Feeling good in your mind, body and heart after trauma and abuse with Dr Ameet Aggarwal

[0:00-1:00] Nunaisi Ma

Hello and welcome to RISE. I am so honoured to have today Dr. Ameet Aggarwal. He is voted one of the top 43 naturopathic doctors worldwide. Dr. Ameet has helped thousands of people around the world heal from trauma, anxiety, depression and chronic disease by combining naturopathic and functional medicine, gestalt psychotherapy, family constellations therapy, EMDR and homoeopathy.

His best-selling book and free online course on drameet.com will help you heal your mind and body together with emotional release techniques and holistic medicine. When you get Dr. Ameet’s online course and book, you help poor and vulnerable children in Kenya receive holistic medicine. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

[1:01-1:02] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Thank you and greetings from Kenya, everyone.

[1:04-1:08] Nunaisi Ma

Wow Ameet, I’m so honoured to have you here.

[1:09-1:12] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Likewise. Thank you, Nunaisi, it’s a pleasure.

[1:13-1:22] Nunaisi Ma

What an honour. You are combining so many modalities in your practice. Can you expand on how you weave all of them together?

[1:24-3:44] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

So as a naturopathic doctor, we focus on of course healing the physiology of the person by healing the gut, changing the diet, detoxifying the liver and also supporting different mechanisms, different biological functions in the body using herbs, nutrition, supplements, etc and the right kind of anti-inflammatory foods as well. And as a psychotherapist, family constellations therapist, EMDR and trauma therapist, I strongly believe that releasing trauma is the key to really releasing physiological stress in the body that is contributing to disease.

So, healing the mind and body together is super important for a person’s well-being. Many people only focus on supplements and diet and nutrition and if you get to heal their emotions and what we call adverse childhood experiences from childhood that have programmed the nervous system to be exhausted or hyper-vigilant or nervous or just feeling unsafe, that contributes to a stress response in the body. It messes up somebody’s cortisol levels and that as we all know, these two blood sugar imbalances- brain degeneration, chronic disease, hormonal imbalance, a whole myriad of symptoms.

Other people focus on only healing their emotions. They go for therapy after therapy after therapy and they ignore the fact that they might have food sensitivity or chronic inflammation coming from a poor diet or thyroid or adrenal imbalance or my favourite topic, liver imbalance. The liver helps to basically detoxify your body, it heals your gut, it reduces inflammation, it balances your hormones, and so without proper liver health you are going to have indigestion, IBS, gas, bloating, premenstrual symptoms, anxiety, depression, various different pathologies related to your liver’s work in the body.

So, you have to heal the mind and the body together and by healing, of course, emotional trauma from the past, healing your gut, your liver, and the adrenal system which I show you how on my website in the free video course as well.

[3:45-5:14] Nunaisi Ma

I could not agree with you more. I must say that in my own journey I’ve started with the physical so I’ve studied a bit of naturopathy and I’ve learned about the physical as you just mentioned, all those systems working together, and along the way, I realised that this is really the starting point because if your body is not feeling well, you don’t even have the motivation to go further in a body that doesn’t feel right. Like you want to be in your own skin. If you can’t even feel that you want to live in your own body, then you can’t go further, right?

This is kind of the foundation but it’s also not enough just to heal the body because as you said there is a whole other aspect of it that if you’re not looking there, you know, just a healthy body and not a healthy spirit or emotional body but to give you that sense of holistic and wholeness. So, I love how you combine the two- or more than two- you use quite a lot of modalities. Can you maybe expand a little bit for our audience that are not familiar with gestalt therapy and then EMDR? What is that?

[5:16-12:08] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Absolutely, so as children, as an adult and as adults we experience a lot of traumas, many of us, and it might not be big traumas like I don’t know, death of a loved one or being raped or abused a whole lot of people have that. It could be minor traumas as well like, mum going away for 3 weeks or something like that or looking away or dad just being absent for a brief period, but the combination- there’s a multitude of traumas that really impacts our nervous system and we get a biological response in our body.

And also, if there’s family like generational trauma from our ancestors or there’s abortion or miscarriage in your family or your mum or there’s a murderer in some part of your family system or you are descendants of some sort of war or holocaust, all these experiences impact your soul, your consciousness, your subconsciousness and your nervous system.

And we’re carrying these traumas energetically and a lot of psychological techniques go into analysis and they don’t support the emotional release of energy from your nervous system, from your body, from your organs and from the water molecules in your body. I believe that a lot of emotions are stored in water molecules and as energy in the body system.

Gestalt cycle therapy, EMDR and family constellations therapy, if done in the right way, really help release the entanglements of trauma in our nervous system, so you get an emotional and physical and visceral experience when you’re going through therapy and that’s when you know that the therapy is really working because your body feels supported, acknowledged and that vulnerable part of you comes alive. You’ll feel seen, which is not a bad thing.

We encourage vulnerability in therapy and if it’s supporting the right way; you become stronger in that hidden part of you, so we don’t want to force a change in behaviour when it doesn’t happen authentically.

Authentic transformation is the most healing and most long-lasting transformation I’ve ever seen in my life and then, of course, we have to combine these with healing the body. Why? because I’ll show you how your body, your gut, your liver, etc. affects your mind as well as anxiety and depression. So, you have a gut, stomach and intestines. Intestines are like a nice lining kept healthy by good bacteria and good food. Over time, with antibiotics, poor diet, etc this lining in your intestines gets damaged and the good bacteria get killed off so we get holes in there. That’s called leaky gut syndrome. With that, toxins go into the bloodstream and cause inflammation everywhere in your body.

The leading cause for asthma, eczema, arthritis and, of course, an imbalance of brain chemicals. Now most of your brain chemicals like serotonin and GABA are actually induced in your gut, not in the brain and so when you have an imbalance in your gut system what we call dysbiosis, then you get an imbalance of brain chemicals leading to anxiety and depression.

Now let’s go back to inflammation. All this inflammation from leaky gut is wreaking havoc in your body and it’s also creating more toxins, so what happens is your liver becomes inflamed and overburdened with toxins. It produces less bile – that’s juice for digestion – with less bile being produced then you get more gas, bloating, indigestion and constipation and a worsening of dysbiosis and leaky gut because the bile is important for the good bacteria in the gut to flourish. So now we’ve got this worsening of leaky gut, more liver toxicity and the liver also controls hormones and many other chemicals in your body, so when you get liver stagnation you go into in addition to digestive symptoms, you also get premenstrual symptoms, hormonal imbalances, oestrogen dominance, mood changes, a progesterone deficiency.

When progesterone goes down, GABA doesn’t work well in the brain, so you get more anxiety and insomnia. So, you can see how your gut affects your liver and, therefore, affects your hormones and, therefore, your mood and your sleep, and that makes you very fatigued. Then you become more emotional and vulnerable to stresses in life. So, you feel overwhelmed and that is compounded with your traumas in your life that you have not healed, so your biology affects your response to trauma and emotions in your life as well as your traumatic or emotional history. Both are making you super overwhelmed and vulnerable and overpowered by the stresses of modern-day life and now that brings me to the third pillar of health- and I covered this all in the free online course on my website so if you get lost just check it out and there’s a beautiful emotional healing exercise there as well.

I come now to the adrenal system. Your adrenal glands are your fight-or-flight organs. They make adrenaline and cortisol in response to stress and inflammation. If you have unhealed trauma from your past your body is in fight or flight all the time or freeze response and your adrenal glands get overburdened and overstressed and they get exhausted, and the chronic inflammation also from leaky gut and liver toxicity also burns out your adrenal glands because your adrenal glands have to make this cortisol chemical to balance the inflammation.

So, the combination of unhealed trauma and inflammation exhaust your adrenal glands then you go into what we call a cortisol imbalance and adrenal imbalance that causes an imbalance in your thyroid hormones, your brain chemicals such as serotonin, dopamine and GABA as well as melatonin, so you go more into fatigue issues, anxiety, depression, insomnia, OCD symptoms, suicidal thoughts, negative thinking.

So you go for all this therapy, you read all these books and stuff and things don’t get better but when you start removing inflammatory foods from your diet, healing your gut with probiotics, vitamin D and other supplements that I talk about in the course and detoxifying your liver and then using the right herbs like ashwagandha, rhodiola -of course, check with your naturopath which herbs are good for you- but the right herbs will support your adrenal system while detoxifying your liver and reducing inflammation and changing your diet, boom! Your mind becomes so much more stable and you heal through emotions and through trauma much easier because you have a clear mind and you’re able to process therapy in a healthier way.

[12:10-12:54] Nunaisi Ma

Wow, that was a very detailed and wonderful explanation. Thank you so much for that. I think that is so much value for all of us to really make the link in a way that we can understand the relationship, right? Between all the parts of our system, because we are so multi-layered and so multi-dimensional and it all needs to work in harmony for us to feel the best we can, and the good news is that once we are able to balance our physical and our emotions that’s where we can really thrive right?

[12:57-14:00] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Absolutely, absolutely, and the funny thing is you know when we have chronic inflammation and excessive cortisol, we have this thing called neuroplasticity, the ability of our brain and our nervous system to make new connections. If we are over inflamed and there’s too much cortisol or cortisol imbalance, then our brain cannot make new connections very easily and so when you’re going through any therapy; gestalt, EMDR, trauma release, somatic experiencing, your brain needs to make new nervous connections to process that therapy, to process the new emotions.

So, if you are toxic and inflamed, you will not make those nervous connections that easily, because your brain is bogged down so you might feel dull during therapy, or you just might not get it. So, if you want to get more out of therapy, emotional healing therapy, you need to heal your body first as well, and vice versa. When you heal the mind, the body also heals, but both need to happen together.

[14:01-14:33] Nunaisi Ma

Yeah, this is vital. This is foundational and I’m happy that you bring it in because we cannot overlook the body when we discuss trauma, and again creating that detoxifying and creating that balance is really key to then process trauma, so I’m really happy that you bring it together. So, if somebody comes to you for therapy, where do you start?

[14:35-16:31] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Well, I look at the history of the person, emotional history, as well as symptoms that are pointing me to an imbalanced gut, liver and adrenal system. So, if they have gas, bloating, eczema, arthritis, any chronic inflammatory condition, we know the gut is compromised and then I look at their diet.

So we remove inflammatory foods which are mentioned in the course and then, of course, we detoxify the liver as well and we change the diet and while we’re doing all that, then, by looking at the emotional history I understand what has happened to the person. Were they abandoned by their father? Did their mum suffer a lot of abuse? Or was their mum criticizing them a lot? What compensations have the client developed in their heart, in their emotions, in their mind in order to try to belong to society or to belong in the family or to feel safe?

These compensations are very exhausting for a person, and we don’t realise how exhausting they are until they’re acknowledged. So I work very delicately with the person, very sensitively, and I sense where the trauma comes from and what happened in the person’s life and then, of course, I add questions about what happened in their family history because using family constellations we can heal generational trauma. Was the grandfather missing? or was he murdered? Or was he in the war? Has there been an abortion or miscarriage and you think you are the first child but really you are the second or third child in the system?

When you misplace yourself in your family system, you also get anxiety and depression and we see that all the time in family constellation therapy. It’s a very holistic approach to understanding the whole experience of a person and his life, the food they’re eating, the emotions they’ve gone through, the state of their liver. All these things will affect the mind.

[16:34-17:35] Nunaisi Ma

Yeah, I personally went through family constellation work and I found it to be profound, so I definitely advocate that. You know, I’m a third generation of holocaust survivors and that was definitely my lineage. Along a lot more, of course, you know we’re talking about so much, that is, so much trauma and I think that for all of us no matter where we come from if we look seven generations back not even that far, there is so much trauma that we carry as you said through our epigenetics. So yeah, once we acknowledge that, once we understand that, and once we have that visceral somatic experience, we can really transform that and really clear generations back as well as generations forward, right?

[17:36-18:28] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Absolutely, and when you heal generations back and you’re healed fully, then your children suffer less. Also, when you go through a visceral experience and heal these traumas that are lodged in your nervous system and your consciousness, what happens is that fight-or-flight response in your adrenal glands calms down because you’re not guarding or protecting anymore or you’re not compensating anymore and when that calms down you save a lot of nutrients in your body.

Your cortisol levels come more into balance and then your gut starts healing, you detoxify better, all your organs including your thyroid start working better so then, you’ll have less chronic fatigue, less depression, less anxiety, less food sensitivities, less physical ailments. So, when you heal trauma as well as generational trauma, I often see physical symptoms healing as well because of that cortisol adrenal liver connection.

[18:29-18:40] Nunaisi Ma

Yeah, so it’s really about clearing those toxins which are physical and emotional and they are so intertwined together that when you do that one, the other happens at the same time, right?

[18:42-19:41] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Absolutely, absolutely, and I want your listeners to be aware that even though they might not be aware of traumas in their lives, to investigate your family’s history and also look at the foods you’re eating and learn how to detoxify your liver in safe ways. Ask your parents, has there been an abortion or a miscarriage in my family? You know, what was my grandfather’s life like? Ask your parents, was your marriage blessed by your grandparents? Or was there any abandonment in the system?

All these things are passed down through generations that we carry without knowing it because we’re born into the system. It’s like if you’re born in water, you don’t know what it feels like to be out of water until you go out and you realise gosh, this is what water felt like. Same way with values and beliefs in your family system, you don’t realise you’re living them and carrying them until you get a different perspective of how it feels to be healthy.

[19:43-20:45] Nunaisi Ma

I love that and I love how you said the trauma can be also something that our emotional system couldn’t process quite well. So, it doesn’t have to be this one big transformational event or, you know, those events that kind of make life before and after, right? It can be simply a child took my personal item at school or bullied me or called me a name and I didn’t know how to process it emotionally. That could be trauma and of course, adding to that I feel this is also an important point which I write about in the book is that as a society, as a culture we suppressed crying as our natural mechanism to detoxify and to heal especially for men. Do you find it also affecting our emotional state of being?

[20:46-21:57] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Absolutely Nunaisi, we have so much stigma around crying, around anger, around emoting. You know there are so many proper behaviours and we have to be in accordance with either society’s wishes or God’s wishes and that’s indoctrinated upon us that our natural expression is not ok; we are not ok emoting.

So I encourage people to feel more. While they’re trying to feel better or before they try to feel better, feel more of who you are and then, naturally you will begin to feel better because self-acceptance is one of the strongest medicines I’ve seen, because sometimes we’re denying parts of yourself in order to belong to society or to a group of families, to a group in general and then we suffocate our emotions and when you let go of that and begin to practise feeling more, feeling more and you believe, then you begin to realise you belong to spirit, to God, to nature and that very strong sense of belonging. So you become more independent, more resilient and strong in your mind as well as your emotions.

[21:59-23:34] Nunaisi Ma

Yeah, I feel that you know, every child that is born into this world coming from that space of unconditional love really has basic needs that he needs to survive and that’s besides the obvious food and shelter and all of that, as you mentioned quite a few times, to feel belonged, to feel accepted, to feel loved and to feel seen and appreciated right?

And when a child doesn’t have those needs met, he will compromise his authentic self to feel that so he will start moving from his own centre and maybe behave differently to what he feels or try to be pleasing or there are all sorts of ways that we as children really move from our authenticity to be accepted and belong in our family, in our society.

So really, the way to come back home is to acknowledge that we as human beings have the entire spectrum of feelings and all of us will at one point you know feel our heart broken and or grieve the loss of somebody we love or anger, rage. It’s just part of our emotional human makeup and the right to allow that to-

[23:36-24:36] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Exactly and what makes some of these emotions more painful is our resistance to them and our fear of them, and our fear of not being accepted if we are carrying these feelings. If we grow up in a society where these expressions are loved and acknowledged and we get a sense of belonging when we are expressing in a safe way to others and no one is feeling awkward around it, then we feel more accepted, more full, more complete and there is less shame around these emotions, so they become less painful to experience.

We don’t try to tuck them away or control them or make sure we don’t break down, and when you can feel safe in your own emotional experience, you will flourish. Your nervous system will flourish, your body will become healthier. So it’s really about developing trust in finding the right therapist who can really acknowledge the safety of your feelings.

[24:39-24:55] Nunaisi Ma

I love that because feelings that have been suppressed or shamed are still hovering in the body and they even consume some vital energy to keep them at bay, right?

[24:56-25:32] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Absolutely, absolutely. They eat up your nutrients as well. We see very often, you know, magnesium and zinc deficiency are for people who are chronically stressed because your adrenal glands and your nervous system use up those minerals in addition to other minerals.

So not only does unresolved trauma use up energy, but it also uses up your nutrients and it also shuts down your ATP response in your mitochondria, so you feel more fatigued and you won’t process toxins and chemicals in yourselves because your mitochondria is shutting down from chronic trauma or unresolved trauma.

[25:33-26:36] Nunaisi Ma

Right, and yet this is the reality for so many people without them even realising, as you said. They don’t know that they, you know, are in water unless they are out of the water and so they’re compromising their life like that and this has been passed through trans-generations. It’s really when you come out of it and you realise that you don’t have to live compromised like that.

We can really shift how our society looks, right? Because I truly believe that no one is born bad, right? I truly believe that at the core of our being we all just have been wounded to be doing some really horrific things in the world, right? Nobody is born wanting to do bad. It’s really just a product of trauma, right?

[26:36-27:18] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Trauma conditioning, ancestral trauma as well that you are carrying, you know, we do certain strange acts out of loyalty to unhealed trauma in our ancestral line because it has not been acknowledged in the system. Good and bad acts are results of unhealed trauma in the family lineage and the faster you start acknowledging them and bring healing to them with healing sentences- and we do that in constellation work. I do it in a group you can find or we can do it online, then these behaviours will shift dramatically.

[27:19-27:34] Nunaisi Ma

I mean, how will our world look like if people really take responsibility for their own being and start to shift all those things that stand in their own way to feel great, right?

[27:35-28:37] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Absolutely, the world, I think, will come to the next level, a new level of consciousness. We’re going into a more caring, more feminine cycle, an awareness, consideration for each other and for the earth and this becomes easier when human beings are feeling safer with who they are and amongst each other.

We don’t have to take advantage of each other or protect ourselves as much when we can consciously and deliberately act in this life, in awareness of our impact on others and the importance of the delicate feelings of others then, we do less damage and then we build more trust, and the more trust there is in the environment with nature, with ourselves, I think we will experience something that we are not aware of yet. It will just blossom suddenly and we’ll have a completely different experience of life.

[28:38-29:10] Nunaisi Ma

I also hold that vision in my entire being and in my heart and I really hold that because we are capable of experiencing that and although it doesn’t look like that right now, where we are there’s a lot of chaos, I can see beyond that chaos. I feel that we are in what, you probably know the term, a healing crisis, right? That things get worse to get better.

[29:11-30:49] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Yeah, things are shifting and all this drama that’s going on in the world, you know, it’s putting a lot of fear in a lot of people. At the same time, we have to look at it that a lot of things are being exposed and exposure is acknowledgment. The more things are exposed then, the more free people get because then we get more rights. People are, how do I say it? The perpetration is diminished, then we know what is appropriate behaviour, what is safe and those who are perpetrators are held accountable.

So you will see more exposure of perpetration coming up. It doesn’t mean that there is more perpetration going on, it’s just more exposure going on off it and this will be freeing to many, many, many souls and then we will develop better systems in society to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We’ll learn how to live better and dysfunctional ways will just fall away. Human beings cannot be sustained with anger, aggression and unhealthy lifestyles.

You see the explosion in holistic medicine. More and more people are going to that. You see the exposure of the negative side effects of certain drugs. So this exposure is reinforcing the importance of holistic medicine, for example. It’s not that there’s more bad in the world, the bad is getting exposed so that the good is more supported.

[30:53-31:14] Nunaisi Ma

Yeah, I agree. We are coming to the end of our conversation. It was very enlightening and I really thank you for all your knowledge and your commitment and the goodness that you’re doing in the world. If people want to work with you, find you, what’s the best way?

[31:15-31:31] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

So the free online course, the free partly online course is on drameet.com. d-r-a-m-e-e-t.com, and just some free videos on how to heal your gut, your liver, your adrenal system and your emotions and then you can always book an appointment from that website as well.

[31:34-31:36] Nunaisi Ma

Thank you so much and blessings your way.

[31:36-31:42] Dr. Ameet Aggarwal

Blessings and thank you. Lots of love and good healing to everyone.

Yeah, bye-bye.

FREE GIFT: Free eBook and videos to treat the Root Cause of Anxiety, Depression, Hormonal Imbalance, Weight Issues, Insomnia, Chronic Fatigue & Emotional Stress by Healing the 5 Pillars of Your Health: Leaky Gut, Liver Toxicity, Adrenal Fatigue,Emotional Trauma and Family Entanglements.

Claim your FREE GIFT here

Watch the Video: