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Katie: Hello and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com. And this episode is all about the cell danger response and its link to chronic disease. And I’m guessing this episode might introduce some new concepts for you that will be incredibly relevant. It did for me and also explained some things that were a big part of my journey in ways that I had not been able to sort of explain and understand well until this episode.
And I’m here with Dr. Cathleen King. I’m so glad I got to connect with her. She’s a physical therapist and neuroscience-based mind-body practitioner. Her professional focus is chronic illness and trauma healing. And she’s the founder and CEO of Primal Trust Academy and Community. And I’ll link to a lot of her resources in the show notes. But I really love her explanation of these things that we’re talking about and how. Her own journey with mysterious symptoms and illnesses led to this understanding and the work that she does today, including a massive paradigm shift that she had, how she slowly, in her words, walked herself out of hell and healed. Her belief that the body is infinitely capable of healing and how she learned to help walk with people on this path in a way that’s very tangible and that I wish had existed when I was recovering from Hashimoto’s and other conditions as well. Kind of centered around her core belief that you have to believe that it is safe to feel safe and that this is the place where healing begins. But she explains it much better than I could. So without any further wait, let’s join Dr. Cathleen King. Dr. Cat, welcome and thank you so much for being here.
Cathleen: Thank you for having me.
Katie: Well, it sounds like our online worlds overlapped many years ago, but this is our first time to actually get to chat in person. And I am personally so excited for this conversation and the next episode we will get to record together because I think they will be incredibly helpful for everybody listening. And as a segueway into our first topic, which is something I’m excited to learn about, which is cell danger response, I know that you also have quite the incredible healing story. And if you’re willing, I would love if you could just share a little bit of your journey as context before we get into sort of the deeper questions in this episode.
Cathleen: Absolutely. Well, I was somebody like many of your listeners who had a lot of mysterious symptoms. And for me, this started back in 2003. And I was somebody who went from doctor to doctor, and I would get one diagnosis and another and it was sort of like my body felt like it was betraying me. I was like, how is it I was perfectly healthy. And now I’ve got gut problems, autoimmune problems, sleep problems, neurological problems, and it just kind of kept piling up.
And, you know, eventually these diagnoses looked like Lyme disease, mold toxicity, co-infections, hormone imbalance, complex PTSD. And this was a span over many, many years. And I know what it’s like to feel like, what is going on? How could I possibly have this bad luck of getting all of these diagnoses? Whereas my family and friends, they’re just like, you know, eating what they want and do what they want and they feel fine. And I didn’t understand that there was a common denominator behind all of these various, you know, these various diagnosis, the lab tests that were coming in. And it seemed like none of the doctors also could find the common denominator. It was just like, oh, now you have this, now you have this, and now you have cavitations, now you’ve got mercury poisoning, now you’ve got that, and all the things, and oh, you’ve got SIBO. It’s crazy making. It was just crazy making.
I have a background, however, as a physical therapist, and I was trained a little differently. I was trained with people from outside of the US. So we approached the body differently, more of a mind-body approach. And I was also trained through the lens of John Sarno, which he has a lot of mind-body connection when it comes to chronic pain.
So I understood that chronic pain was mediated by the brain, that there was a common denominator with fibromyalgia and this chronic pain syndrome. And I thought eventually, what if there’s a common denominator with all of this infection, toxin, gut stuff? And I started to apply brain retraining and nervous system work just as if I had chronic pain. And the practices started to work. My Lyme symptoms and mold symptoms started to fall away. And I was like, what is going on? None of my doctors, this was, you know, eight years ago now, none of them were mentioning this other path at that time.
And I slowly walked myself out of hell. I was debilitated for many years. I had two small kids. I had full-time care. I was reading your website to try to learn what to do. And fortunately, I started to see the common denominator that my autonomic nervous system was extremely dysregulated, therefore causing my immune system and digestive system and endocrine system to not be able to resolve the things that it was working on. And it was less about the diagnosis I was given and more about how is my body’s healing cycle blocked? And that’s the key around cell danger response. Would you like me to go into that now that I’ve kind of ranted?
Katie: Absolutely. And just before you jump into that, I just want to say I love your approach. I feel like you, even in the thick of having all of those health struggles, kind of went to a first principles approach and sort of asked better and better questions until you got different answers, which I love. I think that’s so valuable in many disciplines. And I love that for you, you were able to take what you had learned in one aspect of health and then apply it to others and now help so many people. Because I think you already highlighted a little, like your approach stepped back from just focusing on the symptoms as a problem and sort of playing whack-a-mole with a symptom as if that’s what you’re trying to fix. And instead use those as like springboards for asking deeper questions. So I think, yeah, I would love for you to delve into what is the cell danger response, because for many people listening, this may be the first time a lot of people have heard of this even.
Cathleen: Yeah. Well, if you’ve not heard of cell danger response and you have chronic unresolving symptoms, this is going to be good news for you. Because when I understood this theory and I read about it, it was the first thing that was like, oh, this explains all of it. This explains that whole whack-a-mole game I was playing with my body. This explains why brain retraining and nervous system work made such a huge difference. And this gives me a sense of empowerment of how I can not only continue to get well but stay well.
So there is a researcher by the name of Dr. Robert Naviaux, and he has this theory called the cell danger response theory, where he looks at the body and disease through a different lens. Most of our medical system looks at the body through something known as a pathogenic lens, meaning what is the symptom and what caused the symptom and how do we eradicate the thing that caused the symptom?
So the cell danger response comes to the lens of something known as a salugenesis model, S-A-L-U-G-E-N-E-S-I-S, which is looking at a systemic approach of what is blocking the innate healing mechanisms of the body. It’s not about what pathogens are there or what toxins are there or what your lab tests say. Robert Naviaux, in his brilliance, looked at the human body and saw a body that was capable of healing. He looked at why is the body’s natural healing cycle not coming into completion? That is a huge paradigm shift. That to me is the future of medicine. And that is the approach that I gravitated to with everything that I had once I understood it because it matched my little intuition along the way that there was something blocking me from healing.
So the cell danger response describes the normal response that a cell should go into when you get exposed to a toxin, a pathogen, a physical trauma, or even an emotional trauma. The cells are supposed to go into a protective defensive mode so that let’s say there’s a pathogen in your body or some type of toxin. We don’t want all those pathogens and toxins getting into the cells and destroying all the cells. So the cells say, hey guys, there’s some danger in the body right now and we need to hunker down and protect. We’re going to harden the outside of the cell. We’re going to cease certain communication because we don’t want to be going into certain body processes with this dangerous threat in the system. And we’re going to wait until the immune system and other detoxification systems of the body have cleared out the danger before we open up our protective shell and come back into thriving mode and come back into communication. This is normal. We are supposed to go into cell danger response and then come out of it after the threat has passed.
But what happens if the signal that the threat has passed is never sent into the body? What if the body is stuck in an ongoing threat, danger, danger, danger? Those cells are not going to resume their normal function. And they’re going to have persistent danger signals being sent through the body. A lot of people think that when they’re sick, they’re not making energy. It’s not true. You are making energy. You’re just not making it to thrive, to detoxify, to digest your food. You’re making energy to protect, to create more hardening around the cell wall. You’re creating energy to signal danger signals and to signal the immune system to come and make its T-cells and macrophages and cytokines and all of those things. The energy is being used for a different purpose.
So we have to teach the body how to get that danger signal to go away. And that’s really the theory behind the cell danger response of getting those cells to get a different signal to trigger safety so that we can clean up the debris of the body, clean up the inflammation and come back into homeostasis. And that is the question of our time: How do we signal safety to the body?
Katie: I love that. This is like, like I said, I think like this is a whole area of health that people maybe have never encountered. And certainly like I didn’t have a deep understanding of, I think I stumbled across some of these things sort of accidentally and then like latched onto them intuitively, but it wasn’t something I could find information about. So I love that you actually walk people through this and explain it so well.
And I really loved what you said about, you know, the body being infinitely capable of healing. That’s something I talk about on here a lot is, you know, our body’s always on our side. And this was a hard learning lesson for me as well. So if something isn’t healing, if we’re not recovering, then why is that? What is the body trying to tell us that maybe we’re not hearing correctly or having trouble understanding?
And like I said, I feel like your approach actually takes this to an even deeper level. So I’m guessing many people listening, and I am also curious if this is resonating and people are recognizing this going on in their own lives and with a chronic health condition, how do we start to undo that cycle and send those safety signals and sort of release the body from that cycle of danger?
Cathleen: That’s such a good question. And I have found that before you do anything, it is extremely important to have a paradigm shift because you have been programmed into thinking that there is something wrong with your body and that this infection and this toxin and these things are the problem. That programming has, you’ve got to take some steps back in order to send a safety signal to the body, you’re going to have to be able to coexist with those pathogens, those toxins, your current diagnoses, your current lab tests, because otherwise what’s happening is you go get a diagnosis and a lab test and you’re going to freak out. Oh my gosh, now I have this and now I have that. That will never signal the safety that is needed to turn off cell danger response.
So I spend a lot of time front-loading science and information to anyone who comes through my process because I know, like me, I needed to convince my very smart brain who learned all about these diagnoses and all about what it means and all about the things, I needed to convince my brain to see my body differently in order to begin to send safety from my brain into my body from my limbic response.
I needed to learn how to believe that the body has innate healing capacities when it’s given signals of safety. I needed to learn about the science behind trauma, the science behind chronic stress, the science behind limbic system impairment, as to how that switches the biochemistry of the body, which can help you heal.
So the first step is education, and it is seeking the information to validate your theory, your working hypothesis, that maybe the body can heal itself. Look for that. Help to attune your subconscious to get that information into your field and to discard the information that has made you distrust your body, feel like your body is broken, and feel like there’s no hope. So it starts there. I could go on, but.
Katie: Well, I love that. Yeah, I think I would love for you to delve deeper into sort of the next steps, but I’m so glad that you brought those points up and sort of starting with the mind and like disarming the hypothesis that our body is broken. I hear that so much, especially from people with autoimmunity. And I certainly spoke that way as well. At one point when I was experiencing Hashimoto’s, I would say things like I am sick, or my body is attacking itself. And I had to learn to shift both my mindset and my inner language around that because it was not a helpful or empowering thing to say that my body was attacking itself. And I know there’s more steps to this. So that’s the first step. Where do we go from there?
Cathleen: Yeah. So once you have your belief system behind you, and that’s the number one thing, if you understand the science of placebo theory and the science of nocebo, your belief system is your biggest ally here. And that belief system alone, I see people who understand the science and their symptoms start to drop without doing anything. Because they start to get a different framework of what’s wrong. And that lack of threat will shift the way that they are creating stress chemistry and their neurotransmitters, et cetera, which can sometimes that in and of itself help people to walk out of things like chronic fatigue syndrome. I’ve literally seen that from the science alone.
Now, the next step is to start to build a nervous system that has resiliency, a nervous system that can handle stress, inflammation, things like that, and not have a complete collapse. A nervous system that can handle having some toxins and pathogens and food reactions and not have it cause a five-alarm fire in the immune response.
Our body often mimics an immune response that matches the state of our mind. And the immune system, I think of it as always listening. And so if your nervous system constantly feels like it’s too much, there’s threats everywhere, I’m not safe, your immune system will be overreactive and in dysregulation. And so you need to think about that you’re training your brain and your body to be an example of how you want your immune system to operate.
You want your immune system to be resilient. You want it to be able to see invaders and to know, oh, I need to control these populations here, or I need to get rid of these toxins here. And to know when too much is too much. And to know when it’s time to rest and allow the body to do some cleanup. The nervous system in your brain and your way of living needs to mimic that.
So I want you to first ask yourself, if I wanted an immune system that was discerning as to what real threats are and what real threats aren’t, if I wanted an immune system to know when to fight and know when to let go, how can I in my own behavior, in my life mimic that energy? So again, this gets into like energetic awareness.
Now there are physical things to help your body to be strong and resilient as well. I always start with vagus nerve toning because the vagus nerve is the big daddy of the body. And it really helps to run this whole autonomic nervous system that might be out of balance, sending signals of danger and keeping the cell danger response active. And, you know, this was something that Dr. Robert Naviaux mentions a lot in his work is vagus nerve toning and autonomic nervous system rebalancing.
So the vagus nerve, there are so many ways to strengthen your vagus nerve. You want to think of it sort of like a muscle that if you haven’t been to the gym and you haven’t been working it, it can kind of get flabby and it can get sort of dumb in a way. So it needs to be toned. It needs to be strengthened so that your body can have a better relay between the brain and the body of stress and danger and safety and repair.
So you can Google, how do I strengthen my vagus nerve? And Google is great actually for getting you started. But I would say any type of breathing practice, not any type, certain types of breathing practices that help to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system. I say certain types because there are a lot of breathing practices that stimulate the sympathetic nervous system that are great at the right time. So things like, Wim Hof, holotropic breathing, DMT breathing, those things are too much for somebody who’s just beginning on this journey.
So when you do breath work, it’s not all created the same. You’re going to want to look for something that is calming, like something known as a box breath or the four, seven, eight breath or heart math, quick coherence breathing. These things tone the vagus nerve in a very gentle way. And even for some of you, you might be so used to stress that you know what might happen if you start to do a calm breath, your limbic system is going to say, it’s not safe to calm down. And you’re going to have an even, you’ll have a kickback. So I want to say this, that when you start to try to calm down, you have to first start to believe that it’s safe to feel safe. Going into that breath work practice with that intention, I want to teach my body that it is safe to feel safe. Because for some of you, it’s not going to feel that way, especially with the history of trauma. And that was the case for me.
So you just do a little bit. You see how you respond. You know, just a couple minutes of breath work. Okay, what do I feel? Did it actually make me more anxious or less? If it made you more anxious, then you do 30 seconds. You do a couple breaths and you practice. It’s safe to feel safe. I know body. I know brain. It doesn’t feel safe to be this calm. I’m so used to being vigilant of every little symptom, every little thing in my body and in my environment, but that’s not helping me heal. That’s not helping me heal. So vagus nerve toning is first.
Then I go into brain retraining, limbic system retraining, also known as self-directed neuroplasticity second. And this is important. I found with working with thousands of people that there’s a sequence to nervous system work that matters, that helps you to climb out of cell danger response. Some people can go right into brain retraining, but a lot of them I find do better, if you have a history of trauma, toning your vagus nerve first a little bit. Then going into brain retraining, which brain retraining, for those of you who are listening, it’s a way of targeting your limbic system. It’s a way of helping your limbic system and your amygdala to make associations of safety and calm and joy and okayness versus how a lot of people, when we’re stuck in chronic illness or trauma, we have a association or a meaning making machine in our brain that often perceives threats everywhere. Overreacts to everything, including food and chemicals and toxins and people.
So brain retraining is teaching your brain to shift its reaction to threat. Vagus nerve toning is teaching the body to shift its reaction to threat. And those two things are a nice, solid beginning place to start to move the body slowly out of that ongoing cell danger response signaling.
Katie: That was such a phenomenal explanation. And I feel like my body even responded and resonated when you said you have to believe that it’s safe to feel safe. I think that was a piece for me that took a long time to actually understand and then certainly to feel within my body and to begin that process.
And I wish I had found you and known this when I was kind of trying to navigate that process by experimentation. I’m very grateful for that journey. And I’m now grateful that there are people like you who are walking people through that process, because I think for me, it was a very long and winding journey. And you help people kind of find the path a lot more quickly, which I think is super important.
And I loved how you talked about your belief system being your biggest ally. And I would guess the reverse can also be true, that it can also be kind of the source of your biggest struggle. If you are operating from the belief that everything is out to get you or that everything is dangerous or bad, like that your nervous system would respond to that as well. And that you make this process tangible by walking people through like all those levels you just explained of retraining it. Rather than just understanding there’s a problem but not knowing what to do about it.
And especially the nervous system side, because this was such a big piece for me. And it took a long time to sort of dial in and figure out for myself. And it’s probably one of the areas I get the most questions about and don’t have like a blueprint or a tangible answer. So that’s why I was super excited to find you and realize that you have so many resources for people in actually being able to walk this journey in a tangible way without having to figure out each step as you go.
Is there anything else related to cell danger response specifically that people need to understand when it comes to healing? And I know we’re going to get to also do another episode and go deeper on some other aspects of healing and perception, especially, but before we kind of, you know, put a pin in this topic, what else do people need to understand or often misunderstand?
Cathleen: One of the most important things I teach is that healing is a bumpy ride. Just because you start doing nervous system work and you start to move out of cell danger response, it doesn’t like always feel like easier and better. It’s not a straightforward path. When your cells start to shift from one cycle to another, you might move from a stage where it’s, they’re hunkered down in protection to a stage where they actually start to open up and detoxify.
When you start to detoxify, you might feel flu-like, you might feel worse. You might actually have a lot more pain in the body because cortisol starts to go down. Cortisol, cortisone is an anti, you know, is, is, is pain management. So when you start having these shifts in the body, don’t second guess your efforts. I want you to look back and say, have I been doing things that are supportive, calming? Have I actually been feeling safer?
And so if you start feeling worse when you’ve made those changes, trust the process. Trust that you are moving out of cell danger response because you know that your worldview, your view of your body has started to shift into a good direction. And just because you’re feeling more symptoms, it doesn’t mean something’s wrong. It might mean that the body is trying to figure it out. Like sometimes it will let go of some areas of the body that it’s focusing on and start to like get maybe a little more overactive in another area, but it’s trying to find its balance.
Your job is to keep that mindset of safety, of resiliency, of calm, of sending that signaling to the body. My body can heal and repair. I believe in my body. Trust that process throughout the journey because this is where I see a lot of people get thrown off track. They’ll do a program like mine or another like, oh no, I’m getting worse. When I was starting to feel calm, I’m like, no, your body’s physiological processes were shifting, and you interpreted it as worse because you had such a long history of interpreting anything new as something is wrong. It’s a new interpretation habit that needs to be developed to be able to walk out of this.
Katie: And I know you have very specific resources for this, and I will, of course, link to them in the show notes. But I’m guessing a lot of people have really resonated with a lot of the things you’ve said and would love to keep learning on this topic. So where can people find you and keep learning?
Cathleen: Yeah. So I have a free book that I wrote. I have a sample of it right here. It’s called How Healing Happens. Maybe there’ll be a link below the video or on my website. It’s under the free resources section and it’s about 130 pages and it’s beautiful. It’s got all sorts of diagrams and free exercises. It has the science of cell danger response, of polyvagal theory, of limbic system retraining. It’s like a free mini program for those of you who are like, this is all new. I don’t know if this resonates. This book would be a great thing to download and check out. And it was my way of trying to get this information into the world so that that leap of going from diagnosis into this self-healing path is more doable when you have the basic resources free and available to you. So yeah, my website, primaltrust.org under free resources. I’ve got a lot of books, but this is the first one to pick up.
Katie: Amazing. Well, I will make sure that is linked in the show notes as well as I know you have other resources as well. So if you guys are listening on the go, all of that is at wellnessmama.com. And Dr. Cath, this has been an incredible discussion. I feel like I’ve learned so much, even having walked parts of this path already. I learned so much in our conversation today. I’m so excited for our next interview together. But for today, I’m so deeply grateful for your time. Thank you so much for being here.
Cathleen: Thank you.
Katie: And thank you for listening. And I hope you will join me again on the next episode of The Wellness Mama Podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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