Things I Didn’t Expect When Healing From Trauma, Part 3

Join Rachael Clinton Chen for the conclusion of her three-part series, where she offers a candid and heartfelt look at her journey of holistic healing from complex PTSD and anxiety. In this final episode, Rachael explores the surprising aspects of trauma recovery, including how trauma manifests in the body and the often unpredictable nature of the healing process.

Building on her previous discussions about the mental and spiritual impacts of trauma, Rachael now turns her focus to the physical aspects of healing. She shares insights from her own experiences with various healing modalities, highlighting what has been effective for her. While this episode is not intended as medical advice, we hope the central message is clear: healing is a continuous journey, full of both challenges and progress, and sometimes requiring revisiting old wounds.

We hope this series of heart-to-heart conversations has brought you hope, made you laugh, made you think, and most of all made you feel like you’re not alone.

Thank you for taking this journey with us. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this series—please email us at support@theallendercenter.org with your feedback!

You can listen to Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Episode Transcript:

Rachael: Here we are again for the final part of my three part series on things I didn’t expect when healing from trauma. And today we’re going to focus primarily on the body In this series we’re holding together that we’re whole people and trauma disorders, our brains, our bodies, our spirits, our relationships and communities. We’re going to honor that. Trauma is really the way in which our personhood bears witness to the horror, suffering, heartache of the world in which we live, that we’re individuals and we’re part of a collective.

And we’re going to do the good work of holding the both and of our beauty and our brokenness, and again, honoring that even in processing our healing. There can be laughter and there can be grief, and both are honoring. These stories and hard won wisdom is for you. And to be clear, I’m not a licensed therapist or clinician and for the sake of this conversation about the body, I am not a medical professional. So I’m just sharing some of my own experiences of healing from CPTSD.

This is more narrative and anecdotal than prescriptive, but I do hope you can relate and maybe it will lead you to pursue some of the avenues with experts and specialists and professionals who want to offer holistic care to your healing. And again, as Aundi Kohlber often says, “Take what you need and you can leave what you don’t.” We’ve been talking in this series about how trauma disorders the brain and the spirit and the body, I told a lot of my story of suffering anxiety, which is how I first would’ve understood what was happening to me through all of my childhood adolescents, early adulthood, and some of the journey to begin to have a language to name what was happening for me to connect it to stories and my context as to what was some of the real terror I was experiencing that was traumatizing my body and my heart and my spirit.

In the last episode, I talked about some of the spiritual spiritually formative environments I was in that had some toxic theology and some spiritually abusive realities that only compounded the trauma I was experiencing and actually cut me off from some of the really powerful tools of healing that I’m meant for and made for. And so I ended that part two with just kind of digging into some of the scripture that has actually been reclaimed to be really healing and really hopeful to me in my own journey of healing from trauma. In this particular episode, I want to talk about more of my experiences of my body and healing the realities of complex PTSD and anxiety. It’s the frontier for me that feels the most fraught, that can often feel the hardest to have compassion for that can feel the most despairing and at times debilitating because the impact on the body from trauma can be pervasive. It can be comprehensive.

Just so much of the research that we’re finding around the impact of trauma and chronic stress on the body, it can be a place that just requires a kind of tenderness and a level of compassion. So I just want to offer that kindness to you. If you find yourself in a healing journey from trauma from PTSD or complex PTSD or different disorders that you’re aware of, and you’re starting to discover ways that your body has been shaped or harmed and you’re just longing for relief and it feels hopeless, I think I just want to speak to you to be really kind to yourself in how you take this in because in some ways I think they’re even starting to find disorders. Healing itself can start to become a disordered way. We start to be really punitive to ourselves.

And so this is just really tender ground and I want to give some framework and some story that you’re not crazy and you’re not alone. And again, like all healing journeys, it can be reiterative. It doesn’t mean you’re going back to ground zero, but sometimes we’re just circling back to healing we thought we already had and we need more. And healing takes time. So I hope you’ll check out parts one and part two because I think they’re really good companions for this. But today we’re going to talk a lot about the body. 

And part of why this is really tender is because our bodily experiences are vastly particular and a part of a collective and systems of supremacy and oppression. So my bodily experience as a white, cisgender hetero woman, upper middle class in the United States of America is vastly different from others when we’re dealing with systems of racism, sexism, phobias around queerness, ableism, ageism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The particularities of our bodies can vastly impact how we experience access to good medical care, how trauma is compounded. Because make no mistake about it, we can have developmental trauma that’s happening within our family of origin, but we can have racial trauma, sexual trauma, gender violence, trauma. There are ways in which collective realities of oppression can directly impact our bodies. So this is very tender and fraught territory, and I’m going to be speaking from a lot of my particularity and okayness, which even in and of itself might create some agony for those of you listening.

And another thing I do want to name two more things I want to name as we enter this conversation is that a lot of our Western medical interventions are just now returning to more indigenous interventions and kind of co-opting them and appropriating them. And so I’m going to be mentioning some of the interventions that I’ve utilized that have been around for centuries, even if I’m accessing them through a Western medical system. So I just say that for those of you who may be a part of your healing process, actually looks like leaning into community care.

There are different cultures and different collectives that have healing remedies and interventions that have been passed down or that would never be validated or seen as something healing. And I want to validate for those of you who find time with your family and loved ones to be deeply healing, who have already been using things like essential oils passed down from centuries in your family, or know that the gut is a really core part of healing, I just want to give that caveat that just because I’m talking about ways I access them doesn’t mean those are the only ways those are accessible. And then one thing I do want to say as a deep encouragement is for those of us who are Christian, the body is central to our humanity. And God self entered our humanity in a body that was particularly located in a place and time, in an ethnicity and a gender, a social class, a religious class in the midst of an empire under oppression.

Our God, if we believe the resurrection is true, still has a body today that bears scars. So I think that the incarnation God becoming embodied is a radical testament. That our bodies are important and our bodies are a core part of how God has designed us to experience the world. And so as we enter this conversation on what happens with our bodies when we’re healing from trauma, I hope you will both take compassion, but also profound and encouragement that the one who’s interceding for you at every turn is so deeply well acquainted with what it is to be in a body, the beautiful and the broken.

So let me share a funny, yes, heartbreaking, but at this juncture, mostly funny story with you about an experience I had in my mid thirties at work with a EpiPen and a rolling office chair and the fire department. So if any of you are on your own healing journey, you likely have lots of fun things that you’re learning about your body.

As Bessel van der Kolk says, “The Body Keeps the Score,” and yeah, there’s just a lot going on with our bodies. When I was in my mid thirties, I started taking supplements for hormonal balance.

Up to that point though, I was having sleep terrors. That’s something we’ll talk about sleep, the impact of trauma on sleep. I actually was someone who could sleep deeply, even if someone was literally sledge hammering or drilling, I could sleep through that Up to that point, my thyroid was mostly functioning. I’d always had a disordered gut, which is something we’ll talk about, but my skin was healthy, my hair was healthy for the most part, I was doing okay, but in my early thirties, I had this huge immune system crash, a lot of autoimmune stuff got kicked up. Again, I learned my thyroid was disordered. The gut stuff I was dealing with got exacerbated. I developed severe acne. I started having hair loss. I started having really poor sleep, really disordered sleep. I mean, there’s more symptoms I could talk about, but those were the primary ones.

And so part of that healing journey, which I’m going to get into is I was taking something called Femmenessence, which is an herbal supplement that you can find at most healthcare stores that has something in it called maca root as one of its ingredients. That’s a super food. It’s a Peruvian root vegetable. There’s even an episode on Arrested Development about maca root, which brought me a lot of joy and delight after this scenario. It came out in season four, which was like a season they did later in the series. However, let’s talk about, it’s 4:55 PM on a sunny day in Seattle. I’m sitting at my little desk out in an open office space. I am on day three of taking Femmenessence to help with some hormone balancing to help with the acne because at that point I was told I had polycystic ovarian syndrome, which I didn’t have at the time, but a lot of the symptoms were showing that.

And so that’s what I had been diagnosed with. So that’s what I was treating, and I remember taking the supplement at the time of day I was supposed to take it, and very quickly after starting to have a very strong allergic reaction. And I have an EpiPen because I have asthma, which I think is definitely connected to the impact of trauma on my body and also just connected to genetics. But I have asthma, so I have an inhaler. I have an EpiPen because I had had previous episodes where the asthma got so severe. I went into anaphylactic shock. I jokingly say the way my body in certain seasons of my life has been what it’s really inflamed and overwhelmed, and my limbic system is on overdrive is like all my cells are little Reepicheeps and Reepicheep is a character in the Chronicles of Narnia. That’s like a little mouse and it has a little sword and it’s always trying to fight people, and I feel like my cells are always trying to fight everything. Everything’s an enemy. So leading up to this, I had planning experiences with anaphylactic shock and EpiPen. So I know I got that scratchy thing in my throat. I’m trying to have a phone call with someone. I worked in admissions at the time, so I’m talking with someone about coming to school. My throat starts getting scratchy and swelling up. I’m thinking, oh, it’s just dry. But then that’s not helping.

I have to hang up the phone call. My colleague is also someone who has an EpiPen because she has a tree nut allergy. So we were very good at trying to take care of each other in these moments. I turned around and looked at her. My lips were starting to swell. I said, I think I’m having anaphylactic shock. She was like, where’s your EpiPen? Gives me my EpiPen. It is almost five o’clock in the evening in Seattle, which means it’s rush hour traffic. And if you have ever had to use an EpiPen, you would know that in order when you use an EpiPen, you are encouraged to go to the hospital and you’re certainly encouraged not to get in a car by yourself and drive into rush hour traffic. So my good friend was like, we need to call the ambulance. And I was like, no, I think I’ll be okay.

I got the EpiPen, I took some Benadryl. I was going to stay there around people and let things calm down. And she was like, Rachael, get over yourself. If something’s going to happen, you need to get help. So we called 9 1 1. The fire department comes, these really handsome firemen come up to the fourth floor where my desk was. They’re like, okay, we want to get you downstairs and get you checked out, but we don’t want you to walk. Can we just wheel you on the elevator in this office chair? I am mortified. I am like, I cannot believe this is happening. So they wheel me in the office chair. Everyone that’s left in the office is becoming a spectacle at this point. My multiple stories of some that I’ve already shared, I’m just feeling so much shame. They wheel me downstairs. They’re like, ma’am, what are your symptoms?

I’m telling them my symptoms. And then they’re like, well, what do you think caused it? What did you take? And I said, I took a supplement called Femmenessence. What is that? They’re like, what is Femmenessence? I said, it’s an herbal supplement that’s supposed to help with hormone balance. I mean, I am just like, this is a little bit my worst. I’m single. This is not the vibe I’m trying to put out with any good looking single man who might be a fireman as I take a supplement called Femmenessence, and I think it put me into anaphylactic shock. Long story short, I started to make the connections that it was maca root. So now on my medical record, the one thing I’m severely allergic to is maca root and nobody knows what it is, and I have to tell ’em it’s a Peruvian root vegetable.

And I always see the episode of Arrested Development in my mind where they are illegally growing maca root somewhere in the Mexican desert, and you’ll have to check it out for yourself. But I have so many stories of trying to seek medical care for my body and just having the most absurd experiences. So it’s a place that I actually have had to have a lot of laughter.

I think it is a place that God is very playful with me and is a place that caused a lot of heartache. So back to my early thirties. Now, part of what was true for me is I had gotten a lot of healing from trauma by my early thirties. I had been on medicine to help my brain and my biochemicals regulate. I had been in six years of therapy to do some of the work to connect the experiences of my body to stories, to my personhood, to who I am. I had been on a really beautiful journey, primarily through academics of reclaiming aspects of my spiritual formation that were helping me heal more holistically. And so when things started to crash in my body in part I think stopping the medicine, I also think in part just some of the changes my body was going to go through in my early thirties.

It just was the trauma was like there were things I hadn’t been tending to that were catching up to me. And for many people healing from trauma, the body might be the first thing. And again, I’m aware the irony, the separating brain from the body is false because the brain is a part of the body. And so all of these realms are a part of the body’s experience. I just want to speak specifically to some of those bodily experiences that we might not often associate with trauma or the impact of trauma. And so when things crashed in my early thirties, it actually led to a lot of depression, a renewed fear of what’s happening to me. Any of you who have had autoimmune disorders or a shift in your experience of your body? No. The heartbreak and agony of what it is to be trying to get answers and getting all kinds of tests and the unknown and that feeling of like, I’m never going to get an answer and I’ll be seeking help forever.

And for many of us, that is our experience that it takes a long time to get the right kind of care or to get the right kind of diagnoses or to encounter a doctor who understands all of our systems are connected. And even if you want to isolate symptoms and treat those symptoms, it might be connected to something else. And that was very much a part of my journey. As I already mentioned, my gut was already not well. It had never really been well, I had struggled. One thing I did think I did not expect when healing from trauma is how much I would have to talk about poop. I’m sorry if this is making you queasy, but you need to be able to talk about poop if you want to heal from trauma because the gut is the second brain. And so much of the trauma studies and just medical studies are showing how important our gut, our microbiome is to our flourishing and our wellness and how disordered it can become if we’ve known trauma.

And I kind of had the quadruple threat with the gut disorder because I was a kid in the eighties where you got a lot of antibiotics for just every sickness, even if it was viral. So too many antibiotics that had probably taken out good bacteria trauma, which can really disorder the gut. I was also living my best life eating all the sugar, liking honey nut Cheerios with three scoops of sugar on top. So again, the triple threat of ways you could have a disordered gut. I had it all. And then I had a massive jaw surgery when I was a teenager. I was on a liquid diet for three months and struggled with pretty chronic constipation after that. So I had bloating, I had a lot of discomfort. I wasn’t regular. So that was my normative experience of my gut, which when it’s your normative experience, you don’t know, things could be different.

I just kind of thought eating’s uncomfortable food makes you uncomfortable, digestion’s uncomfortable. But when things crash in my early thirties, it got kind of out of control. And when I had the severe acne and I was going to a naturopath and she was saying, Hey, this could be connected to hormones, it could be connected to gut. We were doing a lot of exploration. I went on all the restrictive diets. I cut out gluten, I cut out dairy. I was gluten-free for six years. My brother used to chase me around the house when I’d be home with a baguette jokingly saying, gluten hurts, gluten hurts because he’s an Italian chef. So for him that just couldn’t comprehend that I would go without gluten. And I got some relief from those things, but not enough. I think it was about four to five years where really part of what happened is I broke a small bone in my foot just from walking and probably my running history.

I got a stress fracture in my sesamoid bone under my big toe joint. And that season, which I’ll talk more about here in a second, just led to comprehensive healing, just a very holistic kind of engagement with my body to kind of take seriously that I didn’t have to live with all of the symptoms I had, but that it was going to be a pretty intense healing process. But eventually I got to a doctor who tested me for something called sibo, small intestine bacterial overgrowth. And so basically what had happened when I talk about that triple threat of antibiotics, sugar, and chronic stress, I had an overproduction of bad bacteria in my small intestine that was kind of eating the good bacteria and not enough good bacteria had been depleted. So I had a leaky gut. And so then I was really inflamed and it’s kind of like the chicken and the egg.

It was just like the inflammation was making the digestion worse and the bad digestion was making the inflammation worse, which was leading to a lot of the acne again, my thyroid crash. So we’re treating that which was also part of the hair loss and some of the symptoms I was having around joint pain and being cold all the time. I mean, I’m telling you, it was just a very hard season. I was a hot mess, but getting a diagnosis for SIBO and getting on the right antibiotics, and I did have to do kind of avoid certain foods to help the gut restore. I also did some acupuncture in that season, which was also incredibly healing and helping the gut and helping all these systems get back online. Because what is true is our bodies do want to heal. They’re wired to heal. And sometimes we need to get to some of the root causes, which it’s hard because some of these causes are happening because I’ve experienced trauma and I’ve had disordered biochemicals and all these systems are connected, and that can be really painful because I didn’t ask for that. I don’t necessarily want to have to do all this work. And I was really privileged to have the right kind of healthcare to have access to care providers who were taking me seriously after having care providers who were like, well, I think it’s just psychosomatic.

And so for me, one of the first steps apart from tending to my thyroid was helping restore my gut to where it could digest food properly. And I’m telling you, it radically changed my life. I could eat gluten and not get incredibly bloated and constipated and not be able to digest. I was regular for the first time in my life, and Lord have mercy. I didn’t know that that was a common experience for people to have a bowel movement every day and not feel bloated and constipated and full and in pain, or I know for some people have irritable bowels and have diarrhea and not know when that’s going to come and have a lot of pain in the gut. And so for me, taking my trauma seriously, something I didn’t expect was how much effort I would have to put into finding some order and restoration to my gut.

And so I just encourage those of you who might be feeling like, yeah, I can relate to that. You’re talking about something I’ve experienced. I just encourage you to try to find a doctor who takes medicine really seriously, but also has a more holistic understanding of all the ways the body works together. And sometimes you might need a team of specialists to help treat some of these things. Again, I know a lot of people who have CPTSD struggle with autoimmune disorders and the ways in which the body can only fight so many enemies right back to the Reepicheeps. So there’s a real heartbreaking reason why we sometimes are more susceptible to autoimmune disorders like lupus or fibromyalgia is a really common autoimmune disorder for trauma survivors, just things that cause fatigue and rheumatoid arthritis cause pain, cause exhaustion. Again, I do think that there, that healing is possible where we can have more comfort, more relief, more life, more sustainability in our bodies.

But another impact of trauma that I want to talk about with our bodies for me is the realm of sleep. Now, I have had sleep terrors my entire life and a sleep terror. I found out after having sleep doctor specialist and doing those sleep studies where they go in and they put all the nodes on you and then you’re supposed to sleep in a weird room covered in nodes where someone is talking through a speaker, it’s virtually impossible to sleep, but apparently at some point you fall asleep, you’re so tired and they get enough data from that. But I have learned that sleep terrors are a disruption of the sleep cycle that happens between waking and sleeping, like deep sleep and waking where there’s a disruption where you’re coming out of deep sleep and it’s basically like some deep sleep. Part of you has an encounter with the waking world and whatever you’re dreaming about can be projected into reality.

So it looks very real. It feels very real. Now, I’m not also afraid to say I think that evil loves to capitalize on these experiences of our bodies. So sorry, that was just my office chair. If you’re wondering what that sound was. Does like to capitalize on places where we have fragmentation and disorder and bring more terror. So certainly I think things can be exacerbated, but I have sleep terrors and sometimes it’s so crazy. I have been known to be at a sleepover with friends and wake up screaming Jesus because a lot of times in my sleep terrors, I am praying to the Lord for deliverance in my sleep. And as I’m waking, I am still praying to the Lord in my sleep. A lot of my common sleep terrors have been spiders. So waking up and thinking of spiders coming towards me and jumping out of bed when I got married, unsurprisingly enough, when I have co-regulation with my spouse during sleep, like just another body that I feel safe with, I actually have far less sleep terrors.

EMDR can help reduce sleep terrors. There’s a lot of different modalities of body care that can help bring regulation to sleep terrors. But when I first got married, all of a sudden in my sleep, tears became robots trying to attack Michael, and he would wake up and I would be swatting over him at some invisible thing that he can’t see. But it feels very real to me. So I do think sleep in many ways, even as our bodies can be the first frontier that lets us know we have trauma for some, it’s the last frontier. And I think sleep is one of those absurd places where the impact of trauma is still working itself out. I rarely have dreams that aren’t like chocked full of absurdity and bizarre terror, and there’s a tornado coming and I’m trying to get everyone to realize there’s a tornado coming and batten up the hatches and get all the windows locked.

And so sleep for me has been a very, very fraught place. I started having sleep apnea, sleep terrors as I was actually getting more healing and integration from my trauma. My sleep got worse, and I’m in a toddler season now. So sleep deprivation is back. But for very different reasons, Evie needs a lot of help with sleep. And so I don’t have a lot of deep sleep in this particular season. And I think that the sleep disorder can be another heartbreaking, deeply problematic space that our bodies are bearing witness to the trauma we’ve experienced. And for those who have active PTSD, I’m not surprised if you have very disrupted sleep where your body is waking you up and you’re feeling the hypervigilance of you have to be ready for some harm that’s coming. And again, I think there are cranial sacral therapy, there’s acupuncture, there’s EMDR.

They’re starting to do a lot of research around psychedelics and mushrooms under medical treatment in helping to heal complex trauma or heal the impact of trauma. But I think I just more want to speak compassion to those of us who know what it is to not be able to control what’s happening in our unconscious world when we’re trying to sleep. And so I have learned to instead of feeling panicked if I wake up and I can’t get back to sleep or, okay, let’s talk about, I didn’t even talk about restless leg, but I don’t need to add more pain to the conversation, but I have seen a reduction in my sleep tears through some different healing modalities and through more healing of just my trauma in general, more kindness to my body. But one of the things that is true is that we know that you still get a decent amount of restorative, of restoration that you get from sleep and deep sleep you can still get from rest.

So something I try to do when I’m having those nights where my body cannot, cannot actually access sleep is to have things nearby that still help me rest. Whether it’s plugging in the iPad and watching episodes of Schitt’s Creek or reading one of my young adult fantasy novels or just practicing deep breathing or asking for a hug or cuddles or whatnot. I think I want to name for those of us that sleep is just still feels like a battlefield and that may deeper restoration find you and may there not be a turning against your body. Your body is trying to heal. And sleep is one of those areas where you don’t have access to all of the tools and skills of the prefrontal cortex and the body care that’s more available when you’re awake and up and moving. And so mercy to you, you’re not alone.

And I think better sleep is available, is possible. And I’m not opposed to medicinal support for those of us that need the care of a sleep doctor to get sleep is vital to our humanity, to our humanity. And so for me, these realms did require a lot of work. And I got to a place with the gut health and getting sleep care and developing some tools to sleep better that I felt like I was in a pretty good place. And then I had new trauma through an assault during a date that threw everything back into chaos. And around that season, knowing what I know with trauma that I was going to have to kind of pursue all the holistic care and really tend to my body and the numbness be patient with the numbness, the terror, the heartache that I was going to need to get back into therapy.

Right around this season, I fractured a small bone in my foot just from walking. Now, full disclosure, I wore cowboy boots to my cousin’s wedding and there was a lot of jumping dancing. And I remember coming home from the wedding, cowboy boots don’t have at least the cowboy boots I had did not have the most support underneath the top part of your, or the bottom part of your foot, near your toes. And I remember having pain from that. And for about six months, the pain intensified and I was still wearing my cowboy boots on work trips, walking around Boston, walking around Philadelphia, New York City. So I did not help matters. And I have a high pain tolerance, which is another thing we could talk about on this podcast.

But I had a stress fracture in my sesamoid bone, which is a little, you have two of them underneath your big toe joints on each side, and they kind of function like the kneecap of the big toe. And I was doing this fitness bootcamp to try to exercise just as a part of my body care regiment. And a lot of my body care was very militaristic and disciplined so to speak, because I was like, well, if I got to be on a certain diet, if I got to get to sleep at a certain time, if I got to do all these things to help regulate these systems, then so be it. I will do it. I will will my body into health. And there is certainly a call for discipline when we’re trying to deal with certain realities of being in bodies that are bearing suffering. So I’m not discrediting that, but there was a harshness that I had and more trauma that was happening in the season definitely didn’t help that.

So I was doing this fitness bootcamp to get back in shape, and again, I’m all for exercise is actually really good for my mental health. We’ll talk about that in a second when I talk about some body care nervous system regulation that can be really helpful in healing. But I was at bootcamp, the pain was getting unbearable, so I decided to book an appointment with a podiatrist. I go to the podiatrist, he’s like, you have a pretty severe stress fracture in this little bone. How are you walking around? How long has it been hurting? I left in a medical boot and with a knee scooter because for six months we were going to try to see if I stayed off of that foot if the bone could heal. So for six months, I rode around on a knee scooter in a medical boot to try to heal the bone.

During that time, I went on a pilgrimage, dream vacation, solo vacation to Scotland. Other parts of my healing journey were really taking shape. I was doing tremendous work in therapy around the assault, which then led to all this work around attachment and around my whole dating history and just really beautiful integrative work was happening. I started doing some EMDR, but turns out I still had to have surgery. So I have surgery on this little bone. They were going to try to save it. They get in, the bone has died, it has necrosis, so they have to take it out, which then led to honestly about a year process of trying to heal the big toe joint on my left foot, which meant about six more months on the knee scooter, seven to eight months of physical therapy where at some point I was picking up marbles with my big toe. While people are coming in with hip replacements, I had to do all kinds of slow patient rebalancing of my body because I had been on the knee scooter and only using one leg.

That season took a huge emotional toll. But there was something that started happening at that time around my understanding of healing, especially for the body. There was something about being in physical therapy for eight months for a tiny little bone under my big toe that nobody would’ve ever known. I had surgery, I had a big incision, but it was a tiny, tiny little bone that had such huge impact on my capacity to move. And that healing process was so slow and the parts of me because of trauma that it had to be so tough and needed to be okay actually without comfort. Because when your body is in pain, when your spirit is suffering, when your brain needs support to not flood all of your biochemicals really fast, you have to kind of be tough and you have to be okay with pain. And so it felt counterintuitive to need comfort to really let my body long for comfort and actually receive comfort.

And there was something about this season with my foot. Again, I don’t have a theology that says God causes bad things to happen just to teach us a lesson. I think that’s really cruel. I do, however, have theological imagination that God promises to bring goodness and beauty out of our ashes and our brokenness. And for whatever reason, God sees this opportunity of this tiny, I mean, it really was my wrestling season with God like my little Jacob hip bone, except it was a sesamoid bone, not nearly as cool as the hip bone because there was something that started to change in me about my posture and approach to my body because I had to go so slow. And I learned a lot about ableism in our society and how cruel and patient and actually violent people are to disability, just having a knee scooter and not being able to move as fast.

I have such a different perspective and compassion for those in our midst. Any of us really. Autoimmune disorders are a disability and they’re often invisible and unseen. So again, it was a season of just profound transformation, but the need to move so slow and to take these in the what about Bob language of baby steps to four o’clock, like picking up marbles with my big toe joint, realizing that there was more therapeutic work I needed to do around my relationship with comfort, that I was actually also withholding comfort from my body because of some of my trauma. Because I was afraid that if I couldn’t be tough, I wouldn’t make it all understandable things. And in this season, I would say is where I really started to grow my body care, like supply system and my body care culture of really nurturing and nourishing my body not as a means to an end, because certainly I wanted it to help my body heal, but also because it’s what I’m worthy of and kind of coming to radical acceptance that some of the suffering in my body may not be eradicated on this side of eternity and that I don’t have to withhold mercy even as I’m waiting for justice.

And so this was a season where I really started to take seriously, how do I tend to my nervous system with more kindness? How do I keep pursuing with a lot of discipline, some of the things I knew I was going to need in order to have a more regulated gut, more regulated sleep, a more regulated autoimmune system? But how do I actually be more merciful in how I do that? I started going to the Korean spa on a regular basis. I started budgeting for massage on a more regular basis or really letting my health insurance support me in getting massage. I really had what I would call a body care network. And it did mean I was sacrificing financially in other places so that I could pursue this. I started stocking up on things like a neck warmer and one of those weird hooky thing back massagers because I was single.

I lived alone. I needed some things that I could do if no one else could help me. I got a weighted blanket. I had friends. I had a community that was leaning into this season as well. I mean, I could go on and on, but what I do know is what guided me was a desire to be more merciful. And that took a lot of work for me. That didn’t just happen overnight. It took being faithful in the small. This was the season I became a plant lady. I started with a couple of plants. They all died. Then I started researching like, oh, plants need different soil plants need different sunlight. Plants need different levels of water. Plants need different types of care. And there was something as cheesy as this is going to sound, that plants were teaching me about what it meant to nurture and nourish the nuances of me and what I needed and that there wasn’t going to be a one size fits all recovery plan and that there would be highs and lows, that the maca root story happens after I’m pursuing all the body care.

There’s going to be moments where my body still decides something that is a superfood and should be really good for me is an enemy of the state. And it has to attack it at all costs. And I find myself now in a season of post giving birth and postpartum and early motherhood where I’m having to really borrow from some of these hard won lessons and postures of mercy and curiosity to understand what my body’s trying to tell me. Because in some ways, I have a whole new body and I’m entering my forties. So is it postpartum? Is it perimenopause? Who knows? Nobody knows. Is it because I’m still breastfeeding? We don’t know. But I know that I’m more inflamed than I’ve been in a long time. I have sleep deprivation and we also have teenagers. So we’re eating on the go and I’m eating a lot of inflammatory foods.

And I’ve needed to get back on anti-anxiety meds because the early postpartum season, my anxiety and my biochemicals, I did struggle with postpartum anxiety, which I was looking for and trying to be really mindful of. But you know what? It still took an intervention from my loved ones to say to me, you don’t have to work so hard. We’re seeing where you’re working really hard to stay back from the edge. You don’t have to be in crisis to get help. So I’m back in a season where even though I’ve already cycled through having to tend to my body and the ways in which trauma manifests inflammation, gut disorder, sleep disorder, pain and autoimmune disorder having, and in motherhood, you are so tempted to forego all those things because you’re offering this kind of care to another human being who’s totally dependent on you. So I’m up against a lot, but I’m back in a season where I’m fiercely committed to asking for help.

I’m fiercely committed to borrowing from past strengths and past ways. I’ve had past capacities to be merciful, to be curious about my body and to listen with more kindness with, to have more integrity, to tell the truth about where I’m actually at, and to know that to get to a place of more health, more healing, more restoration, more rest, that I’m going to have to enter a process that takes time and takes baby steps to four o’clock and takes little steps every day to offer kindness and support. And so I share this with you, for those of you who are just needing a reminder that you’re not alone, that it’s okay if you’re back in a place you thought maybe you’d never be in again because you thought you were past that. It’s okay to have to remember ways in which we’ve healed before in order to heal again.

And it is good and well to reach out for support, to ask for care, and to know again that even though we will experience deeper healing and deeper integration and deeper a deeper freedom that we’re always meant for more. And so it’s okay to be in a place where you need help and where you don’t have to work so hard. So I hope on this meandering at times, informative at times, hilarious at times, heartbreaking at times journey that maybe you’ve found some tools for the journey, some companionship for the healing process and some hope that there is is more healing to come, that there is more goodness to taste in the land of the living. And if I get to continue this series, I want to lean more into what things I didn’t expect healing from trauma when it comes to healing attachment wounds, when it comes to reconnecting with community and the role of community in healing and when it comes to healing within the larger system and understanding our role within traumatic and dysfunctional systems. So we’ll see if those are places I get to journey in the future. But I want to say thank you for being here with me. And until next time, I wish you well.