Do you often feel exhausted, stressed, or simply out of balance? Do you have unhealthy habits that make you feel stuck? It might sound odd, but your emotions and mindset have a huge impact on your brain and body–just like your food, exercise, and sleep habits. In fact, your gut–the home of your enteric nervous system–engages in bidirectional communication with the brain and plays an important role in everything from clarity of thought to inflammation and neurological diseases. Could one of the secrets to optimal wellbeing and longevity be found in addressing trauma and eating mindfully? Join Dr. Carla Marie Manly and Dr. Randall Hansen for a fascinating exploration of the relationship between trauma, unhealthy habits, and mindfulness.

Topics discussed include trauma, PTSD, trauma healing, alcoholism, healthy eating, habit change, gut health, nature, forest bathing, breathing exercises, mindfulness, nutrition, breathwork, spirituality, movement, longevity, wellbeing, comparison, social media, negative self-image, self-worth, and self-love.

Please note that this episode may contain sensitive material; listener discretion is advised.

Emergency Assistance Note: If you or someone you know needs immediate support, please call your emergency services. In the US, 24/7 help is available by calling “911” or “988” (Suicide and Crisis Hotline). Support/informational links are in the show notes.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: No expert in this (or any episode) is offering medical or psychological direction; the content is purely informational in nature. Please consult your physician or healthcare provider before undertaking any new regimen or procedure.

https://www.nami.org/support-education/nami-helpline/

Connect with Dr. Carla Manly:

Website: https://www.drcarlamanly.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drcarlamanly/

Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/drcarlamanly/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drcarlamanly

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carla-marie-manly-8682362b/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dr_carlamanly_imperfect_love

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dr_carla_manly

Books by Dr. Carla Manly:

Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend

Date Smart: Transform Your Relationships and Love Fearlessly

Aging Joyfully: A Woman’s Guide to Optimal Health, Relationships, and Fulfillment for Her 50s and Beyond

The Joy of Imperfect Love: The Art of Creating Healthy, Securely Attached Relationships

Imperfect Love Relationship & Oracle Card Deck by Dr. Carla Manly:

Etsy

Amazon

Connect with Dr. Randall Hansen:

Website: https://randallshansen.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/empoweringpines/

X: https://x.com/rshansen

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randallshansen/

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ranhansen

Healing Books: https://randallshansen.com/healing-books

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Can Resolving Trauma Help You Break Unhealthy Habits? with Expert Dr. Randall Hansen

Top Tips to Improve Your Wellbeing and Change Unhealthy Habits

Do you often feel exhausted, stressed, or simply out of balance? It might sound odd, but your emotions and mindset have a huge impact on your brain and your body, just like your food, exercise, and sleep habits. In fact, your gut, the home of your enteric nervous system, engages in bidirectional communication with your brain. It plays an important role in everything, from clarity of thought to inflammation and neurological diseases. Could one of the secrets to optimal well-being and longevity be found in eating mindfully?

In this episode, I’m joined by a fascinating expert who will help us discover the keys to improving mental and physical health, as well as how to live joyfully. We’ll focus on this listener’s real-life question. “I know this sounds weird, but I wonder if you think that being teased as a kid can cause PTSD. Throughout elementary school, I was chubby and didn’t fit in. I remember eating ice cream after school. It was my comfort food. I’m super strict with my diet now, but every time I get stressed or feel insecure, I end up eating ice cream instead of regular food. It’s the only thing that makes me feel better. Is there a connection?” With that question as the focus of this episode, I’m Dr. Carla Marie Manly, and this is Imperfect Love.

I am joined by an amazing special guest, Dr. Randall Hansen. Dr. Hansen is a trauma expert, author, and founder of the HEALing Revolution. Dr. Randall, thank you so much for joining us. I’m so excited for this conversation.

Thank you, Dr. Carla. I’m very excited to be joining you because I’ve tuned in to your show. I know the advice that you and your guests give is so powerful and beneficial.

Comfort Food & Childhood Trauma: Unpacking the Connection

Thank you. I have a strong feeling you’re going to be adding a lot. I’m so excited. The listener’s question, I find so intriguing because I imagine, I know for myself and practically every person I know, that we all have a little bit of a comfort food urge. Whether we reach for something healthy, an apple that makes us feel better, or raspberries, or sometimes something not so healthy, it’s an interesting question and one that has wide-ranging impacts. I’m excited to talk with you about this because you’re such an expert in this realm. I’m so excited. You cover everything from the gut to trauma to the pillars for a healthy living, whole body-mind-spirit approach, which I’m a huge fan of. Before we get into that, would you please tell our audience a little bit about what makes you, you?

I love that you asked this question. Ever since I first heard you ask it, and then when you asked me on this show, I’ve been contemplating it. I would say, number one, it was a loving mother. I grew up in a traumatic household. She was an anchor and taught me empathy and compassion. She showed me those things. Even though it took me many decades to truly understand that, her love and parenting grounded me and put me in a position where, years later, I could be on a healing journey and finally find self-love for myself for the first time in probably my adult life.

Thank you for sharing that beautiful and vulnerable piece of yourself. I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but I felt this deep sense of still sadness in you, but honor and respect for her. I could feel the sadness coming through. I’m sorry. A childhood filled with trauma is not an easy childhood. Having that mother figure in your life, if we can only have one person to be our anchor, our rock, it can be a huge game-changer. I’m glad you had her.

Beyond Veterans: Understanding Complex PTSD

I appreciate that. It is so true. Especially children, I get upset, it’s maybe too strong a word, when we talk about children being resilient. There’s a resiliency there, but typically, with childhood trauma, the child is not resilient. He or she is pushing that trauma back in their brain because their childhood brain can’t understand it. Why is this person, who is supposed to love me, hurting me, or whatever it might be? It does sit back there. Just like the question that we’re focusing on, whether it’s being bullied in childhood or other trauma, parent, family member, you name it, that has a lasting impact.

This question that we’re focusing on is the perfect question. The other element that I love about this question is that I met a woman who had gotten out of a lifetime of battering and abuse from two ex-husbands. She went from one to the other because that’s what she knew. She sat quietly across from me. She said, “I don’t know if I can say this, but I think I have PTSD from these abusive relationships.” My heart broke because we often think PTSD is just for veterans, soldiers, or first responders, but no, it’s for anyone who has experienced trauma, especially trauma over a period of time. It then could become complex PTSD. I am honoring this question that you have from this listener.

Thank you for pausing with that because I agree. So many times, I’ll be talking to a client, especially if they’re new. Strangers seem to like to tell me their stuff, even though what I do for a living, I have that energy. I try to make a safe space for people to speak. What I’ve found throughout my journey is that so many people look at the medical model of what qualifies for PTSD. Not everyone who experiences a traumatic incident will have PTSD, but depending upon where somebody is in their life on that very day, how or why they develop PTSD is up to that individual and the circumstances. It’s not under their control, but it depends on so many factors.

I often use this example, as I explained to people. You are in an airplane crash or an automobile accident. You’re sleeping, you’ve had 2 or 3 drinks, and you’re passed out, you’re on some medication, or you were unaware of it because you had headphones in and you were engrossed in a podcast. Whatever was happening for you, your experience of that crash is going to be wholly different from somebody who is wide awake, fully alert, and attuned to precisely what was happening and experience that loss of control and that near brush with death.

I like to think of trauma that way because it allows people to see that if you were teased as a child, and that impacted you, and you didn’t have support or a safe space, and you weren’t given immediate attention, loving care, and healing very soon after it, it gets implanted in the brain. What might appear as resilience is instead a compartmentalized trauma. It manifests, as this reader was brave enough to write in, every time they feel stressed or insecure, which for many people can be a daily thing.

Unconscious Habits: How Trauma Shapes Our Choices

From my personal experience, before I faced my trauma, I had that same thing. I’d be driving home after a stressful day. My car would automatically turn to a fast food restaurant, even though I knew it wasn’t healthy for me. There’s that comfort again that we’re talking about. It was unconscious. I need this turned in, ordering it, and afterwards, feeling guilty about it, that I know better. It’s how our brain processes, as you said, so I understand that completely.

I so appreciate you sharing that, because precisely what you said, the car turns. It almost seems as if it’s not under your control. The car turns, or people will say, “I ended up at the refrigerator,” because it does. I’m not making light of it. It does feel that way to the individual. The shame cycle starts afterward. I’m stupid, I’m worthless, I know better, I shouldn’t have, and all of those shaming messages. What do they do? They make you feel stressed, worthless, and insecure. You’re more likely to go and get more of that sweet, that food, that fried thing, or whatever it is. That’s the cycle.

The person then thinks they’re broken, but it’s that the trauma is in control. Even if there’s no trauma, we’re run by patterns. We get up. We brush our teeth. We do all these things that are patterns. The brain is doing the same thing with these negative messages that lead us away from what is truly good for us and into things that make us maybe feel good in the moment. Dr. Randall, it’s also important to give a nod to the influence of advertising.

We are given messages every day. If you eat this, you give yourself a treat, you deserve this treat, and you deserve a pint of ice cream, whatever it is, you deserve this. It’s put into our brain, often somewhat on a subliminal level, sometimes very overtly. We end up blaming ourselves when it’s so many factors. It’s not our fault, but it’s something we can learn how to heal. Back to you.

I concur with everything you said, especially that shame cycle, because it can become that hamster wheel where we do something that we know is wrong or is not healthy for us. We do it because we need that release. All of a sudden, the shame, and we go right back to that. I wonder how you feel about this in your practice, in your background. My first book, I thought I had the most brilliant title, because it was named Triumph Over Trauma. I thought, “Is that not a fall to shout from the mountaintops? We can all triumph over our trauma.” I was doing a book signing at this bookstore. Everyone was avoiding the table.

I thought, “I thought this was such a great title.” I started talking to some people. They saw the keyword trauma as too strong. They thought, “No, trauma is for bad things like murder, car accidents, plane crashes, or war.” After that experiment, I’ve been using more ‘things in your past,’ because I think that’s a safer term. I don’t know. I’m curious what you think. I believe that, from Dr. Gabor Maté and Peter Levine, there’s a spectrum of trauma from the small T we have over here to the big T. For the vast majority of us, is that if we are alive today, we’ve experienced some level of trauma. From my sense, it feels like the majority of people don’t want to call it trauma, maybe because that then puts a stigma. I don’t know. What are your thoughts on that?

Trauma & Shame: The Kintsugi Approach to Healing

First, I appreciate the question. So much is, again, going back to that individual person. I believe that in our society, in our culture, and I’m not pointing this at you at all, I’m giving some context to it, some people have made such easy use of the word trauma. I broke my fingernail. I’m so traumatized. It’s not as long as the other ones. I get that it might be uncomfortable, sad, or disappointing, but I would doubt it’s seriously traumatic. That’s my perspective.

My other thought is that if we put that aside as more of an outlier, and look at what is traumatic to one person is not necessarily traumatic to another. Going a little deeper to speak to your question, one of the things I’ve noticed with my clients is this. I have to admit. It applies to me, too. I didn’t have an easy childhood environment at all, anything but. When we look at the messages that parents or siblings gave you, “That food looks better on the plate than it’s going to look on you. You shouldn’t have that bread. You’re already on the fat side.” This is one I’ve heard fairly often, a teacher commenting like, “You probably shouldn’t have your snacks because you’re not exercising.”

People wouldn’t necessarily get away with that, or a teacher wouldn’t get away with that today. Mothers are saying, “You’re a little on the round side. I’ll reward you with a pretty outfit if you can fit into it.” These might sound like gentle ways of encouraging someone to get trimmer or exercise more, but the child doesn’t experience it that way. Would those jabs, criticisms, or constructive feedback, if you want to call them that, be considered traumatic in and of themselves or trauma-inducing? Maybe not to some kids, but to a lot of people.

Those messages are absorbed. They are held tight. They are in the brain. They end up affecting the person throughout their lives until the memory is uncovered, or it’s often very close to the surface and then worked through. All of the other messages start flowing forward that were associated with that, the messages from dad, brother, sister, teachers, coach, whatever it is. To get more specific in my response to your question, some people in our society feel that trauma is equal to broken. That’s the piece that is triggering. I have experienced significant trauma of all sorts in my life. I have learned not to see it as broken.

When we think of Kintsugi in Japanese pottery, they take the gold. I am a living, walking piece of Kintsugi. Yes, I’ve experienced trauma. Am I ashamed of it? Absolutely not. Am I proud of my ability to heal from it and continue to heal and help others heal? I don’t see that trauma as negative. I don’t see myself as broken. I try to help other people not see that they’re broken. If you have been a victim of trauma, then you have the right to heal, to move forward, and to create Kintsugi, a piece of pottery that’s had some shatterings. Have it glued into a more beautiful form by using gold to fill those cracks.

That’s beautiful. That’s insightful about if you admit trauma, maybe you feel, “Now, I’m broken. If I’m broken, then I’m not lovable or all these different things.” That’s an interesting insight. I love that. You can tell I’m pretty open book and willing to share it if it does sometimes get close to starting to weep about some of these things. It’s not that I’m not healed or I’ve not incorporated those things in the past, but there are still emotional attachments, as you know.

I see it as, for many years, I wasn’t living my whole life because a big part of it was blocked from me. For me, as we heal, it’s discovering things about ourselves that maybe we had totally forgotten. I love doing inner child work because, again, a lot of trauma does happen in childhood. We lose that connection to our inner child. In part, we lose that inner child as we get to adulting. We are told to be more mature and act like adults. It’s also that trauma keeps it back.

As we heal, it’s not admitting we’re broken or admitting anything that we did wrong. If something has happened to us, it was never our fault by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a sense of now as an adult, I can look back, and I can understand what my dad did. I can look at his relationship with his mother and see how much trauma was between the two of them, and how he was also an alcoholic. How he expressed his anger was, unfortunately, in unhealthy ways.

When you come back to your child, and you can explain to your younger self, “This wasn’t you,” look at these circumstances. For a long time, I didn’t have empathy for my dad because he was the main abuser. As I did this work on myself, I saw his relationship with his mother. I saw how his mother pitted the two, he and his brother, against each other. It opened up a world to me that said, “My poor dad never resolved that trauma. He lived his life with that until the end.” I had someone who said to me, and I was talking about my dad, he said, “I got beaten with a belt once a week by my dad. It was normal.” I also wonder how much we normalize rather than saying we’re broken or there’s trauma.

Breaking the Cycle: Awareness, Boundaries & Replacement Behaviors

Whether we’re thinking about your situation or the person who wrote in, the child must normalize to a certain extent in order to be able to cope. That becomes their normal. Often, it’s only once they get into somebody else’s home or leave the home environment that they’re able to say, “That wasn’t normal.” Sometimes, the other families they go to, their environments are so abnormal as well that there’s more and more that is normalized. I believe in that healing journey, as you’re saying, it’s not about blaming the parent, the caregiver, or the teacher.

It is about becoming aware of the patterns if that person is still in your life and they’re still engaging in those patterns, having stronger boundaries, and maybe removing yourself from the relationship temporarily. In some cases, if they’re abusive and not changing, then permanently. The idea is to then not give them any power over you any longer and continue to do that work moving forward so that you are free. Looking at this listener’s question, and I’m curious about your thoughts, this individual is in some ways being held or constrained by these negative people in her past who are so cruel as to poke, jab, and say unkind things.

It sounds as if maybe she didn’t have support at home or somebody coaching her. Maybe, home was part of the problem, too. We don’t know what messages were there. The idea is to track, as you were saying, and as your books focus on. I’m such a fan of this, tracking your thoughts, your feelings, your mindset, your energy, and your actions. That’s actually why I created my Imperfect Love Reflection Cards so that people would have a simple deck of 45 cards to, in a nonjudgmental way, start to learn, “How are my thoughts affecting me here? How is my mindset?”

Let’s break it down for this listener’s question. We use the emotion, even though emotions arise first, and then we have a connection to the past, which gives us our feelings. We’ll use the word feelings to make it easy. You have a feeling, you have a thought, then you have a mindset, energy, and an action. This is my paradigm if you break it in that cycle. For this individual, let’s say they’re having a stressful day.

What comes up is feeling. “I’m feeling stressed.” Thought, “Things aren’t going to be good today. This is too much.” The mindset, “I feel this is scattered, dark, and yuck. I’m not very much in control. My life is out of balance. I’m out of balance.” The energy then becomes heavy. The action then becomes, “Let me get a pint of ice cream. Let me get chocolate, vanilla, or whatever it is. That’ll make me feel better.” It creates another cycle.

If the person is able to catch themselves anywhere, maybe they don’t notice the feeling, or maybe they make it through the thought, but maybe they’re in the mindset where they become aware, “I’m in that negative space. I’m in that space where I’m feeling scattered, heavy, and dark.” Right there, they can go, “How about if I give myself a dose of sunshine, go for a walk, or call a friend?” You’re interrupting that cycle. Each time we interrupt that cycle that started with some trauma a long time ago, then next time we might not always break the cycle, but the more we become aware of that inner play and know that as long as we catch it before the action, then we’ve gotten out of that. What do you think?

Mindfulness is such a powerful tool. You described it perfectly. The way we break that cycle is when we’re getting those feelings. I recognize these feelings. I know what might be coming. What can I do to change the cycle? I love the idea of going for a walk. Nature has always been the most powerful healer for me. That’s what I do. I go for a walk. Sunshine is usually out there as well. Doing that replacement, that substitution of a healthy thing for an unhealthy reaction, is wonderful.

I also want to go back to this question. The other problem we have, and it’s probably more with women, but I experienced it myself, and I know other men who have, is that culture. If we’re a chubby kid to begin with, and we get picked on by fellow classmates, and maybe some helpful words from parents, teachers, or others that say, “Maybe you should skip a meal. Do you need to eat that today?”, there’s a culture with all these airbrushed images. We look at ourselves, and then we look at this image. We say, “I can’t live up to this.” Culture is a way of adding to our, if not trauma, certainly to our negative feelings of ourselves as we see that.

Even worse with social media, I have a friend who calls Facebook Fakebook because all we ever show is our happiest moments. It’s rare to see someone say, “I’m devastated. I got divorced today,” or “My spouse wants a divorce. I never expected it.” We’re always bombarded with these positive images about life. We also need to step away and realize that culture is impacting us subconsciously. We are not even aware that it’s happening. Let me add to that. Sugar, especially desserts and sweets, is probably the number one comfort food in our society. Sadly, I think we’re culturally addicted to sugar. We have it in our beverages. We have it in our desserts. We have it in almost all of our convenience foods. I feel for this person who wrote this question because there are so many layers to what she’s going through.

Navigating Societal Pressures: Self-Love in a World of Toxic Comparison

With a big nod to the societal factors, yes, absolutely. Social media, advertising, movies, all of that, constantly having these images around us that show us some ideal. It’s not just a 21st-century thing. It’s human nature to look around and notice, “This is black. This is white. This is a raspberry. This is a blueberry.” We notice differences. “It’s why the male peacock has these glorious feathers and the female peacock does not.” There are differences. We see them as animals.

What we need to be careful of as parents, as friends, as individuals, and as humans on the planet is not to go into that place of what I call toxic comparison. It’s okay to compare, “This is orange and red. This is healthy. This is unhealthy.” The best thing to do is then to go back to yourself and say, “What’s right for me? Do I feel good?” Keep repeating that. Maybe your ideal weight is 150, and somebody else’s ideal weight is 120 or 110.

It is a constant work of self to keep coming back to be aware. Yes, these messages are there. They’re amplified by social media and advertising, but keep doing your best to come back to yourself with huge self-love and saying, “Do I feel good at this weight? Do I feel good in my body? Do I feel good when I eat celery sticks? Am I feeling better if I once in a while have this dose of ice cream?” It is seeing it as a sense of coming back to the self and what the self needs because, probably, the true self doesn’t want ice cream as a meal replacement. It is probably not.

One other thing in this question that strikes me, as you were talking, is that she said something like, “Normally, I stick to a strict diet, except when I’m stressed.” That is a big red light to me. It might be a wordplay, or she has chosen that word. To me, strict means, “I’m not eating the way I necessarily want to eat, but I’m following some strict guidelines. In stressful times, I am busting out of those guidelines.” That’s where that guilt comes.

One of my philosophies is similar to what you were talking about, body size, weight, and all those things. I dislike it when people say everyone needs to follow the XYZ diet, Mediterranean, MIND, carnivore, vegan, or whatever it might be. My philosophy is, first of all, we call it a diet. I call one of my books, The HEALing Revolution Diet. I use ‘diet’ in the title only because I knew there were thousands of diet books, and it was a way to catch people’s eyes. My book is not about a diet protocol because I believe everyone needs to find that right mix of foods that’s good for their body, their gut, and their brain.

As we talked about earlier, it is that connection between the gut and the brain. If we feel like we’re limiting ourselves every day, restricting ourselves every day, then one day that stress might be extremely stressful. There are other days where maybe it’s a little stressful, but because that strictness is so strong, you’re like, “I need to break free and have something,” even though it’s not that stressful a day. Again, it comes back to mindfulness. I don’t know if this reader chose that word out of random or not, but for me, it’s a chance for her to go back and say, “Are you eating the foods you enjoy? Are you following such a strict regimen where you feel like you’re not enjoying your food every day?” That is then a whole bigger issue we need to talk about, too.

Beyond Strict Diets: Mindful Eating & Body Wisdom

I am glad you picked up on that word strict. I’m a firm believer in that. I know people who, for medical reasons, have to be on a strict diet. They often break free of that. “I treated myself to this.” I understand it, and I certainly don’t judge it. The idea is if you’re not on a medical diet and you’re one that your doctor’s prescribing because you have diabetes or something. When you’re looking at your daily life, anytime we’re too strict with ourselves, there is that natural human inclination to break out of jail. We don’t want to be in jail.

It doesn’t feel good. Give yourself grace. I once listened to a book on tape by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. I love her work. She had talked about looking at life as a smorgasbord and seeing not just the cookies, the desserts, the pastas, and this and that, but seeing everything. It is tuning into your body and saying, “What do I want? Do I want the carrot sticks? Do I want the celery filled with peanut butter? Do I want the coleslaw?” These weren’t her words in particular, but it was her image that I’ve lived with. “Do I want this?”

When we give ourselves the grace of looking at not just food, but lifestyle choices as a whole. I have this smorgasbord. If I pause to tune into myself, sometimes, I will want the ice cream. If I’m listening to my body, tuning in, and trying to clear it from the messages from other people, the choices I’ve made, or societal streaming into my brain, because I’m a vegetarian by choice, no matter what smorgasbord you gave me, it could have chocolate cake, I would go, “I think I’ll have some grilled zucchini and some tofu.” It is simply because if I’m listening to my body, I usually want something like that.

It has taken me a long time to get there. Most of us are raised with certain messages around food. We have to train ourselves to be able to see the smorgasbord. Going back to something you said earlier, I don’t want to skip over the importance of behavior that is a substitute. If this individual is used to eating ice cream as her coping strategy for feelings of unworthiness, feelings of being stressed, or whatever is coming up, and that ice cream is taken away, that individual is left with no coping strategy that they’ve developed. This is going to cause more stress, which makes the gut not feel as good. The body doesn’t feel as good.

The gut-brain axis, the gut is sending 90% messages to the brain and 10% messages from the brain to the gut. This is a big force field in here. Going back to that important piece that you spoke about, it is having not one replacement behavior. Sometimes, you don’t want the replacement behavior. If your walk is your go-to, stretching is your go-to, or calling your friend is your go-to, you might need ten options, in sticky notes, in front of you. You’re not broken if you have a hardwired response. You have a hardwired response. If that person is able to choose a replacement behavior from 9, 10, or 15 responses, then they’ll generally be able to find one that feels good. What do you think of that?

Retraining Your Brain: Connecting with Your Body’s Wisdom

I love that idea. As you said earlier in the show, in our discussion, we get these grooves in our brains. They’re not grooves, but these connections or these pathways in our brain. It becomes natural. We don’t even think about it. If I’m hungry, this, or if I’m stressed, that. If we can sit down at a time when we’re not triggered by stress or whatever that’s triggering us, and say, “What are ten things that will make me happy or that will alleviate these negative feelings I’m feeling, or the feelings of stress?”, have that collection handy. It’s a sense of retraining the brain.

I want to add one more thing because I love what you said. So many of us are out of tune with our bodies. It might be from a disconnection from childhood, where we’ve heard that too often, and we disconnect from it. I hear so many people say, “Man, I love ice cream, but it tears up my stomach.” Why are you still eating it if it’s causing you this? “I love it.” There’s this disconnect that I don’t understand sometimes.

The other thing that I want to add to that, too, is that so many people call the gut our second brain. I have this feeling that our gut is our primary brain. Our brain is the secondary one. Yes, we have these neural networks and all these things happening, but our gut has our serotonin. It has our immune system. When we get upset or anxious, it’s typically in our gut that we first have those feelings.

We seem to have this disconnect sometimes with our gut and our bodies. I love some of these examples you’re giving that can retrain our brains and hopefully, give our bodies and our guts a rest from the stuff that we probably shouldn’t be doing. It’s not just food. It could be something like getting your motorcycle and going 100 miles an hour to relieve that pain or whatever. A lot of times, we take risky actions to do that same kind of relieving ourselves of the trauma or whatever is causing this negativity in ourselves.

Just a caveat, if you have a motorcycle, we’re not recommending that you go 100 miles an hour on the street. If you’re on a track and you have your helmet on and your gear, it’s pretty cool. I’m with you. It’s so interesting that you brought up motorcycles because I love motorcycles. It’s almost like the modern-day horse. There’s a lot of research on this with dogs. When you even put a dog who has been traumatized, say by fireworks, on a treadmill, they can encourage healing in the dog by allowing them to be on a treadmill.

It is that literal leaving behind sense of going on a motorcycle. Most of us don’t have a horse to hop on, but that would be awfully nice. Equine therapy is amazing. It is being able to go for a walk, sit in the sun, if you have a garden handy, if you can link up with a friend, go for a coffee, read a book, meditate, sit, hug a tree, and all sorts of things. We realize that we can create this big toolkit of replacement behaviors. If we don’t have satisfactory replacement behaviors, and especially some support around that, a friend, family member, a psychotherapist, or someone who can help us, you’re not broken.

You have patterns in your brain that aren’t helping you be the you you want to be. That’s it. I love neuroplasticity because it allows us to realize we can change our brains. We can do it. It sounds like both you and the person right here, me, have the power, have changed our brains, and continue on that journey. To me, it’s one of the privileges of being alive that we get to change our brains until the day we’re not on the planet anymore. How cool is it that we’re able to do that?

I also want to focus on something else that you had said about the brain and the gut disconnect. It’s my belief, and I’m sure there are other people who believe it as well and have done research on it. The idea of the mind-body split started with Descartes and the Cartesian split. The mind and the body are different. We believe that the rational mind is so much more powerful and important. We got away from things like gut instinct.

You’re listening to your intuition. You’re listening to your gut. There’s something funny about you. When we go back, and it’s not about letting one or the other be all-powerful, it’s about factoring in both and more. It is factoring in, “My gut is saying this. What is my rational brain saying? What is my spirit calling for? What is my overall body calling for?” It takes a little bit more ‘work,’ but it does help you tune in to this beautiful being that is you.

The Power of Community in Your Healing Journey

I love that. Print that. I want to think of what you said. Community, whether it’s a group of friends, or if you’re lucky enough to have a loving family, a therapist, a coach, whatever it is, healing, we have to do it within, but we need the support of people around us to say, “Keep going. You did a great job. You made it one step. That’s all you need to do today.” We need those cheerleaders and supporters in our lives. I’m glad you brought that up. Thank you for that.

Thank you, because that gives me an opportunity to remind our audience. If you’re more of an introvert, and you don’t have a big support network of friends, or you don’t have family around, support can mean one body. It can mean you’re a psychotherapist. If you don’t have money for psychotherapy, it can mean finding a free support group or a free meetup group. I’m a huge fan, having run a 300-plus-member women’s support group, in having a collective.

It doesn’t have to be women. It can be a collective of people who are of a similar mind or direction that you can feel energetically supported by and connected to. Often, there are more resources in your community than you might know. You can check with your local hospital. You can check with your local community center. You can look online at Meetup and find a hiking group, a walking group, a yoga group, a gardening group, or a painting group. There are groups for about everything. I don’t know if there’s a sitting group, but that would be a good one to start. You could sit together and not say anything, but know there are people around you. I like that idea. I’m an introvert.

Me, too.

Dr. Hansen, I know we’re running out of time. You have these six elements of healing. We won’t have time to go into each one of them, but could you give us an overview, please?

We’ll start with nature. There’s both the woo-woo side and the science side of it. The Japanese have a term, forest bathing, and then there’s the science side that says the plants give off phytoncides, which help us build our natural killer cells within us. They’re immune boosters. There’s so much science. You don’t have to do anything. Go out there, find a park bench, and sit there. It doesn’t have to be a national park. It could be your local park.

It could be your backyard. It could be a rooftop garden or wherever it is, where there’s nature around. In fact, they have even done studies where looking at a picture of nature has similar effects. If you can’t get outside or it’s pouring rain, maybe you pull up a picture of Yosemite, a tree, or whatever your favorite thing is in nature. Watch that, look at that, or watch a video. Nature is a big one. For me, it was the most powerful element.

Hug your potted plant. If you have a potted plant, it can be a succulent or anything that you feel connected to. It’s often the greenery of nature. It’s why so many dentists’ offices, hospital rooms, emergency rooms, a lot of them, especially if they’re on the smart end of healing, have images of nature and colors of nature. It is because they’re naturally soothing. We came from nature. We lived in nature. A couple of hundred years ago, we were bathed in nature, morning, noon, and night. Thank you for nature.

Nutrition & Spirituality: Fueling Your Body and Soul

I want to quickly add that we live in air-conditioned environments. We work in air-conditioned environments. We drive in air-conditioned environments. We’re so separated from nature, which is why I love that you mentioned horses, because again, we’re out in nature. Nature is an animal, and we’re connected to that. The second one is nutrition. Classic line, food can be thy medicine. We know that certain foods can affect our emotions. It’s a matter of finding the foods that work for us. For you, vegetables. I love that. You’ve listened to your body.

Your body says, “No, that gooey cake looks disgusting, but that grilled zucchini looks amazing.” That’s a matter of listening, but also maybe a little retraining, too, or a combination. Food is so important. We live in a world where we think we’re eating something that looks like Grandma’s apple pie or dumplings, but they’re so different because they have so many different ingredients than how Grandma used to cook them.

Back to my mom, I am so blessed that one of the things she did was she cooked everything from scratch, and I was by her side because the trauma was a thing to her. I learned how to cook from that. One of my biggest expressions of love that I give people is when I can cook for them, and an expression of love for myself is that I can cook. If you don’t cook, I would say there are millions of videos. You don’t have to be a gourmet cook. Cooking is also therapeutic for me. It’s all sorts of things within nutrition and food. That’s the second one.

The third one is spirituality, whether that’s prayer or meditation. When we don’t think there’s some higher power that connects us all, we’re missing out on a bigger experience of what life is. I have a meditation practice I do every afternoon where I connect to the universe and connect to God, whatever we want to call that energy, that being, or whatever it is. I’m not saying religion because religion is a man-made thing. I’m talking about spirituality and connecting to our inner spirit. We are spiritual beings living this human life.

Breathwork is another one. We take breath for granted, but thank God, because it’s an automatic function that we have biologically. The simplest thing we can do when we’re stressed out is sit back and do 3 or 4 deep cleansing breaths from the diaphragm. That process, in one minute of doing that or 45 seconds, whatever it would take, is so calming. There are lots of different types of breathwork methodologies that you can follow. It’s as simple as a deep breath, but you can go way beyond that if you’d like.

I’d like to pause there. I’m with you on that. We can, especially because this listener, for all of us, is saying that she gets stressed. The low self-worth is also a piece, the negative self-talk, or whatever is happening. We pause to take a deep breath in, truly a deep in and out because in our society, we’re pushed to go faster, faster, faster, do more, do more, be more, and be more. We can catch ourselves on that hamster wheel.

I know I do it to myself, where I’m like, “I have to finish my day now. I have to do this, do that, do dinner.” Wait a second. Pause. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. I’m like, “I’ve got this. It’s chill.” You do what you need to do, but you’re moving at a slower pace. If you find you’re ramping up again, it’s like, “I’m doing it. Deep breath in. Deep breath out.” In that kind, gentle, and gracious way, you catch yourself with love and give yourself that loving gift of breath. Slow it down and continue on your way. Thank you for pointing out breathwork. Two more.

Movement & Plant Medicine: Alternative Healing Modalities

I want to quickly add. I know we’re running out of time. To this day, sometimes, when I’m deep in reading a report or research, I’ll be holding my breath because I’m so captured by it. My wife will be sitting next to me and say, “Breathe.” I’m like, “Yes.” Breath is so important. It is so cleansing. I love that. The fifth one is movement. I call it movement rather than exercise, because some people see exercise as a four-letter word, “I have to exercise,” but movement is something that can be fun. Dancing is a movement. Gardening is a movement. It can be walking and all these things.

It doesn’t have to be going to the gym and lifting weights, although a combination of cardio and strength training is important. If we think about it as movement rather than exercise, it gives us a better mental picture. “I’m going to dance for five minutes. This is my favorite song. I’m going to turn on my favorite song. I don’t care who sees me.” Although, as an introvert, I’m going to be by myself. It is movement, moving the body, because we’re so sedentary. So many of us, especially if we’re in white-collar fields, are sitting at our desks all day. If we’re stressed, that could be one of those replacements, turn on your favorite song and dance.

Dance like nobody is watching. Whether there’s someone there or not, dance. I’m a firm believer. Last one.

This could be controversial to some, but it’s been a powerful healing modality not only for me. I see it with so many veterans. That is plant medicine. I think almost 200 universities around the world are studying these. They were used in therapy in the 1960s. They got banned by President Nixon in Congress in ’72. We’re seeing a revival in this. If these other five modalities are not doing what you want to do in terms of healing, plant medicines are something to look at as a possibility. There are taboos that go with that that people can find out by reading one of my articles or one of the books.

You’ve talked a lot about mindfulness. It’s about being a mindful consumer, doing your research, and not following a path that’s dictated by somebody else, but being a wise consumer. That’s where the left rational brain comes in very handy. The right creative brain, best friend, but the left creative brain can be a smart friend as well, telling us, “Do the research. Go into the studies. Look at who is paying for the studies.”

If you’re doing a study on how helpful alcohol is and it’s paid for by an alcohol beverage company, think 100 times before you believe that study. Thank you for that. One more thing. I noticed when you were talking about holding your breath, and for many people who have experienced trauma, holding your breath and breathing it at a fast pace, the short, shallow breaths. They are not anyone’s fault. They are indicators, often, not always, of old patterns. I do the same thing, the breathholding. I catch myself, “Deep breath in.” I can trace it back to childhood, holding your breath, because what was going to happen? You had to be small. You had to be quiet.

You had to be vigilant.

Hold your breath because what’s happening? It is certainly not your fault, or anyone who finds themselves holding their breath or having shallow breath. See it often as a sign that maybe your body is holding on to old patterns. You learn that as a response. One of the best things we can do for ourselves is, as you said, Dr. Randall, those big, deep belly breaths like a baby would do. It is that big belly floating and then coming back down. It’s hard when we’re told to hold in, keep our stomachs flat, and keep everything tight. That is often working against those deep belly breaths that are helping us cleanse every part of our system. Dr. Randall, you are fascinating. You have so much information to offer. I’m so grateful. Can you tell our audience where they can find you and your work?

They could go to my website, which is my full name and my middle initial. It’s RandallSHansen.com. I am most active on LinkedIn, so you type in Dr. Randall Hansen. You’ll find me there. It’s probably the easiest way to do it. Please reach out, follow, and connect. You don’t have to buy my books. I have hundreds of articles, all free on my website. I want people to find healing, realize that they can live a beautiful life, and find that grace within themselves to do so.

Dr. Hansen, I want to thank you. Among all of the gifts you’ve given us, one that has stood out to me is your ability to be vulnerable. As a man, especially in today’s world where men are raised to not be vulnerable, honest, and sensitive, you have shown me and our audience what a beautiful, strong, courageous, empathic, and sensitive male role model looks like. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Carla. For the audience who can’t see me, I’m almost blushing. Beautiful sentiment. I will hold that dearly. Thank you.

Thank you. It’s heartfelt. To our audience, thank you as always, from my heart to yours, for sharing your time and energy with us. It’s always my joy and my privilege. This is Imperfect Love.

Important Links

• Dr. Randall Hansen’s website
• Triumph Over Trauma
• Imperfect Love Reflection Cards
• The HEALing Revolution Diet
• Dr. Randall Hansen on LinkedIn
• Dr. Randall Hansen on Instagram
• Dr. Randall Hansen on X
• Dr. Randall Hansen on TikTok
• Healing Books by Dr. Randall Hansen | Triumph Over Trauma & HEAL!
• NAMI HelpLine
• Dr. Carla Manly’s Website
• Dr. Carla Manly on Instagram
• Dr. Carla Manly on Twitter
• Dr. Carla Manly on Facebook
• Dr. Carla Manly on LinkedIn
• Dr. Carla Manly on YouTube
• Dr. Carla Manly on TikTok

About Dr. Randall Hansen

Dr. Randall Hansen wants you and everyone in the world to find healing and optimal health, living a long and happy life. He shares this passion and Divine mission by educating and empowering people to be proactive about their food choices, find a healthy lifestyle, and heal from past trauma. His most recent book, labeled as a “blueprint for anyone looking to create or restore health,” is The Healing Revolution Diet: A Science-based Approach to Heal Your Gut, Reverse Chronic Illnesses, Lose Weight, Clear Your Mind, and Increase Longevity is the third in the Wholeistic Healing Trilogy. He is also the author of the groundbreaking Triumph Over Trauma: Psychedelic Medicines are Helping People Heal Their Trauma, Change Their Lives, and Grow Their Spirituality and the well-received HEAL! Wholeistic Practices to Help Clear Your Trauma, Heal Yourself, and Live Your Best Life.

Dr. Hansen’s focus and advocacy center around true healing … healing that results in being able to live an authentic life filled with peace, joy, and love. When not writing or educating, you’ll find Dr. Randall basking in nature.