ļ»æAre You in a Dark Room
Dr. Leslie Cisar
Edited video transcript | 56:09
[00:00]
Hi there, welcome to the Healing Migraines Naturally podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Leslie Cisar, and I'm a licensed naturopathic doctor, former chronic migraine sufferer, and I've dedicated my life to helping other women with migraines rediscover a migraine-free life. I want to tell you a story, and I'm gonna call her Rachel. She's not one person.
[00:22]
She's a composite of clients that I've worked with over the years, but the parts of the story are based on real client experiences. I kind of put this composite together because I think a lot of you are gonna resonate with it. So her name is Rachel. She's 35 years old. Her husband works in real estate.
[00:44]
She has a teenage daughter. She's got a seven-year-old, and she's about to have her third baby. So, she's done this before, two times before. She knows how labor works. She knows that she's gonna have to take some time to bounce back. Recovery takes time, but she always bounced back before with her other two kids.
[01:09]
And so she knows what she has to do. She's gonna take it easy, but she always bounces back. This time was different. She was in labor for hours when she starts to realize, something is wrong here. This epidural is not working. It's like not wearing off. It's not working. She knows what labor pain feels like. This is not it.
[01:29]
This is something else entirely. And it's a pain that's taking over her entire body. She can't think about anything else other than the pain. In fact, she thinks that she's dying. So not like, oh, I felt like I was gonna die. She's had two babies. She has a high pain tolerance. She knows her own body, and she is literally thinking that she's not gonna survive this.
[02:00]
That's how bad the pain is. The two hours of this, the baby isn't coming. And she can tell that now there's some panic. There's some frantic moving. Thanks to some forceps, that baby arrives. And now she's supposed to be holding her baby, but she's not holding her baby. She's hemorrhaging. She loses consciousness.
[02:24]
She comes back. She loses consciousness again. When they finally put her baby in her arms, she should be the happiest that she's ever been, but she's not. That baby is in her arms, but she's somewhere else entirely. She can't feel it yet. She can't connect to it. She can't quite get there. Something has shifted in her body, and nobody in the delivery room knows it.
[02:48]
She doesn't know it yet either. But she goes home, and she does what she's always done after a hard delivery. She rests. She eats well. She takes her vitamins. She asks her older kids to pick up the slack for a while. These are the things that have always worked. She gives her body time.
[03:16]
A few weeks go by. She's not bouncing back. Well, she's been through a lot. More than usual, the hemorrhage, the blood loss, give it more time. More weeks go by. The dizziness that's been plaguing her since she got home. The dizziness is not going away. Standing up from the couch makes her heart race.
[03:45]
Her vision goes gray at the edges. The sunlight coming in feels like daggers. When her kids come in to talk to her, just the normal everyday kid noise, she gets hit with dizziness that doesn't let up for hours. So she tells herself just give it more time, more rest. It'll pass. It doesn't pass.
[04:03]
I want to pause here for a second. Rachel is not doing anything wrong. She's doing everything that she's supposed to do. Everything that she's always done. Everything that's always worked. She's resting. She's eating right. She's giving herself time, and her body is not responding. Not for lack of trying. It's because something is blocking it.
[04:33]
She just doesn't know it yet, and neither do her doctors because she goes to her doctor. So her doctor refers her to a neurologist, vestibular migraine. This is her first diagnosis. Here comes the medication. At first, it does give her some relief from the dizziness, but then the headaches start. Severe headaches, daily headaches.
[04:56]
Now she's given more medication. Now with that second medication, now I mean the fatigue. She was already fatigued, but now the fatigue it's constant. It's like a bone-deep fatigue. No amount of sleep is going to touch this fatigue. Chronic fatigue syndrome, another diagnosis, another specialist. She starts noticing other things. Every time she stands up, her heart rate spikes.
[05:27]
The dizziness, sweating, feeling like she's gonna faint. POTS. Another label. Another referral. The list keeps growing, but the answers don't. Each doctor is looking at one piece of her, and nobody's looking at the whole picture. So she does what any determined woman would do. She starts trying to figure it out herself. So along with all of this, her neck hurts.
[06:00]
So maybe a chiropractor would be helpful. Now her eyes, they can't handle the light. So she finds a specialist for light sensitivity. She spends nearly six months going to a chiropractor. And after every single visit, she comes home and collapses. She gets horrible migraine after every adjustment. She goes to the Diamond Headache Clinic for an inpatient program.
[06:25]
She feels a little bit better there. Oh the quiet, the structure away from real life, but then she goes home and within days, everything comes crashing back down. All the symptoms return. She tries Botox, CGRP injections, craniosacral therapy, iron infusions, functional neurology, vestibular exercises, a functional medicine doctor, a brain retraining program.
[06:50]
Nothing works. Not really. Not for long. In total, in dollars in years, in what her family has had to give up, that total, that's a number she's long ago stopped trying to add up. And here's what I want you to understand about what she's doing. She's not grasping at straws. She's applying the only framework she's ever been given.
[07:15]
Every specialist she's ever seen has modeled this same approach. Here's your symptom. Here's the treatment for that symptom. Here's the referral to the next provider for that other symptom. So when no one else is connecting the dots, she does it herself. But in the way that they've taught her to connect the dots.
[07:42]
You know, Rachel's a dental hygienist. She was never trained to do this. And I'm not going to walk into a dentist's office and start cleaning people's teeth. I'm not trained to do that. And Rachel shouldn't have to figure out this on her own either. But the job has fallen to her because nobody's asking the question that would change everything.
[08:04]
Right? Not, why does her neck hurt? Or, what would help her neck? What would help her light sensitivity? What would help her dizziness? The question that no one's asking is, why can't her body recover? While she's searching, her whole life is rearranging itself around the fact that she's sick. Her husband, he's in real estate, which means his income is tied directly to, his presence, his availability, his ability to be in front of clients and close deals.
[08:40]
And he's also the one now getting the kids out the door every morning, coming home to take over the evenings because Rachel's in a dark room with an ice pack over her eyes. He's trying to hold the household and the career together at the same time and both are taking a hit. Her teenager is being asked to be older than she is.
[08:59]
Her seven-year-old too. Oh, you're gonna have to step up, you're gonna have to help with the baby, fill in the gaps. And they love their mother. But they're also resentful the way kids get when they're asked to grow up too fast. It's been years of watching the family work around what mom can and can't handle today.
[09:20]
And Rachel, of course, she feels all of it, the guilt of what her being sick is costing the people that she loves the most. And then there's this. Her kids don't remember her being any other way. And there's something I want to say here that nobody in a doctor's office is going to say.
[09:45]
What happened to Rachel in that delivery room was not just a physical event. She felt like she was dying. She hemorrhaged. She lost consciousness twice. She missed the first moments with her baby, the moments that she had been waiting nine months for. And then she went home and she tried to recover because that's what she's done.
[10:10]
That's what she does. It always worked before. She feels responsible for everything, for her household, for her kids, for whether the people around her are Okay. Even lying in bed, trying to rest. She knows what isn't getting done. She knows what her husband is managing alone. She knows what her kids are picking up.
[10:32]
That guilt doesn't just stay in her head. It's in the same body that's trying to get better and recover. Nobody's asking about that. Nobody's looking at the whole picture. The years that follow, things continue to get worse. It's every birthday that she misses, every school event, every morning her husband does alone what was supposed to be shared.
[10:54]
Every night her kids are doing things they shouldn't have to do. She feels all of it. Nobody's accounting for that. And I want to stop talking about Rachel for a minute and I want to talk to you directly. If you're listening to this, there's probably a reason. Maybe her story is your story.
[11:17]
Maybe not the exact details, but the feeling of it, the years, the trying, the hoping something will finally work and then it doesn't. And then you try something else anyway because you can't stop because something in you keeps saying this is not how this is supposed to be. And maybe somebody in your life, someone who loves you, someone who's tired and scared and doesn't understand why nothing is working, has said to you, when are you going to stop?
[11:50]
Just take the medication. Are you really gonna try one more thing? And maybe you've paid in dollars, in years, in hope and things that didn't work In what this has cost your marriage In what you haven't been able to show up for. The version of yourself, the mother, the partner, the woman with a life that you've been trying to get back for longer than you should have had to.
[12:16]
You know what this has cost. Even if you've stopped counting, you know. And maybe there's some days where you wonder if they're right. Maybe the shame of still trying is getting louder than the hope. And before I go anything further, I want to address something specific. If part of you is wondering, am I too complicated for this?
[12:40]
Too many diagnoses, too many reactions, too many years. Is my case too far gone for even the right person to help? I want to talk about that because I get it, right? Why wouldn't you have that fear? You've accumulated a list of diagnoses. You react to everything. You may have been told directly or indirectly that your case is beyond what somebody can figure out.
[13:10]
That experience is real. But here's what I want you to know from nine years of working exclusively with women with migraines. A lot of diagnoses and a long history It's not a sign that you're beyond help. It's a sign that you've been looked at sort of piece by piece for a long time and nobody's looked at the whole picture.
[13:33]
The complexity is not the problem. It's the framework that's the problem. And a different framework gets different results. You're not too complicated. You are not broken. You are not crazy for knowing, like Rachel knew through four years in a diagnosis list as long as your arm, that your body is not supposed to stay stuck like this.
[13:56]
The reason nothing has worked is not because you didn't try hard enough or because your case is too difficult or because the right specialist is still out there somewhere. It's because nobody has asked the right question yet. Every practitioner you've seen has looked at a piece of you. Your head, your eyes, your hormones, your balance, your blood work.
[14:21]
Each one has tried to fix their little piece you've done everything they asked. You've played detective in a field that isn't yours for years, but nobody's asked why can't your body recover? And this is the question that changes everything because your body is designed to recover. I really want you to take that in.
[14:47]
It is not designed to stay sick. It is not designed to feel like this forever. From the moment you're injured or depleted or knocked flat, every system in your body is working to get you back. That's what your body wants. That's what it's always been trying to do. I know it feels like your body hates you and that you're broken and there's something defective in there.
[15:11]
I know you've been told that you have a migraine brain and that's why this is happening to you. That's not true. But there are things and I call them blockers that stop that recovery process. And when a blocker is in place, it doesn't matter how much you rest. It doesn't matter how well you eat, how many supplements you take, or how many specialists you go to.
[15:32]
Your body can't get through that blocker. Not because it isn't trying. It's because something is in the way. I've worked with women like Rachel, women who have come to me after years of searching, binders of lab work, a diagnosis list, and a medication list that keeps growing, and a body that's not recovering.
[15:52]
Women who have been to the top hospitals in the country and have been told there's nothing more to try. The answer for them was never. You're too complicated. The answer was always, Nobody had asked why your body, why this particular body can't recover. Nobody had gone looking for the blockers. And when we find the blockers, we don't throw everything at the wall. We get precise, we get targeted, and we go at a pace that doesn't knock you flat all over again.
[16:30]
Because I know what it looks like when someone has been through what you've been through. We build your recovery around your actual life, not some ideal version of your life where your body doesn't react to anything. Rachel's body had been trying to recover for four years, trying and trying. She could feel it trying.
[16:51]
That's why she never gave up. The feeling that this couldn't be permanent, that she wasn't supposed to feel like this forever, she was right. Her body was telling her the truth. But there were blockers nobody had found. And until someone found them, not just managed her symptoms, not handed her another diagnosis, not handed her another handout that gets handed out to every other patient that comes to the clinic, but found out what was actually blocking her recovery and addressed it.
[17:22]
Until that happened, her body could not finish what it was trying to do. So now, what are your symptoms, but why can't your body recover? Those are not the same question and they don't lead to the same place. So Rachel was not defective. She was blocked and those are completely different things. A defective body, somebody with a migraine brain, has something fundamentally wrong with it, something permanent to be managed and compensated for the rest of your life.
[17:57]
And that was the story being written for Rachel, one diagnosis at a time. Vestibular migraine, chronic fatigue syndrome, POTS, each one a label for a piece of her that wasn't working, each one basically saying this is just how you are now. A blocked body is different. A blocked body has an identifiable obstacle between where it is and where it's trying to go.
[18:27]
And identifiable obstacles have solutions. You don't manage an obstacle, you find it, you address it, and then you get out of the way and you let the body do what it's been trying to do all along. Her body had been working as hard as it could for as long as it could against something nobody had ever properly identified.
[18:46]
And that's a completely different story than the one that she'd been told. What would your next four years look like if someone finally found the blocker? Let me show you because Rachel found the door and I want to tell you what happened next. She found someone who didn't start with the symptoms, trying to make the symptoms go away.
[19:13]
That's what was different, not a new specialist with a different credential, not a medication nobody had ever thought to try before, not a new protocol that everybody goes through, not another person looking at one more piece of her. Someone who sat across from Rachel and didn't reach for the symptom list or what she'd already tried.
[19:38]
Someone who asked what nobody had asked before. Not what's wrong with you, But the first question, are you getting this nutrients that your cells need to your cells? Rachel had seen that question answered wrong more times than she could count. Not because the people treating her weren't trying, but because they were answering it from the wrong angle.
[20:12]
So the chiropractor that she had seen, he had understood, nutrition matters. If we're going to get nutrients to the cells, nutrition matters. So he had given Rachel a list, a healthy food list. So on one side of the piece of paper was the list of the healthy foods and on the other side of the piece of paper were the foods to avoid.
[20:34]
So, nutrient-dense, clean, exactly what a body trying to recover should be eating. Kale was on the healthy list and Rachel, because she wanted to get better more than anything she had ever wanted before in her life, went out and bought some kale. She made a salad, apples and raisins and some shredded carrots, a little chicken salad on top.
[21:03]
She was so excited. This was the right food. She was doing the right thing. Three days later, she was still in bed, vomiting, dry heaving, head pain bad enough that, she could have gone to the ER. But, she couldn't go to the ER because she'd already been three times and she knew what that was going to cost her.
[21:21]
Four hours under fluorescent lights before they even bring her back and then another three hours behind a curtain, right? The place that's supposed to help you in a crisis was one of the worst places that she could be. So she toughed it out for three days at home instead because a chiropractor put kale on a food list.
[21:44]
And here's what I want you to understand about that chiropractor. He wasn't wrong that kale, it's a health supporting food. It's a very nutrient-dense food. If you want to eat a lot of nutrients, eat some kale, right? He wasn't giving Rachel bad advice given the way he was trained to think about it, kale is nutrient-dense.
[22:03]
That is exactly the point. He was asking what foods are good for a body trying to recover and he answered that question correctly. He just wasn't asking the question that should have come first. Is there anything blocking Rachel's body from actually benefiting from this kale right now? And the answer was yes. Her digestive system had been in crisis since the delivery, since the hemorrhage, since four years of a body that couldn't properly break down what she was putting into it.
[22:39]
Whatever Rachel ate or whatever vitamins she took, the carefully chosen foods, the iron infusions that hadn't helped, her body couldn't move it to where it needed to go, Even the iron infusions are bypassing her digestive tract and she was still anemic. It's not because she wasn't eating the right things, it's because the delivery system was broken.
[23:00]
Her body couldn't carry what she was putting in. So we didn't start with kale, okay? The question for me wasn't, what is the healthiest food for any body trying to recover? The question was, what can Rachel actually receive right now? The answer in those early weeks was, almost nothing too complicated. So that's exactly where we started.
[23:29]
She ate what her body could actually handle. Food that went down without a fight, Food her digestive system could succeed with instead of spending three days recovering from. The goal wasn't the so called optimal diet. It was what her body could receive today and we build from there. And alongside that, one drop, a single drop of a gentle herbal tincture chosen specifically for Rachel to very lightly encourage her digestive function to start doing its job again.
[24:08]
Not a supplement protocol, not ten capsules with every meal. One drop in a glass of water. Nobody practices this way. Not because practitioners don't care about getting the dose right, it's because without a map, without something that shows you exactly where in the chain things have broken down and exactly how depleted this specific body is, you're approximating.
[24:32]
You give the kale because it's objectively the right food. You give ten capsules because that's the standard starting point. And when you approximate with a body like Rachel's, you're gonna knock her flat. One drop was all that she could receive. And so that's where we started. Two weeks later, her heartburn was about 50% better.
[24:56]
Gas and bloating down about 25%. But here's the thing that mattered the most to me. By nine o'clock in the morning, she was hungry. She hadn't been able to eat anything before one in the afternoon for years. Not remembering that she was supposed to eat. This is not forcing herself to have something because, everybody knows you're supposed to eat breakfast.
[25:20]
Actually hungry. Her body sending the signal that a working digestive tract sends. The ordinary unremarkable signal that she hadn't felt in years. That's not a percentage improvement on a symptom scale. That's her body beginning to trust itself again and beginning to function normally. Four weeks in, she's eating foods that she hasn't eaten in years.
[25:48]
Waking up with more energy, not like a transformation, not a dramatic reversal. But something that's noticeable, something that she can feel. The dizziness is starting to improve. The head pain, it's starting later in the day. She's actually having some head pain free hours in the morning. Not a lot of them, but they're there.
[26:06]
Where before there were none. And then one day she leaves the house without her sunglasses, okay? She doesn't even notice it until she's about 15 minutes into the car ride. 15 minutes of ordinary light through an ordinary windshield without her body raising an alarm. And again, not because she was trying to test herself. She didn't muster up the courage and bravely go out without them.
[26:31]
She just simply forgot the way you forget to do something you no longer need to do. And her body in 15 minutes of no protection, it didn't react. She'd been wearing sunglasses every time she left the house for years and she forgot them. So four weeks in, her body had shown that it could, break more food down.
[26:57]
It could receive and deliver more nutrients. Not fully, not all the way back, but we're getting that signal. Which meant it was time for the second question. And can your body clear what doesn't belong? Can it clear waste materials and toxins that don't belong there? Now Rachel's functional medicine doctor had understood that the body needs to clear that toxins, metabolic waste material, things that accumulate when a system has been struggling, all have to move out. The functional medicine doctor knew this concept and boy, did she have a great tool for that.
[27:37]
So she's scheduled Rachel for a detox IV with glutathione. Now this is not a fringe treatment. IV glutathione is a standard functional medicine approach. Glutathione, a lot of times it's called the master antioxidant. It's one of the primary nutrients that the liver uses to run detoxification pathways. That's processing toxins so that they can get out of the body.
[28:06]
So this isn't, like a fringe idea, you know, it's a very standard recommendation that functional medicine doctors will give. So, the liver needs support. Here's direct support for the liver. Let's give you a thousand milligrams of glutathione right into your bloodstream. That will be a great idea. Well, after the IV was over, Rachel's dizziness spiked so severely that she couldn't drive herself home.
[28:36]
Her husband had to come to the clinic and pick her up. And the dizziness stayed elevated for five days. Not because it was a malpractice, not because the logic wasn't sound. It's because a body with no reserves can't run that fast. You've got four years of a system in crisis, four years of not getting the nutrients to the cells and not clearing waste material.
[29:06]
And now you're gonna push the liver to process everything faster. But the liver needs other nutrients than glutathione for detoxification pathways. It also needs cellular energy. You can't ask a depleted system, a depleted liver to move fast when it doesn't have what it needs to move that fast. And when you do that, you get exactly what Rachel got.
[29:31]
You get worse, not better, more symptoms, not fewer. Another thing that was supposed to help left her flattened. She felt terrible for not being able to tolerate it. And the worst part, the nurses in the IV clinic acted like she was crazy. Same principle as before. What can this body actually tolerate right now?
[29:58]
Again, five drops of an herb chosen specifically to very gently push her liver to move a little bit faster. Not even a push, not a demand, just a little nudge. Same philosophy as the first question. Calibrate to actual capacity. Build on what the body demonstrates it can handle. Don't ask more of it than what it has to give.
[30:35]
And something starts to happen when those first two questions start being answered. The static starts to clear. Think of, those old car radios, the kind with the dial you turn to find the station. Remember those? The DJ's playing, you can kind of hear the DJ through the static, but there's so much static between what you can hear and the DJ's voice that you really can't quite make out what the DJ is saying. That's what it's like when you have a body that can't get the nutrients to the cells and it can't clear waste material.
[31:10]
You're bombarded so loudly with all of these different symptoms. So constant in your reactions that you can't distinguish one signal from another. Everything hurts. Everything is hard. Stress makes it worse, but everything makes it worse. So that fact alone tells you nothing. But when the first two questions start being answered, when the body begins to receive nutrients to the cells, and when the body starts eliminating waste material and toxins from the body, the noise starts to quiet and then you can start to hear what's actually playing on the radio.
[31:45]
And for Rachel, what came through was this. She'd been feeling better week by week, a little bit better, and then something happened. Something ordinary, the kind of thing that just happens and she crashed hard, back in the dark, back in pain. That crash was information. Before, when she felt terrible all the time, every crash looked the same.
[32:14]
There was no before, there was no contrast to read. It's like, well, this is how it is, it's my day to day. But now there was a before, a feeling of better. And out of that better, something specific had knocked her flat, which meant something in that event had sent a signal her body was still responding to, a signal that had been there all along, just buried under the noise.
[32:39]
And that brought the third question to the surface. Can you weather stressors? Here's what that question is actually asking. I like to think that our body has a compass needle. When the needle is pointing north, you're in a state of health. Your body is functioning the way it's designed to. It's not generating symptoms.
[33:03]
That's north. That's where we want to be. But that needle is being pushed down constantly. Everything pushes it down towards west, towards the symptom zone, physical stressors, the heat, the barometric pressure dropping, a night a bad sleep, a meal you missed, a bad flu. We have mental and emotional stressors, a conflict at work, a hard conversation, a week that asks a lot more of you than what you had.
[33:31]
All of that is pushing the needle down. What pushes the needle back up is your resiliency and vitality. Think of it as a vitality bucket. The fuller the bucket, the more power you have, the more vitality, the more oomph you have to push back when life knocks you down. If you've got a full bucket, you go out to the beach in the August heat, you come home fine.
[33:52]
You miss lunch, you eat when you can, no migraine. You've got a terrible week at work, you get to Friday, and you're okay. Your needle bounces back. But when that bucket is low, when your resiliency and vitality is depleted, the needle barely moves. It hovers in the symptom zone, In any little thing, any small additional push, tips it over.
[34:17]
The third question is, is your vitality bucket full enough to push back? I've been working exclusively with women with migraines for nine years now. For most of the women I work with, the answer is no. Not because they haven't tried, but because their vitality bucket has holes in the bottom. They're pouring things in the top as fast as they can.
[34:41]
The sleep, the supplements, the morning sunlight, the careful eating, and it's running out of the bottom just as fast. Because there are things draining that bucket that they don't even know about. Holes they've been unaware of, probably, for most of their lives. Let me walk you through what those holes look like. The one who can't leave anything unfinished or who does other people's work over because nobody else will do it right.
[35:13]
Who has actual physical discomfort when something is left undone. She doesn't call it perfectionism. She calls it standards. That's a hole in the bottom of the vitality bucket. Then we have the fixer, the mediator. She feels the tension in the room before anyone else does. She jumps in before conflict erupts. She apologizes when she isn't wrong just to bring the temperature down.
[35:39]
She feels responsible for other people's moods. At a family gathering, if someone in the room is unhappy, she can't fully relax. That's a hole in the vitality bucket. Then we have the overgiver. She says, yes, when she means no, she gives more than she has and then she collapses. She feels guilty resting when something still needs to be done.
[36:08]
She measures her worth by what she produces. That's a hole in the vitality bucket. We have, the one who works twice as hard, hoping someone will notice, who tracks whether the effort was seen. A genuine thank you lands, but the satisfaction of that fades quickly. The next project starts and the cycle begins again.
[36:32]
That's a hole in the vitality bucket. We have the one who's always on alert, who rehearses conversations before having them, who monitors the emotional temperature of everyone around her constantly, who finds it hard to fully relax around certain people, who feels relief when a tense moment passes and then immediately starts scanning for the next one.
[36:58]
That's a hole in the vitality bucket. So look at all of that. Just look at it. The vigilance alone is exhausting and it doesn't turn off. It runs all day, every day at work, at home, at Thanksgiving dinner. Not because something is going wrong because this is just how she operates. It's been how she operates probably for most of her life.
[37:22]
She probably just thinks it's her personality. Here's the important thing. These holes don't drain the bucket only when something goes wrong. They drain it constantly. Tuesday afternoon, nothing wrong, nobody upset. And the bucket is still draining right out of the bottom because the hypervigilance is still running. And that's why the bucket never fills.
[37:45]
That's why the woman who, eats clean, sleeps eight hours, meditates, takes her supplements and does everything right still gets migraines. The things that she's doing, they're real. They do help fill the bucket in many cases, but if the drain outpaces what you're putting in, you're never gonna fill that bucket up and the hole is open 24 hours a day.
[38:13]
So Rachel had one of these patterns. And when she crashed, when something ordinary knocked her flat after weeks of progress, that crash was actually pointing to it, specifically a pattern that had been there all along probably for years before the delivery room, probably long before the migraines. And she had done a brain retraining program.
[38:37]
You know, you've heard about these the structured daily practices, the visualization work, the pattern interruption exercises. Again, these are legitimate tools, these can help people, these can be real programs. And in the controlled environment of the program, when she went inpatient away from the ordinary demands of her life, yeah, she did feel a little bit better.
[39:03]
But then she went home and within days, everything collapsed again, because brain retraining works on the response to the signal, it's downstream of the stress and the hypervigilance. It gives the nervous system tools to manage the alarm when it fires, but the signal itself is still transmitting. The hole is still open, the bucket is still draining.
[39:27]
So you can train or retrain your response all you want. The thing that keeps setting off the alarm is still there, doing exactly what it's always done. But actually shifts this is going upstream, you find the signal, you find the actual fire, you trace it back. Where did this pattern come from? When did she first learn that this was the rule?
[39:54]
And once you can actually see it for what it is, instead of just, living inside of it and writing it off as a personality trait, you can ask, is this true? Was this a useful belief to pick up? Do I still need it? What would a regular Thursday look like if I weren't running according to this rule?
[40:16]
And here's what I found sometimes, just seeing it is enough, the thing loses its grip once you can look at it directly. Sometimes deeper work is needed, but being able to see it is always where it starts. Once you can look at it directly, that hole starts to close. And here's what I need to say about the order of all of this.
[40:39]
You cannot do this type of work when you're lying in a dark room for three days at a time. You can't examine a pattern you've carried your whole life when you're just waiting for the pain to ease up enough so that you can go to the bathroom. That kind of work requires something in reserve.
[40:54]
It requires that the person has started to feel a little bit better, started to clear a little bit better, built up enough capacity that looking at this doesn't just add to the pile one more thing I've got to do. And this is why for most people, the first two questions come first, not because the third question is optional.
[41:28]
In my experience, many times this third piece is often the difference between, slight improvement and very meaningful improvement. But it requires the person to have something to work with. We've got to have some capacity. And as the first two questions start being answered, and we start to feel better, we have more capacity to take a look at what might be draining us inadvertently without us knowing it.
[41:56]
Well, let's get back to Rachel, okay? The migraines didn't just disappear one morning. That's not how this story goes. I wish it worked that way. I wish I could tell you that Rachel woke up on a specific Wednesday and the pain was simply gone and never came back. I have worked with hundreds of women like Rachel, and that is not what happens 99 out of 100 times.
[42:20]
And, honestly, I wish that had been the case for me, but it was not. I'm like the 99, not the 100. So what happens is this. Every week gets a little bit better. Every month, a little bit more. Three days in a dark room becomes one day. Four Imitrex in a week becomes two, and then becomes one.
[42:49]
The head pain that was there from the moment she opened her eyes starts arriving later in the day and then later still. And then one morning, she looks at her migraine tracker and realizes she hasn't touched an Imitrex in ten days. Not because she decided she was going to test herself. She was going to cold turkey.
[43:08]
She was going to white knuckle it. She just hadn't needed it. She hadn't noticed that she wasn't reaching for it until she looked back and found out that she hadn't. And that's how real improvement works. Many times you don't even notice that it's happening. You look back and you realize you've been better for a while.
[43:25]
And that's what I mean when I've said on the podcast that the rising tide lifts all of the symptom boats. That's what recovery and restoring your health actually looks like. The tide comes in and the boats rise. Not all at once. It's not a perfect analogy. Not in the same order for every woman.
[43:48]
One woman's migraines might improve in the first few weeks. But another woman finds that first her energy starts returning. Her sleep starts improving. And actually the head pain is one of the last things that shifts. Your body decides the order. And I don't try to change that. I accept that. I ask only one question.
[44:10]
Are the boats rising? For Rachel they rose slowly then more steadily. The dizziness that she had for years 50% better, then more. The light sensitivity that had kept her behind dark glasses even in her own home. Easing up. The heart racing every time she stood up. Quieting. And the migraines. Fewer. Shorter. Less brutal.
[44:36]
Not gone overnight. But the worst days were getting less severe. The good stretches were getting longer. And overall she could feel it. And this is another tremendous difference because we're just so desperate to make the migraines go away. I've heard this so many times. Dr. Leslie I don't care about the heartburn. I don't care if I'm laying awake for two hours every night.
[44:57]
I don't care if I have to urinate three times in the middle of the night. Just make my migraines go away. But we don't realize that all those symptoms are connected. And if we're doing something and it only makes one symptom better. But It doesn't have that rising tide effect. We're not actually on the right track.
[45:25]
And this is the mistake that a lot of practitioners make frankly. But definitely a lot of migraine sufferers make. We can't just say are the migraines getting better. We have to look at the full picture. We've got to look at all of the boats in the harbor. And are they all starting to move.
[45:40]
And if one starts to move and another and another even if it's not the migraines we are probably on the right track. And that migraine boat one day is going to untether itself and it's going to start to lift up with the tide too. So now Rachel makes dinner on a regular Tuesday.
[46:04]
And I know for some people that might sound small but for those of us that know chronic migraines we know that that's no small deal. For years dinner was something that happened without her. Her husband managing it her older kids stepping in and everybody working around her downstairs while she's upstairs laying in a dark room waiting for the pain to pass.
[46:29]
Tuesday was something to endure and now it's just dinner. She makes it. The family sits down and the evening belongs to all of them again. She drives her kids to school. She makes plans. She mostly keeps them. Not always she's human and her body still has some opinions but mostly she shows up.
[46:52]
And that's what the boats rising in that tide of health looks like. And I want to tell you about someone real. Her name is Jody and this is her story. Jody found me the way a lot of women find me alone in a dark room curtains drawn. Nothing she could tolerate. No light no noise no smell.
[47:18]
And she was snacking on crackers because that was all her body would accept for days in a row. She had been to the top clinics in the country. Duke the Mayo Clinic up and down the eastern seaboard. Every specialist with a reputation and a waiting list. She had been given everything that medicine had to give her.
[47:38]
Every injection. Every medication. Every approach that existed. And she was in a dark room eating crackers. She started listening to my podcast because she was bored and lonely and had nothing else to do. Maybe you're listening to this right now in the exact same situation. Within a year of us working together she was at a farmers market every Saturday all summer on her feet all day in the heat In the noise surrounded by smells and people and the full sensory overload of an outdoor farmers market.
[48:11]
She started a baking business something that she couldn't have imagined doing while she was eating crackers in the dark. And Jody was selling out every week repeat customers who came back for the same thing every week all summer. I hear her cookie butter stuffed cookies are legendary. She danced all night at her nephew's wedding recently.
[48:44]
She took her sunglasses off in public inside stores outside in the summer light and she didn't put them back on. She drove through mountain passes without getting carsick. She told me that at some point she realized that she stopped packing her migraine kit for car trips. Not as a test. She just forgot to pack it because she hadn't needed it.
[49:10]
One of my favorite stories because really when we started working together the only food that she could eat were crackers. She had crackers up in her bedroom. She had crackers in her car. She had these boxes of crackers stashed. And after she started feeling better one day her girls got in a car with her.
[49:34]
They're late teen girls. And they said, Hey Mom, we're hungry. Where's your crackers? And she said, I don't have crackers in the car. And her daughter's like, What do you mean you don't have crackers? You know We're hungry. We want your crackers. Where are your crackers? And she's like, I don't have crackers in my car anymore.
[49:48]
I don't just eat crackers anymore. So not only her medication bag was absent from the vehicle but also the crackers. And her daughter's got left in the lurch over that. It was one of my favorite stories. Her family through all of this, Her dancing at her nephew's wedding, standing in the farmer's market, walking around Costco without her sunglasses, her family kept looking at her.
[50:11]
How are you not sick? That question. How are you not sick? Coming from the people who watched her be sick for years, who reorganized their lives around her absence, who'd learned not to expect her. And there she was, present, selling out her cookie butter stuffed cookies at a farmer's market on a hot Saturday in August.
[50:36]
That's what the rising tide of the symptom boats looks like. So I want to come back to you now. You've been sitting with three questions as I've been telling you Rachel's story. Maybe you've been applying them to yourself without meaning to, wondering which one is yours. Whether the answer to the first question is yes for your body or whether something has been blocking that delivery all along.
[51:04]
Whether you've ever had that second question asked. Or whether everyone has been so focused on treating your symptoms that clearing metabolic waste material was never part of the conversation. And the third question, the hole in the bottom of the vitality bucket. I don't know if you felt something when I went through that list, but if you did, that might be an intelligent tap on the shoulder.
[51:30]
Your body is asking these three questions right now. As you listen to this, every system in your body is working to get you there. That's not optimism. That's biology. That's what your body is designed to do. And it's been trying to do through everything that you've been through. But if there's a blocker, if something is standing between your body and the answer that it's reaching for, it doesn't matter how hard your body tries or you try.
[52:08]
It can't get through on its own. What Rachel needed wasn't more effort, more willpower, more white knuckling. She had given four years of effort. What she needed was for someone to look at the whole chain, not a piece of it, not her head or her sensitive eyes or her blood work in isolation.
[52:27]
She needed someone to find out where it had broken down specifically for her and at this particular point. And then address it gently at the pace that her body could actually sustain and benefit from. And this was a completely different thing than anything that she had tried before. So, I want to ask you what I wish someone had asked Rachel four years ago.
[53:01]
What would the next four years look like if someone finally found the blocker, not managed your symptoms either with drugs or supplements or cracking your neck, not handed you another diagnosis, not injected more things into your body, but found out what was standing between you and your recovery and got it out of the way.
[53:23]
What would it mean to drive your kids to school, to make dinner on a regular Tuesday, to go to the birthday party and really be there, not counting down until you can get home and lie down or even worse, worrying the day before, am I gonna make it? Am I gonna let my friend down one more time?
[53:45]
And this is not a dream. This is what your body is trying to do right now as you listen to this. It just needs someone to help it find the door. And you don't need anyone's permission to find out if this is right for you. And if there's someone in your life you want to bring into this conversation first, a husband, a partner, someone who's been part of this journey and needs to understand what you're considering, I understand that.
[54:09]
The door is open for all of you. So if this is what you've been looking for, I'd like to invite you to book a free consultation call with me. And again, you're free to bring any of those support people with you. In fact, I encourage you to do that. And we're going to spend about 30 minutes talking about your migraines and any other health concerns that you have.
[54:36]
And then we're going to put together a game plan to get your life back. I think it's going to be the best 30 minutes you've spent on your health in a long time. So if you'd like to talk with me, book that free consultation call. The link to do that is in the description.
[54:52]
And thanks so much for joining me today. I really built this episode really to speak to those women who find the podcast because they are laying in bed in a dark room. Most of my clients, that's how they find me. They're suffering from a migraine and they're lying in a dark room, bored, passing the time.
[55:16]
When is this going to lift? When am I going to be able to re-enter my life? And let me pass the time. And I need something new to listen to. And so that's where they find this. So today I really wanted to speak to you if you're laying there in that dark room.
[55:38]
Because I've been there too. Trust me. I've been in that dark room, laying there, watching the minutes tick by right? And wondering what's going to happen. I need to get up. But if I get up, am I going to get real nauseous again? I finally got the pounding tamped down a little bit.
[55:54]
If I move, am I going to be in agony again? We're literally stuck. So thanks for listening. My heart goes out to you and I will talk to you soon.
