Nutrition, Trauma and Learning To Trust Yourself

I wanted to share some recent learnings about the healing journey.

It starts with the importance of nutrition for trauma healing, but then kinda broadens out into some more general reflections on holism and self-trust.

For a few years I've been trying to sort problems with eczema, brain fog, sudden flashes of debilitating fatigue. For decades I've never been able to get up in the morning because I feel groggy, I nap a few times a day...I had taken on a bit of an identity as this low-energy, lethargic person.

And I attempted to work with it through trauma work. Which definitely helped. After I started working with repressed anger for a year or two I had clear skin (it eventually got worse again).

After a myofascial release session working through a tension on the top of my skull (!) I remember the worst of the fatigue crashes stopped happening.

(Which is wild. Amazing how this stuff actually works; how blockages in parts of the body can manifest as all kinds of physical symptoms; we're really in the dark ages of understanding how all this stuff works).

Recently, the health issues were getting way too intense, seriously impacting my life: I had some bread, chocolate and beer one day and was in bed for 5 days with the worst eczema and brain fog of my life.

So I hired a nutritionist, did some tests and my gut health was way off. Long story short, after a few years of attempting various elimination diets and random supplements and praying to Gordon Ramsey—the patron saint of leaky gut and bacterial dysbiosis—I eventually found the right diet for me.

And LO AND FRICKIN' BEHOLD: in a couple of weeks the background hum of inflammation is gone, my skin is healing, the brain fog is gone, I have more energy and motivation than ever, I get up early with a clear head, I can focus on work...

It's genuinely life-changing.

I was getting teary this morning, explaining this to a friend. I never realised how much my nutrition/gut was like a brake on my energy and wellbeing, creating constant friction in the engine room.

I had no idea of the power of getting the right nutrition! I mean, I knew it was relevant, but didn't think it could have this big an impact.

This is not necessarily the same as eating 'healthy food'. There are healthy foods that can make you sick, e.g. if you have histamine intolerance then avocados or fermented foods will ruin you, despite being full of juicy nutrients.

“Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food.”
—Hippocrates

And I'm sure I'm not alone in this!

(Trauma, of course, has profound effects on our gut and digestion and vice versa. There's a whole rabbit hole of trauma-informed nutrition emerging. Check this out for example: *"The SMILES trial, conducted in 2017, investigated the impact of a dietary intervention on depression. Over 12 weeks, participants in the single-blind randomized controlled trial received either nutritional support or social support. Participants who received nutritional support experienced significantly greater improvements to their depression symptoms than participants who received only social support"*). Pretty interesting.

Of course, it's not that easy.

Many of us (myself very much included) use food to comfort and regulate our nervous systems. And we can't just take that away. But just as that can end up as a vicious circle—eating bad food, which exacerbates our trauma triggers, which makes us crave bad food—it can likewise turn into a virtuous circle where small changes in diet make life easier. The emotional healing gives us a little space to eat better and so on.

One reflection here is simply the importance of holism in life.

'Holism' and 'healing' both come from the same Proto-Indo-European word 'kailo'—meaning 'wholeness'. We start by recognising our essential wholeness and slowly explore all those aspects of ourself and our life that are not in alignment with that.

The trauma work doesn't sit in isolation. It dovetails with nutrition, exercise, environment, relationships as well as more intangible things like the sense of meaning and purpose you have in life, your sense of connection to life itself and so on.

And whenever you end up imbalanced in one area, problems result. And the error can sometimes be to go harder in areas you feel more comfortable in, rather than rebalancing more holistically.

So, if you're struggling in some way (or a client is), consider broadening the scope of your attention to include more aspects of life. Where is there a lack of wholeness? In what you eat? How you move your body? How you relate to others? In what you do for a living? In how much light and air and greenery you get?

And you could see this as an oppressive, endless list of stuff to do. But really, it's just what life *is*: this never-ending flourish of creativity that yearns for greater and greater degrees of wholeness.

And there's not much else to do, to be honest, apart from to go on that journey.

Within all of this, there is another lesson that has a much wider scope that emerges repeatedly: the importance of self-trust.

In order to heal and be whole and happy, I find that you basically have to live life completely differently to the way that you were taught (and to how most people do it). You need to strike out alone (metaphorically speaking).

Take nutrition again. At the risk of sounding like a negative nancy, when you start doing the research you discover that much of what our society generally takes to be 'food' is literally not actually food. Half the stuff in the supermarket is borderline poisonous.

In 100 years' time, I'm pretty sure we'll look back at the food and drink we have in our supermarkets now the same way we look back at the Victorians powdering their faces with actual lead.

Self-trust involves taking your own experience as the final authority. So with food and nutrition, for example, there's too much contradictory information out there for an amateur to know what to do.

If you go to the 'vegan' corner of the Internet, you can find long, well-referenced take-downs of meat-eating diets that makes it sound like anyone who eats meat is going to keel over any second.

Similarly, if you go to the 'carnivore' corner of the internet there are well-argued critiques of vegan diets that suggest that they are all equally on the verge of death.

Unless you're a full time academic nutritionist there's no way you'll figure out who's telling the truth. The only way is just to trust yourself: experiment, listen to your body and see what feels right.

Self-trust is the same in other areas, like trauma and mental health. If you had just listened to your GP, you would never have stood a chance. They would have given you a pill and marched you on your way.

Instead, you trusted yourself and what you told yourself was that there must be a better way. You just *knew it*. And trusting that inner knowing—the inner guru—is the best source of right living.

So how do you discern? You trust yourself. Feel into it, experiment, listen to the body, adjust.

Repeat. Literally *ad infinitum*—until infinity, which is to say, until absolute wholeness!