The doctors recommendations were to take “lots of Benadryl and Zyrtec.” The focus was on addressing symptoms and NOT addressing the root cause of my illness.
Years went by, and I began doing a lot of research on alternative ways to heal from autoimmune. I took matters into my own hands – first cutting out gluten and dairy. I saw some progress with my health – I generally felt better. However, I was still having angioedema and hives reactions multiple times a month.
I reached rock bottom in October 2016. My symptoms had become even more severe, and had become life threatening. I was terrified, and my body felt completely out of control. I never knew what would trigger it or what to expect. I felt like an alien had taken over and I was merely a passenger on a very scary ride.
The book describes the journey that the author, Donna Jackson Nakazawa, goes on trying to heal her body from severe autoimmune issues. Besides the fact that it was incredibly validating to read about how someone else also navigated such difficult health circumstances, the author is also a science writer. She’s focused on the most cutting edge things she can do to “move the needle” with her health.
In this book, Donna talks about Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) and the link with autoimmune disease. I’ll never forget getting to this part of the book and coming to a complete stop. I had to re-read what she wrote multiple times. Suddenly, a lot of what I had been going through made sense. ACES was WHY I was so sick with autoimmune disease. I had an answer. Now, I just had to figure out what to do about it.
Since, I’m a bit of nerd, I made it my mission to read as much as I could about ACES/trauma and the link with chronic illness. I read Donna Jackson Nakazawa’s other books including Childhood Interrupted, and the names Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Mate, and Peter Levine – all leading trauma researchers - became part of my vocabulary.
I also read about how we speak to ourself has an impact on our nervous system and health. Tara Brach’s book, Radical Acceptance was also life changing for me. I had unknowingly lived most of my life in the “trance of fear” as she calls it. Once you see it, then you can do something about it. Powerful.
My husband noticed a change also. He mentioned how I was breathing differently and with more ease – something had begun to shift.
This was April 2017, and we were about to embark on a trip to France that we had been planning for months. I was still pretty sick at this time, and I was nervous about how I would be able to navigate eating out three meals a day on a pretty restricted diet in France. Overall, the trip went about as well as it could have. I definitely had moments when my body was really struggling and wanted to go back into unhealthy patterns with my chronic angioedema symptoms. In these moments, I had to very consciously tell it that “no” we weren’t going to do that - brain retraining in action!
When we arrived home, I continued to educate myself on the trauma and autoimmune link. As I continued to wrap my head around things, one night, I looked at my husband and told him, “I can’t do all this work on my own. I think I need to go to therapy.”
This was one of the biggest understatements of the century. I TOTALLY needed to go to therapy. I had way more baggage than I even knew about.
Little did I know the positive impact that going to therapy would have on my health and how quickly things would begin to shift. More on that later....
