, the main problem that people have that come to see me, which is they’re disconnected from themselves. So disconnected from their emotions, disconnected from their thoughts, disconnected from their needs, disconnected from their body. And so very quickly I started to adapt, you know, how I was practicing and working with clients to, to bring them into more of an embodied state within themselves. Yeah. And so I guess that’s where I ended up with the term, you know, so gut directed imagery, because it’s actually factual.
That’s what it is. It’s a guided imagery that’s, that moves through the digestive tract that’s gut focused, you know, so, so it’s just an imagery that uses that embodied psychotherapy is exactly that. It’s coming into the self. So when I said before, you know, you can’t use the mind anymore. You can’t think anymore to get your way through physical symptoms in the body. You actually have to come down into the body and do the work there. So if this is a person, we’ve got the mind up here, emotions and body. So these three main aspects and the, those three main aspects are the places that I work. You know, in embodied psychotherapy, it’s, we do some relaxation. We come down and really connect with the self and explore internally, what am I feeling? What’s my body doing? What am I thinking? And how do all of those affect each other?
Because they do. Yeah. So yeah, they do. So the hypnotherapy component is really, I call gut directed imagery because it’s that it’s a lovely guided imagery. The, the, there’s no magic in it. It is literally just a process of relaxation, a deep relaxation. When we relax, what we’re essentially doing is in a guided imagery, is focusing our mind on the imagery. The imagery is designed to keep a person quite engaged, you know, mindset in a rainforest, there’s sounds of birds and waterfalls and things like that. Yeah. So it’s designed to keep you engaged because what we’re doing is moving your way from the stressful thinking that you used, you know, that you used to doing. So we’re slowing down, you know, your mind on those stressful thoughts and bringing your mind to a place that’s either pleasant or neutral. So by doing that, we start to relax the mind and the body begins to relax too. The idea here is that we are trying to move you out of your sympathetic stress response and into your parasympathetic rest and digest response.
Yeah,
Yeah. So relaxation, first winding right down mind, body. And then of course the imagery is gut directed. So it moves through the digestive tract.
It’s like I’m imagining my, something in my stomach or like I’m imagining something in my bowel like that.
That’s right. Yeah. It’s actually you stand under the waterfall. That’s, that’s mine. That’s, that’s how I created it. And the waterfall, the water moves through the digestive tract piece by piece. But we’re not just, you know, moving through, you know, bacterias and things like that. It’s actually, it’s a lot about feeling safe. It’s about how soothing that is. Yeah. It’s about, yeah, it’s about washing away fear and dread, all of those kinds of things. So it really helps bring a person into themselves and to relax that relaxation is such an important piece because at the beginning of our conversation, we talked about that my work is essentially coming back to the nervous system. That’s all it is as the nervous system. So what is activating the nervous system to be in a sympathetic stress response? That’s what I’m interested in knowing. And that’s what our work becomes.
So what is it in that person’s life? Yeah. Is it that work is terrible? Is it that there was a death in the family? Is it that a relationship ended? Is it that there’s childhood trauma that’s still affecting a person now? And how they show up and engage in the world? What are the things that are causing your nervous system to be stressed? That’s the topic of our work. And so part of that is then the homework. It’s like, it’s not enough to see me for an hour once a week. We have to actually start coaching the nervous system to be able to relax. Yeah. And that’s what gut directed imagery does. It allows the nervous system to relax. And it’s no good to do that on its own. You know, I often say to clients, like I have a, I have an app, an iPhone app with gut directed imagery in it, as well as other meditations, andries and practices in there. Now, if that was enough, if someone could just buy a, you know, $10 app and listen to it every night and they were completely, you know, cured of their symptoms, great. You and I wouldn’t even be having this conversation.
And you’d be a bazillionaire. Exactly.
Exactly. But that’s not enough. It’s not enough on its own. Yeah. It’s one thing to help the nervous system relax in the moment, but you actually have to then do the work, the inner work on the thing that is activating the nervous system in the first place so that you can make foundational changes. Yeah. So that you don’t continue to live in that same way to activate the nervous system.
Okay. I see. So tell me if I got this right, it sounds like it looked like on your website maybe they, like you said, meet with you for maybe an hour per week for maybe five or six weeks. Yeah. And then you, it sounds like you’re speaking to them during this hour to get them into that parasympathetic state. And then the homework, it looks like maybe it’s like 30 minutes once a day during the week. Is that right? Yeah.
Yeah. It’s very similar to that. You’re right. So in the work, in the appointments, yeah. Once a week we start with six appointments. It’s just a realistic expectation. You know, we can’t serve this in four appointments. Yeah,
Yeah. There’s something tangible like, okay, I can do six weeks of this. Yeah,
That’s right. Yeah. If there’s more time required, then there’s more time. That’s great. You know, we, it’s therapy at the end of the day, so I’m still a psychotherapist. It’s just that people have come to me with a specific problem and we look underneath those symptoms to what the cause of them are. And so we can spend sometimes years, years and years. Yeah. You know, working together. And so yeah, that work is, it’s dynamic in the sense, you know, there’s counseling that happens in the session, but there’s often a component of some embodied work, which is what you described. So I facilitate some relaxation and then we kind of go inwards, you know? And so it’s an exploration of what am I feeling? How’s this affecting me? You know, what’s, what is affecting me in my life? You know, what does this mean to me?
What am I holding? What activation is it having in my body? And so by bringing that awareness and that exploration to that, it’s amazing that without even doing anything about that in the first instance, it softens on its own. It’s like any of us, when we’re fully seen and heard, we go, oh wow, that feels so good. The same applies within ourselves. When we see and hear ourselves and acknowledge what’s there and validate what’s there, we relax. Yeah. Then we begin to understand, oh, okay, that’s, that’s why this is built into you. That’s where it’s come from. This is what it means to you. Okay. So how do we find a way through that out of that to the other side of that, or to get you what it is that you want or need that is actually gonna help you. Yeah. And so that’s when we start to make foundational changes. So yeah, that’s the work. And then of course, as you said, the gut dreamed imagery is the beginning of the homework. Yeah. Starting point, you know, is to, is to begin that practice of relaxation at home.
That’s fascinating. I’m gonna throw you a little left wing question here, but I can’t not ask you this. Go. Do you have, have you heard about, you can get like a device that stimulates the vagus nerve, like it’s, or vagus nerve stimulating, there’s like the gamma core true Vega like, or like the most, yeah. I dunno if they have them in Australia, but they’re the American ones. Yeah. Tell me what you think about that in terms of, in the context of what we’re talking about. Like if someone say it does have chronic stress or past trauma and they’re kind of stuck in this sympathetic nervous state, like how do you feel about the idea of them, okay, I get this device, I can, is that my neck a couple times a day? Like, why is this good? Like tell me, tell me what you think. Well,
What I know is that bandaids fall off.
Yeah. Yeah.
So it’s okay to utilize, you know, a tool like that,
But you still have to do the work underneath. Yeah. You still have to ask yourself the question, why is my nervous system activated like that? Right. So if you are living a life that’s full of stress and chaos and anxiety and trauma and all kinds of things, and then that’s your waking hours for 16 hours a day, but then you come and lay down for half an hour even to do my gut directed imagery. Right. Or any meditation. If you do that for half an hour, but don’t change any of those other 16 hours, it’s a losing battle.
Yeah. It’s perfect. It’s not sustainable articulation of that. Yeah.
It’s not sustainable. Yeah.
And the,
The safer place to be, you know, look, safety is what all my clients want. It’s actually what we all want in the world. We wanna feel safe. A people that experience heightened anxiety do not feel safe. It’s fear. That’s what anxiety is. And using tools is helpful. But we know in our psyche, we know when we are relying on something that is not permanent, we know when there’s still this background going on of our own fears and anxieties that we are applicating with something. We know it. And so the safest place to be to get to is actually to attend to the fears, to find a way to actually feel safe. Then you don’t need to rely on things, then you don’t need to placate. And that’s the best place, you know, we all wanna move through the world feeling really solid and grounded and steady and safe in ourselves. That’s the goal.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, if, if you’re like in a house with a tiger, if you do something to, like, if you go like hide from the tiger, then maybe for a minute you feel better, but you still know the tigers in the house and you’re, you know, that’s a bandaid. Like you said, I feel like sometimes, because I don’t have the authority to say like, certainly, you know, I’m not, it’s not within my scope to say that someone has the need for psychotherapy. So for me, sometimes a tool like that can be a little bit diagnostic. Like, okay, let’s see if stimulating your vagus nerve does make you feel different. And if it does early on to something. But I, I think it’s so important to not, like you said, stop there. That’s, that’s only learning more that this is real for you. And it’s never gonna be a long-term permanent resolution, like the work that you do with people. So,
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And I love, I love your analogies around the tiger, especially that one in the house, you know, you can close the door, but then what you just stuck in the room. It can’t, you can’t go out and do anything. Yeah. That’s,
He’s gonna find you under the bed soon.
Yeah,
Yeah. Yeah.
I love that,
Michelle. Oh my gosh, I, I feel like I could pepper you all day at some point. You’d have to invoice me because I so fascinated by what you do. But I’m sure other people are fascinated as well. Can you tell people like how they can learn more about this? I know you have an amazing podcast that people can check out and then you have a website that’s wonderful. And then maybe you can share a little bit about more about your app as well.
Hmm. Yeah, definitely. So I think, sorry, my voice, I think the best place to learn more about and get a sense of what we’re talking about here is the podcast. Okay. Because I try and keep all my podcasts under 20 minutes because we are all time deprived. And so people want snippets, right? Yeah. So the idea is that you, you know, they can go on there and, and they, you find, find a topic, you know, that it really stands out to you ahead and you think, oh yes. And listen to that one. You know, because the feedback that I get from the podcast is, wow, I felt like you were speaking directly to me. Yeah. Because it resonates, you know, this is exactly what my experience is.
’cause what you’re talking about is the real fundamental thing and nobody else That’s right. Talks about it.
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And so the podcast, which is called Happy Inside, it can be found on Apple Podcasts and, and Spotify. That’s a really great place to start, you know, and it’s a really great place to get some tips straight away, you know, if people want that too. But just to really hear about yourself, you know, in all the episodes. And then of course, yeah, the website, the website is happy inside.com au and so it has access to all of those things on there. And the iPhone app, you know, that we mentioned just now. Yeah. It’s a, it’s only, it’s only an iPhone app. I apologize to anybody who does not have an iPhone. That’s
Okay.
But yeah, it’s, it’s a tool that can be really helpful. The gut directed imagery is in that app as well as other tools to use other imagery, other practices, meditations, et cetera. So it’s just nice, you know, it is such an AB world, so it’s nice to have something at your fingertips that you can just plug in and use at any time. It can feel a bit supportive, you know, as you need to move through some things or, or find a way to, you know, just bring some relaxation or calm, you know, into your moments. Even people use it during the day sometimes, you know, when they’re at work just to help recenter themselves. Yeah. So all of those, you know, are there and available for people, you know, to really get a sense of what we’ve been talking about today and to see if it resonates with them in some way. And if it does, of course then that’s why I’m here is to then do the individual work, which is so unique, you know, to the person so that we can move through the other side of, you know, the stressors, the anxiety, the desperation, the frustration, the symptoms. And also to make the work that they’re doing with you faster, more permanent.
Right. Yeah. You know,
Easier. ’cause that’s actually a bit of what I do as well because I see clients that most of them are doing some kind of protocol. Yeah. And you might, you know, notice this in your clinic, that sometimes the protocols are stressful. Oh,
Absolutely. They’re stressful.
Yeah. Yeah. And so that’s part of our work too, is to figure out how can we support you best through those protocols, you know, to stay on track, you know, with the practitioner and, and work well in that way so that they have the most success. You know?
Absolutely. You’re such an asset. I wish that there was one of you in every town, which would never happen. I know you’re one of a kind, but what you do is so needed and so essential. So I hope that people can connect with, I’m gonna download your app for sure, like tonight and get a little bit of waterfall. Got going. I can’t wait. And I hope other people connect with that and aren’t listen to your podcast and connect with you as well. And just even if they don’t work with you, honestly, I think that, that just, this conversation needs to happen in the sense that what you said, like people finally feel heard when they hear this message ’cause this is what’s been going on all along. Yeah. And they’ve been kind of gaslit. I, I don’t even know if it’s gaslighting. ’cause I feel like gaslighting is like, you’re, you’re, you know the truth, but you’re not sharing it. I think it’s just, just genuinely within healthcare that, that this truth isn’t like well known. Yes, I agree with you. Any sense. They’re just not getting validated and they’re not getting long-term solutions. So thank you for sharing and would love to have you back anytime. Please just let me know and I would pepper you with a thousand more questions. Michelle,
I’m very happy to answer as many questions as you need. Thank you so much.
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