Beyond Diagnosis
Beyond Diagnosis helps people who are not getting the solutions or outcomes they're seeking from traditional medical care.
We raise awareness of functional, integrative, alternative, life and wellness, and mindset professionals and what they offer, so you can speak up and make confident, informed decisions whilst fostering autonomy for your health.
By following, you will gain access to content for people who have long-term health concerns and connect with functional, well-being, and mindset professionals.
Follow along; this is your path of Alternative Healing with your Host Rita De Michele | Health Advocate | Podcast Host
Beyond Diagnosis
Why Your Nervous System Matters More Than You Think in Chronic Illness
Do you feel like your body is overreacting to everything lately?
Host Rita De Michel speaks with Magic Barclay about PNEI trauma pathways that can keep the immune system and stress response switched on, and the practical shifts that can help calm the system and support whole body healing naturally.
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Welcome to Beyond Diagnosis, a podcast that will raise your awareness, decisions, and voice for Alternative practices, so you can take back control of your health. By subscribing, you will gain access to content for people who have long-term health issues, and connect with functional, wellbeing and mindset professionals.
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If you haven't been told, your tests are fine, but your body tells a different story. This episode's for you. Today we're exploring how unprocessed emotions, chronic stress, and old survival patterns can rewire your brain, disrupt your hormones, and put your immune system into overdrive. My guest, Magic Barclay, a functional medicine coach, has led this journey herself. After facing her own health crisis, she discovered how our thoughts, unresolved trauma, and physical symptoms are far more connected than most doctors acknowledge. Welcome, Magic. How are you?
SPEAKER_00:I'm great. I am so happy to be here. Hello, everyone.
SPEAKER_01:So tell us a little bit about your story. What happened? What did you have, and how did this start leading you down this path?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so I guess we need to go back to day one of life for me. I was born into a very stressful situation with my family. I got used to that. I got used to trauma and drama and pain and fear all being normal. So I carried that through my life. We seek what's familiar. And then when I was married, married to someone that wasn't right for me, I wasn't right for him, and I kept saying to my doctor, something's wrong. And I was being dismissed, I was being unheard, I was being told it was all my fault. I was gaining like a kilo a day and feeling tired, and you know, did a bit of Doctor Google on myself, which we all do. Uh, and that was at the start of the internet, so there wasn't a lot out there, but I kept getting kind of forwarded to things about thyroid. And so I would go to the doctor, something's wrong with my thyroid. I didn't know anything about medicine, and so they would do the basic thyroid panel, not the full thyroid panel. Fast forward to leaving my marriage, my kids and I moved and I found a young doctor straight out of school, so unjaded by the system. You know, he actually wanted to help people. And I said, Something is wrong. I'm working out like a mad person three hours a day, lifting weights, eating really healthily. I just feel like I've got nothing in the tank. I can hardly get out of bed, I can't function at all. I'm angry and hurt and sad all the time. Like I could watch an ad on TV and just burst down to tears. So he said, Let's do some tests. We did those tests. Full thyroid panel was one of them. All of my antibodies for my thyroid were out of control, so I had both Graves and Hashimoto. And he said, Oh, and there's a really big nodule on your thyroid. We need to biopsy that. We did that, turned out to be cancer. I lost my whole thyroid. So here I was from an inkling of something's wrong in my body, trying to listen to that, but not having, excuse me, not having the support network medically behind me to say, yeah, let's look into that, to now finding out what had changed. The one constant through all of this was the stress in my life. So my cortisol was super high. My self-talk was super low. You know, I could look at myself in the mirror and say really horrible things that you would never say to anyone else. So why do we say it to ourselves, right? And I just felt awful going through this horrible divorce. Two kids that totally depended on me, a whole bunch of animals that came with us, and I had nothing in the tank. So that's the start of the story. From there, I then learnt what those thoughts, feelings, and emotions were doing to my body and the link to my thyroid.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, that's an incredible story, and I think one many people can resonate with, you know, like you've gone to the doctor, you know something's wrong, you're being dismissed, and you're just not getting answers, and it's frustrating, and it does start perpetuating what we're going to talk about today. Are those negative thoughts of, you know, you're looking at everyone else, and you think, well, what's wrong with me? Why am I like this? You know, and you start being really hard on yourself, and then that starts a whole chain reaction. So what made you realize that your you know emotional world was directly shaping your physical health?
SPEAKER_00:Look, little things like obviously once my thyroid came out, it took about 12 to 18 months for things to kind of hit rock bottom. Because you know, you you've still got a lot of hormones going on, and then your body kind of drains out of them, and that's when reality strikes. So it was little things like I said, I could watch a TV ad and be absolutely an emotional, hysterical crying and not be able to stop it. And my kids would walk in, what is wrong? What happened? You know, what is going on here? And I would get angry and get hot and sticky, and you know, all of these menopause kind of hot flash symptoms just from getting angry, or I'd start to get itchy on my skin, like you know, you'd someone had cut me off in traffic, and I'd swear a lot, and then I'd start scratching at my skin because I'm like, something's coming out of me. It's like, is this anger coming through my skin? What's going on here? So every system of my body was screaming out to my emotional state.
SPEAKER_01:Is there a particular emotional pattern you see in people with a chronic illness, or is it totally individual?
SPEAKER_00:Look, it is individual, but there is also a pattern, and the main pattern links to cortisol. So when we get overly stressed, now we are supposed to get stressed, it's called eustress, it's good stress, and that makes our body start doing things, right? It starts a mechanism of action. But when we're in chronic stress with high cortisol, cortisol is very catabolic. It breaks the body down and it breaks everything down. So you look at runners, they always have injuries, they're always getting muscle tears, you know, they have really dry, creepy skin. I'm generalizing, but you know, generally there's something going on, terrible gut issues, and that's because the cortisol from the running that they love so much is breaking down their body. And so when we have chronic stress going on, that's when things start to happen. And chronic stress can just come from you not liking yourself, you saying things like, I look awful in these photos, why does everyone else look so beautiful? You know, things like that. Your body's hearing it and it's matching you, and it's going, okay, you're giving me these messages, even just through self-talk, I need to match that because it's a threat.
SPEAKER_01:How does this chronic self-criticism and perfectionism, like perfectionism, I think is a really big one, translate into those, you know, measurable immune dysfunctions? So can self-criticism then create autoimmune?
SPEAKER_00:It certainly can, because any type sorry, any type of danger, even self-talk, is perceived as danger, and your body has to react as one system pathway, which we'll talk about in a minute. But basically, anytime you say something to yourself, your body's listening to you. Anytime you say something to someone else, your body's listening to you, chasing like angry feelings, your body's listening to you, and you mentioned perfectionism, and something we need to realize is there is no such thing as perfect. So we strive for this thing that doesn't exist, and the whole time we're stressing ourselves. And so when we do this, the self-talk, the constant criticism, self-criticism and self-imposed stress, chasing perfectionism, we trigger a system called PNEI, and that's psycho-neuroendoimmunology. And so the P is psycho, it's your limbic brain, it's your thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Now, these are created from messages from your reptilian brain, so at the base of your brain, and that scans everything for danger. So as I'm sitting here talking to you at the moment, my reptilian brain is going, are things about to fly off that shelf? Is the roof about to cave in? Is this light going to explode? What's going to happen with this microphone? Things that we don't think will ever happen. But it's happening the whole time that we're living and breathing. And so it's seeking messages as threat, as danger, and it's sending that to your limbic brain. So your reptilian brain hears that self-talk and hears that chase of perfectionism and says, Now, limbic brain, you need to create thoughts, feelings, and emotions about this to keep my person safe. Right? Because that's the body's only job. Doesn't stop there. So the P limbic brain sends messages to the N, the nervous system. And you know, here's another thing I was finding when I was really unwell. I would get back pain every time I got annoyed about something. That was my N, my neuro, because my sciatic nerve was getting this reaction happening from my thoughts, feelings, and emotions. So that nervous system has to carry this to keep you safe. Doesn't stop there. It sends messages to E, to your endocrine. Now remember in my story, I had a really dodgy thyroid. The poor thing was, you know, going kaputsis on me. And that's because it was getting all this information from my thoughts, feelings, emotions, my pee, from my nervous system trying to stop me and slow me down to keep me safe. And now my endocrine system's got this. So when we're under increased stress, that's those hot, sticky, hot flash, clammy feelings when you get angry, or you know, when something happens, like your E has to jump in, doesn't stop there. If all of that does not keep you safe, it ends up at I, your immune system. We could talk about the immune system in a whole podcast on itself because there's like nine of them, right? And we have all nine of them? I've never heard that before. Yeah, yeah. But I is your immune system. You start with your innate system, the one that your body's born in, you're supposed to stay there most of the time. And then that sends messages to your acquired system where you sit in T-regulation, which is like a conductor with his little batons that he's like, You're sick, go here, you're this, go there. We're supposed to jump in and out, but our eye, our innate immune system, is supposed to be there to back us up the whole time. But if we're looking at PNEI, I is the last stop on this chain, and that will keep you safe by you having autoimmune, multiple autoimmune called polyautoimmunity. It might even just look like a head cold or a flu because it's trying to keep you safe from all the toxin buildup. So this is the PNEI pathway in action, and it happens every single day, and it particularly responds to our emotions because that's what starts this pathway.
SPEAKER_01:That is incredibly interesting. Absolutely didn't know there were nine immune systems. It wasn't it's interesting how you said there about that is the way the immune system is keeping you safe. So you said like a head cold might be the way of trying to get toxins out, or um, you know, sometimes I guess skin rashes are another way of trying to get toxins out. So we naturally see these things as bad, as in we shouldn't have this, and we run to doctor, even even uh, you know, uh other practitioners for medications, supplements, etc. to dampen everything to what we were discussing before about almost symptom stroking that you know, like it doesn't resolve anything because we naturally look at all of the end result as something bad as opposed to this is the body helping us, working with us. How exactly do our emotions trigger this? Like some so many people hear all the brain-body connection, and they know, oh, what I'm saying isn't good for me, but how does it trigger it? How does it create what it does?
SPEAKER_00:Well, first of all, negative thoughts, feelings, and emotions create toxicity in the body. So just as damaging as toxic heavy metals, so are our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions. And if we stay in that for too long, that is poisoning our body, right? So it's creating a higher cortisol, which mentioned before how dangerous high cortisol can be. But your thoughts themselves can be toxic to you. It doesn't matter to anyone else, it only matters to you. So this is where we have to kind of look at what we're thinking, feeling, and saying, and it's not like we need to be robots with no emotions all the time. Like that's not sustainable and it's ridiculous. So what we do need to do is have these thoughts, feelings, and emotions, but then recognize that that's a moment in time, it's done. Now, I mentioned this on another podcast I was on ages ago. I have looked at my anger response. My anger response used to be to match someone's anger to me tenfold. If you're gonna hurt me, I am going to smoosh you into the ground. Like that was my response, right? Now my response is to cry. The angrier I get, I swing into crying where I can't switch it off. But maybe 10, 15, 20 seconds later, I'm done and I'm fine. I'm not angry anymore. I found that's a healthier way for me now to do it. It used to be, you know, my kids, I taught them to box. We have, you know, a boxing gym in our barn, and I said, if you're angry, do not come to me with that. Because I know I will probably match that tenfold, and then you're gonna regret that. Go to the gym, punch the bag, get it out of your system, then come to me and tell me what's wrong. Then I can actually help you. So, you know, we have to recognise healthy coping strategies for these thoughts, feelings, and emotions because it's okay to have them. We're meant to, but it's not okay to live there, to pack your bags and move in and live there. It's just not okay. And it doesn't matter to anyone else, it's not okay for you.
SPEAKER_01:Like people are having these emotions, they can recognise or not recognise that those emotions may be causing their symptoms. But what is it behind that? Why do they get stuck there and can't move? You know, and then find it hard to regulate their emotions. Like emotional regulation is something I think we all must learn constantly, like every day, something fine-tuning it all the time. But there's always a step behind that. Why are they getting stuck?
SPEAKER_00:I guess the the link to the familiar. We all want things to be convenient and familiar, because if it's familiar, we're not going to need more emotions to dig us out of the rut that we're in, right? So we fall into the familiar. My familiar was being full of hate and full of spite because it was safe, it felt safe for me to be there because that's what I knew. Okay, so when we do this, you know, people say, for example, women in domestic violence, people will say, I don't know why she didn't leave.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The devil she knew was better than the devil she didn't, right? Because it was what was familiar. She knew what to expect, she knew how to get around it in a way that hopefully she could survive it. She didn't know what was on the other side. She didn't know that all the stuff she'd been told on the other side, you know, was crap, basically. She didn't know that she could step out that door and take control of her life. Because she was used to the familiar, she knew how to handle that, she knew how to process that. So that's just an example. We seek the familiar. And, you know, it's like when we have friends that really don't like, you know, and you're like, Yeah, but they're my friends, you know, I know them. Okay, but then you go home every day and you vent to your hubby or your kids or whatever about these friends. Because it's the familiar. And as women, we get used to that. We get used to just keep tricking along so that we don't upset anyone else around us. And that's why women are getting the most autoimmunes, because this P and Eye pathway is kicking in, and we're seeking the familiar to try and keep us safe to stop the threat, but that's actually the threat.
SPEAKER_01:It's not easy, or we're told it's not easy to make a different choice.
SPEAKER_00:It's not easy. No, it's not easy at all, and it's not meant to be easy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, to make to from from what you're saying from the familiar. You know, to then to make a different choice and actively, intentionally do different to what you've always done. I mean, that takes a lot. But would you say that then the outcome on us physically would be quite profound?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, definitely. Like I mentioned stress before with eustress being good stress, inflammation's the same. We need inflammation, right? So we cut our finger with a piece of paper. It itches and it's hot and it's burning for about maybe a day, right? And then it's okay. But in that day, in that 24 hours, it's red and it's inflamed. That's good inflammation. It's telling our body there's a threat here that you need to equalize, you need to deal with this. The paper cut the next day is absolutely fine, right? Because that good inflammation did its job. Now, when we're seeking something different, that's that you stress, that's that good inflammation, that's that trigger for something to change. And when we try and avoid that feeling uncomfortable initially, we're not starting that process of change and of healing. So, you know, with seeking something new, that's what we have to do. Now, again, you know, crying is a great way for me to let things out. I did uh a Mikrami class with a friend a couple of years ago. I just could not get the knots sorted, just could not do it. So I started crying. And the instructor's like, it's okay. It's see, I know it's okay. She goes, Why are you crying? I said, I've gotten to that point where I have to push my mind now to the next stage. I need to get over this feeling of they're all getting the knots, I'm not getting the knots. And she goes, but why are you crying? I said, That's my trigger. Give me another 10 minutes. Ten minutes later, I've done a Mikrami, it's actually sitting here in my office on the wall, and everything's perfect and it looks beautiful. Had I not gotten myself to the point where I needed to emotionally explode into tears, I wouldn't have gotten to the next stage because I would have been stuck in the familiar, in what was safe, which was not failing. So we have this fear of failure in life, and you know, we try and avoid that, try chasing this perfectionism which doesn't exist. We actually do have to fail to. Learn. You know, a child learning to walk will fall over plenty of times. That's how they learn to balance, to stand up, and you know, to get their legs moving and all of that. Right? Baby magpies here in Australia, it's bag baby magpie season. The mums will kick the babies, the fledglings, out of the nest so that they're on the ground. Now, if they don't break their legs doing that, because unfortunately sometimes they do, mum will talk them up off the ground into the nest. Because that baby has to learn to fail before it can succeed. And she can't teach that baby how to fly. It has to learn. Just like our babies have to learn to walk. And so we forget that we've done this, that we've, you know, failed and failed and failed till we succeed. And then when we become adults, we desperately try and avoid that.
SPEAKER_01:We do, don't we? That's our it's like a nemesis almost. We're all about not failing. Everything has to, you know, be curated and look perfect. Which really brings me to, you know, when you think about it that way, you know, I loved I read in your work that you talk about the immune system distinguishing self from non-self or or self from threat and what that causes, you know, how it causes the system to malfunction. Can you talk a little bit about that, especially for people who are listening who do have an autoimmune uh condition and they would really like to start reframing what they're thinking to help that condition.
SPEAKER_00:Definitely. So, first of all, autoimmune is not your body attacking itself. Okay?
SPEAKER_01:That's very different to what they say, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. It's your body getting stuck trying to fix something. It's not attacking you, it's actually trying to help you. But it is stuck in the familiar. So self is all of our cells in our body. It's all of our mitochondria, it's all of our neurons and our neurotransmitters. They're things that are self. Non-self is things like packagens, pathogens and toxic heavy metals, and other people's thoughts, feelings, and emotions put onto us and other people's expectations put onto us. This is all non-self. Now we do have pathogens in our body all the time that need to help us. So we have good bacteria in the gut that make our neurotransmitters, that make us feel great, that stave off depression. Great. Those bacteria are not self though. They are non-self, but they are working in conjunction with us. So when we're in an autoimmune condition, the self cells, the self part of us, has kind of been taken over the non-self. And so when the body needs to keep you safe, it gets stuck in an immune type. That's when we get these autoimmunes. So it's your body constantly with its foot on the pedal in the car, and then you're trying to park in the car park and you've still got your foot on the pedal, guess what? You're not going to park. Okay? So it's not attacking you, right? It's just trying to keep you moving, keep you going, because that's what it knows. It's not necessarily the action that you need to take. So when we treat the immune system, we have to look at why it is in this expression, what's the threat? Let's treat the threat, let's turn this car off so that even if you've got on your foot on the pedal, it's not going to go taking off around a car park and let's fix it now. So let's get to the mechanics. Why is this happening? And so when we're looking at self and non-self, same with our thoughts and feelings and emotions, but what you think about you is more important than what anyone else thinks about you. Right? Because that's non-self. It actually does not matter to you what people think of you, because none of your business. That's their problem. And so we need to look at both from the biology perspective and then from the emotional perspective, because they're going to come and clash with each other. And so when you're in autoimmune, that's when you feel horrible. That's when you might compare yourself to people. That's when you might say things like, I just haven't got the energy to get out of bed. Guess what? Your body's listening to you. If all you can do, if you are bedridden, I've got a couple of clients who came to me bedridden. And if you are bedridden and all you can do is lift your leg up and swing your ankle around and write the alphabet with your foot, that's okay. You're still moving your lymphatic system, still getting everything else moving in your body, and you're still telling your body, I want to be mobile, I want to do this. Now I used to have a lot of weight loss clients because you know, back in the day I owned a gym. And I had special populations coming to the gym. And I would have people that would come in wheelchairs with their carers, and they'd sit on the the Ergo bike and you know, just do it with their arms. And I would say to them, I want you to go home and walk to your letterbox. They're like, Why? Because that's your first step of moving. And then if that's okay for a couple of days, I want you to walk to the corner of your street. And then if that's okay, I want you to go a little bit further each day until you can go and grab yourself a coffee from the coffee shop. And sure enough, they would do it incrementally, and they were breaking that pattern of I am stuck a prisoner in my home. I cannot walk. Because that's what they'd been telling themselves for so long. That's what everyone else had been telling them for so long. And so we'd have these people that were actually mobile. And did it matter that anyone would drive past and go, look at that huge person walking down the street? No. Doesn't matter to them at all. What matters is that they're going, Wow, I made it to the corner of my street. That's fantastic. So we really have to look at self and non-self as self is things that we can control, be it our cells in our body, be it our self-talk, be how we look at ourselves or how we encourage ourselves, and non-self are all those things that maybe we still need in life, but we need at an arm's distance.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. I love that answer because you know, it sounds like we need to start celebrating ourselves a little bit more. We do our achievements, having a little bit more gratitude for ourselves, you know, for what we've done, or even where we are, and even if we do have a condition and we feel overwhelmed by it, you know, instead of judging, you know, be curious, and then that's how you start the exploratory work. So I'd like to know, like, how does um like emotional? So if we've gone down the path and we're critical, we've been beating ourselves up, and you're saying now let's just take a step back and really look at what we're doing. So, how would emotional honesty play in physical healing? Like when we're really honest and we look at each other at what we're doing, what we're saying to ourselves, or even our thoughts, because they say even the unspoken word has an effect.
SPEAKER_00:It does.
SPEAKER_01:So being that really emotionally honest with us and digging in deep, like what is the real root cause behind why am I doing this to myself, or why am I saying this to myself? What sort of healing do you feel that they can experience through that?
SPEAKER_00:Look, by readdressing how we say things, you know, we can make a lot of change. So two weeks ago I hurt my knee, just as an example. No idea how I did it. I was doing 12 hours of gardening, I live on a farm, so you know, lots of squatting. I was making sure my squat pattern was great, and you know, going back to primal movement, and then the next day I couldn't walk. My knee was it looked like a beach ball had been stuck over my knee, didn't know what I'd done. It's two weeks on and it's okay now, but I had to address how did this happen and how do I feel about it? Now, the first day I couldn't walk. So this all happened on a Tuesday, on the Wednesday I couldn't walk. I was finding myself saying things like, Oh, you stupid, why did you do this? You know, how did you do this? How who on earth could hurt their knee just doing the garden? You know, like all this was going on, and I had to catch myself and say, now if I want this to heal for however long it takes, I need to just say, Well, that happened, right? It happened. I can't turn back time, I can't stop it from happening. It's already happened. What am I gonna do now? And so I was walking, hobbling on it. We went to the local country show the that weekend, and I'm hobbling around. I keep saying to my my son who is with me, you just need to take little breaks. He said, Do you want me to get you a wheelchair? And I went, dude, no. I need to teach my knee it needs to move. He goes, But it hurts you. Yes, but I need to encourage it to heal. And if I'm going to sit in a chair and not move this, it's not going to be encouraged to heal. And you know, occasionally we would walk around and go, like, oh, it it really hurt. And he'd be like, Are you okay? I'm fine. And I would kind of say to myself, I'm absolutely fine. Yeah, that hurt. Right? But it could be a lot worse. This is temporary, this is not staying like this. Did take two weeks to write itself, but my whole two weeks was keep moving, keep going. I am capable, I've got this, my no, my knee knows what to do, my body knows what to do. This is a passing thing. You know, I'd been to the Cairo and made sure there was nothing structural going on and had a couple of adjustments in that two weeks. But it was me saying to myself, keep moving, keep going. This is okay. You've got this, this is temporary. And so what we need to do is we need to say, especially when we've got autoimmune, this is temporary. This is not who I am, this is not how my life is always going to be. What do I want for myself and what can I strive for, however incremental those steps are.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yes. And that is it, isn't it? It's reframing, reframing what we're thinking and what we're saying to ourselves from the negative put down, which is I think a little bit um human nature. That is our human nature.
SPEAKER_00:I think it's also very Aussie, though. Right? We're both based in Australia.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:How many times have we heard as children in the 70s, 80s, 90s, don't be full of yourself. Like, you know, don't do that. And then we've got the tall poppy syndrome of when you are achieving and exceeding other people's comfortability, they're going to try and cut you down like a tall poppy. So we've been raised with this, and so that's in the back of our minds all the time. We might be absolutely feeling great about ourselves, and then something will sneak in. Don't be full of yourself, be more humble, do this, do that. Well, guess what? If you don't celebrate yourself, no one else is going to.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly, exactly. And then how does your body celebrate itself? You know, how does it how does it go? You know what? I can do this, I can heal. You know, like your body can heal itself.
SPEAKER_00:It can, but you have to give it the chance to do that. That's true. I had to keep walking on my incredibly sore knee and just keep going, the more I move, the more you know what to do. So this is okay. I can deal with this. Right? I could have spent two weeks on the couch with my leg up and not doing anything, going, Oh, don't anyone touch my knee, it hurts. No. I had the cat jumping on me and you know, doing biscuits on my knee, and I'm like, oh, oh, I really wish she wasn't doing that, but okay, she's doing it. And guess what? Her doing that was great because it was moving my skin, and she was basically telling my knee, get better. I'm going to touch you now. Might not tickle, but I'm going to touch you now. So, you know, we need to do that with ourselves and with our emotions and everything. It may feel uncomfortable for a little while, but you have to step out of the uncomfortable to be able to grow and heal and learn. And guess what? Your body does this too. So when our immune system seek uh finds a threat, it seeks messages from our RNA because all of those messages are already there from birth, and it says, I'm going to make you feel crappy for a couple of days, switch your immune type, threats over, then back to life. Out of the sin bin, you go. And then you're going to be back to an innate immune system or a TH3 T reg. So, you know, every system of our body does this, and we have to do it too.
SPEAKER_01:And what would you say to somebody who they've had a lot of trauma or they've had a very traumatic experience? You know, either it is from emotional abuse, it could be from a car accident, and now a couple of years later, they've gone, you know, I'm fine, that's over. You know, that was then, it's not now. But now this under expressed some form of chronic condition. So, how how do you let people know that that trauma is actually still stuck in your nervous system or your immune system? And how can they move on from that without having to live the whole traumatic experience again?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm not a fan of talk therapy. I'm really not, because it does relive the experience, and I'm only saying that for my own personal um history, right, and perspective. What I do like to do is why are you in that emotional response? What what part of is that serving you? Is it the comfortability? Is it the fear of what's on the other side? You know, what is it? It's okay to be sad, angry, confused, hurt, scared, all of these things, but it's not okay to live in any of those. So, you know, I have a friend who had a terrible car accident. He actually unfortunately hit a wombat and rolled his car. And uh he hates wombats now by sight. He comes here to the farm and I've got a resident wombat here, and he cannot see my wombat without you know, stuff going on. I didn't talk to him about it, he told me about it, and I'll cut him off. And I said, the wombat's not a problem. And he said, But what is? And I said, Your fear of the wombat, your fear of it happening again more than the wombat. Wombat's not doing anything, he's walking down the you know, the farm and he doesn't care if you're there or not. But it's your fear of something happening again. Now, you know, we have this way in our lives of almost making things happen again, and I'm not victim shaming or blaming. I hate that, okay? Bear with me. When we seek the fear, and the fear is what he was attached to of if I hit a wombat again, I'm gonna roll and I'm gonna end up in hospital again, and you know, all that. It had nothing to do with the wombat itself. It was his fear, and I kept saying to him, if you allow this fear to govern your life, do you understand what's gonna happen to you? And he's like, I said, You're gonna have a car accident, right? You're gonna have another car accident because you're gonna be driving in a way that is unsafe, unnatural, and that's when you're gonna hit a pothole next, or you're gonna hit a deer next, or something will happen because you've changed the way you're responding to the fear of hitting the wombat. Right? And now that's changing your driving. And so we do this in our body as well. We avoid things that are possibly going to make us sick. Someone in your family has a flu, flu is your body's way of detoxing, but we've been taught over the years, don't get near that person or you'll get sick again. You'll get sick as well, right? So we avoid this loved one when they need us the most around them because we're scared of getting the flu. Right? You can't catch the flu. It's your body's way of detoxing, it's your thought pattern that's gonna make it happen. It's not because, you know, you're getting sick. I mean, you may get sick. That means your body's detoxing something. It's completely separate from the family member who's got the flu, right? But you can actually think your way into an illness. You know, how many times do we go, I'm never gonna do that? Like dieting, okay? I'm not gonna eat that packet of chips. No, not gonna eat them. Before you know it, your head is in that packet of chips. Right? Because you've just told yourself that's what's actually gonna happen. The not, the not doing it, your body doesn't hear that bit. It hears eat the packet of chips. And we all have this way of of bringing things on in our body and bringing things on in our lives. And you know, it's the familiar we're seeking that familiar.
SPEAKER_01:The safety, the safety of it. So uh from a functional medicine perspective, when someone comes to you with a chronic condition, um, where is this where you start? Is this do you talk to them about their emotions first or do you go to testing and all that sort of thing? Like where do you start with someone?
SPEAKER_00:So first place I start is their history. So anyone that comes to me gets a 37-page questionnaire and it asks them everything. And I usually say, save it on your computer in Word, start it, go and have a cup of tea, whatever, go for a walk, come back, take a couple of days, get it back to me. Because if you do it like in the first 24 hours, once you've hit send and sent it back to me, you'll think of 10 other things that should have been on it. So take your time. Now, from that, I get a full history. I have a look at what the major systems of the body are telling me has happened. Okay, the person's not telling me, their answers are telling me. And so I'll have a look at that and I'll draw up a findings report, and then we'll have another call and I'll discuss that with them, and that call's free. And if they work with me or they don't, whatever, they've got an idea of what's happening in their body. So, what I'm doing there is I'm looking at what the systems of the body are saying, what the problem is, not what the symptom is. Now they will report their symptoms on this report as well, and I'll report all their supplements and medications, and I'll deep dive every single one of those, and I'll look at the mechanism of action. So everything we take has a mechanism of action. So, what is it doing inside the body? Is it, you know, trying to thin the blood? Is it lowering the blood pressure? Is it a pain relief? Is it, you know, activating the endocannabinoid system? Like, what is the mechanism of action? And that will help me in where we go to from there. Once we have those findings, yes, I will issue supplements, and that'll be to stop the symptomology at the time or to lessen it. Okay, but it's temporary, and it's only so that you can get some instant relief and we can start setting up what the immune types are doing. So the first thing is if you're in a stuck immune type. We need to unstick you, get it back to neutral so you can start switching in and out as you're supposed to. So we'll do all of this and from there we start to mop up whatever else is left. So it's really important that along that way we do thoughts, feelings, and emotions. But it's not something we can go to first because that's just sticking a band-aid on what is going on in the systems of the body.
SPEAKER_01:Right. So you actually have to look at all of that. See, I would have thought that you would have gone, okay, what are you thinking? What are you feeling? How is this impacting? And then kind of do testing, but you do it the other way around, which is really interesting. So to finish off today, this amazing conversation around how the thoughts affect us, um, what are a couple of daily practices that uh someone can do that will effectively uh help to regulate their nervous system? And uh especially with people who are stuck in the negative, they find it hard sometimes to find the words to be kind to themselves or what to say to themselves. What can you say and give uh what tips can you give our listeners?
SPEAKER_00:The first thing is keep a notepad by your bed. Now, I used to think it was hooy. This, you know, I'd have people suggesting this to me back in the day, and I'd be like, Are you kidding? Like, what do you want me to do next? Go hug a tree, like seriously. And it was things like on days I couldn't move, I would write down things I was grateful for. And it might be that my legs could carry me to the loo. That was just one thing. Because guess what? I'm really grateful. I'm not weighing myself in my bed, right? My legs could carry me to the loo. My eyes could watch my favourite TV show. Was I able to move around a heck of a lot because I was so unwell? No. But I still had these things I was achieving, so they were going into my diary, into my little notebook. And then it was things like, oh, my divorce is over, I'm so glad. So grateful. My cat, you know, she learned to open the cat door, so I wasn't, you know, when she was a baby, wasn't constantly going up and opening it. That went in. I'm so glad she learned to open the cat door. You know, little things celebrate all of the wins, everything that you do. I got up and had a shower and got myself dressed. Yay, great, you did it. Okay, and that's where you need to start, is be grateful for every little thing. And what you're doing there is you're actually setting up your body to enjoy achievement. And then guess what? Your body won't any longer enjoy not achieving because that's what we've gotten used to. You know, I can't walk very far, I'm so fat, I'm so this, I'm so that. That's what we got used to. But now it's I made it to the letterbox. The cat opened the cat door herself, like, yay, all these things are happening. I walked to the toilet, I had a shower. You know, no matter where you're at, you can be grateful for something and set up that achievement, that love of learning and progressing. Because guess what? That's what we have to do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And do you find, just the very last question, do you find that people become impatient around that because they forget it may have taken you 30 years to get to this point, and it's not going to heal itself in two weeks just because you've decided to start changing the way you think.
SPEAKER_00:100%. And look, I'm guilty of it too. I will say that, you know, there's times when uh my kids love restaurant quality food, and there's times when I will get a recipe and I will admit I am not the best person at following recipes because my mind's always like, oh yeah, but I could substitute this and I don't like that, so I'm gonna put that in. So generally the recipes are completely different to what's in the book, but I will kind of start the recipe and my mind will jump ahead and I'll be like, Oh, and when the meal's on the table, hang on. I actually have to cook it first, I have to follow the steps. I have to be patient, and we've lost that patience with ourselves, and so when we're unwell, we do this too. I want to be able to go out, you know, to the office Christmas party. Well, guess what? You haven't been able to leave the house yet. So get that happening first and be patient with yourself.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's great advice, Magic. It has been amazing having you on the show, and I love all your advice around you know our thoughts and the connection to our body, and it does have an incredible impact. And I really hope everyone who's listening to this really takes that on and just start just gently, one word a week, maybe if that's all you can do, just swap it around and start being kinder to ourselves. You know, it's been fabulous, and for all our listeners, all of Magic's details will be in the show notes, including her website, where you can go there, book in with her because honestly, this is that really great foundational holistic approach. Thank you.
