Episode 5 - The Mistakes I Made On My Healing Journey

There are a lot of factors that you aren't prepared for when you're well that you don't understand until you are weakened by one problem after another. It does a number on your mind and emotions and can make you do things, agree to things and believe things that, in hindsight, you shouldn't have done. That is what this episode is about - the mistakes I made that I hope you won't make, or IF you are making them, you'll gain new insight about them.

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. 

"We're all just walking each other home." Ram Dass

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Transcript

Welcome to Episode 5. Today’s show title is: “The Mistakes I Made On My Healing Journey.”

For those who have been listening to this podcast since the first episode, you know that I was raised in a family who practiced alternative medicine, mind/body awareness and quantum mind potential. I saw the world of alternative healing from within and I observed thousands of people who were ill and were seeking guidance. And because of this unique experience of observing and seeing how good people got sucked into bad advice, bad treatments and money sucking wastes of time, I swore that if anything ever happened to me, I’d never make the same mistakes. Be careful what you believe when you’re well and everything’s going to plan (at least what you think is to plan) and you haven’t been drained by a health crisis that morphs into a mental and emotional crisis. Because that’s what happened to me. And I’ll be honest, it’s easy to judge what you’d do or not do IF you were to get ill. There are a lot of factors that you aren’t prepared for when you’re well that you don’t understand until you are weakened by one problem after another. It does a number on your mind and your emotions and it often makes you do things, agree to things and believe things that in hindsight, you shouldn’t have done. That’s what this show is about. The mistakes I made that I hope you won’t make or if you are making them, you’ll get a different perspective on it by the end of this show and ideally make changes. 

Now, I realize that just because I’m giving certain heads up and even warnings based ENTIRELY on my own experience, that you might think “Oh, that’s her. I’d never fall for that trap.” I know there’s a potential for you saying that because when I was warned by wonderful, perceptive people during my healing journey that I was either getting off track and too far into the weeds of my own destruction, or that I was making decisions based on fear and speculation and to be careful, that I thanked them for their concern, but I was O-kay. I had it all figured it. Except when I didn’t and I stupidly maintained the bad directions at times and the dangerous mindsets that did not lead to anything but slowing down my progress. People can say on an esoteric side that I was supposed to go down these divergent paths that never amounted to anything because somewhere in the fabric of time, it had to occur and that the experience had meaning. That’s all well and good but from a practical and non-metaphysical point of view, I’m here today to hopefully help you not make the same mistakes I made. Will you still make some of these same mistakes? Yes. You will. But I hope you don’t make too many of them. These are not in any sequential order. I made a list as I remembered each one. 

The first one I wrote down came to me right away because it was one of the biggest mistakes I made. And that was resisting to the process of surrendering to the process of healing. I spent eighteen long hard months fighting it and it was a lot of needless suffering because the mental resistance made my body tighter and less flexible. And all that did was create more physical tension that produced more physical pain that could not be alleviated by any type of bodywork or chiropractic. When I say ‘surrendering,’ I mean getting out of your own way and putting your faith in a power greater than you which leads to less mental and emotional resistance. Because when you are resistance, you cannot heal. And I know that belief in a higher power is a huge step if you an atheist or agnostic. And I also know that when you’re firing on all cylinders physically, mentally and emotionally, you don’t really think about anything spiritual that much because everything’s cruising along and you feel like you’re in the driver’s seat. It’s a great feeling! You’re on top of the world until you crash. And if you have a spiritual faith of any type, you may have never had to take it for a jog to see what you and your faith were made of. In other words, you’ve never had to really lean on it. And if you don’t have any faith or belief in something greater than you – and that’s the key, something greater than you - you are going to have a very hard time surrendering to a deep, alchemical healing process. Because alchemy demands that you a have a relationship with the transcendent world beyond this one. In fact, I don’t know if it’s possible to do this intense work without a connection to God, to a spiritual world outside of this physical reality, to an understanding that there is a vastness outside of this reality that is infinite and greater than anything you could even imagine. When I think back to my darkest moments doing this work, if I hadn’t been able to feel and comprehend a Divine hand of Intervention that had regularly come into my life previous to my alchemical transformation work, I’m not sure I’d still be on this planet right now. And that’s not an exaggeration. Because I came close to making a permanent solution to my temporary problem two times. And I didn’t go through with it because of that same Divine hand of Intervention that brought me out of the fugue state and dropped me back into the right perspective.  When I finally did surrender, it happened when I finally hit the metaphorical wall.  I realized that my physical body was trashed, my mental body was teetering on the edge, my emotional body was completely destroyed and I realized that the only thing I had left was my fragile connection to God and the angelic kingdom. And I remember saying out loud, “all I have left is God” and then I realized that’s all I had ever had. I’d never had a strong constitution, or a healthy mental and emotional balance. I’d been faking that for most of my life. So really all I had left was a connection to the beyond. And now I realized, that ‘going all in’ with a conscious intention to finally heal everything that was broken, meant I would have to surrender and walk blindly into the hands of God and trust that He actually was there. Because you really don’t get to take your faith for a workout until your faith is all you’ve got. You have to agree that possibly, maybe, there is a pretty good potential that you have no control and you know nothing. Absolutely nothing. And the reason ‘surrendering to the process’ is the first one on my list, is because this is a talent you are going to have to practice and put into action thousands of times in order to transform yourself body, mind and spirit. You are going to have to surrender and die so many times to so many aspects of yourself and your life and your beliefs, that surrendering will become as common as breathing. 

The next mistake I made was being so presumptuous to believe that I could put a timeline on my healing process. I’m embarrassed to admit that but yeah. I was thinking, you know, this will last about six months (where I got that number I have no clue, I think I just wanted to toss out what I thought at the time was a reasonable period of time to do something I’d never done before and had no understanding of what it all meant.) So in six months when I had scheduled my transformation to be done in my head and things were not progressing well, I began to get impatient and a little frosty with God. I was going backward in my progress at that time and I carried that like it was the end of the ages. At the time, I was doing some intense heavy metal detoxing and some strong liver cleanses and if you’ve ever done this and pushed the envelope way too far because why not? You know that you can get a Herxheimer response which is when your body is dumping so many toxins at once and that die-off, as it’s called, overloads your body and you feel very ill and very fragile. And this can set you back for a bit. But it passes and it’s not ‘the end of the world’ or your world. It’s just a passing event and it will eventually stop. But the point is that you cannot put a timeline on how long any of this is going to take. Just know that it will be years but not years of Hell on Earth. 

            The third mistake I made was that every time an obstacle came into my path, I imbued it with incredible frustration. But then I had to realize that the obstacles were actually opportunities that were being presented to me where I could prove or demonstrate that I was capable of coming up with creative ways or intelligent ways of overcoming whatever obstacle it was. And every time I was able to slow my nervous system down (and that was a feat in itself, let me tell you) and gather myself together to come up with solutions, I started to feel just a little bit more capable. And after you successfully overcome a few obstacles, you automatically gain a better vantage point and gain a reference point for the next obstacle that shows up. And then you stop looking at it like “the end of your world.” 

            Next on my mistake list deals with being impatient, because impatience breeds desperation. And desperation is not your friend and I realize that when you up against a health disorder, an emotional breakdown or a mental unraveling that you just want to make it all stop because it is so disruptive to your life. But the problem here is that because you ‘just want it to stop,’ your desperation will make you grab at whatever anybody suggests or gives you without first considering whether it’s right for you. And I’ve seen too many people just agreeing to treatments both medical and alternative that were absolutely bad decisions and they did it out of pure desperation and the belief that they didn’t have a choice OR the time needed to research what was best for them. I was as guilty of this as anyone. Even though I do diligent research on everything, I became desperate during the first 14 months or so and glossed over a lot of potential issues regarding some treatments I had. Desperation will make you spend a LOT of money that is totally unnecessary. I spent money on gadgets, treatments and supplements that did absolutely nothing for me. Two of the treatments I had gave me short term side effects and ended up not making any difference in my state of being in the long run.  

The next mistake I made was actually two parts. One part was thinking I had to conquer fears completely before actually doing whatever it was that scared me. Oddly enough, it never works that way. Usually you have to be afraid and still do whatever you have to do. Susan Jeffers wrote a book back in the 80’s called “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.” I was fortunate to know Susan socially when I lived in Los Angeles and I never forgot that mantra. But it’s one thing to overcome a fear of public speaking and another thing entirely to overcome the bigger fears you have that are holding you back. And that’s actually what next week’s show is all about. You have to overcome your fears, both conscious and unconscious. And it’s the unconscious fears when they are made conscious that really take the courage to overcome. So that’s the first part. Most of the time you will have to do what you fear while being afraid in the process of doing what you fear. The second part of this mistake was when I believed that I would have to wait until I was completely well to do something besides take care of yourself. That mistake held me hostage to my home for months. If you do this, you’re going to become stir crazy and you are going to potentially miss opportunities that come out of the blue when you spread your wings beyond your healing comfort zone. Even if it’s a weekend trip to a friend’s cottage or some short vacation at the beach or in the mountains or desert, you never know the synchronicities that can and do occur and who you could meet who could provide you with an answer to a question you’ve had. This happened to me too many times to be a coincidence. And the payoff was that while the trips did tire me out, I always came back home more buoyant and more optimistic. So don’t chain yourself to the four walls and say “I’ll do this thing when I’m better.” Because doing that thing you want to do but you don’t think you can do, will make you better. 

And the next mistake you want to avoid is the belief like I had that I had an uphill battle and I called it a battle and so I engaged in battle and there’s no laughter or joy on a battlefield. It’s just misery and pain and suffering. So I made the mistake in believing that because the work was very intense at times, that everything had to be very serious. And then one day, someone asked me what I wanted more than anything in my life at that time and I didn’t hesitate. I said. “Joy! I want joy!” And this individual just looked at me with a cockeyed expression that seemed to imply, “You want joy? Then lighten up, for God’s sake!” And this person was right because I didn’t have time, I thought, for the frivolity of life because I had more important things to do than laugh and giggle. But all I wanted was joy so we were at an impasse. And I had to really struggle at first to allow myself to do anything that I thought was silly or a waste of time. But I did and thank God I did. Because it did change the vibe around me and anything that can lift this weight of what you’re doing off of you, even for a bit of time, will feel like you gave yourself a vacation. 

Next on the list is similar to what I just mentioned and I know it’s a mistake that others often make as well because I’ve met enough people who have done personal transformative work and who tell me that they fell into the same trap. And that trap is believing that it is imperative to force yourself into catharsis repeatedly in order to heal. I did this and I also made the mistake of believing that I didn’t have to calm and re-set my nervous system in between these cathartic releases. Which was a HUGE mistake on my part. All I was unintentionally doing was stacking one traumatic release onto another and putting unnecessary stress and expectation on myself that did not serve my highest intention. Please listen to me on this one. I took it way too far and ended up in a very dark and very deep hole that took every ounce of my Being to emerge from. At that point, you’re not helping yourself. You’re contributing to more needless trauma. Added on to this mistake was I didn’t think it was important to have a person available to me whose main job it was to pull me back from these dark holes and offer needed perspective.  I was not working with a trauma therapist at those times and I thought I could navigate the depths by myself and ended up in a very precarious mental and emotional state. It was by the Grace of God that I was able to emerge from that hole and never fling myself that deep again. It took me five years to figure this one out and let me tell you, when I finally realized how counterproductive this behavior was, I immediately stopped doing whatever was contributing to this outcome. And once I broke that belief that intense purging sessions of all this old emotional and mental aspects was mandatory, my nervous system was like, ‘Thank you!’ and it had a chance to tamp down and begin to heal. Because you can’t heal if you keep jacking up your nervous system.

Next up is the mistake of not having enough gratitude for the very small and simple accomplishments I was making. This kind of goes back to the impatience I mentioned. But it’s very important that you don’t make the same mistake because I really betrayed the healing process which is often slow and methodical. Your body didn’t get sick overnight and you’re not going to heal overnight, as many people will tell you. And there is this type of unraveling that has to take place that can be a muscle releasing slowly over time or a belief system gradually untangling itself over time. And if you get really perceptive, which you will need to be, you’ll notice that, “Oh, I can move my foot a little bit better” or “I didn’t have the same reaction to the same extent as I normally do regarding this emotional trigger.” It doesn’t matter how small you perceive the shift. Every shift no matter how small you perceive it, matters. And verbally have gratitude toward your body, your mind and yourself for every single step forward. Because eventually, they will all add up and lead you to where you need to go.

This next mistake I made because I didn’t have a true understanding of what was happening to me until a couple years into it. I mistakenly believed that all the friends I had in my life when I started this process would still be around when I was done with it. And I know that a lot of other teachers bring this up but it needs to be repeated. A lot of the people you’ve known forever and count as friends or partners or even family in some cases, will not all be around when you go through your healing process. I don’t mean they’ll die. I mean they will either drift away or you will break it off with them. It took me three years and a lot of soul searching and thinking to come to the realization that there were people in my life that I was not on the same page with anymore. They weren’t bad people. We just didn’t carry the same frequency anymore and when we would talk or see each other, it became very clear that there was nothing there anymore.  You are becoming the person you never got a chance to show others and the ‘you’ that was entangled in that friendship or relationship before you started your healing process, carried a different vibe, a different frequency and that’s why you and that person were attracted to each other to begin with. But now you’re changing and they either can’t figure you out or you’re boring to them or you’re flat out weird in their eyes. One of the quotes I ran across that really sums this up is: “The people you lose during your healing process are only meant to be with the unhealed version of you.” Whew. That one took my breath away. I can’t find who wrote it and I wish I knew because it’s gold. It made so much sense and it gave me a kind of permission – I have a love/hate relationship with that word “permission” but it fits because I did go through a lot of struggle and deep questioning prior to cutting off long term friendships and you should have some struggle and you should question it and look at these relationships from all sides before you choose to end them. Never drop someone unless they are only able to relate and feel comfortable with the unhealedversion of you. Don’t try to explain what you’re doing with these people because they have no reference point to this work and that doesn’t make them stupid or less than you. It just means they are not on the same path as you are and that’s fine.  

Another mistake I made is one I still regret and I hope that if you are on a transformational healing path that you can hear this and not make this mistake because it does carry consequences that can be far- reaching. And this mistake was blithely and innocently sharing what was going on in my life at that time with any number of people I knew who I naively thought would be interested. Be careful who you share things with. Some people may care but most are just curious and could potentially share your exceptionally private information with others, who have zero context of any of it but will use it to judge you and potentially ostracize you.  A lot of times, you’re talking to people who are still asleep themselves to their own issues and they’ll never wake up. So when you bring up what therapies you’re doing or some workshop you took, they have no reference point and it becomes very awkward very fast if you are able to read their reaction.  Nothing good will come from sharing with people who don’t get it. And it’s fine that they don’t get it. That is their right. Do not take it personally. And choose who you will talk to more carefully, if you choose to share at all. I stopped sharing with people and kept it to myself until I decided to produce this podcast. 

This next mistake is rampant in the therapy world – whether it’s alternative or not - and this mistake allows a blanket of blame to be foisted continually onto one’s parent or parents without providing any context or perspective as to why they behaved and acted the way they did toward you. This is a tough one because when you are able to finally SEE what was done to you and not pretend it didn’t happen or minimize how it’s affected you, you go into this state of righteous indignation. Which is necessary and understandable. And I’m not suggesting you should EVER bypass that process of outrage because you have to feel that since you’ve never allowed yourself to really feel it. So dig in and feel it deeply. However, over time, if perspective and context are not introduced into the conversation - either yourself having that conversation with yourself or engaging a therapist - you’ll take part in the blame game, which I did for a period of time, and if you do that, you risk stagnating in this dangerously myopic, self-focused and seriously unproductive process that does nothing to help you heal. This mistake is not having your eyes opened to the understanding that your mother and father or whoever raised you and had the greatest influence over your development, did whatever they did to you in a bubble and that they were either influenced by their parents or highly damaged by their parents. And that their parents were influenced and damaged by their parents and so on. Until you can understand and accept and then integrate within you whatever happened to you with a deeper and higher CONTEXT, you will continue to weaponize and leverage those memories and experiences of what happened to you, against the people who raised you. You will keep going back to the well of “But why did she allow that to happen to me?” Or “Why didn’t he stop that when he could have stopped it?” “How come nobody protected me?” “How could he abandon me like that?” “Why were they so involved in their own drama that they couldn’t see what was happening to me?” “Why was my dad so detached and unable to express love to me?” “Why was my mother so hard on me?” If your therapist or your shaman or your whoever is not shining a big fat spotlight on generational traumatic energy that allows and perpetuates these cycles of abuse to continue and does not offer you constructive context to how these destructive cycles persist, you will never escape your “but how could he or she do that to me?” mentality. And context does not mean that it releases anyone from responsibility or accountability for their actions. It simply allows you see the patterns that are ingrained and have been repeated consciously or unconsciously in your family of origin. Context does not mean you’ll ever get an apology. Most likely you won’t or you’ll get some half-ass apology that makes you feel worse than before. You will most likely never get the person who you are most focused on to give you the satisfying acknowledgment that you believe you deserve from them. Sometimes it’s because they’re dead. And if they are still alive, it’s because they are still broken and unhealed themselves. Just like you are. The only difference is you hopefully know you’re broken and you’re trying to mend. But I will tell you this, when you have insight into your parents’ childhoods and how they were raised and what they often endured, I hope you can step back with a new perspective and realize they weren’t just your parents but they were two human beings who were also dealt a bad hand. And because they did not have the tools necessary to consciously comprehend how damaged they were, they raised you in an environment that wasn’t healthy or safe or loving. 

I’ll tell you a quick story that was my game changing moment for this issue. Four years after I started my healing journey, I unpacked boxes I had brought back from my mother’s house after she died. And I found a series of diaries she had written from age fourteen to eighteen. I sat down over a period of weeks and read every single word and it was the most gut wrenching, eye-opening thing I’d ever read. I’m reading the words written in my own mother’s childhood handwriting and she quickly wasn’t my mother anymore. She was a confused, terrified, desperate romantic who was entrenched in often dire situations where she and her mother didn’t know how they were going to pay the rent. She spent a lot of time writing about a fantasy life she wished she had where she’d meet the man of her dreams and live happily ever after. I had to stop reading it many times because I wanted to wrap my arms around that girl on the page and tell her ‘I get it. Believe me, I get it.’  I clearly saw a lot of my own fears and naivety within her tiny, cursive writing. Did this understanding I had make her not responsible for some of the things that happened in my family? No. But it provided a massive, mind-blowing context for why she allowed certain destructive things to happen in my life. Gaining that perspective was a real benchmark moment. It allowed me to understand my life and how it all fit together via the generational trauma inheritance pattern, which got me off this damned train of ‘my trauma’ and ‘my grief’ and allowed me to realize that the nature of everything I had gone through and had brought me to this point, was embedded in a tangled web that I had the privilege of unwinding a little bit more because I was willing and able to see my own mother and hear her as a human being.  When you’re able to understand your parents’ actions toward you with the lens of what was done to them and realize that because they were not healed from their trauma, they blithely projected a lot of their unhealed nature onto you. I sincerely encourage you to take what I just said to heart. I know how easy it is to fall into the mistake focusing on “how could you do that to me?” But when you are willing to step out of that mindset and recognize that before they were your parents, they were two people who were fighting often intense battles within themselves and never knew they had a right to acknowledge their pain or do something constructive about it. 

That brings me to the last mistake on the list. And that is believing that there is ‘more to unearth’ and ‘so much more to heal’ that you become forever chained in a very unhealthy way, often in an extremely manic way, to a process that leaves you living more like a researcher than a fellow traveler on the healing journey. There will always be more to learn and digest. But if after three or so years of consciously doing this type of transformational work, if you are still engaging in this type of manic excavation into your life, you are going to be absent and vacant from the life that is happening to you at that moment. And you’ll never get that time back. I realize it can take you a lifetime to reach the point where you are willing to do the work that is required to heal. And the hyper-focus IS necessary in the beginning because you have to give yourself the time and the attention that you denied yourself for decades. But I’m telling you this because I was guilty of it and I wish I could have been told by someone who had gone through it that once you step onto this path, you will always walk on this path but it doesn’t mean that it should permanently envelop you and undermine the life you are creating from that healing. If your true objective is contentment, peace and calm which are three of the objectives people often say they are looking for, you will never attain any of those if you keep your head down and digging and forget to put the shovel down and be able to enjoy the life that you have been able to craft to that point.  

I made a lot of mistakes during my healing journey. I got seriously derailed a few times. I trusted people I shouldn’t have trusted. I allowed desperation to make decisions for me that never turned out well. I lost my sense of humor and then I found it again. I had to agree to be humbled by it all. To not take things “personally” and to do the one thing I could never do and that was to let go. And through all the darkness and shadows I encountered, I gradually became stronger, braver, much more compassionate for other people who were struggling and far, far less filled with the nervous energy that ruled me from my earliest childhood memories. I was able to overcome the many mistakes I made and reach a point where my past no longer unconsciously ruled my every mood or decision and where I didn’t have the need to force or control my future. I taught myself how to be present. I reacquainted myself with Life and everything Life involves, including the ugliness. Part of that journey is doing this podcast. The practice of revealing myself to all of you on a scale like this is not something I’ve ever done and I’m not always comfortable doing this. But as someone who has been down that rocky road of undoing, if my experience can provide you with a unique perspective and a better roadmap or a compass that might prevent you from falling into the common traps and mistakes that derailed and slowed my own progress, then it’s worth it to me. Because, just like one of my favorite quotes, “we’re all just walking each other home.”

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like what you hear, share this podcast with others and follow me. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll find the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. I post a lot of short reels taken from my shows that you can share with people who you think might benefit from that specific message. Looking forward to having you join me here next week when I discuss facing your fears and how you probably aren’t even aware of the biggest fear that is holding you back. New episodes drop every Saturday. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”