Creating a Life Worth Healing For

Sometimes our preoccupation with our health isn't really about health as much as we might think it is. This can be true even when we do have chronic symptoms that make life harder for us to navigate.

I haven’t dug deeply yet into toxic stress physiology, but I plan to post about this topic in the future, as it speaks directly to those of us with ACE-related complex trauma and the resulting metabolic symptoms many of us spend our lives navitaging.

Many of these symptoms aren’t well-understood, such as chronic fatigue, autoimmunity, insomnia, anxiety disorders, MCAS, histamine issues, and more. We often get told by medical professionals that they’re incurable and disparate, and we can build our whole lives around the limitations that these symptoms create.

But when you understand the connection between the nervous system, chronic stress, and the metabolism, concepts like toxic stress physiology can help you understand that these symptoms all stem from some main root causes, and there are real changes that can be made to improve everything at once.

The issue I see a lot is that we’re not always in a place in life to look at these root causes and to take responsibility for what may need to change in our lives. Taking responsibility for our health and happiness isn’t something humans have a long history of needing to do. This is actually a very novel demand to place upon ourselves as a species and can feel muuuuuch more difficult if we’re not even clear on what we need and want for ourselves (beyond basic symptom remission) in the first place.

I've noticed something in my years working with women around trauma and health: many of us become focused on "getting healthy," not because we love our lives and want to feel stronger to show up for them, but more so because focusing on our health feels more manageable than addressing the bigger, scarier problems in our lives.

Of course, some women actually do have lives they love and important structures in place to support them in healing and recovering when, say, a toxic cultural norm, trauma pattern, or bad diet takes its toll on them. These women tend to need less time with coaches such as myself and have more support and security in place to implement the changes we make together. These women also often have more obvious improvements that we can assess and work with as we implement changes.

These particular women often stand in contrast to the women who don’t have these important life structures and securities in place because, without the bigger life needs having been met, women tend to:

• Exhibit more disorganization

• Experience more helplessness day by day

• Are more likely to fixate on little things and lead with cognitive distortions

• Place greater weight on diet and lifestyle, yet have a harder time with consistency and tracking

• Are often more likely to pathologize themselves & use diagnosis to hide from the patterns themselves

I know what these experiences are like, because this was me, for years.

We pour energy into perfecting our diets, many times taking obscure supplements, running expensive functional medicine tests, and researching every possible health protocol on the internet. Meanwhile, we may be living in places we hate, working jobs that drain us, isolated from meaningful relationships, or stuck in circumstances that feel impossible to change.

We form beliefs about our situation, and various states of helplessness take shape in our minds, setting the stage for how we feel about ourselves and our lives moving forward. These feelings can be so upsetting and confronting that we learn to ignore them and focus on what we believe we have more agency over - our day-to-day feelings and consumption habits.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Sometimes our health struggles are our psyche's way of avoiding the harder questions - what would we need to change to actually create a life we want to be healthy for in the first place? What would we be doing if we had the energy and vitality to do it?

I've been guilty of this myself, btw.

During some of the most challenging periods of my life—when I was struggling financially, feeling profoundly lonely, or trapped in situations that felt hopeless—I would hyperfocus on my health instead of addressing the root causes of my distress. I genuinely didn’t know what else to do. I wasn’t yet skilled at tracking my own cognitive distortions, states of helplessness, or recognizing how these states were keeping me stuck and frozen, accumulating into bigger life circumstances I felt powerless over.

I’ve grown to understand in recent years, however, that having a higher ACE score and C-PTSD means there were layers at work causing my distress, not just the symptoms and circumstances themselves. It wasn’t simply that my life circumstances were creating helplessness (which they most certainly were), but also that I was primed to create circumstances of helplessness because this is what I knew a lot when I was younger.

I’m not implying that we all create our shitty circumstances out of some unconscious masochism, but more so that we’re internally set up to accept shitty circumstances and helpless states if we’re used to them already. These states are less intolerable to us because they’re familiar, even if on the surface we’re aware that they’re making us miserable and stuck.

It felt safer for me to research gut healing protocols than to face the fact that I was isolating myself because relationships felt too vulnerable. It was easier to spend money I didn't have on supplements than to confront the reality that I needed to make major changes to my living situation and career. Health became my project, my sense of control, and my way of avoiding the grief of acknowledging that my life wasn't what I wanted it to be.

These weren’t conscious decisions I was making—I literally didn’t have the skills to behave any other way, yet. I couldn’t even grieve properly because I’d spent much of my life dissociated.

This pattern is incredibly common, especially for those of us with trauma histories. When your nervous system is already overwhelmed and your window of tolerance is small, the idea of making big life changes can feel damn near impossible. So instead, we focus on what feels more manageable: optimizing our morning routine, finding the perfect probiotic, or eliminating every possible inflammatory food.

And don’t get me wrong, sometimes this is literally all we can do because we’re riding out our final year of med school, saving up enough money to move, going through a brutal divorce, or nursing a dying family member into a different plane. (All circumstances I’ve experienced in clients dealing with high levels of helplessness).

In these circumstances, we (in our coaching work) dedicated a lot more time to acknowledging the helplessness and grief of the situation and creating small pockets of agency every day that reminded their brain: “there is a way out, and I have power over my direction.”

Nutritional changes and supplements might’ve been part of this, but for these women, the agency was often found in other, more humanizing places - laughter each day, walks in the sunshine, talking with old friends on the phone, building up their savings, lying on the grass after 10 hours in rotations under fluorescents, or crying in our sessions with someone to witness their release.

Fixating on their symptoms made life so much harder for these women because their symptoms made sense, considering how hard their circumstances were. They’re body was saying “fuck you, I hate this.”

Everything I write and podcast about tends to include three main elements: patterns I’ve experienced in myself that I’ve spent time reflecting upon, working with, and changing, patterns I’ve worked with in my clients, and larger-picture patterns I observe that contain the first two. It’s important to me that I emphasize to women that I’m not on some pedestal because of my professional training or experience, but I’m actually in the trenches with you, even if just a few steps ahead. I’ve experienced—or continue to experience—what I write and talk about here.

And here's what I've learned from my experience: if the container of our life—our relationships, living situation, finances, daily environment—doesn't support our wellbeing, it becomes much harder to maintain basic self-care, let alone address complex health issues. When we're constantly stressed about money, lonely or isolated, or we’re living in environments that feel unsafe, harsh, or unsuitable, our nervous system stays activated. No amount of supplements, diagnostics, or perfect eating can fully compensate for a life that fundamentally doesn't work for us.

This doesn't mean you need a perfect life to be healthy, of course, or that up and changing everything at once is the answer either because our brains reject change in all shapes and sizes and huge changes can totally fuck us up—especially if our capacity is low. But it does mean we need to honestly assess whether we're using health optimization as a way to avoid addressing legitimate structural problems that are contributing to our suffering.

We often need to look at the areas we avoid looking at.

Oftentimes, if there are areas in our lives or within ourselves that we avoid looking at, we’ve developed strategies to continue this avoidance, which makes us less skilled at effectively looking at them when life requires that we do.

Growing up around serious addiction, I’ve seen this pattern a lot; the addiction behaviors get more extreme in an attempt to keep those things out of sight. It gets more obviously dysfunctional over time, and the toll this avoidance takes on the addict and their loved ones increases as well.

This is where we want to accept that, if this is an issue we’re currently navigating, looking at bigger container problems may mean that we need:

• Support with grief and outlets for healthy grief work

• Some tools for managing shame and shame avoidance when it comes up

• Skills for recognizing cognitive distortions that exist to prevent us from seeing painful truths

• Other people who remind us that we’re worth this difficult work, that we belong here, and have value in the world

Some of the most common "container" issues I see include:

Isolation and relationship problems: Many of us have withdrawn from social connections due to past hurt, social anxiety, low skills, trauma responses, or inconveniences. It can be harder to make quality friends as we age and the digital age means we all just go out less. But humans are wired for connection, and chronic loneliness creates real physiological and emotional stress. It can feel safer to focus on healing our gut than to risk the vulnerability of building new relationships or addressing the patterns that keep us isolated.

Living Environment: Maybe we are in a city that doesn't suit us, a climate that affects our mental health, or a living situation that keeps us chronically stressed or uninspired. These environmental factors have profound impacts on well-being, but moving or changing our living situation can feel overwhelming, especially when we're already struggling.

Work and Financial Stress: Financial insecurity and unfulfilling work create chronic stress that impacts every aspect of life in some way. But career changes can feel risky and overwhelming, especially when we're already depleted. It's easier to focus on optimizing our diet than to confront the reality that we might need to completely restructure our professional life or find another source of income. Not everyone has marketable skills that transfer easily to different job opportunities—this is truly a problem that expands beyond the individual in this culture.

Unaddressed Trauma: Sometimes our health focus is a way of avoiding trauma work that feels too scary, confusing, or intense. We might spend years trying to "heal" through physical interventions while avoiding the emotional processing or psychoeducation that's actually needed. This was me, btw. Complex trauma tends to create a lot of internal disorganization in us, which can make executive functions and task management hard, including the task of assessing what’s wrong enough to seek help in the first place.

One of the hardest parts of creating a life worth healing for is facing the grief of where we may currently be. This means acknowledging that we're not happy with significant aspects of our lives. It means admitting that we've been settling, avoiding, or stuck in patterns that aren't serving us. This can be accompanied by guilt (for letting this go on), shame (for not being different or knowing how to change), and anger (oftentimes directed internally at ourselves and/or externally at someone or something outside ourselves who’s to blame).

This grief is real and necessary, but it's also why many people stay stuck in health-focused loops. It's less painful to believe that you just need to find the right supplement protocol or get better at avoiding certain carbs than it is to face the reality that you need to rebuild major areas of your life.

Deep down, we may not even believe that we’re worth the effort in the first place, which can be the most painful part we avoid touching.

While I don’t invest much in the new age Pollyanna tropes that we all just need more self-love and self-esteem… I do believe that we need to know if deep down we feel like we’re not worth the effort - if nothing else, so that we can factor this in when we work on changing our behaviors.

A lot of “self-sabotage” patterns come from these kinds of unconscious beliefs, and they don’t just disappear if we start doing some affirmations in the mirror.

Creating a life worth healing for doesn't mean having a perfect life before you can address your health. Obviously. I’ve met a lot of really satisfied, high-functioning people in my life, and none of them had perfect lives. What it means is being honest about the structural issues that are contributing to your suffering and being willing to address them alongside your physical health concerns.

This might mean:

• Acknowledging how lonely you are and taking small steps toward connection, even when it feels scary. Deciding you’re someone others will want to be close to and proving this to your brain regularly through behaviors that align with this.

• Being honest about whether your living situation is supporting or hindering your well-being. Being radically honest, write down what isn’t working about your current environment and WHY. Write down what you want instead. Accept that it may be real work to get there, but it starts with honesty.

• Recognizing that financial stress might be a bigger factor in your health struggles than your diet. If you know this already, make a habit of looking at this head-on and working with the helplessness and cognitive distortions that arise here. There’s actually a difference between an honest, objective assessment of our circumstances and all the distorted beliefs we fall into that drain our agency & impact better behavioral responses. You can still care for your health while acknowledging real financial limitations.

• Admitting that you might need professional help of some sort to recognize and work with your trauma, or to get you out of your current situation.

I want to make it clear that I'm not suggesting anyone should ignore their physical health while they work on life circumstances. Rather, I'm advocating for an integrated approach that recognizes how deeply interconnected these areas are. Humans heal and change through experiences that induce neurosomatic safety, not through passive adherence to protocols alone. Nothing in life is truly either/or, and every path involves trade-offs. We also have phases and seasons in life where some things are more important than others.

If you do have C-PTSD or have struggled with your health long enough that it’s set you back on bigger life goals and milestones, this process may require that you unplug from what the culture is telling you you should be focusing on at this point in your life. For some of us, we may need to focus on our mental health and well-being by lowering our overall workload and slowing our whole lives down. It may require different priorities. This can be terrifying if you’ve spent years building up a demanding career and focusing on financial success.

Sometimes addressing structural life issues will have a bigger impact on your energy, sleep, and overall well-being than any supplement ever could. And, I’ll admit that sometimes feeling physically better gives you the energy and clarity you need to make necessary life changes. So, this is not always linear, and it’s different for each person, depending on their histories, stress levels, and specific circumstances.

The key is being honest about what you're avoiding and being willing to address the real sources of stress in your life, not just the symptoms. Sometimes the symptoms themselves have become a big source of stress, and lowering your experience of these symptoms is a crucial first step to agency. For others, it’s getting out of a toxic relationship. Only you and whoever is supporting you can know this.

If this resonates with you, start by asking yourself some honest questions: What aspects of my life am I genuinely unhappy with? What would I need to change to feel excited about being healthy and energetic? What kind of help might I need? Where do I currently have agency?

We all deserve a life that we want to be healthy for, not just some better metrics on a lab or more energy to show up for what’s already not working. And I believe that creating that life might be the most important healing work we do.

What resonates with you about this concept? I'd love to hear your thoughts on how the "container" of your life impacts your health journey.