Welcome to the trauma informed herbalist podcast. I’m your host Elizabeth Guthrie, and my hope is that this podcast will help you to explore ways that you can use natural remedies as a complementary option on your journey towards healing trauma. Now, notice I say complementary I’m just gonna go ahead and get it out.

Natural medicine works alongside therapy to help people get faster results while building skills that help to maintain resiliency. In this first season, we’re going to explore several different modalities and I’m going to discuss how they’ve been helpful for me and for several of my clients. This season is going to parallel my book, the trauma informed herbalist and subsequent seasons will do the same.

For instance, next season, season two will be specifically about aromatherapy because my next book that is scheduled to be published sometime next year is called essential oils for trauma, a mind, body, spirit approach to healing. But for this first season, I want us to focus on all the different ways that we could get support while we’re trying to heal from trauma.

If you know me, you know that I grew up around herbs. I learned about energy healing from a very young age. I’ve been around all kinds of natural medicines for the majority of my life, but I really didn’t experience a personal form of trauma until I was in my mid twenties. When I started working 9 1 1 dispatch, I was exposed to a lot of different forms of trauma.

And then I found myself a victim of intimate partner violence, and these experiences had a profound effect on me. I ended up diagnosed with PTSD and even now I still struggle sometimes, especially if I get sick, I’ll have days where I have a harder time because there’s trauma in my past and I’ve done a lot of healing and I’ve done a lot of the work, but there are still days where it strikes me and it’s difficult to work through.

So as I began to heal, I started to notice that there were natural options that were helpful for me, but then there were also natural options that made things worse. For instance, certain forms of meditation. While I was still in a state of fight or flight, they were not just difficult.

They would actually bring up horrible memories while I’m sitting there trying to clear my mind and my brain. Dredging up things that I’d rather never remember, especially not in moments where I’m trying to relax. So I focused my undergraduate work in complementary medicine and my master’s of public health has a concentration in functional nutrition.

But once I got to my PhD work, which I’m a PhD candidate in natural medicine , I began to consider how I could better support the mental health of those of us who have dealt with trauma. What that means from a natural medicine angle. Therefore, my PhD focus became naturopathic psychology and the rest is history.

I’ve written the book. And of course, now here we are recording a podcast. As you listen to this podcast, recognize this is not a one size fits all scenario. People are very unique. Our experiences are as numerous as the sand on the beach. Nobody, even identical twins do not have the exact same experience all the time.

There may be a lot of similarities between you and someone else, but you are your own unique person. So some of this stuff that we discuss, you try it out. It’s gonna be great. Some of it, you try it out and you realize, no, I’ve got to adjust this a different way to make it work best for me.

And for those of you who are healers, I encourage you to use this information, to inspire you, to get out and learn more, right? These 20 minute podcasts can barely touch the tip of the iceberg. If you can get out and learn different ways to adjust things, to accommodate different needs, especially in situations where somebody’s still dealing with trauma, you are going to be able to be a much more effective healer for them.

And you may listen through this podcast the first time, and it’s a lot of information really fast. You may find that you need to go back and re-listen to it. My hope is that you’re able to come back to this and re-listen to it again and again, maybe in six months from now or a year from now, you pick this back up and listen to it again.

And all of a sudden there’s a whole new set of information that strikes you slightly differently. It’s not that the recordings have changed, but because you’re in a different place in your life, the information strikes you from a different angle. So let’s dive in, let’s talk about trauma informed care in the natural healing world.

Trauma informed care is almost non-existent in natural medicine. It’s a buzzword – people love to say they’re trauma informed… people think that because they have successfully worked with a couple of people who have some trauma that they must now be trauma informed. But the reality is that it’s a lot more nuanced than just, “oh, I have an experience of trauma” or “I watched my mom deal with trauma and so now I know what it’s like to have trauma.”

There are layers of trauma. There are certain traumas that only affect certain groups of people. There are racial traumas. There are gender traumas. And a lot of these traumas are insidious. People may not even realize that that’s what’s happened. They may not realize that that is the trauma that they’re experiencing.

And they don’t realize that that’s where a lot of unexplained emotional and physical responses can come from. Experiencing trauma only gives you insight into your personal response to a traumatic situation. Many practitioners don’t realize this and they may begin to tell you, “well, when I experienced my form of trauma, this is exactly what cured me.’

And that’s great. It’s wonderful to see these things help people, but that doesn’t mean that that particular choice of therapy is what’s going to help you the most in the natural medicine world. Trauma informed care needs to focus on creating an environment where a person can feel safe, helping a person find ways that they can activate their ventral vagal response that allows them to feel calm and connected, and having a variety of different modalities and therapies that can be adjusted to work based on someone’s needs.

Throughout this podcast, I’m going to introduce you to different modalities and different adjustments you can make within those modalities that may help you to bring yourself into that ventral vagal, calm and connected state. If a 30 minute mindfulness meditation is not working for you, there are adjustments you can make based on what’s happening to allow you to be introduced to meditation without struggling.

In this first season, we’re going to get into a lot of descriptions of what constitutes trauma, how this changes, what happens in our body. and a little bit of information about the scope of practice that a natural practitioner should hold.

This knowledge may feel a little bit academic or cerebral, but I really like being able to introduce people to this because if you understand the principles and the knowledge of trauma informed care, you’re more likely to be able to hold empathy for yourself and for others.

It’s not your fault that you’ve experienced trauma.

It is not your fault that your body has the reactions that it has.

Your body has had a natural response. That’s there to protect you. Your brain has been trying to look out for you. It’s just the, wire’s got a little crossed in the process. As we talk through these things, I hope that it becomes easier for you to show compassion to.

And loving kindness for your body and your brain, especially on those days, that can feel so draining. So exhausting understanding trauma and how it manifests can also help us with other friends and family members. This can help you have more patience in those moments where maybe somebody’s being really frustrating, but once you understand what they’ve gone through, From a trauma angle that may help you to, to stop yourself from initially wanting to judge their scenario.

And now for my caveat, I am not suggesting you should stay with somebody who’s being abusive. I’m not indicating that if a family member has trauma and they’re putting you in a domestic violence situation that you should sit there and be long suffering towards that. Your safety is important.

What I am talking about when I say that we can have compassion towards others is the everyday little things where somebody gets on your nerves because they do something that’s a little annoying, or maybe they have a response to a situation… and you just can’t understand why they’re having those responses.

I have family members that I have struggled to understand why they respond to certain things the way they do, but now that I understand trauma, and now that I understand how different situations can create trauma, I find it easier to accept their responses to situations.

There are, have been, certain times that I’ve just been floored by certain family members who weren’t concerned about different situations happening in the family.

And I’m over here ringing my hands and they’re completely unfazed. And that used to drive me nuts. I didn’t understand it, but trauma explains it. And now it’s not a feeling of, well, they must not care. Instead, oh, this is the response that they have because of the situations they’ve dealt with.

So to me, that education is very important for healing personally, with your family, with your community. All of that can begin with just a little bit more knowledge around how trauma rewires the body, how trauma changes the reactions and the responses that someone may have.

And then we move on to plant medicine, starting with a brief discussion on autoimmunity and how that can actually affect trauma and then moving into herbs, aromatherapy, flower, essences, even plant spirit medicine. Just digging into all the different ways we can connect with plants. I want to talk a bit about the different ways that plants can help us to find that sense of safety and security.

We will discuss different brainstorming ideas and different opportunities you might have to implement these into your everyday life, and I’m not going to just focus on really expensive options. That’s something that we’ll talk about a little later, but I really feel that there is a need for us to consider how we can get cost effective options out too.

So once we’ve gone through several of the plant-based discussions, and again, we’re just hitting the tip of the iceberg. I’m hoping that the subsequent seasons will help you dig even deeper into this. But once we’ve gone through that, we’re going to get into yoga, mindfulness and meditations and Reiki, all the different ways that you could adjust your personal practice to be more healing.

We’ll talk a little bit about sound therapy and I’ll get into some different ways that these things maybe sound a little woo-y on the surface, but if you dig into them, they’ve got a lot of benefits. Now, whether or not the benefits are coming from some kind of esoteric force that we don’t understand, or if it’s just a matter of you relaxing and paying attention to your body, I’ll let you decide.

The important thing is, is whether or not we understand the mechanisms behind this, we understand that this does work. We just may need to adjust it for trauma informed care. And at the end of the day, I hope that this allows you to brainstorm ideas that might be helpful.

I’m not meaning this podcast to be a laying down of the law of exactly how to fix everything.

It’s more of a, “here are the things you can look at and experiment with.” I want to empower you. I want you to find the ways that this works for you. This is not a one size fits all situation. And anyone who tells you that is usually selling something. I hope that when you finish listening to these discussions, that you walk away with a plan.

I love it when I have clients who come to me and we get something together. And then at the end of their first session, they’re like, “yes, this makes sense. I feel like I’m on track again. I feel like I have regained a sense of control over what’s happening to me!” And that’s what I hope that you were able to gain from this podcast.

That sense of empowerment that I now know what I could go work on to make things a bit better for myself. I now know ways that I can enrich what I’m doing in therapy to make things even better for myself. Like I mentioned earlier, complementary medicine is not a replacement for therapy. Therapy has a purpose.

It helps people to process through the narrative that’s occurred. The stories around what’s happened. It helps them to process why their emotions are the way they are. Complementary modalities help people to find a sense of safety. They help people to notice more of what’s happening.

If you notice that every time you go to a certain type of event… afterwards, you have this physical response in your body and you started noticing this because you started practicing more mindfulness. Well, now you can take that to your therapist and say, “Hey, this is what’s going on. Can we talk about this?” And they can help you process through the why. And that’s the beauty of this.

It speeds up the healing process for many people. And for my practitioners, those of you who are in research or who are working with clients, I encourage you to do more research into trauma informed care. I encourage you to start more discussions. I encourage you to link people back to this podcast, to help get them on the same page and then go forth and figure out how can we do these things better for our clients.

Many people want to help those who have dealt with trauma, but good intentions are not enough. We must become educated. We must keep moving forward. My education has not ended. Have I gone, “Ooh, I’m the pinnacle of success in trauma informed care”? No, I have students who find things and realize things that I had no idea would be a concern because they work with specific populations of people who have dealt with specific types of trauma and they catch things that will activate that particular population’s trauma.

That’s not something that I even ever thought about because I only see maybe one or two people a year that have that particular type of trauma. So this isn’t all on me. I need you guys to be working and figuring things out as well, because I can sit here and I can talk, but if you go and you do the work… I have opened up the door, but you are the one that has stepped through it and you are the one making a difference in your community.

If anyone needs to reach out to me, has any questions about anything you can always touch base! My email address is Elizabeth@empathic,coaches.com. You can check out my book and the information on what I’m doing at traumainformedherbalist.com And you can follow me on Instagram @empathicherbalist

I look forward to hearing from all of you, and as you go through this experience, and as you begin to apply it to your life, I hope you’ll reach out and tell me what’s working for you. How are things going? And please let me know what questions come up. Help me to get you, whatever information is gonna be most useful to you on this podcast.

I’m really glad that you were here today. I appreciate you listening and I look forward to going on this journey with you. Thanks again. And I’ll catch you in the next episode.