Episode 2: How to Build An Illness

Most of us spend our adult life compensating for our childhood experiences and we do that by how we choose to operate in our internal and external worlds. Unconscious ingrained patterns are created during our young adult life that become rooted in our psyche as we move into adulthood.  Over time, these patterns of behavior and belief cultivate the fertile soil and seeds for chronic physical, mental and emotional illness. In this episode, I delve into specific examples of these common patterns and the tools you need to consciously transmute these patterns so YOU can begin to finally heal. 

Disclaimer: This podcast is for people who are ready to heal body, mind and spirit and are willing to take full responsibility for what that involves. I am not a doctor. I am not a therapist. This podcast contains adult language and themes that are not suitable for young children or those who are easily offended or triggered. The views discussed in this podcast are my own, based on personal experience and of those I have known and worked with for my entire adult life. This show is not meant to take the place of sound medical or mental health advice. You and only you are responsible for the choices you make based on the information you hear on this show.


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Transcript

Welcome to EPISODE 2 of the Alchemy of Natural Healing. Today’s show is titled: How To Build An Illness.

Most of us spend our adult life compensating for our childhood experiences and we do that by how we choose to operate in our internal and external worlds. Some of us recognize that the compensating factor is no longer working in our lives and is creating chaos, massive stress and, of course, chronic illness. And when we are finally called to “make serious changes,” which will lead to transforming our entire life, we spend what is left of our lives, in essence, recovering from our childhoods, and hopefully, gaining an independent mind and body from the hand that rocked our cradle. 

As the saying goes, “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world” But it also rules YOUR world. It rules the way you perceive your world and how you choose to inhabit your world. It rules the patterns that you begin in childhood and those patterns of behavior either serve your highest and greatest good or work to slowly destroy you. And remember that your parents or whoever raised you were operating from the same playbook which was handed to them by THEIR parents. They probably never questioned any of it just like you never questioned YOUR belief systems. 

If you grew up within the social media years, that certainly has influence over you, BUT it doesn’t have the concrete stranglehold like the incoming voices you were saturated in daily, especially between birth and age six. Those formative years build such a strong template that is unconscious or subconscious because most people either can’t remember what happened to them under the age of 6 or if you can, the memories are murky or fleeting. Those are the years where if you are seriously abused or exposed to trauma, your mind may block it out but your body remembers everything and it not only absorbs it, it hides it away so you can attempt to function in the world. However, when your world eventually crashes in the form of physical, mental or emotional illness, those experiences and traumas that were once hidden, rise to the surface. Energetically, they want to be brought into the light so they can not only be acknowledged but, ideally, allowed to heal. There’s a quote attributed to Buddha but who knows if Buddha said it. “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth.”

We are all the products of our childhood environments where the nurturing or lack thereof informed how we matured or didn’t mature and how we took in information and gave that information meaning and context as our lives progressed. It cannot be overstated that the voice or voices who raised you have a tremendous influence on how your belief systems are built and how you choose to see your world. And whatever voice got to you first and anchored into your psyche and then echoed inside your head since you were a child is the voice you give the most power to. It doesn’t matter if those voices were accurate or right. It’s the power you give those voices over your life because why would they lie to you? When you are a child, you see things as black and white. Light and dark. Innocence is part of being a child. And in that innocence, you believed that whatever you were being told was “the Truth” with a capital “T” and that Truth was nothing short of gospel. And also within that innocence, you blanketly believed that, of all people, your parents or whoever was your main caregiver, loved you and only wanted the best for you. How they choose to demonstrate that perceived love toward you has a tremendous capacity for how you see yourself in the world today and how you perceive your worth and value to others. If those messages were further magnified in the voices of those closest to you - your siblings, your grandparents, maybe your uncles and aunts, maybe your cousins if you’re close to your cousins, that collective influence drove it deeper and built an invisible template that you have been operating within for your entire life. That template can become so fixed that you don’t question it. You don’t even know that you’re living in it. If you had loving, nurturing parents who lifted you up and built confidence within you without turning you into a narcissist and taught you how to be independent, you will have goals and you will work to attain those goals and you will overcome obstacles without becoming a victim because you will have been taught that obstacles are part of life. And there are great people in this world who had that beautiful upbringing and they don’t need to listen to this show. But most of us weren’t blessed with that childhood and the templates that were built for the rest of us are exceptionally destructive, and create the fertile soil and seeds for chronic physical, mental and emotional illness. 

There are probably hundreds of variations on these templates. You may see yourself clearly in one of them or you may see aspects of yourself. I purposely chose two diverse examples that I’ve either experienced myself and understand on a very deep level or that I have been engaged in with family, friendships and partners.

The first example that leads to the destructive internal patterns and programming that create chronic illness, would be if you grew up in a home that gave you the impression that you’ve been a burden from the moment you were born. You are ignored. You are rejected. You’re treated like a red-headed stepchild. You are blamed for everything that has ever happened, that ever will happen or potentially could happen. Everything is your fault. Your very presence is catastrophically disruptive, even when you are just sitting in a chair minding your own business. You are always made to feel as if you are in the way. That you take up too much space. In fact, without you around, you get the impression that life would be so much better. You’re just not likeable. Nothing you do is ever good enough so what’s the point of trying. What you say doesn’t matter so shut the hell up. Nobody gives a shit about your feelings so keep those to yourself as well. Say you’re sorry all the time even though you don’t know what you’re sorry for. You hear the word “deserve” a lot until you wonder if you deserve to breathe the air in the room. Eventually, you wonder if you even deserve to be alive. So you decide from an early age that nothing you have to say is important, your feelings don’t matter and that your mere presence is annoying to everyone. 

So you loiter in the background of your life. The spotlight is not for you. You stay quiet like a little church mouse in the corner, averting your gaze if someone happens to look at you. If you do speak, you talk quietly. So quietly that it’s hard to hear you. People can’t understand what you’re saying because you mumble. And if someone does attempt to speak to you for any length of time, you say something like, “It doesn’t matter. It’s not important” until eventually you slither away from any meaningful social contact and become extremely isolated. 

And as the years progress, you become pulled back even more. You are really tough to give gifts to because you tend to just stare at the gift and grab for words that never materialize so the gift giver is often met with a stunned silence that is deafening and awkward. It’s not that you’re ungrateful. You’re just shocked that anyone took the time to remember you were still breathing and might like a present on your birthday. As the years drag on, you continue to silence your own voice and suppress your feelings. I mean, what’s the point, right? You find that you clear your throat a lot when you attempt to speak. You swallow hard as the acid builds up in your stomach. The acid that has been formed from all the words that have been backed up inside you and never allowed to be expressed. Decades of unspoken words that lie inside you undigested. Fermenting in your gut. Your chest tightens a lot because you are a shallow breather. What’s the point of taking in life when you were led to believe you shouldn’t have been born in the first place? 

You go to the doctor and quietly sit there while he or she tells you that you have acid reflux, signs of COPD, poor circulation, possibly some calcification in your arteries and the beginning of heart disease. They order tests and give you drugs you don’t want but you don’t speak up because why would you? Nothing you say is important. You got that message loud and clear as a child. The tests don’t determine anything specific about your health and the drugs make you sick but you don’t tell anybody. What’s the point, right?

Thanks to your lack of self-worth because the two people you assumed were supposed to love you gave you the impression you didn’t deserve love…or LIFE, you seriously lack any drive or motivation to heal yourself. So because you don’t think you deserve health or really anything, every time someone tries to help you, you don’t take their advice or you reject them. This eventually creates animosity between you and the person who is trying to help you. Then you USE that animosity from others as a reason to maintain your belief that people just don’t like you. 

Ha! How do you awaken and disentangle yourself from this complex situation? Well, first you have to find your voice and allow yourself to use it. YOU have to hear it. And in doing so, you have to release the decades of sound that has never been allowed to be heard. The best and safest way to do this is to drive alone to a private location. Sit in your car. And scream. Scream until you are hoarse. Scream until you cough. And if you are fortunate that tears well up, let it happen. You have decades of pain that need to be released. Allow it and acknowledge it. It’s going to be ugly but don’t judge it. Better out of you than stuck inside you. Next, you have to learn to breathe. Deeply. Breathe in through your nose and exhale from your mouth. It’s going to be very hard at first to do this because you are making a conscious effort for the first time in your life to take in life and you have to do it against that cacophony of voices in your head that are still telling you don’t have a right to exist. What’s the damn point? But your desire to live and thrive must be greater than your belief in those denigrating voices. And so, you breathe and you speak and you learn to take up the space around you because you begin to finally realize that you never got what you needed from the people who brought you into this world and you never will get it from them. They will never be resurrected into the loving and accepting people you wished you had so you could move into your life with confidence. This counts if they are still alive or if they are dead. There comes a point where you can’t keep blaming and using your parents lack of support or their judgments against you as a reason for not experiencing your own life. You have no choice if you’re going to heal but to become YOUR OWN ADVOCATE. Nobody can tell you that you are worth saving except YOU. You must always seek and discover your value to yourself and to the world outside yourself. What can you offer others? Because you do have value. You must focus every day on your own redemption, be grateful for every step you take toward your healing and eventually be able to see yourself as a self-governing human being who gave yourself the chance to finally be born. 

Here’s the second example. See how many of you recognize yourself in this one.

You were never a sovereign human being but a useful commodity for someone or something else. When you were growing up, your value and self-worth was tied up in how well you could perform and how much you could produce. You were not just someone else’s child. You were the shining two-dimensional projection of their damaged selves. You were born to absolve them of all their inadequacies, so a lot was being wagered on your high performance and constant productivity. You were their investment, and they were banking on you to succeed. You were the currency they traded. If you did well, their investment paid off, and you received attention. So you learned early to work your ass off. If you didn’t do so well, you quickly saw how fast any affection was withdrawn. And when I say affection, I don’t mean love. I mean affection in the sense of acknowledgment toward you. And the pain of not having that acknowledgment is just too much to bear, so you work harder and promise you’ll never underperform again or ever think of failing. After all, any success you attain is seen as a brilliant reflection of the people who gave you the opportunity to exist. And your entire existence and reputation is tied up in you not disappointing their high expectations. That’s the gas that fuels your jet!  So because you see yourself now as a commodity, you trade yourself within your relationships, whether it’s personal or professional. Your needs and your likes and loves are never entertained because you’ve agreed to be entangled in somebody else’s dream. You have to succeed, not for yourself but to make someone else look good. Or to make them proud. You can’t stop. You’re like a junkie and the needle is permanently stuck in your vein. 

You’re always on point and always well prepared. You always look well put together. Everybody applauds you for your ability to get things done and make things happen. If you aren’t 20 minutes early you feel like you’re 10 minutes late. Nobody can compete with you. You don’t have experiences. You’re too busy ticking off the boxes of productivity. Nothing is absorbed. Nothing is drunk in. Nothing is remembered but that’s why you have photos! Thousands and thousands of photos that you can’t remember being in. But you must have been, because there you are with that consistently overexaggerated look on your face. But that’s OK! You look happy and all that matters is that you lookhappy.  

You move fast. You talk fast. You drive fast ALL THE TIME. You eat fast. You never chew your food. Hell, you don’t have time to taste your food! But who cares? You won’t remember the meal tomorrow so what does it matter? You have no patience for life and especially for yourself. You set a very high bar for yourself and as long as you devote your entire existence to meeting and even exceeding people’s expectations of you, you feel a certain satisfaction. But not for long. No resting on those laurels for you. There’s always something next. Something to plan, execute and conquer. Make to do lists that you can never finish because you put five times more on the list than what is possible to achieve in 20 hours of waking time. But go ahead, keep setting yourself up! 

Betray every moment because you don’t have time to be present. And you can always look at the photos! You have it all under control. You are the orchestrator of everything. You are the maestro that directs the symphonies that are the backdrop of other people’s successes. Only YOU can do it. You never delegate responsibility because it wouldn’t be done ‘right.’ You know? Like YOU would do it. Because you are right all the time because you cannot be wrong. Every task must be done with the breathless perfection you demand of yourself. And because perfection is such an elusive bitch, you always feel as if you never quite hit the mark. So failure is always built into your equation. That creates a constant sense of you never feeling satisfied. Because when you don’t hit that mark, you view it as a failure and that means YOU are a failure.  But that’s okay! Tomorrow is another day to buy into the illusion that you can actually keep doing this. Again. And again. And again. 

But then one day, the veneer slips. Something is missed. Something is forgotten. You can’t put two words together. You can’t get out of bed. Your adrenals flat line. Literally flat line. Those fragile fumes you’ve been living on trying to make everyone proud of your productivity, have finally drained out of you. Roll up your circus. Load up the elephants. The show’s over. You get diagnosed with a catch all illness called chronic fatigue syndrome. Or as I like to call it, put a fork in me, I’m done. 

But then comes the guilt. You are letting people down. So you promise everyone that you’ll ‘do better’ but you keep getting worse. 

Your fall will be EPIC. And the soundtrack of your downfall will be more depressing than Schindler’s List. As you sit in your bed, whether it’s a hospital bed or your bed at home, your head will spin continually with thoughts ricocheting like a pinball machine that never find their destination. It will feel like you are going insane, and you will appear insane at times to others. And in a way, you are going insane because you have to exhaust out of you all the decades of internal chatter that you are never good enough, or smart enough or clever enough or strong enough to compete in what you see as a hard, unforgiving world that you will never allow to break you. You will clench your fists and tighten your jaw as you refuse to be broken! All you want is the pill or the treatment that will allow you to return to your chaotic life, because dammit all, there are people out there depending on you. While you lie in that bed there are people out there who are doing it all ‘wrong.’ But the harder you fight, the worse it gets until you’re terrified of asking, “What else could go wrong?” because something else will go wrong. But you can’t break. Tighten up more! Come on! You can’t afford to break. Because breaking is akin to chaos. But what you don’t realize is that you’ve been broken forever and you’ve been two-stepping inside chaos since you were a child. Because what really terrifies you more than anything is facing that thing that you’ve been running from your entire life. And you may not even know what that is yet. 

How do you begin to untangle this complicated web?  First, you have to stop running. You have to be still. And you have to sit still while you endure that deafening internal chatter until you are able through the grace of God to hear the voice of reason break through the noise in your head. And that’s when you agree to ask yourself the hard questions. What terrifies you about the silence? What are you running from? What don’t you want to see? What don’t you want to feel? What don’t you want to know? What hides on the top shelf in the far corner in the darkest closet of your subconscious that terrifies you the most? Are you willing to cut the strings of dogged expectation that have always enslaved you just so you can save yourself? 

There is a clear path and it all begins when you agree to see yourself as a distinctly separate entity from those who spawned you. Secondly, you have to clearly recognize that your value is not intrinsically connected to your productivity. Remove yourself from the hamster wheel of productivity. You have done enough. I mean, you can’t even define ‘Enough.’ You’ve done five lifetimes of ‘enough.’ Extricate yourself from those who used you for their own selfish motives and work toward simply BEING. Just BEING. Not being productive or being busy. JUST BEING. Those who raised you will not encourage or support this choice you’re making. But that is OK. Because you’ve reached a point where you stop fighting on the battlefields of someone else’s war. And with that awareness, you can finally exhale. (Make an exhale sound). You agree to be still for the first time in your life. Give yourself the gift of being present in every moment because as each moment is given to you, it is taken away to make space for the next moment. You drink in each sunrise and sunset. You don’t rush the moment any longer. And as you ruminate in the sweet silence and understand that you are not a commodity or a currency, you begin to discover what matters to YOU. You wake up to the realization that you have a God given right to not just exist but to flourish and to blossom doing something that fills YOU with tremendous satisfaction. Doing something that feeds YOUR heart and soul. And NOT because it is productive but because it makes your soul smile. Because you finally allow yourself to be reflected in the pool of your own satisfaction.

Both of these examples share one specific theme. And that is the way in which love was fed to you. How was love ladled out to you with a distorted spoon? Love was either withheld, exploited, manipulated, controlled, engineered, faked or destructively conditional. So if you were shown love through any of these distortions, you carried your life forward and projected those distortions onto yourself and into your world and onto those closest to you. So if love was withdrawn from you, you will often withhold love from others and certainly yourself. You might have no problem giving love to an animal but in many ways that animal represents you and you devote yourself to that animal in the way you wished someone had devoted themselves to you. How many people rescue animals without realizing they are actually trying to rescue a part of their wounded self in a subconscious attempt to heal that fragmented part of themselves? That animal provides them with an opportunity to become a little closer to whole. What a beautiful thing that is. 

So with the understanding now of how your mental and emotional state of today was shaped by how you were shown or not shown love, how do you shift all that into practicing and inhabiting healthier patterns that lead to the transformation you are looking for? Well, read any book or attend any workshop on personal empowerment, and you will hear the same message. The way you change is through self-love. And that’s where everyone gets stuck in this process. Because they either have no ability to love themselves, with the same passion that they would love their pet, so to speak, because they’ve never experienced that type of passionate love toward them and if they did they rejected it because who in the hell would ever love them? Or they conflate self-love with egotistical, self-centered behaviors. So the suggestion of ‘you need to have self-love’ is where the big wall goes up and you halt your transformative progress. And I totally understand this because that’s where I came from. And it held up my healing far too long. Being around so many narcissist people in my life, I associated self-love with their egregious behavior. But once I really learned more about narcissists, I understood that THEY weren’t really demonstrating self-love. They were using their arrogant, pumped-up façade to ironically cover up their deep lack of self-confidence and self-acceptance. 

Within the theme of alchemical transformation, you need to understand self-love through the lens of self-value, self-worth and self-respect. Because when you honor your VALUE, and your intrinsic WORTH and begin to RESPECT yourself, this really weird thing happens. You no longer feel obligated to take one for the team or die for the cause. You will do nothing that your insults your soul. You put your health and wellbeing first because you have become your greatest asset and you seek to preserve and protect that asset because you finally give a shit about yourself. And because of that, you don’t want to destroy yourself anymore. Why would you EVER destroy your greatest asset?! And when you make the decision to not destroy yourself anymore, you just freed up a ton of energy that you can now funnel into your healing. It’s not selfish. It’s not egotistical. It’s all about the art of self-preservation because you decided you’re worth saving for the first time in your entire life. And that is what self-love really is. Choosing to not destroy yourself anymore because somebody a long time ago fed you their projection of love through a distorted lens. And most likely they did that because THEY were fed the same projection of distorted love from those who raised them. It’s just a pattern. But patterns are meant to be broken if they don’t serve your highest and greatest good. 

Those parts of you that never got a chance to explore themselves are still there. Those are the parts of you that will uncover when you undergo a deep personal transformation. They want to be seen and expressed even if they are not the dominant part of you. They still need to be seen and felt and experienced. You may have an artistic side of you that has never been allowed to flourish. It doesn’t mean you are going to become a world class painter or composer. But that’s not the point. The point of discovering these buried parts of you is not so you can exploit them by bragging about them on social media. You know, hash tag look at me!! In fact, I don’t suggest you blast it out on your socials, especially in the beginning of your transformational work. Because you are not formed yet. You are just starting to be born into the you that never got to be. The thing you find fascinating in the beginning of your transformational work, most likely won’t be the point of your fascination six months later. Or maybe even three months later. This work is not meant to be shared with your peeps because, honest to God, they don’t know what in the hell has happened to you and they most likely are looking at you with a guarded eye. So keep what you do close to the vest. This is the MOST intensely personal work you’ll ever do and most people who are on the outside looking in, can’t wrap their head around it. And that’s fine. You’re not doing this work for them. You’re doing it for YOU. The point is to finally have the ability to inhabit these parts of yourself you’ve never had a chance to experience and pepper your world with a different energy. A different vibe or frequency. Because when you are in the throes of coloring outside the lines of your own comfort zone, you exert a different vibration. Part of that vibration is the energized spark that comes with simultaneously being excited about something new while also being scared shitless. But you still dive into the pool regardless. And your curiosity and enthusiasm always override whatever fears you have. And before you know it, your life begins to change in ways you never expected. 

You will either be a victim because of your parents’ inadequacies, or you will be a victor regardless of your parents’ inadequacies. They screwed up and they screwed you up but, oh well. You want to heal? You want to have a good life? You want to overcome your adversities? Then shut the fuck up about what mommy and daddy didn’t do or did do and move forward. Your sole/soul job – spelled both S-O-L-E and S-O-U-L - is to grow and find greater awareness in this game of life no matter what life throws at you. Now it’s to up to YOU to provide yourself with the understanding, the patience, and the perspective you never had before this day. Now it’s up to you to build a fire within yourself that will sustain you through the process you’re about to embark on. That fire may be strong certain days and it may be a bed of embers on others, but never let it burn out. Because a bed of embers can easily be stoked into a roaring inferno with just the right kindling. 

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like what you hear, share and follow me. Check out the notes for this episode where you can find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. I love reading your questions and comments. Tune in next week when I talk about how to build that internal flame within you without setting yourself on fire. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”