Navigating the Holistic Healing Landscape: A Conversation with Katherine Housh
Understanding German New Medicine
Katherine introduces German New Medicine, a concept she learned from a client who had a terminal illness. This approach explores the intricate relationship between the mind and the body, suggesting that physical symptoms are often a response to unresolved trauma or intense stress. Katherine explains how this approach has helped her and her clients overcome fear and improve their overall well-being.
Connecting with the Body's Language
German New Medicine encourages us to learn the language of our bodies and to listen to what our gut tells us about various situations. This connection between our mind and body is crucial in understanding and responding to symptoms. The program emphasizes that our bodies communicate messages through symptoms and urges us to interpret and respond to these messages constructively.
Reducing Fear Around Symptoms
A reduction in fear around symptoms seems to be a key factor in Katherine's approach. Katherine confirms that reducing fear is indeed significant. She also highlights that German New Medicine has empowered her to understand the root causes of her symptoms, which has been instrumental in her healing journey.
The Mind-Body Connection
Katherine emphasizes that mind and body are interconnected, challenging the notion that physical symptoms are purely genetic or related to personal choices. She believes that understanding the mind-body connection is vital to holistic healing, dispelling disempowering beliefs, and encouraging a proactive approach to wellness.
Empowering Self-Healing
Katherine's approach empowers individuals to take control of their health and well-being. She encourages listeners to question, explore, and remain curious about different healing modalities, recognizing that holistic practices can complement conventional medicine and help individuals live healthier, more balanced lives.
Conclusion
In this thought-provoking conversation, Katherine Housh sheds light on the power of holistic healing and the mind-body connection in managing autoimmune diseases and chronic health conditions. Her journey from conventional nursing to holistic health coaching highlights the importance of exploring alternative approaches to health and wellness. The conversation leaves us with a newfound sense of curiosity and empowerment to take charge of our well-being.
Disclaimer: Everything we discuss here is just meant to be general education and information. It's not intended as personal mental health or medical advice. If you have any questions related to your unique circumstances, please contact a licensed therapist or medical professional in your state of residence.
Destiny Davis, LPC CRC, is solely responsible for the content of this article. The views expressed herein may or may not necessarily reflect the opinions of the guest.
The content in this blog post comes directly from a real, human interview between Destiny and her guest on The Chronic Illness Therapist Podcast. This written version was formatted using AI. Listen to the full episode to hear the actual conversation.
Listen to my full conversation with Katherine Housh on Ep 33: Exploring German New Medicine w/ Katherine Housh
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Episode transcribed with AI and may contain errors that are not representative of the actual word or meaning of the sentence.
Katherine Housh she's a trauma informed holistic nurse coach, empowering women with auto-immune disease to stop fearing flare ups by learning to speak their body's language. This is hand in hand. The work that I do as a therapist who uses acceptance and commitment therapy, as well as somatic experiencing. I wanted to start this episode off with a little bit of a disclaimer, backstory of my own experience with holistic practitioners. And my thoughts and beliefs and current standing on all of that. I think it's important because Catherine and I get into a conversation around holistically naturally healing things like chronic health conditions.
As many of, you know, if you've been following me on Instagram for a few years and my clients know I do not preach a cure. That's not my main goal. I do believe that people go into remission from all types of conditions. My belief is that when you find the thing that works for your body, not just the thing when you find multiple things, because that's just how it works. There's never one cure, one kind of quick fix one missing link. There are several pieces to this puzzle. And sometimes we find a piece and it works. And then all of a sudden that piece doesn't work anymore. Um, and so it's just important to like lay this land before getting into this episode. My own experience with holistic practitioners is this. I was terrified of medical doctors my whole life, because I watched my mom, basically not basically I watched my mom be gas lit her entire life
And because I was so young and have my own family history of relational trauma. I really believed the things that people said to, or about my mom. And that is something that as an adult, I've worked on quite a lot. Uh especially because as kids, we also internalize a lot of the things that we hear about our caregivers. We hear these things or we see the way that our caregivers talk to themselves or the way that they talk to us.
And we internalize that and think that those things are true about us. So then they become our burden to carry. And that's where a really good therapist comes into play is helping you unravel some of those beliefs and thoughts that don't belong to you.
And we're never meant for you.
So. I am incredibly lucky enough that I have an amazing cousin who is a naturopathic doctor in Connecticut who specializes in Lyme disease. And when I went to see her one year just visiting, um, she, I was just really just complaining. About my symptoms and about the health problems that I was going through, but I still never really thought that I had a diagnosis that I had something diagnosable.
I actually still struggle with that a little bit. Um, Lyme disease is one of those things where you can't just like, test your blood and say, yep, you have it. Or you don't. Um, and it causes a lot of long term. It can cause a lot of long-term neurological issues and that's stuff that I deal with kind of daily.
Persistent nerve pain, joint pain, brain fog. Things like that. And I've learned so much about how to compensate for that. Um, and to still get my job done and my projects done and all of the things that I genuinely love doing. And so that's how I tend to work with clients is we figure out what is important to you. What is the main thing in your life? Where if you died tomorrow?
You could look back and say, I did live my life in this way. You might not have accomplished everything that you wanted to accomplish, but you can look back saying I showed up every day as the person that I wanted to be. That's our goal, always in therapy and my therapy with clients.
Sometimes that requires.
A lot of grief. Sometimes that requires a lot of discipline. Sometimes that requires letting go of discipline. It's such an individualized process.
And so now my healthcare is really a combination of still processing with naturopathic doctors. And also a functional medicine doctor. There's a clinic here in Atlanta that I respect a lot and send almost all of my clients to, because they do such great work with combining. The holistic approach with.
Also Western medicine.
And there's also such a time and a place for your medical doctors as well. But again, as we have talked about so many times on this podcast, Doctors are not. The end all be all. And that is a good thing. Because when you go to your doctor and they can't fix you, which is what we all so desperately want.
It just helps our brain to understand that that was never really their job to begin with. The human body is incredibly complex and we just don't have the answers that we think we do. So. Again, that leads me into this discussion with Catherine.
As I talk with Catherine today we go back into something called German new medicine, which I had never heard of before I started following Catherine on Instagram. And it's intriguing. I am a bit of a science geek and the way that I just love to read about it and love to learn about kind of why things work the way they do. So, you know, when I come across something like German, new medicine, I want to know all about it. It sounds to me like Catherine has had great success with helping clients get rid of a lot of fear in their body. And when we do that, we know that the nervous system.
Starts to feel safe enough to do the work that it is capable of doing. Sometimes that means reversing food triggers. You know, certain things don't affect us anymore. When our nervous system is more evened out.
Catherine, we'll do a better job at explaining kind of the nuances of German new medicine, but. This disclaimer is for people who might be skeptical of holistic practices. I think we should be skeptical of. All practices. Western Eastern doesn't matter. Germany, new medicine, naturopathic care. Supplements pharmaceuticals. Skepticism a healthy level of skepticism is what has kept us safe as a species and alive as a species. So that's necessary.
I do believe that our bodies. Have the capacity to heal and reverse trauma. That is something that I've seen with clients and it doesn't happen overnight. Not in my experience anyway. So As you're listening to this episode, if you are feeling. Any of that skepticism. Congratulate yourself. You're human and your brain is working.
Allow the skepticism to be there. And then listen with an open heart and an open mind, ask questions. You know, get curious. And if something feels triggering inside of you.
That's allowed. You're allowed to feel rattled by things that you hear and different belief systems and ideologies. I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but. You know, at one point in our history pre-industrial revolution, we just knew 150 people on average from the moment we were born, until the moment we died.
Now you can hear 150 different people's opinions on tech talk literally in an hour. So.
It's a bit overwhelming to take in all of these different ideologies and when you just accept them for what they are as maybe one tool in one person's toolbox that may or may not be that last missing link for you. Well, then it doesn't feel like such a threatening concept. So.
think one of the biggest triggers to hearing things about cures and things that can just resolve symptoms is that if that is the case, and if that's true and it's not happening for you, like your symptoms are not going away. And your disease is not being re reversed. It feels like your failing, your doing something wrong. And that is a lot of times what triggers that anger inside of us.
So just pay attention to that and, and use the skills that you have from your own therapists and from all of the different. Personal development, books and podcasts and things that you listened to use those tools to help keep you grounded and stay curious. Curiosity is one of the biggest components of becoming psychologically flexible, which is our whole goal with an acceptance and commitment therapy. So I'm airing this episode because I think German new medicine is intriguing.
I was really curious about it. And it seems to have worked for quite a lot of people. And I also want to make sure. Folks always know that I'm never pushing any kind of cure or, or treatment. Or anything like that as always, this truly is just for educational purposes. So you absorb the information and then you make an educated decision about what you want and what you don't want for yourself. So with that said, I hope you enjoy hearing from Catherine all about what German new medicine has done for her and some of her clients.
And if you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to ask. You can email me at. destiny@destinywinters.com and you can also. Connect with Catherine. I will put her information in the show notes below.
So,
hi Katherine. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and, um, yeah, background, what you used to do, what you're currently doing now. Just tell us a little bit about you.
All right. Well, I. Professionally was a registered nurse for 15 years and I worked in all the places that nurses can work.
I worked in the hospital, I worked in home, I worked in schools, I did some teaching. Um, so I really got a front seat, the view of how our healthcare system works that way. But then also I, um, was an autoimmune disease patient for. At least that long. It's probably closer to 20 years now. So I also got to see our healthcare system from that side of things, which was really interesting.
And that led me to what I do now, which is nothing related to the conventional healthcare system that I was in. And so now I work as a trauma informed health coach. I help other women that have chronic illness, autoimmune disease. Mental and physical health diagnoses and we use sort of a mind body approach, and that's what helped me.
So that's what I'm bringing back into the world now.
Yeah. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about your approach, what it's called? What are the, some of the tenants of it?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. So when I first got diagnosed, it was in the early two thousands and I went down the track that a lot of us with physical illness do, which is nutrition, and throw out all the supposedly triggering foods.
And I went to therapy, which was great. That was a big part of it. But I did supplements. I did. Natural treatments. I did prescription medications, I did immunosuppressants, so I tried everything and still would suffer these like really debilitating flareups. And they're, they aren't just physical, like I've had anxiety my entire life, which of course then if you have health problems, it becomes its own animal.
The fear of the symptoms becomes worse than the symptoms. And so I just got to this point. About, maybe it was four or five years ago where I was really frustrated because here I was now I transitioned from nursing, I was working in health coaching, and I felt like I was supposed to teach about nutrition, and I was supposed to teach about detoxing and you know, biohacking and just none of that stuff had ever worked for me, even though.
I was privileged to have access to that cuz those things are not cheap. Um, and I think I'd always carried in the back of my mind this really strong intuition that in some way my physical and emotional mental health symptoms were related to trauma that I experienced in childhood. And I remember sitting there with my gastroenterologist and having that conversation and saying, I think, I think my.
Ulcerative colitis is related to my trauma, perhaps related to family or whatever. And he was like, well, you can't get away from them, so I guess you just gotta take these medications. And I was like, no, that does, no, that's not what I wanna do. But that was all that was offered. Um, so then I was working with a client a few years ago who was a naturopath and she had a terminal illness.
It was in her bones and she. Recognized in herself, kind of a mind body connection between her own trauma and symptoms, and she said, I remember this doctor, this German doctor, Dr. Hamer, who did research and found that all physical symptoms and changes in the body, even the ones we label as disease, actually have an intentional.
Root in the brain that are a response to our trauma called a biological conflict, something that felt like a threat to life. So if we perceive that there's a threat or an intense threat in our stress in our life, our brain will actually tell our body, organs, tissues to change to make us better able to handle that threat in some way.
And as I. Dove into the rabbit hole. It made so much sense. I started looking up like my digestive symptoms, my pot symptoms, my Addison's disease symptoms, and it was saying like, Indi digestible morsel, unable to express your anger, overwhelming negative stress being on the wrong, or feeling like you're on the wrong path in life.
And I was like, this describes me to a t. And as I started kind of breaking down those individual. Traumas and conflicts in my life and releasing a lot of it. I saw immediately my health improving. I could tolerate more foods. I wasn't going to the bathroom as much. I didn't need big doses of medications.
My anxiety was nearly gone. And yeah, it just solidified for me that it's all connected. We can't separate the mind from the body. They work together and. Having our symptoms start in our brain is not the same as saying they're in our imagination. You know? Yeah. So that's where I am today. Yeah. Um, can you tell me what the
main factor was?
Like the main changing factor? It sounds like there is like a reduction of fear around your symptoms. Mm-hmm. Yeah. In and of itself I'm sure had a huge impact. What in yes or no? And then is there another mechanism that you can speak to in
that? Yeah. So I don't know about you, but I, I feel like for myself, for many of us, what we really want to know is why am I sick?
You know, the, the theory that it's just bad genes and there's nothing you can do about it, and you're born this way, and that feels very disempowering to me. Right, or the idea that you did this to yourself in some way, like you chose the wrong foods, or you didn't manage your stress or meditate enough.
That doesn't resonate with me. That feels yucky. And the idea that. You know, the, the world is filled with lots of toxins and our food and water isn't the same. I believe that. But I, it still didn't explain to me, well, how come I got sick? But not that person who's drinking the same water, eating the same food, what, what's the difference?
And I understand for a lot of people, they have their own sort of paradigm, how they explain that, well, you know, my genes are different, or my nature versus nurture. All this for me, learning German new medicine. Answered the why question because it's, it's not random and vague. It's very, very specific, like on a cellular level.
And there, for me, the clearest example was, um, when my adrenal glands shut down and I had to go on replacement hydrocortisone for those, it was about 10 years ago. I didn't know why, why just randomly why didn't happen to anybody else in my family. And when I connected the pieces, I learned that what I was experiencing in my adrenal gland was a very specific response to a conflict of being on the wrong path in life.
And since I was 12 years old. I knew that I was on the wrong career path. I come from a medical family. They wanted me to be a nurse or a doctor. I wanted to be a teacher. They said they dissuaded me from that. And so becoming a registered nurse, it was like my heels were dug in the whole way. Like, no, please, I don't wanna do that.
That's not the career for me. It just doesn't fit my personality. And what Dr. Hamer learned is when you're on the wrong path in life. Your body is so merciful, it'll actually lower your cortisol production intentionally to slow you down and make you so fatigued so that you don't have the energy to continue on the wrong path.
And as soon as you switch and realize, your brain realizes you're on the right path, your cortisol production kicks in. Again, this happened for me measurably when I left my nursing career last year. It came time to renew my nursing license, and my practitioner said, As long as you have that license, your brain is associating that you're on this nursing track.
So let your license go. See what happens. Like within weeks, my, uh, my cortisol levels were starting to rise and I was decreasing my dose for the first time in 10 years. Like crazy, right?
Yeah, I do, I believe there's, I mean, it, we talk a lot on this podcast about meaning and purpose, and it's a word that a lot of people get really hung up on because then you can kind of start to think about like, Okay.
Is it fate? Like how do I know what my meaning is or what my purpose is in life? And, um, so I'm curious, you're, we've talked again, we've talked a lot about it on this podcast and. Hopefully listeners know by now, like, I'm, I'm, I stand by creating your own meaning, um, which is a part like listening to your intuition, learning how to listen to your intuition because we don't just come out of, well, I would say we come out of the womb knowing and then we unlearn that, and then we kind of learn how to listen to our bodies again.
So I think, um, That's my stance is like, meet, create. You have to create your meaning and purpose. And that's a mix of listening to your body and trying things and trying and failing and succeeding. Um, what is your approach to kind of meaning or purpose?
Yeah. I love what you said that we are born knowing.
Um, My program, it's called The Whole Self Revolution, and it's broken into three parts, and that first part is learn to speak your body's language, and we do that through German new medicine. But the second part is to listen to your mind and to listen to your body. Because we don't do that. We tell our mind, body what they should think and what they should do and how they should feel.
And we've lost, like you said, that natural birthright ability to tune into what is my gut telling me right now about this situation? Yeah, you can call it intuition, instinct, gut reaction, whatever you wanna call it. And I think that is where the answer lies to healing most of what ails us as a society mentally and physically.
In fact, that's what most of our group sessions are spent doing is using somatic tools, which I adore not only for nervous system regulation, but also for. Interpreting the messages the body is sending us. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've worked with people with chronic pain and they come to me and their shoulders are up to their ears and they're so tense and they have like no range of motion.
And I'll ask them questions and they'll be telling me like, well, I have to do this and I can't say no to that and I have to do this. And, and I'll be like, look at your posture right now. Like, Is your, are your neck and shoulders telling you that you wanna do this thing? Well, I don't. No. We're gonna pause.
Like, imagine for a moment you have a choice. Do you want to do these things? Do they align with your meaning and purpose and deepest desires in life? And they're like, no. The shoulders start dropping. I'm like, can you take a deep breath with me and imagine for a moment, Yourself saying no to this obligation and releasing it and trusting that somebody better able to fulfill it.
We'll pick it up like you can watch them physically transform in front of you. In the moment, headaches go away, 20 years of chronic pain gets released because they finally started actually saying out loud what they, what is true for them, but that they were repressing it in some way because you know, that's what society does, right?
It keeps us small. He keeps us obedient. Um, and so I think the body holds all the answers and my job is to help people have better communication with their bodies so it's not such a foreign language for them.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's the best part of that somatic work. Mm-hmm. Um, I try not to get too.
I try not to shit on c b T too much in this, um, on this podcast because I know that there are a lot of really great cognitive behavioral therapists who do really good work. Um, and I think that I do think like we're at different places, at different times in our life, different places in our life, like sometimes.
Especially with somatic work, you really have to be ready, like mm-hmm. You just have to be ready or else everything, I feel like backfires. Mm-hmm. So sometimes you need, you need talk therapy or you need, um, something that's not somatic based, just to get you maybe even just acclimated to these ideas. For you, it sounds like you were doing a ton of research.
You were, you know, reading for yourself. You were, you wanted what you were searching for. Um, and I know then, and then the clients who come to you, I'm sure are searching for something similar. But I do get a lot of clients who are not, they're, they're kind of like, they really, one, they don't even know what like somatic work is.
And then I, in our consult calls, I'll be like, you know, this is the gist of somatic work. I'm like, okay, like, They're open. Obviously if they decide to work with me, then they're open. But, um, there's still a, just like this. Hmm, okay. Like, I'm just gonna like trust the, the, the professional here on the other end.
And, and so we have to really work on it. It has to be your thing. Mm-hmm. You know, it has to be you who you really believe in, in somatic work, or you, um, you know, you want something different and you're not just going along with it because a doctor or a health professional said like, this is what I think is best for you.
Yeah, and I think sometimes like C B T is the door into somatic work because we are conditioned to feel safer in our minds right now, right? We think if I'm being rational and logical and I'm thinking this through, then I'm gonna get good answers. I think that there's an awareness that has to happen of the thoughts that we're thinking and the stories that we're telling, and the way we're perceiving things and our narrative, for example, about our chronic illness.
And I think cbt, C B T helps with a lot of that. Of like awareness of the thoughts and the way that I'm wiring my body in response to those thoughts. And then once we get a handle on that, cuz some people aren't even aware of their thoughts yet, right? They're just going through the motions on autopilot.
Once we're aware of our thoughts, then we can kind of drop into the body and we're gonna get like another layer, another level of um, answers, I think.
Yeah.
What would you say is a realistic timeframe that you see your clients? Reduction in pain. And does this mean they'll never experience pain again in their life?
What does, what are the expectations that you set for
people? I always say that within. Two weeks, they can notice a huge shift in the symptom that they're working on, whether that's a headache, whether it's constipation, whether it's a skin rash. Um, the problem is after that, they go right back to their old ways of living and being and doing.
And so the symptoms come back and they're like, it doesn't work. I said, no, no, no. This is not how our neural pathways. Function. You can do something once and have this breakthrough awareness that it could be different, but it takes repetition and practice and time to make that your new normal. So usually then it's at like the three month mark where people are starting to really have some momentum.
They're getting a handle on it. They're feeling confident, like, okay, now I'm actually having. More good days than bad days. Um, and by the six month mark, they feel strong enough to go do that big thing that they've been putting off for a while, whether it's going back to work, going on a trip, eating some food that, I mean, we, we reintroduce forbidden foods a lot sooner than six months, but that's when they feel comfortable to kind of take it and run with it.
Um, and will they ever have pain or symptoms again? You know, this is where that reframing and learning to speak our body's language is so important. That's what brings us the freedom from fear, because yeah, we're, we're gonna have pain and we're gonna have symptoms, and we may have new ones we've never had before.
The difference is in the future, we no longer have to immediately jump into that. Fear spiral. We don't have to catastrophize it. And we realize this is just a message from my body about what's happening in this moment. And I can translate it, respond to it, and move on from it. So we never experience pain or symptoms in the same way once we do this program.
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. So they start to feel better. Um, and they, it's
again, sounds like they reduce fear of symptoms. It's not so much, it's no longer there's a symptom. I'm fearful. It's, there's a symptom. What does this mean? And from like a, a healthy, curious place rather than from what does this mean?
Oh my God, this is terrible.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which honestly, on a psychological level, like locks the symptom in, right? Because when we identify a symptom as a threat or a danger, That puts it in a high priority level in our brain, and we'll continue to fixate on it and continue to perpetuate it when we understand that symptoms are temporary and they come and they bring a message, and then when we receive and respond that mess to that message, they can leave.
Um, we're we just, we don't keep feeding or fueling that symptom.
Yeah. Um, and what are the main. Tenants. So like in acceptance and commitment therapy, there's six different tenants. There's acceptance, there's self context, there's diffusion, there's these six kind of core philosophies. Mm-hmm. Um, are, is there something similar within new German medicine?
Yeah. In German new medicine, Dr. Hamer took his findings and he, sorry. And he, um, put them into the five biological laws. Um,
these laws, these are things that he came up with.
Mm-hmm. Yes, they are. How he has found in his research, he's passed now, but when he was alive and he was researching that these were, there were no exceptions, that's why he called them laws.
You know, we have principles of good health, right? That if we eat good nutrition and we avoid toxic products, um, that will likely have a better rate of health and easier healing phases from. What ails us. But there, there aren't laws when it comes to nutrition, right? Like there aren't laws that if you don't eat gluten, you won't have symptoms.
What he found were these unalterable truths about how the psyche, brain, and organs in our body work. Um, the first one is that every disease that we see, Is the result of a, what he called a significant biological special program originating from A D H S. Basically what that means is there was a conflict shock that registered in the psyche and it started running a program from the brain to the organ to adapt to help us survive.
The exceptions to this are like extreme poison or injury like from a fall or something. Um, the second biological law, is that each of these programs, these adaptations in the body, runs in two phases. During the conflict activity, were in that sympathetic fight or flight state, and then after the resolution of the conflict or the trauma, we go into this healing and repair phase, which is rest and digest parasympathetic mode.
The third biological law.
This is the one that I don't cover as much. Um, in my programs. Dr. Hamer did a lot of research in embryology, which is, you know, how the embryo is developing in the womb and the different cells and organs that. You know, mature at different points, et cetera, et cetera. But he found that specific organs that derive from specific, how do I say this?
Um, types of cells in the body are controlled by different parts of the brain, so that's why different organs will get a message from a different part of the brain. And this is all assigned immediately at the moment of conflict. It's not something that we control. The fourth biological law is really interesting, especially in the climate that we live in today, but he found that microbes, so we're talking about bacteria, fungus, a version of viruses don't actually cause diseases.
So they're not infectious pathogens. They're part of nature that plays a role during the healing phase. Just like in nature, they break down and destroy. Dying, right. Rotting log in the forest, they do the same thing in our body. If there's tissue that needs to be decomposed and removed from the body, so in this way, disease is not contagious by spreading a pathogen from person to person, these pathogens, quote are only activated when there's a healing phase and tissue that needs to be adjusted.
Last one. the fifth biological law says that all diseases or these special programs that run in response to a conflict are created to help. The organism, human or animal, during distress, so they're never meant to harm us, which is so different than what conventional medicine teaches us about disease, right?
Our body is always trying to help us. It's never trying to harm us. Now, that doesn't mean that some of these symptoms aren't inconvenient, uncomfortable, painful. Sometimes even so extreme that they're life-threatening. But even then, that's an indication that the conflict that we experienced, the perception of it was so big and life-threatening that the symptoms as a result are, but it's never our body making a mistake going haywire, breaking down and turning against us and attacking our own tissues.
So, Interesting. New for some people, not gonna resonate with everyone. Sure. Totally makes sense to me. Yeah.
Yeah. No, it, it's a huge paradigm sh paradigm shift. But couple things, um, One, have you thought about the similarities in this method to something like, um, Chinese medicine, like fear is in the liver, or, you know, I can't, that might not be right, but, um, they very much have that.
Do, have you studied that at all or?
Yeah. I, I love traditional Chinese medicine. I use a lot of it in my programs and I think. You know when, when we're looking at science, it's all of us just observing nature and natural processes and different observers are gonna have different language or different ways of describing it, different ways of.
You know, integrating that into other practices that they use. So I'm not somebody who says German new medicine is the only way. Absolutely not. I use somatics, I use traditional Chinese medicine. I use polyvagal theory. I use, um, limited C B T I use all sorts of approaches because they all are saying the same thing in a different way.
What makes Dr. Hamer's work so different though is. It is a very specific and repeatable chain of events that we see happen in human body after human body that can be witnessed under a microscope through surgery. That is, like I said, unalterable. So some of the predecessors, like even Louise Hayes work or some of the emotional mind body work, um, sort of gave these vague.
Descriptions of possible emotions connected to organs, and this goes deeper than emotion. This is biological, it's not psychological. So it's, I have assessed that there's a threat to my life and my body is biologically adapting in a very specific and predictable way to help me survive this threat to my life.
So it goes hand in hand, and yet there's also some nuance to it that sets it apart differently.
That makes sense. And you mentioned, I know you said
rule number three is not the one you use the most, but you said something when you were going over rule number three, like assigned by conflict, not something that we control.
Mm-hmm. I'm assuming symptoms, right? Symptoms are the, the conflict occurs. Your brain then creates this, uh, pathway or this instruction manual for how to deal with this particular conflict, which usually results in some kind of physical symptom. Yeah. Would you Yeah. Describe that differently or, yeah.
So if we wanna talk about the embryonic germ layers of a cell, which I am not the expert on, but you have the endoderm, which is oldest germ layer. You have the mesoderm, which is kind of middle of the road there. And then the ectoderm, um, is one of the, Newer, more advanced parts of embryonic development in the brain.
If the psyche perceives what German new medicine calls a self devaluation conflict, this is, I don't feel good enough. I'm less than. This is really common, especially among women. I mean all of us, but a lot of women. You see this in those that have like fibromyalgia or arthritis. When the brain, the psyche, I'm sorry, the psyche perceives, I'm not good enough, that specific flavor of a conflict.
Is controlled then in the brain by the cerebral mea, which sends a message not to the intestines, not to the eyes, but to the muscles, to the connective tissue, to the joints that says, Hey guys, we're not good enough. We're not strong enough. So what we need to do is break ourselves down and then build ourselves back up stronger.
So that literally our muscles, bones, joints are stronger so that I am more valuable, more capable as a person. Now, that process can also be achieved if we go to the gym, right? The purpose of lifting weights is we. We lift weight outside of our current capacity, so we're actually breaking down muscle fibers and then when they heal, they grow back stronger and we're bulking up, right?
The body does this internally and it's controlled by the cerebral medula. It tells the muscles break down and build back up stronger. Now, if you know the day after you've been at the gym, you're in pain, you're sore, you're inflamed, you're swollen, cuz everything's healing. This happens with a conflict resolution too.
You wake up the next day and you might have a quote, fibromyalgia flare up because everything's achy and swollen and painful and tender to touch. What's happening is your body is actually repairing itself, trying to make you stronger so that you can overcome that self-evaluation conflict.
Crazy. Cool.
What do you, what do you, how do you explain, um, the part that gets stuck?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, so we call that a hanging healing, and there are a couple things that can happen. One may be I go to work, I. And my boss tells me, you're a good for nothing employee. You never get anything done on time. Like, why did we even hire you?
And I go home and I have that self-evaluation conflict, but then I talk to my friend on the phone, I feel better. I'm like, I'm a good person. My body goes into healing. I wake up the next day, I have a fibromyalgia flare up, but then I go back to work. And because my boss is just a miserable human, it doesn't matter, he doesn't know my muscles are stronger than they were yesterday.
And he tells me again. You're still not good enough. I don't know why I hired you, and so see how the brain is just like getting attacked over and over again with this self-evaluation. So I have a couple choices. I can either grow internally as a person that is no longer affected by miserable people's assessment of me, or I leave the job and go somewhere else where I'm, you know, supported every day.
That's, that's what we call like a conflict recurrence in a true hanging healing. And this is really common in especially like women that were raised in homes where they suffered narcissistic abuse or chemical dependency in the part of their parents, or just emotional neglect. Or they heard over and over and over and every day, especially during their formative years, what a terrible child they were, that they weren't loved.
That is now the set programming in their brain. And they don't even need anything to happen externally because they'll just devalue themselves in their head every day. I'm so stupid. I'm not good enough. Nobody will ever love me. And see how that keeps the body stuck in this perpetual state of conflict and repair.
And now we have somebody that's chronically ill with fibromyalgia, muscle pain, or arthritis. Um, And this is why so many people with chronic illness had trauma that started in childhood that really programmed their brain to keep replaying the conflict internally over and over. Yeah. Cause it's the
conflict over and over and over that creates such, um, chronic symptoms.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. The trauma, a single event trauma, um, absolutely we can develop P T S D and, and things of that nature, but. But what we do know from the research is that when you go through a traumatic event and you have support, proper support for your personal needs, um, or if you had some kind of, um, role in that traumatic event where you helped other people get out alive or you were like an integral part in your own or someone else's survival, we know that PTSD is far, far, far less likely to occur.
Mm-hmm. Um, So, yeah, it, it's really, it is, it's really fascinating how it's, it's such a tricky conversation because I think when you're in a place where you hear all this stuff and you're like, okay, great, like I have power and control that, that can feel great for some people. And then for other people that's like, okay, so it, it's all on me.
And like, I don't even know where to start. And again, if you did grow up with childhood trauma, you, you weren't raised in an environment where, People probably were praising you for how capable you are. Mm-hmm. So it's just a very, very deep written message internally.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that's the part that takes time and that's why in our community for the past few years, like people join, they do the program, but then they stay for a year or two because they're still rewiring and unlearning ways of being that were keeping them locked in these conflicts.
I had that with my ulcerative colitis. I grew up in an environment where when people's anger was directed at me, I just repressed my own responses to it, and I held it in because that. Is how I stayed safe emotionally and otherwise. And so it's no surprise that I ended up with a bleeding intestine for, you know, throughout my twenties, um, because I was healing from being in a place where I couldn't express my needs and my emotions were a threat to the adults around me, right?
So now I'm a person who. Speaks up for herself immediately. This is not okay. I'm not comfortable with this. I remove myself from situations. Absolutely. Nobody is allowed to unleash their rage or yell at me. Like, you know, that's, that's what's changed within me.
And that was a really deep shift, and it took me over a decade. So my goal in giving people this information about German new medicine is to help them shorten their timeline because I spent so much time hitting things that weren't making a difference in my intestines. As soon as I figured out what I actually needed to target, I saw results like with my Addison's disease.
As soon as I understood that it was being a nurse that was keeping my cortisol suppressed. Okay. I know what I'm working on now, and so everything becomes very directed instead of all over the place.
Yeah. Thank you for sharing all of that. can you give
us an example of you kind of, you mentioned like the cortisol example of a kidney adrenals specifically. Um, can you give a couple more examples of. Like specific stressors or emotional issues in the, the exact part of the body that is affected. Or if you can't, that's okay. But
yeah. Um, well, what are some of the main diagnoses you work with with your clients?
Uh, lots of Crohn's, um, and fibromyalgia. Lots of, um, I've got another like,
uh, nerve. Lots and lots of nerve pain with absolutely
no diagnosis. Um, lots and lots of clinics she's been to. Um, s Don Los is a big one. Uh,
yeah. Yeah, so I see a lot of indigestible morsel conflicts is what G N M calls them in the intestinal tract.
Uh, Crohn's is connected to ulcerative colitis in that way. There's also an element of lack with Crohn's, and this can come from growing up in an environment of poverty. It can also come from, you know, having mild symptoms and then restricting. The food that you can eat, and then your body kind of goes into starvation mode that can lead to worsening Crohn's.
Ironically, the very diet they prescribe to you is the thing that makes your disease worse. The fibromyalgia, as we mentioned, is in that self-evaluation category. Um, nerve pain is often related to very brutal, what we call separation conflicts. Another thing related to that is like eczema and hives.
Separation conflict on the skin where you're, you either lost someone and your body is missing them, and your skin and nerves actually. Adapt in a way that's supposed to help you, like biologically not miss the feeling of touch from that person. It can also mean there's a person in your space that you are trying to separate from, that you wanna get away from.
Maybe you wanna divorce, maybe it's an abusive relationship, and your body is trying to help you adapt and protect you through that as well. So, You know, I, I work very specifically with a lot of women who have been in narcissistically abusive relationships, or they struggle with codependency, lots of hives and eczema with those women trying to get out of those situations.
So all of this is the body protecting us doing its best.
Thank you. What else feels important about this conversation that we might not have touched on or want to expand on?
The science is what gave me the evidence I need to see the truth in this paradigm and this perspective on our illness. I think.
The part I enjoy the most now is that the science has become secondary meaning. I'm not anxiously searching for answers and trying to connect every little symptom and twinge to what the meaning is and what the conflict is. But there's like a more, you could call it spiritual side of it, but just, uh, reconnecting to that inner knowing, like you said, that we're all born with that connection to a purpose bigger than myself, and that my body is really just.
In a sense, like a tool that I use to get through life and have my impact on the community around me and connect with those that I love. And you know, having that relationship with self as well through the body, even through symptoms, which we've so long tried to disconnect from actually connecting to them and leaning into them and just soaking up, what is my body telling me is not working in my life right now?
Where is it that I need to. Make a change. Where do I need to grow as a person? That's why we call it the whole self revolution, because it isn't just about curing your symptoms and then going back to your life the way that it was. Your symptoms are the invitation to completely transform who you are being every day when you wake up, which is naturally gonna change the way that your life looks.
So, If there's some goal or some desire that you have been wanting to reach and you haven't been able to, you may be saying, well, it's because of my symptoms. I did that for years. I can't do this, I can't do that. The truth was, I didn't wanna do this, I didn't wanna do that, and my body was saying, great, don't worry.
We'll make it so you can't. And then when we can start being honest with ourselves about what we really want, and we start learning who do I need to become so I can achieve that and receive that, that's when it gets really exciting and like, Amazing things have happened for me personally, but also for my, my clients and my members, and that's what I'm really in it for.
Yeah. Okay. One more question around that. So, um, you come to the realization that you don't want to do something and your symptoms are helping you out by saying, okay, I'll make it so that you can't mm-hmm. Client comes to a realization around this and says, okay, fine. I don't want to, you know, be at this job, but I don't have a choice, like mm-hmm.
Because X, Y, and Z. What is your next
step? You
know, it's interesting because just this week I worked with two clients. One is bedridden living with in-laws finances are extremely tight and they see no way out of this soul sucking job. And then I also work with a client who is extremely affluent, wealthy, rich, has houses all over the world, can move wherever they want, do whatever they want.
Both of them are sick because both of them are trying to do something that's not meant for them. It's not aligned with who they really are in some way. It's satisfying the expectations of others around them. Both of them have a choice, and it feels like we don't have a choice sometimes. I understand that sometimes choice feels like a privilege.
It's really not. We can always choose to do something different no matter how small. We just start there. And then we start to empower ourselves, like, actually, I did change something. I can change something else. I can change something else. I can change something else. This is how people break through ceilings.
This is how people break, you know, the cycles and curses of generational trauma. This is how people. Provide a better life for their children is it's baby steps. And then we build momentum and we build courage and we start making really big steps. And in that process, we have to not be afraid of what we might lose in service to what we're going to gain.
You know, I, an example for me is like, I grew up with this. Mantra that family is everything and that's not compatible. When you realize my family might be what's making me sick, not them as individuals. They have their own trauma, their own paths in life, but our relationship together, the way it is right now is making me sick.
So how do I reconcile that? Well, In service to my physical health improving, I am. I chose to reevaluate my belief that family is everything, and I realized maybe all family is not everything all the time, and that allowed me to make new choices that I never, ever thought were available to me in the past to yield new results.
And so now I have such peace around that because every part of my brain, body, soul, heart is rewired in that category of my life.
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks again for sharing that. Um, great.
I, I think it's important
to look at different perspectives and different, um, ways of combating the same thing from different kind of modalities.
Um, because not everything works for every person, so, I think the language piece is really important. Even if it's all in the same, uh, you know, it's all in English. Like there are still, there are different lang languages within your program versus other programs or types of therapies or whatnot. Mm-hmm.
Um, so
yeah, thank you for sharing all of that and for giving, giving a new perspective today.
Thanks for having me. I love these kind of conversations. They fu they give me energy. Where can people find you? Right now? The best place is on Instagram. Okay. I'm saying this slowly because I've changed my handle a few times and I'm actually gonna be changing it again soon.
So right now it's the whole self revolution with periods between each word. But also just Google me. My website is autoimmune resolution.com. Autoimmune
resolution do
com. Okay. But that could change too.
We'll have for now.
Well, thank you. Thanks.
Listen to Katherine’s interview with me, Destiny Davis, on Ep 33: Exploring German New Medicine w/ Katherine Housh
Meet Katherine Housh, a trauma-informed holistic nurse coach who empowers women with autoimmune diseases to understand and embrace their bodies' language. Today, we delve into a thought-provoking conversation about holistic and natural approaches to healing chronic health conditions.
Katherine introduces herself as a registered nurse with 15 years of experience in various healthcare settings. Simultaneously, she has been dealing with autoimmune diseases for nearly two decades. This dual perspective, as both a healthcare professional and a patient, has profoundly shaped her holistic approach to health and wellness.
Katherine transitions from conventional nursing to holistic health coaching, specializing in trauma-informed care. Her primary focus is assisting women with autoimmune diseases, addressing both their mental and physical health challenges. Her approach integrates mind and body, aiming to create a harmonious balance for her clients.
Connect with Katherine:
Meet Destiny - The host of The Chronic Illness Therapist Podcast and a licensed mental health therapist in the states of Georgia and Florida. Destiny offers traditional 50-minute therapy sessions as well as therapy intensives and monthly online workshops for the chronic illness community.