Your Body Is Protecting You More Than You Think with Cindy Costley

Your Body Has Hidden Patterns

Carol Clegg 0:00

Today's conversation is about the hidden patterns our body carries and how symptoms, stress, emotional reactions, and even behaviors may be communicating something deeper than we realize. My guest today shares a perspective that invites us to stop seeing the body as broken or betraying us and instead begin listening to the intelligence behind what it might be trying to protect. So joining me today is my guest, Cindy Castley. So welcome, Cindy. Thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Thank you, Carol. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Carol Clegg 0:40

So excited about digging into the EBDT and finding out all about the work that you do. But let me introduce you to my listeners. So Cindy Castley is a speaker, trainer, and a creator of the electromagnetic body desensitization technique. It's quite a mouthful. So I know why you have EBDT as your trademark. So let me say that again. Electromagnetic body desensitization technique. And she is known for her work in helping people decode the patterns behind physical symptoms, emotional responses, and behavior cycles. And after experiencing severe, life-altering allergic reactions beginning in her teens, Cindy has spent decades living in survival mode before discovering that her symptoms were not random. They were patterned responses connected to stress, trauma, and the body's protective mechanisms. And today her work integrates what she calls the six frequencies of human regulation spiritual, energetic, mental, emotional, physical, and behavioral, helping people better understand that very special relationship between body, mind, and the lived experience. So welcome to Connect, Inspire, Create, a podcast exploring meaningful conversations about life, work, creativity, and the ways we can grow. Let's slow down the conversation just enough to notice what inspires us and how those insights can help shape what we create in our lives. My conversations go beyond just business strategies. We explore living with intention and self-trust, alternative ways of thinking and being, creativity, purpose, and personal growth, and navigating transitions in work and life. I am Carol Clegg, your host, your accountability and mental fitness coach, inviting my guests from around the world with a wide range of backgrounds to share insights on how they live, think, and navigate this wonderful challenge of just being a human in our world.

Trauma, Survival Mode, And Allergies

Carol Clegg 2:58

So, Cindy, your story that I've had a look at your website is so incredibly personal and layered, and spending decades, as you've mentioned, living in survival mode, when you look back now, what stands out most to you about the way your body was trying to communicate with you all those years ago?

SPEAKER_01 3:20

I love that question because I had absolutely no idea that every allergic reaction, every symptom I had was my body screaming at me to heal something. I had severe trauma as a child at age six, and then a really big event at age 14 that involved a few individuals, and then another uh sexual trauma at 15. And then at 15, my body suddenly became allergic to the world. But and I mean almost all chemicals, almost all foods, all animal life. I couldn't be around it, I couldn't be five minutes in a room with any animals without having full-on allergic reaction. And then a, and and you know, all the grasses and trees and all of it. And I didn't associate any of it to my trauma because I was happy. Because I was joyful, and I felt like I got away unscathed with some really big traumas, and I just felt joyful that I wasn't impacted mentally and emotionally. I didn't have depression, I did have anxiety. I later learned was actually a lot of the itching, but I didn't know that. So when I look back now, I think I completely bypassed. Like, how could I have thought that going through all those emotions, all that trauma, that I actually would have gotten away unscathed.

Carol Clegg 4:45

Right, that it wouldn't have had a major effect on your body.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

Yes, but what happened is at starting at age six, my body, the trauma was so severe, my bot my body and brain said, we can't feel this. This is too much. We're gonna we're gonna feel your emotions somatically. So I stopped, I stopped feeling emotions. I didn't know how to feel anger or sadness or frustration. I could feel all of that towards other people. If I was sad about something else someone was going through, but I couldn't feel my own sadness because I had suppressed it all. So my body learned to manage all my emotions with somatic processing as opposed to mental and emotional processing.

Carol Clegg 5:31

Wow. You know, I mean, thinking about that, and you sort of say as you as you shared that your body was doing something, and you say the body isn't betraying us, it's protecting us. Yes, and that can feel so different how people think about illnesses or symptoms. And I mean, so could you elaborate a little more on that protection and not betrayal?

Why Symptoms Can Mean Protection

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Yeah, absolutely. So anything that was in my surroundings, so at age six, it was a house. I was allergic to certain linoleum, I was allergic to certain fabrics. So anything that was on my skin, anything that was in my environment at age six, and then at age 14, I was group, I'm very cautious not to trigger people, but I had a group rape, and it was I was outside in the forest, and so I woke up laying on the grass. So any grasses, trees, humidity, the smell of rain, so my body would react two days before it ever rained forever. I used to say, Oh, we're gonna, it's gonna rain in two days, because I'd start having reactions, and that was all related to the humidity. Anything that was in my digestive system during those three traumas, it became a threat. My body associated everything that I went through that was in my surroundings during my traumas as a physical threat to me. And that's why at age 15, I just suddenly became a I literally woke up one day just full of rashes. And that's how my allergies manifested was with like severe rashes all over my body.

Carol Clegg 7:09

I mean, you describe these symptoms as a patterned response to to what happened rather than a random problem to fix. And at what point did you this realization go, hang on a minute? I now need to change and I'm moving into my own healing journey. What when did that change come

The Health Crisis That Changed Everything

Carol Clegg 7:32

about?

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Yeah. Oh my goodness, my eyes are telling me something right now, too. So I'm 48 years old. I so I dealt with these allergic reactions my whole life. And again, I felt joyful. I felt like that's all I have. And when I would, when mom would go down, I raised three kids, I got a degree, you know, I did all the things, worked full time, then I started my own business. But when I would go down, I would go down for a week or two at a time. My family would step in, everybody would help with the kids. Like it just was this pattern that we got into. And then at age 48, we all went water skiing to a lake that we'd never been to. And within about two hours of being in the water, I was taken to the hospital and I had a massive anaphylactic reaction of the skin, which is what anaphylaxis is not just of the throat, you can have it of any organ, really, and it was anaphylaxis of the skin. And I never really recovered from that one. So normally a week or two, it would take to recover, and my body had just had enough. And eight months later, I was having reactions to everything. We had my husband and I had moved to the beach. We had taken all the carpet out of the house. He had to strip his clothes down before we got into the house. We stopped using laundry detergent. Like my world got smaller and smaller and smaller. And my liver and kidneys were, I call it failing. The doctors, I don't know that they would use that word, but basically they were saying I had the liver of an end-stage alcoholic. And, you know, my husband's like, Well, she doesn't drink, she's allergic to alcohol. And he said, Oh, that's not true. You know, you need to get real here. But I didn't drink. And everything, I could just tell I was dying. And I told my husband, I said, My soul wants to dance, and it's gonna dance here on this earth or somewhere else. And at the same time, I had my sister who was like, Let's go see a functional doctor. And so I flew across the country to Massachusetts to see Dr. Mark Hyman, who some people know he's a well-known functional medicine doctor. And that kind of set me in a path of looking at things a little bit differently. Then I saw a psychic healer, and she said, Tell me what happened to you at age 14. And I had never ever said one word about what happened to me at 14. So at age six, I had completely suppressed that. I didn't actually didn't learn about that until several years into my healing journey. At age 14, I knew about it all, but I had never said one word to anybody. And then at 15, my mom had found out about it and got me help. I did three years of therapy and still never spoke about what happened to me at 14 because I was afraid that the individual, one of the individuals involved, would go to jail. And he was, our families were very, very close. So I protected him over me.

Carol Clegg 10:15

At your cost. Yeah. My goodness. Right.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

And so when she says to me, Tell me what happened to you at 14, I told her what happened to me at 15. She goes, No, tell me what happened to you at 14. And that was the first time I spoke the words, and I just started crying. She goes, All of this is related to your traumas. The very next day I see a new functional doctor who's local, and he says to me, Tell me what happened to you in your childhood. And that was the very first moment, like those back-to-back moments were the aha moments of, okay, this is not what I thought it was. This I didn't get away unscathed, right? Right. Looking at my traumas. And so my functional doctor said, I want you to start desensitization right away, which is what I did. And then, you know, it I just started down this beautiful healing journey.

Release Emotions, Integrate Safety, Restore Truth

Carol Clegg 11:09

Wow. Because I mean, what you're sharing is how absolutely the body stores those experiences. So you you talk about integration and the difference between releasing trauma and integrating trauma. And I've I I would love to explore this more because you know, I guess we we separate it so and you get told, okay, you need to release and you're trying to get it out. But the integrating sounds like welcoming it. Welcoming is perhaps not quite the word, but bringing it in. So why does integration matter so much?

SPEAKER_01 11:45

Integration and restoration are both very important aspects of the healing journey. So when we look at healing something from our past, first we got to recognize that we did take on emotions that we may have suppressed. And so those emotions do get released. So that's the release part, right? We release the emotions. We're not releasing the trauma, the emotions that we held inside us that did not get let out, right? That we kept in us that created these patterns of dysregulation in the first place. But we've got to let go of the of the of the emotions. So we release the emotions and then we integrate the new story. I am safe. I am safe. That trauma was back then. So what happens is when we go through something that we don't fully heal, every time we're triggered, our body brings us back to that moment as if it's happening right now. So integration is saying, yes, this happened, but we're safe. That was then, this is now. We're not trying to bypass the trauma, we're not trying to say it didn't exist. We're saying it existed, but we're telling ourselves, but it's okay now. And the restoration is remembering that it doesn't have to impact us.

Carol Clegg 13:06

Right.

unknown 13:06

Right.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

We're restoring, we're restoring the truth, which is we're whole, we're complete, we're healed, right? We're healthy, our body has its own ability to heal itself. So we're restoring the truth. So we're releasing the old story, integrating that it did exist, but it no longer impacts us, and then restoring truth around our body's ability to thrive and live in a functional way.

Carol Clegg 13:35

And I just, you know, what you shared now, this is minute in comparison to what you have been through, but I am a terrible sleeper, have been for the last handful of months, and it's probably in partial processing grief and dealing with everything else that I am, you know. But you talk about saying, you know, I'm feeling safe. And that is one of the things I have started saying to myself when I wake in the middle of whatever hour of the morning and just go, my breathing, and then I am safe. I am safe where I am, and kind of you know, feeling and I just think, you know, that reassurance for ourselves to tell ourselves when when we are really safe. There isn't a threat, there is nothing coming to get us, and to just to to sit in that moment. So just for those that that are battling to sleep, I'm certainly finding that that helps

Six Frequencies Of Human Regulation

Carol Clegg 14:26

me. But you teach something called the six frequencies of the human regulation.

unknown 14:31

Yes.

Carol Clegg 14:32

Can you walk us through that a little and then how they intertwine or how they work together?

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yes. So the six frequencies of human regulation, as you mentioned, are spirituality, energetic, mental, emotional, physical, and behavioral. And they at our healing process actually heals in alignment with those six. So, for instance, number one is spirituality, because if we don't believe in something higher than us, something greater than us, something beyond our own brain and body, then we can't really believe that we have the innate ability to heal. Right? So, first we need to believe in something bigger than us, that's spirituality. And then we need to really look at, okay, and yes, we are all energy. We are energy. Every word we say, every thought we have is an energetic imprint. Every emotion is an energetic imprint of emotion. And so once we understand that concept, then we can start realizing how it impacts us mentally and then emotionally and then physically and behaviorally. And so healing, incorporating those six frequencies of human regulation is important because they all work together, they're not separate from one another, and we kind of are trained and raised that you know, we have depression that's separate from the physical. It's not right.

Carol Clegg 15:57

And would you, I'm just curious, would you put them on, you know, the as you spoke them, spiritual, energetic, mental, would they always follow in that linear passage, or do they kind of move around?

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Yeah, it depends on the pattern and and depends on where you're at in your healing, but they do need to start with the spiritual and the energetic in order for our body, so our body has innate ability to heal. All we need to do, and this sounds so simple, and it's not simple, but it's it's not easy, but it's it's simple. We need to direct our body on how to heal. We need to remind it how to heal. Our body already knows, but our job is to remind it how to heal. And when we understand that spiritual and that energetic, it's a lot easier to remind

Itchy Eyes As A Real-Time Signal

SPEAKER_01 16:42

our body. I'm gonna give you an example of something that's actually happening to me right now. You can see it, but your listeners, I know, are not seeing something, but my eyes are very itchy right now. Right before getting on a call with you, I was on another podcast. I was interviewing somebody from my podcast, and he brought up something that reminded me of something, and my body wants to cry. And so my eyes are itching. My eyes are telling me, pause for a moment and feel this. When we hang up from this, I'm gonna just go and sit down. It'll take me about 90 seconds, literally, it's a minute or two, to let out that emotion. But because I'm not able to let it out right now, it's expressing through, and my eyes are super itchy right now. And in the past, I used to think, oh, this is an allergic reaction. This is I'm what am I allergic to? Were there a candle? Is there, you know, whatever it is? And that's not what it is anymore. I know now that my body speaks to me through these reactions. And so when we hang up, I'll sit down, I'll ask, I know exactly what the moment was, and I'll let myself feel that and cry, and then that just comes out of my body and it's done.

Carol Clegg 17:53

That's done. Oh, how beautiful. Thank you for sharing that example. I wish, because you know how important it is when they say just take that moment of pause, that my heart goes out that I wish you'd had a moment to pause between to allow that to process. Yes, well, I'm learned.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

I'm separating and not booking things so close because when we do these kind of podcasts, it does bring up some stuff.

Carol Clegg 18:17

Absolutely. I mean, there are deep conversations, and that's part of the reason you know that we talk to the people that we do and bring our show out there, is for other people to just you know, it just might be a tiny nugget that just sits with them and go, yeah, this this will help me understand, as opposed to yeah, an open mindset to explore.

What EBDT Is And Why It Works

Carol Clegg 18:39

And so I know that you you created the I'm going to say EBDT because and for somebody hearing that for the first time, what is it and what makes it different from other healing approaches?

SPEAKER_01 18:54

Thank you for asking that. So, EBDT, first I want to say evolved through my own healing journey. So everything that I went through was became a part of EBDT. And what I learned through my healing is that almost everything is a pattern. So my body has a pattern of when I something is sad, it itches my eyes, right? That's not true for everybody. That's my body's pattern. Now, that's not a pattern I necessarily want to heal because I love that my body tells me how to heal, right? And I've learned that that's a trigger, and triggers aren't bad. So I've learned to go, oh, I was triggered by something, but triggers aren't bad. I'm gonna just go see what this trigger was trying to tell me, right? So what EBDT does is it teaches us, it teaches our body, trains our body to go back into a state of homeostasis one layer at a time by addressing the patterns that that that our body created during for through dysregulation. So for instance, we first we look at like what's the core thing we want to heal today? What's the one thing we do timeline healing? So we go back through everybody's life and we say, okay, this event, but what is the what how is your body speaking to you about this event? And that's what's so different for everybody, right? For some clients, it's through it's it's hormonal, for some clients, it's mental, it's emotional, it's anger, it's for me, it was allergic reactions, right? And so then what EBDT does is it allows us to say, okay, this event is safe, and we retell the new story saying that it's safe. Now, here's the difference we're not addressing it from the trauma space, we're addressing it from the pattern. So we're looking at the pattern that is in that is no longer serving us in our life, and then, and for instance, let's take you're sleeping, right? You're having a hard time sleeping. So if someone came to me and said, I'm having a hard time sleeping, we're going to ask their body, what is the pattern in this? What is it trying to protect you from? What is it trying, why is it is your body not allowing you to sleep? And then it goes, we we look at the different stages, different parts of your body that are in dysregulation because of it, and and the emotional pathways that have created, been created from it. And then we, after we create a remedy that says we're going to heal this pattern, the most important step is tying that pattern to the origination of the event. So we don't start with the origination of the event. We look at your patterns and we say, when did this pattern start? Let's heal that. But what we're really healing is the pattern of dysregulation that's happening. Whether that dysregulation is mental, emotional, behavioral, right? Sometimes it's a behavior that's no longer serving us. Sometimes it's a you know, a physical response, an emotional response, the way we handle our emotions. Those are all patterns, but they stemmed from something. And there was a moment in time that our body said, This isn't safe. I need to create a new way to live. And so it's those pathways that we heal by addressing the actual physical dysregulation in the body and then tying it back. And I'll give you an example of this.

Healing Food Reactions By Finding The Origin

SPEAKER_01 22:18

One, so when I was 15, I became allergic to everything. And dairy was one of those things. So if I ate dairy, I would break out in rashes. Well, I was 15 years old, so I didn't listen, right? I didn't pay attention. I ate like crap, anyways, and I would still have dairy sometimes and I'd break out in the rashes. And then a few years later, I became absolutely anaphylactic to the dairy. So if a drop of milk, when I was nursing my daughter, or not when I was nursing, but when I started feeling feeding her milk, if a drop of milk broke out or dropped on my arm, my whole arm would break out. If I drank even just the tiniest sip, my lips would swell, my tongue would swell, my airways would close. And I lived this way for 34 years, like I, or like 32 years. And finally, after I had healed all the trauma and I'd healed all everything, I hadn't touched dairy yet because it was scary for me. Like it was one of the solutions that this is, I don't know if I really want to mess with this. And I went to a restaurant with my brother and they got it wrong. The the restaurant, they had put there was butter in the hash browns, and I had a full-on anaphylactic reaction. And I came home to my husband after I healed, after I relaxed when it came, you know, took my bed of drill, did all the things I had to do, never needed my epi pen, which was great, but I had it there with me. But I told my husband, I'm never going to allow a restaurant to predict my life again. Like I am so tired of going to a place where they get it wrong and it impacts me. And so I gave myself a treatment that night and I did a remedy, and they're they're homeopathic remedies, and I created a remedy that told my brain I'm safe with dairy. Now, this was before EBDT came fully into fruition as to what it is now. So this was before we looked at the pathways, right? So I told my brain I'm safe with dairy and I started eating it. And as I would eat it, my my throat would start to act up and I would tell my body, no, remember we're safe, we're okay with this. Well, that was strange to me because that went on for about six months, eight months, where I still would have to talk my body down, and I didn't understand why. And it it was because I didn't know, I didn't realize you had to address the origination of the pattern. So, you know, almost a year later, actually a little over a year later, my husband makes lasagna for me. I've been eating cheese, I eat the cheese, my eyes swell shut, my airways were fine, but everything I broke out in rashes, everything else that used to happen with dairy happened other than my airways. And I knew my body was telling me something. And so I sat down instead of freaking out that I was having another reaction to dairy, I said, What do you want me to know from this? And I saw the moment, the thing that happened when my body said dairy was not safe. And so what my body was trying to tell me is, we're three quarters, we're we're 90% of the way there, but you need to heal the reason that you became that allergic to dairy. And it turned out to be an event when I was 17 that happened and it was pretty traumatic, not nothing like the other traumas, but still hard for me. And so at that moment, my body associated dairy as being highly unsafe. And that's when it became that much more dangerous. So I don't want to get too involved in this or advanced with this, but basically I had retrained my body that I was safe a year ago, but then a year prior, but then I had to actually retrain I had to actually heal the moment my body said that diarrhea isn't safe. That's why I kept having my body kept saying, wait, wait.

Carol Clegg 25:56

We're not finished. We we've got more to do.

SPEAKER_01 25:59

Yeah, and I could tell my, I could tell my body, I could talk my body down and say, nope, stand down, we're fine, we've healed this, we're good, and it would go away. But then this one moment, my body's like, no, we need to finish this last part. So it just shows like with EBDT, it it's not just about the dysregulation, it's not just about the pattern, it's not just about the event, it's all of it together.

Carol Clegg 26:21

Together.

SPEAKER_01 26:22

And that's what is so powerful about this process.

Carol Clegg 26:27

Is that sounds incredible? I mean, absolutely incredible. And I'm so thrilled that you've shared the living stories with my listeners as opposed to just putting a theoretical spin on it.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

That's that's how EBDT evolved. Like, I I I that moment is when I realized I cannot leave out the originating event. So God like kind of has been speaking through me as I'm building this program because He it was shown to me that yes, we can tell our body a new story, right? We can integrate a new story, we can release the emotions, which I had done, but if we don't actually tell the brain that that event is safe now, we're not fully healing ourselves. So all of it matters. And that's what each remedy does now is addresses the whole process of dysregulation for each individual event.

The Purposeful Pause To Reconnect

Carol Clegg 27:28

Cindy, for somebody who is listening to what we've discussed, and they're just feeling disconnected from their body or maybe even a little afraid, because they have, if you talk about the chronic symptoms that you've had to experience for so long, where would you gently invite them to just begin with a small step to reconnect with themselves?

SPEAKER_01 27:51

That's that's what's so important is not not trying to change everything that you know or think, but just starting to listen. So starting to recognize that your body is not failing you, your symptoms are trying to tell you something, they can be tied down, tied back to something. And so the first step is just pausing. I call it a purposeful pause. Oh, I have a like right now, my eyes were itching. And remember, I don't know if you saw this, but they were itching pretty bad when I first started. Yes. I mentioned what it was, my eyes calmed down.

Carol Clegg 28:28

You acknowledged it, you gave it space.

SPEAKER_01 28:30

And I said, We're gonna heal you in just a little bit. But trying to tell me like it was getting itchier and itchier, and I'm like, oh, and so once I acknowledged it, it went to the side. So the first step is just acknowledging, it's taking that personal pause and saying, Okay, what might you be trying to tell me? And it could be something as simple as you've been sitting in this chair too long, go stand up and walk around. Or it could be something big like, this is a trauma that the trigger is there. The key is starting to look at those patterns, right? Starting to look at the things that are not serving you, the things that are not actually going well in your life, and tracking, because when we start to really track things back, we can see it's a pattern, it's not just a one-time thing.

Carol Clegg 29:20

Right. And I it makes me think you know, you've been robbed of your joy and your hope and your happiness, and there's a reason behind that as opposed to just going, oh, this is life.

SPEAKER_01 29:30

Right, exactly. I used to say I won the allergy lottery. This is just the way it is for me.

Carol Clegg 29:36

Right. Just resigning yourself.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

I don't eat, I don't eat gluten because my body never wanted me to heal that. So that was the thing that my body was like, no, this is literally a physical thing, but everything else I eat, I'm around animals, I have a dog, I I don't have any chemical reactions, like I live life fully. How beautiful. I know, thank you. And it's because I stopped to listen and try and was willing to hear what my body was telling me.

Carol Clegg 30:09

Cindy, I know that I I have a place that we want to send listeners to, and I'd love for you to tell me a little bit more about it. Uh is it the restore the design community?

SPEAKER_01 30:20

Yes, yes, I have a free community, and it's just to help. We meet once a week, I mean once a month at the first Wednesday of every month, and it's just to start having those conversations around listening to our body, start learning to get to know our bodies and how to do it. I have a practitioner's portal as well, that's different, but the end of for individuals it's that are just learning to listen to their body, it's a free community and it's there to support you. And we're I have a podcast called The Underlying Answers, and so we go into podcast conversations on a deeper level in that community as well.

Carol Clegg 30:57

That sounds wonderful. And I'll make sure, yes, I've got the the underlying answers podcast that you go, as you say, deeper into how the body communicates, and then I'll make sure to have the link that people can find you for the restore the design community.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

So thank you, Carol. Thank you so much for having me.

Carol Clegg 31:16

Thank you for joining me. Thank you for sharing as depth and so much of your soul and your experiences. Uh very brave and very vulnerable, and I appreciate you. So thank you for that.

Resources, Community, And Closing

Carol Clegg 31:29

So for those that have been listening to Connect Inspire Create, if our conversation sparked something for you and you want to learn a little more, then I recommend that you reach out and connect with Cindy. I will have some links to her website, to the community that you can connect with her and explore more about this conversation. And you might even think of somebody else that comes to mind that you say, I need to share this episode with them. So I invite you to do that. And if you would like to experience some of my work in community, I host a complimentary monthly accountability circle, which is just a supportive space to pause, gain clarity, and choose a gentle next step forward that we often try so hard to do on our own that by having others with us, we can gain momentum. And so you'll find that information on my website at CarolClegg.com. And if you want to know more, you're welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn and also under Carol Clegg. So until the next time, may your choices bring you ease and flow.