Michael Roesslein:

And we’re live with today’s episode of the podcast. I’m excited to be joined by my friend, Dr. Ameet in Kenya. We are very international on this podcast today. So Dr. Ameet, thank you for being here.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Real pleasure. Real pleasure, Michael, I’m excited to dive into homeopathy, inflammation, trauma, family constellation therapy, everything we can do for a chronic disease and mental health.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, let’s do it. It’s going to be fun. We’ve connected one other time for an interview, and I had a blast and learned a ton so I’m really excited for this episode. And for those who don’t already know your work, I’m going to just do a little introduction and then we can get into talking about those things. Voted one of the top naturopathic doctors worldwide, Dr. Ameet Aggarwal has helped thousands of people around the world heal from trauma, anxiety, depression, and chronic disease by combining naturopathic and functional medicine, gestalt psychotherapy, family constellations therapy, EMDR and homeopathy. His free online course and books on drameet.com will help you get faster relief from burnout, anxiety, depression, chronic disease, and trauma by helping you heal your mind and body together holistically. And personally, I get really excited when I get to talk to somebody who kind of blurs the lines and crosses the lines between the “sides” of healing that I see so often separated into… this is the mental and emotional and spiritual over here and this is the physical over here. And I personally see that as a very flawed dynamic.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah. Because the mind-

Michael Roesslein:

So before we get into the… Oh, go ahead.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

The mind affects the body, and the body affects the mind. Yeah. And we’re going to talk about how that happens through neurotransmitters, through stress, affecting the gut and the liver and the vagus nerve and how you can use homeopathy to actually discharge emotions and heal the body at the same time, how to heal the gut to heal your mind, how to use family constellations therapy for ancestral trauma and how that affects the body as well. So we’ll be going between the body and the mind throughout this interview.

Michael Roesslein:

Perfect. Yeah, the more I’ve kind of… I started on one side and now I’ve migrated over to the other and as I’ve been learning, I just realized how little to no separation there is and that what affects one instantaneously affects the other, even in quantum levels and things happen at speeds faster than biochemistry so really excited. I’m curious, before we get into the nitty gritty of some of these things, which came first for you, the chicken or the egg, were you interested in naturopathic medicine and functional medicine and homeopathy and things like that first, or were you interested in the family constellations, trauma, EMDR, psychotherapy first or was there a first?

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

I was interested in naturopathic medicine first and that’s when I went back to Canada to study that. Intuitively I was always connected with people’s emotions and their heart. I was always in tune with what people felt. I knew it. I didn’t know there was a profession around that. Yeah. It was just a gift. And then against all my resistance, I joined psychotherapy school. I didn’t believe in psychotherapy. I used to call it BS kind of thing. And somebody somehow introduced me into psychotherapy school because he carried himself in a very special way. Wow, there’s this a lot of power and presence with this person. And lo and behold in psychotherapy schools, they peel the way every layer, I faced my childhood traumas, my boarding school bullying, mother issues, relationship issues, breakups and it was really a deeper healing than just only using medicines, only using holistic medicine. Yeah.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

It went to another level and because of this exposure that I got into family constellations therapy and I realized how important healing ancestral trauma is, right? Because normal psychotherapy, yes, it’s very transformative especially if you use… I use things like gestalt, EMDR, somatic experiencing and tapping and those are great because they create an emotional discharge, which also heals your physical body, right. But when you get into ancestral trauma and healing with family constellations, you’re healing at a much different level, you’re changing patterns in your DNA. You’re changing patterns in your belief systems as well and things that you don’t know you’re carrying on behalf of your ancestors. And when you let these burdens go and when you heal generational trauma, your physical and mental healing goes so much deeper and so much faster, Michael, right. Because you’re actually addressing the true root cause or potential true root cause.

Michael Roesslein:

So that’s an interesting journey and thank you for sharing kind of the dynamic between one led to the other and I’m really interested in constellations. First, I want to get to a little bit of background as to how and why, because people might be listening to this and they might be thinking, but my issue is a physical disease or it’s anxiety or it’s depression or insomnia, something like that or inflammation, chronic inflammatory conditions, why are we talking about trauma? Why are we talking about intergenerational trauma? Why are we talking about bullying? This is mental health topics, not physical health topics. And so I’d like to just start with… You found the link and you’ve kind of bridged the gap in your practice and what you’ve been trained in. I’m along that same journey of really starting to see these links. But for somebody new to this concept, how is mood, anxiety, inflammatory conditions, depression, and [inaudible 00:06:06], even digestive GI problems, all of this that people might out there be viewing as, I have a physical condition, I need to change my diet or take supplements or this or that.

Michael Roesslein:

And we’re not downplaying those things. But how is that linked to what you just mentioned about your own trauma, intergenerational trauma, bullying, stress, those type of things, where’s the correlation there?

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Let’s start with the basics of your biology. And if you get lost, I have some free videos on my website. You can watch to walk you through healing your gut liver, adrenals and emotions, which I’m going to go into right now. So the basics, you have stomach intestines. The intestines are like a nice tube, a nice lining kept healthy by good bacteria and good food. Over time with antibiotics use, poor diet, birth control pill, excessive alcohol, excessive coffee, inflammatory foods like gluten, dairy, et cetera, what happens is these things then kill off your good bacteria and or create damage to your intestinal lining. Your intestinal lining is this barrier that prevents all the toxins from aggravating your immune system, which sits in your gut, a lot of it sits in your gut. And this barrier also prevents toxins from leaking into your bloodstream.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

So now we’ve got this whole damage going on, right? And I’m going to get how stress affects all this and trauma and generational trauma. But we got this damage going on. So now we have toxins leaking into your bloodstream and aggravating the immune cells that line your gut lining, it’s called gut associated lymphatic tissue, GALT, that’s your immune cells. So with the toxins going to your bloodstream and also the toxins aggravating your immune cells, your body goes into an immune response and an inflammatory response. So you going into chronic inflammation, right? And this inflammation then is the leading cause for asthma, eczema, arthritis, a lot of chronic conditions. The inflammation also creates a neurotransmitter imbalance leading to anxiety and depression, insomnia, sometimes suicidal thoughts as well. The inflammation also causes nutrient deficiencies. And of course, if your gut lining is damaged, you’re going to absorb less nutrients.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

When you absorb less nutrients, you’re going to make less neurotransmitters, less adequate amounts of fired hormone, right? And we’re going to fire it later on. So all these things will cause chronic health issues, susceptibility to cancer and mental health issues. Now let’s go back to the inflammation. It’s all over your body, right? It’s creating more toxins in your body and there’s more toxins leaking into your blood. And you also have toxins from pesticides from the environment, from even the drinking water. All these toxins and as well as the inflammation, they go and slam against your liver. Your liver takes a big hit. Now your liver is your master organ, right? It produces bile for digestion, so you break down the food better, right? It detoxifies your entire body and balances your hormones, controls blood sugar regulation, controls cholesterol metabolism, iron storage, vitamin storage, immune cell activation, your liver does everything. It is the master organ. In Chinese medicine, it’s called general. So with the liver being overwhelmed with toxins, pesticides, inflammation and inflammatory foods and the byproducts of inflammation, your liver becomes sluggish. In Chinese medicine, we call it liver cheese stagnation.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

And when that happens, your liver produces less bile, with less bile being produced you have more gas, bloating, constipation. Because constipation is a lack of bile flow, it’s not a laxative deficiency. Constipation usually means that there is not enough bile flowing. You also get hormonal imbalances so usually it’s a progesterone deficiency or estrogen excess, which usually translates into PMS symptoms, breast tenderness, gas and bloating, cramping, irregular [menses 00:09:48], clots during menses as well as anxiety, depression, insomnia, and weeping, sadness during menses. Usually the emotional symptoms during PMS are due to low progesterone because progesterone is important for GABA, this brain chemical to work better in your brain. GABA is your anti-anxiety neurotransmitter. And so when progesterone is low, GABA doesn’t work as well, leading to insomnia, anxiety and all these mood disorders. Also when you have damaged… when you kill off the good bacteria in your gut and you have lots of inflammation, right? And you don’t have enough bile flowing into your gut, basically the environment in your gut is compromised. Your good bacteria will not grow as much because there’s not the right kind of bile salts in there, right?

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

And bile salts also kill off the bad bacteria so if you don’t have enough bile salts in there, the bad bacteria will grow, your good bacteria will not be enough. Why am I bringing back the bacteria? Because serotonin, GABA, your neurotransmitters, most of them are made in your gut. So if you have a compromised gut from the antibiotics, the inflammatory foods [inaudible 00:11:06] as well as from liver stagnation, not producing the right amount of bile. Then your neurotransmitters are going to be low.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

You’re not going to produce enough neurotransmitters. And so that’s why people make a mistake of only healing the gut and they forget about the liver, right? They’re taking probiotics, they’re changing the diet, they’re avoiding gluten, they’re avoiding dairy, they’re taking the supplements but they forget the importance of the liver. And that’s what I cover in my online course. All the homeopathic remedies, all the herbs, all the supplements you can use to properly really detoxify your liver in a safe way, right? So those are the two pillars of health, gut health, liver health. Now let’s go on to how this is connected to stress and trauma and brain chemicals and anxiety and depression. Ready?

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

So all this inflammation, all this toxicity requires your body to make cortisol to manage the inflammation, right? Who makes cortisol is your adrenal glands and a lot of your other cells as well in your body. So now this chronic inflammation stresses your adrenal glands to make cortisol. Your adrenal glands are already stressed from daily stress. Yeah. A divorce, financial stress, deadlines, moving, the COVID issues, the government issues, whatever. So your adrenal glands are already burning up from chronic daily stress and from the demand from chronic inflammation. So you go into adrenal burnout. When you go into adrenal burnout and you have a cortisol and adrenaline imbalance. When cortisol levels are imbalanced, your serotonin, dopamine, melatonin and dopamine production reduces, goes down leading to anxiety, depression, insomnia, OCD, suicidal thoughts. That’s the physiological causes. So we have the physical causes, right? The biological causes, I should say from inflammation, from toxicity affecting cortisol as well as from the stress response from daily stress. And I’ll talk about how trauma and ancestral trauma.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:13:04]

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

… Bonds from daily stress. And I’ll talk about how trauma and ancestor trauma exacerbates your stress response, because you have the stress response also changing your cortisol levels. So two things are changing, cortisol levels and therefore brain chemical levels leading to anxiety, depression, and mental health symptoms.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Now, when you remove the inflammation by healing your gut and you detoxify your liver, basically your adrenal glands calm down a bit. But remember they’re being stressed by daily stress. The other thing to notice is that if you have been traumatized as a child, or you carry these ancestral traumas, your nervous system is already primed into the stress response. If you have unhealed trauma, it’s stored in your nervous system. So when you were traumatized first as a child, you entered into the a fight or flight response. You made a lot of adrenaline and cortisol that requires your real glances to work hard.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

If that traumas stays in your nervous system because you haven’t resolved it, your nervous system will be in a fight, flight, or freeze response perpetually. Then as an adult or while you’re growing up, you are faced with an angry boss, or a tyrant partner, or a mean woman who reminds you of your high school teacher, either subconsciously or consciously, or a relationship issue that triggers the abandonment response in your body, because your mom maybe went away for a holiday or your parents were fighting or they divorced and you were left alone. Basically modern day stress, your adult stress, often triggers traumas that are unresolved. So your adrenal glands going to hyper response. That’s why unhealed trauma exacerbates your stress response.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

When that happens, your adrenal glands burn out faster, into more cortisol imbalance and more mental health symptoms. As well as what happens, Michael and those of you listening, is when you have a cortisol imbalance, your thyroid hormone doesn’t get activated. You have an inactive T4 that gets active T3. With a cortisol imbalance, T4 doesn’t get active T3. So you have low thyroid function in your body, leading to hormone imbalance, certain types of cancer, constipation, dry skin, et cetera, low energy and fatigue.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Also, the cells in your gut lining, they need thyroid hormone to function well. If you’re not making enough active thyroid hormone, the cell lining will be weaker. The lining in your gut will be weaker. So you’d be more prone to leaky gut syndrome. That creates more chronic inflammation, more liver toxicity as well. It’s a vicious cycle. So you can see how stress and trauma throw off your cortisol levels, throw off your thyroid hormone levels, and therefore affect your physiology.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Of course, now we come to the vagus nerve.Your vagus nerve is this big, beautiful nerve that goes throughout your body and controls your heart, your digestive system, your liver, a lot of different organs in your body. When your vagus nerve is affected by stress and trauma, it affects your organs directly, your physical organs, and it actually releases different kind of chemical into your gut. So a stressed vagus nerve will affect your microbiome, the environment in your gut. It will affect the way your liver functions. Your breathing changes as well, and when you have shallow breathing, your diaphragm does not massage your liver as well. So with shallow breathing, you’re more prone to liver stagnation which means less bio flow, so more constipation, heartburn, gas loading, and an unhealthy microbiome. That’s why stressed people often get heartburn and indigestion, because of liver stagnation affecting your stomach acid levels. Stomach acid is often low, more alkaline and not acid enough in some people with heartburn. So they get the reflux because this sphincter is not closing well. So you can see how all your physical symptoms are connected to your mental, emotional, and ancestral health.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Now in the online course I cover remedies like homeopathy to basically release stress and trauma from your past. I’ll mention a few remedies here so we can use homeopathy to actually heal stress and trauma. Ignatia amara, a great remedy for betrayal, for feeling abandoned, if you have a lot of anxiety, sense of lump in your throat, tearfulness, et cetera. Aurum is another great remedy I use. That’s great for people who have a sense of failure, suicidal thoughts, have lost a loved one or feel a lot of guilt because they’ve fallen from great heights. What does that mean, fallen from great heights? Experienced a big failure. So they’re very self critical as well.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

So there are different remedies we use for different symptoms of people going through trauma. So homeopathy is very different from normal medicine. Normal medicine will give one kind of medicine to mask symptoms. Homeopathy, using the individualized symptoms, picture of a person, goes in there and discharges the stress response associated with that to particular kind of trauma and associated with the symptoms the person has. So with homeopathy, you actually get a better energetic resolution. You come out of the trauma faster. There’s a difference between suppressing symptoms and coming out of trauma. That’s the beauty of using energetic medicine like homeopathy because it goes to the energetic level, not the neurotransmitter level of just controlling symptoms, because trauma is energetic. So we need to meet trauma at the energetic level so it can come out of your body or help your body physically heal from that compensated frequency it goes into. After a trauma.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Now that we’ve covered homeopathy to release stress and trauma, and you’ve seen why healing, stress, and trauma is super important for mental health as well as your gut health, vagus nerve, and liver, let’s talk about healing emotional trauma using psychotherapy, EMDR, family constellations therapy, gestalt, et cetera. So talk therapy is also important because when you get connected to a therapist and you feel safe and you get to emote certain feelings that were unacknowledged or you were stuck, because of fear, because of lack of confidence or the environment was not safe enough for you to emote or to express yourself.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

When you get in contact with a good therapist, then you discharge these stuck emotions and your nervous system starts to relax. When you process the emotions somatically and cognitively as well, you come into understanding of your situation. You catch up with your life of who you are now. You let go of the past emotional charge associated with your memories. So your nervous system calm down and when your nervous system calm down your adrenal glands, go out of fight flight or freeze response. That is very important because when that happens, you have more of a chance for your cortisol levels to come more into balance.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

I also teach how to use adrenal herbs like ashwagandha and rhodiola as well to help support your adrenal healing, but the important thing is to release the emotional trauma. When your cortisol levels come into balance, as you’re stabilizing your nervous system, then your neurotransmitters come more into balance. So serotonin, dopamine, melatonin, are likely to come more into balance and you’ll lead less supplements over time. As your stress response reduces, and your cortisol levels are more in a balance, then you have more chance of recovering your active thyroid hormone levels as well and your gut permeability also improves because of the connection with thyroid hormones and gut permeability and other cytokines released by your vagus nerve. That’s the importance of that.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Now let’s talk about trauma. A lot of people have been waiting for this. I practice family constellations therapy, which notices or looks at generational trauma and imbalances in the family system. Epigenetics has proved that we do carry trauma from our ancestors. For example, if your grandmother was in the war, she has a stress response and traumatic memories, that will affect her physiology. That will affect the eggs that she’s carrying, which one of them is going to make your mother. Then when your mother is born, her physiology has already been affected by the stress and trauma that your grandmother had. Now her physiology being affected is going to produce you. So your physiology is created based on what your grandmother experienced. That’s the epigenetic route.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Family constellations, first of all, was created by Bert Hellinger And he studied with the Zulu people in South Africa and African traditions have certain methodologies, traditions really, to release entanglements from the past, these traumas from the past. And so Bert Hellinger developed the concept of healing sentences, things you can say to family members out loud to your soul consciousness to release these entanglements from the past. And they really work. I’ve seen people’s headaches and ulcers and everything disappear just by speaking certain sentences to release the emotional charge and the ancestral information that’s stored in our nervous system, in our heart and our soul.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

For example, and this is not necessarily generational, this could be within your own family system. If your parents have a miscarriage or an abortion, and it’s not acknowledged and it’s kept a secret and you’re born next and you think you’re the first child, you will likely have this overwhelming feeling in life, a feeling of not being good enough or not doing enough or having to do too much. It’s because you’re living the life of you and representing the missing child unconsciously. We see this all the time. So what I get my clients do is really look at both parents, see the missing child in front of them or before them and feel their position as the second child.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

It’s important to ask your parents if there’s been any miscarriages or abortions in your family and get a sense of where you are in your family system. Your nervous system will calm down. Your anxiety, depression will decrease. That’s one small example. And you know the importance of your nervous system calming down in relating to gut health, liver, health, et cetera. So you can see how family constellations therapy can also affect your physiology through your nervous system.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

A common thing people do is rescue one of the weaker parents. So if one of the parents is being abused, whether it’s the father or the mother abusing the other, the child will take side of the weaker parent and will reject the stronger abusive parent. That’s a natural thing we do. That loyalty to the weaker parent can lead to depression, a sense of fulfillment in living your own life because you’re busy and occupied and you might not even be available for a healthy relationship, or you might attract an abusive partner because you resonate with the abuse your mom went through and that’s your expression of love. Out of loyalty, dear mom, I will not leave you alone in your misery. So I will attract in a way, something that matches your pain so that we are together still. We want to create resonance. That’s an unconscious loyalty, a soul loyalty that goes on.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

So a healing sentence that we can use in family constellations is, “Dear mom, I honor and respect your journey. I am the little one. You are the big one. I want to see you. I want to honor and respect-“

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:26:04]

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

“The little one. You are the big one. I want to see you. I want to honor and respect your great position as my mother, so let me see you as the one who carries your pain, your burdens. And, I still love you. I still recognize your path and I respect your fate.” When you say sentences like that, you feel like a child again. You let go of this unconscious burden you’re caring for your parent.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

And by doing that, you suddenly are available for more life energy. And, this respect you give to your mom or your dad who has been suffering, this respect you give to them by not over carrying their burden, strangely, energetically, they somehow become more free, because they have more dignity at a soul level. And you will feel that energetically, and that will give you permission to be more free and live with dignity in your life and look for relationships and encounters that are more suitable and healthier for you.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

So that’s the power of family constellations. So I combine that with homeopathy to heal trauma, as well as naturopathic medicine to heal your gut, your liver and your adrenal glands. And that’s how the mind and body are interconnected, as well as generational trauma.

Michael Roesslein:

Well, that was a very, very complete answer to my question. And it actually checked off about four other questions I was going to ask you. So, I have a few questions that I’d like a little, either touch point on to really highlight, or ask for a little clarification. But, my understanding of your explanation of where trauma comes in with all this stuff, is it rewires the nervous system. It changes the way that your body responds to stressors. So, you may notice, if you’re listening to this, that there may be times where you get really upset or overwhelmed or triggered, or there’s a response, and you’re with other people in the same position, in the same place, in the same occurrence, and nothing seems to happen to them. Or, when you get upset, there’s this whole cascade of other things that happens. And you might be, someone in your family or in your life has the same thing happens, and that cascade doesn’t happen.

Michael Roesslein:

What I was noticing, or what I wanted to mention is that, I didn’t realize that, until I started learning some of these things and going through these trainings, and then I would realize that, “Oh, there’s something that when it happens, I feel uncontrollable, either anxiety or panic or rage or some sort of reaction, and my wife doesn’t even bat an eye when that thing happens.” Or there’s times where something happens and she goes off, and I’m like, “Wait, I didn’t even notice the thing that just happened. What even happened?” And, if everybody kind of pauses and looks inside, they can probably think, or remember, or feel, times or occurrences or things that might be said to you or anything, that you’ve either been told you’re irrational or that your responses are irrational or that it doesn’t make any sense, or, “Why are you so upset?” Or you’ve noticed that you get more upset by something than the people around you do.

Michael Roesslein:

Is that kind of a way that… Because people might be thinking like, “Oh, I don’t have traumas.” And I would’ve said the same thing five years ago, because I was never beaten as a child. I’ve never been sexually abused or assaulted that I’m aware of. I’ve never had these things that people think of as these big T traumas.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

And, I’ve noticed that I have certain triggers that are very, very strong, that other people don’t have, in certain situations. And I’ve now done the work to link them back to why that is and why that occurs. But, could you speak to that just a little bit?

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah. Michael, you use beautiful examples there. Thank you very much.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

So, trauma doesn’t have to be the big Ts, like the abuse, et cetera, right? It could be your mom going off on holiday and leaving you with your grandmother. It could be basically your parents fighting, your mom being sad or complaining to you about her problems, and then you start carrying her burden. These are also mini trauma. I don’t even want to say mini traumas, because they all affect the nervous system. And strangely, when you have an issue with a parent, you begin to have issues with yourself internally. So issues with parents are actually more traumatizing, more difficult to get over, than if something happened to you by another person, like if there was a beating or sexual abuse, because that’s more external. But because we come from our parents, issues with our parents, we really internalize and reflects on our own self-value, self-worth and our identity.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

And so if mom was too busy taking care of your sick sibling, for example, it means that the other sibling is more important, or you had to try really hard to get mom’s attention, so in life, you have to try really hard to connect with people or to get your job and stuff like that. So, there’s so many mini traumas that are often ignored, and they come up time and time again in therapy. In fact, sometimes these are affecting our behavior more than the big traumas. So it’s super important to look at these, as well as the ancestral traumas. If your father had a lover before he met your mom, and the lover was super angry with your dad for leaving her, you might actually embody or carry the energy of that lover. And suddenly, you’re angry with your mom or angry with your dad for an unexplained reason. But it actually belongs to somebody else. So sometimes the feelings you’re having are not yours. They belong to entanglements that you can resolve with healing sentences and awareness.

Michael Roesslein:

That’s interesting. I have not been trained in intergenerational or constellations work, so my examples were more “your experiences”, but it’s interesting how those can be pulled from people in dynamics that didn’t involve you at all, that you weren’t even present for, that kind of have been passed on. And, for the whole cascade there, to tie that into stress and a physiological reaction is, that when something triggers me, that may not trigger somebody else due to unresolved thing that I’m carrying, there’s a physiological reaction to a trigger, like what we would call a trigger, like, “Oh, I got so upset,” or, “Oh, I so freaked out,” or, “I got so angry.” And that’s where you’re mentioning stress, you mentioned, disrupts microbiome, disrupts breathing, disrupts liver bioproduction, disrupts thyroid conversion, chronically will cause liver stagnation, disrupted microbiome, stomach acid, all these kind of things. And, that’s not just at work. That’s if…

Michael Roesslein:

Say, your partner does something, and this is projecting that people have poor communication just because I’ve had poor communication and I know a lot of people do, say, your partner continually does something, that they have no idea is triggering you, because you don’t say anything and you don’t deal with it or work with it. But every time they do it, you just like, “I wish they didn’t do that thing. I hate it. I hate it.” Every time that happens.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

There’s a reaction in the body, right? Like there’s a [crosstalk 00:33:53]

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

There’s a physiological response. [crosstalk 00:33:55]

Michael Roesslein:

Neurotransmitters. And the cascade that you went through earlier, people hear stress and they think, “Oh, my boss is a jerk and that’s stressful,” or, “I’m in traffic and that’s stressful,” or situations that are stressful for everyone, but they may not tie in these trauma-driven episodes of trigger and reaction and stress. That’s the same hit. And for some of those things, it’s all the time. Or if you’re anxious in public, because you’re a kid and the whole class laughed at you or something like that. So every time you have to be in public or talk to somebody in public or in a room, you’re freaked out.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah. Sweaty palms, [crosstalk 00:34:37]

Michael Roesslein:

That’s a stress response. So, I just wanted to really hammer that there’s very real ways that these things physically manifest themselves in the body and try to connect that. And [crosstalk 00:34:55] go ahead.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Very important example is, some people are traumatized by a certain incident. Let’s say they read a very offending email or dangerous email, and they think they’re over it or they just leave alone. They’re traumatized, and then they carry on work. Strangely, when you approach a computer, without knowing it, your body is subtly stressed because it’s expecting that same insult. And you’re carrying on working. You don’t know why you’re burning out or averse to work, is because subconsciously, your body’s averse to going to that computer again. Or certain area. And you don’t make the tie until you really do the deep in a work, and you release the initial trauma, then work becomes easier.

Michael Roesslein:

Interesting. It kind of makes me want to do some more mental inventories. And, this is where something like mindfulness comes into play though, mindfulness practices where you become a lot more aware of these things, because there were… I had unconscious reactions to so many things that I could probably barely even list them now, that I have become conscious of and that’s when you can really kind of dive into them.

Michael Roesslein:

But I love how you mentioned neurotransmitters are controlling symptoms and that trauma’s energetic, it’s a feeling. It’s an energy. And so, these things can lead to low dopamine and low serotonin and receptor sites being blunted and all these different neurotransmitter imbalances. And you could take L-dopa. You could take these different five HTP and serotonin precursors and metabolites, all these things. And you might feel better. And that’s part of why some people are like, “I need coffee,” or, “I need alcohol,” or, “I need these things.” People with low dopamine, alcohol makes them feel really good. People with low… Just [crosstalk 00:36:55] things, coffee will make them feel really good. And that’s why certain drugs and medications, like for ADD and different types of things, might make them feel good is because it manipulates the neurotransmitters to a more balanced level. But then you’re still [crosstalk 00:37:11]

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Either foods or supplements, et cetera, because you’re not resolving the underlying stress response that’s stored in your nervous system and the subconscious beliefs. So I have an exercise where people go through their beliefs based on different traumas in their life. And, that creates a huge healing response, because when you look at the beliefs you create after a trauma, those beliefs start letting go, your body relaxes as well. So it’s not only resolving trauma, it’s actually resolving beliefs.

Michael Roesslein:

Beautiful.

Michael Roesslein:

You mentioned epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, and went through how something that happened to your grandmother could impact the physiology of your parents, which then impacts the physiology of you. I’ve read some studies done on mice that show epigenetic changes up to 12 generations.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Wow.

Michael Roesslein:

And so, if people are saying… And, not only epigenetic changes, but they were able to demonstrate a fear response in a mouse, to something that 12 previous generations ago of a mouse was traumatized with. And they were afraid of that thing. I don’t remember if it was a certain color or a sound or something, but they were able to instill fear 12 generations away. And 11 of those generations never received the original stimulus, so they were never scared of it. Logically, they’ve never been given something to be scared of it. Now obviously, studies like that can’t be done on humans. That’s inhumane, and it’s questionable whether or not they should be done on animals. But, that demonstrates 12 generations. So if somebody’s out there saying like, “Well, my grandma wasn’t in a war,” or…

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:39:04]

Michael Roesslein:

… something like, well, my grandma wasn’t in a war, or I don’t know of anything that happened to my grandma, or my parents, or anything like that. I can promise you that there’s things that have happened within 12 generations. 12 generations ago was a very long time ago. The world was a very different place and life was a lot less cushy than it is for a lot of people now. So, you cast a net that wide, and I believe 12 generations is hundreds of individuals.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

If you went. [crosstalk 00:39:31]

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah. I haven’t done my calculations but yes, I’m sure there are hundreds of individuals.

Michael Roesslein:

It’s exponential. It’s wild. So, I read that the other day, so I figured it was relevant to this.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

And what you brought up about Hellinger. I knew about Bert Hellinger. I know about the origins of family constellation. Well, I thought I did. I didn’t know that it came from the Zulu people or that he was in Africa with the Zulu people and that there’s-

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

He was influenced by the Zulu people [crosstalk 00:40:00].

Michael Roesslein:

Influences. That’s what I mean.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

He was a therapist as well. He had his techniques, and by spending time with [crosstalk 00:40:06] he also learned some of the traditions and the orders of love as well. And in fact, I discovered something similar here with the Kikuyu in Kenya where if somebody has a problem, they go to a healer really, and the healer will ask them to gather sticks to represent the issue or the family members et cetera, the people that are involved, and the healer will look at these sticks and how they’re placed and stuff, and will help the person resolve. So, it was very similar to family constellation therapy. I was blown away.

Michael Roesslein:

[crosstalk 00:40:34]. It’s so funny. In the Western world, we always think we invented things because in native first nations in Canada, native populations in the US and Central and South America and North, like in the Amercians a lot of the native populations, they have practices that are very similar to Shamanic practices that have either representations for others, or communication with somebody who’s not there physically to resolve things. And my first career and degree and stuff was in history, and sociology, and a little anthropology, so I always love finding out little tidbits of … And then honoring it. Like finding out the influences and the origins of some of these things, and then honoring it.

Michael Roesslein:

Like, a lot of people now say Buddha was the first psychologist, or one of, like that there’s these ideas in the Western world that we’ve created or invented a lot of things in psychology, and a lot of ways of healing, and a lot of these modalities, and if you traced them far enough back, almost every single one of them has been part of human healing for millennia, and so I’ve found that was interesting. And I’m sure it’s fascinating to learn too for you. I think you mentioned you come across things like that are mind blowing.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

I think so. Yeah. I think every culture has these healing abilities. It was just suppressed by organized religion, by these monarchies and stuff wanting to control the world. A lot of these things were suppressed. So, even in the Western world, they’re made up of a lot of Irish traditions. And people from Europe, they had beautiful traditions. Yeah, some of them, okay, I don’t condone all this human sacrifice and stuff that were going on, but you go to Ancient Ireland, Scotland, et cetera, there’s such deep folklore and belief in energetics, and spirit, and those are very powerful, powerful practices as well when done in the right way.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

So, I think it’s about awakening our innate spirit from long time ago rather than perpetuating the divide between the Western world and traditional world because the Western world is made up of people who have spiritual ancestry as well, and it’s just a gentle reminder for them to get back to those, their own origins of spirit, as well as spirituality. You don’t have to take on a ethnic or another tradition, spirituality to feel spiritual. You can also return and respect your own origins, yeah, beyond the influence of organized religions and things like that that some of them maybe masked or manipulated the information. Right? Going back to the original Christ energy within you, or the original Druid energy in you or whatever it may be. The Ayurvedic energy. All these traditions need to find their place again in our hearts rather than creating a divide between people.

Michael Roesslein:

Beautiful. I couldn’t agree more. And I think that gets lost as well because so much of history in Western cultures has been washed over by institutions that didn’t want those things to survive, and if you trace your lineage far enough, you’ll often find similar things to what we’re talking about in the African tribes and the native tribes. There were indigenous light-skinned people as well. Like in those placea. Like in Ireland, and in Norway and in [inaudible 00:44:25]. Like all those places. We say the word indigenous and we immediately associate it with darker-skinned people, and you came from somewhere too if you’re out there listening to this and you have light skin. Your ancestors came from somewhere too, and they had practices too.

Michael Roesslein:

And so, yes, I just learned an interesting story about Druids that, I believe it was the Romans, some authority figure wouldn’t collect taxes from the Druids because they were afraid that the Druids would turn them into stone. That was quite cool. Hook me up with that. I want to find out what they were up to that they were able to dodge taxes because people thought they could turn them to stone.

Michael Roesslein:

So, all right. This is great. Awesome stuff. Thank you for succinctly connecting the dots with a lot of the physiology with the trauma, with the liver health, and the gut, and the hormones, and how it all really, really clearly and simply … I mean, simple is maybw not the right term because if you really get into the biochemistry of how some of this stuff works, it’s not simple at all, but the concepts and the major map of it is very simple, and very easy to see, and it doesn’t have to get overcomplicated, and healing it doesn’t have to get overly complicated either.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

It’s not complicated, and if people want clarification, there’s free videos on my website drameet.com. I presume you have the link there.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, yeah. We’ll put them in the show notes.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

[inaudible 00:45:59] walk you through healing your gut, your liver, your adrenal glands, and a beautiful exercise of healing emotional blocks, and then you can get the full online program where you get all the protocols for proper gut healing, all the remedies I use for liver detox, adrenal herbs, homeopathy for anxiety, depression, stress and trauma, Bach flower remedies. I cover it all, so it’s all there for you.

Michael Roesslein:

Beautiful. Yeah, we’ll have all the links right down below. And that’s all at drameet.com, correct?

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah. D-R-A-M-E-E-T dot com. That’s correct.

Michael Roesslein:

Si. Ah, I just said si. I’m in Italian language school, so si slips out instead of yes sometimes. All the links will be right below in the show notes. And the videos are great. I watched all that stuff, or most of it, before I interviewed you the last time, so I can vouch for the quality of the stuff there. It’s really generous to put it out and check all that out. Check out the site. Check out the course. It doesn’t have to be complex. It doesn’t have to be scary. And thank you for learning all the things you’ve learned in order to be able to share them because that’s no short list of from naturopathic medicine, Gestalt psychotherapy’s pretty involved. EMDR is an entirely nother practice, as is family constellations, and having bene trained in a couple of things now myself, I know what goes into those trainings and the depth of those things, and it’s a lot. And I know it starts out as a personal journey. It was probably an interest of yours for you, and then it can be turned into a gift for everybody else.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Yeah, and I thank my guide for guiding me. And yeah, these therapies sometimes they break you and you remake you, you know? It’s always [crosstalk 00:47:48]-

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, yeah, the trainings I’ve been through are the hardest and the most beautiful things that I’ve done and I thought I was just going to learn stuff and instead it became really, at times, difficult and challenging experiences that led to a whole nother perspective on life and in experience of life, and a seat from which to live life.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

But not to scare people, the emotional healing exercises I’ve put in the online course, those are gentle. They are in a way where you can really pace yourself and also titrate the amount you want to expose yourself.

Michael Roesslein:

Beautiful. Well, thank you for creating those resources. It’s great to connect. It’s always great to talk with you, and everybody check out the links below to check out the videos and the courses. Thank you Dr. Ameet. We’ll connect again soon.

Dr. Ameet Aggarwal:

Pleasure. Lots of love everyone. Thanks.