Are your clients stuck in a cycle of chronic illness that defies every intervention you’ve tried? The missing link might not be another supplement, test, or protocol—it could be unresolved trauma. In this episode of ReInvent Healthcare, Dr. Ritamarie Loscalzo welcomes Tonya Octave, integrative psychotherapist, coach, hypnotist, and creator of the Octaves Method. They dive deep into the connection between past emotional wounds, misconceptions, perceptions, and chronic health conditions. Discover how trauma silently drives physical imbalances, keeps clients from healing, and what you can do to unlock transformative breakthroughs in their health journeys.
Tonya Octave is an integrative psychotherapist and coach specializing in the interplay between mental health and physical wellness. As the creator of the Octaves Method, she bridges psychotherapy, hypnosis, and nutritional endocrinology to address the root causes of chronic illness. Tonya is also the author of Heal Thy Mind: Seven Strategies Towards Mental Wellness, a guide to achieving emotional, mental, and physical harmony.
Dr Ritamarie
Welcome to the podcast. I’m super excited about what we have in store for you today. Are you or your clients struggling to overcome chronic health issues that have been defying solutions for a long time? If so, there may be some hidden past traumatic experience at play.
So let me introduce you to my guest today. She is an integrative psychotherapist. She’s a coach and a hypnotist, and she specializes in helping people heal from deep emotional wounds. She’s the creator of the Octaves Method, and she blends the art and science of psychotherapy, coaching and hypnosis, to create physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. She’s also trained in nutritional endocrinology and knows how to use nutrition and lifestyle integrated with her long-term practice of psychotherapy to create outstanding results.
So let me introduce you to, and welcome, Tonya Octave. Hi, Tonya.
Tonya Octave (01:32)
Hello. Hi, thank you Dr. Ritamarie for having me.
Dr Ritamarie (01:35)
I’m super excited to have you, and I got the pleasure of being with you in person for about four or five days back in September. And it was such a joy to watch your interactions and watch how naturally you weaved and could see people and help them with things. They weren’t asking for help, but you were naturally flowing with it. And so many people got so much benefit. So I really, I’m in awe at your expertise. So thank you very much for being here.
Tonya Octave (02:04)
Well, thank you for the compliment.
Dr Ritamarie (02:08)
You’re very welcome. You deserve it. So what are the common misconceptions about trauma healing? I hear so much these days, people are starting to talk about trauma this and trauma that, and there’s all kinds of programs. So what are some of the common misconceptions that you hear, and how do you address them?
Tonya Octave (02:25)
One of the big things that I hear is that I wasn’t abused as a kid, so I must not have trauma. And there is this negation that I came from a good household. I was raised by my mom or dad or both parents. And I had a happy childhood and things must be good until they’re not.
Dr Ritamarie (02:45)
Yeah, yeah, so when that happens, right, I see that all the time. Some people call it the big T and the little T trauma, right? Or when we look at the ACEs, people with a one or two score versus the people with the nine or 10 score. And it’s very common for people to think, that was just a little thing. That was just a little thing. So I want to hear more about how those little things can actually come back and affect chronic health conditions, because I’m sure you see this a lot, people who are exhausted, brain fogged, have an autoimmune condition or other debilitating things. And they just think they’re doing all the right stuff, but they’re not quite getting to the root causes.
Tonya Octave (03:26)
Let’s back up a little bit and talk a little bit about what little t trauma and big T trauma is. That bigT trauma is that big thing that has happened in our life where we feel that there was some sort of life, life threatening, event that happened for us. And mostly people will associate the big T trauma with something like PTSD, that’s a diagnosable condition in our diagnostic statistical manual.
And it involves this long lasting effect of emotional, mental, and kind of physical challenges. And you mentioned the ACEs study, which also is the connection in terms of physical health later on in life. And then the little t trauma are those things that maybe we experience every day that still can have an impact on there. And when we talk about little t and big T trauma, it doesn’t stop there, because there’s all kinds of other forms of trauma that we’re learning to understand. And this is how I kind of explain it to people.
Think about it like this. you have an experience, something happens to you. It is your perception of what is going on in that experience. So if you were on a bus, and the bus got in an accident, and I came out of the bus, no physical injuries. “My God, I can’t believe this happened. I almost died.”
I can then start to develop, because based on my perception, these traumatic things. You can come out like, “Yeah, I got a broken foot. I get to stay off of work all day. I get a couple of months off. This isn’t so bad. I can catch up on my reading.” You can come out of it, even if you had the physical injury. So it’s not necessarily that, but it’s your perception that is allowing you to recover and not develop these long-term symptoms.
Dr Ritamarie (05:18)
I love that differentiation. What differentiates those people, right? The different person who looks at the same situation from a different perspective. I had a friend whose house burned down in big fires we had like six or seven years ago. And he was visiting. We had a gathering, and people were talking. I saw him, hadn’t seen him since the fires. And I knew he lived in the area. And I said, how are you doing? How did your house turn out? How did you survive with the fires?
And he said, “My house burned down.” And then he continued to have the conversation with the rest of the people. And I’m like, holy cow, right? Other people would be like, you know, and my furniture got damaged, or this happened. But he was just like, yeah, I said, “wow.” He said, “Well, what can I do about it? It is what it is. And now I get the opportunity to redo the house and rebuild it and fix the things I didn’t like.”
Tonya Octave (06:11)
Yep. So it’s the perception. And our perceptions, they begin in infancy. So when you’re an infant, you learn how to explore the world through your senses. You’re smelling things, tasting things. That’s why babies are constantly putting things in their mouth, skin contact, hearing things. And that alone, that is contributing to an experience.
So if you grew up in a household, and you perceived your, we’ll just say mom, because it could be dad, could be anybody, but let’s just say for the purposes of this conversation, mom, you perceived her as a good enough mom. That means she loved you just good enough that she showed up for you. She was available just good enough. It really had less to do with her, but was there a good match between you and her during infancy to help you navigate that, to feel safe, to develop trust?
And within that, you are perceiving what is going on. And so some of that will lay the foundation to later on in life. Then there’s that idea of negative self-talk. Can we have an experience and the example you gave with your friend, but put a twist to it and go in another different direction? “My God, this happened to me, I’ll never be able to recover.” That is based on their perception. So how can we work in terms of moving those thoughts?
So I would say those are the limiting beliefs or the cognitive errors, and there’s a lot of cognitive errors we can have. How can we then transition that and move that into a positive self-talk, which I often will refer to as alkaline thoughts? Because our thoughts can be acidic too. If we say bad things to ourselves, that’s acidic, that changes ourselves, that makes things go on in our body, that’s not always going in a positive direction.
Tonya Octave (07:59)
So how can we have alkaline thoughts? That is purposeful and meaningful for us and that moves us towards a healing path.
Dr Ritamarie (08:07)
So what are those skills that people learn early on in infancy, because they did feel that sense of safety? Or do they pick them up as they go along, the negative association, the acidic thoughts? What’s your experience with that?
Tonya Octave (08:26)
That is like the question, is it nature or nurture? And can there be a combination of both? Does it have to be one or the other? I think about it like, imagine being a toddler, you’re two years old, you’re watching all the nonverbal communication going on with your parents. So if you have a mom who’s a little bit more anxious in terms of how she is understanding the world and interaction, you are absorbing that into your skin.
Tonya Octave (08:53)
How you perceive it is going to be the question that plays out later in life. And I also say it’s also the opportunity for you to grow, because you get to figure these things about yourself as you grow in life. So that’s probably what I would say. I think, did you get enough? Were your parents good enough for you? And this is often why you can have siblings who grow up in the same household who have different experiences with the parents.
One may say, “Mom, she was so nurturing and loving.” And the other child is like, “Well, wait a minute, what mom did you have? She was mean. She never let me out. I was always stuck in the house. She was too strict.” So really, that is, remember that individual’s perception of the experience going on. And that then will start to turn some of those thoughts. And then I think, well, what if we were all born to like Buddhist monks?
Tonya Octave (09:45)
Would we have these negative self-talk or would we then be mimicking as we do in childhood some of these positive ways of being and showing up in the world? I think that’s the question that we’re asking ourselves. I’m a firm believer that we live in a society of chaos, and it’s hard to be healthy in a society of chaos. It’s like, if you want health, you have to pay for it, you have to work harder.
Tonya Octave (10:12)
It doesn’t come easy. You’ve got to be more motivated. You’ve got to sometimes figure out solutions for yourself and not rely on other people or other institutions.
Dr Ritamarie (10:21)
And that external chaos shifts and becomes internal chaos. So the metabolic processes, the digestion, the hormones, the enzymes, everything gets chaotic and isn’t working appropriately. And my interpretation of that is that then leads to the physical conditions that are so rampant in our society. What are your thoughts on that?
Tonya Octave (10:46)
It makes me think of an example. So I can recall a time when I wasn’t having the best dietary decisions. And if I felt some way, like depressed, and I was going through a depression in my twenties, when I felt that, I tend to go to foods that contributed to the depression, chocolate cake, chocolate with milk in it. So like milk chocolate was my go-to thing or my Snickers.
This is how it’s even imprinted into the subconscious mind for kids. You put on the cartoon, and you want to have your child entertained by that, watch the commercials that come up. I didn’t grow up as a kid watching kids play at the playground and bringing out carrot sticks to eat. They were bringing out snicker bars and chips, and they made it look so fun and enticing. And even at that stage, we were being hypnotized in some way of how we’re supposed to be and what we think health is. And it’s lies. It’s all lies that we’ve been told.
Dr Ritamarie (11:50)
Absolutely. And you’re right, it does start early and the commercials, right? The commercials are so, everything’s some kind of food. No wonder our kids are food addicts by the time they’re five years old, right? And developing metabolic disorders and diabetes at early ages and gut stuff and brain things like ADHD, and they can’t focus, because they’ve been fed and programmed on these foods, and they’ve learned to turn to it.
Tonya Octave (12:18)
I get so excited about this, because ADHD has not always existed, and it doesn’t exist in other parts of the world. Autism hasn’t always existed in our world. And I would say it’s only been the last couple of maybe 40 or 50 years where we’ve had that diagnosis. Our original diagnostic statistical manual was only a couple of pages. Now we have a thick book that we use.
So mental illness is not going, well, they consider it mental illness, but it’s not going in a direction of health. It’s making people sicker.
Dr Ritamarie (12:59)
So you had a journey of overcoming emotional and physical challenges. And as a result, you developed your methodology. We all have our methodologies of helping people. And it’s conveniently called the Octaves Method, because you can remember it that way. So tell us a little bit about that, like how you came to learn how to work with this methodology, and what your methodology is, what your steps are, that you take with people.
Tonya Octave (13:30)
So how it kind of started was in my twenties. I was going through a period of a bad relationship where I felt, my God, I’m so in love with this person. He’s the one person ever. And then my heart gets broken, and I’m sitting there in depression for maybe about a year. And I think a lot of people can kind of relate to that, especially if it’s their first experience having an intimate relationship or being in love. And then I said, well, I know I need to do some things. So I would dibble and dabble maybe with some vegetarianism.
I would do some exercise, I would do some meditation, and I never did it all at the same time. So I think that even helped to sustain. But I was like, how come I’m still having this cloud still over me? It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s that that opened my eyes. And I said, okay, so now we got to figure out something. I felt like I had the tools, and people typically say, I had the tools but maybe not the motivation to do it yet.
And what I learned is that having the tools is helpful. I knew that I didn’t want to be sick anymore from the Hashimoto’s. So how do I need to think about this differently? And I came up with what I call the acronym for my last name, the Octaves Method. And I looked at seven areas that people can work on at the same time. And it doesn’t have to be this complex thing. It’s things you can do during the day that take less than a couple of minutes.
Or it can be something that you do like even in a retreat forum, and you’re spending a couple of more hours or months kind of working through some of this stuff, and mastering some of the concepts.
The O is for observation and that’s looking at meditation, mindfulness. There’s all kinds of practices. One of the things I often hear is, I’ve tried meditation and it doesn’t work. Like, well, what type did you try? Well, the one on YouTube. Well, let’s try some different ones, right? Like breathing is meditation, exercise, running is meditation. If you’re a poet, I talk about whatever your thing is, then make that your meditative art and immerse yourself into it, because that’s how you’re going to get by into it. So O is for observation.
Tonya Octave (15:42)
C is for compassion, learning how to have compassion for yourself and learning to forgive yourself for the things that you felt that maybe you showed up in some way instead of holding it in, because that’s acidic, is learning to forgive yourself, learn through the experience and move on.
T is for therapy. And when I talk about therapy, it’s not always psychotherapy. Even though I am a psychotherapist, I believe engaging in therapeutic activities. It’s not coming in, I don’t have a couch anymore, but most people would come in, they would lay on my couch, that was comforting for them. But that’s not for everybody, but engaging in things that can be therapeutic.
Tonya Octave (16:19)
Gardening is therapeutic, drawing, coloring, whatever your thing is. I worked with a mathematician, and boy, he would just do math all the time. That was therapeutic for him. My mind would hurt. I was like, can we do that one more time? I’m a little lost.
Tonya Octave (16:38)
O-C-T, A is for animals. And the reason why I picked animals for A is two things. One part is that animals observe nonverbal behaviors. They watch everything. Most of our communication, they say about 80 to 88% of our communication is nonverbal. The other stuff, that verbal stuff, we’re just saying all kinds of stuff that’s untrue out there. But animals, that’s what animals do. They observe nonverbal communication. Think about if you have a pet, and you’re going on a vacation, they watch you. They know where you’re packing, they know where you’re going.
Tonya Octave (17:16)
They’re like, wait a minute, I’m packing myself in that suitcase. Don’t think you’re going to get away without me. And I think that could be helpful if we start tuning into people’s nonverbal ways of communicating. And this is what I tell young people when they’re dating, watch his or her nonverbal behavior. He says, or she says, she loves you, how are they showing up in their behavior to demonstrate that?
Tonya Octave (17:45)
That’s going to be more honest in terms of it. And it’s not like it’s intentional, but that’s just going to be a more of an honest way of looking at how they’re showing up in the relationship. And then the other part is being playful. I distinguish the difference between being childlike and childish. We do not want to be childish as adults. Cause that’s not good. That’s like you’re playing video games all day, nothing is getting done or anything like that.
Tonya Octave (18:12)
Or you’re engaging in gossip, that’s childish. That’s things that you did in high school. You’ve got to grow up and get past that. But being childlike is like, OK, I’m going to go do a cartwheel. Let’s see what it’s like to be in this body and do a cartwheel at this age. Or hula hoop, or the games and the activities you enjoyed as a child to bring that back in. And the reason why is because kids laugh hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times a day. I think adult humans laugh less than 50 times a day. There’s something to be said about being more childlike, in appropriate situations.
Dr Ritamarie (18:48)
in appropriate situations, right? I get it.
Tonya Octave (18:51)
And then V is for victals, which is nutrition and eating food that is nutritious and that is going into the body and is also helping to detoxify the body. So I talk a lot in terms of vegetables.
Tonya Octave (19:05)
I work with people in terms of their diet. So if they are experiencing things, let’s say like anxiety, the first thing we’re going to probably talk about is caffeine and what are you drinking in the morning? Are you having coffee? Do you think 10 cups of coffee is kind of contributing to some of the anxiety? So what are some of the other alternatives that we can give up? And I’ve even used some of your suggested alternatives too, which has worked very good with some of my clients.
Dr Ritamarie (19:33)
You mean, like the cordyceps elixirs and things like that?
Tonya Octave (19:35)
The elixirs and adding things, and when you travel, have your water. And if you’re tired of drinking water, you can put some essential oils, just one, because essential oils can be pretty strong when you’re putting them in water to consume.
E is for exercise, moving the body, moving the body throughout the day. It’s not like you have to do this hard cardio workout. Some people like going to the gym and that works. And then there’s people who go for walks. There’s people who might play at the beach, but how can you move your body every day and give your body what it needs throughout the day?
And S is socialize. And I think most of our challenges are usually the challenges within relationships with other people. And when I talk about relationships, it’s not about relationships with other people. It’s about the relationship you’re learning to form with yourself.
Tonya Octave (20:31)
So even in terms of self-care, most people say, yeah, I get my hair done or my nails, that’s my self-care. And I say, okay, that’s good. That’s on the surface. How can we go deeper? How do you get to know who you are in this physical body? Because you’ve been there since you were born, and you’ll be there when you leave physical earth. So you should be the best friend showing up. And that’s the part about socialize.
Dr Ritamarie (20:58)
I love being the best friend, because I see so many people who are not being their best friend, their worst critic. And do you see that a lot in these folks that come to see you?
Tonya Octave (21:11)
I do. Sometimes you’ll see things, you’ll hear things like, I’m too fat, and I’m not good enough. I’ll never find someone who will love me. And I’m like, well, if your best friend walked in, would you say that to your best friend? You’re like, no, girl, you’re going to find someone. He’ll just love you, or she’ll just love you and want to spend the rest of it. You’re going to be so encouraging in terms of that. Why wouldn’t you give that gift to yourself? Like, why wouldn’t you just, I always say, why aren’t you just loving on you?
Tonya Octave (21:42)
In the end, that’s really what you got, is you. So how can you move that mindset between focusing on other people and doing the internal work, which is hard. But boy, it is rewarding. You get to see and experience the world differently, and your relationships transform. I mean, that’s a win-win.
Tonya Octave (22:06)
If I were to say, develop that relationship with yourself. If I were to prescribe that the side effect is bliss and happiness. If you go to your doctor, and you get Prozac, the side effect may be weight gain. I don’t know.
Dr Ritamarie (22:21)
Yeah, yeah, and suicidal ideation on top of it. Oof, wow. Yeah, that’s a big one, especially in young kids, right? So as practitioners listening to this or self healers listening to this for themselves, how do you overcome the inertia of being stuck in that? Because I find that most people have that self critical vein in them, right?
Dr Ritamarie (22:45)
It’s like, someone, way back, it might be early on that they got this, you’re not good enough message. And now they’re playing it over and over. And it’s hard, it might be easier to say, stop eating gluten and start eating vegetables than it is to say, this is a top thing, being down on yourself. So if you have any tips or tricks that you’ve found to be helpful with your clients, I’d love to hear it.
Tonya Octave (23:09)
One of the things that I think is helpful for people is therapy. So they do come to therapy and find a therapist. People say, well, what modality is good. You know, they talk about CBT, which is cognitive behavioral therapy or EMDR. That’s pretty popular, at least in the California area. I say, find someone who you feel you can trust, because you’re going to talk and share things with that person that you would not reveal to anybody else, even yourself at times. And that takes time.
Tonya Octave (23:43)
I often say it’s like a dance of the egos. Your ego’s going to tell me some stuff, my ego’s going to feel some way about it and express some other things to you, and then we’re going to do this dance together. And once that dance, it goes through all different types of emotion. There’s a settling into it to where now your ego’s like, okay, I think I can trust. And I say that takes about six to nine months to get there.
Kids, actually it’s a little bit easier, because I don’t have to argue so much. I don’t have to have so many violent dances with the ego. They’re a little bit more willing to share their experiences.
Tonya Octave (24:23)
Ask yourself what you really want. And when you’re ready, you’ll know. And sometimes people need little nudges. So life is going to give you that little nudge. Life may say, here’s depression in your 20s. That’s a nudge. Did you get it? You didn’t get it. Here’s Hashimoto’s in your 30s. Are you listening? You’re not listening.
So then at 40, should I give you diabetes or cancer? Cause that’s going to be the next thing that happens on this life journey. And I said, I don’t know. I don’t need to be pushed off the cliff. I just needed to be nudged a little bit. So that’s the question you have to ask yourself. How far do you need to be pushed? And do you need to be pushed off the cliff before you make changes?
Dr Ritamarie (25:06)
And sadly, a lot of people are, a lot of people do need to be, and a lot of people are pushed off the cliff, and they’re still not making the changes. There’s a choice. and then there’s the background. Going back to this whole trauma, traumatic experiences, some people get through the most horrific stuff and they turn out to be lovely, well developed, you know, healthy people.
Dr Ritamarie (25:34)
And others, twitch their toenails every so often, and they think it’s the worst thing that happened in the world and everything in between. So as we work with people, like a lot of us who are listening are not psychotherapists by trade, but we’re more, you know, physical, right? Not physical therapists per se as a professional, though some people might be, but we see people coming with complaints of, have Hashimoto’s or I have fatigue, or I have some other autoimmune disease, or I need to be going to the bathroom every 15 minutes, and I want help, and I’ve tried this, this, this and this.
How do we know when we need to just start digging into that background? Is there some traumatic experience that’s creating this for them? And is there something, a mental, emotional, spiritual evolution that they need to go through in order to solve these physical problems.?
Tonya Octave (26:35)
Yes, there is evolution. Great. I love that there’s definitely an evolution that people need to go through. And if I back up a little bit.
Tonya Octave (26:43)
The mind is, boy, it is some powerful stuff. And so when we are struggling with something in life, that may be because, like you kind of mentioned, the idea of being stuck. So I want to put a little twist to it in a little bit in a way. When we are struggling with something, that is usually because we have created a pattern of familiarity.
Tonya Octave (27:12)
This isn’t like, a pattern of, I think this is good for me, I think this is bad for me. If you grew up in a household with a parent that was on the American Standard Diet, who also was raised by a parent on the American Standard Diet, and we go back generations with that, we are now, that has become our norm. And so, you then have to change what you feel if that norm is not going to get you in a healthy, vibrant way that you want to leave and show up in the world.
Tonya Octave (27:45)
It’s the same for relationships. We date the same people over and over, because we’re trying to work through something. We just don’t stop and say, hey, maybe there’s some work that I need to do in this process. So I don’t keep recreating these patterns over and over, but that is the hard part then once you’ve made a decision.
Okay, I think I’m going to change. Now I’m going to try and become a vegan. I’m going to make that change even though I had many generations before me on the American Standard Diet. That’s when you will notice other parts of your personality come out that you didn’t think were there. Like you thought you worked through some of your mommy and daddy issues. They start to show up when some of those parasites start to come out of the body, because you’re starting to detox more.
You may have to give up some of those child emotional relationships, for example, with food. So if on Friday nights, the only time you got to spend with a parent who wasn’t arguing or yelling was Friday night, and everybody watched TV and ate ice cream, that has become what your norm is. And you’re going to keep repeating that. You have to be the one that says, okay, I don’t want to keep repeating this pattern. This pattern isn’t good for me.
Tonya Octave (29:07)
And then you’re going to have a lot of hiccups along the way. So that’s where compassion comes in. We don’t need to harbor on it, because that’s not good. We need to work through it, not get stuck in it. But a lot of the things, their behavioral patterns, are things that we’re so used to. One of the examples I will give is with domestic violence, if you grew up in a household where there was domestic violence, that becomes your norm.
Tonya Octave (29:33)
So you can recreate that and think nothing of it, because you know how to survive in a domestic violence relationship. What you don’t know is a healthy relationship and how to survive in a healthy relationship. So then you start recreating those patterns with that healthy partner. And eventually, it goes back to the old pattern you’re familiar with, which is a domestic violence pattern.
Dr Ritamarie (29:56)
Interesting. So we look for or attract into our state of consciousness replications of things we’ve done, but we figured out a coping mechanism, and we know how to deal with it. And we don’t know necessarily how to deal with this new thing that might be better, obviously might be better, but we don’t know how to deal with the emotions that come up in that.
Tonya Octave (30:21)
It’s like the genomes, right? There are things that we know, even though what we know may not be healthy, useful, alkaline for us or anything. It might bring us closer towards a disease state in terms of the pattern, but it’s what we know. It’s the unknown. I don’t know how to show up in a healthy relationship. I don’t know how to be vegan when all of my community and family is on the American standard diet. So it’s the unknown.
Tonya Octave (30:49)
And some people will say, I’ll just do the opposite. I don’t know that that is even the solution of doing the opposite, because now you’re at the balance. You’re at both extremes. I’m saying, well, why don’t we find a balance and then start to develop some comfortability in this new way of how you want to show up in the world.
Dr Ritamarie (31:09)
Awesome. So I know personally, I’d love to hear some examples, like people that you worked with who had some physical stuff, maybe even your own case with the Hashimoto’s of how you dealt with that and go back and help them to move through this method of healing.
Tonya Octave (31:28)
So I’ve had clients, a lot of my clients will struggle, because they’re usually 30 and above. So they’re already struggling with hormonal issues.
And so a recent case, without giving too much kind of demographic information, she was in her 40s, and she was told by her gynecologist to have a hysterectomy. And when she was told, it was because of irregular bleeding, something like that, and maybe some pain, but maybe it wasn’t like a pain on a skeleton, but maybe it was some discomfort, at least about maybe like a seven or eight. And she became very nervous. It just so happened she was my client at the time that she was going through some of these conversations with her doctor. And I don’t ever give medical advice, but I encourage people to have conversations with their doctor.
Maybe question them on some of this. Like, there’s no other possibility of something else other than a hysterectomy. And then she would, then her doctor said, no, this particular insurance is only going to cover a hysterectomy. Once she told the doctor she wasn’t going to do it, the doctor contacted her and gave her another option, right? And so then she’s still feeling some way, but the other option was a little bit better in terms of how she felt about her body, but she wanted to see if she could do it naturally.
And she has been through a lot in terms of having those changes in emotions. And I call it emotionally expressive. I’m like, yeah, you get to express yourself one time a month. And maybe that one time a month goes a little bit longer. But hats off to you for clearing all your throat chakra stuff. So good for you. So a point now where she’s at the doctor’s and they’re not recommending any surgery. And I’ve seen that a lot of times.
I had a client that went in for an operation, and I didn’t know her at the time, but when she came out of the operation, they removed her thyroid, and she had a change in her voice, and that resulted in a depression. And the doctor had told her when they removed her thyroid, it was because they saw cancer during this procedure.
So then now, she comes in and meets with me, and I just become a little bit curious with her. I would say, “Well, do we believe this to be true? I don’t know. Maybe you don’t want to know more information.” She eventually ended up getting more information. And when the labs came back, she did not have thyroid cancer. So they removed it, but she did sign something that says in case they find something.
I’m like, well, if I go into surgery ,and you find something, go ahead and wake me up. This ain’t something that has to be done now, right? I could go back in another week. Yeah, I can come back in. But they want to make it convenient. You’re already under. So we might as well do it. And unfortunately, people are losing body parts because of it.
Dr Ritamarie (34:46)
Yes, yes, I had that experience. I actually had an ectopic pregnancy when I was in my 20s, and I went in, and it was an emergency. My blood pressure was down to whatever they had to do it. And before I went under, I signed and made them sign that they would not remove my ovaries. They would not remove my uterus, because that would be an easy thing for them to do. Right. They were just going to take out the fallopian tube that was ruptured. And unless they woke me up, gave me what needed to happen and then I had to approve it.
Well, I didn’t think about my appendix. What does my appendix have to do with my ovaries? I would not have thought of that. And I get out, and I find out they took out my appendix, because they thought they saw some suspicious fecal material around the appendix. Well, that’s kind of normal because it’s part of the intestine, right?
Dr Ritamarie (35:40)
And I went back afterwards and had a gynecologist, a new gynecologist, because I was never going back to the old one. And they said they got the reports. They said, my God, that’s what they do. And that’s what we’re taught in medical school. When you have somebody open, take out their appendix just in case. And I’m like, what? What? So there’s no way you can take any action against them. And he looked at the report and said, your appendix is perfectly fine. So that’s happening.
Dr Ritamarie (36:09)
And how many people does that happen to, where they open you up for one thing, and then they take your appendix, it’s relatively innocuous to take out, I don’t think so innocuous, because you’re much more prone to infectious processes down there, because your lymphatic tissue is gone for the appendix. But in some cases, it could leave women infertile, because they’ve removed an ovary. Right?
Tonya Octave (36:33)
That’s true. And there can be these other things aside from changing the hormones and having to navigate that process. That is a medical trauma. So when we talked about that small T or that little T trauma, this is a medical trauma. And a trauma is when something is done to you, and you weren’t asked or had a choice in that decision. So we think about that with child abuse, like we’re okay. Like we get that, a kid is abused physically or sexually abused. They didn’t have a choice in it.
Tonya Octave (37:00)
But what about us as adults when that choice is taken away from us? That is a trauma. And we can start to develop symptom presentation, but it is also how we perceive it. We can say this is a medical trauma. This is something that was done to us. But how is it going to push me still towards wellness and not send me back the other direction towards a disease state?
Dr Ritamarie (37:21)
And it goes back to what you said right at the beginning. Perception. Perception is everything. We can perceive the world as unfriendly and stressful and something to be feared, or we can see the beauty, and we can do things about the things we don’t like. But perception is everything. It really is.
Tonya Octave (37:42)
Then it kind of makes me think of the grieving process when things like that are a loss. And then we’re kind of just forced to have to deal with it without real acknowledgement that there’s a process to the grieving process.
When someone dies, we help support people through the grieving process. When someone removes something from the body, there is a grieving process. Who helps support us to navigate that? Other than trying to give, I’ll just say women, like Prozac and psychotropic medication, here you go, here’s your pill, let’s help with the depression. I’m like, you’re the kind of, you’re kind of the one that caused some of the depression.
.
Dr Ritamarie (38:25)
Yes. Let me express my anger, buddy or ma’am. I got some things going on here, right? And with your client who lost her thyroid, that’s major. Like there’s no major hormone imbalance that’s going to come from you not having an appendix other than maybe being more prone to food poisoning or, you know, some other kind of overgrowth in my gut.
Dr Ritamarie (38:48)
But with that, I mean, they have to spend time balancing her hormones. She has to take external hormones for the rest of her life, and it is a constant work to and struggle to get the balance back, you know?
Tonya Octave (39:01)
So you’re dealing with the physical stuff, the physical changes in the body, you’re dealing with the emotional, that can send you straight into a depression. So when we talk about major depression in terms of a clinical presentation and how that may be altering, you know, trying to balance out the chemical balances within the brain.
Tonya Octave (39:19)
There are times when something is done to us, even in a criminal case where we then get to face the accused person, or the person who harmed us like the perpetrator, and that helps and allows us to grieve. Will we ever be in a society that when, and I’m not necessarily blaming doctors, but when things are done to us, because of a procedure, when do we then get to have some sort of grievance with that process.
Dr Ritamarie (39.49)
And it’s really tight because of the medical statute. It’s perfectly normal to take out an appendix just in case we saved you from having it burst and having to have an emergency surgery. It’s standard of care. And if they follow standard of care, even if we think the standard of care is barbaric, like, bloodletting or leeches or whatever else they might be doing, that could be harmful.
Dr Ritamarie (40:15)
If it’s standard of care, there is no way to do a grievance, right? There’s just no way. It’s standard of care.
Tonya Octave (40:20)
I like that standard of care. I like that. Like, is it a part of the standard of care? I don’t want standard of care. I want my care. And so maybe we have to learn that our voice, we may have to put our big girl pants on and get past some of this anxiety or silence or thinking that particular people are the experts. Cause I don’t even believe that I’m an expert when I’m working with someone.
Tonya Octave (41:50)
I believe the client is the expert. I’m here as a kind, I’m just trying to navigate and help that client understand things that I may be seeing in their experience, in their life experience. So when did we give control of our bodies to other people versus us saying, well, maybe I don’t want the standard of care. I know that that is your policy or your procedures or how are you showing up? I want personalized care. So I want to know and be able to make decisions even if it is an appendix.
Dr Ritamarie (41:17)
And I think that we need to educate people that they have that kind of a choice. Because as we grew up, it was just, you have a headache, here, mama gave you the Tylenol. Or, you have this going on, mama took you to the doctor, and they gave you a shot or whatever. It was always given up from the time we were itty bitty, even at birth, right? Pull the baby out, stick drops in their eyes, smack them around, give them a vaccination.
We didn’t have a choice from the time we were born. And so I think it’s like educating and empowering people that they have the choice. And I do this all the time with my own clients and with my workshops and things like that.
It’s like, this is your body. You get to stand up for yourself. And the more that we as holistic kind of functional practitioners take that and educate people to that, the more clients are going go to other doctors, and they’re going hate them and fire them. And I’ve had lots of people fired by their doctors, because they asked too many questions, and they demanded too many things. And I think we just owe it to people to do that, to empower them to ask the questions, to empower them to take charge back of their health and then to give them the tools and the strategies and the dietary recommendations that they need in order to rebuild their body to the amazing healing potential that it has.
Tonya Octave (42:43)
You’re also doing something even more important, Dr. Ritamarie, you’re helping to get into the subconscious mind. And there’s a lot of ways you can do that. And you can even do it in a more direct way by passing some of the filters in terms of how the mind is understanding and obtaining information. But when I talked about the examples of kids and when they watch commercials and there’s this candy, now this has also gone back generations, to who we believe are the experts of our bodies and who, sometimes, we don’t even meet, just because they’re kind of doing the standard of care kind of approach.
Tonya Octave (43:24)
You’re helping them to free their mind, to liberate their mind. And you’re doing it, the more consistent you are, because you give a lot of information, and you are very strong and passionate about it.
Tonya Octave (43:38)
If someone stays as your listener, just listening to that is going to start embedding into their subconscious, because their mind has to have something that will contradict what they believe to be true for generations, not even this lifetime, but for generations. And you’re saying, well, I don’t know, maybe we should question some of this. Maybe we should ask them for other tests. Maybe we should explore these ideas. You’re helping to liberate and free their mind.
Dr Ritamarie (44:05)
I love that. I love looking at that. I remember when my kids were little, I taught them to question authority. I taught them not to believe what they heard, that they had to bounce it off of themselves. And I remember one time my son, I taught him this process ,and he’d go, wait a minute, okay. I know what the answer is. I’d say, go inside, ask your body. And I’d say, well, who’s talking to you right now?
Dr Ritamarie (44:31)
And, you know, it depended on what his situation was. I got a tummy ache. Okay, well, ask your body what’s going on. What does it need? And he’d go, I have to poop. And he’d run to the bathroom or, I have to do…. And he would get the answers by going inside. And I told him, no matter what, you know, what’s right, you know, what’s wrong. if somebody in quote unquote authority asks you to do something that doesn’t feel right to you, you have every right, whether they’re the principal, whether they’re the priest, whether they’re a rabbi, whether they’re a president of the country, you have the right to say, no, that’s not okay with me.
Tonya Octave (45:11)
I love that. So I don’t know how the schools and the teachers felt about it, but they got to figure out how to learn how to teach kids as individuals instead of putting them in a category and want all the kids to fit in that category. So that’s beautiful.
Tonya Octave (45:30)
It made me think of an activity I used to do with little kids. And this probably would work from kids about maybe about four or five to about maybe like eight or nine, you could do something called red light, green light. And you have a piece of paper, one is red, or you could just write red on one side, and one is green. Like, okay, we’re going to play our game when you have a headache. Or you can kind of create questions. And then the question is like, no, which is the red, like stop, or yes. So if a teacher comes to you and tells you, you can’t eat carrots in the classroom, ooh, is that a red or is that a green?
Tonya Octave (46:09)
Or if your friends are around and everybody’s sharing lunch, and you really want that Snickers bar, because your mom put marshmallows, is that a red or is that a yellow? It’s interesting to hear what kids will actually say during some of that, but being playful in terms of how they communicate, because kids communicate in these nonverbal ways too.
Tonya Octave (46:33)
So if you integrate games and tasks that are age appropriate, you can do exactly what you were doing with your kids. It is just teaching them resilience, teaching them that they have a voice and that their voice is important. And more importantly, they got a body, and their body is talking to them, and you’re teaching them how to be in tune at such an early age.
Dr Ritamarie (46:54)
That’s our goal, right? Is to teach the littles, right? When they’re little and as they grow up. So if you’re listening, and you have kids who are already grown up, maybe there’s some grandchildren or nieces or nephews or kids in the neighborhood that you can practice on, right? And I don’t mean to teach them to contradict their parents or anything like that, but sharing with them why the carrots are a better choice than the Snickers and how they affect the body differently, and I did brainwash my kid by the time he was three. He was like, what’s a cookie? Why would people eat it?
Tonya Octave (47:29)
I was going to say it. If you did it between birth and five, you already started to get it into the unconscious part of the body. And you’re definitely tapping into the subconscious part. Most of our memory, 88% of our memory is subconscious. So when you do it early on in life like that, they’ll go through a period in life that is interesting, because they’ll become teenagers, and they might sneak food and do all of that.
Tonya Octave (47:53)
But once they’re about 25, when that frontal lobe is developed, you will see them naturally starting to revert back to what they learned from birth to five. Remember I said, it is, you do what is your norm. That could be domestic violence or that could be eating carrots. That is your familiar space that you will keep recreating in life until you figure out that this is the pattern. And it’s hard to kind of sometimes figure out these patterns, but that this is the pattern and then you make a decision if you want to change it.
Dr Ritamarie (48:24)
That’s beautiful. It’s so great returning this discussion into as practitioners, as people who are caring about their health and are listening to this, yes, you may not be between the ages of zero and five anymore. So it takes longer and more repetition and more to reprogram. But we were not born and raised with the concept of self-healing.
We were born and raised that when something goes wrong, you reach for a drug, you go to a doctor, you don’t go inside. And if we can teach our young ones to go inside, like I’d say to my son, what is your body saying? Close your eyes. What part of your body needs attention right now? And he learned that as a very little, very little child. So all of this stuff is awesome. Yes.
Tonya Octave (49:13)
So I don’t want to skip over something that you said, which was so important. You’re teaching them to get to know themselves and not rely on other people in the world. Don’t worry, other people are going to give you all kinds of triggers. They’re going to show up in the world in all kinds of ways. They’re going to show up as a mirror with things, you’ve got enough stuff you‘ve got to deal with. But when you teach them that they have the answer, isn’t that the truth? I am the only one that has the answer for me.
Tonya Octave (49:43)
And so when you learn that as a kid, you learn to trust that. And that doesn’t become an extra hiccup later on in life like it is for other people and like it was for me.
Dr Ritamarie (49:55)
So turning around, you discovered all this. You were in your 20s and had the depression and in your 30s got diagnosed with the Hashimoto’s. How did that play out for you, and how did that lead you to create this methodology?
Tonya Octave (50:13)
I got scared, and that was the stronger push in life. And I knew that once you have Hashimoto’s that there is a trajectory that makes you go in other directions. I had done the 23 and me. And the interesting thing, this is how beautiful the vibe is, I have looked at the 23 and me several times over the last couple of years. I had never seen thyroid issues.
I had never seen pre-diabetes on that test. It was only recently after doing that workshop with you, I said, when did pre-diabetes show up? I know I took this when I was like 30. And so the subconscious mind was blocking it out, blocking it out. The same thing happened when I took a food allergy test. I never saw wheat. Wheat, I grew up since birth. I think my mom ate wheat. She encouraged me to eat wheat. I had wheat all my life.
I thought it was helpful and I had, I never saw it on my full delayed allergy test. I go back after taking some of your classes and there wheat is, a high allergy. I said, what? How did gluten show up? Cause I never saw that one ever.
This mind was blocking it, but you know what, there were some things maybe I needed to do and then I was at a place to now start working on that type of work, right, change your perception. It’s not bad. I don’t need to beat myself up about it. I see it when I need to see it, so I can continue the healing journey.
Dr Ritamarie (51:47)
So I can continue to heal. Yes. So as we wrap this up, I know you combine physical healing with the nutrition and exercise and the emotional with the therapy and all the other pieces of the Octaves method that you described to us. What does that look like if someone comes in to you with issues, where do you start with them and how do you take them through a process?
Because I know a lot of us listening, a lot of people listening are health practitioners, some health coaches, some doctors, nurses, et cetera. And some are just listening, because they want to know more for themselves. They are ready to be empowered and throw away that old paradigm and step into the new. So what do you suggest that we as practitioners do as a starting point when we’re working with somebody?
Tonya Octave (52:36)
So I love that. Listen, work on patience. So sometimes we, as practitioners, are going to have things like impatience. And so it’s an opportunity for us to grow with our clients, because it doesn’t happen overnight, and we have to understand. So learn to listen, and learn what the client’s language is, not verbal language. Learn their nonverbal, watch their body.
Tonya Octave (53:07)
Their body’s going to tell you a whole big story. Like I love this, and I really love when I used to work with kids. I just don’t have the opportunity so much. But I would say, close your ears and just watch what your kid is doing. You’re going to see an entire story play out. Close your ears. Watch your husband. Watch your wife. You’re going to see an entire dramatic beautiful display of something going on, because the language part is what we get distracted by.
So patience, learn to listen, learn the other person’s language and know when you are being triggered, because we’re not perfect either. And when we’re working with something, if we notice things like they’re not going fast enough, or I’m saying the same thing over and over in this repetition, and they’re just not getting it. I said, so what’s going on with you?
You have to slow down and listen to what is being triggered in you, because it’s invoking something. It’s an opportunity for you to learn and grow instead of just dismissing it and say it’s their problem.
Dr Ritamarie (54:24)
Wow. That is great advice. And it’s listen, not just listen with your ears. It’s listen, and listen to their listen, right? Watch, use your eyes as part of the listening process to their nonverbal cues, right?
So we have been speaking with Tonya Octave, wonderful conversation going all over with the mind and its effect and the traumas and how all of this plays into health and how our paradigms of health and wellness in ourselves and our perceptions are developed really early on.
So she has a book, tell us a little bit about your book, Heal Thy Mind, Seven Strategies Towards Mental Wellness. Tell us a little bit about that.
Tonya Octave (55:10)
So this is my book. It’s an easy book to read. It’s available on Amazon. You can read it from front to cover. You can read it in different sections. It gives you some affirmations.
A way to do the affirmations, I suggest, is that you record yourself saying the same affirmation for about seven minutes. That may be, I am exceptionally healthy. I am exceptionally healthy. Change the tone, change how you use it, play around with it. You’ve got seven minutes to talk to yourself, so you can be fun. You can have fun with it. Before you go to sleep, listen to it. It’s going to get into the subconscious mind. First thing in the morning, listen to it, before you get out of the bed.
One, it’ll start to bring that heart rate variability down, especially if your cortisol is too high in the morning. So instead of getting directly out of bed, stay and listen, so that you can have a calm way of waking up in the morning.
And that will help kind of get into the subconscious mind. So there’s some journaling exercises that go along with it, there’s some suggestions in terms of diet and exercise. And I believe that we move our body with the seasons. So how do we kind of prepare? We’re coming into, you know, a new season. How can we switch up some of our movement, our body routines in terms of that?
Dr Ritamarie (56:26)
Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us. I so appreciate all your insights and you do have fun with it, which I love, keep it light, keep it fun. Cause that helps to get things into the subconscious too. So thank you so much again for being with us. And I want us to all see that as a group, we are the future of healthcare. Those of us who are connected to each other, that are connected to a new paradigm of helping people to actually get to the underlying causes and change their way of thinking and taking charge of their own health.
You know, the old symptom suppression way is just not cutting it anymore. It’s just making people sicker and sicker. So if you want to learn more, click on the link on the show notes page and visit us at inemethod.com and learn more about the physical things and the genetics and the insulin and how to do all that together. And until next time, shine on.
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