951: You Are Not Your Past: Overcoming Childhood Trauma and Addressing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) With Dani Williamson

Child: Welcome to my mommy’s podcast!

Katie: Hello and welcome to the Fit Bottomed Zone Podcast. I’m Katie from fitbottomedzone.com, and I am back today with Dani Williamson to talk about a second topic, which is that you are not your past and overcoming childhood trauma and addressing adverse childhood experiences, also called ACEs, and how they can have a very much real world physical impact as adults.

And she shares her own story with this from a very tough childhood and tough conditions through much of life and how she moved toward healing. And even her, her healed her body and the process. Um, she explains what the ace. Index is how to take this test and how having a score of at least four can increase your risk of earlier or shorten your lifespan by up to 20 years, or your risk of dying goes up drastically from this childhood trauma piece as well as how to address it.

I love how she takes the whole body into account in her approach. She runs Integrated family medicine and wild and well in Brentwood, Tennessee, where she helps people from around the country and she really does combine the physical, the mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of healing, both in her own healing journey where she reversed 24 years of chronic disease and in her work with many patients from around the country.
So let’s join Dani Williamson. Dani, welcome back. Thank you for being here again.

Dani: Thank you. That was fun. Let’s do it again.

Katie: Exactly. If you guys missed our first episode together, we got to dive into the topic of inflammation and Dani’s six kind of steps and pillars to reducing that in our lives and also creating much more health and cohesion in all aspects of our lives. We even got into the stress and community pieces. It was phenomenal.

I’ll link to that in the show notes. And in this episode, I would love to get even more vulnerable because I know this was a piece for me as well and talk about a topic that we might not like to talk about as much, which is instances of childhood trauma, or as they’re called in the literature, sometimes adverse childhood experiences or ACEs.

And the very real data that shows how these things can show up in adult life and really be impactful even in our physical health, not to mention our mental, emotional and spiritual health. And if you’re willing to share, I know you have a very personal and impactful story around this and just how profoundly it impacted you that I think would be really helpful as a starting point for this conversation.

Dani: Yeah, I, um, I grew up in complete chaos. Actually, I like to tell patients I grew up in a shithole of chaos. So, and I did, and many people did as well. I had a grandfather who had died by suicide in our driveway. On the day that I was born six years later, January 18th, I was a constant reminder to my mother about her father. My mother attempted suicide multiple times. I had a stepfather that was a child molester. And then a second stepfather who almost killed me my senior year in high school beat me so badly one day. I started in my senior year in high school with chronic diarrhea, just chronic gut issues going to the doctor.

I had four colonoscopies before I was 40 years old diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome, put on everything for reflux and GERD and diarrhea. Then I started itching and then I was diagnosed with a loop chronic itching in my twenties, started with joint pain and diagnosed with lupus and fibromyalgia.
And then I was depressed. And so I was put on multiple antidepressants. 24 years of seeing doctors, not one doctor ever asked me about my diet. But also no one ever asked me what’s going on at home. What’s happening? Why would an 18-year-old have chronic diarrhea and, and you know, every time they ate, something’s going on, you know, what no one ever addressed it.

In fact, I was probably 50, I’m 59 now before I ever really learned about childhood trauma and adverse childhood experiences. And that the body does in fact, keep score of what happens to you before the age of 18 even after 18. But what we’re really talking about is adverse childhood experiences, what happened to you before the age of 18, which was a landmark study, not perfect, not a perfect study that came out right in the 90s, but it was a landmark study on areas of trauma, physical abuse, sexual abuse, you know, emotional abuse, neglect, verbal abuse, and it’s fascinating. The 10 questions that were partnered through Kaiser Permanente and the CDC, the 10 questions that they ask are a huge predictor of future health and life longevity.

You know, if you have an adverse childhood experience score, you answer four or more questions as yes, you have a 20 year shortened lifespan. This is what the research shows. 20 year shortened lifespan than someone who has no adverse childhood experiences. But Katie, the interesting thing is, they did this study on 17, 000 people in San Diego, upper white middle class college educated people. Okay. And what they discovered was approximately 60 percent of the population had at least one or two adverse childhood experiences. This did not include the black, the brown population, the not college educated, right? The lower socioeconomic group of people. 60%. of that group had it. Can you imagine then if we’re talking nationwide or worldwide?

So it was a fantastic study but it wasn’t perfect. So what we know from this is that it is very common. It is way more common than people think and it can in fact devastate your life and it does until we understand. That you can reverse things you’ve turned on. You can do the hard work. If you have a 4 or more score, you have a 1200 percent higher rate of suicide. 460 percent higher rate of depression and anxiety and the list goes on. Cancer, lung cancer, COPD, you know, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, lots of problems. I mean, decreasing your lifespan by 20 years, that’s unbelievable. My score is a 6. I have patients who come see me because I deal with the sickest of the sickest, a lot of autoimmune patients, and the focus of my practice is Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.
That is the main bulk of my practice. So many of my patients come in, we give the ACE score on the very, before they ever come in so they know. They’ve already filled it out in their paperwork. So many of my Hashimoto’s patients or my autoimmune disease patients, they have scores of 8, 9, and 10. They have never been taught about this.

They have no idea what I’m talking about. And then when I explain to them, this right here is your thyroid, this is the master gland, this is your voice as well, the fifth chakra. And as children, if in fact this was childhood abuse, as children, children lose their voice, not physically, but they lose their voice.

They don’t feel they can speak their truth. They don’t have anyone they can tell they’re being abused or that bully’s coming in, you know, to the room every night they lose their voice. Their thyroid then oftentimes is when they get Hashimoto’s or thyroid cancer or thyroid nodules. And it is so, it’s so sad to watch these patients realize this. Right. That they’ve suppressed all this. My trauma did not manifest in the thyroid. It manifested in the gut. And that’s the second place that I see that many patients, men and women, their trauma is here. They hold it here. And it could be constipation. It could be diarrhea. It could be colitis.

Any sort of irritable bowel disease. So it’s fascinating. The body does keep score. And I think that we agree with the Dr. Block. I can’t remember his first name. He was the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics for a long time. He said, this is the number one unaddressed public health crisis is that we do not address childhood adverse experiences, childhood trauma in the pediatric office.

You may have had a different pediatrician than I, well you did clearly had a different one than I did, never talked about it with me and my children.

Katie: No, definitely not.

Dani: So, it’s fascinating to me. Yes, it’s your past, but you don’t have to be your past, right? We can address this. I had to go through a lot of trauma work. My mom didn’t protect me and I hate to say it. She died. She died at 78 with Alzheimer’s. And I’m sorry that my mother died, but she never admitted to anything.

In fact, she looked me square in the eye when I was 13 years old. And she said, Danielle, you caused me to lose the only man I’ve ever loved. That was the child molester. Well, I didn’t know. I was 13. I didn’t know how to process that. I really didn’t know how to process any of that until I went and did some deep trauma work on my own in my 50s.

I went to on site for a week. I did a tremendous amount of on site as a, it’s in, it’s in Cumberland Furnace, Tennessee, world renowned for trauma. And I went for a week and I did that work and I did the EMDR and I’ve done the, a lot of hard trauma work to be able to calm this nervous system down and to be able to forgive my mother. And had I not done that work prior to her getting sick, I don’t know that I could have been there for her. And cared for her because I’m an only child as she was dying and she’s an only child so there was just us left because she was never there for me. And I was so grateful that I made the decision to be there for her and be there with her at her dying breath, her last breath.

I was standing right there with her when she took her last breath, but it’s so interesting. So I’ve done a lot of hard work, still a lot of healing to do, but what caught me off guard, and I think this is true for a lot of trauma patients is I’m not grieving what I lost because I was told my entire life, you do everything half ass, you’ll never amount to anything.

You know, I mean, I never was good enough. I’m not grieving that. I am grieving what I never had and I never will have. It is a very interesting kind of grief, indifferent than what I thought, right? I never really expected. I didn’t even know about grieving about something you never had, and now I’ll never have the opportunity to. So, all that being said, every bit of that manifests itself in your body if you are not able to do some hard work, to acknowledge it, and to start really facing it head on, that trauma.

Katie: Wow, that’s such a powerful story and so many important things you just said. And I agree with you having also had what would have been on that list of adverse childhood experiences as a high schooler. I saw that how that eventually did show up in my body and how for a very long time I had that exact case you were talking about.

I had the thyroid issues, the autoimmunity, the voice, both metaphorically and physically, my voice sounded different before I addressed that. And it took me years to even connect those things. And then it took a while after that to admit that I still like, hadn’t actually processed that and to be willing to look at it because I, my response had been like, I’m going to lock down all these emotions.
I’m going to micromanage everything in my life. I’m going to control the variables and that worked until it didn’t. Um, so I love that you take this whole picture into account with your patients and that you help people do this work because I know firsthand it can be difficult. It can be elusive. It can be hard to even know where to start.

And I feel like your story also speaks to that really tough point we get to as adults. If we had a tough childhood of realizing our childhood and what happened to us was not our fault. And as adults, it’s still our responsibility to work through it. No one’s coming to do that work for us. And I even had a conversation with someone dear to me the other day and who was wrestling with this, with his mom and kind of that adult realization of like, even if we only received conditional love from our parents, we can choose to heal and to be unconditionally loving if we want to, and it’s like all of these kind of reparenting ourselves or maybe parenting for the first time, those inner child parts of us that needed that.

And that never got it. And like, in your case, you know, never will get to in childhood experience. You touched a little bit on your journey through the trauma side and through recovery. Um, I would love to hear any particular methods or methodologies that were really helpful to you and or, um, ways that you address that when people come to see you, um, realizing that this is statistically likely a piece for the majority of people, if not almost everyone.

Yeah, it is very rare that I get a zero score in that office. You know. For me, I found a trauma therapist who did a lot of EMDR work with me, which is I, what is it? Eye movement rapid. Oh, gosh, I forget what it even stands for, but it’s hard, hard work where actually you go back to your trauma with your eyes closed and things like that.

It’s hard work. It’s hard work. And sometimes they’ll bring you out of it. You know, if it’s too much your nervous system, I did a lot of that. I did a lot of talk therapy, which honestly did not help me nearly as much as the EMDR work and the experiential therapy that I got from on site, which is where you are actually reliving your original trauma and hammering it out physically crying, you know, beating it out, things like that. So that’s what I did is and I still probably think that I need to break it back into counseling. I think we probably all need to be in some sort of therapy with something, the majority of our life we travel through seasons in our life, right?

We go through different seasons. What I have done for my patients is I have built a toolbox of Trauma Therapists in the middle Tennessee area that I work with, and I know who to refer to for trauma and different levels of, you know, what people can afford sliding scale places that work with trauma people that don’t take sliding scale.

So, I have a great toolbox, and I think that’s really important as a provider. You have to have a tool toolbox of the best of the best because we can’t do it all right. I have to have the best cardiologist out there and the best neurologist and all that. And I feel like I have the best therapist in middle Tennessee. But also, I don’t know if you know, our friend, Amy Apigian, you know, the biology of trauma. She, to me, is the leader in the United States, even above um, Dr. Monte and Dr. Vessel VanDerKolk, yeah, The Body the Body keeps Score. I love her somatic therapy work that she does online, online with her patients.

Dr. Amy Apigian and I can’t tell you how many people I refer to her programs with zero. You know, I don’t have any affiliation with Amy. I don’t make a penny with Amy. Amy don’t make any money off of me and. I think she is brilliant and what she’s done, she has changed so many of my patients lives. So that’s how I work with it.

And while we’re working on the stress and the eating and the sleep, eating well, sleeping well, moving well, pooping well, de-stressing well, communing well, I find oftentimes a lot of my patients with high childhood trauma scores, they have a hard time communing well. They have a hard time trusting anybody in their life, and it’s a big deal to come to me, you know, or to any health care provider and open up because they’ve been, you know, they just really haven’t gotten the help they needed through the years.

So that’s how I start with patients. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but, you know, I come from a place of….. Many of them, if they’ve read my book, they know the whole first part is on childhood trauma. You are not your past. That’s what I titled that chapter. And I’m a big believer in that. You are not your past. And you may have started off badly, but you do not have to end up that way. And they already know what they’re getting into. And I come from being very vulnerable with them and that, you know, I, I see you. And I hear you and I feel your pain. Their trauma may be different, but trauma is trauma, right? And there’s little t trauma stuff in there too. Little t, big T.

I mean getting bullied at school, which has nothing to do with what this adverse childhood experience questionnaire is. That is childhood trauma. And my daughter went through that. She was bullied in school. My son was not, she’s got trauma from that. So, and again, the body keeps score. So I’m living proof that you can turn anything around. It’s hard, but I am famous. Like you talked about, I am famous for compartmentalizing things because that’s how I’ve had to get through life, right?

It serves me well, it was fine. And then once I started unlocking all that, holy cow, it was just like this explosion of stuff that had to be dealt with. As you age, and as you have some wisdom, you learn and you do deal with things, you know. And so, I still deal with it. It’s hard, isn’t it, Katie?

Katie: It is, and I think it’s so important that reminder you have of that you are not your past. And I know so many teachers have beautiful quotes along the lines of the magic you are seeking being in the work that you are avoiding. And never does that feel more true to me than in these types of arenas. And like you, I did the talk therapy for a long time.

And what I learned was. If you’ve had an adverse enough experience that like cause those responses in your body, like at least for me, I learned how to adapt to the game of talk therapy in a way that my nervous system could handle. So I knew what I was supposed to say and I knew how to talk to my inner child without ever actually getting vulnerable because it’s not, that work is not in the logic.
It’s not in our words. It’s not in our mind. It’s in our bodies and our emotions. And often for me, at least, parts of that I had totally shut off, like I dissociated from entire parts of my body due to that experience. And I had to learn how to reconnect with those and I couldn’t logic my way into that.
So for me too, it was a mixture of the inner work, the somatic work, the reconnecting to the body and realizing yes, the body keeps the score and we can do the mental and emotional work to heal our body. And also our body can be on our side in the recovery from traumas and in our mental and emotional process as well.

And I’m especially glad you brought up little t trauma. Because one thing I have noticed is, especially for those of us who went through what would have been, you know, a technical trauma that someone would recognize and say, Oh, that’s terrible that happened to you. People who didn’t experience what they consider to be a big enough trauma often diminish their own experience and feel like they don’t have to deal with it or that they feel guilty even for addressing it because it doesn’t seem as bad as what other people have gone through.

And I think Unfortunately, a lot of people miss a lot of healing because of that comparative trauma. And now that trauma is being talked about more, there is more seemingly comparison in that. And so I love that reminder and how even something that wasn’t, you know, direct physical or verbal abuse, or wasn’t one of these really horrific childhood experiences, you still might have bodily symptoms from you might still be in a nervous system state that relates back to that. And it could be something as simple as something one of your parents said to you as a child that you internalized a certain way. Or I know for me being I remember being very young and being in my crib and crying and realizing my parents are both Hearing impaired, but they couldn’t hear me.

So I remember internalizing like no one’s coming to save me. And that was a belief I held onto for a whole long time in my life of like, I’m alone. I have to figure it out. No one’s coming to help me. And so it can be a not like my parents were loving and amazing. They were never abusive and I still interpreted that and let that live in my nervous system for a really long time.

So I say all that to just hopefully illustrate a little bit like this work can be absolutely transformative and in my life, it wasn’t until I addressed the inner and the mental and the emotional that the physical stuff was able to start resolving as well.

Dani: That’s exactly right. You’re right. You know, it’s so interesting on the trauma thing. I remember a preacher saying one time, which is, this has been said forever and ever. Hurt people hurt people, you know, so as I started learning about trauma, I thought, you know, my mom, you know, and you hate, again, you hate to speak ill of the dead, but there are some people who should have never been a parent and my mother was one of them. And it’s okay for me to say that I finally okay saying that because what I realized once I said this, there are so many people who reach out to me often and say, holy cow, this is my story. This is my story. So. people, hurt people. I gave my mom the adverse childhood experience questionnaire, just like I gave her an Alzheimer’s genetic test.

She had no genes for Alzheimer’s. It was all lifestyle that turned on her Alzheimer’s. She, her ACE score is 2. Her parents did get divorced, and yes, her father was mentally ill, the one who died by suicide at the house. Um, 2. 2. Nothing crazy, but it was, I mean, it was, it was a lot. So it’s so interesting that her life turned out the way it did with, you know, she was, she was diagnosed manic depressive, which is actually bipolar, basically.

And, you know, but she did not have a tremendous amount of trauma. She loved her daddy. She loved all this. Yet, she was not able to parent or make wise choices right with husbands her entire life, but you want to know something that’s so interesting. She kept her friends, her girlfriends her entire life, since she was five years old, her best friends were, several of them were still alive, and they all came to the funeral, like they all stayed tight all these years, could not stay married, had a lot of mental health issues, right? But yet she had this tribe and I’m still trying to figure this out.
So her tribe was incredibly important to her. And I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. I find that so interesting that you’re so unstable in other ways. She kept her job and she kept her tribe when it came to husbands and family and daughter, complete chaos and mental health wise. Yeah. So there’s something really interesting in that to me.

Katie: And another piece of this that I feel like is also not talked about as much, and I would love your take on this, like we’ve talked about how you can heal and you are not your past. I’ve also seen, and I felt in fell into this a little bit myself, even in the healing process, was we can go from identifying with kind of whatever health problems we’re having to identifying with being sort of in healing of trauma or identifying with our trauma, which then seemingly also eventually we have to move past that to identify with being healed, not being kind of stuck in this collective forever experience of the trauma itself.

And I’m curious, do you see that? Did you see that at all for yourself or with people you work with where like they almost. Let go of one identity to move into another identity of trauma being their whole life, or if like for you, most people are able to move through it pretty quickly.

Dani: No, I think it takes, I think everyone’s different for sure. And I oftentimes the people who come to see me have never even addressed this part of it. They don’t even know what I’m talking about. They are blown away that this could manifest in their body. So get a lot of patients who do identify themselves as sick that is difficult to turn around with people, right?

And I have to tell them every single day, listen, Katie, you are not broken. You are not broken. You were not born broken. You are not broken. You are whole and you’re not as healthy as you need to be, but you could be. So the same thing with the whole trauma, you know, identify themselves as not a victim. I don’t want to say that. I don’t know what the exact word would be. Yes, I see it all the time and it’s very difficult to, I don’t think I ever identified myself that way. I think that, honestly, honestly, I think I was just in survival mode for so many years. I compartmentalized everything, so I ignored it, which is equally as bad, And so once I started unleashing all this and all this stuff started bubbling up and coming out, it was like, whoa. But I do think it is very easy to get in that mindset that yes, I was victimized. I was traumatized. And not knowing how to move forward. And so that’s where a good provider helps you do that and has the toolbox of people.
And again, I tell patients all the time, if your provider is not helping you do this, like your healthcare provider would have helping you walk this walk, then you deserve a new provider. You find a provider who’s not going to watch and wait for you to go into some massive chronic disease over there, diabetes or depression or whatever who’s going to walk this journey with you and knows that’s the people in the toolbox to help you move past this work through this. Maybe you don’t ever get over it, but you get through it and that’s the key Walking through this journey walking through the fire. It’s hard work, but nothing worth having is very easy.

Katie: Yeah. Such a good point. Like it may be actually simple, but it’s not easy. And that idea that what we resist persist, I’ve heard that quote, you know, from different sources. And, It sounds like, yeah, I also had a phase certainly of ignoring it and thinking like I am totally fine.
And again, until I wasn’t, um, and also for me, it was a helpful step to realize like just like our, we talked about in our first episode, symptoms are messengers. We often can get reductionist and view them as a bad thing and try to get rid of the symptoms. But if we can reframe that symptoms are messengers, it’s a direct communication from our body and it’s a gift. Then we are in a state of being able to learn from those and to give our body what it needs. I feel like the same is true with the mind and the emotions when it comes to trauma and healing. And I had to, it was a slow shift for me, but to realize like even these responses and even all this stuff, my mind was always on my side. My emotions were on my side. All of these things was my body, my mind, my emotions trying to protect me.
And so it wasn’t about fighting those things. It was about doing the work and actually integrating those things, making friends with them, thanking them for the role they played in my journey and then letting them off the hook and realize that they didn’t have to keep doing that anymore. And I know there’s so many things related to that with like parts work or with you did EMDR.

Like there’s so many great ways to do that. Somatic therapy. So I’ll put links to some of those in the show notes. But I would guess based on statistics, a lot of people listening have some score on this ACE index and have had adverse childhood experiences and absolutely echo what you said of like always find a practitioner who is on your side and going to work with you.

Like I say a lot, we are our own primary health care providers and the best outcomes happen when we have aligned practitioners with specific knowledge who can help us on that path. But for anybody who is resonating with the things that you’ve said and those experiences and recognize that in their own life, what would you suggest as starting points if they’ve never like, if they’re like the patients that come to you that have never even considered that part and they, this might be something they weren’t even aware of. Where would you suggest? Baby steps for getting started.

Dani: Baby steps. You know what I would do first is I would take that questionnaire, right? I have it in the book. It’s in the book, but it’s also online for free. You just look at it and, and mark down. I think that’s a great first step because that is an eye opening physical situation, right? You look at and go, holy cow.

I think that’s the phenomenal first step. And it can also be a trigger. For people right when they, because they’ve compartmentalized things and so I think that’s the 1st step. I think that you also have to realize okay, I do that, and that says that my ACE score is this and we know what the research shows on the higher the score. Then I’ve got to start working on this, right, and either find a therapist, find a sliding scale place, go online, do some, just some online courses, things, I mean, that is a great starting point. Start there, take that quiz. But also and say to yourself, you know, this is not my fault. What happened to me before the age of 18, I had nothing to do with. Nothing.
And I think, you know, with my mom telling me that you caused me to lose the only man I ever loved, what I don’t care what they say, we have to go back to, I did not do this. Now I’m experiencing the fallout from this, but I am not responsible for this. And then my, is just realizing, I mean that’s a huge second step, is realizing that you’re not responsible.

But guess what? Now I’ve got these symptoms, and I’m gonna start teasing these out. One. by one. And the whole messenger or your symptoms or messenger that messengers. That is great way to say it. I’m going to start using that. I do talk about that with patients, but pay attention to that and start addressing those symptoms one by one.

That anxiety is not natural. It’s not normal, right? You weren’t born with anxiety. You weren’t born with depression. You weren’t born with migraine headaches. I wasn’t born with reflux and GERD and irritable bowel and joint pain. So baby steps, paying attention to those symptoms and backing it up one by one. Okay, what’s causing this? Let’s get to the root cause of it.

It’s a long journey. It’s a lifetime. It’s a lifetime of work. This is not going to happen overnight. I’m 59 years old. I’ve got almost six decades of dysfunction going on with me. And so I tell patients, look, this is going to take longer than six months. It’s going to take a long time. You’ve got four decades here, but you’re going to start feeling better, so fast within a week, maybe. Right? So, I would take that question, I would take the ACE score, I would start teasing out those, trying to find somebody who could help me with that, and it’s different with every person and then just baby steps start realizing, okay, I’m not responsible for that. I am. I’m not going, I’m going to work on lifting that burden off of me every single day and thanking Jesus that I am right here right now. It’s an honor and a privilege to be here right now. And maybe I have 4 decades behind me. Maybe I have 6, maybe I have 7 decades behind me, but I’m going to make the rest of the decades. I have way better than the ones that I had before. Because our body is designed to heal itself. And again, it’s very simple, it’s not easy. It’s not easy work. And when you start taking responsibility off yourself, yes. I mean, you start to heal. It’s a heavy burden on these shoulders.

Katie: Yeah. And when we can choose to put down, which is such important news, like a reminder of hope. I love that in your message and that you’re doing this work with people and helping them find resources on doing the really deep work when there’s trauma. I think this is, it’s an overlooked part in a lot of areas of medicine, and I love that you are bringing it to the forefront and really guiding people on that journey.

And on that note, you mentioned your practice, but also I know you have tremendous amount of resources. I will link to your book, to your practice, to everything in the show notes. But where can people find you and or work with you if they want to?

Dani: They can find us all over social media, Dani Williamson Wellness on every platform out there. DaniWilliamson.com is the website if they want to work. There’s an area on there for patients, uh, the books everywhere on. Every place you buy books and if they live or if you’re ever in Nashville, you know, come see us.

We’re in Brentwood. We’ve got a great supplement store, wellness store, not just supplements, lots of things in there. So we are available and we’re all over online. So it’d be an honor and a privilege to get to see, I get to walk in that supplement store. It’s actually connected to the clinic every day and there’s people in there that have never been in there before who’ve come or stopped by.
And it’s such an honor to get to meet people. But one thing I want to say real fast, my son is in medical school. He graduates in two months. Hallelujah. And then he goes on to residency, but he’s not taught any of this in school. So, and it’s not his fault, right? It’s not his fault that he’s not really taught about trauma or um, nutrition or any of that, but I am telling you, find a provider who understands this, who’s gone deeper and learned about this and is thinking outside the box, who’s not just treating every symptom with a pill. We need prescriptions. We need prescriptions, but, but generally it’s not a Nexium deficiency going on with your heartburn, right?

There’s usually a big cause for it. So please know that you have the right to find a provider who’s going to walk that walk with you because they’re not taught this in school.

Katie: Such an important reminder and yeah, thank you for that. And thank you for all the wisdom you’ve shared in our two episodes together. You are so fun to talk to. I love that you are taking so much into account and really looking at people as a whole person and all of the parts that are included when we’re talking about a whole person and really helping people to thrive. So thank you so much for your work and thank you so much for your time.

Dani: Thank you. I appreciate you keep up the great work
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Katie: Well, thank you. And thank you as always for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Fit Bottomed Zone podcast.