Trauma, Resentment, and the Lymphatic System Guest:
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNPThe contents of this presentation are for informational purposes only and are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. This presentation does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Shivan: Hi, Doctor Keesha Ewers is with me. She is one of the most eclectic healers that you will probably hear from on most of the summits that you attend. She is a true healer and a true advocate for anyone who is seeking a higher path, who is a survivor of trauma. She's the one who taught me about the ACEs studies, which I know she'll be talking about here. She's the one who really helped me see the science behind a variety of childhood experiences and later experiences in terms of your health, your mind, your body and your spirit. She's also a cookbook author. She does women's retreats. She is so cool, you guys. I will let you experience her for yourself. Hello, Keesha. Thank you so much for being here.
Dr. Ewers: Thanks for having me on. I've never been called eclectic, but it's totally true.
Shivan: It is. You are an integrative medical expert, a doctor of sexology. Come on now, that’s eclectic.
Dr. Ewers: I know, it’s totally true. In my mind they all fit together very well.
Shivan: Look at you. You're a living vision of health, and balance, and joy. So speaking of which, let's all try it out, I'll have what you're having. How does trauma impact our lymphatic system?
Dr. Ewers: Well, first I want to tell you a little story and then we'll tie them together. So a lot of people have heard my story from my book, Solving the
Autoimmune Puzzle, where I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis when I was in my early thirties. And I traced it back and discovered that my early childhood sexual abuse had something to do with this auto-immunity that I was experiencing. Within six months, I was able to reverse it, never went on meds. Well, this other story, I don't think I've ever told on your summit before, 10 years later my son was home from college. I have four children and my two older boys were home from college. And my second son sat me down and said, “Mom, I need to talk to you.”
And I said, “That sounds serious.” And he said, “Well, it kind of is.” And so we sat down at the dining room table and he said, “I just needed to let you know, it feels like the right time that Cameron,” his older brother, “And I were sexually abused.” By the neighborhood boy that I had had babysit them a couple of times and I of course lost it. And I said, “Why have you not told me this before?” And he said, “Because of this. I didn't want my entire childhood to be defined by this one event.” And he said, “You such a good mom.” And all of these different things and he said, “It just felt like it was time to let you know.”
So I went into action and I found the young man who was 12 at the time who had done this with my boys. And when I called him, he said, “Mrs. Ewers, I've been waiting for this call for 15 years.” And I knew like this has impacted everybody in our field. And so I had him pay for part of their counseling. I facilitated this amazing forgiveness process when it was time between my kids and him. And it was just this amazing process that occurred. Well, four months after that was settled out, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. And when I went in, the radiology oncologist was over my left breast where I had felt something, and there was this huge blood supply going to this tumor. It was so healthy. And I looked at it on the screen and I said, “I know exactly where that came from.”
And I said, “Give me a month and then I will come back and I will listen to what you think needs to happen. But for right now, I know what has to happen in this moment.” And it was right in my left breast, right over my heart. The minute this came out of Collin's mouth when he told me, I could feel like my heart shatter and guilt and shame, and the very worst thing I could imagine for my children because of my own experience. That I had been responsible for this happening and all of this stuff.
So here I facilitated this forgiveness between them and even helped the perpetrator with his stuff, but I had not forgiven myself. So physically, what had happened was my lymphatic system was congested. My liver wasn't draining, my brain was on fire. And yet from the time Collin sat me down to 10 years prior to that when I'd reversed my rheumatoid arthritis, nothing that I was eating, my lifestyle choices, my exercise, my sleep, my hydration, the
way that I dealt with stress, nothing had changed. The only thing that had happened was this tremendous amount of guilt and shame that even as I talk about it today, woof, right under the surface. And so my lymphatic system was congested as hell in my left side, only right here. So you have to wonder, is this really just physical? Is this just about the liver? Is this just about the brain? Is this just about, you know what I mean? Is this just about cellular metabolism and detoxification processes that are on a physical plane? And in my experiences, absolutely not. And so what I did to get rid of that cancer was in four weeks, it was gone.
Shivan: Wow that is amazing.
Dr. Ewers: Four weeks, it was gone. And I had to go in and I had to do this deep trauma therapy, deep. Can you imagine forgiving yourself for something like that as a mom?
Shivan: I am not a mom. So my heart breaks for you and do you know that that's actually why I decided not to have kids. I could not handle it. I know myself well enough that I couldn't handle it. So God bless you in all the ways.
Dr. Ewers: It was life or death to have to forgive myself.
Shivan: I’m so sorry.
Dr. Ewers: It was either to do it or die. And my genetics are that I do not metabolize estrogen very well. My mother has had breast cancer, my grandmother has had breast cancer, but isn't it interesting that it arrived in that moment? My genetics, my liver's inability to process estrogen, all of that came to her head right there. My father has chronic lymphocytic leukemia today. He has had it since 2004. I have genetics that go with like really messed up lymphatic system. And yet it only really came to my head and manifested on a physical plane when I got that information and had to actually go in and do this deep forgiveness process. And then when I went back and I had to know that ultrasound, could you just believe all of those little veins that were feeding that tumor were just hanging there and there was this open space right there.
Shivan: Your doctor must have freaked out.
Dr. Ewers: He said, “I can't even believe what I'm seeing right now.” And I said, “No, don't try.” I just knew exactly what was going on here and not everybody does. And so why I don't tell this story very often, and the reason is because I don't want anyone walking away saying, “Well, I just have to think myself out of cancer, or I have to go do therapy and my cancer will be gone.” It just happened to be there. I just knew why it was there, and I knew why
everything had slugged and why it was stuck and why all this was going on. And so the science behind this then, there are several studies, but the one that's the most famous was conducted between 1995 and 1997 by Kaiser Permanente and the Centers for Disease Control. And it's the one that you called the ACEs study, Adverse Childhood Experiences study is the largest study that's ever been done of its kind. It had over 3000 participants that were Kaiser enrollees.
And it started because in this weight loss clinic which was very successful, people were enrolling through Kaiser and losing their weight. But there was a certain percentage of population of that weight loss clinic that was successfully losing weight, but dropping out before they got to their goal. And luckily the director of the clinic was curious and went and started investigating this and found out that most of them had been sexually abused in childhood. And so found that fascinating and said, “This needs to have more investigation.” And joined with the Centers for Disease Control and they did this study.
And what they did is they asked the participants, over 3,500 of them, before the age of 18 did you experience any of these 10, what they called adverse childhood experiences? And they're the things that we call Capital T trauma. That's how I label it, lowercase T trauma and Capital T trauma. They're the things that you ordinarily think of when you hear the word trauma like sexual abuse or domestic violence, or emotional neglect, abandonment, having a parent that is addicted to a substance or incarcerated or died, divorced, abandonment, all of these things that are very traumatic for children.
[10:00]
If you said yes to any of those, you had a score of one, if you said yes to two and so on. So I had a score of two at least. And sure enough, the findings of this study said the higher your ACE score, the higher your risk for every single physical ailment we have in our society, all the chronic illnesses, including cancer and auto-immune disease. And so I wound up with rheumatoid arthritis, but my grandfather had had it. I wound up with breast cancer while my mother and my grandmother had had that. So you could say like my doctors both said when I went in with these things, “It's genetic.” But at the end of the day, you have to ask, “Well, what made that gene express itself now, rather than a different time. So again, with the RA, I was able to reverse that.
And I had to do a lot of trauma work because what I figured out was the sexual abuse from my childhood had to have had something to do with this auto-immune disease, because back in those days, at the age of 10, it was at the hands of a vice principal in my elementary school, I wanted to die. I was
trying to tell people what was happening. Nobody could really get what I was saying. I didn't have the right language, and so I wanted to die. And so when I went back and I visited that little girl version of myself at that time period, and I saw how badly she wanted to die, I thought, yeah, she wanted out, this has to be connected. And sure enough it shows in science that it is.
And I conducted a study in 2013 called the Healing Unresolved Trauma study, and discovered that there's a whole pathway that gets set up with this first initial hurt. You actually have an emotion that gets attached to it. For me, it was panic, whenever the intercom would go off in the classroom, I would have it. And then from that, you attach a meaning to that sympathetic nervous system response. And the meaning that I attached was, I'm not safe, which was true for that little kid.
And then there's going to be a belief and a behavior that gets attached to that. It's an adaptive response for that age. And remember that our brains are not fully developed till we're 26 years old. So whatever we think in that time period makes sense to that age, but then it doesn't really work in adulthood. So the belief I created was that people in charge can't really be trusted, which I could find evidence for today, for sure, but it's not always true. And then my behavior was to be perfect because I figured if the vice-principal’s telling me this is my fault because I'm a bad kid, then I need to be perfect. So there perfectionism was born.
And I always say that people with cancer and auto-immune disease actually have these Ps in place, perfectionism, people-pleasing and holding onto the poison of past pain. And it's holding on to that poison of past pain part that sledges up our lymphatic system. And Ayurvedic medicine, which is the sister science of yoga from 10,000 years ago actually says, and this is what got me on the right path for healing myself. I started investigating, what else can I do besides Methotrexate? Is there something else out here? And sure enough, Ayurvedic medicine says, “Auto-immune disease, cancer, tumors, it's actually undigested anger.” Well, when you think about undigested anything, what are you thinking of? You're thinking lymphatic system on a physical plane of undigested stuff sitting in the emotional and mental plane. And I went, “My gosh,” because I remember sitting back in front of the computer going, “But I'm not an angry person.” And then thinking that might be a problem. Maybe that's a big problem. Not that I'm not an angry person, but I actually don't even permission myself to have anger and express it. I don't even know how to do it. And I, of course, didn't have great role models for that growing up either. And so I had to learn all this. I had to learn how to digest emotions properly, and then guess what happens to my lymphatic system.
Shivan: It clears once you cleared that up. That’s amazing.
Dr. Ewers: Fatty liver, Ayurveda says the same thing? It's like, you've got a bunch of undigested anger in there. Well, I don't think you can still drink a bunch of alcohol, eat a bunch of sugar, if you have an APOE4 gene, eat meat and then meditate a lot and have that work. You’ve got to do all of it. And Ayurveda talks about these five layers of us. We have our physical layer, the one that we feed, and water and take care of, then we have an energetic layer called the pranamaya kosha. And that energetic layer is those 72,000 chakras that are inside of us, where our nerves cross actually connects to our emotional layer and our mental layer. So those belief systems that we created in response to our events in childhood are stored here and they connect to the physical body through that energetic system. So this whole thing becomes important for detoxification. It's not just physical.
Shivan: When you say you did a lot of forgiveness work, let's say, someone's sitting here like weeping, because they can relate so much and you're telling a story of their lives and your version of it. And they realize now, “Okay, I have to do something.” Give me a couple of first steps.
Dr. Ewers: I have this whole forgiveness practice that, this is my eclectic part. I was in India and I was in a cave and went into this meditation and downloaded those lot of years ago. And it's what I used when I had to do this work. I call it the mirror exercise, and it's in my book Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle, but here's how it goes. So let's say that you're triggered, let's say that I was late for our appointment today, like 10 minutes late, I didn't show up. And that time was really important to you and you got really irritated. Okay. So what you would do with this forgiveness process in the mirror part of it is you would go, “Okay, so what's the ego trait or the personality trait that I'm assigning to the other person?” So is time really important to you? Would you be irritated if I were 10 minutes late?
Shivan: Probably not, but I get the idea. So maybe I would think that you were selfish or something.
Dr. Ewers: There it is, selfish, inconsiderate, disrespectful, whatever that would be. And I never put words in other people's mouth because it's going to be what you see. And so if you say, “Selfish.” Then you would go, “Okay. So how do I do selfish?” And it's going to be a whole different behavior. And people get very confused by this. So I used my sexual abuse as an example, because you can't argue with that. So I'll say, “Okay, so Mr. Johnson, here's an adult who in authority did this.” And so if I assign ego traits to his behavior, then I would say, “Cruel.” Because of the way that he told me I was white trash because I was bad and all of that, cruelty, and misuse of power and bigotry. And so those are three things that I identified when I was first doing this work.
So then I went, “Okay, how do I do misuse of power?” Well, at this point, I'm a mother of four children, easy. I was like, “Okay.” I actually just that morning and had an experience with my oldest son and I called him up and I said, “Cameron, did you experience me as guilt tripping you this morning?” He goes, “Yeah. That about sums it up.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry.” And I said, “That's a misuse of power.” And I said, “If you ever see me doing that again, I'm going to really watch that, I ask you to point it out to me so I can relate.” And he said, “Sure, mom.” So from that point forward, I really watched that for myself. The other one I found was cruelty again, mom, like how often have my kids probably thought I was mean if I didn't let them go play because they hadn't done their chores or whatever.
The last one was really hard for me bigotry. So I was like, “I am not a bigot. I lived in the Navy, which meant all over the world.” I was like, “I am not a bigot.” And then I started realizing we were in an election with George W. Bush and I live in Seattle and there are all these people that are really upset by the outcome of the second election. And I thought, “I'm actually really intolerant to people that are intolerant.” And I got it that all of Seattle was, we’re intolerant to intolerance, we're bigots in our own way. And I got this cultural bigotry and I went oh. And so the thing that you get from doing that is not a forgiveness for the behavior. You never have to forgive sexual abuse ever.
[20:00]
But what you can do is you can get into this place where instead of coming from the pulpit where you're like, “I would never do that to another person.” So you have the self-righteousness, which actually puts you in a judgment seat, which actually congests your lymphatic system. When you're tight like that, you can just feel it like self-righteous, indignation and anger. You can feel like the same as a bra would cut off your lymphatic drainage out of your breasts. So you can feel that.
So what it does is it takes you off of the pulpit. It puts you as humans right here, and you go, “I see what you've taught me here. And thank you for being my teacher.” So now I can watch cruelty, bigotry, and misuse of power. And at the same time, I don't need to reconcile with that person. People get confused. My whole doctoral dissertation was about forgiveness and so I know all the statistics around why people don't forgive and one of the main root causes of unwillingness to forgive another person, is you think they're going to get away with something. But in the end of the day it's not up to you. You can hold on to that all you want, but you're only making yourself sick.
And actually, I think Mark Twain and the Buddha are both credited with saying, “If you don't forgive somebody, you dig two graves instead of one.” And
there's a reason for that. You really do congest your mind, your brain and your lymphatic system. Everything is so rigid. So I was able to forgive him without reconciling with him. You never reconcile with someone that's hurt you if they haven't demonstrated contrition and safety. So you can do all this inside of yourself. I don't have to call up Mr. Johnson and say, “Hey, I just figured out we’re the same. Should we have tea?” You just don't do that. So I got to do this process and drain. I always say, resentment is the most toxic chemical created on the planet. And it's not created by a corporation and dumped into our air, water and soil. It's created within us and dumped into this terrain, which then affects our microbiome, affects liver detoxification, affects our lymphatic system, our mood, our weight, our hormonal balance, all of it.
Shivan: You're doing a beautiful job of explaining this. Because as a yoga teacher, as a metaphysician myself, I find it's very few people that can give language to what you're talking about in a way that makes sense to somebody who has not spent a lot of time meditating and has just maybe started their spiritual path, or is very literal about the word forgiveness and all of that. So I hope everybody who's listening will listen with an open brain, ears and heart. You don't need to really make a decision about whether or not this is true, but let it seep in. Take this and use this as a lens to look at some things in your life and in the world, because I think
Dr. Ewers: Just know that resentment will kill you faster than BPA.
Shivan: There you go. It just opens up a lot of possibilities, a lot of possibilities for healing. It's really exciting. Thank you for that. Now, is that in your book? Because I want to go get that book.
Dr. Ewers: Well, I'm writing a book right now called Healing Trauma through the Chakra System, and it goes into more detail. Solving the Autoimmune Puzzle does have this process in it. And I talk about it in the same way, but I go deeper into let's really get this done in the Healing Trauma through the Chakra System, which I have as a program which I'm happy to do something with your community if you want to. But it's so powerful because that resentment bath that we put ourselves in, the resentment hot tub, it's the most damaging thing that we can do to ourselves. And like I said, that doesn't mean you have to go out and go reconcile with all the people that have hurt you in your life. But the other piece around this, one that I think is so important to understand is that we have been the perpetrator also.
And while I may not have bought tanks and taken over Poland and committed genocide like World War II and Hitler, I am like Hitler. And I can find the same ego traits inside of myself as Hitler had that drove him to those actions. I just
have done it differently. And so the Cherokee said that beautifully where they have the parable of the little boy going to his grandfather, the chief of the tribe and saying, “Grandfather, how do I become a good man, not a bad man.” And the grandfather saying, “Grandson, every man and woman has within them a black wolf and a white wolf. And whichever one you feed the most to is the one that grows the strongest.” And the thing that we don't seem to understand is that we're feeding that dark wolf when we stay in our victim stuff, when we stay in that place. And that literally will cause the lymphatic congestion that does kill us. So it's not at someone else's hand, it's in our own.
Shivan: That's some heavy, really liberating stuff. It really is. It's revolutionary, and it's infinite, and it's universal. And so everyone take a breath because this is really powerful. It's a really powerful. I so appreciate you for helping us expand our perspective and our consciousness and doing it in such an elegant way and using the technology of Buddhism and the science of Western medicine all at the same time. So like I said, not just eclectic, but really very special. Something can be eclectic and not special, but you are very much both. Thank you so much.
Dr. Ewers: Thank you. And thanks for having me.
Shivan: Always a treat. So we'll look forward to learning more from you in future summits. Thanks so much Doctor Ewers.
Dr. Ewers: Bye everybody.