From the Trauma summit

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Niki:  Perhaps as you call it overall, we could talk about what happens to this sort of top down, like what happens from the trauma down to on the biology and then we'll do bottom-up, so what happens to the changes in the biology and how does that affect the psychology, but do you want to expand on that? 

Dr. Ameet:  I love that question. So basically any sense of overwhelm it's a trauma - your parents fighting, financial loss, girlfriend breakup, separation, feeling unloved or not held. So I grew up in boarding school and I was bullied all the time. All of these things create the fight-or-flight response as most people know, and the fight-or-flight response is basically your body making adrenaline to fight or flee from a threat. And there's also the freeze response where it just freezes. 

And when your body makes adrenaline it pushes your adrenal glands a lot to make this adrenaline. And when the trauma is over the memory still in your limbic system, in your nervous system, and that primes your adrenal glands always to be on watch or to be fragile. And so this continuous stimulation of your adrenal system combined with everyday stress - phone calls, financial issues, whatever - these things burn out your adrenal system. And when your adrenal glands burn out basically they produce this hormone called cortisol, well, they're meant to produce a nice circadian rhythm. And the cortisol balance goes out of the window, right? So you get a cortisol imbalance as well as noradrenaline and adrenaline imbalance. And then all of these imbalances then start suppressing serotonin, dopamine, GABA, melatonin - all your brain chemicals - so how to heal adrenal fatigue naturally?

So a lot of people who have experienced trauma from childhood and even adulthood they're more prone to anxiety and depression because of this adrenal imbalance and cortisol imbalance. And then when we go to the bottom up I'll show you how cortisol imbalance is also caused by the foods we eat and inflammation and liver toxicity and things like best herbs for liver repair, right? 

So the first thing is why people don't get better is that they don't release this emotional trauma from their childhood or even events that really kept them guarded and made their body adjust to certain perceptions, to certain realities. These adjustments are toxic for us, right? You deserve to be free and authentic and childlike without any compensation, without any body armor, right? And just trust that the universe has your back and just freely with confidence, and all these are possible with all these therapies you're covering in the summit. 

Niki:  Awesome. And so that's a beautiful summary of bringing so much together, so it really is like truly the mind and body are one thing and health cannot be without happiness, right? Really. 

Dr. Ameet:  Absolutely, absolutely. 

What is Family Constellation Therapy

Niki:  It's the physical expression of happiness, right? So I've also ... it's very interesting, you also have experience with the intergenerational trauma aspect as well because I think a lot of people don't, (a) you've sort of touched on it, don't realize they have trauma, you mentioned it's that they've been through overwhelm and it's sort of sitting in their nervous system and they haven't released it, but then they just look at their childhood and go, "Well, I had a pretty good childhood. It's okay." Do you find that a lot like, "I look back, it was pretty good. I wasn't physically abused, no assaults or anything," what do you want to speak to that with your clients and how do you help people sort of recognize they might have had more going on or that it might not be their trauma, it's something they inherited from perhaps their parents? 

Dr. Ameet:  So I practice something called family constellations therapy which looks at trauma from previous generations and imbalances in the family system. So for example, if your dad was absent for a long time and your mom was left alone and she suffered and you witnessed her suffering, then you become a partner to your mother in a way, right? A confidant. Whereas, in the opposite or in a different scenario where your dad was around and everything was healthy you would be more childlike and feeling more supported, but because of these events that happen with our parents and also goes into other generations we adjust our behavior to rescue mom, for example. And that adjustment then becomes more chronic in our nervous system, in our subconscious. So we become rescuers in adult life or we don't have space in our heart and in our freedom for a healthy relationship, so we attract very needy people and then we get tired of them and we're wondering why are we not attracting the right partner - because of these habits we've created out of love and loyalty to our parents or to the family system. 

Another example of an imbalance could be so in many countries abortions and miscarriages are just kind of brushed aside, and what I found out through family constellations training is that these missing children are so integral to our soul family, our network. And so people who are born after a miscarriage or an abortion and they think that they're the firstborn but they're actually the second child in the system, and when they realize their correct position, Niki, I promise you I've treated so much anxiety and depression just through that, just finding your right position in the system - this is one of the natural remedies for anxiety and depression.

Niki:  Wow. 

Dr. Ameet:  It's so healing. And then speaking of miscarriages and abortions also if you had one and you don't really say goodbye to that soul properly and grieve it and thank it for coming in even briefly and telling it ... there's a certain expressions we use like thank you for coming to my life, you'll always have a place in my heart, I'll let you go now through the light. Little sentences create a very deep holistic trauma healing effect in the nervous system and that can give a lot of relief to chronic anxiety and depression where other therapists are not helping, because these are the root causes of the anxiety and depression - that can be solved with natural remedies for anxiety and depression. 

Niki:  Wow. 

Dr. Ameet:  So bringing balance back into your perception and your nervous system through family constellations has really treated the root cause for many difficult severe conditions that I've seen. 

 Emotional Issues

Niki:  That's amazing. I've also ... if you had experience with family constellations helping ... I think there's the sort of widespread trauma from being in war zones where it might not be a present war but past war where we've been born into a culture where there's tremendous trauma. Germany, the UK - big, huge world wars - Japan. Have you experienced in your experience as well helping to clear that through with family constellations? 

Dr. Ameet:  Absolutely, yeah. So a lot of my clients are from overseas, from different countries and many of them have ancestors who have been in war situations. And many of these people have a lot of guilt about happiness because their grandparents suffered, so there's a huge burden, there's heaviness in the system and it's like, "I'm not allowed to take love and life that easily because of the suffering of my grandparents." There's that. There's very subconscious pains going on. So we do little sentences like I love you still, mom and dad, or I love you, grandma and grandpa, please accept me as I am, and thank you for sacrificing so much in your life to give me the life that I have. 

Niki:  Wow. 

Dr. Ameet:  And then suddenly you feel this freedom, right? And this freedom then brings energy to the nervous system, improves the immune system, increases serotonin levels. So it literally translates physiologically as well. Very powerful. 

Niki:  Wow, yes, that's really amazing. It's just brought up a memory for me about there was ... I have to remember her name, there is another practitioner who talks about the mother wound and it's to do with ... there's minorities and there's so much suppression in the world of minorities that includes women as well and the racial tensions going on at the moment, but the mother wound is exactly what you're saying there where it's the daughter's feeling guilty about having happy, successful life because her mother sacrificed everything and somehow if she's happy that's not going to be good for her mother, it makes everything worse. So she self-sacrifices to save her mom, and her mom not might not even be aware of that, those unconscious processes going on. 

Dr. Ameet:  Absolutely. And that's called loyalty, we call that loyalty in family constellation. So if I'm happy mom will be smaller or isolated or abandoned. 

Niki:  Yes. 

How to Heal emotional Trauma

Dr. Ameet:  So as long as I'm sitting with mom and we're both sharing the grief she will not feel alone. And I've seen a lot of people in attracting similar partners as their mothers or fathers did, either abusive or alcoholic partners or whatever, because of that loyalty. And it's strange, when we look at mom and we bow down to mom and thank her for giving her life, his life, and give her back her pain with honor and love, the certain sentence we do, then I'm free, then I'm free as a child. And I still respect my mom but I give her strength back by giving back her pain and her burdens because then she can carry with more clarity and more integrity. And then the whole family heals that way. And then I have a better relationship, mom is a bit more free to think for herself and that heaviness from the family system then starts dissipating. 

Niki:  Amazing, it's really good to actually talk a little bit more about family constellations. I don't think we had anyone specifically talking about it. It's truly powerful because we're still seeing trauma mostly in the context of car accidents, discrete events, and you do use EMDR in your practice as well, do you find it useful for that kind of work, right? Or do you have anything to say about EMDR? 

Dr. Ameet:  Yeah, I combine everything together. So EMDR is eye movement and reprocessing, so when you do your bilateral like your eyes move from side to side it basically stimulates your nervous system to process what you're experiencing. So I'll use it for ... so I treat a lot of people from terrorist attacks in Kenya a long time ago using EMDR and other therapies and homeopathy which we're going to talk about today as well. 

Now in family constellations as well or even in Gestalt psychotherapy when somebody has that AHA awareness moment where they go to a paradigm shift and they release something I will include EMDR, some stimulation of the eyes or the tapping to help the nervous system process what they're getting, what they're realizing. 

Niki:  Awesome, that's amazing. I want to come and see for therapy, just kidding. I love talking about constellations. Now I want to talk about homeopathy because this is really interesting. Perhaps one of the only sort of something in a bottle that you can take for getting all the drug therapies that does actually get to the root ... can get to the root cause of healing trauma, something that's imprinted onto water basically which is pretty amazing. Expand on your impressions or experience with that. 

Dr. Ameet:  Okay, so I'll go through a few remedies and all the remedies are in my Free Holistic Medicine Courses Online on the exact remedies for anxiety, depression, herbs for anxiety and depression and trauma in homeopathy. But basically homeopathy is like a diluted form of medicine, right? They have many substances in nature that are diluted so that it has an energetic influence on the body. And it really works with the vibration of a person. So if you are depressed or anxious or traumatized you are in a state, in a certain state, and that state have a picture, a vibration, and there's certain remedies, particular remedies that match those vibrations and states. So for example, aconite is a beautiful remedy for shock where you have palpitations and breathlessness and things like that and fear of death. Great for seeing ... or like an accident, a car accident or being scared, things like that. 

And so each trauma is different and the response to trauma is different in each person, so if somebody goes through a breakup and they feel betrayed and they're crying a lot and they're just so anxious then we use a remedy called ignatia. Ignatia is fantastic for that. If somebody goes through a breakup and feels very resentful and alone and closes the doors on people and really suffers inside and there's more melancholy then it's natrum muriaticum. And I go through all these remedies in detail in the Free Holistic Medicine Courses Online. 

So it's very important to recognize that there are little pills out there, homeopathic pills, that can really dilute and dissipate the experience of shock and trauma and give the person their life back, right? 

Niki:  Yes. 

Dr. Ameet:  It's like 10 years of counseling in a pill. 

Niki:  Yes, it's amazing. Yeah, it really is. 

How to deal with depression and anxiety

Dr. Ameet:  And then some people have depression with a lot of sadness and isolation, some people have depression with suicidal thoughts; some people have depression because of burnout, right? So there's remedies for burnout, for example, califos, if you've worked too hard and you're just burnt out completely, your memory is failing and you just have that apathetic feeling or you're feeling startled by noises then there's remedies for that like califos. Or if you're really burnt out and you're angry and irritable, work too hard, too stress, we give something like [unclear 16:29], right? 

Niki:  Yes. 

Dr. Ameet:  So these are all beautiful remedies that are available to really discharge the energetic influence of stress and trauma. And it goes really into a person so that they need less medication over time, less therapy over time because the body has its own innate ability to heal itself. When you cut yourself your skin heals, so in the same way homeopathy stimulates your body's innate ability to come out of compensation let's say to a more healthier, neutral state. And it's also used for physical problems - any physical ailment, homeopathy is used with amazing effects. And there's the proof that mind and body really work together. 

Niki:  So this is the crux of what you're saying, the biochemistry just can't come good, it can't heal itself until we've put the body back into the healing state with all these different tools that you talk about. 

Dr. Ameet:  Absolutely, absolutely. People are pushing themselves with supplement, supplement, supplements but their nervous system and their energetics are so like influenced by other effects that until you heal those effects the physiology doesn't really change, you're just managing it with bandage solutions. 

Niki:  Yes, so it's really ... I can't help really to go back to a lot of people can get very stuck in the biochemical model, they're just everything's about gut health and taking probiotics for gut health or just taking the nutrients or just taking neurotransmitter support, like very biochemical. And it's very much like that, and we're sort of trying to break out of that paradigm and bring in the psycho energetics into the US and sort of got it a little more in kind of Germany and Russia and a bit more in the UK because we're a little bit more open maybe to that, we're trying to sort of open that out into the USA as well. But I know you've had history and perhaps trained in Canada, anything's quite about your experience? Like, because you're an international star, a practitioner, and have these experiences in these different continents, any cultural comments about that, the international kind of differences? 

Dr. Ameet:  There's a lot of difference, like I can't pinpoint it but I'm using a different muscle in my brain when I'm working with a different culture because different cultures have different beliefs, different upbringings and also reference to reality - so how I see the world and my expectations of people and the way things work then determine the way I walk through the world, right? And we have all these beliefs unconsciously, we're walking through them and we just follow them as children. And so it takes a lot of awareness to become aware of some of these operating beliefs and where the comfort zone is. And so it's like you become more and more sensitive to their operations or their reality and then you use that awareness to really touch into that vulnerable space inside of them. 

Niki:  Yes. 

Dr. Ameet:  Because you've got to touch the heart of a person, right? 

Niki:  Yeah. 

How does depression affect the brain

Dr. Ameet:  You want to touch the heart of a person. And when the person feels touched that way then people are basically the same in one love and [unclear 19:44] and just to feel safe. Safety and love are really our basic needs. 

Niki:  Yes, that's like food and water, I couldn't agree more. You have an amazing ... talk more about your Free Holistic Medicine Courses Online and your particular process, what you call the permission to heal process which we'll talk about in a second. Is there anything else you want to share practically for people, just maybe anything practical, any lifestyle recommendations, anything just for people to get into doing, your top things that are really good for people on a daily basis? Or we could just go straight into your exercise, it's up to you. 

Dr. Ameet:  I'll zip through the practical stuff because I really want to do this exercise for people, I think it helps a lot of people. 

Niki:  Yes. 

Dr. Ameet:  Okay, so we have the gut, the liver and the whole digestive system, right? And when we eat inflammatory foods or take too much antibiotics, etcetera, it destroys the gut and kills the probiotics. And my whole Free Holistic Medicine Courses Online in my gut health book is about this. 

So then when you have holes in your gut then toxins go into the bloodstream, cause inflammation, that causes a cortisol imbalance and, therefore, neurotransmitter imbalance and, therefore, anxiety and depression. All these toxins go to the liver and most people forget about healing their leaky liver, and that's really what a lot of my holistic medicine books are about, the liver as well, with best herbs for liver repair and best tea for liver repair.

When the liver gets stagnant it produces less bile so there's poor digestion, more gas, bloating, constipation, worsening of leaky gut - learn how to heal leaky gut in 2 weeks. With leaky liver stagnation you get a hormonal imbalance, with that progesterone estrogen go out of balance, and progesterone helps GABA work better in the brain so with a progesterone deficiency people get more anxious and with testosterone deficiency people get more depressed. So liver is very important for mental health. 

Now all this inflammation because of the toxicity in the leaky liver, etcetera, stresses the adrenal glands to make more and more cortisol, so adrenal glands are stressed. With trauma and stress as well as from inflammation and toxicity - both wipe up your adrenal glands, create the cortisol imbalance, brain chemical imbalance pursues, anxiety and depression. So when you're healing mental health you've got to heal trauma from the nervous system as well as find how to heal adrenal fatigue naturally and heal the gut, detoxify the liver and then strengthen the adrenal system with the best herbs for liver repair.

Niki:  Wow, that was really awesome, that's amazing. Yeah, absolutely brilliant. So that was ... we're going to do your practical exercise, but the piece that you said now, that's really key, it's something that I learned clinically recently - attachment trauma, the connection between attachment trauma and fatty liver, like there's a huge connection between this early life stress, this long-term survival stress that we have and specifically the liver. And I realized through my own experience as well that you can't heal the liver if there is that nervous system stress happening all the time because we don't feel safe in our own bodies because of the attachment trauma and never feeling an inner sense of safety. This liver piece I think this is ... I think the diet is a huge factor and the reason we have ... I think we have an epidemic of fatty liver and problems with the liver. But I worked with chronic fatigue for many years, but I think that trauma and specifically developmental trauma, these long-term like ambient trauma, the liver is crucial. And I think it also gets ignored in the context of digestion as well because we have so many summits about gut health and microbiome and forget that the liver is putting bile into the digestion, right? And you're also saying very intuitive that you're seeing that clinically too that, "Hey, guys, you've got to sort out the liver." 

GABA for anxiety and depression

Dr. Ameet:  I was actually voted one of the top speakers in a lot of summits because I talked about the liver, best liver detox and make connection. 

Niki:  Right, so interesting, okay. 

Dr. Ameet:  And I don't mean to show off, no, it's just to stress the importance to everyone that you have to heal your liver when you're healing leaky gut, right? And I've got some free videos on my website that you can watch in like how do the liver, best liver detox and the connections and stuff like that, because remember the liver produces bile, number one, the liver processes toxins and bile is so important for digestion. All those probiotics you're eating depend on a healthy gut environment and if there's not healthy amounts of bile in your gut your probiotics are going to suffer, they're not going to proliferate. 

Niki:  Yes, and you're going to get fat imbalances, very interesting, or you just can't absorb fats. And the gallbladder is critical to all this process as well. I think gallbladders being out of whack often leads to sort of ... can lead to maybe hiatal hernia as well, people that can't then get their stomach acid sorted out because it's getting the wrong place but it actually could come from the liver and gallbladder and we just ignore it, don't we? I'm just glad to emphasize that. 

Dr. Ameet:  No, you're right, Niki, most heartburn is a liver stagnation issue from what I've seen. 

Niki:  Amazing, you're amazing. Okay, do you want to talk about your ... this practical permission to heal exercise. 

Dr. Ameet:  I think we have a limited time, right? So I wanted to get this exercise in for people. 

Niki:  Go for it. 

Dr. Ameet:  So how am I going to explain this? So we all have belief systems that keep us stuck, right? We are conditioned as human beings and that conditioning has removed us from our spiritual expression and our authenticity let's just say and our vulnerability. And this conditioning comes from magazines, from TV, the Marlboro man - men have to be like this kind of stiff, tough person, etcetera. And so in my meditations I came up with an exercise that I found is helping a lot of my patients and I just want to share this with the world because we need to get out of our stuck places, and I call it ... I used to call it permission to heal but I think it's permission to be spiritual or permission to dehumanize ourselves. 

So what I'd like you to do is basically just close your eyes and you can put one hand on your forehead and one hand on the back of your head. And then you can think about an event that happened in your life, a stressful event, don't make it a too big event, do this with a therapist, of course, but a minor event. And then just look at the sensations you are feeling in that event. And you might want to judge it that I shouldn't feel this weak or I shouldn't feel scared, etcetera, let go of the judgment for a while and just say these sentences to yourself - it's safe to breathe once in a while. And stay with the feeling, just notice that feeling. And then use the word once in a while or from time to time very deliberately, so you give yourself permission to feel those feelings and not feel those feelings, because if you force yourself to be positive your body will go into resistance. 

"So it's safe to breathe from time to time. It's safe to be scared once in a while or it's safe to be exhausted from time to time." So give yourself permission to go into that exhaustion, that part of your body is in, in that old memory or experience and use the word again once in a while, from time to time. 

And take your time in this exercise. And take a deep breath in and out. And then again, go to the next feeling you might have, either a positive feeling or what you're labeling as a negative feeling. "It's safe to be upset from time to time." And really feel that from time to time inside of you. 

And the connection of the hand on your forehead and behind your head is based on this therapy called Tapas where it connects the hemispheres of your brain and helps the nervous system process emotions. 

"And it's safe to relax once in a while. It's safe to give myself permission from time to time, to be myself from time to time." So all parts of you are yourself even the person who's feeling emotional and whose feelings are coming up, those are all parts of you. 

And then you can end it, you just take a break from the exercise by saying, "It's safe to smile for myself once in a while or from time to time." So giving yourself permission to come out of the role of seriousness, of pain. So sometimes we fall into a role that we're not conscious of doing, and giving yourself permission to come out of those roles with the word from time to time, so there's no pressure to change immediately. That will readjust or give permission for your nervous system to let go of the fight or flight or guarding. 

And that permission creates an automatic healing response that takes over your whole body so you don't have to work so hard in therapy, the body understands that, it can readjust and it gets a different experience of life and a different experience of life from the vulnerable place is what gives a message to our vulnerable self that it's okay to come out of shelter or guarding and then the whole body begins to trust in the life process, takes more air, the blood flows and it deeply starts healing including your immune system. 

Niki:  Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that process. I hope people are ... I think people have got a lot out of it. I guess my last sort of questions for you is that what you're talking about there is really important, like we want this embodied, obviously, the embodied experience of feeling the safeness and the calmness and that feeling of being connected and grounded to the earth again and that all is well because a lot of us are just not living in that space, do you recommend people do that process how many times a day or what do you recommend to help people stay connected to themselves and grounded on a daily basis? Because it's like everything on the planet seems to be pulling us out of that where it's like it's not just from what our own histories, but any other practical final sort of recommendations like to get people on a daily basis reset their nervous system. 

Free Holistic Medicine Courses Online 

Dr. Ameet:  So I have all the exercises in my Free Holistic Medicine Courses Online one by one but I'll go through some of them briefly right here, one is becoming aware of the shoulds - I should be perfect, I should perform well, I should do this, I should do that. So our language to ourselves is I should, I should, I should. So changing that language to I can, I will or I won't. Because I need to and I should is a very stressful word and language on ourselves, and that removes us from our heart. It should come from our parents, from society, from governments, from magazines, from TV, whatever it may be and it puts pressure on that poor little child inside of you. 

The other one is just something like this and with your hand around your forehead and the back of your head and just remembering a scene that was disturbing and just doing some long deep breathing and giving yourself permission, so not force yourself, but giving permission for yourself to feel what you need to feel and to heal. Emotion is much more powerful I think than affirmations because your body does things naturally in its own authentic juice. 

Niki:  Exactly. 

Dr. Ameet:  Simple tapping techniques and then alternate nostril breathing as well, so it's called [non-English 32:07], so both feet on the ground and hopefully you can touch some real ground not just cement, so find a park or some mud even, whatever it is, and just breathing in, like in, then switch nostrils, out. So you're closing one nostril on the in-breath, switching fingers, breathing out of the other nostril and breathing in through this last nostril you breathe out off and out the other one. So it's in, switch, out, in, switch, out. And this resets the two hemispheres of the brain. 

And it's fantastic especially after you've processed some trauma; you've gone through some therapy or some emotional healing work. It's fantastic for helping your nervous system, really integrate the healing, really deep healing so that you just need less therapy over time I think. 

Niki:  Yes, and that is awesome. 

Dr. Ameet:  Yeah, yes. 

Niki:  That's great. No, I know, it's absolutely great. So I really enjoyed the interview. And before we talk about how people find out more about you and your website and so on, anything else, any final recommendations or messages that you want to share with the audience, important things that you just want to say for people? 

Dr. Ameet:  What's coming to mind is the children with disabilities I'm treating right now. I'm using homeopathy and I've already seen a lot of progress, so homeopathy works. So I think when you don't get influenced by negative statements and placebo claims on homeopathy it really works. I've seen tremendous results on really vulnerable children - they're stopping grinding, they're opening their eyes and things like that. It's magic. That's one. 

Number two; like you say as well, Niki, love is medicine. So really forgiving yourself for any traumas you've been through, forgiving yourself for compensating yourself when you were hurt, abused, raped, whatever, forgiving yourself for the pain. Really self-forgiveness helps us reconnect with that sense of self-love and a sense of self-love then connects with our spiritual strength. So love is medicine and forgive yourself. 

And smile once in a while, even in the mirror, even though you're in the role of seriousness, remember, a lot of our persona is a role we've adjusted to based on the influence from an experience. So just smile at yourself once a while takes us out of that role that we don't realize we're stuck in. And so I'll leave you with that. 

Niki:  Awesome. Dr. Ameet, thank you so much. It's been really awesome. Thank you for all the work that you're doing. It's really incredible. 

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