What if your chronic illness isn’t just physical… but deeply connected to your nervous system and past experiences?

In this powerful episode of Adult Child of Dysfunction, I sit down with Faith Ashenden to explore the connection between childhood trauma, nervous system dysregulation, and chronic illness.

Faith shares her personal journey from multiple autoimmune diagnoses, including Graves’ disease, to full-body healing by addressing the mind-body connection and subconscious patterns. We break down how growing up in dysfunction wires the nervous system for survival instead of safety, and how that chronic stress can manifest as fatigue, anxiety, gut issues, brain fog, and long-term health conditions.

We also talk about why symptom management alone isn’t enough… and what it actually takes to heal at the root level.

If you’ve ever felt like something is “off” in your body but can’t find answers, this episode will help you understand why.

🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• The connection between the nervous system and chronic illness
• How childhood trauma impacts adult physical health
• Why high-achievers and perfectionists are more prone to chronic symptoms
• Common early signs of nervous system dysregulation (fatigue, anxiety, gut issues, brain fog)
• Why traditional and even holistic approaches sometimes fall short
• The role of the subconscious mind in healing
• How to begin shifting from survival mode to true regulation

💬 Key Takeaway:

You are not broken. Your body is responding exactly the way it was wired to survive… and healing begins when you understand that.

🔗 Connect with Faith Ashenden:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thathealingfeeling

Website: https://faithashenden.com

Hey there, I’m so glad you’re here and tuning in! If this episode spoke to your heart, just know there’s even more support waiting for you.

If you would like to ask a question, and hear the answer in a future episode, please leave your question here: https://www.speakpipe.com/Tammyvincentcoaching

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As an international inspirational speaker, NLP Practitioner, Trauma-Informed Coach, Neurofit Trainer, and Best-Selling Author, I bring both deep personal experience and professional training to the work I do. I believe in prevention, not just intervention — and use a body, mind, and spirit approach to guide others toward becoming the happiest, healthiest versions of themselves.

My holistic toolbox includes nervous system regulation, trauma-informed coaching, nutritional support, and natural healing strategies,

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Welcome back to another episode of Adult Child of Dysfunction.

Today we have with us Faith Ashenden.

And she is going to be telling us all about something that we talk about all the time on here, but we're going to actually be breaking it down in layman's terms because it's what she specializes in, and that is the connection between the nervous system and chronic illness, especially for those people who grow up in constant dysfunction.

Our bodies learn that survival before safety method, I guess you could call it.

And sometimes now as adults, we're suffering all of these symptoms and we just don't understand.

So Faith is going to help us break it down so we can understand it pretty easily.

So welcome, Faith.

Thank you so much for having me.

You're very welcome.

So tell us about how you realized your nervous system was in trouble or what led you to doing this kind of work, Honestly.

Yeah.

Well, it was my story and my journey that thrust me from corporate America into what I do today, which is coaching in this space, specifically with women with chronic conditions.

I had a slew of autoimmune conditions, so I started with my first diagnosis in university, and then I just started collecting them.

And it wasn't until I was bedridden and unable to work and just my life was completely stalled and that I really started to dig into the mind body connection and specifically the impact that our nervous system has on our physiology and really learning, like, where did I learn these behaviors?

And why is this my default state?

And in doing that, I was able to reverse my conditions.

And so now this is what I teach and have been doing so for six, seven years now.

So, yeah.

Okay, nice.

So was your growing up a very unpredictable, unstable environment, or is it just something that kind of kicked in as you got older?

Growing up was incredibly unstable, unpredictable.

My baseline was a learned baseline and not something, I think that, like, you think about when you're young because it's normal to you.

And I think it takes, like, getting out of it and realizing often your body screams at you first that as long as you stay in what's familiar, which is how you were raised, you physically can't heal.

And so it's so much more than the symptoms.

Like, for me, the deeper work was, okay, what's actually going on?

What's actually my default response?

And how is this impacting my physiology?

And that was the key to me getting to where I am now.

And, I mean, that's.

That's difficult work.

It's much more difficult than, oh, I have a symptom.

I can Just treat that symptom.

Do you know what I mean?

Right.

But at the end of the day, when we're masking symptoms and we're putting Band aids on, things like high blood pressure or joint problems, which is inflammation, which is from cortisol, like, people don't understand that you can't.

You can only mask so many symptoms.

And I don't know about you, I am not a huge fan of any kind of medicine, if I can help it.

Now, there is a time and a place for medicine.

I was.

I tell people I had a stroke last January, and I was more than happy to get the medicine that they injected into me that broke open the clot so that I could actually feel.

Feel my left side again, like.

So do you mind if I ask what some of those diagnoses were?

Because I think some of our listeners are going to be like, oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So the first one was Graves disease, and I would say this is the most serious one.

So it's an autoimmune condition that affects the thyroid.

And so this is kind of like the opposite of Hashimoto's.

A lot of people have heard of Hashimoto's.

It's a little bit more common, and it's quite serious, whereas Hashimoto's you can sort of.

I don't say you can live with, but the symptoms are slightly more mild.

Graves disease is a very serious condition and absolutely cannot be left untreated.

So I was quite sick, and this is my first time where I had to take a gap year, as they say, from university because I was just completely bedridden at such a young age.

And, you know, it took a long time to figure it out.

And then I ended up taking medications and what have you and getting back to school.

And at the time, I'm, what, 21?

I'm not questioning, like, why is this happening?

Of course, I'm.

I'm just like, oh, this is annoying, but what can I do to get back to class?

You know?

And then as I get older and join corporate America, like you said, I was.

I was just existing on, like, I have a picture that I share with my students.

I have, like, 13 prescriptions in front of me.

Like, I was truly, like, on so many drugs.

I say pharmaceuticals, right?

Like, to just get through the day, because that was a solution that they had for me.

And then they gave me a diagnosis of ibs.

And I think a lot of women, unfortunately, struggle with this, and so they didn't really have an explanation as to why my Gut was so off.

And so that's when I started, like, not being able to eat very many things, like a highly restrictive diet due to, like, severe reactions to everything.

And they just said, well, you know, it's ibs, so that's.

That's your deal now, you know, deal with it.

And then I started having, like, passing out episodes, dysautonomia type heart rate issues.

And they said, oh, we think maybe pots.

So I was wearing a heart monitor and they said, you know, you need to have these beta blockers and adding all this stuff on, right?

So here I was, heart monitor, and then they had like my blood pressure monitor and I had all these pills.

I was really young.

I had crippling anxiety because of all of the symptoms.

And it got to the point where I couldn't work, so I had to leave my, my job, which I was sort of hanging on by a thread as it was.

And they just said, you know, you're gonna have to manage this.

Chronic is for life.

And that's what thrust me into, well, I mean, it can't just be the end of my life now, do you know what I mean?

Like, I'm only just getting started, right?

And I have aspirations and I want to, like, like live.

And.

And so that's what thrust me into this.

Awesome.

And it just gave me chills when you just said those words.

Chronic is for life.

I mean, literally, it literally gave me goosebumps all over my legs.

I mean, that's exactly what you're told.

And even going back.

And I know we're going to get more into this, but just as a basis, I don't know if you've ever heard of them, but I do like a bioresonance voice scan that does like 171,000 different frequencies in your body and it tests for imbalances.

And I have a lot of people that will show up for, like, thyroid markers and, and like the, the pathway going into the thyroid and the meridian going into the thyroid and the chakras, like all of that around that area.

And they'll say, but I haven't been diagnosed.

And, and you made a perfect point before when you said, but your body talks before it screams or like your body whispers.

And, you know, there's a path of when your thyroid actually gets affected.

And it's not in the beginning of the path.

It's after all the chronic stress and all of that, and then the adrenals and then it's your thyroid.

So like I tell people, if you have a thyroid Marker showing up on this voice scan.

Quick, figure out how to.

How to regulate everything else to calm everything else down, because it's going to.

Your thyroid messes with every single system in your body.

Talk.

Yeah, talk a little bit about the thyroid, because I'm sure being diagnosed with graves, you learned a lot and did a lot of research.

Well, you know, it's funny because they struggled to diagnose me for almost a year.

So I was going.

And it's sort of the same story you hear a lot, especially with young women, where you're going to the doctor and they're saying, oh, it's anxiety.

Because that was a huge symptom of mine, right?

Like, my heart was at 181 per minute, which is crazy.

But they think, oh, you're anxious, right?

You need to be on antidepressants.

And I was losing a ton of weight, and I just, you know, again, I'm like a young girl, and I'm like, oh, this is a bit of a result.

I guess I just have a fast metabolism now.

But it was getting really, really dangerous.

I think when it's a low thyroid, you start to gain weight, your metabolism slows down.

When it's a high thyroid, like me, you lose weight really quickly.

And I was really, really hungry.

I was always sweating.

When you're hypothyroid, you're always really cold.

So it's a poster boy.

I was a poster boy of, like, you have a hyperthyroid, right?

To the degree that it's an autoimmune disease.

And then I would go into this thing called thyroid storm, which is very, very dangerous, where, like, you just be, like, an adrenaline, like an adrenal storm in your body where you would.

To the point of having to, like, tranquilize, to, like, calm it all down.

All of these are symptoms of just super, super hyper.

Like, you can be hyper, and then you can have graves, which is like, where I was, which is like, the worst case scenario of autoimmune thyroid conditions.

So I was experiencing that for about a year.

But the symptoms are very similar to anxiety if you think about, like, just a ton of adrenaline to some degree, you know, and it was a year before I even got the diagnosis to understand what was actually going on in my body and then getting on all the medications at the time.

So it was incredibly challenging.

It was the most challenging of all of the, like, physical symptoms I've dealt with.

I have a friend at work, and she's, I think, 27, and she was getting anxious, and she was Getting depressed, and she was having these anxiety attacks, and she ended up going to the doctor, and without even, like, a second opinion, without anything, they gave her a shot that literally disintegrated her thyroid in about three months.

And so she's now on medicine for the rest of her life because she has no thyroid, and she's, like, 28 now.

And I say to her all the time because she knows what I do.

I'm like, you know, which came first, the chicken or the egg?

I used to say to her, you know, and then when she had her thyroid out, she says now.

I mean, she's like, God, I wish I had done some research, because I feel like that was.

It was so quick.

It literally, like, she was in the hospital for two days, and her thyroid was out in a week.

Like, the shot was in a week.

So there was no.

It was just, oh, you've got this crazy thyroid, and it's doing this, this, this, this.

So we're going to take it out, and then we're going to medicate for all these things.

And now.

Now it is chronic because now she has no organs.

Yeah.

Well, there you go.

I mean, you know, a lot of women have thyroid issues.

It's not uncommon.

And, yeah, so like I said, mine was one of the more extreme ones, but it's.

For me, I say it's common.

I work with women with chronic illness.

So when the thyroid issue comes through for us, it's very, very common.

Yeah, absolutely.

So what was the moment where you were like, okay, I'm gonna figure, like, was there an aha moment?

Or were you just thinking about this and kind of starting to dive in?

Or were you just like, screw this.

I'm doing this on my own and figuring this out.

Well, I had one of my specialists tell me after, you know, just so many tasks, so much research, I think this is just your baseline, basically, like, stop trying to solve it.

This is just how you're gonna feel.

And I think that really hit me, like, hold on.

You're saying, like, because usually when you're unwell, you're working towards getting better, but that was the first time someone was like, there's no, you know, other side.

It's.

It's managing this, which is your life.

And at this point, I'm not even working, so I'm like, so what you're saying is I can't do.

I mean, like, what's the point here?

What's the trajectory?

So that's really what thrust me really deep initially into the integrative Space.

And I did all the things, you know, I had the imprints on.

I was dry brushing every day.

I did all the detoxes, I did like the NASA grade red light therapy every single day.

I lived in Austin, Texas.

I had multiple functional medicine doctors.

I did every functional medicine test.

Like you know, I did the classic root root, which of course was helpful and I did feel better, but ultimately I didn't heal.

That to me was the light bulb moment.

Like I thought I had hit nirvana when I accessed all of that.

And again I did feel marginally better, but not better to the degree that I had freedom in my life.

So that's when I started looking into me.

My background is in behavioral psychology, so I'm not a stranger to this research.

Although it's, you know, it's largely like up and coming even now.

And it hasn't even been that long since I was school.

So I started diving into some more certifications beyond what I had learned and specifically even a little bit more ambiguous.

So my background's more in the neuroscience and I really wanted to understand the subconscious mind which you can't exactly measure in the same way that I was taught.

So I was learning hypnotherapy, trauma informed therapy, rapid resolution therapy, like different niche certifications to try to get my hands on some information that could be helpful beyond like the, the kind of textbook regulate your nervous system advice.

And that's when I started to learn about the subconscious patterns that are really driving the nervous system to taking it a step further.

That's how I healed myself.

That's what ultimately allowed me to build my, my program and then coach women.

Because I think, wow, that was actually really easy and like nobody's talking about it, right?

And even now people will say oh, do a cold plunge, which I don't totally agree with anyways, or oh, stimulate the vagus nerve.

Great, yes, helpful for sure, but, but it's not the end all be all.

It's not going to be what gets you over the line for a sustained life of freedom.

Yes, you cannot, I mean yes, you can stimulate your vagus nerve and you can regulate your nervous system, but if it's stuck in your cells, if all of that trauma is still stuck in your, stuck in your cells, every single time something comes up, you're going to have to completely re regulate and you're going to have to spend your entire life chasing these moments of ah, yeah, so talk about, we're going right into the nervous system.

Obviously talk about how when you grow up, I mean Obviously, everybody, that's.

If you're on this podcast, adult child of dysfunction, you grew up in some kind of dysfunction.

And because of that, by default your nervous system is on higher alert or was on high alert.

And it, and it's all these.

I kind of the easiest way to put it is I, I call it the invisible backpack.

Every single emotion that you did not process, every single single feeling, everything single experience that wasn't processed, it sat in your backpack, kind of.

And that's what is now a thousand pounds.

And you're in your 50s.

So talk about what that physiologically having your nervous system on high alert does to your body to cause these chronic illnesses.

Gosh, that was a big question in layman's terms.

I know we could, we could be here all day on that one.

But in general, I think I like.

To look at it like, okay, so the women, this is how I teach it and how it makes sense for my brain.

The people that I'm working with, we break up.

The initial introduction, right?

Everyone has a chronic illness, and this is written from my experience by trauma responses.

Your trauma responses that you think are your personality are what's driving your chronic illness.

It's not your personality.

You.

It's from the past, right?

So you might say you're a perfectionist, type A.

These were mine.

Perfectionism, type A, controlling.

And I like to say that I'm recovering even to this day, but it is extremely challenging because this is how I spent my childhood, right?

And so I learned that if I control every situation, I do my.

I'm the best of everyone, and then nothing bad can happen to me.

That was the best chance I had at protecting myself.

And so as I grew up, that was reinforced in school.

Oh, great job, good gpa, you know, and like, great job.

You're always the one to organize the parties or whatever.

Great job.

You got promoted at work.

And so it was reinforcing the trauma response I had learned in my childhood that was not serving me and ultimately was keeping me hyper vigilant because perfectionism, perfect doesn't exist for me.

The, the.

These parts of ourselves that we think are who we are are actually just manifestations of what we had to be and, and ultimately what are driving, what is driving the physiology.

And so it's like stripping it back to that identity level of, you know, and one of the interesting things I do with my clients and that I have done myself and it's my favorite therapy, rapid resolution therapy, where you're speaking directly to deeper mind and you're really asking, like, I have my clients will.

The event will come because your subconscious remembers everything and it's the inception point of, you know, their one trauma response we're working from.

And, and yes, there will be lots of reinforcements throughout, but the inception point of that trauma, being able to release that in a way where you're not actually having to talk through it and re.

Experience it, is incredibly powerful and what that does to your physiology.

I mean, I've had clients heal chronic.

20 Years of chronic pain in one session of doing that, because they're real.

They.

They let go of that need, that desire, that hypervigilance.

So for me, that's how it impacted me.

Right.

Like, I was always that the way the degree of type A and perfectionist is, like I said, to this day, like you said, is it still a part of you to this day?

I'm aware and I'm always trying to not.

But like, up until I did this work, it was absolutely my default.

And I think, oh my God, I never rested ever, Ever.

No, I, Yeah, I get it.

I totally get it.

It's kind of like the people pleasing.

I remember saying to someone one time, have you ever in your life stood up for yourself?

And she was like 60 years old.

And she said, no, never, not once.

And it didn't matter what the boundary was, if it was the same thing.

She said, I. I am so wired to just give whatever people need quickly to avoid confrontation.

And I was like, you have got to.

Got to say no.

Like, and.

And so we started small, of course, but it's so wired, like you said, that perfectionism is so wired, so deep.

Mm.

Yeah.

So.

So.

But to be able to.

So your perfectionism led to all of this stuff because what talk about physiologically, like what that stressor on the nervous system does, like, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think especially in cases of like type A perfectionist, you know, this, like I said earlier, perfect isn't possible.

And so when you're striving for that, you never achieve it.

So if you think of the word striving, right, it's a verb, which means you're always working towards something.

You're never just at this, you know, where you want to be and able to rest.

So what does that mean?

The nervous system is doing a job.

So it's in the survival state, that sympathetic dominant state.

Sympathetic is great sometimes.

Like, yes.

If you're working out, if you need to be, like at a meeting, at work, whatever.

Like, there, there's.

It's functional and no organism in nature can survive if they're always in a sympathetic state or they're very sympathetic dominance.

And, and that's what I was, because I was in that mindset all of the time.

Subconsciously, it was a protective mechanism.

But consciously I was like, oh, I'm just doing what I do.

This is me.

And I'm, I'm like, just, I work harder than everyone else.

And so then what starts to happen to the body is it breaks down because we weren't designed to live that way, you know, and I say this to my students all the time.

Like, you do just start to break down, like, and that's just it.

You literally did not evolve to live this way.

And it slowly starts to deteriorate.

And I think that like you said, it's whispers at first, mentally, emotionally and physically.

And then the body starts to yell.

And we see that with chronic symptoms, and then it becomes a little bit sticky because then we see the changes in the brain.

So then you're trying to heal these symptoms and a lot of them are neuroplastic at this point because the brain has already changed.

And it's very confusing because you're between, like, why is this not working for me?

I have these neuroplastic symptoms and then I have the root cause of why this happened in the first place.

And you really need to take a multi pronged approach beyond what you're just doing physically to heal yourself.

Yes, absolutely.

And some of the symptoms, I mean, you brought up a couple of them.

It's the thyroid, it's the, you know, it's the immune autoimmune, it's gut issues.

That is a huge one.

I mean, there's so much science about the gut brain access and that your gut is your second brain.

So things, you know, they talk, call up.

They say that when you get bad news, you get a gut punch or you feel it in your gut.

I mean, that is where it starts and then it goes to your brain.

So thinking about that, guys, if you're out there listening, how many times have you felt something in your body before you even process that something bad happened?

I was 18, went to the doctor because I was vomiting blood.

They gave me medicine and said, oh, you have bleeding ulcers and if we can't clear it up, we're going to do surgery and patch them.

But so what did I do?

I took 15 times for 15 years.

I took like 10 or 12, the equivalent of, I think seven 72 tons a day or something.

Like, it was crazy.

How much I was taking.

And so what did that do though?

That messed up every other system in my body because now I wasn't producing the correct stomach acids.

And so that was messing up my digestion, which messed up my colon, which messed up my blah.

So it is a snowball effect.

And at the end of the day, like if you could just like you said, get to the root and find out what is keeping your nervous system in that hypervigilance, you will it.

Will it?

You'll be able to heal.

Your body will be able to take that 10pm to 2am and actually rest.

Yeah.

Instead of that being your biggest cortisol spike of the day.

A hundred percent.

Yeah.

So what are some tricks that you have for some people that if they kind of know.

Okay, things are getting a little crazy now.

I'm starting to get really bad brain fog and I'm starting to maybe get some like dizzy spells.

What are some of those things like symptoms that you see coming on first with your patients?

Fatigue, digestion issues, anxiety, like you said, dizzy and brain fog and.

Or unexplained pain in that order.

So I work with a lot of clients who are coming without a diagnosis and have those chronic symptoms before the diagnosis part or they've had those symptoms for 20 years and they still don't have a diagnosis.

Which again, to me it doesn't matter if you have a diagnosis or not because you're still having the very real experience and the diagnosis doesn't change.

You know, unless it's something you're born with, like cystic fibrosis.

If it's something you've developed, it doesn't change that.

The approach we take with this, this.

Kind of work and what is beside you do the, the rapid resolution therapy is that one of your main modules that are mod modalities that you use.

Well, that is something that I like to dabble in.

But actually I wrote the curriculum that I teach, so I kind of, I.

Because I have a very interesting and unique approach.

Right.

Like my background is in neuroscience.

I'm very interested in starting with the neuroscience because I think it's really important to get the brain on board.

Especially because a lot of the, the women I work with, Right.

Like if you're talking about chronic illness, it's likely burnout, it's likely high achieving, highly intelligent women.

And that's absolutely who my client is.

And so I say, hey, let's start with the science.

Let me explain to you chemical messengers and how every cell is listening and how you elicit you Literally manifest with your thoughts.

Right.

Like you're manifesting a neurochemical, chemical and hormonal reaction within the body through thought alone.

So let's explain the science then.

Once I have the buy in, I go into the deeper mind, like my favorite part of it, which is the subconscious mind.

We can't measure it, but here's how we can sort of measure the impact on our physiology.

When I go into the deeper mind work, I like to dabble in hypnosis, rapid resolution therapy, but it's not my primary methodology.

The curriculum in and of itself is what I wrote based off my education.

And that's.

It's very fun for me.

Like, I love to play with the exercises and obviously I've had.

I've had quite a few students and we get amazing results.

I'm always like, how can I make it better?

What can we do faster?

Like.

But I do love rapid resolution therapy.

And it's by Dr. John Connolly, who works primarily with CPTSD patients.

And so we're talking about 9, 11 victims, sex trafficking.

And I learned from him directly and I've watched his work and his whole basis of his work is, you know, you don't have to talk through it all and relive it and re.

Traumatize to heal.

And he created this modality where you speak directly to the deeper mind, metaphorically and in images and to release the trauma.

So I got certified and I learned from him and I play around with it in my program specifically for chronic illness, because to me, if you have a chronic illness, I related to CPTC to wake up every day and well, it's not even what got you there.

Let's, you know, not even even considering the trauma that got you there in the first place.

It is a trauma to wake up every day unwell with no end in sight.

And so I use that, you know, logic, if you will, and kind of crux of why we're teaching that way to support my students.

Because I completely agree with that.

Yeah.

Oh, absolutely.

And the cptsd, I mean, everybody thinks of PTSD as like war.

And then the, the complex PTSD which so many adult children of alcoholics have because you lit.

Like, I think about it and I'm like, I was literally at war every single day of my life.

Yeah.

So when people say, oh no, you know, it was just.

You just grew up and that was rough.

Well, you know.

Yeah.

But my little brain at the time, every little thing, first of all was very big.

And nothing, not a thing ever got resolved and got Co regulated and sent out of my body.

Same.

Yeah.

It's like, how do I even do that?

What even is that?

You know, it's.

Wow.

I remember the first time I felt a happiness in my heart and I was almost 26, like in my heart, like holding something and feeling.

I felt I bought a puppy because I was pregnant and I figured, oh my God, I better learn how to love this little thing.

So I literally bought a puppy.

And that was like, whoa.

That was the beginning of like my massive healing journey because I held that in my hand.

He was about eight weeks old.

His name was Batman.

His cutest little shih Tzu.

And my heart melted and I was like, oh my gosh, I've never felt that, but it was like.

And I bawled and I cried and I was like, oh my God.

But it's like my whole life, everything had been deflected from my heart.

And that's a major organ.

So then they wonder why 50 years later, I have a stroke.

I know, 100%.

It's all connected.

And I think, you know, it's so important if not for our children.

I work with a wide range of ages, but a lot of the women I work with are basically, they have kids, young kids, and they hit a breaking point because it's.

You can do it so long and then it pushes you over the edge.

So like, I always say, like, if not for yourself, because, you know, for your children, because you can't like say, break the cycle because it's like trendy on social media.

Like, the only way to break the cycle is to go inside and identify or else it just repeats itself.

Absolutely.

And that, you know, is my.

And was my motivator for like, it has, we have to get to the crux of this because the cycle has been going on and on and on and on and like, it mustn't be the case, you know, now that I have two children.

Right.

And you.

And even if you're, I mean, we're not perfect, there's no, like you said, perfection is a myth, so there's no point in striving for it.

But when you see that difference, I mean, your kids will be raised 100 different than you were because you are going to co regulate with them.

I had a woman on yesterday, I believe, or a couple days ago, and she talked about the voice and she talked about, you know, not only just having a voice, but she was so stifled as a child that she literally had tonsillitis all the time.

Had to get her tonsils out and then she ended up losing her thyroid.

And so, I mean, you hear about all the time, you look at the statistics now of women that get divorced and have a really nasty divorce, and then six months later they have breast cancer.

There is a lot to be said for where the energy and, you know, emotion is energy in motion.

It's.

Where is it going in your body?

Absolutely.

And like, it's, you know, it's even down to the point where you think about, you know, like, my.

My generation, like, and this is most people, it wasn't specifically like, oh, you know me, but, like, parents would say, it's okay, it's okay.

And now even just being a parent, like, that's such a simple thing, right?

Like, most people's parents are saying that realizing the impact that has on a child to be like, they're crying and you're like, it's okay, you know, and it's like, no wonder that we all, like, suppress our emotions and we don't process or acknowledge and we think it's bad to feel something bad or whatever.

And those are little things, you know, that's not abuse per se, because it's not like everyone was taught to do that.

But the implications of this good girl, bad girl thing, that it's okay that so many different things that, like, are even normalized in society that now, like, for example, we work a lot on worthiness, right?

And I break it all the way back to good girl, bad girl conditioning and just remembering, you know, like, and it's, it's.

It's.

Everything is so important and it carries such weight and it's such a huge responsibility.

And it's.

I'm sure with all mothers, like, it's the primary, primary driver to be the best version, isn't it?

Oh, of course.

And, you know, even if you're at the beginning stage of this, and I say this all the time, you're at the beginning stage and you're just now going, oh, my gosh, I really got some work to do on me, and I need to heal.

And I want my kids to see.

They're going to see your growth, and they're going to see that healing.

And that is healing for them as well.

So I know a lot of people are like, oh, it's too late.

She's 12.

She already hates me.

Blah, blah.

No, it's never too late.

It's never, never.

I don't, I can't stand when I hear people say that because they're like, well, this is just how I am.

And she Just got used to it.

Well, un.

Get her used to it.

Get her used to the new you.

Get her used to the you that knows now.

Because when you don't know, you don't know.

But once you do, now you take some responsibility if you want to.

Now if you don't want to, so be it.

But.

But I think in.

Children aren't looking for perfection.

I think, you know, children are learning from, like you said, our mistakes.

Like being able to say, like, I did this and then I shouldn't have, and this is how I thought about it and this is how I reacted and this is how I solved it, and then I said, I'm sorry, like, this is how they're learning.

Like people, not robots.

But I think, yeah, I mean, and we can't be, we can't be perfect.

But again, this is the eternal struggle for all mothers, probably anyways.

But yeah, it's all so tightly linked and unfortunately, as, like you said, so much linked to chronic conditions and especially in women.

Right.

So when people come to you, you said they come sometimes because they're just burnt out, they're ready to go.

They're like, I can't do this anymore.

Or they come to you because they're like, okay, I have this chronic illness and I'm pretty sure that it stemmed from, blah, blah, blah, let's get rid of this.

So I always kind of say I'm their last resort.

So my clients will have done so.

Like, one of the prerequisites to work with me is that you've not only done and use the allopathic medicine model, but you've tried other integrative approaches.

So I wouldn't have someone come to me if they haven't used a functional, some sort of functional doctor and then something.

Because if you haven't addressed your diet, if you haven't addressed kind of the lower hanging fruit, then I can't ethically tell you if you've come to me and you're like, I've did all these functional tests I did, you know, this energy work I did.

Yeah.

So I did my Reiki and I've done with chiropractic work and acupuncture.

Okay, so you've tried, you've tried and now we have these neuroplastic symptoms.

Let's get to the root of what's going on.

I, I agree with that.

And I think that not even just the last resort, but the missing link.

Yeah, that's a better way.

Better branding.

Right.

But I mean, yeah, because that's everybody I hear that all the time.

I've done that.

I've done 11 years of therapy.

I've done reiki, I've done this, I've done this, I've done that, I've done this.

And I still am waking up at three in the morning and sabotaging and berating myself.

And first thing I always say, and I think you probably do too, is let's, I mean, we have to use the brain, obviously, because that's a big part of it.

But get out of your mind for just a minute and start questioning the body and start looking to the body first.

And even if you reverse engineer it, like, okay, I feel these symptoms, let's start working on that.

Maybe you never even get the chronic diagnosis.

Feelings are the language of the body.

Your body doesn't speak English.

So physically and emotionally, right?

Like, your body can only scream at you that way.

So if your body's trying to tell you something, it's not that your body is not working the way it should.

Your body's trying to indicate where should you be directing your attention, what needs your attention?

And this mind body connection, the idea is, you know, that we can actually interpret that relies on the fact that we have a connection between the mind and body.

So if the narrative is my body is broken, it's working against me.

There's no ability to listen to what the body is saying.

If we can get into the narrative and the vantage point of, you know, my body's always working to protect me, my body's always striving for homeostasis.

We're on the same team.

Then you can drop into your body, you can listen to your body.

As I say to my women, we all have this intuition.

It's not that I, I was able to listen, it's that it's been stifled.

Here's how you get back.

You repair the relationship by listening, right?

And your gut instinct.

And I think it's people, they, they almost need like a facilitation of like, oh, I can trust myself, I can trust this.

Is this not wrong?

Because I've been told I was wrong.

And so it makes complete sense.

And equally, it's like you were born with 90.

To me, you're born with 99% of what you need.

There's this 1%, let's say you get in a car accident or like what you said.

Yes.

Amazing.

We have these emergency scenarios where we have allopathic medicine to say, save our lives.

And then the rest of it with something that's not life threatening, you have the connection, the mind, body connection.

And so this is a huge part of the empowerment piece.

Like, you can be your own healer.

But so much of the prerequisite is what I'm doing, which is filling in the gaps of how do I get back to what I actually had before, you know, everyone got in the way.

Right.

It's literally I picture.

I always give that scenario of the mom standing over the crib, and there's like two cribs, two babies, and the one is just standing there.

Well, first of all, it starts even before that, in utero.

If your mother had a really high stress pregnancy, was fighting with her husband all the time, drinking alcohol, doing that.

Your nervous system is 100% different than the person next to you.

But you picture that crib of the two moms, and one's leaning over with grandma, grandpa, mom, dad, and they're all like, oh, you're going to be the president.

You're going to be this.

And that whole nervous system is just like, oh, this is great.

I'm going to rock it.

And you have the other one where in, like, in my case, my mother was like, okay, I can't go to work because I had to have you, and I wish you had never been born.

And you picture that and it's like this.

You just even getting that visual, your whole body does this.

Your shoulders go up, and that's.

That can last your whole life until you say, no, I don't want it to.

I want to choose better.

I want to be happier.

I want to untangle under, undo all these lies.

Yeah, but you're right.

It's.

It's in your gut, you know, so those people that go to a doctor and they say, something is wrong, I don't feel good, something's not right.

And every test comes out right.

Yeah, it's.

It's just in your cells and they don't see it.

Yeah.

100.

And the problem is people wait too long because they're told they're okay.

And then you, you know, it's a different.

You know, it's a difficult situation.

The system isn't built for chronic illness.

And so I went from, you know, two fingers to the system to neutral now because I appreciate the emergency care and equally appreciate the sort of difficulty in disseminating that information to the allopathic medicine model.

And so it's less of a distrust in the system and more of a just understanding that there's no knowledge there unless it's an emergency.

And that's where I've come to.

So it's an inside job.

It is definitely an inside job, and it's definitely worth it.

I mean, you know, I think that's the biggest struggle is that again, even monetarily, the system isn't set up to be able to heal yourself with.

With the.

All the other modalities and stuff.

I know my daughter ended up with a holistic doctor, and it cost us, I want to say, 30 to $50,000 to get her healed, but no medical doctor could do it.

They wanted to cut open her heart at 21 years old and told her she'd still probably be on a pacemaker by 30 with no cause, couldn't tell me why, and went to a holistic naturopath doctor and with vitamins and detox and imprinting frequencies in her little vials and all that stuff, her blood is fine.

So.

But there's enough out there that you can advocate for yourself.

And I think that's the biggest thing.

If you feel something in your gut and you say something's not right, I mean, get on these groups, get on podcasts, ask questions.

There's a lot of free information out there, too.

If you find the right person that you trust or, you know, not everybody is going to charge you $50,000 to run a couple lab tests.

The right one.

And there.

You're absolutely right.

There is a lot of free information.

Like I say to my team, we.

We give out free information every single day.

There's infinite knowledge.

Right.

I'm not gatekeeping knowledge.

I am an open book.

I give out as much free information as possible.

And I think more people are starting to do that because like you said, people need a way to access this information and be empowered and at least have, like, a foundation to stand on to make informed decisions.

And so I am starting to see that more in the industry, which is fantastic.

And like I said, I'm a huge advocate of that and do that myself.

I also 100 agree that you really can't, with this kind of work with, I mean, even co regulation and everything else, you can't do it alone.

So having a coach or having a mentor or somebody alongside you to not only hold you accountable, but to guide you, because there's also a lot of disinformation.

Yeah, it's like the wild west, you.

Know, and you can go down a rabbit hole just throwing all this kind of crap at it.

But the end of the day, I truly agree with you that 99.9% of what is a chronic illness started as a.

A dis.

Ease in the body, something was out of whack, something was not right.

And every.

Your body will compensate.

It'll move from one thing to another to protect itself and to save itself until it can anymore.

Yep.

And that's why when those chronic diseases hit, they hit hard and they hit quickly.

Because it's been probably eight, in your case, 19 years.

It was building.

Yep.

And then you could just couldn't take it anymore.

Your body protects itself and compensates as long as it possibly can.

Big time.

It works hard.

It does.

It works so hard.

So hard.

If you think about.

I say this, I had the call yesterday with my, my, some of my girls and, you know, they were like, I had this stressful event and I was knocked out.

And I said, if you think about what your body's been through and like, it's not always, you know, don't expect perfection.

You've been the stress of living a life, you know what I mean?

In that response, your body's working so hard.

It's been through so much more than your average person.

So to be a little knocked down from a stressful event, maybe more than someone who had the perfect upbringing and the perfect.

You know what I mean?

It's.

It's a lot.

It's normal as well.

I say to my girls, like, don't strive to be like, you know, maybe as oftentimes, like my husband, who just kind of doesn't ever have anxiety and never really had and accepts like, because the body can withstand more that scenario.

But your body's done so, so much.

It's worked so hard and like, you might be a little more sensitive and that doesn't mean that you're not healed, you know.

And I think this especially goes for women in general because even like going through childbirth and breastfeeding and all that already is so much.

But throw trauma into the mix or chronic illness into the mix.

The body works so hard, and I truly believe it's always doing its best to keep us in as close to homeostasis as possible.

And I think that is the prime directive of the body, even when we feel like, you know, absolute crap.

So I have great admiration for, you know, what all of our bodies are doing.

Even seeing my girls sick and in bed and, you know, in the hospital, I still.

It doesn't change my perspective.

Right?

Absolutely.

Well, this has been awesome, Faith.

I could sit here and talk to you all day, but if people want to reach out with you and work with you, tell them how to get hold of you, the best place you.

Can Find me on Instagram at that healing feeling.

I give away a lot of free content almost every day.

My signature free content is I run live masterclasses where I actually break down my methodology that I wrote about the subconscious mind and I just talk you through the logic behind it and how to apply it to your life.

So if you're interested in like seeing me directly, you can get on the free masterclass, but there's tons of free resources there for anyone who just wants to learn a little bit more about deeper mind in the relation to chronic illness.

Perfect.

Thank you so, so much for coming on.

I really appreciate it.

But so if you had to give the listeners one big piece of advice or your biggest message, what would it be?

Oh, gosh, no, no, don't worry.

I mean, I think the biggest lesson, which I kind of already said, but this is sort of, you know, like written in big letters on my website and really at the crux of everything that I teach is you are the answer you're looking for.

Like the second you stop looking outside of you, which by the way is so much work and so hard, the second you stop that and you turn inward is going to be really the starting point to your path to getting to where you want to be.

It's where you're going to realize your power.

It's going to realize that you have the answers.

You're not always seeking the validation of other people.

And the more self trust you build, the faster you feel safe, which is what underpins all healing.

And so if anyone ever works with me or interacts with me in any way, I want them to realize that they are it, they are the answer and they do have it within them.

And like empowerment is, is underpinning everything that I teach.

Love it.

Thank you again so, so much.

Yeah, thank you.

And you're welcome.

Listen to Faith when she says you have everything you need and you are absolutely 100% enough right here, right now, just the way you are.

So thank you.

You all have a blessed day and we will see you back next week.