My Recovery from Chronic Illness

I’ve been asked to share more about my illness and recovery. In telling my story, I’m going to be as honest and open as I can so that if you are dealing with similar circumstances in your background you will know there is hope. Whatever you are dealing with, I truly believe your life can be better than it is now.

Lower right photo: Dipping my feet in the Mediterranean Sea in the south of France last year - I’m beyond grateful to be able to travel again!

I’ve had health issues all my life, both physical and psychological. I come from a family that is wonderful in many ways, and also has a lot of challenges. In my family there is mental illness (bipolar disorder, psychosis, major depression, anxiety disorders), addiction to substances and other unhealthy behaviors, suicide, abuse, and incarceration. The mental illness and addiction patterns go back generations, pointing to a family genetic predisposition to these conditions.

By the time I was in high school I was dealing with challenges such as depression, anxiety, insomnia, and disordered eating. I used alcohol and cannabis to cope. I was often sick with viral illnesses and bacterial infections such as strep throat.

I went away to college and at first it was great, but then things went downhill. By my sophomore year, after harder drugs, a sexual assault experience, and a lot of stress had been added to the mix, I crashed. Suicidal depression, severe gastrointestinal pain, and hives the size of golf balls were some of my symptoms.

I left college and had the great good fortune to meet the man who would become my husband. He has been a constant loving support in my life ever since, for which I am eternally grateful.

Once I got stabilized, my quest to find healing for my body, mind, and spirit began and has continued to this day. I’ve worked with lots of different practitioners and modalities, including psychotherapy, bodywork, acupuncture, naturopathy, nutrition, supplements, EFT/tapping, and more. Most helped some. I did lots of research and experimentation on my own - trying different diets, supplements, meditation, yoga, and other healing tools.

I’m grateful that, with lots of support, I was able to live a pretty normal life - get married, start a career, have a baby, make friends, enjoy life. But I was not very resilient and during times of intense physical and/or emotional stress I would crash again. I’d recover, but never quite back to the same level as before the crash.  

In my early thirties I was balancing having a family with a stressful job requiring lots of travel. When my youngest brother died in a drowning accident, grief on top of the job stress was too much, and I had a big crash. That was the first time I received a diagnosis of adrenal fatigue, a condition that was just beginning to be recognized in the functional medicine field. I left the stressful job and eventually was able to get back to a more normal level of functioning.

In 2006 I was struggling with deep fatigue and lack of stamina, and it was discovered I had a congenital heart defect that was leading to heart failure. Open heart surgery saved my life, for which I am extremely grateful. My recovery went pretty well - I was able to go back to work part-time and resume a fairly normal life. But within a year I went through another time of high emotional stress and crashed again.

This time I developed a mystery autoimmune condition where I would get chest inflammation in the area of the surgery - the lining around my heart, lungs, and other tissues. My Western medicine doctors could see the high inflammation levels on lab tests, but couldn’t explain why it was happening or offer much besides pain medication and possibly steroids if it continued.

I worked with various practitioners and did lots of research on my own to try to understand what was happening and what to do about it. I started tracking everything that might be contributing to the inflammation flares - foods, supplements, stress, exertion. For example, I could ride my bicycle around the block once and I’d be okay, but if I rode around the block twice then within a few hours I’d have painful inflammation in my chest that would last a week or longer and be very debilitating.

After the heart surgery I also became much more reactive to all kinds of scents. I had always been more sensitive to chemicals than most people, but after surgery even natural scents would cause symptoms such as headaches, brain fog, and sore throat.

I was doing my best to cope by managing everything in my life to prevent inflammation flares - minimizing stress, exertion, exposure to scents, inflammatory foods, etc. and getting support from family and friends, therapy, meditation, and other healing modalities.

Then in 2013 my mother became very ill and began a long slow end of life process. One of my roles in our dysfunctional family had always been to try to take care of my mother, and I jumped back into that pattern full force. I thought it was going to be a sprint - just a short intense time until she passed - but it ended up being a marathon that lasted more than three years.

By early 2016 I was completely burned out and struggling on all levels - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. I was experiencing severe insomnia and fatigue, suicidal depression, and debilitating anxiety.

I had also become extremely reactive to all scents. For example, if I was in the backyard and one of our neighbors was doing laundry, the scent of the laundry products coming out their dryer vent and wafting into our yard would make me so ill I’d have to go back into the house and close the doors and windows.

I had to leave my job that I loved. I was homebound and socially isolated - I couldn’t have visitors because most people use laundry and personal products that would make me ill. I couldn’t go into stores or other public places, and travel was out of the question. Cognitive impairment made it difficult to speak on the phone or even write an email. I was reacting to many foods and other things like mold, sounds, and light.

I saw a number of Western and alternative medicine practitioners and specialists, and received the following diagnoses: chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, cognitive impairment, major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and severe insomnia.

My Western medicine doctors had only psychiatric medications to offer. I tried many - one after another - and couldn’t tolerate them. With the alternative practitioners, I tried acupuncture, thousands of dollars of tests and supplements, IV treatments, and more. Nothing helped, I was just getting worse.

I am so grateful to my husband and daughter for their loving kindness, support, and patience during this challenging time. A big part of me just wanted to give up, but they kept me going.

Then in July 2016 I learned about a brain retraining program called the Dynamic Neural Retraining System that has helped a lot of people with scent sensitivity, as well as many other chronic conditions. I was skeptical, but desperate, so I bought the DVDs and began working with the program. Because of cognitive impairment and severe depression, at first I wasn’t able to do the program as it was designed, so I just did the best I could. Gradually I started to see some minor improvements, especially in sensitivity to scents.

By the end of 2017, after working with the program for a year and a half, I started to see bigger changes. Then it was almost like a switch flipped in my brain, and the positive changes accelerated. My recovery continued throughout 2018, and has felt truly miraculous to my family and me.

Today I am so grateful to be free of all those conditions - it was a wonderful day when I sat in my doctor’s office as she clicked buttons on her computer to move all my diagnoses from “current” to “past history.”

I have my life back, but better than before. I feel better than I have in decades, in some ways better than I have my entire life. My mood is consistently calm and positive. I am resilient and can handle stressful situations. I no longer have inflammation flares or reactions to scents, foods, mold, sounds, etc. - I can go anywhere, smell anything, eat and drink anything, be with anyone.

My energy levels and stamina are good. I recently went on a 15-mile bike ride, which I have never been able to do before. I am grateful every day for the amazing gift of life on this beautiful earth with my wonderful family!

If you are wondering how brain retraining can have an impact on physical health, the answers are not mysterious and can be found in the rapidly developing field of neuroscience. When the ancient survival-focused mechanisms of the brain get stuck in the fight/ flight/ freeze response, all systems in the body are affected. For me this pattern began in childhood and was exacerbated by all my health challenges - my survival brain kept getting more and more triggered.

Brain retraining calms the survival brain so it shifts into the relaxed background state it is meant to be in most of the time (except when there is the rare true emergency and it needs to react). This allows the body’s own powerful natural healing mechanisms to activate, and seeming miracles can occur.

As for how brain retraining can override genetic predisposition for conditions such as mental illness and addiction, the emerging science of epigenetics tells us we can have a lot of impact on whether our genetic predispositions are expressed or not - our genes do not have to determine our destiny.

I have learned so much from what I’ve gone through, as well as additional study in applied neuroscience. Now my passion is sharing that knowledge, especially with heart-centered women who want to make a difference in the world, but are dealing with challenges such as anxiety that can interfere with living a full life.

If you are dealing with serious chronic illness, please know that thousands of people around the world are being helped by intensive brain retraining programs such as those on the Resources Page.

If you are dealing with milder mental and/or physical challenges, rewiring your brain for default states such as love, joy, gratitude, and connection can help with things like calming anxiety, elevating mood, increasing energy, and reducing or eliminating sensitivities to things like foods and scents.

Brain retraining techniques can also help with learning to set appropriate boundaries and gaining clarity about life direction, as well as a host of other benefits.

I created this blog to share information and inspiration about our amazing brains and how we can work together with our brains to live our best lives and make a difference in the world.

Thank you for reading! I’d love to hear from you. Please send comments, questions, or suggestions to liz@happybrainlife.com.

Have a beautiful day!