A drop of reassurance. I have been healing myself for a year and a half now, with every resource at my disposal, putting in the hard work.

I am in a safe healing space now. I didn’t feel safe for quite a long time. But I have found one, and I am in a space where I ask for the help I need, and have finally found the support that I need to continue my journey from here.

I am safe.

I no longer hide in shame, I now choose instead to thrive in the courage of vulnerability.

I didn’t always feel that way- and that will be relayed here.

I intend to be raw and truthful and authentic about my experiences. I think that it is important to know that you are not alone if these things are happening to you. In the depths of this all, I really felt alone and isolated, most of it was my doing, because I was too ashamed to share and not yet emotionally intelligent enough to process what was happening, as it unfolded.

I thought that everyone struggled with those levels of inadequacy, that it was pretty normal for people to feel like they aren’t enough- our society is flooded with reasons to not be enough.

I felt inadequate in nearly every aspect of my life, in that underlying always reaching to be more, something well within reach, but never putting in the effort to get there kind of way. I learned later that it is not a healthy mental state to live in.

So, even though it is against every grain of my existance to be this vulernable- I am going to give it my authentic best and the raw honest truth about my thoughts and feelings along the way.

This abrupt journey, into being incapable of tending to my life, did put me into a real tailspin, and it got dark, and it got ugly and depressive. It took me to levels of anxiety I hope that most people never experience, it is debilitating to feel that helpless.

In those moments I made myself a promise, and I have kept it relentlessly. I have kept it at all costs. Because of that promise that I kept, that promise to myself, I am healing slow steady, and permanently.

The more I learn about my condition, and how my life to date seems to back-fill all of the puzzle pieces that contribute to a condition like I have, the clearer it is that the way I was thinking was not contributing to my health and general well being. As someone who thought I was doing pretty well in the world, it was alarming to learn that most of the physical pain that I experience is from how I have coped with my life with bad physical habits from bad mental habits.

I learned all about my condition Centralized Sensitization Syndrome. I learned the link between medical and mental health was syndromes like this that go un-diagonosed because the medical and mental health systems do not work together, at all.

I learned that being exposed to traumatic events, as well as not having the proper healthy support from professionals or healed people post crisis are also contributing factors. So l learned, and linked that the underlying cause of most of my issues was unresolved trauma from my childhood triggered again by the trauma of being force-ably removed from my life for pain that didn’t go away for months.

Trying to reconcile this all led to an existential crisis for me, and I have never been so grateful for chaos, because making sense of all of that non-sense was the secret to prolonged wellness for me.

As the research is indicating now, many chronic health issues are being linked to poor mental health due to unresolved trauma. The long term solution to resolving trauma is teaching self love to people to build them through their limiting beliefs to their ability to see their value again, no medication can provide this for a human- because it is an emotional reconcilliation process that needs to occur. It has nothing to do with a chemical compound prescription.

But instead of offering quality helpful advice which is free, and makes no profits, Doctors are trained to provide prescription solutions, not helpful longterm ones.

I have done enough research to know that medication is not the answer for me, because of the damage it does to my central nervous system and my highly sensitive body. I have been protecting my body by not being a live lab rat for some billionaire, it is just not something that I think my body needs.

Unfortunatley, both the mental health and the medical systems failed to provide me with any helpful help in spite of my relentless asking for it.

They don’t have the answers because emotions do not have prescribability when people aren’t afraid to feel them. I was looking for helping practices, pain clinics, and tools guidance to healthier ways to heal. I was looking for clairity on the healthy combination of things required to get non prescription relief from chronic pain.

It is a big huge abuse cycle being chronically ill and relying on the “systems”to support you.

I learned that you can break the trauma cycles when you break it down to the components of the underlying issues and actually start to heal the brain by removing the patterns that cause the chaos for you.

But how do you break the trauma cycles that you are living in and up against to save your own life?

I have learned that to find ways to stay away from that kind of “help”.

I will explain what I mean by the above separatly because the complexity requires it. Basically, the systems have the patient in a three way battle with medical help, mental health help, and their own capacity to endure the ignorance of both systems as they resist helping patients by passing the buck to eachother, like a cruel game of hot-potato, but with your life. All while you are expected to wait in the agony of trauma. It is cruel, and this is a hard reality pill to swallow in the depths of desparation in my pain cycles while waiting on wait lists that are years long.

I want to share with you how I am going about caring for myself, and managing my life while I have been left to my own devices, while I wait.

I have learned and adapted to each obstacle and hurdle that I have encountered along the way, and done some real soul searching and self work in the midst of it all.

It has not been easy. In fact, it has been the most traumatizing year and a half of my life… because as I lived my current trauma of being disabled suddenly, I mentally calculated my reality with the emotional pain of my old traumas flooding back to me in my present life. This is anxiety for me. When all of these things seem to happen at once and you can’t slow down to process, that is an anxiety attack. Long before my anxiety became agoraphobia/ anti-social like, I used anger, negativity and sarcasm to cover up my anxieties among many other things, unknowingly.

Finally having the knowledge that this is a reflection of the love that I needed to give myself, I have began to adapt and heal… and the more I heal the more I am addicted to the feeling of healing my way to the whole health that I have been desparately searching for.

I have learned that coping is absolutely the most common thing we do as people carrying trauma. Literally everyone copes. Everyone. Unless you take the time to resolve your past with where you stand today, on a very regular basis- you are probably coping in some way.

I found many unhelpful ways to cope, from avoidance to self sabbotage and enabling my own addiction cycles with my emotional reactions, rather than finding appropriate ways to respond to any given situation. I would always choose to cope instead, because coping is easy. Coping is like fast food… you know it is not good for you, but it fills the void in the moment.

Ultimately you are settling for convenience over quality, and accepting the long term consequences of that. We all do it more often than we would really like to acknowlege. I did anyhow.

My elaborate coping strategies led the straight path to where I am today. All because I never properly took care of the past events that shaped my thought patterns, mainly because I didn’t realize they were broken until I sat down and had a good look at my life from my bed and found the hard realization that this was all connected. That my brain had created symptoms in my body that scared the ever-living-shit out of me and sank me into a deep place of contempation, where I found my promise and jump-started my self worth with all of my mama bear fight to stay alive, and out of my bed for my children, I used a little bit of that force on myself. I mothered myself out of coping and into dicipline, mentally and then physically.

I have been levelling up as I go, and I am so ready to share my path to health from being chronically unwell. I want to share my journey, my messy, sometimes embarassing journey through it all! If for nothing more than to normalize being a little messy, and hopefully make sense of some of this non-sense for someone else.

I want there to be less shame around not being okay. I hope my story allows for that, because perfection was my goal, and so many people thought I had it. Perfectionism is the obsession with unattainable goals and the mental torture that comes along with it was alarming to recognize.

I went to counselling/therapy and dealt with underlying issues that were creating limiting beliefs in my processing patterns. Each time I found helpful help it led me in the direction of mindfulness and its contribution to health.

If you are struggling, I encourage you to reach out for help. Medications, if used as a strategic tool can and are very effective in treating patients, when combined with the proper support and mental health trauma-informed care. I chose not to use the medications, only because that was the right choice for me and I made those choices with my medical professionals.

So just know, as a drop of reassurance, that the places I write about, I have healed through and I am no longer suffering in the ways that I was.

I am excited to share what I have learned and how it has felt along the way.

I am so excited for what is coming next. I think it is going to change my life. A huge level up for my health, and a really big investment in myself.

-B.