Episode 26: Stop Identifying With Your Illness

Today’s show is for the listeners who either don’t realize they are entangled with their illness or admit that they are, and want to learn how to dig themselves out of the pit they are buried in. This show is for those listeners who are not offended by what they hear but who are willing to take a step back and see if they are indeed identifying with their illness for whatever reason, and understand that by doing that, they are not going to heal. Because when you agree to entangle yourself with an illness, you are also agreeing to give up your power and use the illness as a reason for staying in a state of helplessness and believing that helplessness is going to give you whatever it is you crave or demand from a need that was not met a long time ago. 

When your illness becomes your identity, there is no way you are going to extricate yourself from that place because you have melded yourself to the thing that is actually trying to teach you something about yourself but not through BEING that illness. It’s through the conscious understanding of what it needs to teach you and how you must overcome it in order to move to your next level of awareness in this lifetime.

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Transcript

Welcome to Episode 26: Today’s topic is “Stop Identifying With Your Illness.”

When I studied herbal medicine, I went to various schools to learn from a variety of teachers and points of view. One school was the School of Natural healing which was started by Dr. John Christopher. On the first page of one of his textbooks for the school, there is the quote: “There are no incurable diseases but there are incurable people.” That quote always stuck with me because as a child growing up around the natural healing world, I was always aware of the percentage of patients my grandmother worked with and later, who came to my mother for help, who never seemed to get better. They might not get worse, but they certainly didn’t improve. And there was always a sense about these people that bothered me. They seemed to be a little too comfortable with nothing changing. Many of the other patients were gung-ho to get well. But this subset of patients seemed to get some kind of supply met by maintaining a low energy acceptance of a disease or illness that had the potential for being cured or resolved through the use of diet, herbs, some supplements and targeted therapy. I asked my grandmother one day why this particular woman was not getting better, and she said, “Because it’s her food and she’d starve without it.” The “it” was her illness. It made no sense to me because as a child under the age of ten, I was sick all the time. I had the weakest physical constitution and missed a lot of school and even had to be tutored for a period so I didn’t get held back one grade. I wanted nothing more than to be healthy and not lying in a bed watching the world go by. 

But as I grew older and into my twenties and thirties when I started writing my herb column and then plant medicine books which led to conducting workshops and lectures around the country, I began to meet a lot of people who wanted me to help them. And I was more than happy to give advice and to walk them through various healing modalities that I KNEW were effective for whatever their issue was. But for some of those people, they never seemed to recover. Or they’d recover and then, BAM, something would hit them again and they’d be down for the count. Someone observing that would say that’s just bad luck. But when that pattern happened dozens of times, I had to step back and consider that it wasn’t bad luck at all. In many ways, it was by design and it was being done because the individual had decided that their illness served as a 

currency that they could trade for a quasi-power play, sympathy, attention and getting out of responsibility. For many, it was the way they were assured of attention, and I could tell they needed that attention. For others, it allowed them to be ‘seen,’ perhaps for the first time. It allowed all of them to gracefully get out of their responsibilities. It gave them an excuse to hibernate and isolate. It provided a reason to not see certain people due to health issues. It allows them to mesh with their illness and become so identified with it that they completely forgot what it felt like to feel any other way. The illness, in many ways, had become them. 

            This is a mindset and the genesis of that mindset can begin in childhood or erupt in adulthood as a reactive response to a need to exert control or power over others or to feel as if one is part of something that provides them with the attention they truly believe they deserve, even though it’s attention that is gained from a struggle rather than a celebration or achievement. And while this type of mindset stews in the individual, they rarely seem to focus on getting well or truly utilizing the programs or regimens that have a chance to release them from their supposed ‘misery.’ Because sad to say, it’s that misery that is the wind that sails their boat. Gaining and embodying true health is something this mindset doesn’t really want. I’ve confronted enough people when I used to do nutritional counseling who were not committed to the process that was required to help them create the major changes in their wellbeing that they claimed they wanted and was the reason for coming to see me. They were faking it, not doing the program, or being inconsistent with it or seeing it as a drag or a bother. Believe me, people who are really dedicated and genuinely want to get well do not want to pal around with their disease. They want to acknowledge it, find the roots of it, work through it and then they want to resolve it and move on with their lives. Period. And they are 150% on board with what it takes to do that. They don’t forget to take their supplements or do this exercise. They don’t miss a few trauma therapy sessions, no matter how burnt out they are on the trauma. They came wherever they are to heal, and they are willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. That’s how people who want to heal approach alchemical healing. People who claim they want to get well but are really more interested in maintaining an entanglement with their disease will whine and complain a lot and say they want to be well but they never grab for it. They never take the opportunities offered to them, even when the offers are free!

I’ve seen this behavior so many times and it’s infuriating because I know there are dedicated people out there who would grab that opportunity without blinking an eye. And they would be so grateful and they’d run with it and they would succeed. Because that’s the kind of energy you need to do transformative healing. You must be fully on the train and the tracks and moving forward at a steady pace and full steam ahead. That’s powerful energy when you engage in your own healing like that, and it produces an even more powerful mindset that can take a dedicated person into some very unique destinations. But the person who claims they want to be healthy but doesn’t grab for what it takes to heal, sees their illness as a covert grab for power. But it’s not true power. It’s victimhood wearing a mask of power.  Why would you ever seek health when your illness gives you a lot of what you perceive as power? And if you play it well, you can use it to your advantage and create massive destruction and chaos in the lives of others who are at the mercy of your inability or refusal to heal your body. That’s the mindset you are up against with someone who has no intention of healing because the mere act of doing so runs counter to their subconscious or conscious need to sabotage that desire because the only way they understand power is through controlling others through their illness or disability or disease. 

That mindset is what must change. The person with that distorted mindset must perceive health and wellness as power, NOT SICKNESS, or they’ll never change. If they can’t do that, they will consistently choose bad food, not take their supplements or treatments that are given to them or that they reluctantly buy with the idea of “looking like they’re trying” when they really have no intention of following through. And in doing all this, they will continue to entrap good people, good healers and therapists who “just want to help them” when, in reality, they have no intention of using their help or doing the work required. They inevitably entangle a lot of great, well-intentioned people into their sphere of destructive influence. And a lot of those people will be innocent and naïve and truly just trying to help. And if you’re listening to this show and you are a professional who is attempting to help someone who has no intention of getting well, pay attention to how your good nature is being used against you. And pay attention to how their lack of commitment is draining you and ask yourself if it’s worth it.  

When I’ve mentioned this topic of stop identifying with your illness or disease in a couple other shows, I got some very upset emails accusing me of being insensitive to people who had chronic or terminal diagnosis. And I realized that these people were not really into doing alchemical healing of body, mind and spirit. Perhaps they didn’t understand the nature of this podcast. And if they are not into this type of transformative healing, that’s absolutely fine. I’ll say it again, alchemical healing is the road least traveled. I’ve heard people say that herbal medicine and natural healing are the road less traveled. And that’s true. But toss in the conscious focus of transforming not just your body but your mind (meaning your emotions and mental bodies) as well as your spiritual body, and you are choosing to traverse a road that most people don’t ever walk on. I know a lot of alternative practitioners who would never do alchemical transformative healing because it’s too upending to their life. And it requires a partner or a family and possibly co-workers who are willing to be the witness to someone’s total de-construction and then reconstruction and eventual resurrection into their true self. 

When you are fully immersed in alchemical healing, part of that process is agreeing to shift your perspective from what you have always believed or how you have always approached things in your life and be open to seeing where you’re getting in your own way and being willing to admit that your unhealed nature is creating patterns that are not doing anything to help you heal. I had to face this head-on many times when I was going through the various stages of alchemical healing I took part in. I had to admit where I was stalling my own progress or veering completely off the course. It’s not easy to be called on your own shit but eventually you accept it when it’s true and you begin to call yourself on your own bullshit when it rises up. And that’s how you forge ahead. Change your mindset and change the outcome. 

So today’s show is for the people listening who either don’t realize they are entangled with their illness or they admit they are, and want to find out how to dig themselves out of the pit they are buried in. This show is for those listeners who are not offended by what they hear but who are willing - and the word really is willing - to take a step back and see if they are indeed identifying with their illness for whatever reason, and understand that by doing that, they are not going to heal. Because when you agree to entangle yourself with an illness, you are also agreeing to give up your power and use the illness as a reason for staying in a state of helplessness and believing that that helplessness is going to give you whatever it is you crave and I’ll get into that in a second. 

            Now it’s one thing to say I want to understand this illness and why I attracted it to me. Yes, you attracted it. You attract everything into your life, what is seen as positive and what is seen as negative. And what is seen because it is perceived as negative often is not negative and turns out to be positive. But you attracted it to you so the illness, disease or injury has the potential to be the impetus for the change your soul wants you to experience. And understanding your particular illness or disease and why you attracted it is not the same as identifying with it. Understanding it is about looking at it as an observer and identifying with it is entangling yourself with it so that you and the illness are so intrinsically connected that to remove that energy from you feels like a betrayal. And I think that’s the energy that was in those offended emails I got. How dare you insult me! Or How dare you insult my relationship with my illness. How dare you question my deep need to use my illness as my identity. It feels like an attack on YOU because you and illness now feel like one entity. When your illness becomes your identity, there is no way you are going to extricate yourself from that place because you have melded yourself to the thing that is actually trying to teach you something about yourself but not through BEING that illness. It’s through the conscious understanding of what it needs to teach you and how you must overcome it in order to move to your next level of awareness in this lifetime. 

I’ve said this before in a couple other shows: You are not your illness. You have your illness. It exists. You are not denying this fact. You are not trying to pretend it away. But you can be moving through your illness and simultaneously not using it as a leveraging tool. You can still get therapies and other things while also focusing on other aspects of life that make life worth living. But when you insist on using terms such as “I am a fill in the blank sufferer” or even I’m a survivor of such and such illness or disease, you are still circling back to the disease. And I have a problem with the word “survivor” because words carry meaning and energy.  The official definition of a “survivor” is “someone who remains alive or in existence after a difficult or dangerous situation.” I’d rather say I was transformed by this disease that I no longer have. Or I learned a lot after resolving and recovering from this disease I no longer have. I hope you’re doing more than existing! I hope you’re thriving! I’ve said this before:  When you agree to entangle yourself and define yourself by your illnesss or disease, you unconsciously become that illness and then you can’t extricate yourself from the spirit of that illness. It grabs onto you energetically. It literally becomes you and in doing so, it inevitably becomes the premise of your life and the daily conversation that runs in your head every single day. You can’t get away from it. It is your theme song, and it follows you everywhere. 

            One of my biggest issues is with people who literally wear their illness or disease all the time on their clothing. I can understand if you need or want to show support for an event every now and again, but when it becomes intricately woven into the tapestry of your wardrobe, across banners or flags you fly outside your home, on the stickers you put on your car’s bumper, maybe on your actual license plate, the wallpaper of your phone and computer so every time you turn it on, there’s the name of your disease staring back at you. My fervent advice is to stop allowing yourself to be corporatized, meaning “subject to corporate ownership or control.” Nobody who is serious about true alchemical healing of body, mind and spirit is going to agree to pimp themselves out to a corporate marketing campaign of their illness or become the poster person for that organization. You want to talk about entanglement?! That’s entanglement with a strong push of exploitation. There is a beautiful and vibrant world out there that exists if you choose to find it beyond you and your disease. Ask yourself why it’s more important for you to saturate your every waking moment in the gyrating center of your illness? I understand you must do research and talk to various people and get second opinions and so on. I know very well that in the beginning, it can be a nervous rush of research and emails back and forth and lots of anxiety as to how to proceed or not proceed. That’s expected. But what I’m saying is when this becomes the daily long-term lifestyle and is the dominating conversation that excludes or ignores all other potential conversations that have nothing to do with the disease or illness, you’ve succumbed to the energy of that disease and it’s going to drag you down and it’ll corrupt and deeply affect those you love and who love you, and it’s not going to let go until you agree to change how you deal with it. 

            So how do you start that process if you see yourself living in this reality and truly want to shift this destructive energy? First thing, I think it’s important to ask yourself some questions:

            First question: What emotional supply is being met by you becoming so engaged with your illness? How do you feel emotionally when you talk incessantly about your illness to other people? What does this provide for you?

Second, really important one, what power do you feel you have now that you didn’t have before you got sick? 

Third, how does your illness give you the permission to do what you want or to not do what you don’t want to do? Another way to phrase that question is what does your illness help you avoid? A job? A person? A commitment? A fear? An escape to a better situation?

Fourth, what is the biggest fear you have regarding getting well or recovering from your illness?

Fifth, what does a healthy version of you even feel like in your mind? Can you even visualize that version? Would that version not get as much attention? What would happen if you weren’t “the chronically sick one”? Who would you be? What would your identity be? Without your illness, who in the hell are you? 

Does this describe you or someone you may know? Are you so connected to your illness that anytime there is a viable and tested treatment that might possibly alleviate the symptoms or outright resolve your issue – something most people would jump at – you instead argue the point and question the methods used and declare that “it’ll never work”? People around you may be shocked at how you aren’t jumping at the chance to get some relief or even resolution of your health issue. But there is nothing but entrenched resistance from you. Inside your head, you can’t imagine being anything than who you’ve always been and without that weight around you, where would you metaphorically fly to? You’d be starting fresh and with new wings. Instead of flying, would you purposely clip those wings so you could remain in the proverbial cage that is safe and doesn’t demand anything from you? I’ve known people who wear their disease or illness like a crown. It’s like they finally have something to use as a weapon or a leveraging tool against their family, their friends, their community, etc. Why would you want to give that up?

So what does it take to break through this mindset? How do you get out of this destructive mindset? First and foremost, you must acknowledge you are engaging in it. You gotta name it and claim it. You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge. Then you must dig deep and discover the root or core reason you are engaging in entangling yourself with your illness. Is it attention? A need to be seen? A need to be witnessed? A need to be comforted? Where can you get these needs met that involve healthier options rather than getting it from illness? Volunteering your time is a great option. Giving of yourself to someone else. The only caveat is to not choose a volunteer job that is associated with your illness or disease. Choose something completely out of the box. I chose to volunteer at a local no kill animal shelter, and I walked dogs that nobody wanted to adopt. I walked Lily almost every week, who was a senior Chihuahua who was blind in one eye and afraid of the shadows she could make out with her one good eye. We trudged through snow, and mud and she shook and whimpered the entire time. But I made sure Lily got her exercise and lots of treats when we got back to the shelter. 

I’ve really given this subject a lot of thought over the years and throughout my own healing journey because I wanted to dive into what determines this destructive mindset and the real need to become so entangled with a disease. And I thought about three instances that might help shine a light on it. 

The first one is my own experience. And while I wouldn’t classify my story as identifying with my illness, I would absolutely characterize it as using my multiple health issues as a way of retreating from the world and having a viable reason for getting out of life’s responsibilities. I understand what it feels like to be exhausted from dealing with everyone else’s problems and not being seen or appreciated for what you are doing. And through that exhaustion, I began to falter, and a deep fatigue took over that, for me, was diagnosed as severe adrenal exhaustion where my adrenals actually flat lined for three solid years. By flatlined, I mean that I had low morning cortisol which needs to be moderately higher and that low cortisol continued in a flat line all day long until nighttime when it slightly tanked even more. That started to trigger a symphony of other issues including muscular problems, inflammatory conditions that would pop up and disappear and then migrate somewhere else in my body. And if you’ve always been considered “the strong or capable one,” as I was called, you may be expected to ‘figure it out’ or ‘get over it’ and get back to life and by that I mean, get back to focusing on everyone else but yourself. And that’s exactly what I went through. And with that discovery, a deep resentment set in. And resentment is just re-feeling anger. So I let this boiling anger simmer and one day I said, “I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t care what you want or need from me. I need rest and I’m going to get it.” Now, I wasn’t seeking attention when I became chronically ill. I just needed to sleep and find ways to heal and not take on the insane stress I was under all the time. But once I truly leaned into that downtime, I did in fact dwell in that space and used my issues as a reason for not being part of life. At first, I needed that downtime like a fish needs water. But after about sixteen months of that, I was fairly stabilized and while I still had to strengthen and protect my adrenals, I didn’t go looking to jump back into life. I exploited my health issues as if I was still in the chaotic center of that tornado. So no, I wasn’t identifying with it, but it became a great excuse for not taking part in life again. After you spend sixteen months out of life and secluded and nesting in that place of inactivity, you become less confident in your abilities, you become less able to deal with life in general, everything annoys you, your patience becomes thinner, you cannot handle even minor stress, and you create scenarios so that you do not have to engage with people or work or anything. I did all of that. It’s the same vibe that happens to men when they retire after having a consistent, scheduled daily life for thirty or forty years and then, bam, they have nothing to do. And after six months or a year, they will tell you how disconnected they feel from the world and how eventually, they don’t have the confidence to even interact anyone. Isolation will do that to you. Isolation due to illness does the same thing. 

I realized as I was healing that I did not want to being consumed or drawn in again to the chaos that created the physical and psychological issues I was dealing with. And I mean consumed in the sense where I felt I had no say in the amount of energy that was expected of me and that I had expected of myself but that I no longer was willing to put out to ‘make things happen.’ As I went through the total undoing of myself and began to see the patterns I’d created that were keeping me in a state of ill health and more, the mere thought – just the mere thought – of going back into that rat race made me crawl back into bed. But the answer was not to stay ill or isolate because of the fear of being consumed. The answer for me was to get stronger, to build incredibly stronger boundaries, to learn to say “no” and not feel like I was letting people down and little by little, work my way back into society and socializing, even though I felt like a stranger in the world for many months while doing it. Eventually, I had to reintegrate myself back into Life for this special occasion or that one because if I didn’t, I’d still be cloistered in my comfortable bed and terrified of the big bad world out there that I felt would eat me alive. 

The second example has to do with entanglement of a disease because the illness is the only way you’ve been able to get the attention that you’ve always craved. I truly understand this mindset. If you’ve been ignored, dismissed, made to feel you don’t matter and then suddenly your illness brings friends and family out of the woodwork and you are being shown the love and caring you have never experienced, you are going to feel as if you hit the jackpot. You are finally being seen. It’s like living in a new beautiful reality you’ve always dreamed of. Why would you want to get well and lose all that? But eventually all that attention will wane. The people stop showing up as often. When you call to ask for help, it’s harder for people to rearrange their schedule. This is typically when victimhood settles in. Why don’t you come see more often? Can’t you see I’m sick? If you are living with a partner or children, they are bearing the brunt of this in spades. They aren’t given a whole lot of choices except to make you the focus of everything and that is when resentment will set in with them. They may never tell you that but it’s there and it’s simmering. 

I’m going to tell you a story to illustrate this point. It’s a story that I observed closely over the course of forty years. This was an extended family member who I would see maybe ten or more times each year. And every single family gathering, she’d show up happy to see everyone and hugging people and then at a certain time during the family gathering, whether it was a day event or a seven-day vacation, she would fall ill. And she blamed everything from getting a whiff of diesel when she was waited at the stoplight to the ubiquitous draft that made her hoarse or dizzy or you name it. Now coming from a family that had alternative medicine practitioners in it, all hands would be on deck and this woman would bask in the glow of attention she would get from the waterfall of genuine love pouring toward her. And being the observer that I always was and still am, I would watch this scenario from the corner of the room and focus on this woman, watching how she preened and changed into another version of herself. And when I was old enough to understand and correctly interpret what I was seeing after learning more about her childhood, I realized that version of herself that came forth was her five-year-old wounded child that fragmented when her brother was born. That five-year-old wanted to be ‘seen’ and presented itself every single time she “got sick” at family gatherings. But what was the trigger I wondered about when I was reflecting on this many years later. What was the root that anchored in her the need to “become sick.” And after really giving it some thought and re-thinking various vacations and what always led up her illnesses, I finally realized the trigger was when she felt ignored. And family members were NOT ignoring her at all. They just weren’t focused on her 24/7. But when she didn’t get her supply of attention met, over the course of a few hours or longer, she’d come down with something. But what was the genesis of this corrupted need for attention? 

Well, I found out that she had a brother who was sick from birth. Up until her brother’s birth, she was an only child and the center of her parents’ world. But within a twenty-four period, she went from being the center to being forgotten. All the attention was focused on her seriously ill brother. Someone else was now more important than she was. And she felt abandoned and unloved. It didn’t stop in increments. It ended like an ax falling and severing her connection to her parents. This was personal and she felt it deeply. She became what they now call a “glass child.” A child of a sibling or parent who is chronically or terminally ill for years if not decades and who is never seen or regarded as existing. For some “glass children,” their parents forget their birthdays, their milestone moments such as graduations or sports events, and more, all because the child who is sick, either mentally or physically, takes up all the attention from the parent and leaves the other child or siblings literally starving for that attention which they always experienced as love. But the issue here is that attention is not love. It’s the seeking of attention based on a need to feel love. You know, people can shower you with attention but it’s not the same as love. But in this woman’s case, when she was five, attention to her sickly younger brother equated to love. And when they ignored her needs or didn’t hear what she was saying, she felt the additional pain of rejection and abandonment. Now she was in the foundational soil that grows the need in some people who are wired that way to entangle themselves with the one thing that brought attention and love and that was illness. So what do you think she did after three years of being a glass child? Well, at the age of eight, she began to experience severe stomach pains where she would truly be ‘sick to her stomach.’ Now there’s a potential valid reason for this classic mind/body reaction. As some of you may already know, there is a distinct connection between the gut and the brain and how the brain is signaling anxiety and deep emotional pain and sending signals of inflammation into the gut creating the soil for any number of gastrointestinal disorders from gastritis, to IBS acid reflux and more. If you’re interested in this subject, I highly recommend a book called “The Mind/Gut Connection” by Emeran A. Mayer.

So, the twist or Aha! moment in this woman’s story is that her brother eventually died at age five which put her at age ten and she wasted no time developing every physical issue that was mysterious or hard to diagnose in western medicine and spent almost sixty solid years engaging in that mentality and mindset. She rollercoasted throughout her life up and down and around every type of problem and when she was triggered by not getting attention, she would revert, almost on cue, to that fragmented five-year-old child who was still deeply grieving and insatiably in need of both comfort and the attention she missed out on as a younger child. Yes, you could characterize this story as a selfish little brat who demanded more from her traumatized parents than they were able or willing to give her and decided to manufacture and then believe to the point of genuinely feeling physical discomfort and pain and use this pattern as a way to draw attention to her in her older years when she felt ignored. And I would not disagree with you. There was an absolute manipulative nature to this particular woman. But that doesn’t deny or ignore the events that took her traumatized inner child’s nature and used it to create an adult who became adept at manipulating people’s time and attention through getting sick or potentially acting more sick than she actually was. In a case such as this, I don’t think that intense identification with illness is curable. I don’t think a person such as who I described is able to remove themselves from the potent need for being constantly victimized when that has been their operating system for decades. Putting it another way, someone like this is not able to therapeutically reconnect with her five-year-old self because she’s far too entangled with the resonating trauma she’s lived with for too long. And I know this for a fact because the individual I’m talking about was indeed incapable of being able to even allow the thought of having a wounded five-year-old trapped inside her who needed to be seen and healed from her grief and integrated back into her so she could hopefully stop repeating this destructive and often times intrusive pattern. 

The third story is based on a woman I met when I was in my mid-20’s. She was the sister of a client of my mother’s who lived on the same property as the client. The sister was single and an extraordinarily talented interactive map designer who freelanced for some very big companies and made a good living. When I first met her, I figured she was in her late 50’s and she was very pregnant. And I thought, damn, that’s old to be pregnant and then I found out she wasn’t pregnant. She had a very large benign tumor in her ovary. And she’d been carrying it around for ten years. And to my shock, she wasn’t in her late fifties. She was thirty-seven. So this tumor was aging her and draining the life out of her. It wasn’t that big at the beginning, but it reached its status that I observed three years before. So she was carrying around what looked like a full term pregnancy for three long years. And for whatever reason, she wasn’t interested in having any surgery. She was fully committed, I found out, to maintaining this tumor which, I kid you not, she named. The tumor was named Jonathan. I’m not going to speculate on the potential reasons for that one but I’m sure a lot of you can connect some trauma dots that led to naming the tumor Jonathan or any specific name. And ever since Jonathan came into her life, she told me she felt more complete, more artistic, more serene and life was good. Now I was only twenty-five and I didn’t know much of anything except what I read in a bunch of books, but I spoke up and told her that she shouldn’t ever name a tumor because now that tumor has a backstory and a purpose for living and thriving and growing. It becomes sentient almost. But eventually, it’ll grow to the point where internal organs are going to be crushed or blood circulation is going to be reduced because of the pressure the tumor is creating. But she assured me that that would never happen because she would never “reject Jonathan”. Her words, not mine. And apparently, she felt he’d reached his peak growth spurt. 

But then she got interested in a guy who worked in another state in connection with her map business. This is long before cell phones and the Internet so they exchanged photos eventually, but she made a point to exclude Jonathan from the photo. And that realization didn’t escape her when I talked her during this time. Very surprisingly, she told me that she was going to have emergency surgery as the tumor…she didn’t say Jonathan anymore, had cut off blood flow and she was risking any number of outcomes. I also remember she stated that she couldn’t wait to get “this thing” out of me so she could “start her life over.” I’ll never forget that. She survived the surgery and they removed a twenty pound ovarian tumor. And her life completely changed. She left her sister’s property and moved to the city. She attempted to have a relationship with the guy but it didn’t work out but it didn’t matter because she always felt that he was just the cosmic bait that was handed to her to jolt her out of her Neptune Haze and shock her back into the reality that she had to stop naming her tumor because whatever that tumor represented to her, it was triggering some deep unhealed part of her psyche to possibly reenact a time in her life that traumatized her. And in that trauma, that part of her froze to the point where she melds with that trauma and it becomes a benign twenty pound ovarian tumor. And the wake up call, so to speak, of a potential love interest was enough to overshadow and overpower her need to carry the weight of the tumor any longer. And so, she rejected the tumor. Something she swore she’d never do when she was drinking the Kool-Aid squeezed from her own trauma. And in that rejection, it rejected her and now it was going to be her, or the tumor and she chose herself. And with that choice, she changed the energy in her world and when she changed the energy, she changed her need to be dangerously entangled with her tumor. And all she wanted was that thing cut out of her so she could finally wake up from her traumatic slumber and live again. 

As you can see from these three different stories, in order to break free from this need to entangle oneself with one’s illness, it takes a lot of intentional energy to unravel and rewire one’s brain and perspective. 

I never would say that this type of healing is impossible. But remember the quote I told you about earlier in the show? “There are no incurable diseases but there are incurable people”? That is a valid quote for the highly entangled energy that anchors this need within many people to over-identify with their illness and then use that energy to foist their unhealed self onto the world or the world around them. Resolving this need to become entangled in one’s illness or disease requires healing an incredibly deep and powerful wound. And that requires a supremely conscious awareness and acknowledgment that you are using the illness as a leveraging tool for what you see as “love.” That’s the first step. And that alone requires the ego and the traumatized inner child to not be front and center and running the internal conversations. This is something you can’t do by yourself. You’ll need to work with a qualified trauma therapist who has the right tools to take you where you need to go. This can take months IF the individual is open to truly changing how they perceive not just love but human connection and redefining one’s power source so that it doesn’t emanate from a victim mentality but rather, from a victor mindset. And brother, does that take a lot of time. It can be done. But again, it must be fully acknowledged and owned by the person who is doing it. These are deeply engrained learned patterns that can become etched in stone so the visual is you must blow up that stone and build a new canvas that doesn’t require using illness as power. Asking them to let go of the one thing that has given them an identity means they have to seek meaning and identity through another healthier source. That’s why I asked the question earlier, “Without your illness, who in the hell are you?” 

 There’s a lot that must get unpacked. Lots of layers that must be gradually revealed and healed because the root of the root of over identification with one’s illness, from what I’ve personally witnessed for decades, is a broken inner child that was never given the love they felt they needed. So they find any way they can as they grow up and into adulthood to braid themselves into the one thing that they believe will deliver to their door the love they always wanted. People who seem to attract bad luck via illness or accidents can be doing this on a totally unconscious level because the supply they get from the “bad luck” gives them the food they are hungry for. I’ve found that cutting off the attention or what is seen as love to someone who falls into this mindset becomes a very chaotic trip. Depending how close you are to the person, they will immediately fall into a victim mindset and often use your lack of attention toward them to weaponize your relationship with others who still agree to dote and focus on the one who is always ill. Just being honest here that my own experience has shown that once that victimology takes root and the individual is unable to clearly see what they are unconsciously doing to themselves and to so many people around them, it’s damn near impossible to extricate them and give them the eyes to see how they are working at cross purposes for their highest and greatest good. And I definitely understand how incredibly frustrating it is to be around this type of individual and how it wears down caretakers, partners, and family members physically, emotionally and mentally. It is exhausting being around someone who carries the trauma from perpetrators or instigators who are often long dead and cannot get closure or clarity or whatever you want to call it from those who forged the original wound in their psyche. It can’t be overstated how healing this aspect of one’s nature can drastically improve all the relationships in the orbit of the person who carries this deep traumatic wound. Because when you use your illness to create a power dynamic between you and whoever you are living with, eventually the other person or people involved will feel as though they are being held hostage by you. Nobody within that orbit can live their own life freely and with joy when there is someone who needs the focus on them all the time. 

The longer you sit and stew in identifying with your illness, the longer it takes to remove yourself from that space. I know too many people who have successfully gone into remission from cancer but are still deeply involved in constantly researching and sharing articles and studies about cancer, volunteering at cancer centers or taking part in annual events all focused on cancer. It becomes an obsession, and eventually, these people lose all the friends and family who are not part of that dynamic and they only hang out with those who are equally obsessed with cancer or highly focused on their personal struggles. Now I realize what I just said will hit a lot of nerves because this subject of weaving yourself into sickness is often perceived as noble, especially after one is in remission. And it doesn’t have to be cancer. It can be remission from any chronic or potentially terminal diagnosis. And I want to be very clear. I’m NOT characterizing those who have healed their traumas and illnesses and speak about that journey to give others hope and optimism along with pathways and avenues forward to explore what can eventually heal the illness or disease a person is dealing with. That is not the same energy as becoming entangled with the disease. I personally know and have known dozens of people on the lecture and workshop circuit who do this and they are NOT intertwined with the illness they used to have. They did the work needed to resolve the emotional and mental issues that were reflecting back onto their physical body and they look on their former illness certainly as a great teacher perhaps but they are not interested in melding themselves or latching onto that illness as a way to leverage their power. Their power comes from doing the hard work and truly transforming themselves into the healed version of their true self. 

I’m going to wrap up this episode with a beautiful quote I found, and I don’t know who said or wrote it. But here it is: “Heal, so you can see that attention is not love, attachment is not connection and bare minimum is not effort.”

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. Keep sending me all your great emails with your questions for the upcoming show I’m putting together. My email is in the show notes. Share this podcast with others and follow me. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. On all the show notes, I’ve included the companies I support and have helped me greatly in my healing process, so check that and look for the coupon codes. Looking forward to you joining me next week when I’ll begin the first episode of a four-part series on sacred plant medicines. This is a series I’ve been working on for almost one year and I just finished interviewing the last person and am finally ready to launch it. 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.”