Childhood Cancer Symptoms

athena: aloha everyone and thank you so muchfor tuning into another week of trauma recovery university. i'm your host athena moberg and with thisin the green room of course is your incredible co-host bobbi parish. who are we? we show up here every week and you're probablywondering if you're in the right place. if you are an adult survivor of child abusespecifically childhood sexual abuse, we show up here every week and we answer your questions. we do live q&a every monday 6pm, pacific 9pmeastern and we have a new topic every single

week. this week's topic is adult survivors of childhoodabuse and auto immune diseases or auto immune disorders. now, we're going to unpack this topic fromthe very beginning of it, moving all the way down to strategies and helpful tips on howto manage any type of an auto immune disease or your lifestyle or maybe an anti-inflammatorytype nutrition plan or even mild exercise or different tips and strategies that canhelp you if you are living with an auto immune disorder but we're also going to talk fromthe very tip top of the topic which is what are auto immune disorders.

what are auto immune diseases? what are some examples of them and how dothey connect with childhood trauma? and we're going to unpack all that in ourcomprehensive onepage so if you are listening on a podcast platform such as itunes or stitcher,we want to say thank you and we want to welcome you and remind you this is a video broadcastas well. so we do have a roku tv channel. you can find us on any roku device by doinga simple search for trauma recovery university. you can also find this on youtube by searchingfor trauma recovery university or you can just simply type in the url youtube.com/traumarecoveryuniversitytvand we have an entire library of almost two

hundred hours at this point, between one hundredsixty to two hundred hours of resources for you, videos, question and answer, just livediscussions just like this that are very casual between bobbi parish and myself and all onthe topic of just different areas of recovery from childhood abuse whether it’s when yourabuser dies or what happens when your family members or perhaps your abuser denies yourabuse ever happened or family relationships perhaps healthy boundaries, nutrition, nutritionthat can help you heal your body from the inside out, all kinds of, cognitive distortions,cognitive dissonance, all kinds of different topics, ptsd, complex ptsd, anxiety. so we hope that you enjoy our resources.

we thank you for being here. we're honored to serve this community. i will go ahead and turn this over to bobbiparish. before i turn that turn this over to bobbiparish i just wanted to let you know that as always every single week, as a thank youfor being a listener or viewer, subscriber or just an awesome survivor, we have a complimentarydownloadable onepage resource for you. and it's a pdf format so it is printer friendlyand you can view it or print it, save it, put it in a book. we have tons of them.

we have over one hundred of them for you,the adult survivor of child abuse who is making your way through your recovery journey andyou just want to navigate this area of your life a little bit easier. you can get complimentary access to that bygoing to any of our websites, either traumarecoveryuniversity.com or nomoreshameproject.com and simply clickon the tab that says downloadables. you’ll be given an immediate access afterentering your e-mail address. you'll get e-mail access to the entire libraryof downloadable onepage resources. so thank you, thank you so much for beinghere. welcome.

and if you are a fan of the twitter verse,please tweet your questions using the hash tag #nomoreshame and we'll answer them onthe topic of auto immune disease and childhood abuse this evening. bobbi: hi everybody. i just got to remind my phone to be quiethere while we're talking, lots of people on the twitter stream already here with us. gosh, kalisha, matt, lindy, maggie, sarah'shere, hi sarah and so many other people and it's wonderful to see each one of you andwe're so honored that you're here, that you spend an hour of your week with us and wehope to make it a really good hour, informational

and supportive. i do want to issue a trigger warning for tonight'sbroadcast because we do talk about childhood abuse and we're going to specifically mentionchildhood sexual abuse, nothing explicit, never on that but sometimes just the mentionof it is triggering for some people. so if you get triggered, if you're upset,please just go ahead and shut the broadcast down. if you're watching live, it will be up onyoutube in a while and if you're listening on a podcast or watching a video of this program,the video is not going anywhere and the podcast will be out forever.

so don't worry about shutting it down andcoming back to it later when you feel better. if you are triggered or you are in crisis,we want to encourage you if you're in the us to reach out to our friends at rainn. their number is 1800-656-hope. rainn stands for the rape abuse incest nationalnetwork. they also have a crisis chat feature on theirwebsite and that is at rainn.org. if you're in the uk, you can reach out tothe samaritans. the samaritans have a hotline number at 116-123. they also have the capacity to text you supportand you can get that by texting them at 0775909090.

you can also reach them via e-mail at jo@samaritans.org. if you're in australia, you can reach yournational hotline at 13-11-14 and we courage to reach out for all the help that she wouldneed because you're worth it and it gets better. we promise it does. athena and i have more than thirty years ofexperience together in recovery and we can promise you that it gets better. we can't promise you that it’s simple. we can't promise you that it is easy but itdoes get better if you're willing to put in the work and i'm hoping by going through allthe videos that we have and information that

we have on the website that you'll find somehelp that you need. come to the twitter chats; join one of ourfacebook support groups. we’ll talk about those later on and i thinkthat you will get even more help than you ever imagined. and talking of help and wanting to connectwith people, we encourage you to sign up and to attend our trauma recovery university liveconference in orlando, florida, november 11-13. i have been talking to people this week andconnecting with speakers. we have people who are going to come in andtalk about what trauma informed care is and you're going to find particularly interesting,after tonight's discussion of auto immune

diseases. we have people talking about how trauma interactswith anxiety, how they cause one another and how we can unlink them and feel better aboutour anxiety, lots of discussion about narcissism, narcissism with a partner and narcissism witha parent, both of those aspects. so we're very excited to have you there andagain we encourage you to go to www.traumarecoveryuniversitylive.com. we have completely filled up the agenda now,all of the speakers and there are discussions that they're going to have, their name, thetime is there and one or two says description about what they’re going to speak about. if the presentation can earn you ceus, ifyou’re a therapist or nurse or psychologist,

you can go ahead and see those as after thename of the person presenting it, let you know whether you can get ceus from attendinga net workshop or discussion. so we encourage you to hop over there andsee all the things that we have going on with the conference. so other than that, i think that’s all ihave to say and we're going to talk about auto immune disorders today. like athena said, we're going to start fromthe very beginning. we're going to define what they are, we'regoing to define what childhood trauma is, we’re going to talk about the aces testwhich is the adverse childhood experiences

scale and you can find it on a website calledaces too high. it is simply a ten question questionnaire,that’s it, just ten questions and the more that you answer yes to, the higher your acesscore is and the higher your aces score, the higher likelihood that you will have healthissues in adulthood and it's both startling and disheartening to see the statistics pairingchildhood trauma with illness in adulthood. in fact there was a study that was done. it's on the onepage that talks about justthe issue of did you feel close to your parents that in self if you did not feel close toyour parents that has been amazingly negative impact on your health.

so we're going to talk specifically aboutauto immune disorders tonight. keep in mind that autoimmune disorders cansometimes lead to more serious issues such as cancer, heart disease. so even when we're saying just i don't meandisorders, it doesn't mean that they don't tie into things that can be even more seriousas if auto immune disorders aren’t serious enough as they are. so athena, how is everybody on the twitterstream and what kind of questions or comments are people making already? athena: edna needs a passport.

bobbi: i will grant edna a passport. athena: i think i would love that. oh. matt is tweeting out the conference link. matt you are the bomb diggity. bobbi: absolutely. athena: thank you so much matt and then we'requoting. julie ann said good morning starshine andi said hello. bobbi: yes, i saw that.

it’s so funny. athena: oh dawn’s here. hi dawn and dawn says, fyi if it is approvedfor nursing ed credits, it is also approved for respiratory therapy ce. bobbi: fantastic. athena: that is good to know dawn. thank you so much. i’m retweeting that right now, let everybodyknow, if you know anybody who's a respiratory therapist or a nurse.

they’re talking about the lives dream possibilitiesfor the conference and i'm so happy you're here sara marie and dominic, just my heartis just exploding with joy and dominic is so awesome. she's like ready for some monday night magic. yes we're very excited to be here you guysand cimmy wants us to remind you guys to please, please, please send her your drawings of butterflies. the conference theme is around butterfliesand the metamorphosis from someone who has lived through child abuse and who is in thiscocoon and they’re all alone and there's a lot a lot a lot a lot a lot of hard workwhen we’re in recovery kind of like a growth

process when you're in the cocoon all alonebut then once you work your way through your recovery, you get stronger and then you exityour cocoon and you're this beautiful butterfly who can fly and do amazing things and you'restrong and beautiful. so that's how we see you guys, you're strongand beautiful and so cimmy we're doing, i tell you all but i tell you this, we're doinga fundraiser with an adult coloring book and it's drawings from each of you, anyone inthe community whether you are a survivor or an advocate or the loved one of a survivoror you just have a heart for this community and you would like to send in a drawing ofbutterfly. we're going to make any minor edits that needto be made so that we can publish it and we're

going to sell these adult coloring books anduse them as a fundraiser for this amazing event that we're doing in november. so cimmy, she's on twitter at @wavemistressor you can email her for all the information wavemistress@gmail.com. so thank you cimmy so much for volunteeringyour time to take all of the submissions, i believe we already have, i think it's seventeensubmissions. i might have a number the wrong. i thought we had 17 submissions. i might be making that up somehow and cimmywants to remind everyone, it doesn't matter

if you're an artist or not. even if you're drawing only look sort of likea butterfly, we will take it. we'll be in contact with you. so please just if you have a heart and youwant to submit a drawing then please do and you have your time. so i think that's all i have bobbi. i wanted to perhaps turn it over to anyoneon the twitter stream who has any questions about auto immune diseases, immune disorders. otherwise we can go into some onepage contentwhich we already have curated for you.

dominic says “can feeling enmeshed withparents have the same effect as not feeling close?” i'm going to say yes because when you're enmeshed,it's unhealthy. enmeshed means that you're connected at anunhealthy level, your feelings are their feelings, their feelings are your feelings and you'resort of an appendage of theirs. you are not healthily separate connectingwith one another in an interdependent way where you are launching into adulthood andgaining independence as children often do from the time they learn how to toddle aroundand then slowly, slowly, slowly until they get their twenty's and then they launch intoadulthood.

if you're enmeshed with your parents, there'sno healthy boundaries, there's no way for you to learn take calculated risks and exercisethat muscle of learning what it's like to be yourself and not yourself in relation towhatever your parent is thinking or wanting but like a healthy version of yourself likehi i’m me. hi mom and dad. hello. and we're separate. oh but i love you. oh good but we're separate.

so my answer is yes, it can have devastatingeffects completely and i'd love to hear bobbi's take on that. bobbi: yes i think it can definitely haveadverse effects on us because it's exactly like athena said, we don't have the choiceto develop normally when we're enmeshed with a parent. i don't know that it has been studied specificallylike it was at the harvard study where they compared how close it felt to a parent versusafter effects, health after effects when you're an adult but i can't even begin to imaginethat that would not have some adverse effects on you.

i can't tell you how many survivors i workedwith who were enmeshed with one parent as a child and then abused by someone else, sometimesthe other parent, who didn't have resulting issues that they needed to work through andsometimes it's just a matter. and i don't mean just because that's not justa matter. sometimes it's a process of having to turnaround and know who we are years and years into our adulthood. who am i? what kind of life do i want? what makes me happy?

not what does my mother say i am, what doesmy mother say will make me happy and what will get my mother's approval. so yeah i'm one hundred percent with athenaon that one that has lasting after effects. i wish i could give you numbers like i cangive you numbers with the closeness to your parent that the harvard study gave us buti guess you'll have to trust athena as an adult when she says yeah. that one's going to hang around for a longtime and you're going to have to do some hard work to establish your own identity afterhaving then under the spell of a parent and their wants and wishes and needs for so long.

i wish it were different but a parent choosingto raise a child to be enmeshed with them is dysfunctional. i don't know that people are going to clearlylabel it abuse but it sounds very emotionally abusive to me so. athena: and perhaps emotionally incest tous. bobbi: good question. is there a book about that athena? athena: emotional incest? bobbi: yeah.

athena: yes, there is. i'm blanking on the title of it right now. bobbi: i think that's the title: emotionalincest. hand on. let me look. athena: yeah. when you are enmeshed with a parent or guardianand do not have the ability or the freedom to think on your own, you do not have thefreedom to learn who you are separate from your parent, take calculated risks, fall down,skin your knees, get up, be loved unconditionally,

move forward, we don't learn to trust ourselvesand that carries us into adulthood not trusting ourselves and we second guess ourselves everystep of the way and we end up self sabotaging. yeah. i believe, my belief is that being enmeshedleads to a lot of self sabotaging behaviors because you have no way of learning to trustyourself to make calculated risks, fall down, get up, fail fast and try again without condemnationor guilt or shame because you're only taking on the feelings of another human being andthat's just yeah. i can't picture that ending well or progressingwell. did you find the book bobbi?

bobbi: i did. i found two: the emotional incest syndrome,what to do when a parent's love rules your life by dr. patricia love. how ironic is that? a lot of used ones available on amazon, soi see used ones as low as a penny so that one's been around for a while. and then there's also another, i've seen this;i've seen it called sometimes covert incest where the parent essentially elevates thechild to the level of their partner. even though there's nothing sexual happeningbetween the two of them, the parent depends

on. i had a client whose parents separated whenhe was like fourteen years old and from that point forward, his mother put him in the roleof the man of the house so he had to do all the farming work. he had to make sure the home was safe andsecure. he had to do all the chores around the houseand essentially, she made him her male partner without the sexual aspect involved and sothat can be so damaging and it can be so difficult to recover from because it's not overt abuse. how many times have we not been able to seebruises or black eyes and the world goes,

oh you're fine. nothing happened to you. just you know get over it. suck it up, rub some dirt on it, you'll befine. there's another excellent book called silentlyseduced when parents make their children partners and that's by kenneth adams and i believethere's another one and this is actually called covert incest and that one was one of theones that i used to use that a lot with my clients whose parents had elevated them tothe level of a partner. let me see here.

athena: hey bobbi. matt would like to touch on stress and anxietytrigger flare ups for chronic illness. most definitely we will. and maya and tiffany jenkins said, so couldrunning from the past and ignoring emotions have a bad effect on one’s health producingauto immune disease? i'm going to re-tweet this and respond witha big fat yes ma'am. because when you are running from your past,we run from our past in three ways: we numb, we avoid or we stuff all of those feelingsand emotions and when we numb, avoid or stuff and we suffer and we suffer, we get inflamedand inflammation causes our immune system

to attack itself which causes cancer and allkinds of other horrible things. so my answer is yes to tiffany jenkins. thank you for being here. bobbi, i would love to hear your answer andi would love for you to touch on it with your amazing wisdom on the topics of stress andanxiety trigger flare ups for chronic illness. bobbi: i'm with athena, a big fat yes on thestuffing things because we have to remember that and one of the primary points of whyour childhood causes auto immune disorders is because we lived in a high stress, extremestress environment when we were young and that essentially kicked our system it.

our system is stuck in high stress mode. it doesn't un-stick itself and we get to calmdown in the stress where core hormones like cortisol and adrenaline get to flush fromour system. we're just humming at a million miles an hourall the time and all of those hormones in our body cause parts of our body to be inflamedwhich causes pain which then causes our immune system to say wooh, something's wrong. we better go fix that and our immune systemthen goes out and attacks those parts of our bodies that are inflamed and that leads toauto immune disease and disorders. so when we don't resolve what’s causingus the anxiety, when we don't resolve what's

causing us the horrible emotional pain, itleaves that temperature it's still stuck just like we're pretending it doesn't exist andstill coping with that, dealing with that, uncovering those sources of things that haveleft our auto immune system stuck in overdrive or make it vulnerable to attack, then thereisn't any way we can resolve it. it just stays that way and it stays that waywhether we recognize it or not, whether we avoid it or not, whether we stuff our feelingsor not. so we have to face that and acknowledge thatif we're going to limit our exposure to auto immune diseases and dealing with those feelings,confronting them, getting that temperature that the monitor reset so we're not stuckin high stress mode all the time is the best

way to do it. and yes definitely, stress and anxiety willcause auto immune diseases to flare up because stress and anxiety, again they pour thosechemicals of adrenaline and cortisol into our system which causes inflammation, whichcauses pain and causes symptom flare up. let's go over really quick before we talkabout this and more the definition of an autoimmune disorder. our immune system was created to help keepus healthy and what it does is when it perceives that there's a bacteria or any kind of a diseaseor disorder in the family in our body, it sends out and they go out and they attackthe bacteria or what they think is the problem

and usually, it's just a bacteria or somekind of an infection and then antibodies flushed from it our system and everything goes backto normal but for those of us whose thermostats are stuck on high stress because of our childhoodand the high stress is causing inflammation, our immune disorder goes wow, something'swrong. we're going to go out and attack these cellsor this tissue and solve this problem. so now you have an inflamed system that isbeing attacked by our own immune system. it's not meant to attack healthy tissue. it's trying very hard to get rid of what itperceives as disease or disorder but what it's doing is attacking healthy tissue andby doing that, it creates an even bigger problem

than just the inflammation. some examples of auto immune diseases arethings like arthritis, diabetes, thyroid issues, multiplies coreopsis, celiac disease, cronesdisease, lupus is another big one. some allergies are caused by our immune disordersand then they themselves can lead to even bigger problems. so those auto immune disorders are a directresult of our trauma when we were children being stuck, our brain and our body beingstuck in the high stress level and it causes our immune system to attack itself, to attackus, to attack healthy cells, healthy tissue rather than attacking diseases that it canget rid of and flush out of our bodies.

so essentially, we have traumatic childhoodequals constant pouring of toxic chemicals into our body which leads to inflammation,which leads to our immune system kicking in and attacking healthy tissues and cells. it's just a boom, boom of the domino effectand those stress hormones are friendly to our body up to a degree but when they're consistentand they pour into our body, month after month, year after year like what happens with thoseof us who have consistently traumatic childhood, it sets us up for serious diseases and weneed to start talking about this some more. we need to talk about it with our doctors. we need to talk about it with the doctorsand get them to start asking people.

do you have a history of childhood trauma? just that factor is that people who have childhoodtrauma have twice the rate of auto immune disorders than those who don't. that's a huge statistic, not just twenty percentmore likely, not just twenty five percent more likely, twice as likely of having autoimmunedisorders than those who didn't have a traumatic childhood. if you go through and you do the aces study,for every question that you answered yes to in, the questions are things like where you'rephysically abused, did you witness your mother or father being physically abused by his orher partner, did a parent go to jail, were

your parents divorced or separated? all of these are when you're under eighteenyears old. were you sexually abused? for every one of those that you answered yesto, for women it increases your chances of getting a serious chronic illness by 20%,for a man it increases your ability to get a serious illness by 10% and that’s becausemen have testosterones which mitigate some of the stress hormones. so it's not because women feel differentlyor do something differently or do something wrong.

the numbers are just staggering at how itshows that childhood trauma leads to chronic illness and disease. it inflames our heart which guess what, leadsto heart disease. if our immune system is triggered by an autoimmune disorder, we have a greater chance of getting lymphoma and hodgkin's disease,both cancers of the lymphatic system. so it's just a huge high end and all of usneed to be aware of our medical history and knowing what that can do to us and lettingour doctors know and then all of us also need to be making others more aware of how traumaand health are connected so that we can get the medical profession to start talking andasking about these things.

athena and i tell people all the time tryingto find a doctor who's trauma informed and sometimes us like saying you know go out andtry to find a meteorite the size of your house. the likelihood is just about as great. we struggle enough to have people see a psychiatristor therapist or psychologist who's trauma informed, let alone finding a medical professional. athena: exactly. so many people have stomach issues. did we answer matt's question about stressand anxiety? bobbi: yes.

okay, so stress and anxiety will cause thosechemicals to pour out in your brain even more which will then cause the inflammation whichwill cause a flare up. so one of the best things that we can do andwe talk about this on the onepage, one of the best things we can do as survivors ismitigate our stress levels. we need to be particularly vigilant at keepingour stress levels as low as possible and for our health, that’s necessary. it's just one of the things that we're goingto have to watch for the rest of our lives and maybe that means that i'm not going tobe a corporate executive because of the stress level that that carries with it.

i'm going to choose a career that's a littleless stressful or a lot less stressful and more nurturing to me. so it definitely, anxiety and stress definitelyflare up auto immune diseases and controlling our stress level is very important for survivorsfor both our mental health and physical health. there's a great presentation that lindy actuallyjust posted. it's the one that she emailed to us previouslyby i believe it was steve rdey on the depressed brain as an inflamed brain. i re-tweeted that. jack had a question about sciatica.

i said yes because that's inflammation andcimmy had a question regarding add. i'm not as familiar if add is considered autoimmune. add is neurotransmitters and i don't knowif it's inflammation or if it's neurotransmitters not firing properly so i'm not educated enoughto answer regarding add or adhd but with regards to sciatica being inflamed, i'm saying yes. bobbi: yes definitely. the adhd, that's an interesting question. i know that it is like you said athena thatit's more about hard wiring than it is inflammation but it would not surprise me if it's alsotied to inflammation because inflammation

in the brain is a beast and it causes a multitudeof mental health, cognitive neurological issues and i know that our brains can become inflamedvery easily. stress anxiety, in fact even one night ofbad sleep has been shown to have measurable increases in brain inflammation. so again like i talked about with the stress,sleep is very important for survivors. we need to get enough of it and it needs tobe restful sleep. so if you need to work with your health provideror your psychiatrist to tweak medication or use medication to help you get restful sleep,i know that can be a difficult choice for people and it doesn't always have to involvenarcotics.

the medication i take to help me with my sleep,clonidine is actually an old high blood pressure medication and all it does is just damn thenthe central nervous system enough to help me sleep. so it doesn't always mean narcotics but iwill tell you it's vital, vital, vital, vital for survivors to get sleep and going withoutsleep, again it shoots that brain inflammation way up which means your depression is goingto flare, your anxiety is going to be bad, your stress levels are going to run high andit can even mean that for example people bipolar disorder they could become manic, you couldbecome psychotic, you can become delusional. so it's very important.

sleep is critical, got to have it and gotto have a good quality of it too. lying in bed for eight hours just doesn'thelp. athena: there's a lot of talk right now inthe twitter stream about migraines bobbi. i would for you to touch on. i realize that migraines are not necessarilyauto immune but they are something that is connected directly to childhood trauma. do you want to talk to for a few minutes aboutmigraines? because we talked about this before, i thinkwe did a video specifically. i don’t know if it was called migrainesor we’ve talked about migraine.

bobbi: we have. we’ve talked about migraines and that rachelthompson has an article on her blog. i wish i could remember rachelintheoc.com. i know she has a search bar just do a searchin there, migraine. she has an article about the connection betweenchildhood trauma and migraines and part of it is inflammation. and we're going to keep going back to that:inflammation causes pain and the brain is full of tissue that can become inflamed. so part of it is inflammation but part ofit is also stress and remember that if we've

been abused as children, our stress levelis set at high, twenty four seven and so what happens is that the blood vessels in yourbrain constrict down to half their normal size and that causes pain and so what we haveto do and some of the role of migraine medication is to allow those blood vessels to relax andthat's why sometimes caffeine helps because caffeine will also help those blood vesselsrelax which will help your headache to go away. so migraines remain cluster headaches thatseemed to form or around your eyes and behind your eyes. yeah those are bad and again tied to inflammationand stress.

so there's a lot of stuff that happens thatisn't necessarily classified as an auto immune disorder but it involves that inflammationpiece. that can happen for children who have hada traumatic childhood. so let’s see. somebody asked if polycystic ovary diseaseis auto immune. i don’t know that. that's interesting question. athena: yeah i don't know that either. oh you mentioned something about sleep earlierbobbi and you said laying there doesn't count

or i forget the word you used. it is about like just laying there. bobbi: lying there dozing for eight hoursdoesn't count. athena: no it doesn't count. but i just helped one of my clients with thisand that is, try to follow me on this bobbi. when we can't sleep like let's say we're wakingup at the same time every night and it's like three something in the morning and then we'reso stressed out that we're not sleeping because we know how tired we're going to be, i learnedthis. i forget when i learned this.

i want to say it was a few years ago, fouryears ago and it was from a counselor i was seeing. i began sort of like this little mantra ihad was because i would start to stress and shame myself for not sleeping which is worseand so i began sort of whispering or sort of thinking to myself, rest is a form of sleep. rest is a form of sleep and i would thinkthat over and over again and then i would end up falling asleep because i just keptsaying to myself that rest was a form of sleep because then i wasn't shaving myself or justlying there resting. bobbi: yes, yes you were giving yourself permission.

it really helped me and then after chat thismorning, we were talking a lot about like just how all of this is connected, everythinglike body with the body and socially and spiritually and just in our being, in our soul and ourmind. i began helping a client with their affirmationslike they are doing some affirmations and i decided to help them around the one memthat we tweet it out like i'm doing the best i can today to release fear and worries andanxiety and even if i feel angry or bitter today, i'm releasing any shame that i haveattached. just like releasing all of the things thatit started to talk about on that mem that was like the four different squares of likehow everything is connected.

because what we tend to do as survivors iswe're responsibility takers especially if we were the scapegoat of the family. and so like if we release ourselves from thatresponsibility like i release anything negative that could be causing problems with my heart,i'm intentionally wanting to release any stress and anxiety or any shame that i have thatcould be affecting my body and it's not like i'm not saying woo woo or say things thataren't real but like if we’re in a meditative state or like a place where we’re intentionallyfocusing on making healthy choices or affirming ourselves that we're doing all we can, focusingon those specific things that are that are attached to things that attack our insides.

bobbi: i agree. i think the power that we have in our mindis incredible and we probably underutilized it. when the reality is that the power of ourmind was what was used to groom us and get us into the place that we were in and thatsame power that was used then, we can now use to get out and to retrain our brain andto talk to ourselves and how we talked ourselves is so important and like you said, we takeresponsibility for everything even if it's a room full of people we've never met before. so yeah talking ourselves through that processof it's not my fault, i let it go, it’s

not my fault, i let it go. i can't fix this. i'm letting it go. that’s one of the tenants of the twelvesteps. let it go but we as survivors, even if wecould fix it or not, we were taught to hang onto it and not let it go until we did fixit which of course we could ever fix it so we were doomed to carry a pretty mess ourlives. so yeah, that’s not good. athena: oh no.

julie ann says, every time i show up i pissedsomeone off. i just want to let you know julie ann thatyou don't piss us off. we love you. we're glad you show us and we’re glad you'rehere. so whoever is pissed off, i’m not one hundredpercent certain that that is a reason for you to not be here and i would love for youto know that you're welcome here. tiffany jenkins says she got diagnosed withlupus around the time when her memories popped in and she was in college. she says i should have seen the connectionbut we wouldn't have known tiffany.

there's no way we would have known. i mean modern medicine to this day right nowin 20116. so many doctors even right now are denyingthat complex ptsd even exists or that there is connection between childhood trauma andadult physical ailments. i mean there's such limited, there's suchlimited information in practice, in practice right now. what are you going to so say bobbi? bobbi: i was going to say we have so mucheducation to do, so much education to do about trauma informed care in both the mental healthworld and the medical field, not that mental

health is not medical but usually they'reseen as two separate entities. it's amazing, the amount of information wehave about the time in between childhood trauma and adult health that we don't utilize. it's shocking. oh fibromyalgia, that was another one. fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndromeare both auto immune diseases. tammy is talking about being diagnosed withfibro and then surviving cancer, when i have memories of abuse come back also. so i'm so sorry tammy that she went throughthat and i'm hoping now that you're doing

okay, that your health is better. athena is it okay if i put up the onepage? athena: oh yeah i think that will be a goodidea. tammy, i'm not sure if you're tuning in withus but we're so glad you're here and welcome. and i'll send you out a tweet and i'm sorryyou’ve been through so much. bobbi: there we go. so again as athena stated earlier, the onepagesare available on the website nomoreshameproject.com. you'll see a tab at the top that says downloadablesand that's where all of our onepages are, more than one hundred of them now.

you'll be able to go in click on them, printoff any ones that you want if you utilize them just as a pdf. you’ll see links that you can click on andbe able to go and get more information. so the first part of our onepages are usuallyeducation and the second part are tips and strategies to cope with whatever topic we'retalking about. so this one is auto immune disorders, thefirst half is definition and research and the second half are tips and strategies. so i'm just going to read through this andadd comments here and there. in past videos we've discussed how childhoodtrauma affects every aspect of ourselves including

our bodies. we have done a specific video about how traumaaffects the brain. today, we want to discuss how childhood traumarelates to the development of auto immune so, first some definitions research finding. what is childhood trauma? childhood trauma is physical, sexual, emotional,verbal abuse, neglect, witnessing family violence and even parental separation or death. auto immune disorders - when our immune systemmeant to produce antibodies that fight of illness and bacteria in our bodies turns againstus and begins attacking healthy body tissue

and cells. some examples of auto immune disorders – arthritis,lupus, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, celiac disease, sjogren’s syndrome, diabetes,thyroid disease, crohn's disease and multiple sclerosis. there are more but those are just the onesthat i could easily find at my fingertips and list. how does our childhood trauma cause autoimmunedisorders? when we experience a persistent traumaticevent in childhood, it causes our bodies to pour stress hormones such as cortisol andadrenaline into our bloodstream and body tissue.

in frequent exposure to those hormones cansave our lives when we're attacked or afraid but persistent exposure to them is toxic. when we experience repeated traumatic experiencesin childhood, our body gets stuck in a high stress mode. even at points when we're not going throughtraumatic events, our body is still producing the adrenaline and cortisol. eventually, parts of our body become inflamedas a result of the high constant levels of stress hormones. the inflammation causes pain and our immunesystem attacks the inflamed cells or tissue

causing disease disorder. childhood trauma has been shown that our chancesof developing an autoimmune disorder are twice as high as someone without childhood trauma. research done by harvard in 1993, i believeit's by ferguson the harris i think showed that something as simple as a lack of perceivedcloseness by child to his or her parent is a greater predictor of a serious adult diseasethan lifestyle issues such as smoking, drinking and unhealthy diet or being exposed to unhealthyenvironmental substances. that's just crazy that we don't given thenthat we don't ask people about their childhood experiences of trauma to me is just absolutelyamazing because a childhood, even just the

lack of closeness, that's it. if a child thinks they were not close to oneof their parents. that's a greater predictor of adult illnessthan smoking, drinking and unhealthy diet or again you know living next door to an oilrefinery, breathing in all the fumes and the gases the come out of there. that's reason enough i think for us to pushfor more trauma informed care. in order to help cope with an autoimmune disorderor to help prevent one in adulthood, follow these tips the strategies:focus on reducing stress in your life. we talked about this earlier.

stress can result in stress hormones whichcause inflammation, pain and a flare up of an autoimmune disorder. consider following an anti-inflammatory dietwhich will help reduce inflammation in your brain and here's a link to a video about it. we did a video on, is that the video thatwe did under nutrition? athena: yes. bobbi: great. athena presented some absolutely incredibleinformation on an anti-inflammatory diet so pop over there and look at that.

that’s really helpful. undertake regular exercise as is safe foryour health conditions and in accordance with your doctor's advice to help keep your jointstissues and cells healthy and thinking in particular with fibromyalgia, doctors talkabout how a consistent form of even mild exercise helps to mitigate the stress than to our bodywhich decreases the symptoms of fibromyalgia. sleep and rest are essential tools in yourfight against autoimmune disorders. inform your doctor of any childhood traumayou experienced as it can be very helpful in determining the etiology or diagnosis ofany disorders. etiology means the cause.

take a safe support person with you to medicalappointments to help advocate for you if your physical or medical team is not adequatelytaking your trauma history into account. i know that sometimes with medical professionalswho are being brusque or dismissive with me, i can freeze. so my fight, flight, fun, freeze hormoneskick in and i freeze. so having someone with me can be very, veryhelpful. know you are not alone and thousands of childabuse survivors with auto immune disorders and or chronic pain are building a life thatthey love every day through trauma informed care, pain management and healthy lifestylehabits.

ask us about getting plugged into a free onlinesafe support group for survivors. and that's it. that's all we have. are people asking questions still athena? athena: we were confirming that asthma isin fact on the list. bobbi: yes asthma should be on the list asan auto immune disorder. athena: yes i think we answered everyone'squestion. there's so much that’s all connected andany stress that in our lives on a constant or continual basis, even if it's good stresslike let's say joe landed a new job and this

new job required as part of the job description,a lot of travelling and a lot of overtime. traveling and over time is added stress soin order to compensate for that added stress of traveling and over time, joe would thenneed to compensate with extra planned times of refreshment, relaxation, sleep, rest, recreation,even just like just down time like reading a book or something that was soothing or calming,a healthy soothing or calming. i think one of the best ways that any typeof an ease or anxiety or stress was described to me very literally is that it it’s dis-easeand causes disease. dis-ease causes disease and that is just sotrue. i have so many family members that are verystressed out about a lot of stuff and whether

it's internal things that they feel guiltyabout or they're just unkind, unhappy, ungrateful people, there was this link that i tweetedout previously. i don't know when it was. it was not too long ago and it was about howgratitude actually changes our brain chemistry, gratitude because when we are active, whenwe're actually grateful for something, it produces a hormone, it produces a chemicalin our brain and i come from a family of a lot of people who are very, very, very ungrateful,uneasy, very guilty, angry, just really stressed out about a lot of stuff and they have a lotof physical conditions whether it be rheumatoid arthritis, congestive heart failure, diabetes,you name it, like almost every single thing

on the list, lupus. oh my goodness you guys like i can't tellyou how grateful i am to not be living the lifestyle i was living ten years ago becausei don't know that i would be as healthy as i am right now because i have pared down mylifestyle in a way that is much less stressful which i just feel really, really, really grateful. so if there's any way for you to, i know thatwe remind you of this every week but we want to always continue to remind you of this everyweek and that is you matter, your recovery matters, your wellness matters and it's difficultfor us to shift into realizing that we matter when we were sort of groomed or trained into sort of believing that we needed to take

on the cares of the world and the needs ofthe world and we need to make everything right in our families of origin. please just know that somehow someway, it'sgot to be okay for you to somehow find a way to put your needs in the primary position,not in a selfish way. i don't think that if you're on this channelyou have it in you to be intentionally selfish and self-serving and all of that but in away that makes sense, you need to put your needs. you need to allow yourself permission to dothings that are healthy for you whether that's extra rest or finding a way to have some thingsthat are less toxic you know whether it's

food or just the environment that you're in. i know that dawn, she's a nurse and she wastalking about the power of breathing and just being in a meditative or breathing state,deep breathing exercises, breathing is so therapeutic. just to take a deep breath sometimes is itjust clears your mind for a minute so bobbi and i just want to remind you always thatyou matter and anything you can possibly take away from this to reduce the inflammationin your body would be wonderful and we want to be a source of support for you. bobbi: i had a client this week that i toldto dance on the edge of selfishness.

so as survivors, we’re so tuned in to beingselfish. we don’t want to be seen as selfish. so i said, i want to go to just the very edgebut not over the edge. just got to the edge of just being selfishin your self-care and then see if that makes a difference. so dance on the edge of being selfish everyone. it will help if you take care of yourselfand your body and your mind better. you know interact with your pet, take a walk,go outside. there's so much more research now that showsthat just getting outside, it's not like you

have to go out run a half marathon. my psychiatrist tells me just go stand onyour patio, sit on your patio, take a cup of tea. just go outside. experience the fresh air; get some sun onyou, up your vitamin d levels, just simple things. we’re not talking about changing your world. we're talking about us mall steps that willeventually add up to enough change that changes your world.

so a lot of people talking on the twitterstream right now about illnesses that they have had that they never realized were autoimmune disorders or things that we did they didn't even realize were disorders until nowfor the first time they're hearing things called unhealthy that they thought were justpart of the ways their bodies worked and it's amazing how those of us who were raised ina traumatic environment didn't have access to basic health information. how many of us went to yearly well child checks? athena: never. bobbi: yeah exactly.

you know when i had a child and people weretalking about well child checks, what in the world is that? i never heard of that. so we didn't get, many of us didn't get regularhealth care. we didn't get information about how our bodyis supposed to work as opposed to how it's working. so for some of us, we reach adulthood andwe have a lot of self education to do and when you're in the midst of crisis becauseyou are recovering memories and having metal health issues, educating yourself about yourhealth is not your number one priority.

so i can understand why people are hearingsome of these things are going well, i didn't even know that was a disorder or i had noidea that that disorder is tied to my abuse. so that's one of the things that we want tochange is we want our physicians to let us know. “hey you told me about your childhood abuse. i think this might be related.” and we also want to educate ourselves. that's important. so anything else athena that we want to talkabout before we wrap up.

athena: i think lindy wanted to know if wedid a video on abandonment issues. we did attachment which is similar but it'snot synonymous. bobbi: no and last week we talked a littlebit about abandonment and depression. but, not, that's a great topic. that is on the list. athena: that's a great topic. so next week you guys, we're going to transitionnow from that portion of our broadcast which is teaching and sharing the onepage with everyonewho's normally hear every week. we're so honored that you're here every week.

we really appreciate you supporting one anotherand showing up and just thank you for letting us know you find our resources and that theyare helpful for you. it means the world to us. we're transitioning now into the portion ofbroadcast where we're going to welcome new people but i want to let you know next week,don't miss this. next week, we are going to talk about thetopic of positive psychology and we have our special guest brenda un who is a student atjohns hopkins and just an amazing advocate for survivors everywhere and a supporter ofthis community in so many ways. she’s heavily involved with aces, adversechildhood experiences and she’s just been

a great friend to bobbi and myself. so that's next week on the topic of positivepsychology and then i believe the following week, bobbi are we going to be doing ho opono pono? bobbi: wooo. athena: so ho’o pono pono you guys is ahawaiian for make it right. here in hawaii, we have something called livepono or thank you so much for being pono. we really appreciate you being so pono. it means like to do the right thing and notjust like oh yeah you're right but like to really do the right thing, like intentionallydo what is right.

like it's not pono to cut people off in traffic,it’s not pono to leave your shopping cart out in the middle of the parking lot. it's not pono to cut in line or to steal orto take people's mangoes off their tree or whatever. that's not living pono but to live pono orto do something, to be pono means that you're just you're living your life in a way thatis other centered. you're considering other people and ho’opono pono, in a lot of the schools here where i live, if there is bullying or there is adispute with students, they have something where they like bring them in to a meetingwith one another, the students and they sit

down and they talk ho o pono pono and whatit is, is you are saying to the other person “i am sorry. will you please forgive me? thank you. i love you.” it's so simple 4 things and it's a way oflife. it's a modality that people use with counseling. bobbi brought it to my attention that shehad a client that brought it to her attention and i was like “wow i know people that usethat in their private practices here where

i live and it's in our schools and it's justvery much a part of our culture and i didn't even think of doing a video on that topicbecause i thought it was just only hawaii.” but it is something bobbi that i think thatyou're right. we really should share that. what do you think? bobbi: i think so too. so let's to do positive psychology and thencan you say it again athena? ho’o pono pono. athena: you said it perfect and thing withthe hawaiian language you guys is you pronounce

every vowel. so it's hoo pono pono and little things thatlook like apostrophes, those are actually called ochinas. so it’s ho’o pono pono which translatedliterally in the hawaiian language means to make it right. and it's a way of life here. it's something that is very intentional, doesn'thappen on accident. you don't live pono or practice ho’o ponopono on accident. you have to actually be intentional aboutit and think of others and really want to

make things right with other people and havethat be a part of your core. bobbi: i have had a client tell me it's justbeen miraculous in her life and she's not a hawaiian origin's. she attended a seminar or something aboutit and she's just crazy about it. she loves it. she talks about it. so i think it can’t do any harm to talkabout it. let's talk about it. let's see what it is and wrap it, unpackagedit.

athena: oh that would be amazing and i'venever really talked or taught on ho’o pono pono especially as it pertains to childhoodabuse because we as the abused, don't necessarily want to say to our abuser, “i'm sorry. but i really want to stress that this isn't,bobbi and i are not saying that you, the adult survivors of childhood abuse, need to askyour abuser for any type of apology and tell them that you're grateful for them abusingyou and that you love them and that you're sorry. that’s not what we're saying. we’re saying like this is probably tieda lot.

this will be tied to releasing any bitternesslike if you have any bitterness in you or any anxiety in you or even like inner childlike that younger version of you who needed to hear those words from perhaps an abusiveparent, you know to hear from one of our of abusers, “i am so, so sorry. thank you.” like that would have like we often think thatthat would have changed everything because we'll never hear that. that's just preposterous but ho’o pono ponoas a way of life is you're not ever intentionally holding on to anything.

you're releasing it and you're living yourlife in a way that is very intentional to make it all right and if you hold on to angeror bitterness or holding out for something rather than releasing it, it's only causingyou dis-ease. i did some reading and it talked about howpeople use it even to heal physical illnesses because when they have, the article talkedabout when they have back pain, they're able to focus on the four strategies: “i'm sorry. please forgive me. to clean that part of their body and it worksthe same way with anxiety or stress or a negative belief or a lie our abused taught us, anyof those things.

it seems too cool. athena: i never even thought about sharingit with our community because i guess i didn't want to appear like all like hawaiian localwoo woo girl you know i didn't want to come across that. i didn't really think about like how thatcould really benefit. i think it would be really transformationaland powerful for those who are open to that. so positive psychology, the week of september5th and the week of september 12, ho’o pono, pono and then how about the week of september19, we could do abandonment? bobbi: we will do.

we will do abandonment. athena: we got it set. bobbi: sounds good. i love it. athena: you guys thank you for being hereevery week with us. bobbi and i are so honored and grateful foreach of you. thank you for letting us know that the workthat we're doing is helping you and that you're finding the resources helpful and that you'resharing them with your therapists or counselors or loved ones.

bobbi, did you want to say bye to everybody? bobbi: we’re so thankful that you're hereand i'm so grateful that we have the honor of being part of your journey to recoveryand we hope to see you back here next week or we hope that there are some help that youcan find all over onepages and other videos. so see you next week. if you're new and you're not plugged intoa safe community or this is your very first time finding our youtube channel, we showup here every week and so live q&a. we do some shorter videos as well occasionally. i feel like i need to start doing shortervideos but we're going to transition and show

you a couple screen shares for five more minutes. so if you want to stick around for five minutesand find out how you get plugged in with other survivors and sort of heal in safe community,if no, no pressure. no tupperware, no sales pitch, everything'sfree but we are going to transition right now into just sharing with you where hundredsof other survivors are all in groups all over virtually healing in safety and you can goover to the about section of our youtube channel if you're curious on how to get plugged into safe community, easy four steps and bobbi has an awesome screen shares for you. so thanks for sticking around guys.

bobbi: ok let's talk about how you can connectwith athena and i. so we have by e-mail. i am bobbilparish@gmail.com, athena is athenamobergspeaking@gmail.comand we have our joint e-mail address which is nomoreshameproject@gmail.com. on twitter, i would love for you to followme and i would love to interact with you on twitter. my twitter address is @bobbilparish, athena’shandle is @athenamoberg and then we have trauma recovery university which is @traumarecoveryu. on facebook, we have trauma recovery university’sprofessional page which is our joint professional

page. my page for professional is bobbi parish coachingand consulting. my personal page is bobbi parish. athena’s professional page is athena mobergspeaking and her personal page is dawn athena moberg. you can find all of our videos on youtube,roku tv or google plus by just doing a search for trauma recovery university and twentyfour seven, three sixty five you can find all of our videos at bit.ly/traumarecoveryu. athena: hey bobbi i know we said we have thetopics for the fifth and the twelfth and the

nineteenth taking care of. matt suggested, right around that same momentthat we were talking, if we wanted to on the following which would be the twenty sixth,the week of september twenty sixth, we could do the topic of the unique needs of the malesurvivor community. bobbi: sounds fantastic, absolutely. athena: i would love that. so make that a big 10 for yes matt and perhapsyou could give some research for us and even answer some questions for everyone. so hopefully you all can let matt know thatwe just talked to him if he's already gone

and. bobbi: ok let's do this present everyone everyone. there are multiple ways that you can joinour safe community, interact with other survivors, get support, information, education, encouragementthat you need. we have three twitter chats a week and wehave multiple secret facebook groups, support groups that you can join, all of them arefree. they always will be free. so we have three twitter chats the first oneis monday at 10am pacific or 6pm in uk. the hashtag for that is #csaqt which standsfor childhood sexual abuse question time.

and then there's a second twitter chat whichif you are with us live tonight, you are participating in. it is an interactive video and twitter chat. that's at 6pm pacific 9 eastern and tuesdayat two o'clock in the morning uk time and then tuesday evening is the original sex abusechat which was started by rachel thompson and myself back in january of 2014 and thatis at 6pm pacific 9 eastern and wednesday at two o'clock in the morning if you're inthe uk. if you would like to join one of our facebooksupport groups, we ask that you follow this four step process.

it's not complicated and it is literally thebest and fastest way for you to get to one of our support groups. sending us an email, dming us a twitter, idon't think i even check my dm's anymore. it's a lot easier for you to fall throughthe cracks and or not even connect with us so we would ask that you will follow thisfour step process. the first one is to like the trauma recoveryuniversity page. the second step is to send friend requeststo both athena and i. we're five hours apart in time zones and wehave very different schedules. one of us is going to be able to get to youbefore the other one.

once we have accepted your friend requesteither one of us, then send that person a message that says i'd like to heal in safecommunity or something like that. say for example, i'd like to join one of yoursupport groups. we will connect with you. we will if we don't know you from a live eventfrom twitter or facebook, we may ask you some questions to get a better idea of who youare and to verify for our self that you are safe to add to our support groups. the safety of our support group members isthe most important thing to us so we don't want to let anyone in who is a predator innature.

so after we've asked you some questions orbeen able to ascertain that you're safe, we will put you in one of our support groups. and, again twenty four seven three sixty fiveyou can watch all of our videos and get our information at bit.ly/traumarecoveryu. there we go. so i'm going to put, i’m so excited nextweek to talk about positive psychology because it's a very strength based healing methodwhich i'm a huge fan of so make sure you come back next week when we talk about positivepsychology. that one is going to be i think really eyeopening and helpful for many out there who

are tired of hearing all the things they haveto change about themselves and to be well. instead, we're going to focus on what he alreadygood at and we're going to build those things up rather than giving you a list of don'tdo this, don't do that, you're bad at this, you’re bad at that which was a lot of whati got my recovery and that was not fun. athena: yeah we don't need any more of that. so you guys just wrapping this up and tyingit with a bow. thank you for being here with us this week. we are next week as bobbi was just mentioninggoing to cover the topic of positive psychology with our special guest brenda un, who's astudent at johns hopkins, a dear friend of

ours and an awesome advocate of the survivorcommunity. so don’t miss that, week of september 5th,2016 and then the following week, the week of september 12th, we will be discussing ho’opono pono if you wanted to just brush up on that or figure out what it is that i'm eventalking about, you could google that ho’o pono pono and enlighten yourself. even just go look at some awesome mems orread some articles, watch them videos, whatever if you're into the whole wanting to live awhole life. you really are looking for wholeness and releaseof things that don't serve you that are negative and you're really just wanting to be intentional,then that would be something you might really

love and then after that, the week of the19th of september, we will be discussing abandonment and how that ties in with childhood abusein our adulthood years now like after the fact and even when we were in childhood abandonmentbecause it's all tied. this here is always about that. this is always about that. so don't miss that. and then the following week on the 26th ofseptember 2016, we will discuss the unique needs of the male survivor community whichwill be amazing. matt pappas who runs a blog called survivingmy past.

he is he is an advocate for this communityas well, really active, has a podcast, has a youtube channel, just been doing a lot ofawesome things in his recovery journey and is actually going to be speaking in a breakoutsession for men at our event coming up in november and he's going to do some researchon that topic and we'll sort of tap him on the shoulder to help us out with that stuffas well. bobbi, what would you like to share with everybodybefore we go? bobbi: thank you so much for being here andwe obviously, there you have it, september is mapped out, lots of good topics and wehope that we will see you each week either live or on the replay.

thanks everybody. i’m athena moberg and this is bobbi paishand we love bringing you everything you need for healthy informed trauma recovery. bye.