Season 4, Episode 6: Effective Nervous System Regulation with Jen Donovan

Evelyne: Me too. We will be talking about Jen’s personal healing journey from mast cell activation syndrome, her work with clients on trauma release and nervous system regulation, and how she works with clients with complex chronic illnesses. Jen, before I read your bio, what is lighting you up this week?

Jen Donovan: Oh my gosh. Well, we are about to do a free webinar, we do a free webinar every month, and so I’ve just really been distilling, I’m always trying to rephrase the work that we do in my programs, in just more accessible language. So, we just retooled our presentation, and I really like to explain the gut-brain axis as simply as possible. So, that’s really what I’ve been working on this week.

Evelyne: I love that, and I actually love that you just said that because I think that from a business and marketing perspective, it is so important as practitioners to know how to communicate with prospective clients, and what is the language that will land with somebody and resonate with somebody. So, that’s amazing. Love that.

Jen Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. I know it’s impressive when people have a lot of really fancy vocabulary, science-y sounding vocabulary to share, but at the same time, sometimes breaking things down in the simplest ways actually helps you understand it in more of an embodied way, and helps you actually implement it more effectively in your life.

Evelyne: I love this, and I think it just sets the tone well for whatever we end up talking about today, and how you’re going to explain it. So, Jen holds her master’s in family therapy, she’s a nutritional therapy practitioner, and a certified gut and psychology syndrome practitioner, and a tension and trauma releasing exercise provider. She’s the author of the book, Rebuild Yourself: Whole Body Practices to Heal Your Brain and Nervous System. Her specialties include gut-brain axis, mood balance, mental health, navigating chronic illness, histamine intolerance, mast cell activation syndrome, neurological sensitivities, and more. Jen, can you share your story with us? You were in a different career as a therapist, and then you experienced some personal health challenges and then that led you to change careers, right?

Jen Donovan: Yes, absolutely. So, I actually proved myself wrong in terms of what causes a lot of mental health symptoms. I went into the mental health field because I had struggled with mental health symptoms my whole life. I had always been an anxious kid, I dealt with tendencies towards substance abuse, I was borderline obsessive compulsive, struggled with depression, had trouble feeling resolved from traumatic experiences in my life, so I had PTSD, and I went into the field because I wanted to help myself and people in the world recover from these kinds of symptoms. And obviously, I felt like going into the mental health field would be the best way to do that. There’s a lot of wonderful things about the mental health field, obviously just having a non-judgmental, thoughtful, educated, kind person to talk with, and vent about your feelings, and talk through basic emotional coping skills, there’s some wonderful outcomes that can come from that, but I didn’t actually find that my mental health symptoms were getting very much better, and I didn’t notice a whole lot of success in my clients either.

And in fact, by the time I was graduated with my master’s degree and starting my career, I found that my mental health symptoms of anything were getting worse and worse and worse. And it got to a really critical point, I can talk through exactly the symptoms I was having, and what my life was like at that point, but I finally realized that this was not just a psychological problem, there was something actually going on in my brain and nervous system and body. And so, I ended up totally starting back from scratch to figure out what was going on with me, and what I actually needed to do to recover.

Evelyne: I am actually curious, if you wouldn’t mind sharing, what were some of those symptoms, and what led you to a diagnosis? And with the approach that you used, I assume you were kind of looking for the root cause, right? Or the root causes. Did you find those ,or was it something that just tipped you over the edge?

Jen Donovan: Yeah. So, I, like I said, I had been an anxious person my whole life, I’d also had food allergies from the time I was very little. I was one of those rashy kids. And so, I tended to get a lot of skin symptoms very easily, and had to avoid certain foods because I would start getting allergic symptoms from it, and even anaphylaxis. So, I was used to carrying around an EpiPen even when I was pretty young. So, basically, I probably had histamine and mast cell issues from the time I was born, very likely, but they were more mild. I went about my life very functional most of my life, with those small issues. So, basically, all of that got significantly worse in a very short period of time. So, I went from just being anxious and having certain food intolerances, to having a serious, what I call, dread attack, this very visceral sense of impending doom, on a daily basis.

It felt like my world was closing in around me, I started feeling actually somewhat delusional and paranoid, the things that I was worried about and fixated on, so my intrusive thoughts and obsessive tendencies got significantly worse. And at the same time, I started having more and more random allergic symptoms. So, I started noticing digestive issues for the first time in my life. I started getting hives all over my body for things that I never had been allergic to before. I started feeling like my throat was getting tight, and I was producing all this mucus and saliva every time I ate, even though again, I was eating things that I wasn’t allergic to. And so, all of these things were happening at the same time, and I did go to a lot of different doctors, I had times where I ended up in the ER because I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and so I was referred to an allergist.

Luckily, I did find an allergist who had just been to a conference with Dr. Afrin actually, it was so serendipitous because this was back in 2016, when these conditions were not well known, even among allergists. But she had just been educated on the condition mast cell activation syndrome, and she had one appointment with me, and said, this is what you have. So, that was just a really fortuitous turn of events for me, that I was able to get a name for what I had. Unfortunately though, her answer was, here’s mass stabilizing medications, here’s antihistamines, you’re going to be sick the rest of your life, let’s just find the best way to medicate you.

So, at that point, I was very frustrated, I was really grateful that I had a name for what I was dealing with because I really worried that I was going crazy, so it was very validating to know that, oh, okay, all my symptoms are connected, this condition can manifest both in the gut and the brain, both in the immune system and the nervous system. But I had a really hard time believing this was just a genetic condition that I was just going to have the rest of my life, and it came about for no reason, and there was no solution, that just did not vibe with me at all. So, that’s when I really started looking for other answers.

Evelyne: And I want to thank you also just for sharing so openly, that’s really refreshing, and it’s just such a crazy story and that you’ve suffered for so long. So, what were some of those other answers that you found?

Jen Donovan: Yeah. So, I started looking at more natural health options. So, it started with literally just me Googling things, and finding natural health blogs. And this was a whole world I had never been exposed to before at all, I had always just very much thought that conventional Western medicine was the be all end all, and that was just what the answer was, and this really forced me to think outside the box, and really changed my perspective. So, I started realizing that there was something called a low histamine diet, I started learning that certain foods affected the balance of our gut microbiome. I started learning that there were certain foods that caused more of a chronic inflammatory response in the gut, and others didn’t as much. And so, I just started really self-educating myself at first, and I changed my diet pretty dramatically pretty quickly, because I was eating a pretty standard American diet.

Well, I thought I was eating a healthy version of a standard American diet, because I ate salads, so that meant I was eating healthy. But I really dramatically changed my diet in a very short period of time, I cut out the top inflammatory foods, things like gluten, and corn, and soy, and processed foods, and things like that, and all high histamine foods. And it certainly didn’t cure me, I was still very, very ill at that point, but I noticed a significant reduction in my symptoms. I went from being in a horrifying doom spiral every single day, to actually being able to get through my day with moderate anxiety, with just having some flares and episodes depending on what I was exposed to that day. So, I became much more functional at that point, and that’s when I knew, oh my gosh, the mental health issues I’ve been having my whole life, they’re not just a psychological problem.

I started seeing things shift that I had been dealing with my whole life, just from some small dietary changes, and I realized how much I had missed the boat in my career, the way it had been, in trying to help myself and help people, just through learning cognitive skills and things like that. Because I felt firsthand that that had obviously not been what was going on for me. I had been trying to readjust all my thinking patterns and my emotional coping skills for years, and just the shift in my microbiome that happened in the two weeks of shifting things made more change than those years of therapy. So, like I said, I was a long way from better at that point, I was still very ill, but it was such a dramatic shift that my entire worldview changed at that point, and I couldn’t go back.

Evelyne: Yeah, that’s incredible. I find it interesting too, as much as we know about the gut-brain axis, I think that with mast cell activation syndrome, pardon my ignorance, I associate it more with the physical rather than psychological symptoms, even though we know there’s that connection. But I think traditionally we do associate it more with the allergic type symptoms, right?

Jen Donovan: Absolutely. And this actually leaves a lot of people not getting the care that they need, unfortunately. Most people, I would say, with histamine or mast cell disorders do have some amount of allergic symptoms, so they get flushing, or rashes, or hives, or sneeze attacks, or digestive issues, those kind of classic symptoms, but there are people, and I have worked with people, who didn’t have any of those symptoms, it was all neurological or psychiatric. And these people, I personally think, actually, a lot of the times, end up in our mental institutions. Because when mast cell activation happens very strongly in the brain, it can induce psychosis, and the whole spectrum leading up to that.

So, very often, like what happened to me, I just started feeling like everything was wrong all the time, I started feeling very paranoid, like everyone was out to get me, the world was a dangerous place. I started having very dark, intrusive thoughts. And luckily, I was able to catch it before it got any worse. But for some people who aren’t able to catch it, it will sometimes go into full-blown psychotic episodes. And I really think if we started educating people in the psychiatric field about mast cell activation syndrome, we could actually get at a lot of so-called treatment resistant people in these facilities.

Evelyne: So true. Even just, well, changing the diet, focusing on gut health could have such a dramatic impact. So, at that point, you were still a therapist, right? Did you start implementing some of this new information in your therapy practice at that point?

Jen Donovan: Yeah. Well, so not at first, because I was still trying to figure myself out. So, it was quite a long road. From the time that I made those initial changes, it took me about two years to get to a place where I felt like I was confidently in remission, where I define my in remission period of my life starting. And so, I felt like I was really traversing new waters again. This condition was still very unusual at the time. I did find, I was very fortunate that I was able to find some key mentors who helped me along the way, and pointed me in the right direction. So, as I ventured into the nutritional and natural health world, there were definitely people who guided me, but I was also doing a lot of personal trial and error.

And so, I really wanted to make sure that I knew what I was doing, and I was getting better before I started implementing it with other people. So, it wasn’t until I more got into remission that I went back and got my nutritional therapy practitioner certification, and my gut and psychology syndrome practitioner certification, and that’s when I really changed my business and started Whole Body Healing with Jen.

Evelyne: That’s amazing. And during those two years of healing, can you take me through what that was like, the things that you tried, and what did it take to get to that place?

Jen Donovan: Yeah, it took a lot. Sometimes I struggle when people ask me, what did you do to recover? Because it’s like, do you have an hour? But luckily we probably do. So, it’s perfect.

Evelyne: Yeah.

Jen Donovan: But yeah, I was very ill at that point. So, mast cell activation syndrome comes on a spectrum, and some people, they have the condition, and their symptoms are annoying, difficult, but they actually maintain pretty good functionality overall. Some people are even worse than I was, where they are literally bed bound, or room bound, and really just in a very stuck place with it. So, there’s a very wide spectrum. I would say I would on the more severe end of the spectrum in that, but I really think if I had just taken one aspect of natural healing, and just done that, I probably would not have recovered. So, I was already in the process of learning how to do more somatic nervous system regulation techniques in my therapy, because I had already been frustrated with the lack of results I was getting with my clients, it was just people were coming back with the same problems and the same repetitive thoughts and the same repetitive emotions every week, no matter how much we talked it through.

And so, I had already been in the process of trying to get certified as a tension and trauma releasing exercises provider, so we can definitely talk about that more too. But I really took that practice to heart in my personal recovery. So, while I was implementing all my nutritional interventions, I was also doing a lot of nervous system regulation work, I was learning to meditate, I really took this as an opportunity for profound personal growth. It’s really interesting, I had been in a place in my life where I was overworking, I was partying and drinking a lot, I had some really unhealthy friendships and relationships, and I felt very just on autopilot in my life, in terms of just like, this is what my life is like, and every day is just repeating this pattern.

And so ,sometimes our illnesses, even when they’re really debilitating, are a gift, and I realized that this was an opportunity to stop drinking, stop partying, stop staying out late, stop overworking, end relationships I needed to, and I might not have done that if I hadn’t had a actual life-threatening reason. If I hadn’t had that reason, I probably wouldn’t have done it. And so, I kind of became a hermit for probably at least the first year, where I just really kept to myself, I did all this nervous system regulation work, and I really just changed my personality, and changed the way that I lived my whole life. So, diet was huge, but the nervous system piece, and just changing my attitude and my personality was huge as well.

Evelyne: Yeah, I want to dive a little bit deeper into both the diet and the nervous system regulation part, and I have a lot of questions within those. I’d love to start with the nervous system regulation part, can you share some of the specific practices that you used but that you also now use with clients that you feel like are the most impactful? And we’ve talked about somatic work in probably maybe one episode, but what does that entail exactly?

Jen Donovan: Yeah. So, the modality I use is called tension and trauma releasing exercises, and the founder of this modality, it’s not the physical response in the nervous system that he invented, that is just an innate thing that exists in all of us. What he developed is a structured method to allow this release process to unfold, in a way that feels safe for more people. So, what this process does is it actually induces a shaking or vibrating response in the fascia. The fascia is the connective tissue that surrounds all of our organs, all of our nerve fibers, it’s basically like a sheath over all our organs and nerves. And so, it should be very flexible and moist, it kind looks like a damp spiderweb, if you look at healthy fascia under the microscope. And so, that means that anytime we have a stress response. And I mean a stress response for any reason, I really want to expand people’s concepts of what stress is.

Because yeah, it could be a difficult conversation you had at work. It could be getting stuck in traffic and getting frustrated with that. It could be your body not feeling like it has enough nutrients. It could be something more acute that happened to you when you were younger, for people who have experienced abuse and things like that. So, stress, I’m talking about this in a very, very broad way. Anytime we experience that stress response, our fascia will contract and tighten inwards, and this sends this cascade of hormonal shifts in our body that lets us know we need to go into fight or flight or freeze, we are basically under attack or under threat. That’s totally normal, there’s nothing wrong with that response. So, I really like to shift people’s perspective, it’s not the stress response that’s the problem, it’s the lack of being able to come out of the stress response that is the problem. It’s normal to experience trauma and stress, that’s just what it’s like to be alive.

But when we’re resilient, when our nervous system is healthy, when our fascia is healthy, we can easily come out of that stress response once it’s appropriate to. And we actually do that through shaking and vibrating. You may have felt like this if you’ve ever felt like you were about to have a panic attack, often people will start feeling like they’re shaking, or if people have ever been in a car accident, it’s very common for people to get out of the car and do whatever they need to do, to exchange information, and then as soon as they get home and sit down, they just start shaking. People also talk about feeling shaky on their wedding day, if they just have a lot of nerves. And so, people frame it this way, they’re like, oh, I just have nerves, I need to stop my shaking, but the ironic thing is that it’s actually the shaking that is calming you down.

So, the answer is not to stop yourself from trembling or shaking, it’s actually to allow that fully to happen. The problem is that we’re conditioned with all these very rigid social norms, where we are concerned if we see someone shaking on the street, we’re going to be like, what is wrong with that person? Are they having a seizure? That’s going to be the first thing that we think. But actually, this is a very normal and healthy response in the body, and it basically sends a signal to that part of the fascia where it starts to unwind that tension pattern, and it gets it back to its more moist, flexible state. And that sends a signal to the brain, oh, that trauma associated with that tension pattern, that stress associated with that tension pattern, that’s over, we can go back to our base now. We can go back to our life.

And so, what I love about this modality is that you don’t have to sit there and rehash every traumatic or stressful thing that’s ever happened to you. First of all, we probably don’t even remember a lot of them, depending on what has happened in our life, and also that can be really re-traumatizing for a lot of people. A lot of people will leave therapy actually feeling worse, like, well, great, now I just brought up everything I’ve been trying to repress for all these years and I feel terrible. So, this really gives the nervous system a chance to do the work it should naturally do. Because if a deer develop PTSD, it wouldn’t survive, even though they experience all sorts of trauma being chased by predators out in the wild, but they have this mechanism that they fully allow to unfold in their body, where they shake out and release everything they’ve experienced, and humans have that potential as well.

Evelyne: I was just going to bring that up, I remember either reading it somewhere, I don’t remember whose work this is, but that animals do that shaking naturally after something stressful happens, and we don’t do it, which is very interesting.

Jen Donovan: We’re the only mammal that represses this, yeah. And it’s just because our ego gets in the way. And it’s not that the ego is bad, the ego helps us survive all sorts of situations in which we have to just push through. But the problem is that we don’t often have a chance to put that aside and actually just let ourselves be the wild animals that we actually are, and trust our nervous system that it actually knows how to let go of things all by itself.

Evelyne: Super interesting. Can you give us an example of what the exercise looks like? Because a few years ago I had learned about, I think it’s called Qoya shaking, which is an exercise that you can do… But it’s just shaking out the whole body. But is this what you’re referring to? Is it just shaking different parts of the body when you’re stressed, or just as a daily practice? What does it look like?

Jen Donovan: Yeah, so you can do that, I sometimes will tell my clients, if you’re feeling really keyed up, just do the hokey pokey, it’\ will actually help you calm down. But this is actually stimulating a neurogenic tremor response, so it’s actually coming from the brainstem. Yeah, there’s a lot of modalities I think that work on this mechanism. You can get to it through a lot of different ways, so I don’t want to make it sound like this is the only method of unleashing this response in the body. I think somatic experiencing as a modality, actually gets to the same thing, and yeah, there’s lots of other methods too. But basically, this actually stimulates a neurogenic tremor from the brainstem. So, it’s not conscious, you’re not actually consciously shaking your body, your body actually just shakes itself. And so, it feels like, some people describe it as a massage coming from the inside out.

Evelyne: Wow.

Jen Donovan: That’s more pleasant. Some people have also described as like, oh, it feels like something’s crawling under my skin, that maybe sounds less pleasant, but it actually is if you experience it, if you understand what’s happening, it can actually be a really pleasant experience, and it feels very natural. So, basically, what you do is you do a series of exercise to stimulate your core fight or flight muscles, and then you get grounded in a safe container. So, I take people through a grounding visualization, I help them get really comfortable in their body and their environment, and we get into a position where the psoas muscle relaxes, so just feet on the floor and knees up towards the ceiling, and this mechanism just starts, Evelyne. I am telling you, it is incredible, people will be like, I don’t think it’ll work for me… It always works. We all have this innate mechanism in our body, and people experience it different ways.

Some people do have very strong emotional releases with it, they don’t even always know what they’re crying about, or what they’re feeling emotion about, but they just have this very intense sensation of release. Other people, like I said, it’s just mild and pleasant and relaxing, they just feel this very gentle sensation, and they just have a sense that something’s rearranging under the surface, and they just feel more relaxed when they’re done with it. So, it can be experienced in a lot of different ways, but I actually teach all of my clients who go through my programs this method. I think it’s so empowering, because what it teaches you is that you actually don’t need any fancy therapy to recover from trauma, your nervous system actually knows how to do it all on its own.

Evelyne: That’s super cool. Talk to me a little bit more about somatic experiencing. When I was going through a hard time a few years ago, I did work with a somatic therapist, and I had a really hard time with it, because I guess I associate it with, oh, notice a smell, notice a color, notice a sound… And I think maybe I was just too wound up at the time to fully take it in. I don’t know. Do you find that depending on what is going on in somebody’s life, that… Because I would say I was resistant in a lot of ways, and now I’m not in that fight or flight, or I was probably in freeze at the time, state, and I feel like I could be a lot more receptive to it. So, I’m curious, have you experienced that with clients, where they’re just not receptive based on what’s going on?

Jen Donovan: Well, absolutely, and I’m going to circle this back around to MCAS. Because when you have mast cell activation syndrome, your body thinks that everything around you and inside of you is a threat. This condition is really your immune system on its last legs, it’s saying we have been assaulted from so many angles so many times we have to have this hypervigilant extreme response to anything we come into contact with, because what if it hurts us again? What if it’s that last straw that finally does us in? And so, it is the immune system 100% trying to protect you, trying to keep you alive. It really thinks if it was not having this extreme immune response that something worse would happen, that’s what the body is convinced of. Now, this usually starts from real physiological causes. So, I don’t do the trauma releasing exercises because I think that this is just your nervous system keyed up, and you just have trauma, and it’s all in your head.

I don’t want anyone to take it that way, I don’t think that at all. I think people have extreme gut microbiome imbalance, and extremely high toxic loads in modern society. And I think pretty much everyone with MCAS has heavy metals, parasites, SIBO, candida, all of the above, really. But the problem is then that gets into a feedback loop with the nervous system. And this builds on trauma we’ve experienced earlier in our life, many people with MCAS do come from families where it was either very unstable and chaotic, or it was very fearful and sheltered and overprotective. It’s often one of those two types of upbringings, which really program the nervous system, like the world is not safe. So, people may have that earlier patterning that they already have in their nervous system, and then there is some kind of one major triggering event or series of triggering events. For me, this all developed after I had probably taken 10 rounds of antibiotics in the course of one year for recurrent UTIs and vaginal infections-

Evelyne: Oh wow.

Jen Donovan: … and the last thing that happened to me before this really started was I had IV antibiotics, because I had such a severe UTI that they were afraid it was going to turn into a kidney infection, I had a super high fever, very, very quickly, I ended up going to urgent care, and they gave me IV antibiotics, and everything really crashed after that. So, at the same time, I did always have this kind of anxious temperament, where I tended to always assume the worst, and just think that certain things just didn’t work out for me, that was just kind of my lot in life. I just had that negative mindset about life. So, I think these really play into each other.

And so, of course, with my microbiome in such a terrible state, and being so vulnerable now to any other threat I encountered in my environment, of course the body is going to be full on in fight or flight, it’s going to see everything as a threat. And so, yes, we need to rebalance the microbiome, but we also have to train your nervous system, hey, you are actually empowered to experience the world in a different way. You actually have the opportunity to come out of these tension patterns and experience the world as safe and pleasant and maybe even enjoyable sometimes.

Evelyne: Yeah, I think in my case it was a psychological issue, and then it got better after that. But tell me a little bit more about the somatic experiencing, for somebody who’s not familiar what that looks like.

Jen Donovan: Yeah. So, to be clear, I’m not actually a somatic experiencing practitioner, somatic experiencing is a very specific modality that you do a two or three year training program to specifically become a somatic experiencing practitioner. So, I don’t have that training. But there’s also just people who use just somatic techniques in their practice, and I definitely use somatic techniques in my practice. And so, that means when I am coaching someone, we are really not talking about just the level of thoughts and feelings like you would in traditional mental health therapy, we’re actually going deeper into the body and the nervous system. And probably what your therapist was trying to do with you, it was trying to get you more grounded in your body and the world by using these kind of mindfulness skills. Where it’s like, okay, notice this sensory sensation, and notice what effect that has in your body, and that’s a really key introductory skill of not only learning the things that trigger a negative nervous system response, or a stress response…

I often have people do an audit of their lifestyle, like are you listening to certain kinds of music? Or are your lights set up a certain way in your house, where it’s actually triggering a bit of a stress or a threat response in your body? But then also, what are the cues of safety? Are there smells, colors, images, sounds that actually give you that sense of safety? And so many people with complex chronic illness, they’ve been in such a place of suffering for so long, they have forgotten how to even acknowledge small, pleasant experiences. And it’s completely understandable, but it’s something that we have to shift to really get them out of that state. So, yeah, we’re just really working on the level of the body, and learning to build a new type of relationship with the sensations you experience day to day.

Evelyne: Yeah, let’s dive into the diet piece a little bit, and then I have more questions just about how you work with clients, especially clients who have very complex issues. So, with the diet, you said that you went on a low histamine diet, I know that you also changed pretty much everything you had to eat to balance your microbiome. I know from your website that you use different types of diets with the client you’re working with, depending on what they need specifically. Could you share a little bit more about what some of those are?

And also, I think one of the hardest things that I see is from both the practitioner and the patient standpoint, when somebody gets put on a restrictive diet, I don’t know, sometimes they get really discouraged, and then they might stop on their own, or they get so freaked out that they might have a reaction to a food that they end up eating a very restrictive diet for a long period of time, and then it’s very hard to introduce more food. So, I’m curious, in your programs and in your work with your clients, how do you get somebody to eat a more varied diet again? Or do you keep people on some sort of restriction all the time?

Jen Donovan: Oh, this is such a good question. Yeah, I have a lot to say about this. So, I started realizing that a low histamine diet had somewhat stabilized me, but I wasn’t getting better, and in some ways I was actually getting more and more sensitive. So, part of that is because when you take out a lot of the inflammatory noise, I did really transition to a much lower inflammatory diet than I had been on before, the problem then is that your reactions to things become much more acute, right? Because now you really notice them, now it’s like, okay, I’m not completely inflamed all the time, so now I’m going to notice more and more of how things are affecting me.

Great, that’s good to have that awareness, but at the same time, we can really get into this loop of now we’re eliminating more and more and more things because we’re noticing more and more smaller reactions to things. And that’s what happened to me, I got to a point where I was eating probably about 10 different foods-

Evelyne: Oh wow.

Jen Donovan: … between meat, grains, vegetables, fruit, and olive oil. So, it was just maybe two or three in each of those categories that I was just rotating. So, again, I was kind of functioning, but I could tell that it wasn’t really progressing my recovery. And I have clients who come to me eating two foods or three foods sometimes.

Evelyne: Oh my gosh.

Jen Donovan: Or even more restrictive, and it’s just because of this feedback loop I’m talking about. You notice the less inflammation you have overall, the more and more you notice these reactions. And again, people with these conditions, we do tend to be people who get easily fixated or hypervigilant, we’re type A perfectionist type people, and so we really tend to notice things. We’re not the people that’s like, sure how that’s affecting me. We know exactly how everything is affecting us. And again, that can be a blessing because we are very perceptive people, but it can also be a curse because we get so hypervigilant. And so, that’s when I really discovered the GAPS diet, and the specific carbohydrate diet. And this is a method that has been used a long time now, a version of it was even used as early as the late-1800s. But it’s been expanded upon and adjusted over the decades, and now the primary version of it that’s used is called the GAPS diet.

And the idea here is that when you have serious microbiome imbalance, and you have a lot of damage in the gut lining, you basically develop a complex carbohydrate intolerance. So, it’s not necessarily like celiac, where you actually have a severe allergic reaction to the protein in the grain, but it’s just overall, your digestion is not properly breaking down these long-chain carbohydrates anymore, and it’s causing all this irritation in the gut lining, it’s not allowing your gut to properly heal, and it’s feeding bacteria that is overgrown. So, a lot of people will hear, oh, get resistant starch in your diet because it’ll feed the good gut bacteria. And it does, but it also feeds the overgrown gut bacteria, right? So, that’s the problem, is that people are eating these foods thinking that they are promoting their gut health, but they’re actually exacerbating the dysbiosis, at least in the beginning.

So, I had to go very slowly with this, in terms of implementing the GAPS diet and cutting out the complex carbohydrates. First of all, rice, and I think quinoa were the two… Or no, it was rice and oatmeal, I think at that point, were the two grains… Two of the 10 safe foods I had. So, it was really terrifying to cut out foods I was not actively reacting to. It is really counterintuitive, when you’re already on a restrictive diet, someone’s telling you to cut out foods that are safe foods. And when we have safe foods, when we have mast cell activation syndrome, we tend to really want to hold onto them. But at the same time, I understood the science enough by that point that I realized that even if I wasn’t actively reacting to it, it was probably impeding on the ability of my gut to heal itself.

And so, every time I started cutting some of it out, I would have these massive die-off reactions. So, I actually had to go very slow, and I actually implement with a lot of my clients what I call the slow starch reduction guide, because I see people try to eliminate these foods… There’s a lot of people who say, oh, I tried a low-carb or a GAPS diet and it didn’t work for me, a lot of times they cut the foods out so quickly, they have this massive die-off reaction, and of course you feel terrible. You feel like you’re going to die because a bunch of bacteria in your gut is dying. So, part of you is dying, and it really does feel like that. And so, I encourage people to go really slow, and I had to go really slow too.

But that was the biggest thing that allowed my gut to actually heal more optimally, is getting those complex carbohydrates out of the diet. And at that point, I was able to start systematically adding more therapeutic foods in. So, I don’t think people with MCAS need to be on a low histamine diet even the rest of their life, let alone a GAPS diet the rest of their life. I think if we can get to the underlying imbalance in the gut and the immune system, we can expand the diet massively without symptoms returning. That’s been my experience, and that’s been my experience with probably hundreds of clients at this point.

Evelyne: So, generally, ballpark, how long do you keep somebody on a restrictive diet before you transition them to adding more foods?

Jen Donovan: I encourage people to add more foods as soon as they can. I keep them starch free, however, for usually one to two years. So, it’s very strategic.

Evelyne: Oh, wow. That’s a long time.

Jen Donovan: Yeah, it can take up to two years to fully rebalance the gut microbiome, there are a lot of bacteria that are dysbiotic bacteria that can live up to 24 months without any fuel or any food. There’s other types of microbes like candida, especially, as much as we want to think we can starve out candida on an anti-candida diet, it’s just that it doesn’t actively feed the candida, so you feel better, like you’re not having a candida flare. But candida can feed on anything. So, we need to get your immune system strong enough that it can fight the candida naturally.

And I get a lot of people who just start naturally having massive candida die-off, just by rebalancing the gut bacteria, because that’s going to modulate your immune system and help you just naturally release those candida biofilms. So, I find for people who are very ill, they’ve usually had gut dysbiosis since they were a baby, and maybe even the two or three generations before that, there’s been gut dysbiosis in the family. And so, I really do find that people need to be consistent for that long period of time to really get fully in remission and be able to eat a wider variety of foods in the long-term without the symptoms coming back.

Evelyne: Do you find that you can potentially speed up that process with using antimicrobial herbs at the same time and also afterward, maybe feeding the good gut bacteria with polyphenols?

Jen Donovan: So, I see so many of my clients come to me who, they’ve tried the antimicrobials, because that’s the obvious easy answer, right? There’s something bad in your gut, so kill it off. That seems so straightforward. The problem is, people with MCAS have very, very sensitive systems, and they usually have extremely congested detox pathways. That’s part of why they develop these conditions is because their body is overloaded with toxicity. And that’s actually why mast cells degranulate in the first place, they degranulate anytime they come into contact with what it perceives to be a toxin. So, if our detox pathways are very congested, we’re just going to be accumulating more and more toxicity that we’re exposed to, and so if we are really trying to force a major detox response through supplements, it can actually make the symptoms a lot worse. So, I’ve had a lot of people who come to me, who they knew they had some kind of gut dysbiosis, and they went on an antimicrobial protocol and it actually made their mast cell activation syndrome more severe.

And so, they’re coming to me after that experience. So, I never start with antimicrobials for that reason. I want to get the gut rebalanced initially, just through our nutritional interventions, and honestly, going on some version of the specific carbohydrate diet, where we cut out the complex carbohydrates, it tends to cause such a dramatic shift in the microbiome all by itself, we really don’t want to pile on anything else on top of that. We just let people get through that, and then we see how they’re doing, maybe six months, eight months, 12 months down the road… I have worked with a lot of people who never took any antimicrobials, and they were able to completely rebalance their gut microbiome, and get into remission.

I’ve had other people who saw improvements, but again, six to 12 months into it, they’re saying, look, I’ve still got these stubborn symptoms, my immune system is still struggling in this way. So, at that point, we know that the microbiome has rebalanced enough naturally, there’s a much better foundation, and when we do antimicrobials, first of all, they usually have to do much less. Maybe I use one or two herbs at a time, probably at lower doses than a lot of other practitioners might. And because their gut has already cleared out so much, your immune system responds in a much stronger way to it, it actually takes better.

Evelyne: I just find it interesting speaking to different guests how everybody treats differently, and you can get to the same place. Something that keeps coming up is the timeline, as you’re speaking, and I know you said for you it took about two years, and you said that with clients it can take six to eight months for this, a year for this, and I’m curious, because it takes a long time, especially because you’re working with complicated cases, how do you set that expectation up front? Because I imagine it can be very frustrating when the change is slow. So, I’m curious, how you word that, or how you work with that psychologically.

Jen Donovan: And I just want to just add one more thing before I go into that, which is, this is very much indicated with these conditions of high sensitivity. So, someone who’s coming in and their main symptoms are they have chronic fatigue, and then they test positive for SIBO, that person, you probably could use a really strong antimicrobial protocol with right away, and it might show them a lot of relief. And so, I think there’s so many different approaches because people are different. So, because my specialty is with such sensitive people, we just really need to be cautious about that order of operations.

But yeah, back to the timeline, I actually feel like I was given a real gift in my recovery, I had gone to a naturopathic doctor in the first few months of starting my own recovery journey, and I had done all the testing, like often people do, and literally every test came back positive, Evelyne. It was so… In some ways it was validating, so I was like, wow, my immune system really is struggling. Okay, I have so much more compassion for my immune system now because it really is dealing with a lot. But at the same time, it was discouraging. It was like, whoa, how is so much wrong with me? And my naturopath sat me down, she was like, “Look, the level of toxicity and infections that you are dealing with, give yourself three or four years.”

Evelyne: Wow.

Jen Donovan: She said, “Really, I just want you to have that perspective. I think we’ll be able to get you to a full recovery, but give yourself that timeline because this is a lot.” And that let me completely release my expectations on my timeline. Honestly, it just gave me complete permission to pace things in the way that my body actually needed to. So, I let go of any goals I had, of by six months I want to be here, or by this I want to be here, and I was just like, all right, I’ll see how I’m doing in four years, and then I’ll reassess.

Evelyne: Wow.

Jen Donovan: So, I really surrendered to the process completely, because I was given that kind of timeline. I was just like, okay, this is my life now, and I just really fully accepted that. And so, I try to give that gift to my clients too, if they’re ready to accept it. That’s why I… And I tend to give it more the two-year mark, for most of my folks, where I say, we’re going to be working on this probably for the next one to two years, so sit back. It’s okay, we don’t have to rush, we need to let this unfold in your body at its own pace. And I think a lot of times when people keep getting worse, it’s because they’ve been trying to implement too much too quickly, and their system could not integrate all of those interventions.

Evelyne: That’s such a great point, Jen, and I guess in the grand scheme of things, when somebody has been dealing with these issues like you, since you were a child, or maybe even since you were born, then four years isn’t actually that long to recover from a lifetime of all of this.

Jen Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. I think we just have a really skewed sense of time expectations because of Western medicine. We’re expecting to get a medication, or get a surgical intervention that’s just going to patch things up, and then we go back to our life, and that’s just not actually how the body works at all.

Evelyne: Right, you have to do a complete lifestyle change. I’m curious too, what are some of your favorite nutrients and/or that you incorporate with your clients?

Jen Donovan: Yeah. So, I am a big fan of keeping it simple. Again, when you have these high sensitivities, usually a lot of the multivitamin or multi-nutrient type supplements can just add a lot of noise. It works great to use some of these supplements that have all these different nutrients together, just for ease for some clients, but if you’re very sensitive, you might take something like that, have a really weird reaction, and then have no idea what in it you were having a problem with. So, I really try to introduce single nutrients, just one at a time for people. So, really important ones for the immune system include, of course, the vitamins A, D, and K. So, sometimes I will just supplement those and… It varies, some people with these conditions, they do better with the more natural forms, and some people do better with the more synthetic forms, it kind of just depends on the person.

So, I have a lot of just tools in my toolbox. Like, okay, well, if this didn’t work, we’ll try this. There’s always another option we can do. But I am a big fan of cod liver oil to support the immune system. Also, the minerals. A lot of people with MCAS also have POTS, or another form of dysautonomia, where there’s hormonal imbalances going on in the kidneys that are leaving them chronically dehydrated. So, magnesium, potassium, getting enough high quality salt. These are big ones too, calcium can actually regulate the histamine pathways, and so sometimes a little bit of calcium carbonate can actually really help people. Vitamin C is also a really good one, unfortunately, a lot of the food-based vitamin C sources are pretty high in histamine, and so often we have to rely on cruciferous vegetables, which give you a reasonable amount, but often I will supplement ascorbic acid with people, because vitamin C can help flush excess histamine out of the body, and can be really useful.

So, I usually just start with those basics. I have some clients who are very, very sensitive to herbs, I have other clients that do really well with antihistamine herbs, so I will use things like nettles to help reduce histamine symptoms in people who do better with the plants. Sometimes I will have them do other just culinary herbs, either in their food or even juice them. So, things like fennel, and cilantro, and parsley, and celery all have natural antihistamine properties as well.

Evelyne: Do you ever use DAO supplementation in your clients?

Jen Donovan: Sometimes in the beginning, usually people, by the time they come to me, they’ve already tried that, to be honest. Just because that’s such a, you Google histamine intolerance and that’s the first thing that comes up. So, for about 50% of people it works great, for about 50% of people it makes absolutely no difference. So, if someone comes to me and they’re on it, and they’re like, this really helps, I’m like, great, stay on it. But if they’ve tried it and it doesn’t, then we don’t bother.

Evelyne: Gotcha. And then, in terms of with the nervous system regulation, in addition to the therapies, are there also supplements that you use for that part?

Jen Donovan: Yeah. So, the nervous system really needs a lot of B vitamins. Now, the issue with B vitamins is that they are activating, they are up-regulating. And so, it’s kind of this ironic thing where people with a lot of nervous system and dysregulation are usually very depleted in B vitamins. And this is connected into the gut, of course, because when we have gut dysbiosis and damage in the villi, we’re not absorbing our B vitamins well, we’re not producing or absorbing our B vitamins well. And so then this causes the nervous system dysregulation and dysfunction, when we don’t get enough of the B vitamins. However, when you are very, very sensitive, or have a very dysregulated nervous system, sometimes those supplemental B vitamins can be pretty intense also. So, this is another reason I don’t usually start people with just a B complex, usually it’s just too much all at once, it’s too activating.

So, usually we do one B vitamin at a time, and we make sure we have those mineral cofactors, so things like magnesium and potassium are important for properly absorbing the B vitamins, we make sure of that. But I usually start with B1, actually, this is the one I see actually support symptoms of chronic nervous system dysregulation the most. I think it’s a really underutilized nutrient, and it’s really the foundational B vitamin. It is in control of our entire energy production on a cellular level, just the entire ATP cycle is very dependent on having enough B1 in the system. And so, that is often the one I will start with for people.

Evelyne: And do you use a specific form? Do you use benfothiamine? Do you use thiamine?

Jen Donovan: Benfothiamine is the one that is actually the best absorbed, so that is the ideal one that I see really make the most difference for people. The problem is because it is so well absorbed that it can be pretty intense for some folks. B1 is kind of annoying in that people can get a paradoxical reaction to it, meaning the more deficient you are, sometimes as you start to supplement the nutrient, the symptoms of your deficiency initially get worse before they get better. So, people will be like, oh, I have POTS, I’m going to take B1 because POTS is associated with a B1 deficiency, and then their POTS symptoms will get worse when they start supplementing it.

It does pass, but we want to start basically where your nervous system can handle it. So, if people can tolerate benfothiamine from the beginning, that’s great, it’s what I see make the most difference, but I will use other forms, so TTFD, which is also known as allithiamine, that is one form that is, it’s bound to a sulfur molecule instead, it’s actually extracted from garlic. That one can work really well, for some people that one is a little gentler. And sometimes just kind of a more basic form, like thiamine HCl, we’ll start with as well. It’s not as well absorbed, but sometimes that’s just what people can start with.

Evelyne: Okay. I have two more questions for you, the first one is, we know that muscle is so important, and thankfully we’re talking about it more in general, in the conversation in regards to longevity and health span. When people are going through these types of protocols, and they have very complex chronic conditions, do you work on them building muscle mass? Do you focus on physical activity? Is that something that comes later? Because I imagine it’s a big struggle, especially when there’s just so much dysregulation already happening.

Jen Donovan: And actually, posture is a huge issue with my clients. Honestly, I think most people probably sitting in front of your computer world that we live in, yeah. But it can really exacerbate some of these conditions because when we have poor posture, it can really impinge on the vagus nerve, and we’re not getting proper blood flow up into the brain. And poor vagal tone is associated with almost every chronic illness, especially more complex ones, and more stubborn ones. Things like MCAS and dysautonomia. And so, we really do want to work on posture, but that’s hard if you’re mostly bed bound or couch bound. So, actually, my husband was a trainer, a personal trainer for many years, now he’s our meditation coach, but he has a background in personal training. And so, we actually worked together to develop an exercise program that you can do lying in bed, if you need to, or sitting in bed if you need to.

Evelyne: Oh wow.

Jen Donovan: And so, it’s very gentle exercises that just, it’s almost more than building muscle, focusing more on just connecting your brain to muscle groups that might be lacking that nervous system connection, just because of underuse. So, we use a lot of rhomboid squeezes, and hip bridges, and dead bugs to just start to activate the glutes and core and back muscles. And then as people’s fatigue improves, as their symptoms improve and they can be more active, we actually do really encourage people to start gentle strength training, especially rows and things, that help to activate the upper back muscles.

Evelyne: Yeah, that makes sense. My next question is more on the business side, I’m curious just how you structure your programs. Do you work with a lot of clients one-on-one? Do you do a lot of groups? What does that look like for you?

Jen Donovan: Yeah. So, I have a group focused on clients with mast cell activation and histamine issues, but also just very high sensitivities. So, people with multiple chemical sensitivities and things like that. So, it’s called immune resilience, it’s a six-month program, I make it six months because that’s the time period it takes some of these folks to see results, like we were talking about with the timeline. Things can feel worse before they feel better. And so, I really want people to be committed to that six months so they can actually work at their body at a slower and gentler pace, and see the even bigger longer-term results. So, what that is, is it’s you get six group classes every month, and then depending on the tier, there’s a few different tiers with different price points just to make it more accessible for a wider variety of people, but you can get monthly one-on-one sessions with either me or one of my coaches that I have personally trained.

So, that’s what I encourage people to do just because it is a really all encompassing program, we do a lot on nutrition, we take people through what I call the gut rebuilding diet, which is based on GAPS, but with high sensitivities in mind. The traditional GAPS diet, if you just go and Google the GAPS diet, people with MCAS are going to think I’m absolutely crazy for using this, because it’s like bone broth, and ferments, and it’s like these are very high histamine foods. But we just have to retool it to be lower histamine in the beginning so that people can tolerate it. So, we walk you through all of that.

But you also get the tension and trauma releasing exercises, you get meditation coaching, you get lifestyle and detoxification support. So, yeah, it’s just a really nice one-stop shop if people want to really simplify what they’re doing. But if people don’t want to commit to six months at first, I also have what I call root cause assessments available, where people can just come meet for an initial session and get a sense of what they may need to really focus on in their recovery.

Evelyne: Great. Thank you for sharing. I always love to hear from practitioners how they’re actually working with clients. And where can people learn more about you?

Jen Donovan: Yeah. My website is wholebodyhealingwithjen.com, and that’s Jen with one N, for people listening. And I’m also, that’s my handle on pretty much all platforms, wholebodyhealingwithJen. So, I’m on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook.

Evelyne: Wonderful. So, Jen, just to wrap up, just some rapid fire questions that I ask every guest on the podcast, the first one is, what are your top three favorite supplements?

Jen Donovan: Oh, well, magnesium is going to be a really easy one, just because I think almost everyone I talk to have signs of magnesium depletion. And then I’m actually going to say, salts, this is really funny, but I kind of consider that a supplemental nutrient because we add it to our food, and I think there’s a lot of fear around eating too much salts, getting too much sodium in the diet, but if you get a high quality mineral salt, I think people are actually really under eating it. So, then that, and… Let’s see, I guess I might have to go back to the B1, I just see it be such a game changer for people’s quality of life, especially with the serious nervous system dysregulation issues.

Evelyne: Awesome. What are your top health practices for your own personal wellbeing? I guess you have such a toolbox, what are maybe the three that you really focus on?

Jen Donovan: So, working in front of a screen every day, I get a whole lot of blue light exposure, so I really try to prioritize, even on my busiest days, I take two walks every day.

Evelyne: Nice.

Jen Donovan: So, I take one in the morning and one in the evening, it’s a really good way to bookend my day, and then I make sure I get some natural light exposure every day. So, that really helps my quality of life. I also personally have a really consistent yoga practice, and so I’ve been doing that for eight years. I find that it’s a great balance of meditation and physical fitness and alignment, it helps keep my posture good, again, even being on the computer all day. And then, I think trying to find joy, honestly, as much as I can, just in small things. I try to go out of my way to look for things that are fun or silly or hopeful or inspiring.

Again, this has just been a big mindset shift for me when I tended to just see everything that was wrong in the world before, and there is a lot, for sure, there’s a lot that’s wrong in the world, but when we hyper-focus on that, we neglect all the wonderful things that are happening every day, and all the ways that we are all so privileged. And I was able to really start that practice when I was in the depths of my illness, so I really want to emphasize to people, this is not a practice that waits for you, for when you’re better. This is a practice to start right now when you’re at your rock bottom, because there still are things, and you will find them.

Evelyne: Absolutely, I so agree with that, it’s so important because there’s so much beauty all us, every single day. Whether it’s interactions with people, no matter how small, or to me, it’s always like the flowers and the clouds and the plants all around me.

Jen Donovan: Yes.

Evelyne: And the last question is, what is something that you’ve changed your mind about through your years in practice?

Jen Donovan: I’ve changed so many things, Evelyne, oh my goodness. I feel like I’m having trouble thinking of one thing. I think maybe it’s just that there’s one answer for everyone, maybe we’ll make it really broad like that. Because you get on these little fads or trends, even as a practitioner, where it’s like, well, oh my gosh, this one person is promoting this, that must clearly be the answer for everyone. And I just find that the more I am really able to understand the language of the body, and really understand more deeply what different constellations of symptoms are trying to tell us, the more I’m able to really fine tune what people are doing. So, if someone is telling you a carnivore diet is right for everyone, or a vegetarian diet is right for everyone, or everyone should be taking this one supplement, just always is a red flag word, right?

Evelyne: Yeah, there’s so much nuance, and I think that’s something that comes across with everyone I talk to, is that, yeah, there is no one size fits all. So, thank you so much, Jen, I love how you explained everything today, and thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us.

Jen Donovan: Yeah, thank you for all the wonderful questions, this was very enjoyable. Yeah.

Evelyne: Awesome. Thank you for tuning into Conversations for Health, check out the show notes for resources from today’s conversation. Please share this podcast with your colleagues, follow, rate, or leave a review wherever you listen or watch, and thank you for designing a well world with us.

Voiceover: This is Conversations for Health with Evelyne Lambrecht, dedicated to engaging discussions with industry experts, exploring evidence-based cutting-edge research and practical tips.