In this episode of The Dr. Hedberg Show, I interview Niki Gratrix in a discussion about adverse childhood experiences, overcoming trauma, PTSD, EMDR, somatic experiencing, relational trauma, anxiety, depression, emotional freedom technique, ADHD, chronic fatigue, and psychedelics. Niki speaks with great passion about her work which is why I wanted to interview her.
Dr. Hedberg: Well, welcome everyone to the Dr. Hedberg show, this is Dr. Hedberg. I'm very excited today to have Niki Gratrix on the show. I heard her on the 15-Minute Matrix with Andrea Nakayama and just really enjoyed that interview. So, I wanted to have her around today. So, Niki, she's actually an award-winning nutritional therapist, bioenergetic practitioner, and transformational coach. She helps people to optimize energy. And in 2005, she co-founded one of the largest mind-body clinics in integrative medicine in the UK. The results with patients at the clinic were published as a preliminary study in 2012 in the British Medical Journal open. In August 2015, she hosted the largest ever online health summit on overcoming fatigue, interviewing 29 world leading experts on optimizing energy with over 30,000 attendees. So, Niki, welcome to the show.
Niki: Thank you so much for having me. It's awesome to be here.
Dr. Hedberg: Great. So a lot of my listeners are familiar with the material I've been putting out on average childhood experiences, but why don't we just lay some bedrock for that? Can you give us just an overview of what adverse childhood experiences are?
Niki: Yes. So, it's very interesting. It's based on a lot of data that's been done actually. It's been a lot of mainstream research that should get more attention in my view. So there were some big studies done by the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, looking at what they were calling adverse childhood events, and they called them ACEs. And they were looking at if you had a high level of ACEs, the sort of correlation with illness in adulthood. The sort of things they were looking at were sort of parents separating, divorce, that would count as an ACE, things like physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, physical or emotional neglect, domestic violence, mental illness in the family, substance abuse, or things like incarceration of a family member. So those were the particular categories that were chosen by the researchers that were working on this. It's about the mid 1990s, they started that work. And it's important work because it really... I'm sure you've covered some of the data, it never does any harm just to mention, you know, if you had a high level of ACEs, you have an increased risk of 7 out of the top 10 causes of death, 67% of all the people in these studies. And it was a huge study, they were like...it was almost seventeen and a half thousand people in the study. Sixty seven percent had said, "Look, we had exposure to some degree of this." And that was probably an underestimate, which we can talk more about why that is. I got into this topic because things like chronic fatigue, you have a six-fold increased risk of chronic fatigue in adulthood if you had ACE's in childhood. So I called fatigue and the kind of fibromyalgia and those kinds of related illnesses, I like the poster children for adversity and childhood. You know, and if you have six ACEs, you have a 20-year reduction in lifespan. So you that gives people a bit of an idea about why we're talking about it and the types of things we're talking about.
Dr. Hedberg: Yeah, it's a big issue. And in my 15 years of functional medicine practice, I do admit that it's something that I overlooked, you know, early on for many years, just no one was really familiar with it or talking about it. So one thing I wanted to ask, you had mentioned... So one of the questions on the ACE questionnaire I'm having difficulty getting a good answer on this, so maybe, you know, but, how come an ACE is if your parents get a divorce, but death of a parent is not considered an ACE or is it? Can you elaborate on that?
Niki: Yeah, so this is an area where the researchers, you know, they didn't come out with an exhaustive list, they weren't expecting the results that they got. And they really just chose 10 categories a bit arbitrarily to kind of, you know, start...they had data already on those areas. And so they just picked 10 areas, and they held their hands up afterwards and said, "Listen, we missed a lot of different ACEs." And this is why I said there was also an underestimate in that 67%. So they missed out by being a victim of bullying, for example, and definitely death of a parent would count for sure. So, yeah, there were lots of things. And, you know, they didn't mention this is the whole topic we could touch on, but an intergenerationally inherited trauma. So when they were asking people, you know, "Did you have any ACEs?" You might say no in your childhood, not realizing you've actually inherited the psychological and physiological expression of trauma because your parent or grandparent actually experienced the trauma. And we know that because of the survivors of the Holocaust victims, and there's been a lot of research done in around the world, whether it's been famine or genocide, and so on. The third generation survivors of their grandparents who were in the trauma have the same physiological and psychological expression. So that's another area that people can underestimate as well. Yeah, so it's a big area.
Dr. Hedberg: Yeah, so I just count that...I've been counting that as an ACE if they had a death of a parent because to me, I mean, at least from my understanding that when your parents divorce, that's obviously very traumatic, but I would think death would supersede that. So what about the...? So let's say someone knows they have at least any score of one or higher, how do these ACEs actually affect health?
Niki: Yes, what are the mechanisms? So again, they did research looking at the impact of early life stress on the biology and they started with actually looking at rats, and things like this, and they literally found that there's a neuroendocrine-immune system reset. There's a shift that happens in the epigenetic expression of your sensitivity to stressful events that happen, really from the date that the trauma started. And remember, we need to talk more about this, but we are not talking about necessarily, at all, a one-off event. That can definitely be... A one-off event can definitely cause that neuroendocrine-immune system reset. It's also more of the chronic, just lack of emotional connection will create biological changes in the baby. So we have these things called mirror neurons, where a baby will actually learn to feel empathy because mom can feel empathy. So the baby actually develops these mirror neurons, so she or he is reflecting what's being expressed to the baby from the mother. Mirror neuron is another fascinating area of how, again, social relations, OP, other people, how they affect us. And the brain does not develop in isolation, it develops in response to our social interactions, our social environment. And the interesting thing about trauma is, most trauma is relational. It comes from other people. The very rare form of trauma is what we always kind of assume when we say the word trauma, people think of maybe a car accident or a natural disaster, or maybe hospitalization as a young child for some kind of procedure. Now, definitely those things are all traumatic, they're just relatively rare. Most trauma comes from a child's attachment relations, usually, that's the parents, or its key caregivers, or authority figures, and so on.
So in response to what's happening in this social interaction, it's not only this biochemical change, usually, it essentially is upregulating the stress response system. Most people know that stress is bad for you, that stress kills, but really the ACEs study shows that, you know, the developing brain is particularly vulnerable. The developing brain is below age 18. So the brain is still highly imprintable. The neurons are literally there to respond to external stimuli. So as an event that could happen as an adult will just become a state, it might lead to PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is a stress response to that specific event, or anything that triggers, or reminds you of that event. The issue with a developing brain is that the states, really that should stay as states become traits, they become part of the personality type. So we've got this multifactorial impact. We've got this neuroendocrine-immune system reset where our system is in a state of stress, it's reset from the date the trauma starts to happen. Our biology and neurology changes as well. And also, very importantly, we won't forget this, the identity of the child changes. So this is where we call, like, sort of survival adaption mechanisms kick in. So when a child, for example, doesn't get emotional bonding from the parents... And by the way, the statistics on that are incredible. I think it's only 55% of babies securely attached with mother. So this was done in a strange situation study, the 6,000 mother-baby interactions were observed, and only about 55% will securely attach, the other sort of 45% are split between insecure attachment, which is, where there's a lot of anxiety from the baby, and they find it very hard to calm themselves, so they lose the ability to self-soothe.
And the other group is they actually shut down from the emotional connection, like mom leaves the room, the baby doesn't really care, mom comes back in the room, baby doesn't respond, and that's more reflective of being rejected by the mother, which is very sad. So these kinds of attachment issues, it causes, not only social interaction problems, but it causes a sense of isolation and alienation in the child, they're not building up a sense of ability to self-soothe in safety,
