There are two things that we regularly talk about with our clients that reliably help them make life-changing strides in terms of general health: The Lugol’s Iodine Protocol and trauma. Most people, including children are deficient in both forms of iodine (potassium iodide and molecular iodine) along with a smattering of the supportive nutrients that are needed to absorb and use iodine. Without these nutrients, the body is being challenged every day to survive. And trauma is a problem that results from being exposed to something that’s “overwhelming” either on a physical and/or emotional level. Trauma hijacks the mind-body interface known as the autonomic nervous system. When the autonomic nervous system has been hijacked and it loses stability and reliable function, people experience major illnesses and physical dis-ease along with mental health issues. In children, trauma is expressed a bit differently than in adults. Most parents of children with autism never suspect that their child experienced birth trauma as a part of the overall trauma-load that contributes to autism spectrum symptoms.
It seems controversial to suggest that autism might be caused, at least in part, by birth trauma, but this is a fairly established fact that is cited in the scientific research on a regular basis. Being born is traumatic. Some kids experience more trauma than other kids on their way into this world despite a parent’s best efforts to ensure that their baby has a safe and happy birthing process. But there are other types of trauma that can contribute to ASD symptoms too. There are biological traumas, for example. Dr. Robert Naviaux has cited the Cell Danger Response in his incredible work with Suramin for autism. The Cell Danger Response details how our cells respond to trauma in its various forms. Cells go dormant. They close up and stop interacting with and communicating with other cells. Suramin helps cells relearn how to reopen themselves to the world.
But when we talk about trauma and autism, it’s vital that we talk about how trauma impacts both the child and the child’s parents. Parents, after all, are tuned into their children on a number of deep levels. When a child feels pain, many parents feel that same pain empathically. This is a fact. We are designed, as humans, to be able to intuit the feelings of a baby and of other grown humans too. We do this through the autonomic nervous system via the melanin in the skin. Melanin is hardwired into the autonomic nervous system so that we can receive radiation that’s transmitted into the world by the sun, through radiowaves and other energy frequencies. We also give off radiation, of course. When babies are young, they need for their parents to intuit their needs because babies have no words. Doctors regularly scoff at parents who have a intuition about their child’s health, but doctors shouldn’t scoff at parents in this way. Doctors ought to know and be taught that human beings can feel each other, but the science regarding melanin is not taught in medical schools. Melanin and the technology of the human body that allows us to feel what another person is feeling, is not the domain of medicine, but rather weaponry. If you want to learn about what the melanin in our skin can actually do and why children with autism, who tend to have pale skin for their ethnicity, experience sensory intolerance as a result, you would need to delve into the science of synthetic melanin that the U.S. military is developing.
Click here to read more about sensory intolerance in ASD.
Parents with children who have ASD have to consider the role of trauma, not just in their child, but also in the entire family. Parents are traumatized by feeling their child’s trauma — by intuiting how their child feels. It’s natural for parents to feel what a child feels, but parents with ASD kids have to fight for the right to speak for their child. Mothers or fathers who feel like they’ve reached the ends of their ropes may feel like they’re bad parents when in fact, they are parents who are deeply tuned into children who are in pain. The same mothers and fathers who are beating themselves up for feeling desperate and hopeless may actually be the parents who are really deeply tuned into their children in a way that gives them the ability to act not just as advocates but also as healers for their kids.
Many, MANY women have birth trauma too as a result of going through the birthing process. Even a smooth birthing process can have a moment that’s traumatic for the mother. If this mother is then flooded with other traumas after experiencing birth trauma, she may develop postpartum depression or anxiety. Even postpartum psychosis is closely correlated with birth trauma and high “trauma load”.
Psilocybin is the most powerful and yet gentlest sacred indigenous medicine that can be used to release trauma. Psilocybin can be administered as microdosing or as macrodosing trips. People who work with psilocybin for trauma experience life-changing results within short periods of time.
Trauma is this secret tool in psychology that’s been buried under the idea that it only applies to people who have been to war. Indeed, as a concept, “trauma” is something that’s only really been studied by psychologists though in fact, trauma causes both physical symptoms of disease (e.g. fibromyalgia, headaches, chronic fatigue, skin rash, arthritis, asthma and other breathing problems, menstruation issues, and more) as well as mental illness. As someone with a master’s degree in psychology who has also studied trauma from various angles, I can say that few, if any of the diagnoses in the DSM-5 are not treatable and curable using models of trauma and trauma-informed therapy. Trauma makes people feel hopeless, but in real life, it’s possible to release trauma and heal permanently and completely.
Not everyone who stumbles across this article will be ready to start microdosing with psilocybin. Even fewer people will be ready to work with psilocybin “trips” for trauma. Luckily, there are other ways to treat trauma at home. Trauma therapy is often gentle and yet powerful. Results are apparent within just a few hours or days after treatment. Below, we talk about psilocybin alternatives for trauma. If you’re not quite ready to work with psilocybin for trauma, or if you can’t obtain psilocybin, consider working with some of the trauma therapies we list below instead.
EMDR for Trauma
As a tool, trauma-informed therapy literally guides us through a new way of looking at the interface between mind and body. To date, “trauma” is an idea that has been fairly well-developed such that psychologists have found some very interesting ways to interface the mind with the body through nothing more than eye movements. For example, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR is an elegant treatment method that releases trauma from the autonomic nervous system through back and forth eye movements that mimic the movements made by the eyes during REM sleep. EMDR uses eye movements to pull on the cranial bones via the eye muscles to slightly alter how they knit with the other bones of the skull at the joints. EMDR works a little like how chiropractic therapy alters the position of the vertebrae (except EMDR is much gentler). When the cranial bones shift, they relieve pressure on the cranial nerves that supply the parasympathetic nervous system and when the cranial nerves are no longer under stress, our organs function better and our emotions emerge into our consciousness with greater clarity.
Craniosacral Therapy for Trauma
Craniosacral therapy is another system that alters the position of the cranial bones and the uppermost vertebrae to release trauma in the body. Craniosacral therapy is also extremely gentle. It is both an energy-healing modality as well as a modality of healing that uses actual physical manipulation of the cranial bones and upper vertebrae to foster healing. Once the trauma is released and integrated, what was once experienced by a child perhaps as a dark, impenetrable mood or painful emotions (or as poor, inexplicable behavior, deterioration in pro-social behaviors, etc. as the child’s parents), becomes transformed into a deep and profound insight – trauma, once integrated turns into an emotional resource. The transformation between having a perpetual or frequently uncomfortable mood state and having an emotional resource and insight happens in a split second when the autonomic nervous system is properly activated.
DreamLight.app Brain Entrainment for Trauma
One valuable resource that we’ve recommended to our clients is the DreamLight.app, a tool that can be used for guided meditation and self-hypnosis as well as to intentionally induce a healing trance. This tool uses sound and light for brain entrainment. The sound and light frequencies function to help you pull up the unconscious traumatic material from the right brain so that this material can be processed into a part of the narrative, linguistic left-brain. Once integrated, trauma becomes a source of wisdom rather than a source of stress. The DreamLight.app complements craniosacral therapy and EMDR for a more powerful approach to trauma treatment at home if you aren’t quite ready to work with psilocybin.
The DreamLight.app uses flashing lights and it may not be appropriate for use in kids with ASD, particularly kids who suffer with seizures. This tool can be useful for parents though, to help them find relaxing states of mind and access their own Inner Wisdom in the face of chaos.
Psilocybin for Trauma
Both EMDR and craniosacral therapy work very slowly, but they do work to release trauma. Psilocybin microdosing for autism is something that scientists are studying now as a medicine that can work much more quickly to release trauma to treat autism. Psilocybin can also be used by parents to treat trauma and to help parents access their Inner Wisdom. Psilocybin, after all, has the ability to grow new synaptic / thought connections in the brain which helps children and parents with trauma get out of that “dark-mood” loop. This medicine literally helps people find “new roads” out of the cul de sac of thoughts that make them get stuck in negative behavior or thought patterns. I can guarantee with almost 100% certainty that psilocybin will never be approved by the FDA for use with autism because it has the potential to truly help kids with this disease (which means that Big Pharma will lose an entire population of young, profitable patients), but parents who have worked with psilocybin themselves, as adults, understand that this is a medicine that helps you get past mood problems, looping thoughts, obsessive behaviors, repetitive notions, etc. and this is why scientists have identified psilocybin as a plant-medicine with a lot of potential to treat autism naturally.
Adults who take psilocybin often experience episodes during their trips where their eyes pull sharply to the right and then to the left, similar to what happens when people work with EMDR. For most parents, psilocybin microdosing is a much easier thing to manage than EMDR sessions or craniosacral therapy appointments (though all 3 can be used together for a more powerful overall effect).
A large proportion of children with autism have developed symptoms as a result of heavy metal exposure. Their bodies reacted to trauma at a cellular / biological level. For this reason, we recommend that parents work with a modified version of the Lugol’s iodine protocol to improve the body’s nutritional status and the natural immune system function. Children with autism tend to be quite pale which suggests that they are lacking sulfur-containing nutrients like MSM that help the body produce melanin. The melanocytes (melanin-producing cells) in the skin are directly connected via very tiny nerves to the sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or flight branch of the autonomic nervous system. This connection between the melanocytes and the sympathetic nervous system allows our bodies to stay synched up with the outer environment such that the body knows when it is daytime and when it is nighttime. Without this connection between the melanocytes and the sympathetic nervous system, which in turn is connected directly to the pineal gland in the brain (the part of the body that manages our circadian rhythms), we feel like we are in a state of perpetual, severe jet lag. This is why we always encourage parents of autistic children to do what they can to administer the Lugol’s Iodine Protocol along with trauma-informed therapies.
Parents can also seek out trauma-informed therapist to release trauma in autistic children in the hopes that alleviating the burden of trauma will make the autonomic nervous system function better, but unless the problem of having hijacked circadian rhythms (due to nutritional deficiencies impacting the melanin in the skin) is addressed, children with autism are in a state of perpetual jetlag.
Birth Trauma and Autism
Trauma is any event that causes a sense of profound overwhelm that impacts the autonomic nervous system either as a result of some physical or biological insult or as a result of an overwhelming emotional event. Shamanic cultures viewed “trauma” as any event that could cause soul loss or the loss of vital energy from the body. This shamanic view of “trauma” seems too far out for a lot of our readers when they first begin looking at this material, but we’ve found that often, children with autism are on a spiritual path that specifically was designed to attract their parents and their families back to their roots in nature. The autistic child is a shaman, the wounded healer, but they work closely with parents on a spiritual level who find that, as a result of the powerful love that they have for their child, that the parents become open to things that they would’ve never considered before.
Decades of studying medicine, psychology, shamanism, energy healing, and various systems of medicine from across the world have shown me that the shamanic concept of soul loss is deeply pertinent to any dialogue about autism, but I also feel strongly that autism is a disease that iconically points out major flaws in medicine and in our way of life. Tragically though, I also believe that once parents have a child with autism, they feel locked into their way of life for fear of making changes because the parents have been so traumatized themselves that they feel trapped. The parents lack their own spiritual and emotional resources that are wrapped up in trauma thought-loops. In my view, healing autism is not just about the child, but the entire family system. Often, in order to find the right combination of things that a child with autism needs in order to be whole again, parents have to heal themselves first. This is a radical view, but once parents find this information, it often resonates deeply. Parents intuitively know that they are their child’s best hope in terms of healing.
Industrialized nations of the world downplay the value of family, but anyone who has experienced what it’s like to watch a sick child suffer knows that family is the greatest resource. Autism is a call to explore this material around the family and to accept the idea that when one person heals, be it a child or a parent, the entire family system experiences a shift. This shift can be spiritual, emotional, or yes, even physical.
Today, the word “trauma” is most often used to describe events that occur during war or as a result of an event that is extremely dangerous and life-threatening. In fact, “trauma” by definition can include something as mundane as a door slamming shut loudly and suddenly when an infant’s back is turned. Though most children won’t experience symptoms of trauma as a result of a loud noise that startles them, it is possible that a loud noise could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back in terms of trauma. When someone is traumatized, a part of the soul is “lost” but it isn’t necessarily gone forever according to shamanic medicine. The lost soul part can be retrieved using special techniques. Some of these techniques involve a “technology of the human body” that we rarely use with intention including, for example, the fact that special eye movements (as in EMDR) can call back vital force by relieving tension on the cranial nerves that feed the parasympathetic nervous system (one of the other branches of the autonomic nervous system).
If you have trouble accepting the idea of autism as soul loss, then you can instead of think of autism as being due to trauma. Essentially, the model of trauma that’s been set forth by Dr. Peter Levine and great thinkers like Dr. Richard Schwartz (creator of Internal Family Systems Therapy) is identical to shamanic concepts of soul loss and soul retrieval. Dr. Robert Naviaux has observed soul loss at the cellular level wherein human cells will go dormant and fall into a state of sleep in the face of extreme emotional trauma. He has cited Resignation Syndrome in refugee children whose families have been threatened with deportation back to warn-torn places like Syria as situations that can cause soul loss that causes children to fall into a comatose state. In Dr. Naviaux’s view, autism is a lesser form of Resignation Syndrome.
Trauma can also be biological / physical. Vaccines, for example, cause the Cell Danger Response according to Dr. Robert Naviaux. He is studying the use of Suramin (a plant-derived substance) to treat autism. On a cellular level, the Cell Danger Response is equivalent to how the autonomic nervous system shuts down and becomes imbalanced as a result of vaccine administration in children with autism. Rather than being deported and experiencing a toxic and overwhelming emotional response, children with autism have the same cellular response to trauma except the trauma is a physical / biological inundation with disease-causing pathogens.
Giving birth and being born are two of the most stressful, life-threatening situations that we all experience as human beings. It is rare for women and newborn babies to not experience trauma through the birthing process especially under today’s hospital birthing experiences. Women often develop symptoms of birth trauma that manifests in the form of postpartum depression or any number of physical health problems or sexual issues after the birth of a child. Babies in contrast who felt fearful and who were traumatized before, during, or after their own birth may be hard to console, have difficulty suckling or eating, difficulty sleeping, difficult behaviors, and later, as they grow, they may also have inexplicably poor social behaviors. Children with autism often seem to be okay at first and then there is a sudden shift that occurs wherein the child stops making eye contact with adults and their development becomes delayed. There are a number of experts who believe that autism may be caused, at least in part, by birth trauma as well as the trauma of receiving one vaccine after another within close succession among other things. If this is true, psilocybin microdosing for autism may offer new hope for parents and children.
Psilocybin is medicine that helps us connect the mind with the body so that we can understand the “high-tech human suit” of flesh and bones that we wear every day of our lives. Psilocybin itself can be taken with the Intention to understand the mind-body connection and the mushroom itself can teach directly to the person taking it. This is hard to understand unless you’ve experienced it yourself, but nonetheless, it is a true statement and one that isn’t hard to prove to those who want to know. Parents with autistic children or a child on the spectrum can benefit from taking psilocybin to help them feel their child. What I mean to say is that a parent with a child who is struggling to communicate can use psilocybin to make it easier to feel what their child is feeling emotionally. If this doesn’t make sense to you or if you absolutely don’t believe that such a thing is possible then you’re probably overwhelmed with trauma yourself. Being overwhelmed and traumatized causes people to become numb and to stop experiencing feelings and emotions. Emotions, after all, are a phenomenon that we feel in the body. We don’t feel emotions in the mind. Psilocybin microdosing can restore emotional feeling while simultaneously allowing the autonomic nervous system to release trauma.
If you are new to the idea of healing autism, then the Lugol’s Iodine Protocol and trauma-informed therapies are a good place to start. Whether you agree or disagree with the idea of soul loss and autism doesn’t really matter because if you open yourself up as a parent to the idea that autism in your family may exist to lead you to an entirely different paradigm for living, not just for your current family but for future members of your family, the path regarding how to get to this new way of being will open up ahead of you.
There has to be a place to start for people who have never considered working with the oldest system of medicine and spirituality on the planet. Parents with children who have autism or cancer or any other serious illness, experience a deep kind of pain that leaves them ostracized and alone in society. Most of the efforts toward solving the problem of autism don’t address the fact that a lost soul can be close to the body, that it can even “haunt” other family members and cause physical manifestations that look and seem almost like demonic possession in children. Everyone is looking for a physical cause and a physical cure for autism, but most of the time, the parents who are able to reverse autism do so because they open their minds and hearts to the Universe to guide them step-by-step where they need to go. Their desperation makes them open and their openness gives them hope. And hope is no small thing in the world of healing.
If you are the parent of a child with ASD or another serious disease, contact us at info@alivenhealthy.com for information about joining our weekly Intention Group on Tuesday between 7:00-8:30 PM Mexico City time zone. In this FREE group, we sample different trauma-informed therapies and we work together as a group to HEAL.