Have you struggled with anxiety, depression, sleep issues, difficult relationships, a stressful job, and/or burnout in general? 

Are you feeling like you’ve tried so many ways to address it, and still, the pattern keeps repeating? 

In today’s episode of How Humans Heal, I interview Dr. Brandy Cummings, a doctor of clinical nutrition, who specializes in helping high-achieving women who’ve tried everything to break free from chronic symptoms, including burnout and emotional overwhelm, so they can finally feel better. 

Dr. Brandy and I are going to talk about how subconscious patterns can keep us stuck in stressful situations and not feeling well, AND how it is possible to heal your nervous system by using techniques that allow us to reach the subconscious and rewire the programming. 

In doing so, you can completely change your health and your future.

Understanding the Mind and Subconscious Programming

This is such an important topic. We try everything else. We try to change our diet, exercise, take supplements, but we’re really dancing around the emotional stuff that needs our attention. 

If someone says they’ve been to therapy and still feel there’s an emotional component to their health issue, we want you to know that there are other ways to help.

First, we have to understand what the mind is. Our conscious mind is about five percent of our mind. It is the source of logic, reasoning, creativity, and goal setting. For example, we can consciously say “I want to be free of HPV or I want to lose weight,” but then there is the subconscious mind, which is the ninety-five percent actually running the show. 

The subconscious mind is our programming, our beliefs, our responses, our past experiences, the language we’re using about ourselves. It is the goal GETTER. It’s going to bring you results based on whatever programming is running in the background.

If we have past traumas, significant emotional events, limiting beliefs, unresolved negative emotions like anger, hurt, sadness, fear, shame, and guilt that we haven’t resolved, that is going to impact our results in our life. 

If somebody has been going to therapy for years and still hasn’t gotten resolution, then perhaps it’s time for a different perspective.

If we can go into the subconscious mind, clear out what needs to get cleared out, reprogram things so we are not running on programming that is not in alignment with our highest and best self, then we’re finally able to increase our internal frequency, which our external environment has no choice but to recalibrate in alignment with.

When we’re in stress mode or trauma response, it’s so familiar we don’t even know there’s something outside of that. Most of us have been existing in a state of stress or trauma since childhood. 

Once you experience a moment where you observe that you’re repeating patterns and you see that it is affecting your health, that’s when you start to see that there’s a possibility of a completely different perspective and reality.

Recognizing the Signs, Symptoms, and Patterns

What are some symptoms? What might people notice showing up in their body?

A big thing noticed right away is the language we use. How are we talking about ourselves? Are we blaming others or our environment? 

For example, if we say “I’ve got bad genetics, or this runs in my family.” Are we taking radical self-responsibility for the results in our life, or are we in effect of our circumstance?

As far as symptomology, a lot of thyroid issues have a strong connection to a history of trauma, especially in women who feel there were situations where they couldn’t speak their truth or use their voice.

Symptoms of the skin often correlate to separation conflict and sometimes abandonment conflict. For people with HPV, a lot of times there can be boundary conflict, if somebody crossed boundaries where you feel like you couldn’t stand your ground.

What’s often seen is that people will loop. They’ll try all the things, get some results, and then go back. It’s because there’s a motivation strategy running in the subconscious keeping them looping. If somebody is looping, that’s a big tip-off there’s something under the hood (in the subconscious) that needs attention.

Another common symptom is pain. For some, migraines for many years, and chronic shoulder pain. Oftentimes when we dig deeper, we learn they feel like they are bearing the weight of the world on their shoulders. Even though there wasn’t anything physically on their shoulders, it can show up as chronic shoulder neck pain.

This concept that our emotional stress and trauma can show up on a physical level is so important to understand and consider. If you have unresolved symptoms in your body, whether an abnormal pap smear, on your skin, in your joints, and if it’s not getting better, it is time to consider whether there is something else your body is trying to tell you?

Accessing the Subconscious Mind

The body is so much smarter than we will ever be, and the subconscious mind will continue to send you messages until you get the lesson. Over time, symptoms will get worse. The message is getting louder, or new symptoms will happen until we think: “what am I missing here?”

Awareness is the first step. Get really curious about your language. Are you waking up having thoughts like “I wish I wasn’t in pain, I wish I didn’t have to go to this job I hate, I don’t like how I look”? Oftentimes, people are completely unconscious that they are having these thoughts. 

If you are speaking all day about things you don’t like or don’t want, you’re going to call in more of those things.The subconscious can’t process a negative. If I ask you to not think of a purple elephant, you’re immediately going to think of a purple elephant. 

The next step is to think about your timeline. When did your symptoms start? What else was happening in your life at that time?

Dr. Brandy Cummings shares her story. When she was a child, she was sexually abused by her grandfather, starting around age five. After that event, she had a very strong protector part born to try to keep her safe. How this showed up was what she thought were personality traits. She was very into spreadsheets and math. She believed that if you’re not early, then you’re late. Everything was very rigid, structured. She thought – I’m just type A. Well, it turns out, it wasn’t her personality. It was the protector part trying to create structure and keep her safe.

Get curious about those parts of you. Where does that behavior come from? 

The protector part also impacted relationships in Brandy’s life. If she wasn’t emotionally connected to somebody, she could be physically intimate. As soon as she got emotionally intimate, that part turned off. 

When you start to notice a pattern, don’t approach it with guilt or shame; just get curious. It also impacted Brandy’s business. You achieve a certain level of success, and then the protector part can take over and say, “this is all brand new, which is not safe; let’s go back to our comfort zone.”

Plot out your timeline and get curious and bring awareness. Even if you take fifteen minutes each day to write or journal. When you notice a thought or belief, write it down so you can get it out of your head and onto paper. If you do that for a couple days, it starts to shift things because it gets it into the conscious mind.

The Concept of Safety and the Cell Danger Response

Safety is a really important concept related to trauma recovery and nervous system regulation.

In our cells, we have the mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell because they make ATP, our cellular energy. When there is some irritant to the cell, whether a trauma, stressor, injury, or toxin, the mitochondria switch from powerhouse mode to battleship mode. They enter what’s called the cell danger response, which is a three-step process mitochondria go through, in the right order, and then it loops back to health.

The cell danger response is normal and healthy. The problem is when it becomes chronic. We can get stuck in any one of those steps. But a big reason we can get stuck is if we don’t feel safe. If on some level our cells think there’s a bear, that’s not a time where we’re going to relax and start healing.

What are the reasons we might not feel safe? If we’ve had significant emotional events in our past, whether capital T trauma or lower t trauma, it all impacts how safe we feel. From age zero to seven, there’s a lot of imprinting. If we didn’t have strong attachment to our mother, if we grew up where there was food scarcity, or if we saw our mom getting abused, all of these things impact how safe we perceive our environment.

If we have heavy toxin exposure, that doesn’t feel safe. If our language is always in the negative and focused on what we do not want, we are constantly sending messages to our subconscious. All of these factors contribute to how safe we feel in our body.

When a person is struggling with their self-worth, their sense of purpose, and/or their physical health, it is quite possible that they don’t feel safe in their body. If we don’t feel safe, we’re going to be contracting. There’s going to be more fear. These emotions have a lower vibration and impact our health in a negative way. 

Everything is connected to how safe we feel on a subconscious level. Most of the time we think we are safe in our current reality, and yet, at a deeper level, our nervous system does not feel safe.

Try taking a breath and consider, do I feel safe? Calm, peace, and consistency create safety versus triggering a stress response.

Neuroplasticity: Shifting the Patterns

We can literally make new neurological connections in our brain. We can rewire our nervous system. We can clear out past traumas and lift that up and out of the body, and it can happen fast. And having an emotional breakthrough can relate to a breakthrough in someone’s physical health. 

A lot of times when people talk about calming the nervous system, there is conversation about using meditation and/or breath work. But if sitting still makes your eye twitch, how can we move that energy through your body?

Dr. Brandy mentions how important it is to try different modalities until you find what helps your nervous system to experience a different perspective. There are many ways to support neuroplasticity. 

Even if you have had these patterns wired into your nervous system since a young age, it can shift.

How Healing from Trauma can Help to Clear HPV

If you are testing positive for high-risk HPV virus, we’re dealing with a virus that is very active on a physical level. And yet healing on an emotional level can help the immune system clear the virus.

The immune system is deeply impacted by our nervous system. Emotional baggage impacts how the immune system does its job.

Research studies show that when women are exposed to childhood abuse, not just sexually, but emotional, psychological abuse, or any kind of trauma, they have an increased risk of cervical cancer unless we start helping them recover from the trauma. And it’s not talked about in the gynecology office or the therapy office. 

Testing positive for HPV could be your moment to pivot and finally pay attention to your emotional healing.

When you get a diagnosis, get curious about your language. What are you saying? Are you saying your body is broken, or you feel betrayed? Why is this happening to me? How can we get up and out of effect and over into being at cause? How can we say, this is a message from my body. Why is this happening for me? What’s the message within the mess? What’s the gold within the garbage?

Oftentimes, when it comes to HPV or a diagnosis that involve the reproductive system, it’s about boundaries. Did you feel like you weren’t protected? How much shame are you carrying around? Do you feel like you’ve lost your sense of power? 

If we think about the cervix, that’s chakra number two, our sacral chakra. That is the center of our creation energy. If there’s blockages there, that impacts our symptomology.

The most beautiful thing is when we realize: this is happening FOR me, not TO me. 

That’s when start to see things from a different perspective. We start thinking – what can I do? 

It’s not that we are not going to doing things that support our health on the physical plane, like eating right, and taking supplements. It’s that we add support on an emotional level, and that causes an energetic shift because now energy can flow. 

The energy in the sacral chakra literally creates humans. If it creates humans, it can create anything else. We can use that energy to create abundance or call in love or further advance our health.

Dr. Doni shares how women who follow Dr. Doni’s HPV Protocol report experiencing a shift in their perspective, and what a difference it makes in their healing process. They express “I’m so grateful I had this diagnosis because it helped me see things differently and to change my whole health.” 

Part of it is the choice to prioritize ourselves. There can be shame simply around having emotional states. And we feel like we can’t talk about our emotions or invest time or money on getting help. The same thing happens with HPV. Women feel very isolated and alone because they feel ashamed, and that perpetuates the issue.

Breaking Free from the Patterns of Shame, Guilt, and Trauma

What’s recommended when someone recognizes that shame or guilt or fear has them locked in?

Awareness is key. The highest prime directive of the unconscious mind is to preserve the body. The more we repress and reject our unresolved emotions, the more harmful to the body. Your body is going to try to bring you messages to get your attention, to get resolution. We just need to start noticing the messages from our bodies.

Then we can use different modalities. The modalities used include neurolinguistic programming, quantum time technique, hypnosis, past life regression, inner child work, and parts integration. 

We can clear negative emotions out of the body so the body has resolution and can heal, because the subconscious has a blueprint of perfect health. It’s already inside of you. We just clear out what’s blocking it.

The beautiful thing about these modalities is that it’s not content-dependent, meaning unlike therapy, there’s no need to rehash the whole situation, especially if that’s going to be retraumatizing. The subconscious doesn’t need you to get that all out again in order to clear it.

Everything is about bio-individuality. The tools chosen are dependent on the person.

• Neurolinguistic programming is about the brain-language connection, communicating with the subconscious mind, making new neurological connections, and busting through limiting beliefs.
  
• Quantum time technique is about going back on your timeline to different events, and getting the wisdom and the learnings. Once we get the wisdom, the emotion will disappear.
  
• Hypnosis is just a state of trance. If you’ve ever done meditation, that’s hypnosis. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis. If you’ve ever pulled into your driveway and didn’t remember your drive home, you were in trance.
  
  When we’re in the trance state, the subconscious mind is more open. We have the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. In between, we have the analytical wedge there to keep us safe. If you’ve ever done affirmations, like, “I’m clearing myself of HPV,” but your subconscious mind is not open to hearing it, it’s that it hit the analytical wedge.
  
  We want to remove the wedge. When we’re in a state of trance, we’re removing the wedge so we can get into our subconscious, communicate effectively, clear out unprocessed emotions, and install new programming.
  
• Past life work is based on the perspective that different programming and limiting beliefs can be passed down through our DNA and lineage, but also from past lives. 
  
• Inner child work involves being able to speak to the little girl inside you who may have experienced things she didn’t know what to do with. It can be a beautiful process.
  
• Parts integration: We can have different parts in us that can be conflicted. We might have a part that wants to get healthy and another part that is resistant and saying: “that’s dumb, or not scientific.” All parts of us have a positive intention, but their behaviors can make us feel fragmented. We need to integrate our parts so our body feels whole.

These are all ways we can understand ourselves and rewire, by enhancing neuroplasticity, so we can shift the effect of trauma from our past. Just because you went through trauma doesn’t mean it has to negatively impact your future.

Transformations and Breakthroughs

Everything people do on the physical plane – how we’re eating, how we’re moving our body, the supplements – it all works better and faster when we have done the work to heal from trauma on a subconscious level. It’s like running against the wind with a parachute on our back, and then if we can unclick the parachute, now we’re off.

What do you want in your life? If you could wave a magic wand, what do you want? Where would you live? What kind of relationships would you have? What type of impact would you have on the world? 

If you really allow your imagination to run wild and curate a life exactly how you want it, what’s your ten out of ten life? And then imagine, what if that was just a two? Allow yourself to think of the limitless possibilities when you are no longer limiting yourself.

The people who come into our lives are mirrors of ourselves. If someone irritates you, they’re reflecting something back to you about yourself. Get curious about what that might be. The same is true when someone comes into your life that you love – those positive qualities are also inside of you. When you notice something in others, especially family members, it’s an opportunity to look within and discover what needs transformation in yourself.

After experiencing emotional breakthroughs, our dreams feel attainable. We realize that we’re human, and stress and trauma is part of being human. Recovering from trauma is also part of living a human experience.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience. What do you want to experience? Waking up in fifty years, what do you want to feel? You want to have enjoyed the journey. It matters so much more than the destination.

Setting Boundaries and Protecting Your Peace

Boundaries is another concept we don’t learn enough about. In our childhood, we didn’t tend to learn about boundaries. It’s important to have some boundaries and also to be able to give space so you have the strength to heal.

How can we start to understand what boundaries look like? 

First, it’s bringing awareness to where in your past have your boundaries been crossed, and how can we map that across to your life now.

Dr. Brandy shares that her whole life, up until going through this process, she continued going over to her grandparent’s house where her grandfather was for holidays. And she was not the only person in the family who had experienced abuse by him. At Thanksgiving dinner, he was sitting at the head of the table, and the table was full of women who have been impacted by his behavior. That was the programming. She just kept shoving it under the rug.

After going through all of this work, Brandy decided: “I’m no longer going to interact with that lower frequency. I’m not going to go to holiday dinners with him.” We can figure out what boundary had been crossed and then map that across to where people are crossing your boundaries now, so you can protect your peace.

The more we have awareness about the impact, then creating a boundary sometimes feels so much simpler. It can also be powerful and so freeing. 

It’s amazing the difference it makes in people’s lives and their health and their connection with themselves. A lot of times, women go from feeling so separate within themselves. 

We often feel angry at our body and ashamed of our body. And yet our body is our vessel through our lifetime, and it is always working to help us heal. This realization can help bring integration with our physical body. We start functioning from a place of “I can be a whole person showing up and honoring my body.”

Final Thoughts and Encouragement

It’s important to go at your pace. Let this start to open up gently and listen to your body along the way so you can experience the healing.

Remember, everything that has happened is for your highest and best purpose. As long as you are willing to lean in and get the wisdom and the learnings and alchemize it, then you get to have the gold out of it. 

We just have to be willing to listen to the messages that our innate wisdom is sending us. And then just suppose things could get better than you could ever imagine, and lean into the possibility of what that would look like, because it is possible.

If you want to learn more about Dr. Brandy and how she can help you, you can find her on her at www.resilientmotherhood.health and on Instagram @resilientmotherhood.health and Facebook @ Resilient Motherhood with Dr. B.

Note from Dr. Doni

There are so many overlaps and synchronicities with what Dr. Brandy and I do to support women’s health. I’m excited to work in parallel with her to change women’s lives. 

Whenever struggling with any health issue, we need to consider what is underlying, and that is also true for your mental and emotional health. If we don’t address the underlying stress and trauma, the physical health issues will recur over and over again. 

Common women’s health issues that arise when we have not healed from trauma include: 

• Fatigue
• Vaginal infections (HPV, BV, and yeast, and more)
• Hormone imbalances (including menstrual irregularities, PMS, fertility issues, and menopause related symptoms, as well as thyroid and insulin related issues)
• Digestive issues (such as bloating, reflux, and leaky gut)
• Autoimmunity and frequent infections 
• Anxiety, depression, and other mood fluctuations
• Issues with focus and memory

And so many more…

In my book, Master Your Stress Reset Your Health, I go into great detail about our built-in stress response system, and how stress and trauma can cause us to be stuck in “stress mode.” 

A key insight from the book is that stress doesn’t affect us all the same way. For some, our stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline) will remain high, while for others, the levels may be too low, or somewhere in between. It is essential to know how stress and trauma have impacted your stress hormone levels, as well as your neurotransmitter levels, and your mitochondrial function, so that we can provide an individualized protocol for recovery.

Start by taking my Stress Type® Quiz to get a sense of how stress and trauma from the past are impacting you today. Then you can follow my Stress Recovery Protocol, including my proprietary C.A.R.E. Method to support your body and nervous system to heal. 

TAKE THE FREE STRESS QUIZ TO FIND OUT YOUR STRESS TYPE:

Take the Quiz

It’s important to work with a practitioner who can help you look deeper to uncover what is really leading to your health issue so that you are able to finally break the pattern. And that’s exactly what I do in my one-on-one practice, and group programs. 

If you’re dealing with HPV, I welcome you to join me over on Instagram @drdoniwilson and on my website at clearhpvnow.com. You can download my free HPV Recovery Guide and watch videos of women who’ve implemented my HPV Protocol and found freedom from high-risk HPV. I want for you to feel hope that you can heal too.

If you’d like to get a better sense of my approach, I welcome you to join my next free How to Get Rid of HPV online workshop where I help you to create a plan to get HPV out of your life for good.

Sign Up Now (Free!)

From there, you might choose to join the Heal HPV Kickstart Program, for the initial steps of my protocol, including diet changes and supplements, over the next 30 days. Or you can begin with the comprehensive Say Goodbye to HPV Program, which includes everything you need to implement my full protocol and to address all eight susceptibilities to HPV, including helping you to resolve underlying emotional stress and trauma. 

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If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to my office. My team and I would be happy to connect with you and help you. Click here to set up a call with my team.

Thank you, everyone, for listening in to How Humans Heal and learning all about emotional healing from Dr. Brandy. If you don’t already subscribe, I welcome you to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. 

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Disclaimer: This specific article and all other Content, Products, and Services of this Website are NOT intended as, and must not be understood or construed as, medical care or advice, naturopathic medical care or advice, the practice of medicine, or the practice of counseling care, nor can it be understood or construed as providing any form of medical diagnosis, treatment,  natural HPV cure, or prevention of any disease.