Hi friends!
For some of us, the day after Mother’s Day is sort of a post-apocalyptic experience:
You wake up, have a second to adjust your pillow and then, you remember… oh shit… and feel like your body is in a hole as you register the devastation.
Something big happened.
‘Mom’ happened.
Either the event that you went to that turned out like it always does — disapproving glances and pursed lips, or a less silent rendition with cutting phrases and more words than you can even process from the full on blame fest —
or maybe it was the event that didn’t happen, because you’re not speaking to each other.
So, Mother’s Day was spent, keenly aware of who isn’t in your life.
And why.
Our moms have no small impact on the way we see ourselves as women and it can have a large impact on the way we experience our health.
I remember going to a healing center in 2000 when I was trying to understand Hashimoto’s and there were such limited resources out there.
We drove and flew all over the country to learn and experience healing that was happening in unexpected places and in unexpected ways.
At this particular healing place, they dealt with topics like Unforgiveness, Anger, Fear, etc… On the days that they dealt with the topic of ‘Bitterness’ several women shared how they had breast cancer or ovarian cancer — and that once they reconciled with their mother or mother-in-law, the cancer disappeared.
It wasn’t the first time I had heard about the connection between our relationships with others and our health. In fact, I had been studying it for years.
And while I’m keenly aware that there can be other reasons for having those cancers, as a seeker on a quest, I was willing to shine the flashlight down that corridor of possibility.
There was something that resonated with me and still does, years later, that when we have trouble digesting our food, the good nutrition can’t get to our cells and the toxic stuff can’t get eliminated.
It all just gets ‘stuck’.
It calls me to think about my system — what’s going on in me that can’t handle the ‘something’ that I’m ingesting…
Where is my mental system short-circuiting that I can’t process the emotions of the relationships that I’m in?
I ended up doing a lot of work around the stories in my head.
Looking at where I take a positive, neutral, or negative circumstance and I filter it in a way that makes me lose.
All the time.
The way someone looked at me, the words someone said, the circumstance that happened…
As I filtered life and relationships through my beliefs of “I’m unworthy” and “I’m disposable” — those situations turned to toxicity.
A good thing happens: I’m a sitting duck. I can’t trust this.
A neutral thing happens: This is going to turn sour.
A bad thing happens: This is what I deserve.
With that kind of thinking, I couldn’t win.
It was my compromised mindset that I was using to try to digest a complicated relationship with my mom.
Which, you know, she was part of creating so, it’s just a lot to sort out, as you can imagine…
At some point in my 30’s (and some in my 20’s, and more in my 40’s) I realized this:
I can’t change her.
I can work on me.
And so I did: Noticing my triggers and reactions.
The healthy and unhealthy reasons I was either in or out of a relationship with her
and how I processed her way of being — not just with me, but with life.
Because she wasn’t this way only with me. She was this way with life.
Seeing that, helped me to take it less personally.
When I started seeing that her way of acting was just her reacting to her stories in her head — that she hadn’t healed — it helped me to see that her reactions to life actually made sense for what she believed about herself.
It didn’t mean that they were right or healthy — it meant that they started making sense and I could ask myself,
“Can I still enjoy the best parts of her and have that as my good nutrition — while eliminating the waste of the toxic stuff that she’s still dealing with and bringing my way?”
Some seasons were a “Yes, I can.” Some seasons were a “No, I can’t.”
It wasn’t any more about how wrong she was, it was about, “Can I still be my healthiest self in the space of this relationship?”
I was taking responsibility to honor me since I knew I couldn’t change her.
And honor has a reciprocity to it: When I honor me — my health, my time, my energy — I’m not taking something away from you, I’m actually adding to you. Because honor begets honor. We are raising the vibration of relationship when we live in an honoring way with ourselves.
Bottom line: When I started taking the emotional enzymes of healthy thinking, I was able to process my mom and her unique strengths and weaknesses differently.
Girlfriends, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have digestion issues in our body and digestion issues in our relationships — especially with our moms.
I don’t know where you are today with the woman who brought you into this world or the woman who raised you…but what I do know from almost 5 decades of experience is that health is a whole system experience — and the more we can experience healing within ourselves, the more healthily we can digest the life we experience.
How can I support you in this — how can we support each other?
This is what I’m all about and this is why I started the Girlfriends’ Guide to Hashimoto’s — making it about wellness on an emotional, mental, relational and spiritual level and not the medical one. Because if we can take care of these things in these unique ways, we ARE taking care of our health.
Is there any hot-button issue in this topic that you want to chat about? Let’s start the conversation here and see where healing and love lead us.
Sending you love on this special day we all have called “Life” —
Please be good and kind to you.
Love,
Stacey
Stacey, I cannot believe this email content. It is tailored for me. 100%. My life was fine until I was almost 8 years old and we had to move to an upper middle class area way up in the hills, and I was rejected by all the kids for not wearing nice clothes and my parents not fitting in also. Since my parents separated and then divorced when I was 12/13 years old, I tried to survive my mother’s incredible anger. This was in the middle and late 1960’s, so you can imagine what I drifted into to get away from my mother. Verbally abusive, I needed confirmation that I was ok, as my mom was always putting my father down and saying I was like him. I tried to re-establish a relationship with her around 15 years ago (I am 65 years old and she is 81), as I hoped that between us being more mature, that we could find a way to connect. Every once in awhile I would call her (for a long time she didn’t call me, but finally after 10 years or so of infrequent phone conversations, in which I never brought up anything negative, and was always upbeat and grounded), she would call me every few months or so. But, every time we talked on the phone she would say negative and often untrue negative things about me. I chalk it up to the fact that she took so many prescription drugs ever since her divorce, that it had a negative affect on her memory. She also had to say things like “your father tried to kill me” (which I know he didn’t) every time we talked. I had seen her rant on her mother every holiday and say the same thing for many years too. Her mother finally many years later told me how things had really happened at the time my mother was ranting about. I used to be embarrassed at how my mother treated people like waiters and also how he had to always appear to have so many possessions to flaunt. I think that was because she grew up in the depression as one of 4 kids being raised by her single mom. I really do have compassion for her, but feel that she is too far out of reach. I had to finally tell her as nicely and sensitively as I could the I couldn’t talk to her anymore, as not only would she never let me come see her or do anything for her, but she was abusive on the phone. So around 25% of my hair fell out when she sent back a very hurtful reply saying my grandmother had said that there was something wrong with me, and other things. I have a messed up microbiome, and feel like I am not only not enough, not desirable (never any sweethearts), that I am a pretender (not authentic), operate out of fear, and constantly make sure I do things for my friends in order to keep them. And I don’t take care of myself. I have such a fuzzy brain, bad memory, can’t focus (ADD), am very stressed, full of yeast, mercury, lead, mold (tested, and got rid of some of the heavy metals). I can’t have intercourse, as it hurts too much even though I use Esterase cream, and so I feel very lonely. I have been on a quest to heal my body from an extreme reaction to Reflex, an antibiotic, since I took that in 1997. I am not even telling you all the health problems I have. I have been listening to many webinars on health issues as well as emotional/spiritual, but am at an interesting point where I know my health, my inflammation is at its worst. I am changing my eating habits, and getting more exercise, and trying to start meditating and doing yoga. My gynecologist thinks that my lack of sexual intercourse ability is in my head. So not sure where to go with that. Thank you.
Great post, thank you. I’d love you to talk further about what exactly are the emotional enzymes of healthy thinking.
I have both a very challenging relationship with my mother, and, surprise , surprise, digestive issues. Looking forward to addressing the mental and emotional side of healing.
Alison
I know that many of my health and emotional problems are because of the power I allowed my mother to have over me. However, I recently promised myself that I am no longer going to allow my mother to have power over me; I have taken the power back in order to become happy and healthy for the rest of my life.