I am really excited about our host today, Adalina East. She is a neuroscientist and a certified therapist. She actually found me and hosted me on her podcast so I started learning more about what she does and I really thought that she had some serious value for Toxin-Free Talk listeners.
We're going to be talking today about releasing trauma to detox your brain. How good is that topic? First of all, we're going to dive into trauma, and what that means and the different kinds of trauma. So welcome to Toxin-Free Talk. How are you doing today?
Adalina: I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Megan: So please tell me about what connected you to me. How did you find me and a little bit more about your story and why you needed to learn more about toxins?
Adalina: I worked for most of my career for the UN and various other NGOsand when I was doing all of this, I was working in various countries around the world and we have such an incredible advantage. You and I both living here in the US, sometimes we may feel like we don't, but we don't have diseases here in the US like malaria and dengue fever. But I was working in places where we did and so I was spraying my body with pesticides that were given to me by the medical clinic where I worked, all day long every day to avoid malaria and dengue. We also sprayed for bugs, you know, on our work compound, as well as on our private compounds, like where we used to live. All of this added up to a huge burden on my body. I had gone to school for various things. But I have worked as a neuroscientist, I've worked as a therapist. Eventually it was time to come back stateside, and work here for that same organization. When I moved back to the States, I ended up getting incredibly ill. I was working in a moldy environment, the spraying of pesticides had caught up with me and I was just incredibly ill. So I decided to dive into the education that I had been so privileged to receive and figure out what was wrong and at that point, I started relying on my neuroscience background. We actually have this part of our brain called the glymphatic system. A lot of people have heard of the lymphatic system but this is the glymphatic system, and it actually only cleanses and detoxes at night while you sleep. But the hard thing is, if you've been exposed to pesticides and a lot of mold, you're not sleeping. I was not sleeping anyway and so I just continued to get more and more ill. At a certain point, we did figure out that it was all of these toxins plus Lyme disease and I was finally able to work with various medical practitioners, I still to this day worked with various medical practitioners, to try to recover. But throughout that time, I also discovered EMDRand for those beautiful listeners who aren't familiar with EMDR, it's called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. What all of that means is basically it's a really great way to heal trauma and the neuroscience of why it works is something that people have been getting to the bottom of for the last 25 years or so. We're still working on it, but it was originally used with people who served our country and were trying to heal from war, trauma and those kinds of things. But we've found it to also be really effective for anyone with medical trauma, and relationship trauma, all different kinds of trauma. So I became certified in this and I now use EMDR with people all over the world to help them recover from things like marriages, breakups, the death of a child. You know, really serious and intense things, as well as medical trauma. It's something that people don't really talk about. But when, let's say you've been exposed to mold or chemicals, or whatever the case may be, and your body goes through such a trauma response, it's really, really hard to heal your brain also, out of that trauma response, not only in the glymphatic system of that, like detoxing of your brain that happens while you sleep, but also just to feel safe in your own environment and so I work with a lot of people on that using EMDR.
Megan: Yeah, so in 2022, I went through EMDR. It was also virtual, which is interesting, even though the practitioner was here in my own city and it really does work because I have friends who have done it in person, and they said, You could do it virtually and yes, it really does work and, you know, originally I thought, you know, I haven't had any really severe traumas in my life, do I need to go through this? I want to dive into this a little bit more like the big T versus the little t and then generational trauma. But when you just brought up that medical trauma, that is something that we did work on with my practitioner, because when I was just 21 years old, I ate a piece of fish, and I got really sick because a fishbone poked a hole in my small intestine. I did not know what was wrong with me. I went through a week of testing every single test you can imagine. They thought I was dying of some strange cancer, so my family flew in to see me. They ended up doing exploratory surgery so I have like a seven inch scar on my stomach. They just opened me up and that's what they found. They found that my body was getting close to being septic, because my stomach juices, you know, all that stuff was just leaching out into the rest of my body cavity. It was traumatizing as you can imagine. So a week of that, being ill and doing the testing and then I think I was in the hospital for two more weeks of recovery. I had a tube draining my stomach for a very long time and I lost 30 pounds within three weeks. It was dangerous, crazy. So that medical trauma, like I never would have thought I need to heal from that, you know, but then you go through this practice of EMDR and then other things come into mind, like maybe some traumas that your parents experienced and that's what the generational traumas are. I don't really know the science behind generational traumas. So maybe you can share those with our audience.
Adalina: Well, the science behind generational trauma is new and we are still exploring. One thing that I can speak to about my own therapeutic practice, I have noticed that we can do a great deal of healing work, we can do tons of EMDR and heal a bunch of different things that have happened to you throughout life, medical traumas, car accidents, I won't use big T and little T languaging. Only because I think that the trauma is in the eye of the beholder. What may seem like a little T to someone, like let's say, your car breaks down by the side of the road, and someone dangerous seeming stops to try to help you and that's traumatic. Whereas someone on the other side of the world who's going through different things might not find that traumatic, they might find that helpful. So it's always going to be in the eye of the beholder. So I just asked people what is happening that's brought you here. I never say big or little T trauma.
And I think that what I've noticed in my practice, too, is that the generational trauma that many of us carry is not only inherited from our grandparents, but it is inherited seven generations back. That's what the latest research on epigenetic shows is that there are remnants of trauma from our families, seven generations back. Things we don't even know about. I tend to use it in my own therapeutic practice, which is called transformational healing and it's trademarked and I'm the only person in the world practicing this right now. I am training others and how to do this at the moment, other therapists but at the moment, I'm the only person to work with and that practice combines a lot of different things. It combines a lot of things that other people might use as part of neuro linguistic programming, things people might use as part of EMDR, as well as a different element of working and resourcing with your spirit guides, which not everyone is into. It is a very specific thing. But it does help people work through generational trauma, especially if it's going back two or three generations. You know, a lot of us hear from our grandparents, oh, your great grandfather did this and maybe we've heard the story so many times that it's almost become a point of vicarious trauma. Like, it's almost as if it's happening to us because we've heard the story so many times. So it is really important to clear and, and detox, so to speak those things because they can still affect us. Yeah, I had a client who was incredibly terrified of the water and she'd never had a bad experience. She grew up in LA, she'd never had a bad experience. Her whole family loves to walk on the beach, she hated it. After she had her first baby, her baby loved the beach and she had to take her baby, of course and finally, through long, long talks with her mom, she learned that her great great grandmother had drowned. What's so strange is that we can actually genetically hold on to that. They've found this one genetic, sorry to completely nerd out, but they've found this one genetic snip, and people's genes that can be inherited only through the father. So we can, you know, blame the men in our lives for this one, that if the father has experienced PTSD at some point in his life, which now, basically, officially all fathers have, because we've all been through the last two years, right? They can hand that down to their children of both sexes. Isn't that insane?
Megan: Yeah, that is crazy. Obviously, we need to release those. Think about if you have some sort of phobia, just how free you would feel if you could release that and I mean, it's really kind of detoxing your mind, like you said.
Adalina: It's detoxing your brain and when I found you, I was so happy to find you. I found Megan, everybody on Instagram, where she does a beautiful job informing all of us and educating all of us about how to detox. But it was such a great thing when I found you, because, you know, not everyone really thinks in this way and once you start thinking in that way of like, how can I detox my home? Okay, I'm getting rid of the Clorox. I'm adding in these separate things that Megan's recommended. But once you start thinking that way about your home, how can you detox your mind? What are the top of mind phobias that you have? What are the top of mind things that hold you back from really living the life that you want to live? And then you can work with an EMDR practitioner, or with me directly to get rid of those things. To really heal those things and live a more free life.
Megan: Incredible, really incredible. So can you tell me about the different ways that you work with your patients, clients, whatever you call them.
Adalina: So I mostly work with people virtually, I work with people all over the world and I love doing that so much. I have a crazy schedule. Some mornings, I start at five. But it makes me so happy and what usually happens when we first start working together, as I say, what's the number one thing that's really holding you back? Usually they will know? Right away, we go back in time and we try to look through their history and see what started it. So for example, with me, let's say that my big fear is of falling off a cliff, right? So we can go back in my history and we can see oh, when I was hiking at 15 I almost fell off the side of a cliff in Sagres, Portugal or whatever the case may have been. Then we can even use EMDR to heal that, to resource a safe place for everyone because everyone needs a safe place, and then we use eye movement. So some practitioners like to use their finger going back and forth in front of your eyes. For some of my clients, that's a little weird. So we use a soundbar that I have. I subscribe to a service with a sound and so they put on headphones, and they can hear the sound first in one year than in the other ear and that also re-processes the memory. If I'm working with someone in person here in Santa Fe, we use buzzers so there's a buzzer in each hand, and that person can feel the buzz first in their left hand and then in their right hand and use that technology. I know it sounds so simple, but it's so effective. It really moves the trauma out of your brain in such a way that you can think about that memory and have no reaction to it and what I usually find is, after a few sessions, people no longer are afraid of that thing, or held back by that thing in any way.
Megan: I mean, I can speak to this in my personal experience with doing EMDR. That it's a way to completely reprogram your brain. Maybe it's even something you did yourself that you can't forgive yourself for, you can reprogram how you think about that and completely forgive yourself for that. But it works in so many other ways. So if you had this one instance of a trauma, or a bad experience, and you still think about it all the time, you think really negatively of it, when you go through EMDR, you change those thoughts and so then the next time you think of it, your brain doesn't go to negative, it sees it as neutral, right? It's really crazy how it works. I was recently telling some friends of mine, you know, a friend was saying that she was struggling with this thing in her life and I said, “You know, if you really want to work on it, I would suggest EMDR because therapy is wonderful. I'm not going to diminish traditional talk therapy at all. It's wonderful. But what I like about EMDR is that it's almost like solving the problem versus just talking about the problem.” It's pretty incredible.
Adalina: I was a talk therapist for so many years, and I think it is the right modality in certain circumstances. But I think mostly what works, or what I've found works anyway, is either my modality transformational healing, or EMDR. Because I just think that when we're dealing with trauma, if we keep talking about it over and over again, we're actually traumatizing ourselves. We're actually forming deeper neuronal pockets within our brain for that specific trauma. It does the opposite of what we're trying to do. So save the talk therapy for something else. If there's trauma involved, EMDR and my modality, I think they both work much better.
Megan: Well, that is super enlightening and we can see that if we are detoxing our brain, how much better we're going to feel about our lives. I love to tell my listeners too, that you know, you're just making small changes, that can add up to a big difference and so this is just one more step to detoxing your life. To living your best life really, and being the best you that you can be. So I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and telling us all about EMDR and I'm really glad I had some personal experience with it, you know, so do it. Well, so can I ask how my listeners can find you and follow you and learn more about you?
Adalina : Yes. So I actually don't have much information about EMDR up on my website at the moment, but it doesn't seem to stop people. It's very booked these days. But you can always find me on Instagram @adalinaeast and ask me whatever question you want. You can connect with me on my website, if you want to put in your email address to join my newsletter, you get entered to win a free session. www.adalinaeast.com. So a winner each month and I would love to meet some of your listeners that way as well.
Megan: Very, very cool. Well, thank you again for coming on to Toxin-Free Talk. I really think this is a really great conversation and I encourage you listeners to go find Adalina and go subscribe to her email.
