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