My understanding of health began with experiences I did not yet have the language to understand.
From ages four to thirteen, I experienced sexual abuse. I grew up within the Two-by-Twos religious group, which I experienced as a controlling religious cult. Expectations about obedience, acceptability, and belonging shaped how I related to myself and the world.
I learned to adapt. To monitor myself. To suppress what felt unacceptable. To organize my behavior around what seemed necessary to remain safe and connected.
At seven, I attempted to run away. I remember being under a bridge, cold and alone, trying to escape.
When my life unraveled.
At nineteen, I experienced severe physical and psychological illness. Depression, anxiety, panic attacks, agoraphobia, psychosis, difficulty forming new memories, and more than seventy physical signs and symptoms became part of my life. I was also living with multiple autoimmune conditions.
My body often felt like something that had betrayed me. My mind became a place of profound distress.
I searched extensively for answers. Medicine, nutrition, physical training, rehabilitation, emotional work, and contemplative practice each became part of that search.
I know what it is like to keep trying, to accumulate explanations, and to wonder why understanding more has not changed how you feel.
Understanding was valuable. Experience mattered too.
Over time, I began recognizing patterns that had once helped me survive: vigilance, emotional suppression, control, and the need to become someone acceptable.
I could explain many of these patterns before I could meet them differently.
The work became more experiential. It included feeling what I had learned to avoid, recognizing needs I had suppressed, speaking honestly about my history, and exploring what happened when I no longer automatically followed a familiar protective response.
An important shift was recognizing how often my search for healing carried the assumption that I was the problem.
I could care for what had been hurt without continuing to treat myself as fundamentally defective.
What changed.
At thirty-four, I experienced a profound shift in how I experienced myself and life. I describe it as emotional wholeness and inner freedom.
My physical health also changed meaningfully during the broader course of emotional integration. I believe childhood adversity contributed substantially to my autoimmune health challenges, and that addressing its emotional and physiological effects was an important part of my recovery.
That is my understanding of my own experience. It does not establish one cause for another person’s illness or mean that emotional healing replaces medical treatment.
I also have a congenital disorder affecting thyroid hormone production that continues to require care. Experiencing inner freedom did not remove that need.
This helped me distinguish physical illness, emotional pain, and the psychological struggle surrounding experience. They can interact deeply, and they do not always change together.
What this means for your care.
I take physical symptoms seriously. I also make room for the experience of living with them.
We may need to address an injury, rebuild strength, support recovery, or consider relevant physiology. When useful and welcomed, we may also explore apprehension, emotional experience, protective responses, or the feeling that you must continually fix or defend yourself.
Your story does not need to resemble mine. You do not need to explore trauma, adopt a spiritual framework, or pursue a particular realization.
My experience informs the questions I ask and the attention I bring. Your needs, goals, and feedback guide the care.
Explore childhood adversity, biology & autoimmune risk
