Beyond the Thyroid

Understanding Modern Trauma with Dr. Christy Gibson

• Dana Gibbs • Season 1 • Episode 42

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Beyond the Thyroid – Episode 42: Understanding Modern Trauma with Dr. Christy Gibson

In this powerful and compassionate episode of Beyond the Thyroid, Dr. Dana Gibbs is joined by Dr. Christy Gibson, a family physician and trauma therapist, to explore the concept of modern trauma — the cumulative impact of smaller, often invisible wounds that leave people feeling unsafe, unseen, or unheard.

Dr. Gibson introduces the idea that trauma isn’t always caused by a single catastrophic event. Instead, it can develop through repeated experiences of dismissal, chronic stress, medical encounters, or societal pressures. Together, Dr. Gibbs and Dr. Gibson discuss how trauma shows up in the nervous system, how it intersects with chronic illness and endocrine dysfunction, and why so many patients feel stuck in “survival mode.”

The conversation also explores practical and emerging approaches to healing, including nervous system regulation, body-based practices, affirmations, polyvagal theory, and the evolving role of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy — with an emphasis on safety, context, and informed care.

🩺 Learn more about Dr. Christy Gibson:
Website: christinegibson.net
Tiktok: @tiktoktraumadoc
Facebook: Christine Gibson MD - tiktoktraumadoc
Youtube: Dr. Christy Gibson
Book: The Modern Trauma Toolkit

📑 Join the The Thyroid Clarity Checkup Priority List! 

📲 Follow Dr. Dana Gibbs on the Goodself App!

🩺 Interested in a Discovery Call with Dr. Dana? Click here!

📺 Watch on YouTube

Episode Highlights
00:00 – Introduction
00:45 – Understanding Modern Trauma with Dr. Christy Gibson
02:45 – Dr. Gibson’s Personal Journey with Trauma
04:33 – Defining Modern Trauma and Its Impact
06:03 – Media, Society, and Chronic Stress
10:46 – Medical Trauma and Complex Trauma
16:38 – Polyvagal Theory & Befriending the Nervous System
23:46 – Techniques for Managing Trauma Responses
26:51 – Understanding the Stress Response
27:35 – Trauma Therapy and the Endocrine System
28:20 – Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy
29:31 – Set and Setting in Psychedelic Therapy
30:43 – Challenges in Clinical Research
32:22 – Rebuilding Safety and Agency
34:42 – Developing Nervous System Skills
42:04 – Chronic Illness Identity
46:35 – Resilience vs. Post-Traumatic Growth

Let's connect! 🔔
Facebook - Consultants In Metabolism
Instagram - @danagibbsms
LinkedIn - Dana Gibbs MD
Tiktok - @dana.gibbs.md

✉️ Email Dr. Gibbs at drgibbs@DanaGibbsMD.com or visit https://www.danagibbsmd.com/ for more information.


Thank you so much for listening! Tune in on the next episode.


The medical information provided in this episode is intended for informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider regarding any medical questions or concerns.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_1_10-29-2025_122506

Welcome to episode 42. I'm your host, Dr. Dana Gibbs. Today we're gonna talk about the intersection of the mind, the body, and the way we experience stress. So. If you know me at all, you've probably heard me say that stress and our body's hormone reactions to our stress can make or break your thyroid and hormone balance. But sometimes that stress isn't just from our to-do list and our job and our relationships. Sometimes it's what. Our guest today calls modern trauma, the accumulation of smaller wounds that build up over time, and it's the subtle ways that we're made to feel unsafe, unseen, unheard, especially by the systems that are supposed to be helping us heal. So Dr. Christy Gibson is a family physician, a trauma therapist, speaker, and the author of a new book called The Modern Trauma Toolkit. She is a true pioneer in reframing how we think about stress and safety and healing. Her work expresses how trauma shows up in our nervous system, in our health, and in the ways we relate to ourselves and to others, and how we can move from surviving to growing. So if you've ever been told your symptoms are just in your head, or if you've spent years fighting to be taken seriously and that experience has left its mark on you, this conversation is for you. Because that, too, is a form of trauma. So today we're gonna talk about what trauma really looks like in modern life, and more importantly, what to do about it. Let's get started.

You're listening to the Beyond the Thyroid podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Dana Gibbs. I'm an ENT surgeon and hormone specialist. For years, I struggled with my own unrecognized thyroid problems before and even after I was regularly performing thyroid surgeries. Then, one day, I learned something that turned my health around and opened my eyes to the limits of mainstream medicine in treating more subtle thyroid abnormalities. I spent the next 20 years fine tuning my hormone expertise in disorders like Hashimoto's disease, perimenopause, and stress related illness. Come join me as I share this new approach to hormones that empowers you to take control of your own thyroid and hormone imbalances. Let's dive in.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Hi Dr. Gibson. It's so nice to have you here on Beyond the Thyroid. I would love to have you start by introducing yourself, share a little bit of your personal history, professional history, find out what drew you toward this deep work with trauma, and specifically how your own experiences shape the way you help people heal.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I think we all have a personal story around, harm and distress and, and a lot of mine was really around the practice of medicine. So at the time that I was caught in the earthquakes in Nepal in 2015 and started to explore about what is PTSD, I was working as a hospitalist and I hadn't recognized just how emotionally, physically and spiritually traumatic That job was. We would work 30 hour shifts, ignore all of our signals coming up from our body about distress, from lack of sleep and food and calmness. And so as I was just recognizing some more overt signals coming from the earthquake. I started to recognize, wow, you know, my life has really got a lot of these distress signals that I've been suppressing for a long time. And so I, I transitioned into family practice and fairly quickly within a year, because my lens was just so much more focused on it, recognized that in a low income community health center. Lots of people had gone through complex trauma, and as a physician, I didn't have the tools and the resources because in Canada, physicians are free, but mental health isn't necessarily free, especially for something as

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

I did

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

specific as ptsd. So I thought, okay, I better learn. And that was about eight, eight or nine years ago now. Yeah.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Wow. Okay. Well, in your literature, in your book, you use the phrase modern trauma, and that really caught my attention. So tell us what that means and how it shows up in everyday life in ways we don't always recognize. I mean, as a physician, I, I really do see it in myself a lot in what I went through as a surgical resident and then in a private practice with a bunch of men who don't empathize with patients in the same way that women do. So yeah. What do you mean by modern trauma?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I was trying to get at a few different things when I called my book the Modern Trauma Toolkit, but the, the main one was just that. When, when they defined PTSD in the DSM, the big book of psychiatry, one of the things that they mentioned was that we witnessed trauma and it lodges in the body and that our ability to witness and experience secondhand trauma, or we would professionally say vicarious trauma is just so much more in our daily life. So when we talk about, you know, war or protests or climate change or divisive politics, it's almost hard to get away from it now. And so there is this like, level of collective trauma around all of these issues. You know, I, I'm a person who still masks indoors and crowded spaces and that is really triggering to people who've been through the pandemic and really want it to be over and

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

And, and we have all of these triggers so people aren't willing to discuss the climate emergency because it's almost too scary and it, it is in your face and people are talking about you know, scarcity of food or refugees and you've got these issues that seem so much more alive because of modern media and modern cell phone devices.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah, it's just, it's a really different way that we're exposed to distress.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Wow. Yeah. I mean, I, I know how I handle it personally, and that's, I just don't watch the news anymore and I've pretty much given up on social media as well. So for people people.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I'll, maybe I'll just mention Dr. Gibbs that is an a really common response, and sometimes that's protective. But if it kind of gets locked in, it's a little bit of that freeze dissociate disconnect response. So what happens when distress is overwhelming is we go from fight and flight, which is an active response into a passive response, and that's the freeze dissociate. And so for people who are like,"I can't handle the news or social media. It's too much. It's overwhelming." That for for many people, signifies that response towards freeze collapse. And it's not necessarily true for everybody, but it's worth just checking in on your own nervous system and, and asking, is that what's happening? I

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Oh, for me, that's absolutely what's happening

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

for.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

because that's not, I mean, it's not just the news, it's, you know, if somebody speaks harshly to me or criticizes me or anything like that, I'm just like, I don't even know where to turn i's just like my ears start to, you know, roar and I, I, you know, can't think of what to say next, and yeah, it's very, very physical when that happens. And I think you're right. I think a lot of people live in this constant low grade state of, not an emergency exactly, but just not settled, not safe. I mean, do you see that just kind of as an everyday part of our modern world, is there a way to get around that?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I think the modern world actually tries to push us there. Like this isn't something I talk very often about, but if you think of what keeps us act like actively watching news feeds. It's negative news. Our brain is like designed to pay attention to that at like a 5:1 ratio, but once trauma sneaks in, it's more like 20:1. So the more bad news or scary news that is out there, the more that we might be attuned to it. So I actually think that modern marketing, modern news channels. Like the way that the modern world works is they know that by keeping you feeling threatened, you're gonna purchase this thing or feel this emotion or stay tuned to their station. And we do get bombarded with a lot of, and it's not too, to, to, to invalidate the distress that many, many people are actively living right now. I mean, I work in refugee health, that's one of my clinical environments, so I'm very much aware of the state of the world and, and how many people are being harmed. And yet there is this kind of way that we can, that we are being kind of kept in this state. And I think the, the pandemic response has been a really. A good microcosm of this greater kind of fractals of all everything that's happening because the pandemic is still ongoing and there is a lot of long COVID or chronic symptoms that are happening in folks, and it's almost like taboo to talk about it even amongst medical professionals because this pandemic has been such an emotional response for so many people. So there's just a lot of things that are happening in the modern world that feel really overwhelming and I don't know how new that is. Like, I, I think about growing up in the seventies and back then it was like the Cold War and nuclear attack. And I remember like sitting in a gym giving my teacher a note saying I wasn't allowed to watch this scary movie called the Day After Tomorrow, because she knew I'd. Terrible

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Oh

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

nightmares,

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

I

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

but then all the other kids in class were like watching this movie about nuclear war and like, I don't know if it was elementary, like grade six or seven, but we were little babies. So like

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yeah.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

there are ways that like our bodies are conditioned to learn how to remain in fight and flight or freeze and collapse. And I think it's definitely gotten way more common, you know, even in the last five years.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yeah. And you know, in the, the work that I do with hormones and it's, you know, it's an 80 to 90% women related field, and I see patients all the time who come to me because they've been dismissed or disbelieved by the medical system and I see that invalidation really becoming a part of their healthcare story, and it's almost like they don't have any attention to focus on the wider world because they've internalized this:"I'm not a valid human being because nobody believes me about X, Y, Z." And so what's happening with people when that really happens?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

There, there's two pieces to that story Dr. Gibbs. One is the, the medical trauma. So the healthcare system itself is very traumatizing for people because it means that you have. Something potentially threatening within your body. So just being,

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

in that way with the medical system.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

invalidating or kind of gaslighting definitely happens to women and people of color a a lot more. And it. Yeah. It, it, it's often related to physician shame is the way I think of it. If, if

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Okay.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

we were to believe all the patient's experiences and we don't necessarily have an explanation for it in our repertoire. So it could be menopausal hormones, it could be long COVID, it could be any kind of endocrine condition that, oh, they're confused about, or, gosh, endometriosis, I've never heard of that. So, so all of these conditions and definitely functional conditions that

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

amplified by the stress response.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yes.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

of medical practitioners don't know how to approach it, and so instead of feeling the shame and taking it on as they're professional burden'cause I can get pretty heavy. They give it back to the patient and say, oh, this is your shame. I, you're the problem, you're the one that can't be figured out or is faking your symptoms or used, doesn't even make sense. So I think of it as like a hot potato of shame that is kind of being tossed around in the, in the medical system. And, and then the other piece of that is I, I've mentioned PTSD and certainly that's one of the series of symptoms that I had from the earthquake was post-traumatic symptoms. But the DSM and psychiatry has yet to really well define complex trauma. So complex trauma happens from relationships and so that not good enough feeling or invalidated feeling can happen from childhood. It can happen from school and it can definitely happen within medical practices. So that not good enough feeling is complex or attachment trauma, and that's not something well-defined in medicine, but it's something I'm very interested in. Both as a clinician and a social media educator.'cause I'm on TikTok. It's a big focus of the modern trauma toolkit and I'm also doing some academic research around it. So

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Excellent.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

this is a, a complex topic because we never learned about it.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Right. I mean, it, it's a lot like what I do every day, which is this thyroid imbalance where people get said, oh, well, your TSH is fine. And like, I've got 20 symptoms of hypothyroidism. So what's going on? And, and yeah, they get told, Hey, it's in your head here, have an, have an antidepressant. it's just, you know, I, I see that, well, I would say 90% of the people I see that's where they're coming from and it's

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

So. You've said, really your body is telling the tale, body is telling the truth, even when we can't articulate that this is a shame-based issue or this, you know, that you've been invalidated by another person. So how does that work? How does that show itself through body? Is it through symptoms or is it through thoughts? What, what's going on there?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

It is often both. And so I, I like to break it down to the physiology of like human bodies are just fairly complicated mammals. So we've got this evolutionary stress response that's told us, well, hey, most of the stress you're gonna encounter is like a wildfire or a natural disaster or a predator because we're mammals. And so fight, flight and freeze made sense for those kind of evolutionary scenarios, but they make no sense in the modern time, which is another reason why I called the book the Modern Trauma Toolkit, is because modern problems are not easily solved by running away, fighting them, or freezing in place, which is what I'm nervous.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

I'll add one more to that. Eating all the things.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Well, eating all the things, buying all of the things, gambling, all the things, having sex with all the things. I mean, there's a lot of different stress responses that people go into. And I think of them as two branches. So active stress is fight and flight, and that's when your sympathetic nervous system turns on. And so when you think about an overburdened sympathetic nervous system, that's a really high heart rate, that's sweating, and that's a racing mind that can't shut off when you're trying to go to bed. So it's an activated stress response. And so freezing collapse is a passive stress response. That's when you can't get off the couch and you're doom scrolling or you can't get out of bed. You just don't have any energy. And maybe it's a thyroid problem and maybe it's chronic stress that is signifying that you're overwhelmed and you're locked into an overwhelmed parasympathetic state. Or that's the underactive, what we call rest and digest when it's in that window of tolerance where you can cope and handle things. But when parasympathetic is overwhelmed, your whole body shuts down and doesn't do anything. And so in medicine, we'll call those patients non-compliant, or not adhering to treatment plan, but actually it's their nervous system trying to protect them.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I've heard that referred to as ventral Vagal and dorsal vagal. I don't know if that's a, a terminology that you use or

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

That is chapter three of my book or Polyvagal theory.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

oh.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah. So chapter three of my book explains Stephen Porges polyvagal theory in, in very simple terms, I tried to keep the book written at a grade eight level'cause I work in Refugee Health and addiction Medicine, and I just give all my patients a copy of it. And that was really the goal, is to help them explain what is your brain doing and why is that trying to protect you and what might we do differently? So it was really in endeavoring to give them tools and a really compassionate explanation for what's happening. So I find the language of polyvagal theory can be quite daunting to folks. So, so dorsal vagal and ventral vagal basically means ventral vagus is down the back body or kind of runs from the brainstem down through the chest and, and even past the diaphragm. And so that is the biggest nerve that's connected to the shutting down response and

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

a huge mistake saying that it actually actively changes your heart rate and, and shuts the metabolism down. But what it's actually doing is it's dampening the sympathetic tone. So that was one revision he had to make to polyvagal theory. The other vagus nerve is one that we all learn about in medicine, and it's cranial nerve 10 that goes up into the face. And so what he's describing is a social engagement state, which is what he calls ventral vagal. Ventral is the front you going up to the face and. In that state, we are connecting. We are co-regulating with the person in front of us, and we use cues like facial expression, tone of voice and cadence of voice to, to help us bel like create an understanding of whether this person is safe. So initial vagal is when we're connected. And so what we're trying to do is to climb up that ladder from like stuck and can't move. Getting some movement into the sympathetic body and then finding some connection into that ventral vagal state, which is where we are

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

our window of tolerance. And that term is from Dan Siegel. He's a psychiatrist who's done a lot of work around the stress response, so. The polyvagal theory is Steven Porges. He's like a basic science researcher. But there are similar thoughts in psychiatry as well. And interestingly, I, I actually have this in my book'cause I really wanted to also explore our ancestral knowledge. So the polyvagal theory maps perfectly to the Ayurvedic texts from ancient Indian Health. So in the Vedas they talk about Unas and those Unas map perfectly onto to polyvagal theory. So humans have known this for thousands of

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

For a really

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah,

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Wow. Wow. And I, I guess we've just mostly just forgotten it.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

there is so much we've forgotten. Like it's, it's actually quite, I, I mean, I talk about ancient practices that we've always done. Humans have always sung or chanted or hummed in, in, in groups. This is something that we've always done through millennials of human civilization, except for now. It's something that we've kind of forgot to do. I just joined the, the women in medicine choir here in Canada. Although they're like intimidatingly good, but I thought, you know, I should probably be doing more of this. I keep saying that this is something that's good for my vagus nerve. And it's something we've always known.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

that's so cool. That's very, very cool. Okay, so what are some early signs that the body is in a trauma response even before we're really aware of it.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Well, and that's you've really mentioned this secret to unlocking this whole thing. It's developing and interceptive awareness and so because I like to break things down into what that, you know what the basics are? Interoception is the signals that actually are coming up through your vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve is supposed to be sending signals up to the brain. About 80% of the fibers are what we call afferent or sending upwards and

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

A lot of times when we have been gaslit by our doctors or told by our families that we're not good enough and scapegoated, or we've had a learning disability or neurodiversity, and society is telling us that there's something wrong, we actually learn to suppress the signals. Chronic pain is another thing that does it. So sometimes we just push down those signals. Sometimes the signals snap back and say, well, I'm gonna have to amplify the signal until you pay attention. It

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Gotta

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

is gonna turn it up. And so that interoceptive messaging gets really, really amplified. So there's, there's two pathways. One is interoception, which is learning what is the message that my body is sending me, so it's paying more attention to, well, am I anxious or is it my heart beating? And that's the way my body is perceiving the symptom. So it's perceiving the heartbeat as anxiety. Could it also perceive that as excitement or exhilaration? And could I tell myself a new story in the perception path in the brain? So there's the interoception, which is the body telling the brain, this is what's happening in the inside environment and the outside what my senses are uncovering. And then the amygdalas decide, well, okay, is that input dangerous or not? And then it helps form that perception. If the amygdalas decide you're in danger, it's actually a reflex response. It doesn't even go to your thinking brain. So, so much about interrupting these pathways is getting to know them. It's getting to know, well, what are those early signals that my body is sending me that ends up turning into the stress response. Deb is.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Got it.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

The clinician for the polyvagal theory, and she calls this befriending your nervous system, which I think is such a beautiful way to describe it.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Wow. Okay. So tell us a little bit more about befriending your nervous system.'cause I'm intrigued. That sounds really cool.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I, I think of it as getting to know the ways that your brain and your body are trying to protect you. So rather than thinking of this as something that's wrong with you, I think of it as something that's right with you. And I'm always asking my patients, well, why? Does that make sense? So, so befriending your nervous system is looking at it with the lens of curiosity and self-compassion instead of pathology, which is what all of us as clinicians are taught to do, like, well, why? What needs fixing? What's wrong with this? The stress response is adaptive. It's not maladaptive. It's, it's sending you signals to let you know that something is threatening. And that threat could be coming from inside the body as a pain signal or a signal of something that doesn't feel right in your digestion or your nervous system. So all kinds of people can get different signal pathways that turn on or off because of stress.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

And then there's a lot of it to do with perception. So once your amygdalas have turned down, and that to me happens best through body-based practices because it doesn't involve your thinking brain anyway. But once you've turned down the amygdalas, then your thinking brain is more available to you, and then you can think your way out of a stress response better. But the first step is actually through the body.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Okay. Very cool. So what are some of the techniques that you recommend for that?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I've been studying this nonstop for like, I actually can't stop studying. It's really weird. I keep saying to myself like, you're teaching this stuff now. Why are you still so committed to learn? But I just find it fascinating and it's constant like the things that we're. Uncovering about what works for the body. So I learned something called the Havening Techniques, which the basic science researchers uncovered that this is the basis of EMDR or eye movement desensitization or accelerated resolution therapy. When you move your eyes from side to side, your brainwaves create more delta and theta waves, which are calming and decrease the gamma waves, and it turns out that really gentle, soothing touch across the palms of the hand, the shoulders, and the face does the same thing. So I will teach my patients to find a common, peaceful place in their mind or to create one or to imagine going for a swim or playing basketball or petting your dog, but just doing something that's really neutral or calming and you just do this gentle touch and within a minute or two, your brain is creating delta and theta waves and the body calms down. So there are so many different practices. This is why I joined TikTok and why I wrote the modern trauma toolkit is'cause I was like. I can't believe how many things we don't learn in medical school, but I could easily teach my patients in like a minute how to do this. And then not only that, but I do it for myself in between patients so that I can co-regulate better and I'm not showing up for all my patient encounters in a jumped up nervous system.'cause I mean, when I was a hospitalist, I was showing up in sympathetic tone for every single encounter. No wonder everything felt supercharged.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Right. that's very, very cool. Since I work with hormones, how does the stress hormones and the adrenaline and the cortisol, how does that fit in with all these nervous impulses?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

It's also interconnected and, and you're probably a bigger expert on this than I am, but when I think of a stuck, sympathetic nervous system, it's kind of shifting your body's overall functioning away from what parasympathetic is supposed to do. And parasympathetic is your gastrointestinal tract, your endocrine system, your reproductive system, and your immune system. So, all of that shuts down when you're locked into sympathetic tone. So for many of us, we're locked into fight and flight. We have this activated nervous system response. We feel like, you know, there's a motor inside and it's go, go, go. And even when we finally get some time for parasympathetic, that system is not optimized because it's not in the right window either we're not getting enough sleep, or that system shows up in overwhelm too, so. Our body functions best when we have a balance of parasympathetic and sympathetic and when neither of them are overactive. So that definitely speaks directly to the endocrine system. The job of the adrenal glands or the the amygdalas is to activate the adrenal glands and say, Hey, pump cortisol

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yes.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

This is the stress response that's gonna help shift all of our energy to the heart and the muscles and the eyes and escape our problems. But like we can't escape our problems in modern times. So we're just stuck in this body that's shifting all this energy to organs that like don't need that much energy. I mean, I'll see it with patients. When I had a family practice, one of my patients, her legs looked like she ran marathons because she was just so stuck in sympathetic tone all the time. Her legs would be jittery, she'd have restless legs at night. Her body was in constant motion because of her childhood. So once we started doing trauma therapy, things began to shift, and it's true. I had another patient with diabetes just to think of hormones and.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

trauma therapy and her measurement of like diabetic control, which is what we call hemoglobin A1C, or the sugar attached to your blood cells dropped in half. And so much of it was because her endocrine system shift and so much it was because she was able to,

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

cortisol all day long.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

she was able to be back in her body again and recognize the signals that were coming up. Because once you've been pushing down those signals and suppressing them and not recognizing the interceptive signals. You don't really know what's happening in your own body.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Wow. That's pretty cool. All right. I wanna shift just a little bit because I know for some people it is so difficult to get out of this, particularly this PTSD kind of response and I wanna talk kind of an academic way about what we know about psychedelics and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and how that is developing and possibly even progressing towards being legal in the US and Canada. So, so tell us what you know.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

This is something that I studied pretty early on in my journey around trauma because the evidence has been there for a long time. I mean, there's been good evidence since the 1960s that was kind of suppressed when, you know, they had this war on drugs and they decided the psychedelics were lumped into drugs. Realistically there, when you look at the social and physiologic implications of most psychedelics, they're more benign on the human anatomy than like alcohol or you know, Marijuana, even like if you just look at kind of the social implications. So it's quite fascinating to me how they're still kind of being targeted as, as dangerous especially when used in the right clinical environment. So when we talk about psychedelic therapy and I've been trained by three different organizations in this. We talk a lot about set and setting. So set is your mindset, and that's why I think if you have a heavily traumatized brain, you have to have some skills, whether it's body-based or brain-based skills to stay in the window of tolerance, or you're gonna go into your psychedelic journey with a mindset that's in fight and flight, and then it may or may not be able to actively shift. So a lot of it has to do with the mindset you're coming in with. I could do a whole hour talk about epigenetics and the ancestral, you know, pieces of our trauma response that we also inherit.'cause that's a whole other thing. So that all makes up our mindset. And then setting is, do we trust the person that we're in the room with? Are we in a group? Are we in another country?'cause some people are, you know, flying to Costa Rica and doing ayahuasca, some of which is happening in pretty unsafe environments. So the setting is also a really important piece to it. So I don't clinically practice psychedelic medicine because I just haven't found the right safe environment. And because right now the only safe medicine is ketamine, which is more of a dissociative than a psychedelic,

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

yeah.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

But I do think it has incredible potential and I, I think that the FDA ignoring the level three evidence was really unfortunate because their argument was, well, you can always tell the difference between a psychedelic and a placebo. So we have to throw at all of the studies because everyone knew which one branch they were in. Yeah.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

That's

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

It

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

thing I've

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

is so ridiculous, and it just goes to show you the limits of randomized control trials. And even when they do somatic based therapies, like of course, you know when your stress response is being calmed down. So it makes sense that when they do randomized control trials that it's not always giving you the same kind of responses when you do case control trials. When people are saying, wow, that was really beneficial, which is what I get every day from these somatic therapies that I share.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Well, yeah. And you know, and I think that problem exists across clinical research. You know, like even in trials of weightlifting for older women or you know, you know, whether you've lifted weights or not, you know. It's like, how can you, how can you blind that? You can't blind that. Okay. So, but it's still randomized. You tell somebody, Hey, this, this exercise is gonna be good for you. You tell everybody the same thing, but some people lift weights and some people do, you know, water aerobics? I don't know. Yeah, it's like how can you, how can you insist on blinding in a, I mean, it was like the Women's Health Initiative,

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah. Yeah.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

You know, they had to pick people who were beyond menopause symptoms to get people who would not be aware of whether they were getting placebo or not. It's just stupid stuff. Anyway my next question is really about rebuilding safety. And I wanna know, you emphasize this, and I really wanna know what does safety really mean emotionally, physiologically and how does it work when somebody starts to really feel safe in their own bodies?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah. I think a lot of it has to do with agency or a sense of control and choices. So when you think about what a stress response is doing when it's activated and your amygdalas are in charge, it's sending you down a reflex arc. So you're going into fight, flight, or freeze without having conscious control over it. And so the opposite of that to me is when you have agency and more choices. So I don't think of the opposite of trauma as like you're never in fight, flight, or freeze.'cause like the world can be scary and bad things might happen, and you might need those responses. The opposite of being stuck in a trauma response is having mental flexibility, so having lots of possible paths in front of you. So a lot of the work that I do is helping people understand and even practicing like really, really gentle approaches to practicing different responses that they have

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Under their awareness. So, and even just believing that they have more than one path available to them'cause so much the of that stress response is saying, well, this ca catastrophic outcome is bound to happen and our brain goes straight to the worst case scenario. Like every single day someone will say to me, well, I don't know if I would necessarily wanna change that because then I'm ready for the worst case scenario. Like, yeah, but what if you prepared for five different possible scenarios that are equally likely? That's a huge shift. So, so a lot of it is bringing. These unconscious processes that are adaptive and protective into conscious awareness. So being more aware of those interceptive pathways, what is my body telling me? Being more aware of the perception. How is my brain interpreting these signals? And then how much of that is because of painful past experience and expectations of the future? And once you've brought that into conscious awareness, then you have choices. So that's in a nutshell what therapy is. But a lot of it you can DIY. So the reason I wrote the modern trauma toolkit is because so much of these nervous system skills and these vagus nerve remodeling is something that we could all do. We could teach it as physicians or parents or teachers. We just need to get this into the common language of everyday human behavior.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Right. Well, I mean you, you said an important word just now. You said the word

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yep.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

These are not, I'm, I'm thinking about my own personal experience now, which is, you know, when I get into a situation where somebody's criticizing me in some way, that I just freeze, I just freeze and that pathway is so well worn that you know, I just, I have this thought in my head, you know, if somebody criticizes me, I'm gonna die. I know that response is gonna happen. I know that's what is gonna happen. I mean, it's not necessarily true, but that's what my brain is telling me, is if I put myself in a situation where I get criticized, I'm gonna go into this freeze response and gonna make a fool of myself and maybe even die.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah, and I, I can totally relate to that. I mean, medical training kind of. Gives us extra of that like imposter syndrome and not good enough feeling just the way it was designed. I'm sure you were a similar vintage to me. I, I, I think that new generations are pushing back against this like, kind of shame-based learning, but we, it,

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

oh. Thank

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

a really, it's a really difficult way to be in the world having this like sense of not being good enough and all physicians have it because we actually can't heal and cure many, many things and like all human bodies die. So there, there, there is always going to be a sense of what we would perceive as failure. And so much of it is like learning to tell ourselves new stories. So, so many times if I had somebody in front of me who was reacting to bullying or criticism, we would try to bring so much more of that response into adult consciousness. Well, so what happens in the body first before you shut down? And how much of that can we be aware of and try something different? So if you're noticing that you're taking shallow breaths, could we deepen those breaths? And because we really want to invoke your sympathetic state, we're gonna deepen our inhale specifically, but if you're in fight and flight, we're gonna do the opposite. We're gonna deepen the exhale. So even just learning how to do breath beyond box breathing, where everything is equal into actually learning well, what is my stress response doing and how can I use my breath to shift that deliberately. And then once you have some. More cog cognitive capacity or conscious control over it. What is the new story you could tell yourself about this hot potato of shame that's being tossed your way and you're like, well, I don't have to accept that. What would it feel like to to not accept that potato and kind of give it back to them? Not necessarily verbally, but even just metaphorically to say, yeah, that must be really hard to be them, where they feel like they have to criticize me to feel like they're good enough, so.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

I love. Oh, I love that. That's, that's awesome.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah, so we, we bring this into conscious control, and you don't have to have that as a dialogue, but it can be an inner dialogue and it's a lot nicer of an inner dialogue than the inner critic saying, well, you're not good enough. And so we actually counteract it. There's lots of different practices that I use where we, we use metaphor and imagery and body-based practices to strengthen this really positive dialogue that's so much more self-compassionate.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yeah. That's so cool. So on that same line, as physicians, we really get, you know, especially in our training, we get a lot of, I don't know. We get a lot of messages that we need to push through and you can't take a break. You can't go to the bathroom. You can't stop to eat dinner. You can't stop to read a book that you actually wanna read. You have to go, go, go all the time. You have to sleep. Deprive yourself. are there things that folks in training can do to help kind of push back against that? I mean, is there, like, you know, like you, you mentioned box breathing. I mean, is there just, is there a role for just, okay, I'm gonna take 10 seconds and I'm just gonna breathe.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I think the first thing is recognizing that the modern world is kind of designed that way. The modern world is designed at a really fast pace. I mean, the, the work life of a physician was like, I mean, I, I know for me it was like 80 to a hundred hours a week. It was absolutely bonkers. But

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Right.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

just looking at you know, a teacher's work life, like my sister will bring five or six hours of work to her home on the weekends or going to school

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

and, and we just have this expectation that there's 40 plus hours in a week, and then we go home and we, you know, are sandwiched between generations there and have all these other duties or hobbies that we've lined up for. And it's no wonder that people, like people talk about bed rotting, where they're just like scrolling social media or watching Netflix in bed like that makes sense that it's a, it's a natural response to having been overwhelmed in the daily life for so long. So I think a lot of it is conscious awareness and

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I had no idea I was locked in sympathetic tone when I was working as a hospitalist, but once I started to look for the signs and symptoms, so for me. I did a 24 hour blood pressure monitor and my pressures were through the roof, and then I did the same thing on a day off and it was normal. And I was like, wow, I'm having a really elevated, you know, cortisol surge when I'm on

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

What should I do about this? Starting to recognize the signals that I was getting about fatigue because I was just so constantly overtired. Like I was the kind of person who could sleep sitting up in any room on any flight at any time of the day. So really starting to listen to the signals that your body is sending is the first step that's developing your interceptive awareness and recognizing. When you're stuck in sympathetic tone and then really deliberately getting parasympathetic. So for me it was I got deep into yoga practice. Sometimes it's discharging sympathetic tone. So sympathetic tone is like stored in your muscles and your tissues'cause it wants to run or fight. So sometimes it's. Getting to the gym or, you know, playing an instrument like drumming is something. Bruce Perry is another psychiatrist who's studied this a lot, and he talks about the rhythm of regulation. Like anything that you do with both sides of your body, whether it's going for a jog. Is really, really helpful both in releasing sympathetic tone, but also creating what we call bilateral stimulation or something that's happening on both sides. So I use tapping, which is self acupressure. It's one of the skills on my TikTok and in the modern trauma toolkit that I just think everyone could easily learn. So tapping on different.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

And it's quick. It's very fast.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

It's effective. They've actually, they're getting some really good evidence base on this one too, which is great because the pushback has always been, well, what's the evidence? And there's good evidence on chronic pain, on anxiety, even PTSD.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yeah, so cool. All right, well, we're getting towards the end of our time, so I wanna ask you one question that's really related to a lot of patients that I see, and that's in these people who've been for decades sometimes. I mean, I, I met a lady this week who for 30 years she's been told that her symptoms are not real. And they finally find this diagnosis and then, it explains what they've been going through. But then sometimes they kind of have internalized this label of I'm sick. And so they hold onto that and it's kind of become who they are and they're so wrapped up in this identity of sick that even when physically we get the hormones balanced out, they keep holding onto that identity of sick, and I'm just wondering if you have any insight for me on what's happening there and something specific that I can recommend help a patient release this identity and start to develop a new, I'm healthier than I was, or I'm learning to heal, or, you know, things like that.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

I have the perfect skill for you in this one. It's called affirmations. So we've all heard of affirmations. That's like when you say things like, I am, well, my body is strong. Did things happen to.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

and it's hard to believe those when you've been 30 years of

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Exactly. So an information is just sticking a what if in front of it and even giving yourself a bigger distance. So information would be like, what if I could imagine a time in the future that my body is strong? What if I could be well? And you're just tiptoeing towards the affirmation. So the affirmation feels like you're gaslighting yourself'cause you don't believe it,

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Mm-hmm.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

but the

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Right,

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

just plants it as a possibility. So remember how a few minutes ago I was saying that the opposite of trauma is mental flexibility. That's what the informations do, and you're just planting seeds. So actually, I, I tell my patients to visualize a garden in their brain where there's been this one tree that's getting all the sun and nurturing, and this tree is the story of sickness. You've been telling yourself that story for so long, and what's it like to plant other seeds and start to nourish them, so you're literally planting a new garden in the brain of different stories, different possibilities. So when I do tapping, instead of saying, I am anxious or I am sad, or I am sick, or I am in pain. I always say there is pain, there is sadness, there is anxiety. Just knowing that every single human has that experience and right now you're experiencing more than your fair share, but everything is also supposed to flow. So getting stuck in that experience is, is creating that identity state. And so instead of saying I am, I say there is, there is, there is sickness, there is illness. And sometimes you experience it and sometimes you don't, and sometimes you experience greater states of health. And so rather than there being this polarity of I am sick versus I am well there, there's just all these, this spectrum of experiences that you can attune to. So a lot of chronic illnesses, attunement and I, I always share with folks that so much of it is about what you're paying attention to. So in that interceptive signal that's telling you, oh, my guts are churning. Like I, I have IBS. That's definitely one possibility. And another possibility is that you're paying a lot of attention to signals that are actually neutral. So we actually start attending to neutral signals and interpreting them through the interoceptive perceptive pathway as dangerous because our amygdala has decided that they're dangerous. But we can help the amygdala learn a new story. So this is so much of what I do, and this is kind of more the second phase of trauma treatment. So the first phase is befriending your nervous system, and the second is what we call memory reconsolidation, which is telling yourself a new story and everyone can do it. So it's not to gaslight you and say that your symptoms aren't real, because often they are. But what happens to a lot of folks is that pathway starts amplifying the signals. And so we need to learn how to turn the volume dial back down and even start to start to reinterpret the signals in a new way.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

So cool. So, so cool. All right, do you have one more thing that we didn't touch on today that you think it's really, really important for folks to know?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

We had kind of mentioned this in the notes, but the concept of resilience versus post-traumatic growth I think is just a really important one. So we always talk about being resilient and, and bouncing back to your baseline and how important that is. But what I think is also equally important to share with folks is that once you've been through trauma and toxic stress and huge challenges, and once you've confronted all of the collective trauma that we're facing. The opportunity is to bounce somewhere different rather than bouncing back. So do we really want to recreate a world where, you know, we're just letting rampant climate change happen? Do we really wanna recreate a world full of inequity and like oppression? No. We wanna recreate systems, whether that's the healthcare system or these like broader government related systems, or our nervous system that bounces back differently. So the differently to me is, oh my gosh, I have this new awareness of my own nervous system that I never had before, and I have more conscious control over it. So, I have that because I went through this stress and challenge, but what a gift. And that's what like to me happened after the earthquake is I have so much more awareness of my own stress responses and I have more pathways and skills to help me feel like I have more control over them. And that by turn helps me change systems. So it's, it's all these fractals of like post-traumatic growth that I think is possible for all of us and for the greater systems that are also harming

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Super, and you don't have to go through an earthquake in order to have

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

you don't.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

That's, I mean, that's, that's another huge message here is that, you know, your, your trauma doesn't have to have, that doesn't have to be a big T trauma, you know, bad car wreck, whatever, does not have to be that for you to experience this

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

And it doesn't even have to be an event. It can just be a feeling, this feeling like, well, I don't know if good things happen. I don't know if the world is safe. I don't know if I'm good enough. You know, that feeling is what we talk about. Complex or developmental or attachment trauma, which is not as much in the medical lexicon, but it's really important. So telling yourself a new story. Well, what if I could believe that everybody's good enough and everybody holds value? What, what if that is a seed I could plant today?

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yeah. Awesome. All right. How can people find you?

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

So my book can be found through moderntrauma.com. There's like a little bar at the top, but it's like, it's on all the Amazons and at your local bookstore to to order.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Sure.

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

It's. It gives you a lot of skills. There's about 40 different practices within the book with activities, lots of nervous systems, skills that you can learn for yourself, but also teach patients or your kids. These are just things I think everyone should know. I don't take on clinical patients, but I do lots of speaking. So to find me there, I'm just christinegibsion.net and I'm on all the socials, but pretty prominent on TikTok.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

Yay. Yay for

christine-gibson--she-her-_1_10-29-2025_113557

Yeah.

dana-gibbs-md--she-_3_10-29-2025_123557

That's, oh, cool. Okay. tiktoktraumadoctor. I'll make sure that's in the show notes and thank you so much for coming on today with me. This has been really informative and I'm sure that my listeners are gonna really love incorporating some of the stuff that you've teaching us. And I just wanna say that if you're listening and you're not a physician, please keep in mind that while we are doctors, we are not your doctors, and that the content of this podcast is our opinions and is for educational purposes only. It's not individual medical advice. And you need to consult your own physician for any me medical diagnosis or issues that you might have. if you knows somebody who needs a carrying and expert doctor to help them with their thyroid or hormone problems. I am she. I have a few new patient spots open for next month, and you can set up a discovery call on my website at danagibbsmd.com. Thanks for listening today. Take care of you guys.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Beyond the Thyroid. If you found this information valuable, it would mean so much to me to take a few seconds and give the podcast a five star review. It helps other people who need this information find the show and it's really easy. Just search and click on the name of the show, Beyond the Thyroid, and scroll to the bottom to ratings and reviews. I truly do read and appreciate. Remember, when it comes to hormones, there will always be more to discover, so follow the show so you get the next episode as soon as it's released. And if you or someone you care about needs a caring doctor to help figure out how to heal hormone problems that other doctors have dismissed, check out my website at www. danagibbsmd. com. And if you're not a physician, please keep in mind, while I'm a doctor, I'm not your doctor. The content of this podcast is my opinion and it's for educational and entertainment purposes only. This is not meant to be individual medical advice and you should consult your own physician for any medical issues or diagnoses that you may have. I look forward to continuing this journey with you beyond the thyroid.