Dr Nirala Jacobi:

Welcome listeners to another episode of the SIBO Doctor podcast. Today, we will be talking about the impact of trauma on the digestive tract, trauma known or unknown, and all the things it can do to impact not just your digestive health, but really your sense of wellbeing, your systemic health. We know that trauma is an underlying factor to many, many chronic illnesses. And many of my patients... We talk about this quite a bit in their session. With me today, I have Rupda, who is a friend for 40 years, and I'm just stunned that we're actually sitting here together having an episode of the SIBO Doctor podcast talking about your area of specialty, which is working with trauma. Rupda is a therapist, she's a very much in demand therapist that travels all over the world talking about important topics like trauma, like intimacy, like self-worth, leadership, and relationships.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

So it's a great time in the world, as the world is highly anxious right now, to be talking about trauma. And I'm just so thrilled and delighted to have my best friend on my podcast discussing this. And what we really want to do is we want to offer solutions, or at least some resources for you to start not just diving into trauma, but also how you can help regulate your own nervous system in these troubled times. We're probably not going to get to the bottom of your trauma in this podcast, for that you need a lot more professional setting, but I think it's important to touch on this. So welcome my friend Rupda.

Rupda:

Thank you for having me.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

It's amazing. So like I said, in previous podcasts I've had conversations with my podcast guests about anxiety, about stress and overwhelm, about hypnotherapy, about breathing, and this topic is trauma. So how do you define trauma?

Rupda:

And the simplistic response is too much, too soon, too fast. I wasn't prepared, or when the system gets flooded, essentially the nervous system gets flooded, and we call it overwhelm as we know it today. And as you know already, because this is your area of expertise, in the fight flight response, we have the parasympathetic and the sympathetic. So the sympathetic goes into fight flight, Oh shit, I'm not safe. It's not okay to be here. It's a perceived threat, or it goes onto high alert or into emergency mode. And then everything... All the blood starts rushing. The heart starts going. Everything starts to pump, and ready to either flee or fight. Which is great to have that survival mode ready to kick in. But of course, when we get stuck in that mode, that's when the issues start to occur, and parasympathetic, the rest and digest, can't really come into relaxation. And the body doesn't somehow send the signal back, Hey, we're not in threat anymore. Hey, we're okay now. We can relax.

Rupda:

So then we get stuck in that mode. And as I was saying previously, this is where we... In our today's world, especially Western cultures, over stimuli, we get overstressed, we have so many things that create that stress, demands and pressures, and to keep up, to stamp of the water, to keep our bills paying, and so on. That we have a hard time... Just slow down, which is really what the parasympathetic needs in order to have the rest and digest.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

So great. That's a great definition of what trauma is and what it does. We could go further into amygdala response and all of that, but we won't do this right this moment. I wanted to... Now that we have an understanding that it is too much, too fast, too soon, that's the definition of trauma, and that something gets almost shut down in us, that's the normal response. And that has wide ranging effects.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

Now how did you get into this field of therapy and helping people, and especially working with trauma, because I know that you've worked with somatic experiencing and that's a really powerful type of therapy that works with trauma, but how did you get into it?

Rupda:

Well, as you know, I grew up in a conscious community, and I was very fortunate to have that holding, which is a very beautiful environment. At least my experience of it was, it was a very enriching environment. Of course, like any environment, it has its moments. It has many dimensions and aspects to it. But the overall feeling was I felt like I was part of something big, and that fundamental human need of belonging was met.

Rupda:

And also the need for connection. So in many ways, my parasympathetic really had a lot of nurturing, but I also did have... The first seven years of my life were really traumatic if I'm honest. It was just so strong, to the point that I had somehow managed to compartmentalized it and forgot about it. So when I was doing all these meditations and workshops, and my own personal development journey, I really didn't get the full throttle of what was happening.

Rupda:

And until I started to do this work, and then I started to see that my body's been paying a price. And it was unavoidable, to the point that the symptoms were screaming loud at me. And I know some of you listening right now have those symptoms, which can be anything from panic attacks, which come out of nowhere, or anxiety or fearfulness, where it's just like my gosh, why am I so fearful? I can't sleep at night. All sorts of things where you become highly reactive, or you get behavioral disorders.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

Or IBS.

Rupda:

Or IBS. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. The big one. And hello, the body doesn't lie. The body isn't going to be BS us, the body's always going to tell us exactly where we are in the now, about what is going on. That's the good news. Because we hold in the body some of our past stuff, but we can also release. So that's the good news.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

So this is a side story of how Rupda and I met, because when I shared on a previous podcast of some of the... I had a lot of physical trauma in my life. So when I was born I wouldn't eat, and went through all of that with a very anxious mother. When I was eight years old, I had a very severe barbecue accident where I burned a large part of my body. Age 11, I was attacked in a park by a would be rapist, and was rescued by my father. And all of those things really made me shut down a lot. And so by the time I was... Let's see how old was I? 14. I actually moved to America with my family to a little community, and many of you listeners don't... Nobody knows really about this so far, but Rupda and I were part of a community that was featured in Wild Wild Country documentary on Netflix.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

And it was amazing to see ourselves in that actual documentary. But so by the time I arrived, I was still really in that shutdown place. And Rupda was 12 years old, you were at the time. You were a sanctuary for me. And it was like a really... I felt safe. I felt safe, I was welcomed on what we called the ranch, and the community of friends that to this day are in our lives. And so this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

And to have you here is really special for me. So that's something, I think one of the reasons why we wanted to talk about this, is because it is... Trauma is so prevailing in our society, and you can have experiences of where you feel really safe and you start to come out of your shell.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

And I want to get to the resources a little bit later on, but I thought that was a nice way to begin sharing why are you on my podcast. What is this all about? It's about trauma, and how it can really shut somebody down and set them down a path of lifelong health issues. Because I see patients that... We work with them, we get so far, and there still is something that they cannot overcome.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

And at that point I often refer them to practitioners that do, for example, somatic experiencing, because all of us have experienced trauma in our lives to some extent. So can you talk a bit more about some of the ways that people shut trauma out of... Or forget about the trauma in their life and just gloss over it? I think men, you mentioned something before, have this tendency just to say, well... Maybe I'll let you say that.

Rupda:

Well, men get a bit more of a pressure, conditional and societal, to man up. To not cry, especially as little boys. And by the way, crying is a release. We need to cry, it helps create relaxation. Anything that can create a healthy release is always good to do for the body, for the nervous system.

Rupda:

And I just want to say it was very touched by that story you shared Nirala, because you're not sitting here in front of me right now, but it was very feelable. And we have had a direct experience of being each other's resource and place of safety, and then another important resource is laughter. And for whatever reason, we both have very strong mothers. Let's just leave it at that. We could really somehow relate to each others... And that created a lot of joy and laughter, so we ended up being a resource without even knowing it towards each other. We just kept on gravitating to each other. We lived in Oregon together. We lived in California together. We've traveled. Even in Germany we were together. And now we both reside in Australia. Quite a story.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

I hope everybody listening has at least one very close friend in their lives that they feel seen, they feel heard, they feel like they can be really themselves. And I think that's part of the healing really.

Rupda:

That's what makes the resource for friendships so important, because we can come to each other. And Nirala's seen me in many dimensions of myself, and I've been able to know that I can call her in any given moment and she's really there. Time can go by for years, and then we can show up at each other's doorstep. And that's really a true friendship.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

We'll be coming back to drama.

Rupda:

But this is so important, because one of the biggest things in the workshop that I've seen and recognized over time is when people go into isolation. And that isolation can be driven by many different things, a coping mechanism. Or can be that they end up there because their trauma was so big that to face it was unbearable. So their coping mechanism might be to isolate. Might be to isolate and they have a drug addiction, or other addictions, alcohol addictions. Many different addictions we have.

Rupda:

We have work addictions. We have computer addiction, sex addictions, all sorts of things. OCD. All sorts of things in order to avoid the pain of the trauma. And the irony is that the moment we're willing just to turn our heads and face it, and talk about it, and say, Hey, Oh yeah, that did happen to me. Because it often... Why do we not talk about it, because of shame.

Rupda:

The shame of what... Big one. Shame keeps us in the pain of it, and shame continues to thrive in secrecy. But the moment we're willing to talk about it, whether it's with one-on-one with a coach, counselor, a friend. Or in a group environment. And then slowly, has less of a hold on your nervous system. And you know that you're in trouble when you clench your jaws. When you have a shortness of breath, when you're clenching your feet or your hands, or if you have a restlessness in your body where you can't take deep breaths, or you can't rest your eyes, or you can't sleep. You know your body's saying, Hey, I'm in trouble here. I need some rest and digest time. So one way, and this is what Nirala was indicating to, was there's this other step that you can take, which is to... Maybe to stop minimizing our traumas. Oh yeah, but my mom tried her best. It wasn't that bad. Or my dad tried his best, but it wasn't that bad.

Rupda:

And trauma comes in many different colors. It can be neglect, can be abandonment, and it can be abuse, physical, psychological, mental, emotional. And it can be, of course, an accident, and war trauma, and so on. If we minimize it, we don't work with it. But if we're willing to work with it, we're willing to then be able to release some of the charge in the nervous system, what we call discharge. And that's what Nirala was indicating. Later on, we would like to talk a little bit about resources to help you to learn to self-regulate again. Because what naturally happens when a baby is born, that the baby's taken out of the womb and placed on its mother's chest. And the baby's nervous system then regulates to its mother's nervous system. That is what naturally happens.

Rupda:

Now, if the mother has been unstable as she had a complicated birth, or she had a traumatic experience just getting to the hospital, or the environment that she was living in. Or if there was some kind of alcoholism or physical abuse, or anything that she was subjected to, the baby growing in her belly is going to feel her nervous system. So it starts at conception. Before the pre-verbal. So this then of course has a big impact.

Rupda:

So many of us who go, I don't know why I'm shut down, Rupda. I don't know why I have a hard time talking. Or I don't know why I become so explosive I just want to punch. Or I don't know why anytime something gets difficult or uncomfortable, I want to run. And I go, Aha. Well, maybe there's something in the nervous system. And I don't even need to know the whole story. I can then work through your body to discharge some of that in the nervous system, so that you can find the state of relaxation again.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

Can you talk a bit more about, because I think that needs more clarification, what do you mean by discharge?

Rupda:

So when we were saying earlier, for example, man up, and I was saying it's really beautiful for a guy to be able to have tears. And thankfully today vulnerability's becoming more and more acceptable. So to release... Discharge is to release. What might be through dance, through movement, through shaking. That's a big release for the trauma work. Because there's a beautiful guy, Italian man. Roberto, and I forget his last name, but it's a beautiful Italian name. And if you want to know, we can put it on the show notes, maybe we should. Because he worked with the traumatized kids in Rwanda. And when you want to talk trauma, my gosh, it's big.

Rupda:

Because they had to take their own parents, and they had to... So we don't even need to say it, you know it. And he works through shaking, a particular pelvic shaking that helped release some of the trauma to help the kids come back into some kind of state of normality, so that they felt safe, so that they could function, so that their learning ability could improve. And it worked. And he did it on a large scale. This is for heavy war traumas. So this goes to show that the body, yes, keeps the score, but the body can also release.

Rupda:

So that we can... What does trauma inhibit us from? From feeling alive, from feeling able to really open up, from feeling like I can really trust another, from feeling like I can really be intimate with another. All these qualities of just relaxation. And when we don't have it, we feel like we're wearing a straight jacket, where we're inhibited from so many things of living. We don't have joy for life. We have what's called depression. And that comes in... Look, as far as depression comes, it comes in many different channels. I don't want to say it's only trauma, but there's certainly a direct link, let's say that. There's the hereditary of course, as well.

Rupda:

So what he discovered was the release. But also Peter Levine talks about release, and there's great work around that. And that's what I'm trained in for the last three years, or sorry, in his training I should say. I've been working with trauma many years. And there's many different ways you can release. Through sound, through voice, through movement, shaking, through laughter, through tears.

Rupda:

There's even a beautiful story when the deer is being chased by a lion. And it's the middle of the day, and just moments before the deer was eating grass. And it was happy days. And then all of a sudden, a lion sees it and it hears the snap of the woods, of the stick, and boom, starts chasing him. From that second, the deer was eating lunch to about to be lunch. And it just starts running and running and running and running. And the lion is coming after it and coming after it, you can imagine it's in full flight response. The amygdala is going off. All the organs are going. Everything's going. And then what happens, thankfully in this particular story, the lion gets too tired and he can't catch up with the deer. Then what happens?

Rupda:

The deer, and this is what we don't do as humans sadly, the deer then realizes, Oh, it's worn out. Maybe it's a half a kilometer or a mile away. And it sees that the lion's not coming after it anymore, and it does a full body shake all the way down to its tail. You've seen that dogs do that with the water when they come out of the sea. This helps reset it, and tell the body, Uh, you don't need to be in fight flight response anymore. You can go into rest and digest. And it even has another thing that Peter Levine observed, which is called pronking, which is started to jump really, really high in the sky, going, I survived, I survived. I made it. And that joy-like experience brings us back to life again. And many people today, sadly, if they don't address their traumas, they don't feel that joy-like experience in life, and then of course we have the symptoms.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

That's a great story. And I often tell that to my patients in terms of this ability for animals to reset their nervous systems very easily. Can you talk about... Because Peter Levine is, would you say the founder of somatic experiencing, which is a type of therapy that basically in a nutshell allows the completion of a fight or flight experience in relation to a particular trauma. So in this case, the deer was able to escape, and did the shaking. And so with somatic experiencing, you're allowed to... Without really reliving the trauma, but you're basically completing that experiencing and discharging as what Rupda was saying, that stuck energy. But there is a third state, which is the freeze response. Can you talk about that, because I think that is what I'm talking about, when a lot of people are in this frozen state of not really accessing... Sort of disconnected from their experience of trauma, and things like that. Or can you just talk about the freeze state a bit more.

Rupda:

Absolutely. Without going into my whole trauma workshop right now, I'm just going to give you a certain sense of it so that you can have a example of it. We have that overstimulated place where we over associated, what was that? Did you hear that sound? Oh my God, did you hear? What was he thinking? What was she just saying to me? Why is he looking at me like that? The over alert. The over vigilant.

Rupda:

And then we have... So that's the over associated. And then we have the disassociated. Disconnect. And it's a coping mechanism. So when an animal gets caught by the lion. We'll go back to that deer. And version B [crosstalk 00:22:55] the alternative ending. Sadly. But I want you to know that everything is going to be okay at the end of this story. And what I just did is I prepared your nervous system.

Rupda:

And by the way, when I work with people like that, and I go, okay, well let's do this, but I want you to know it's going to be a happy ending. Is that okay? And then they say, yes. And then we've already created some level of relaxation. They might even exhale, and I know that their bodies responded.

Rupda:

So the deer gets caught. And as its last ditch efforts, last mode of response, because now it cannot run and it cannot fight, so it plays dead. It freezes. And it shuts down all its system. So this is a mode. It's one of the modes that we do get into, and I want to talk about it. So by the way, the deer's okay. Because the story... We just evaporate the story into thin air, and the deer's okay.

Rupda:

I want you to know the deer got up and goes, Thanks Rupda and Nirala for... I'm going to go back to grazing. You don't need me anymore in the story? No. Okay. Oh good, I'm good. All right, bye.

Rupda:

So the deer's okay and the lion's okay, he got his feed somewhere else. Cool. So in the human experience, because we don't somehow cope with our traumas the same way. If we did, we would have so little different... Completely different quality of life. Let's just say that. In the human experience with freeze, I'm going to say a story that might be quite strong to some of your listeners, especially if you've had this experience yourself, and so just to let you know. If you are someone, for example, who has been physically raped as a little boy or a little girl, and it doesn't mean that you had to have been repetitively, but there are some people who have been more than once, it can just be a onetime experience even.

Rupda:

In that moment, when you have someone who has power over you, and what's called a boundary breach or a boundary rupture, where someone takes advantage of you and disrespects your boundaries, and then sexually abuses you, what then the individual who's in the vulnerable position does is freeze, and feels powerless. So this then has created, and can create, and often creates a disassociation in the individual. It's not safe to be in my body anymore. So I'm going to leave my body. And I want to say that I've heard that again and again from people who have had sexually abused, I just checked out. Do what you will with my body, I'm not here anymore. Because they had to find a safe place, and to be in the body in that moment was not safe.

Rupda:

So what then happens later on in their adult life, having intimacy can be really challenging because it can be the over-association that creates the disassociation. Or I should say under-association, if you want to go the correct term. Where they disassociate. So the freeze response comes back again. Not when they want it, because they know their partner's okay. They know that that person's not there going to harm them, but it's created the trigger. Of course, that's why we look at trauma and how to unpack that, and how to uncouple it. So that we can have intimacy and not disassociate. And I know a lot of people listening right now know that experience, and it's not just in intimacy, but that's one place where it shows up quite a bit. The freeze response.

Dr Nirala Jacobi:

Great. Yeah.