Sad Sick and Stuck Rethinking Mental Health
when
i was in my mid-20s life appeared to be
going pretty well
i was working at my dream job as a tv
host at a local station and i had just
bought my first home
so i was really settling in and you know
just
feeling like life was on track i was
getting to put down some roots
near family and friends so you can
imagine my surprise
when one morning i woke up and i went to
the sink
to brush my teeth and the first thing i
noticed
was a huge bald patch on the side of my
head
and when i say bald patch i mean there
was not a single strand of hair on this
patch of skin that was about the size of
a golf ball
so next thing i’m on the phone with my
mom
asking her what is going on what do i do
is this normal
and she told me i should probably go get
it checked out so i did i went to the
doctor
and i was diagnosed with a condition
called alopecia areata
and two other autoimmune illnesses and
with autoimmune disease essentially what
happens
is your immune system attacks your
body’s own healthy cells
and in my case my hair follicles my skin
cells and my mucous membranes would all
be affected
and i remember my doctors really trying
to reassure me you know that this wasn’t
that bad
the symptoms were very manageable but
there was no cure
and once you have one autoimmune illness
you’re likely to get some of the others
and there are between
70 to 80 of them everything from lupus
to rheumatoid arthritis
uh and i basically was just supposed to
accept that this was
my life now and i remember thinking
absolutely not this is not what my 20s
were supposed to look like
i was supposed to be out having fun and
dating
not going to the doctor’s office and
having steroid injections into my scalp
hoping that my hair would grow back and
i was really afraid
you know i worried what if i did get
sicker what if i lost my job
lost my house lost my hair
maybe my sanity um so i really had to
get past this initial shock
and and when i did i kind of realized
you know what i had been
ignoring a lot of symptoms for a long
time so years prior to this i had had
chronic fatigue sleep issues digestive
issues
panic episodes and these periods of
anxiety and depression
but i really thought these were just
kind of normal stress responses
to a very demanding career so i tried
everything to fix
my situation i took all the medications
my doctors prescribed i went to a number
of medical specialists and holistic
practitioners
tried every diet and lifestyle change in
the book
and honestly nothing really got better
maybe a minor improvement you know here
and there but nothing
sustainable and what was becoming clear
though was that my mental health was
suffering
profoundly so i
several years into this and several
thousands of dollars
i just decided you know what maybe i
need to stop seeing medical
specialists and start seeing a therapist
and this wasn’t something i had really
considered before because i was still
functioning you know i was still going
to work
every day and i just i think there was a
bit of a stigma attached to it
but i did finally go and see a therapist
and i didn’t realize this at the time
but this would be the catalyst for me to
completely
switch gears um go back to grad school
at age 30 to pursue a career in mental
health
and that’s what i do now so i get to
work with my own therapy clients and
support them through some of their
challenges
so you see an interesting thing happened
when i went to a therapist and really
started to focus on my mental health
both my psychological symptoms and some
of my physical symptoms began to improve
and i’ll just say here no i did not cure
my autoimmune illness i still have them
but i don’t have flare-ups the way that
i used to my hair doesn’t fall out in
chunks
anymore thankfully now it just sheds
because i’m getting older but i i don’t
have such severe
flare-ups and you know more importantly
the way that i relate to myself and
relate to these diagnoses
that has completely shifted and that’s
really improved my quality of life
so i’d like to share what i’ve learned
with you and
you know health and mental health these
are such complex topics but
this is one perspective that has been
really helpful for me so when i first
started researching all of this i
consistently found there was a huge link
between mental health conditions and
chronic illness especially stress and
trauma related disorders and autoimmune
illness
and you know i always thought well i
don’t have trauma because again i was
still functioning
and i was kind of in denial honestly so
the word trauma didn’t really resonate
with me until i came across the work
of dr francine shapiro and she describes
trauma as existing
in a couple of categories so there are
the capital t traumas which are
the things we might think of like war
natural disaster
assault and then there are the little t
traumas which are
no less significant but they might be
less visible and these can be things
like
early life experiences or life
transitions that were overwhelming for
us
and we can think of the big t traumas as
a huge wound on our bodies
and the little tea traumas are like lots
of little cuts you can bleed out from
both
so once again once i got past my initial
denial
i realized you know what yeah i had
experienced both big t and little t
traumas but they were kind of scary to
look at so for years
i just told myself i was fine and i
ignored
all of my symptoms and feelings but when
i started to learn about the physiology
behind my responses
i felt a lot less crazy because i
realized you know what it’s not about
crazy
it’s about survival and dr bessel van
der kook’s work
really helped me to understand this so
he defines trauma as anything that
overwhelms our nervous system
so it’s less about the event and more
about the way our nervous system
responds to an event
and our nervous system’s functioning is
of course influenced by things like our
biology
our environments and any trauma and
stress
but whether you identify as having
trauma
you definitely have a nervous system so
i think understanding the way that it
works can really help us with our mental
health
and most of us already know the basics
here right that we have a fight or
flight response
to stress and threats but there’s a
third response that we don’t always
talk about and that’s the freeze
response and the freeze response happens
when our nervous system decides fight or
flight are not the best option here
and immobility is so we see this in the
animal kingdom
where some animals will play dead to
deter a predator
i see this a lot now in my work with
sexual assault survivors who
you know they blame themselves for not
running away from their attacker when
what’s actually happening
is the nervous system has decided within
milliseconds that the best way
to survive this threat is to completely
freeze up and your muscles
actually do lock up it’s called tonic
immobility and you might also completely
dissociate
from that painful experience and dr
steven porgis
is a neuroscientist and he says that
getting stuck in the freeze response
can look a lot like dissociation
depression
and a general sense of hopelessness and
another piece to all of this
is that whenever we’re experiencing
chronic stress or trauma
our limbic system is activating that
fight flight freeze response
and our logic system goes offline so
those thinking parts of the brain like
the prefrontal cortex
aren’t even fully available so this is
why it’s really hard when
you’re in like a really heated argument
with your spouse
to come up with a rational solution to a
problem
and when we’re constantly in fight
flight freeze our body gets worn out
and our thinking processes are affected
so there’s a very
real physiological component to
psychological health
ultimately we’re wired for survival and
our symptoms and behaviors often make
sense
in the context of trying to meet those
survival needs
even our most stubborn behavioral
patterns things like addiction
perfectionism codependency these can be
survival strategies
that we’re using to either get our basic
needs met
or to cope with our needs not being met
but we don’t usually think of it
like this right we think well something
must be wrong with me i’m weak i’m lazy
and it kind of makes sense because we
live in a society that
reinforces this message that we need to
hustle
hard to be worthy and never ask for help
and so we really normalize our actual
human needs
not being met and then we tell ourselves
we just need to toughen up
and try harder what do we do
instead here we have to start listening
to the wisdom
in our bodies and get curious about our
needs starting with one of our most
basic needs which is safety and not just
physical safety but a nervous system
that feels safe
and dr poor just says that safety is a
prerequisite to meeting a lot of our
other survival needs like connection
because without safety we’re not going
to get closer to other people and we’re
definitely not going to meet
our higher functioning needs like joy
and creativity
but what’s amazing here is when we
create safety we can support the ideal
environment that’s going to encourage
recovery and change to occur
naturally and change really can occur on
a neurological level
so neuroplasticity means that our brain
can create
new neural pathways and learn to
function
and respond in different ways so
let’s say one of our basic physical
safety needs are met
but we still feel unsafe in our own
bodies and this was a really tough one
for me it took me years to go from
my body is betraying me to my body is
protecting me
i really had to learn about my nervous
system and kind of befriend my own body
before it started to feel safer for me
and so i like to think of a dysregulated
nervous system
as a kind of chaotic house and if you
ever watch
the netflix show tidying up with marie
kondo you kind of already know what i’m
talking about here
but if you’ve never heard of her marie
kondo is a decluttering guru
and she helps these really stressed out
families reorganize their homes and
reclaim a sense of peace and this is a
pretty big task because you’ll see
in these homes you know families who are
not getting along
there’s stuff everywhere one person
might have a hoarding problem
and they’re just not functioning well
because the stuff in their homes has
become
overwhelming and when marie comes into
the home
the first thing she does is kind of
unexpected so she’ll gather up the whole
family
with all their disgruntled feelings
and she’ll ask him to sit in the living
room and she’ll usually kneel on the
floor and
put her hands on the floor and she’ll
ask everyone to close their eyes and
she’ll say
i want you to thank your home for
keeping your family safe
and this moment this recognition of the
home
as a supportive structure often brings
people to tears
because they’ve simply never seen their
homes as a haven
they’ve seen it as a source of stress
and shame
and i think this is how many of us feel
about our own bodies
but with marie you know instead of
shaming these families for having so
much stuff
she simply invites them to look at all
of it
to acknowledge all of it the painful
memories
the items that need repairing that have
been neglected
the messy parts that aren’t helping
and every item in the house gets
addressed so she’ll tell them to pick an
item up
hold it and feel whether it sparks joy
or not and if it doesn’t she’ll tell
them to thank the item
then repurpose it or let it go
and as the house becomes reorganized and
repaired
the whole family starts functioning
differently
there’s better communication there’s
more compassion
and there’s really more safety in the
home both emotionally and structurally
and this is so cool to watch you know
and of course if you’re watching it on
netflix you get to see it all happen
in 45 minutes but in real life this is
not such a
quick process because it really requires
us to slow down
and look at our stuff and when we look
inward we might find trauma that needs
processing
we might find that we’re living with
stressors that are really activating
that survival response
but when we can start to honor our pain
and start seeing
our bad habits as survival strategies
we can start to listen to what our body
is telling us
and it will often speak to us in
emotions
every emotion has an intention to
communicate a need
or to protest a need not being met and
when we ignore the emotion we also
ignore the possibility
of meeting our own needs sometimes our
bodies will speak to us
in symptoms in discomfort and pain that
force us to pay attention but we’re so
quick to think of symptoms
automatically as being a sign of
pathology
when sometimes they’re just a sign of
our humanity
and we think there’s something horribly
wrong with us when the fact that we are
currently alive is a sign that there’s
something very right with us
our nervous system is doing its job so
instead of making our mental health
about our perceived deficits
and character flaws sometimes we should
really be
asking ourselves what do i need to feel
safer
right now and there are so many ways to
create internal safety
whether that’s practicing healthy
boundaries and protecting your
environment
or mindfulness and deep breathing
exercises
that really counteract the shallow
breathing of the fight flight freeze
response
it’s different for everyone but we first
have to learn to stop
bypassing ourselves and instead ask
ourselves what needs are not getting met
and how can we choose to organize and
protect
our homes if there’s one thing you can
take away from this i hope it’s this
two ask yourself over and over again
what does your body
need and then to listen until you start
to feel
more at home in your own body with
practice and support
you can learn to reorganize your home
appreciate the safety it has provided
for you
and find the joy you didn’t think you
could have
thank you
you