The Case:  Maria has been dealing with a lot of inflammation and pain.  She’s been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s and Raynaud’s. She’s tried everything suggested from conventional medicine to functional medicine. The cleanses, special diets, and supplements only made her feel moderately better. When inflammation, malaise and autoimmunity persist despite doing everything possible to heal the gut, clean the liver and support the immune system properly, there is something bigger going on. I knew we had to dig deeper into her past to find the root cause of her issues.    The Investigation I spoke with Maria for over 2 hours. At some point, the conversation moved from her condition to her personal history. When she started talking about when her parent’s divorce during her childhood and then her mother’s unexpected death, I knew there was a link. We just had to connect the dots. A lot of people think that these experiences can’t possibly be the root cause of physical conditions like autoimmune disease. But, Dr. Don Wood, through his research has proven the link between the traumas we experience and our physical conditions. He’s the founder of the Inspired Performance Institute where he’s developed technology called TIPP as well as programs to ‘reboot’ the mind around past trauma that our body continues to feel.  I’m thrilled to have him join me for this episode.    Understanding Trauma Dr. Wood separates trauma into two camps. Most of us think of trauma as a clearly defined, often injury-inducing event like a car accident or a mugging. He calls this big ‘T’ trauma. The second type of trauma he calls emotional concussion. These are experiences that affected us psychologically but may be more loosely defined or harder to pinpoint. Dr. Wood says that a very large percentage of the population is dealing with unprocessed trauma when you consider these two types of trauma.   How Trauma May Cause Autoimmune Issues When we experience a traumatic event, our body has a physical response to that trauma. Trauma triggers that fight or flight (aka active state) response. This creates inflammation in the body as a way of pausing the immune system so that the body can use all resources to respond to the trauma. When we are no longer in danger, the body allows everything to return to normal. What a lot of people don’t realize is that when we have unprocessed trauma, we think about it. And, when we think about it, we relive it which results in the same fight or flight response. We have the physical response to the trauma just by thinking about it! If we are doing this constantly, the immune system can’t function properly, which overtime results in autoimmune issues.   Diagnosing Trauma as a Trigger Often we dismiss the idea that trauma is the cause of an issue because we may not recognize the experience as trauma. Dr. Wood uses a great analogy in this episode that points to the high-definition memories we have of traumatic times in our past vs the muted memory we have of a non-threatening event (like the dinner we had last night). These high-definition memories can be very powerful and can trigger a physical response. The first step in identifying them as triggers sit to recognize the level of the memory and the physical response it brings. In Dr. Wood’s program, they actually monitor the brainwave state to determine the response to memories.    Treating Trauma Triggers Recognizing the physical response to memories of past trauma is not enough, the brain needs to be reconditioned as to how it responds to that memory. This is what Dr. Wood does with TIPP. This program gets the mind to reset that high-definition memory into the same format as a day-to-day memory. By doing this, the body no longer sees that memory as a threat and it no longer triggers the fight or flight response. The brain is no longer sending an error message.  Dr. Wood points out that far too often we treat the symptoms caused by these trauma responses. For example, trea