Today I bring back an interview with Dr. Eva Detko, who is a mind transformation and holistic autoimmune specialist.
As you know, educating about detox is one of my biggest purposes in life, and it’s important to include the emotional component as well. Dr. Eva is here to explain how to identify and overcome emotional toxicity, and you’ll learn her top emotional detox strategies to achieve optimal wellness. You will also hear about the link between emotional toxicity and its vast effects on your health.
More about Dr. Eva Detko:
Dr Eva has studied natural medicine and the human mind for over 20 years. She has recovered successfully from chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and reversed Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Now she is passionate about helping others recover their health.
Dr Eva has an extensive knowledge and experience in the field of human physiology, biochemistry, and nutritional sciences. She also uses a wide range of mind-transforming tools and modalities, including: Havening Techniques ®, Brain Working Recursive Therapy ®, psychoanalysis, hypnotherapy, Mindfulness, and applied psychoneuroimmunology.
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Transcript:
Dr. Pompa:
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Ashley Smith:
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Hello, everyone, welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I'm Ashley Smith and today we welcome mind transformation and holistic autoimmune specialist, Dr. Eva Detko. She is here to discuss the whys and hows of emotional detox for optimal healing, and she'll also share her top emotional detox strategies to achieve optimal wellness. This is an important topic, and I cannot wait to turn this over to both of you, so let's get started and welcome Dr. Eva Detko and Dr. Pompa to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Welcome, Dr. Eva, thanks for being here.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I am so hugely passionate about this topic, so really excited to talk about it with you.
Dr. Pompa:
All the way from southern Spain, nonetheless.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yes, at the moment, yes. There are plans to move to Poland, so south of Spain at the moment, a bit nomadic.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, which is—your heritage is from Poland, correct?
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yeah, that's right, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Technology, right? You're in Spain right now and here we are. I love that, 9:30 at night where you are and 1:30 here I am.
Dr. Eva Detko:
So I apologize in advance if I'm not completely with it, so yeah, it's a bit late.
Dr. Pompa:
We had to get you before you went to bed. Alright, but that's good. I'm glad—thank you for making the time. This subject, I actually have been just fascinated. I always say look, I'm not the expert when it comes to emotional detox. That's why I have you here. I'm the expert when it comes to chemical detox and how that affects our lives, but when we look at traditions, which this is another area of your study—it's autoimmune. This is a big topic for me because so many people have it unknowingly. I talk about it as a three-legged stool meaning that one leg, certain gene gets triggered of autoimmune. It's different for all of us. We—all of us have these weaknesses or susceptibilities, but the center leg is the stressors that turn on that gene, and it could be physical, chemical, or emotional.
In my doctor training the other day, we all were in agreement that we see this combination of chemical and emotional traumas that take place in a perfect storm and boom, we have the autoimmune condition or whatever condition it is. Then the gut plays a role here as well as part of that three-legged stool. Today, emotional trauma, I think that it doesn't really get the attention that it really deserves in that trapped emotions are no different than trapped toxins in that the body doesn't know the difference. I want to give some solutions for people, and that's why you're here. Let's talk about the problem as it relates to conditions like autoimmune but how do traumas cause the same type of thing that a chemical would?
Dr. Eva Detko:
Well, first of all, I really want to say that—I want to draw some parallels here because obviously you talk a lot about biochemical detox; I talk a lot about emotional detox. That is true; for the body, toxin's a toxin, right? There are emotional or chemical. Unfortunately what happens is for one reason or another—there's obviously multitudes of reasons for this. There seems to be quite a—what I find a superficial approach to emotional detox.
I remember when you gave me an interview for one of my [04:43] and we got to talking about biochemical detox. You were talking about the fact that some people can approach the biochemical detox in a superficial kind of way, just taking a supplement that says oh, this is a detox supplement. Just take that and a few days later, I'm considering myself detoxed. I have to say that I find the same problem with emotional detox. This is why I really encourage people to delve a little bit deeper into the subject because when we have a lot of emotional toxicity and believe me, anybody with chronic physical symptoms, whether it is autoimmunity or something unidentified, which a lot of people go through maybe they don't have a diagnosis by they have a whole host of physical symptoms that they've had for years. If there's anything like that going on, obviously anything that—cancer obviously falls into that category as well. We're really talking about you're not going to get to that point, that the body manifests physically in that way without having a level of emotional toxicity.
In all honesty, I haven't seen this myself yet. Perhaps there's somebody out there who has seen this, but I have not seen a person with physical issues that wouldn't have complex emotional stuff going on. They may or may not be aware of how much emotional complexity there is because actually, that's part of the issue. Part of the issue why people treat it so superficially is because it's not so easy to understand for people. It can be quite confusing. It can be quite overwhelming, not people who specialize in biochemical stuff won't necessarily at the same time be experts on emotional stuff. If you go to a functional medicine doctor, they will tell you manage your stress, but that may mean that you will occasionally do a meditation and that is just not going to do it, is it? It's just not going to do it, right? I just wanted to just put it out that we really need to—we talk—when we're talking about cellular healing, when we're talking functional medicine, natural medicine, we're talking about root causes when it comes to healing. We want to really go after the root causes rather than treat symptoms, which is obviously what conventional medicine tends to do.
With emotional healing, it has to be the same. We can't just treat the symptoms We need to go after the root causes. Of course, we're going to go into more detail, early childhood events, emotional trauma. There's obviously other layers to that. That's another thing that I want people to think about when you're thinking about your emotional healing. You need to be—rather than think oh, how do I maybe numb the bad feeling that I have, that being frustration, anger, sadness. You need to be thinking why is it that I'm experiencing this feeling on a regular basis. Obviously we're talking about the chronic stuff if you occasionally get angry. By the way, this is a normal human response and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm talking about symptoms, which I will hopefully get to that in a moment.
What sort of symptoms are we talking about when we're talking about emotional healing? We're talking about stuff that goes on chronically, day in, day out, and the issue with that is that a lot of people are not even aware that that's happening because—why is that? Because we desensitize. If we're exposed to something day in, day out, and we experience something day in, day out, very often people will get to a point where they will desensitize to the fact that they may be chronically angry or chronically anxious or chronically fearful, upset, whatever it is, sad, because that's been with them for such a long time. They will say well, that's just how I've always been. They won't even go to question why they're feeling this way in the first place. They just accept it as part of who they are, which then causes other problems because it becomes part of their identity, and that's [0:09:21], right?
Dr. Pompa:
It's similar to—gosh, I didn't realize I was angry but they have mercury in their brain. It's like oh, gosh, I just respond that way. With these emotional toxins, it's the same thing. How do we identify it? I'll use myself as an example. I mean, I had dyslexia as a child and got through it. As a matter of fact, I would argue it's part of my gifting today, what makes me special in the sense that I can remember things the way I do and put—so I wouldn't have even the influence that I have if it wasn't for my dyslexia. However, when I dug deeper here, I realized how many things that I do, react certain ways because of my insecurity, was developed thinking I was dumb because I couldn't read because I was—all of that. I literally had to go through that.
I would look at it and say well, I wasn't abused. That's a real trauma, meaning that that's real stuff. I didn't have that, so I always put myself in the camp of well, I didn't have these emotional traumas. Well, I did, and arguably my brain could perceive it as traumatic as being abused. The point is how do we identify it? That was me looking back and identifying something that I didn't think affected me but did.
Dr. Eva Detko:
So yeah, you've made a good point there about the severity of trauma that is very interesting. People often think of trauma. They will hear a term PTSD, and they will assume that in order to consider themselves traumatized they would’ve had to go through something really major, perhaps be in a war zone, or somebody dying, or even a divorce, or something like that, being abused. That, obviously, is an issue. Something like this has happened to somebody. Then that is one of the adverse childhood events we talk about. However, people really do underestimate the trauma that doesn’t necessarily happen as a one-off big event but rather is an accumulation of small, not even events but this daily—perhaps daily maybe teasing at school. Something like that.
I had that. I was bullied at school for four years. It wasn’t necessarily that one big thing happened. That was highly damaging. That was highly, highly damaging because it was something that happened over a long period of time. In addition to that and this is the biggest one that I see when I work—I predominantly work with people with chronic health issues and highly complex emotional issues, and the one that I see as most underestimated is the developmental trauma. The developmental trauma I think is more interesting because it’s not about one big thing that happened, although it obviously could be, but it’s really about lack of bonding. That’s really what developmental trauma is about and the first years, the 0 to 4 in particular, extremely vulnerable years for any human being, and in those years, if there isn’t enough human contact, if there isn’t enough, basically, kisses, cuddles, connection that every human being needs, then that could result in a person actually being traumatized. In fact, that sort of trauma will usually affect people’s identity, so it’s not so much that it will just affect their behavior. No, it will cut much deeper. It will go right to the core.
Why is that important? This is important. When dealing with emotional stuff, the behavior also—for instance, somebody could have a phobia, so they’re doing this phobia. Phobia is really a behavior. When they’re doing this phobia, it may be that they see a spider and they freak out. Every time they run this path over and over, but that is actually fairly easy to deal with. A straightforward phobia I can deal with with a client in a matter of half an hour and maybe sometimes not even that, and that phobia is gone forever. That’s actually an easy if it’s a straightforward phobia, obviously not a complex one.
Then what most people actually with chronic illness will experience, they will experience erosion of their core identity. That is actually a much—that will take a little bit more time to resolve. It still can be resolved, but it’s not a superficial issue. It’s core identity issue. That comes from a lot of the time from the fact that people may have just felt abandoned as a child, or just purely and simply, their emotional needs in the first few years of their lives were not being met sufficiently.
Dr. Pompa:
How would you know? Just like a toxin, like I always say, when we look at toxins, there’s so many parallels here that the number one source is actually what we inherited from our mother and father. You don’t know that, especially mom gives lead and mercury through utero. You don’t remember that, of course. You don’t remember not being cuddled or kissed, or you don’t remember what happened or the stresses in that time which can create that. I just taught a Mastermind to my doctor group. I was talking about—really, about functioning from your true identity. I’m trying to help these doctors, and when I see them not functioning from a true identity is when they don’t build rapport with patients, whether they’re speaking from stage or one-on-one. It’s because they’re not coming across as authentic in a sense. Really, the key is is they’re not functioning from their true identity.
What you’re saying is when you’re not in your true identity that affects your life in many ways. Here I am training professionals, and the ones that are having trouble functioning just from who God made them, who they should be, the gifts they have, they’re not. They’re struggling. It could be all the way back from 2 years old.
Dr. Eva Detko:
That’s absolutely right. It’s very interesting. Of course, as you said, that’s going to affect so many things. It’s going to affect your whole life. Ultimately, erosion of your identity means you’re not going to be comfortable with who you are. It doesn’t get any worse than that, let’s say. When it comes to emotional healing, we need to heal that. That’s going to be—that’s the foundation. That’s the foundation of everything.
If you’re not comfortable with who you are and you—maybe you self-criticize. You beat yourself up over various things. You tell yourself that you’re not good enough, that you’re too stupid, too fat, too thin, too this, too that, right? When you do all that on a regular—a lot of people have this negative self-talk that just goes on every hour of every day, and they don’t even know that they’re doing it. Of course, rapport with other people will be difficult because you will always project. In sight of that, we will call it projection, when you project your own emotional crap onto other people, basically. That will, for instance, manifest. Let’s say somebody feels—they’re self-critical. They’re critical of themselves, and they don’t feel good enough. Immediately, what they’re going to do is they’re going to assume that other people are critical of them, so that’s what I mean by projection.
When you think about it, every single relationship that you have will be affected by that including relationship with patients. If you’re not comfortable with who you are, undoubtedly, you will impact the relationship with your patient. Then, of course, we know how important the relationship with a patient is for their—through their healing, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Right, so here’s the thing. It’s just like toxicity. How do we identify it, and then, okay, how do we detox these emotions? All right, so give some solutions of how we identify areas where this may have affected our identity and this may have caused emotional traumas that we don’t even know. How do we know?
Dr. Eva Detko:
You asked that question, and yes, I was going to answer that. Let’s start with how do we know? I actually devised this questionnaire that I have on my website. People want to go in a little bit deeper. I’ll explain in a minute what symptoms we’re looking out for, but if you want to do it at a deeper level, you can go to my website. Check out that questionnaire. It’s just free for people to look at.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ll make sure—Ashley will put that up here. Then we can go to your website.
Dr. Eva Detko:
The reason I say that is often times people will say, no, no, no, I’m good. I really don’t have anything like that going on. When they do the questionnaire, that really opens up their eyes, and there are things that people wouldn’t have thought about when it comes to emotional toxicity. Let me give you a few examples. I already mentioned in passing negative self-talk. If you identify that you do have negative self-talk, then that is emotionally toxic, and that definitely tells me that there has—there would’ve been some issues earlier on in your life. Anything to do with in fact poor self-worth, poor self-esteem, poor self-image, those are the ones that are identity based.
Dr. Pompa:
Give us examples of the negative self-talk.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yeah, sure, so for instance, you’re doing something, and you’re thinking, oh, I’m not really doing this right. I should be doing this and should be doing that. Maybe I’m not good enough to do this. I’m not smart enough to do this, just talking yourself down. Talking yourself down really is what I’m talking about and saying—looking yourself in the face, in the mirror. Looking at yourself and thinking, oh, gosh, I’m so ugly, and I wish I didn’t have this pimple or whatever. I mean, it’s just that constant negativity directed at yourself.
Dr. Pompa:
Let me ask you a question. I want you to keep going giving us examples, but I have to ask this right here. Can it go the opposite way, meaning narcissistic people? Often times out of great insecurity, they make this false thing. You look at these people, and you go, my gosh, they must be super insecure because they’re the greatest at everything and they’re always right. Can it be the opposite to protect that person?
Dr. Eva Detko:
A lot of people overcompensate. You’re right; you can spot that from miles away, right? You can sense when somebody is truly comfortable with who they are, and they’re a confident person. They’re an assertive person, which assertive is a positive thing. It’s good to be assertive and assert yourself in life. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there is that line that some people cross. It’s quite true, and they go out of their way to appear confident, or they always have to prove that they’re right. For instance, they would—if somebody questions them, they would go and research on the internet and dig out the encyclopedia, whatever. That they will just go out of their way to prove that they’re right on this particular point. Stuff like that is overcompensation.
Dr. Pompa:
Then there’s they have almost an obnoxious self-positive talk where it’s like you look at it and go—I mean, it’s just not normative, and they have that kind of talk too.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yeah, and so part of it is actually personality trait. Part of it is personality trait. I use different personality profiling tools, but one of them is Enneagram, which people may be familiar with. There’s nine personality types, but what’s interesting is it’s not necessarily that you—one thing or the other. It’s just that you just dominate in one area with your personality, and we all do. What’s also interesting is that across each type there’s—it’s a spectrum, so you can be at a high expression of that personality type or a really low expression of that personality type. That narcissistic type person would be actually the lowest expression of Type A, for instance, yes.
However, you see, if that person ever comes out of their narcissistic bubble, which—obviously, with narcissism, isn’t that the whole thing? They just don’t see the wood through the trees. Occasionally, that may happen that people decide to embark on self-development or whatever else they’re going to do. They may actually recognize that, even though their safety is in always being right and always being superior or whatever else that they need to do to feel important, when they step out of it, they understand that they can actually be more balanced and still feel good about the world and about themselves. That’s a journey that is very, very difficult for somebody who isn’t actually skewing in that direction. Yes, a part of it is actually a personality thing. Yes, we have a lot of narcissists out there. That’ true, but most people and particularly people who have chronic health issues, they will be on the other side of that. They will be more inclined to do the negative self-talk. That’s what we think.
Dr. Pompa:
The self-talk, negative self-talk is one symptom. What’s another sign?
Dr. Eva Detko:
Another sign is anything such as not feeling deserving. Something happens and you feel, oh, yeah, this is nice, but I just don’t feel like I truly deserve it. Again, just feeling like you’re worth less, and everybody else around you is somehow more worthy than you are. That’s a big identity issue as well. Chronic guilt and shame, this is quite a bit one because that will come out from early childhood as well. We’re not talking about healthy shame because there’s such a thing, but most people these days—because the society shames us in so many different ways.
I mean, it’s nuts. It’s nuts from the word go, particularly in the West. I’m talking Western society, obviously. Children are shamed for all sorts of things, and particularly when they’re shamed around the toddler age, preschool age, that could cause big problems later on. That is something to be aware of. Just going in and thinking, well, do I feel guilty all the time? Do I feel ashamed all the time? It’s something that people may actually be aware of, right?
Another thing is feeling constantly anxious, constantly worried or fearful. Of course, anxiety is just a symptom. It’s not actually the root cause. Anxiety is basically fear. It’s fear of something. How interesting. Do you not find it interesting that not so long ago we didn’t even have the label that is the generalized anxiety disorder? Now we have this thing that is generalized anxiety disorder, which means that this would be somebody who is just anxious all the time about everything, and sometimes they don’t even know what they’re anxious about.
Now, that is highly emotionally toxic. You’re winding up. You’re basically stressing your nervous system constantly, so you’re constant fight or flight. Of course, you can’t heal and you can’t detoxify if you’re constantly in fight or flight, as we know. Those things could be all sorts of things. It could be fear of failure. A lot of people have that, fear of failure, fear of losing control, which are connected, fear of criticism, fear of rejection. That’s a big one. Of course, even things like fear of death or fear of illness. Let’s not forget that illness itself is a trauma. When somebody is being chronically ill for a very long time, often time I—before I even get to any other trauma with them, I need to work with them on the trauma of the illness itself, and some people actually do have fear of the unknown, which leans back to fear of not being in control.
There are also other things, people who over-analyze or overthink a lot. What that means, that means that they live in their head so much that they almost lost the connection to their feelings and to their body. Why is that? Why does that happen? Usually, this happens as a result of a bad experience, and this is a protective mechanism. Some people think that if they’re able to rationalize and analyze the hell out of everything they feel safer if they can do that, but of course, it’s not exactly possible to do that all the time. Sometimes we need to accept that there are things that we don’t have control over and there are things that we cannot analyze or understand. That would make somebody that way inclined very, very uneasy. When people have this, often people say I’ve got a monkey mind. I can’t meditate because my mind is so busy. We know there’s something majorly toxic going on at the emotional level if you can’t make your mind go quiet and that you’ve got those constant thoughts and they’re usually negative coming into your mind just constantly so the monkey mind, obviously, as well.
Dwelling on anything that happened in the past, how many people do you know who can literally—who will still go over today something that happened 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and they just can’t let it go? It’s like that inability to let go of stuff, inability to forgive, that resentment, that chronic resentment that some people hold, the chronic grudges. That’s obviously highly toxic, and that definitely points that—to the fact that there’s been—that something went on earlier in life, some level of trauma must’ve occurred in order for you to have that chronic resentment.
Of course, when people are in toxic relationships is another one. Again, you need to have serious identity issues; i.e., you yourself have to feel quite unworthy in order to let other people take advantage of you and treat you like dirt. If you’re in a personal or otherwise a relationship where people treat you—walk all over you and treat you like a doormat, then you know that there is an issue there. That’s why we say, yeah, there’s quite a lot within that but nonetheless, really important for people to pay attention to all those things.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I mean, you give us literally nine things there that people need to look at. I mean, it's not like you'll have all of them, so how many of those would you say yeah, okay, you need to really look deeper, that you have some emotional toxicity from your childhood?
Dr. Eva Detko:
Actually, when—so I'm going back to the questionnaire because I graded it, and there's 42 questions on that questionnaire. I've given you nine, but there is obviously—when you break it down, there is more. If you answered to any more than five, then you already have a level of emotional toxicity that needs to be looked at.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so take the quiz. We'll put how to access the quiz right here.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yeah, I believe that will be really helpful to really shed some more light for people on this and where they're at. Essentially before we can move forward and look for solutions, we need to assess where we are. We do that with biochemistry as well.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, again, the parallels with chemical toxicity—we want to know what we're up against. It's like okay, great, now we've identified that mold and mercury are prevailing here, so now we know what we can do about it. We've taken the test; thank you for that. Then okay, great, now what can we do about it? Now what do we do? This is the—now this is the detox question. How do I detox these emotions out of me so that I can live a happy, normal life.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
Again, we're talking about turn off this illness that I'm dealing with. We know just like the chemical toxins, it can keep these symptoms there, no different. I need this next level of detox so I can get where I want to with my health or my emotions, whatever it is.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yeah, that certainly was the case for me. I had chronic fatigue nad fibromyalgia nad I was really, really sick and couldn't get out of bed at some point. It was not so much the diet because I had already been gluten-free at that point anyway. I was quite careful about what I was eating. It was actually doing the trauma work that got me out of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. It definitely—and I definitely see that with many of my clients because what ends up happening is I get a lot of inquiries from people who have already done a lot of work on the biochemistry front. That's what people tend to go to first because it's just easier. Then the emotional stuff is left til the end, usually. What I'll say here don't leave it til the end. Just do this work alongside each other because really when you get—
Dr. Pompa:
What is the work? How do we do it? What's going on?
Dr. Eva Detko:
We've got the awareness, and that is really, really important because you can't deal with something you don't know what you're dealing with. The trauma work, there are a number of superb modalities these days, and the goal of the modalities for me, havening techniques and brainworking recursive therapy.
Havening techniques is actually psycho-sensory modality, which means that you simulate the receptors on the skin and that acts directly via the nervous system connection on the amygdala part of the brain, so the part of the brain that is responsible for processing emotions, and this is a very incredible method because you can use it for severe trauma, but you can also use it as a management tool. For instance, you go into a meeting and you have to give speech or whatever; you have to speak or give a presentation and you're a bit anxious. You can actually use it to manage the symptoms of anxiety. Of course, I always encourage to get to the root of the anxiety and you can use that method for that.
Dr. Pompa:
How do you spell it? You said havening techniques?
Dr. Eva Detko:
Havening, like haven as in haven, a safe place, havening. The havening touch itself is actually very, very simple, but please do not underestimate that just because this is simple and easy to do—a child can do this—doesn't mean it's less effective for it because it's actually incredibly effective. It also combines really well with all sorts of other modalities. It's a very flexible method. People may be familiar with emotional freedom techniques. I've got havening, so I don't work with EFT so much because I've got havening, but of course EFT is also an excellent technique to work with.
Dr. Pompa:
Just so people know, EFT is the tapping.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yes, [35:08] tapping.
Dr. Pompa:
Could you show us what the havening technique is?
Dr. Eva Detko:
Right, so yes, since we've got the video here, so there are three sides, and essentially what's really interesting about havening techniques is that by stimulating the receptors on the skin, like I said, you actually are able to change your brainwave activity. Usually when we stress or when we're going through a traumatic experience, the brainwave activity is really high. With havening, we're able to bring it right down all the way to delta level which is the same level of activity that we experience in deep sleep, which of course is when we heal. Havening is very conducive to healing in that respect.
There are three sides, and it's really simple. The first one is the face, and all we're doing essentially is strokes like this. You can go from the top of the forehead or you can go even from under the eyes. That's the first one. The second one is the arms, and you can do it through one layer of clothing. Of course, if you have lots of layers, you need to remove some of them, but you don't need to do it on the skin; you can do it through one layer of clothing like I've got now and you've got now. We're going from the top of the shoulder, and we're sweeping all the way down to the elbow. Obviously I'm just doing this now; you don't need to hold your arms up in the air; I'm just wanting to show this. You're obviously keeping them down here so that you're comfortable That's more or less the speed and the tempo of it, so it doesn't need to be too slow or too fast. It's just moderate. Then the third one is your hands, and it goes like this. It's basically almost like washing your hands, very easy.
Here's the thing with this modality: you can actually work on a specific traumatic memory with this. You can have the memory of something that you experienced that's still causing an emotional response, so that's the key one. You still need to have an emotional response You go to that memory, close your eyes and go there, and then the moment you bring that feeling up, because of course you remember something and immediately, you've got that emotional response You start havening at that point straightaway. We don't want to re-traumatize, so we don't necessarily want to go over and over what we experienced.
What we do with havening is we start stimulating the brain in a variety of different ways. We use humming, we use counting, and we use spacial awareness For instance, you would imagine that you're walking on the beach, or in the forest, or something like that. You imagine yourself walking or skipping or skipping rope or something like that so there's movement involved.
Then finally, we also use the eye movement. People may've heard of EMDR. This utilizes the eye movement also as well as the havening touch; you're doing that and at the same time, you're moving your eyes sharply right and sharply left. You can go over your own—obviously I want to have it here. If you have complex emotional trauma, don't try and work on this yourself because you could bite off more than you can chew, obviously. If you maybe had a family gathering and somebody really got on your nerves and then you're still fuming a week later, go back to that in your mind, bring up the emotional response, and haven on that. In a matter of ten minutes, sometimes even less, you could get rid of that emotional response.
What then happens is you still have the memory but it does not upset you anymore. Essentially it's the emotional response that's going to put the stress on the nervous system. If we just have a memory of something and it causes no emotional response whatsoever, then fine. That's not toxic. What's toxic is the negative emotional response that that memory will induce. That can be addressed with havening. Of course, if people know tapping then they can tap on those things as well, on those negative memories.
That is one way of using this modality. I mix it with all sorts of things. Like I said, I work with really complex emotional trauma. I bring all sorts of other things into it. I bring NLP, hypnosis, Gestalt therapy, all sorts of other things in a child work because of course when you were—if you had issues in those first formative years of your life, then we need to do some work around that. I obviously use havening alongside other techniques to do that. Definitely this is a self-help tool that anybody can use. It's really amazing because sometimes—okay, so maybe you're in a meeting and you're a bit stressed. Okay, fine, you're not going to start stroking your face, but you can still rub your hands and nobody is going to know any better because people just do that, don't they? Nobody's going to question why you're rubbing your hands. You can even do it in the heat of the moment while you're going through something stressful, so that's really, really excellent.
Then another one that I use is brainworking recursive therapies, actually psychotherapy techniques. There's no sensory stimulation, that it's actually a set protocol of steps and just to describe what we're trying to do is we're trying to inter-wrap the pattern. For instance, people know that—may know or may not know; I don't know, but a conscious response is much slower than instinctive subconscious response. For instance, if I were to throw something at you, you immediately would either try to catch it or you try to get out of the way, right? It will be something that you just do and a moment later, you'd be aware that you've done it. It's that consciousness only catches up a couple of seconds later.
Dr. Pompa:
What's this called? What's this technique called?
Dr. Eva Detko:
Brainworking recursive therapy, BRWT, for short. The idea here is that we want to almost interrupt the pattern. When people have emotional responses, it's usually that they have a memory and then that emotional response comes in. We want to interrupt—we actually almost injecting something else in between the original memory and the response. We actually work with pre-fed response and we work with future memories. We're replacing the original memory, if you will. That's sort of what we're trying to do with this one. Your mind doesn't actually know reality from fiction, so the alternative memory work is actually really, really effective. That's another great technique that people can do if they have memories that are seriously disturbing to them.
Dr. Pompa:
Give us an example of how you would interrupt that.
Dr. Eva Detko:
The protocol has got about 14 steps in it, and you follow those exactly. Basically what you do is you recall the original memory and with that, usually there will be an emotional response. Even if there isn't that immediate emotional response, we can still work with the memory. Then we want to then think about how we want it to be instead in that moment. We know what we did or didn't do, but how could you change that original memory to be more positive, more empowering so you're more in control. We want to keep it positive, so we don't want to be vindictive in it or anything like that, just keep it nice and clean. Keep it positive.
Then you also create a future memory where in that memory, you look back and you realize hey, I had this problem once, but now I can see I don't have this problem anymore. The future movie or whatever it is that you're doing is telling you that you don't have that problem anymore. Then what we're doing is—and there's other steps involved but basically, you're jumping around between those three stages, between those three memories, the original and the preferred and future memory.
What then ends up happening is that after a while—you repeat that X number of times, and then there's other steps involved, but after a while, what often happens is that you can no longer recall the original memory in the same way as you did initially, number one. Number two, you don't have the emotional response that comes with it. Again, you can eliminate that emotional toxic response, essentially. That's a great one. This one is not so easy to do on yourself, but the alternative memory work—this is not necessarily something completely new because in NOP, we use the alternative memory work as well. That people can do on themselves, so that is as simple as going over the traumatic memory or whatever memory that upset you still and gives you that feeling of fear, anger, frustration, whatever, or sadness. Then you go over that memory in a different way. You create a different movie of that memory as if you're still there doing something different in order for that memory to give you a better—so you have a better outcome in the memory, in other words. We change the outcome.
That's another—that's more of a psychotherapy technique, but another one that I really, really want people to have a go at is in their child work because that's huge. As I described, we have those different stages of child development. We've got infancy; we've got toddler, preschool. John Bradshaw was the one who described this really well. If somebody wants to know a little bit more about this, John Bradshaw's Homecoming is a great book to read. He talked about infancy, toddler, preschool, and school child. We have different emotional needs through those different stages because as we develop, our needs change.
In the infancy stage, of course it's all about touch. It's about that comfort, physical comfort. Then as we become a little bit older, we start learning to say no, and then we start to communicate, and so on. Our needs change through those different stages. Sometimes when people, for example, have difficulty saying no, I already know that there was something that happened at the toddler stage because they never developed this ability to say no and feel good about saying no. That's another symptom when people just say yes to everything and then they feel resentful about it; they're just not able to say no to people.
That's already a little red light there. Another one is, for instance, when people have difficulty expressing anger. That will be more to do with the preschool stage. What we can also do is we can go—if people don't have specific memories of when they were really little, it doesn't stop them from imagining—so we're creating some imagery around this time of our lives. Even if it's not real, it doesn't matte because I already told you your subconscious mind doesn't really tell the difference between what's real and what's not real, which is why you can alter memories and get a better response.
We can create that imagery around the child, and then we can bring our adult self into that memory and we can be the protector for that child. This may sound like something really weird, but people have incredible emotional releases and responses when they do this exercise. Again, if you know that you had loads of trauma as a child, then maybe you do need to be guided through this process. If you feel that your childhood was okay but maybe there was some wounds there that you want to heal, okay. If you know that you had a lot of trauma, then potentially that exercise could bring up a lot of stuff that you may feel completely overwhelmed by. If you're in that camp, then it's better to get two, three sessions with somebody to guide you through this process and then you're done.
I just want to do this responsibly. I don't want people to end up in a situation where they're not able to handle their own work. People can do their own work, and I encourage—I always—that's how I work with people. I coach and teach people to do a lot of their own work. There is some times when there's a lot of complexity. It really pays off to have a little bit of guidance at the beginning. Then you take it away and you can do it yourself.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, wow, and I agree. Some people are going to need a coach. That's what they hire me for, right? You're too toxic; you can't do this alone, although I encourage people. I teach people all the time. This is what you should be doing in your life. However, many people are far too toxic physically, chemically to do it on their own and they need a coach, and that's what I do. Same with this; you made great suggestions here, but many people watching and listening, you need a coach because you could end up in great doo-doo just like chemical toxicity. Hire a coach; that's the point. You have her information here and the quiz even to take as a starting point and even some things you can start right away, but I'm sure it's much deeper than that, Dr. Eva. Some people need you, no doubt.
I'm so [50:42] this because you gave us really good tools, from an understanding, a testing—is this me—to start here right away to start some of this emotional detox work. I think it was the most useful show that we've had on this subject, really. You gave us great, great tools, set tools but yet it's still a starting place. We have to identify this stuff just like a toxin. Otherwise, you're not going to get well. It's the hidden toxin of all hidden toxins, frankly.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yeah, and there's one thing that I didn't mention, but there's definitely a place here to mention values and beliefs. Sometimes people can have very negative response to live, not necessarily as a result of trauma but as a result of something that I call social engineering. This basically happens to all of us from the word go. We come into this world and immediately we're being passed on other people's values and beliefs because quite honestly, without them we would not be able to survive because you need to know that you don't stick your hand in the fire because this is a bad thing to do. There's obviously a lot of positive beliefs that our caregivers, our parents, our guardians give us when we—at that young age when we need to learn, but at the same time they have their own hangups, and they have their own insecurities. They're going to end up—a lot of it will end up being your stuff just because it was their stuff.
That is another thing to pay attention to. One of the things that people—that I didn't mention earlier as a symptom of emotional toxicity is emotional conflict. This is huge. How do you know you have emotional conflict? Because you've got that constant eh-eh-eh-eh going on in your mind. It's like ugh, I want to go in this direction, but ugh, oh, God, and you're questioning yourself and going back and forth. You're feeling conflicted because maybe you think that your biggest value in life is making a lot of money but at the same time, you've got your family and you want to spend time with them. Do you see what I mean?
Maybe that value isn't even your value. Maybe that's something that somebody said to you when you were young, and they said, “Oh, in order for your life to be worthwhile, you need to be making lots of money.” Do you know what I mean? You just take it on.
Dr. Pompa:
One of the things that I had said when I was coaching my [53:22] is look, you have to go back on a timeline. Of course, look at these potential trauma that occurred, things that really changed your views and also evaluate not just the events in our life but the people, teachers, friends, impact—that had—that gave you certain premises. We carry these false beliefs and premises that set up certain values that aren't right. Yet it defines our life, possibly for the negative. You have to look at these premises and evaluate them because you're right; sometimes they're given to us and it's not even who we are. We're living our life in conflict.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Yeah, and it goes back to having enough self-awareness to step back and go okay, what is it that's going round and round in my head? Is it that maybe—I actually had a client once who believed they were going to die at the age of 60 because their mother and their aunt died at the age of 60. Now wow, when you have a belief like that, that's really bad. You need to change that.
Dr. Pompa:
Look at the areas in your life that you're not successful or you're struggling, whether it's your health, finances, relationships, and evaluate your premises around those. If you have trouble with money, I promise you there was a belief that was maybe given to you by your family, your father, a teacher, brother; who knows? It's not right and it's creating a lot of grief in your life.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Absolutely. Yeah, so that's a big one. If somebody—people can do that for themselves. They can sit down and actually just spend 15 minutes, half an hour to really think what is really important to me and what do I believe about health? What do I believe about myself? What do I believe about my professional life or whatever else it may be? The things that are important, and just see whether those things align. If you're not aligned, then you're going to be emotionally toxic and we're back to square one having this problem all over again. Yeah, that's another important thing that I forgot to mention earlier.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that's good. That's great stuff. Thank you so much. Gosh, wealth of knowledge on this subject. I can't wait to visit your site; I'm going to take the quiz. That's awesome.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Brilliant, excellent. Thank you for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure. I am really pleased that you're shining the light on this for people as well because there needs to be more discussion on this and there needs to be more depth. This is not just about doing an occasional guided meditation. There's a lot more to it than that.
Dr. Pompa:
This is important I think I'm going to have you come to one of my seminars, so when we can get you to the US, let's get you here. Thank you, Dr. Eva, appreciate you.
Dr. Eva Detko:
Thank you so much. Dr. Dan. Thank you.
Dr. Pompa:
Hey, I want to tell you about one of our sponsors, CytoDetox. Look, podcasts cost money. There's a lot of production going around this, but we are grateful to have CytoDetox as one of the sponsors. It's so easy for me to talk about the product because myself and my family use it constantly as we practice what I preach. For over 15 years, I've talked about and taught doctors and the public about cellular detox. I'll tell you, Cyto was a breakthrough for us. It's changed so many lives. We're grateful that they sponsor Cellular Healing TV. It makes sense, doesn't it? They should.
Ashley Smith:
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