Podcast 533: From Trauma to Power: Healing Hormones & Reclaiming Self

(Intro)

KELLY: If you're a victim of sexual trauma and you don't address it, and you compartmentalize it and put it way back here in your brain, but it's going to affect your relationships. You might not be as affectionate, as warm, there's a million things. And you could be the biggest teddy bear on the planet or the sweetest person, but your partner's not getting that because you haven't addressed that trauma.

MARTIN: Greetings, everyone. This is Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast Podcast. You will find me at life-enthusiast.com. And with me today is Dr. Kelly Barron, doctor of chiropractic, and her story is compelling; it will have so many touch points that all of you, every one of you, will be able to relate. Welcome.

KELLY: Well, thank you, Martin, and thank you for having me on today. I'm really excited. I'm fascinated about the work that you do, so I was just really excited to be able to come on and tell my story, and hopefully it resonates with some of your listeners.

MARTIN: Right. I'm an open book myself. I have shared my story with our clients. They're probably here because they trust me. They can relate to me. They know I've lived the same tragedies that I had needed to overcome that they are dealing with now. So let's start with that. What is your journey? How did you get here?

KELLY: My journey, it just started out as a typical child growing up in Long Island, New York. My father was a police officer. My mother was a nurse. It's a very typical upbringing. Very safe. And brothers and sisters. You kinda, when you live in New York, you sort of don't ever leave New York. But I did, and I left when I was 19, and I moved to the South. And I was in college, and was waiting tables to support myself while in college, and that is where my life sort of changed from your typical upbringing to something I could've never imagined, and the impact I could never imagine it would have. But the story is, I had started working at a new restaurant. It's in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, so it was more of a bar. And it was my first day, and by nature I am an introvert. And I was coming out of work at 2:00 a.m. in the morning, forgot my jacket. I had come into the parking lot with staff, forgot my jacket, ran back, and came back out into a parking lot at 2:00 a.m. Nobody was there. There was lights in the parking lot, but nobody was there. And this is the daughter of a police officer. I should know better, but I didn't. So I went to get in my car, and at a car right next to me was a gentleman who was on drugs. They think it was meth. But when I was trying to get in the car, he jumped out and proceeded to chase me down and there was an assault. I was lucky that he didn't get too far. It wasn't a sexual assault, but it was a physical assault. 

Pretty bad. But people had come out, the last manager had come out, and so they were able to call the police and stop it before it went any further. But that incident changed everything about me.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: It changed how I felt about myself, who I was, how I viewed the world. And it kind of stayed in that, I kind of stayed in this very sheltered, quiet place for probably a good 10 years.

But in that time, I was afraid to be alone. I was afraid to, I got married, but if my husband had left the house, at night specifically, or gone away, I wouldn't sleep. I would sleep at sunrise. When the sun rose, I'd sleep for an hour. And I had children, and that's where my life took yet another shift. 

Because at the time I was just, I was so scared, and I had these young children to care for, and my husband had said, "You know, you can't live a life like this. You have to learn self-defense. You have to learn how to protect yourself."

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: Right, prior to that when I had my first child, all three of my sons were home births. And I had gotten my doctor of chiropractic, and I had started to view health and nutrition and fitness in a whole new way. But I really, in high school, I was an athlete, but I had stopped, went through college, and then with the assault I just shut down. So a few things changed right about getting pregnant, nutrition. I began to see, first, nutrition as a way to take control of an area of my life. I wanted my children to be, I wanted my pregnancies, my children to be in the best environment in my womb, and I knew I could control that. I couldn't control anything else. So I drastically changed my nutrition.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: When the children, when the last child was born, I looked towards fitness and I started to think, "Wow, I can control the shape of my body. I can change it. It's all up to me." And so I got into exercise, nutrition, and I started to just see, that was my source of comfort. The one area I controlled was the vessel that I was living in. 

And from there is when self-defense came in and fitness and having to be able to be strong enough to, and it's not strong enough to overcome someone, defeat someone, if it's a male. If things are, six-foot male, 250 pounds, chances are slim that I'm gonna do any damage, but I needed the confidence to be able to do that. So I started taking self-defense and started to become very empowered and confident that I could have, at the very least I could protect my children. 

And at that point I thought, I'm still though,  I'm very, there was still this feeling of being frightened, scared, helpless, was still lingering. So I then decided that the only way to get this out of my mind was to fight, and when I say that, mixed martial arts. So I started to, my self-defense instructor introduced me to a gym. He’s an amazing UFC coach right now with an excellent gym, and I started training under him. And at age 38 to 42, I fought MMA in Colorado. And I will never forget the first time. I was, I loved training because it was so empowering and you looked great and your body felt great. But that first fight I said, "I want to fight" a girl, obviously.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: "I want to fight. I want to be able to know that I can defend myself." And I gotta tell you, the training was great and not, and I had to train with, there weren't many women at the time in MMA, so my partners were all 18 to 24-year-old males, and I just felt so great. I got into that cage that day, that night, and I remember they shut the cage door and I was like, "This is it. I'm gonna banish my demons." And I looked across at the other girl and I was, I just immediately turned around and said, "You know, it's time to go. I am not really ready to do this. This is not a good thing."

MARTIN: Oh, dear.

KELLY: I went on to fight that fight. I lost, a split decision, but it changed everything. It changed everything, because I knew mentally I could fight back. I knew I had it in me.

KELLY: So I went on and did a couple more fights. Then I realized at 42, the amount of scars I was accumulating probably wasn't gonna get me on the cover of Vogue. So, a couple trips to the emergency room with black eyes and three young children didn't really go over so well with the,

MARTIN: You show up at school and they're thinking, "Oh, is she living in an abusive relationship?"

KELLY: Yeah, exactly. I sat down at a bank one day with my husband, and we were just doing, we were opening a new account, and I had a black eye, and they just stared at him. And I'm like, "You don't have to call the authorities. It is completely fine. This is not his work." But it took a lot of courage. It took, it was a very scary thing, and it became my mantra, especially after the assault. Was to get comfortable being comfortable.

MARTIN: Yeah. It's super interesting that you are describing how you took this activity, but also this, what shall we call it? Well, putting yourself in danger, right? Having to really face down an ultimate demise, really. I mean, you could get really hurt if you don't defend, right?

KELLY: You could get very hurt. After that first fight, because it was the very first fight, I decided to use my face as a focus mitt in the first round instead of defend myself. So by the time of the end of that fight, my face was a mess, and it could've been that I had stitches. It could've been bad. But my gut instinct was, I have to, just like you said, I have to put myself back in that situation and make sure that I can defend myself.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: It's almost like, can I have a redo, even though it's not the same situation. But being able to do that was amazing, but I knew I couldn't, that wasn't going to be enough. I knew I had to continually put myself in these situations. 

MARTIN: You know what I'm thinking of? Is that you actually have been rewiring your brain. I mean, this,

KELLY: Exactly

MARTIN: This, what you're putting yourself into, is just completely rewiring how you relate with getting punched and how you relate to having somebody attack you and so on. All of that, right? So you're completely redoing all the neural pathways that are related to a physical assault.

KELLY: And it's fascinating that the human body can do that. If you had me before, I would've said, "no, there's no way you can do that." But you really have to do it. I would, I started teaching self-defense for women because I felt passionately that you just have to feel empowered. You'll be okay.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: And there are ways where, yes, you could take out the 6'2", 250-pound man. Yeah, absolutely, there are ways you could do it. But I used to walk in a parking lot, like Walmart, at dusk, and be really afraid. Or on the flip side, prior to, never paying attention to my surroundings.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, it's the sucker punch that gets you, right? It's the what you don't see that comes at you that takes you out. If you're able to practice a 360 awareness, then you're a whole different chess piece on the board, right?

KELLY: Exactly. And in continually working on, I don't say I'm consciously working on rewiring my brain, but putting myself in those situations. Now I moved on to competitive powerlifting because you don't get punched in the face, so there's a lot less damage in the mirror. But it's the same situation. It's going out on a stage in front of all these people and you need to lift these weights, and you're scared and you're vulnerable.

MARTIN: Yes.

KELLY: But you put yourself in there and you say, "Look, you can do this." So when something trivial now comes along, public speaking, which I used to be deathly afraid of, or things like that, you just can tap into that energy now and say nothing is as bad as what you went through way back when.

MARTIN: Right.

KELLY: Unfortunate as it was, it changed everything. And a lot of things had changed for the better. Gonna shock some people when I say that.

MARTIN: Right. Yeah, when I talk to people about health, I use four fingers, and I say the four legs on which chronic illness and problems will stand are toxicity, malnutrition, stagnation, and trauma. And you must address all of that. It's like four wheels on a car. You don't get to choose. All four have to work. And so nutrition, well, fine, we understand where that is, but trauma is oftentimes not addressed well. And you're talking about this now, right? Neuro-linguistic programming is one of the methods where you get to understand how the wiring in your head, in your brain, in your subconscious can be shifted, and that's one of the methods how it can be done. You went and did it full life. You didn't just do therapy. You went and redid it. But it's interesting to me that you have overcome this tendency that we have as humans to go victim, right? It's so easy to just say, "It happened to me. Poor me. I'm now having to live a life of consequence of that." And I think that it was your choice that you just decided that that's not how you're going to live it out.

KELLY: That's exactly how it was because I didn't live as the victim, but I did allow a situation to victimize me internally.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: And I think a lot of people do that. They,

MARTIN: Well, it's hard not to. 

KELLY: Right.

MARTIN: Stress, especially traumatic stress, happens. There are, I don't know, PTSD is something that gets mentioned, and it's usually relating to soldiers and first responders, but it can happen to anyone. 

KELLY: And I wish people understood, how that trauma, how it can take control of you, and you don't even know it, and how it can change your relationships. And it's not saying that something bad is happening, but if you're a victim of sexual trauma and you don't address it, and you compartmentalize it and put it way back here in your brain, it's going to affect your relationships. You might not be as affectionate, as warm, there's a million things. And you could be the biggest teddy bear on the planet or the sweetest person, but your partner's not getting that because you haven't addressed that trauma. And I'm just spotlighting that as one thing.

MARTIN: Sure.

KELLY: But I knew at some point when I felt myself just, there's no reason I should be going to sleep at dawn and staying up all night. And I said, "No, this is just, this is, I'm not letting this take over. I'm not letting this control me. As much as I'm scared, I'm not going to do it." And I think a lot of people want to break that. They're just scared to address it.

MARTIN: Right.

KELLY: For whatever reason, they're scared or they don't want to. They may feel shame that they shouldn't address it or shouldn't take care of this, but it's so important. And a lot of the things that you talk about in terms of your health, people don't understand what it does to their health. Anywhere from their cortisol levels, their gut health, their metabolism, the ability to lose weight, to sleep, all these things, hormone levels.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: If they would just,

MARTIN: Yeah. I mean, we're right back at the autonomic nervous system, and what all is playing here, right? Is it the mineral balance? Is it the emotional balance? Is it actually something mechanical? How's your vagus nerve doing, right?

KELLY: Ah, yeah. That's a good one. That's one of my favorites.

MARTIN: Right? Well, let's talk about that. So you went and became a chiropractor, and so you help people get their body back together too, right?

KELLY: Right. So, a chiropractor addresses, we don't address just bone and soft tissue, but also the nervous system. And it plays such a big role. Most folks look at chiropractic as snap, crackle, pop, and I'm walking better. What they don't understand is, your nervous system needs to be healthy. People don't view your nervous system as healthy or unhealthy. It's just a thing you have, if they even pay attention to it. But if they knew or if they were educated to see that your nervous system controls everything, and if it is not healthy, everything's going to go wrong. Minute or large, it'll manifest somewhere. So yeah, that vagus nerve,

MARTIN: Right. So, for example, we have people living with anxiety because something's pushing them into the acidic or calcium-driven state of being. But it could be that there's some kind of a pressure right here somewhere. I think the outlet is just under the ear, right? Thereabouts.

KELLY: Yes. Yes.

MARTIN: And so if you have some misalignment over here, in fact, you can find the lack of symmetry. I'm just palpating for this. This would be the big wings of the atlas. Or pardon me, not, is it correct? No. The next one. What's it called? 

KELLY: Yes. Atlas is right.

MARTIN: Yeah, that's the atlas. Okay.

KELLY: Cervical, C1 and C2.

MARTIN: Yeah, C1. Well, anyway, so it has big wings that they stick out into the neck, right? And you can find them if you want to look for them.

KELLY: Mm-hmm.

MARTIN: And when they are, what's the word? Misaligned.

KELLY: Misaligned. It could be something so small and physical as that, that manifests in a totally different way. 

MARTIN: Anyway, so yeah, the flow of energy. Is it impeded by some mechanical problem or an emotional problem? What is the primary driver, and do you care?

KELLY: I think you absolutely have to. I'm not sure that it's easy for folks to find out the primary all the time when multiple, multiple areas are affected.

MARTIN: Yeah, right.

KELLY: Just start addressing them as best as you can.

MARTIN: Yeah. I've often thought of fixing the bicycle while riding it.

KELLY: Right. Exactly. Exactly.

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: That's a great analogy.

MARTIN: Yeah. So okay, so there we are, chiropractic. Well, I've had a good deal of experience with it, mainly because my physical structure fell apart due to mercury poisoning. And so I was unstable. And I remember hearing all kinds of people saying, "The chiropractor made me loose, I keep losing my adjustment." And I say bah to that. It's not the chiropractor, it's your discs that are not firm and not holding together. And it's, well, for me it was mercury toxicity. I think it's common for a great many people, where the connective tissue becomes weak.

KELLY: Yes.

MARTIN: And that's what I suffered from, and it took me years to put it back together.

KELLY: I can't imagine what your journey was like because that's, mercury poisoning is,

MARTIN: Well, I can tell you what it was like. I would lose my adjustment, and it would, of course, as soon as it goes, the body locks up. And so I would have two, maybe three weeks of, can't walk. So I would be sleeping face down on a rocking chair, and I would roll off and crawl on all fours to the toilet, push my butt over the toilet, do the business, and then crawl back to the rocking chair. Not the bed. Couldn't lay on my back.

KELLY: How long did that, how long before you felt, you know?

MARTIN: Well, I needed to come to the bottom of it, right? There was a time when I had this, "You will not carry on like this. This has to stop." So I had that hit the wall moment where it was like, up to a point I was trusting the professionals. I went to the doctors, naturopaths, chiropractors and so on. I was looking for help. And the most competent of the lot were the chiropractors, but they were not fixing the primary driver, the toxicity. They would never ask, "How did you get here?" So I actually went into research. I'm originally a business analyst, so with business we always ask, "Well, what's the driver here? What's the cause?" And with the medical they don't seem to ask that. So I finally started analyzing me and my problem, and then that led to me realizing where it all came from and then undoing it. There is help out there, it's just that it's not readily available, not readily sought. Most medical people are trained in symptom manipulation.

KELLY: Yeah.

MARTIN: Rather than cause resolution. And so that's what I experienced anyway. And now,

KELLY: That would lead perfectly into where I am today. As I said, when I was childbearing years I went the home birth route. I could control everything and I became a childbirth educator and taught classes online because I was fascinated. Just like you, I researched, and I wanted to know exactly about that subject and all the components that I could control of it. And now fast-forward, I'm 53, and that same with menopause and perimenopause in women in this age group, we feel like when we go to the doctor they don't ask the root questions. They just want to get, take care of the symptoms. That's their goal is, "Okay, you got a symptom. Let's take care of that symptom."

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: Not what,

MARTIN: I have five minutes to diagnose, write a prescription and kick you out.

KELLY: Yes. Or otherwise, "No, the insurance company is not paying for this, so let's get going."

And they don't listen, and that's all people just need to, people need to be able to tell their stories. You need to be able to weave together what's going on with them. There's always so much underlying. But with that is when I started to see that my invincible body was not invincible, and researching hormonal shifts and things of that nature. And, "Oh, there's really not much out there for women in this age group, and you just kind of got to suck it up and live with it." And that’s where that whole, "Oh no, I'm not gonna be the victim," because again, women feel that they're a victim right now of menopause itself, of their bodies,

MARTIN: Yeah. There’s a betrayal, aging sucks.

KELLY: It sucks horribly, but you've got two paths again. It's the same thing with not being a victim and being a victim.

MARTIN: Yeah

KELLY: You could just say, "Well, this is it." Pull those polyester pull-ups out of your drawer and your orthopedic shoes and just resign to it. Or you can say, "To hell with it," and you can not be the victim, and you can do whatever you can do to live out the best life that you can.

MARTIN: Right.

KELLY: And look for things, ask questions.

Change your mindset about, oh, we're aging, the body's biologically women, really we, this is the saddest thing to say, but our job's done. There's really no use for us at this point.

MARTIN: Yeah. The period stops, the uterus is shutting down. It's over.

KELLY: Yeah, you're just on the slow road to fizzling out into the great beyond.

MARTIN: Except you now have tons of wisdom and patience that you didn't used to have, and all kinds of things to share, right? Grandmother is a wonderful, useful role or stage of life.

KELLY: Oh, it's amazing. And, and what's changed in society, with our lifespan increasing, what's becoming, there’s these hierarchies in women. You know, they go back hundreds of years. But it would be maiden where you're up to just before childbearing. Then you're in your childbearing stage, and then you move on to the crow, or the crone, they call it the crone.

MARTIN: Yeah, crone.

KELLY: And then you’re a grandma. But that doesn’t happen anymore. We don’t grow up, have children, because we had them so young, then our children are having children, and we're just constant caregivers. Now they've seen at this stage people are having children later, so you're about, early 40s, mid-40s. Your children are off. You're now an empty nester. There's no grandchildren, and women have this block here. They're either smack dab in the middle of their careers that they've worked so hard for, or they're coming on the downside, or they just don't have grandchildren. This is like the best time to be a woman. You don't have to take care of anyone necessarily, like you did.

MARTIN: Yeah. I'll tell you though, as you're describing it, I'm just visualizing the complete opposite of it, where you have dysfunctional children who still need you and parents who are just aging enough that they need a lot of help. And all of a sudden, instead of being all free and whatnot, you're now carrying double the load.

KELLY: Well, that is true, too. That's also true, and I think that women just need to, there's so much, like you said. You can either be an empty nester and have so much time to pursue things, or you could be taking care of aging parents. My parents are in their late 70s. You could have dysfunctional children, and that's things that you're gonna have to bear, too. But if you compile that with all the cr*p that's going on with your body that you can't do a lot about, nature's deciding for you,

If you just victimize yourself, it's just going to be a miserable existence. But we still have half our lives left, and this is where really we can start to take care of the vessel again. Starting to put a lot of attention on nutrition, fitness.

MARTIN: Okay. So what do you now do in your practice? Do you have, you mentioned that you do remote work, too, right? Telemedicine.

KELLY: Yeah. So I have a chiropractic practice, but I practice with my husband, who's a chiropractor. But I primarily now, I have an online business called ‘Tempesta,’ and that's Italian for storm. Because menopause, hormones, it's a storm. And what we do on Tempesta is virtual work where you can book a visit with a doctor online for a virtual visit for menopause symptoms. You can book a call with me to talk about alternative healthcare and how to thrive in life with menopause or when you're in perimenopause. We offer fitness, nutrition coaching, supplements, weight loss, you name it. But it's such a busy world right now that having, going to see your doctor in person is amazing, and we should seek that out, and I wanted to offer an alternative where women had a voice, and they could do it from home, from the office, wherever they needed to be.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, it sounds really, actually attractive because why should I drive when I can,

KELLY: Right

MARTIN: When can we actually do it right from here? Yes, I want to drive to the chiropractor's office because I want the hands on me to,

KELLY: Right.

MARTIN: Push me back where I should be. But all of the other stuff, we can do it over the phone or over the screen. That's good.

KELLY: Couch and your jammies. You don't even have to, you don't have to get dressed or put makeup on.

MARTIN: Okay. Well, you do.

KELLY: Yeah, I do, but that's okay.

MARTIN: Yeah. All right. Good. And so Tempesta?

KELLY: Tempesta, yes.

MARTIN: Okay, got it.

KELLY: When I was in MMA, when I was fighting, I had this big dream of starting a female fight wear line called Tempest, and I thought, "Oh, it's a storm and it's gonna be great," and that never came to fruition.

But when I wanted, when I started researching and getting more and more into menopause and perimenopause, that just kept coming back and I was like, it is a storm. It's a storm that hits you. You just can't prepare for it. And I thought, that's a great name.

MARTIN: Yeah. Good. I took a course in, bio-identical hormones, and I certainly have, a decent enough understanding of what happens and how it happens and the timing and the schedule and how things go and what symptoms you can expect and how it actually this period from, the end of fertility, let's call it that, and the beginning of zero chance of fertility. That period is very unsettled, unsettling.

KELLY: It is. It's very, there's at least, and it's growing, at least 34 symptoms of menopause right now.

And I was talking to one of the gentlemen that works with me, but on the website, on the technical end, and he's 26. And he's going through and he's looking, and he's like, "How many symptoms are there?" And I said, "34." And he goes, "How are women not just dead at this stage? How could you go through life with 34 different symptoms?" And I had to tell him, "Well, we don't get all 34."

MARTIN: Yeah.

KELLY: Some women have three, some women have none, some, this is how it is. And he goes, "Oh, I am so glad I'm a man." And I said, "Yes you're quite lucky. In this respect, you are quite lucky."

MARTIN: Well, I guess in a way, yeah. Although most men end up living with a fairly narrow emotional range, which,

KELLY: True

MARTIN: I don't know, it would be nice to experience some amplitude.

KELLY: Yes. Well, would you like a mood swing? I can share a few with you if you want.

MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah, let me trade a couple of mood swings for one of your hard-ons. Thank you.

KELLY: There you go. Thank you very much. 

MARTIN: Yeah. Okay, good. I remember myself as a 16, 17-year-old with this incessant, overdrive testosterone, right? It’s really, really not fun looking back at it, where the only thing on my mind was what to do with it. Where can I put it? You know.

KELLY: Exactly. And I think women right now in this age, going through these hormone shifts, the majority of the women are going to go with decreased libido, which just, you don't know what to do with that, because,

MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah, it's hard.

KELLY: But then there's a certain percentage that their libido increases, and then they don't know what to do with that. 

MARTIN: Right

MARTIN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you'll be hanging out in the grocery store hoping to score something.

KELLY: Yeah.

MARTIN: Oi. Okay. Well, so let's just try and get some specifics for the person that's listening to it and wants to talk to Kelly Barron. So we'll find it online as...

KELLY: As the website is mytempesta.com. You can also find us on Instagram at mytempesta.com. Tempesta we just couldn't get. I really just wanted the actual name, but they said there's a market, it's somewhere in Italy that has it.

MARTIN: Oh.

KELLY: So Mytempesta, so we're on Instagram, Facebook. The podcast is the KellFire Show. That has social media, too. And, yeah, on the website, mytempesta.com, there's email. You can always email me if you have a question. If you want to chat.

MARTIN: Yeah, I tell you, having somebody who's on the other side of it looking back is so valuable, right? When this first hits, this perimenopause arrives, it's so unsettling for so many people.

KELLY: It, it is.

And it's something that mothers don't tell you, or the elder women in your life, they just don't tell you that this is coming. And when it's, when these things start to happen, and first you think you're either going crazy or you're sick or you have no idea. So it's nice to get to talk to someone who is knowledgeable about it or has gone through it, and you start to realize, "Oh, this is, this is actually very common, and I'm not going crazy, and it's okay."

MARTIN: Yeah. I think that would be the most useful thing I can imagine, other than getting a pep talk from a gal who's not afraid to get punched in the face.

KELLY: Right. I'm gonna tell it to you like it is, and it's gonna be unfiltered, so there's no need to be worried like, "Oh, I don't wanna say that word," or, "I don't wanna talk about that." It's, yeah, no, we're going to talk about it.

MARTIN: Yeah. Awesome. Kelly, it's been such a delight talking with you and talking to you, and learning just what's possible. It's awesome.

KELLY: Yes. Thank you so much for today. It was so much fun to come on.

MARTIN: Yeah. All right, so mytempesta.com

KELLY: Yeah.

MARTIN: Look it up. Kelly Barron, doctor of chiropractic. Thank you so very much. This is Martin Pytela, Life Enthusiast, life-enthusiast.com. Look us up. Thank you.

KELLY: Thank you.