If I was starting over on a therapy and wellness journey, I would start with a really good private blood test.
This is the story of how I came to believe my very treatable health issues were energy issues and triggers.
I work in somatic coaching, so I have spent a lot of years around the other ways in to “doing the work” as people often say.
In most cases, you start with the story of your childhood and then you move on to labeling and sorting your parents, kids, friends and spouse. You build a web of stories with causes and effects. When you get upset you look for a reason. When life doesn’t go your way, you see it as a problem to solve.
I think most people stop here. They spend their life deciding who is healthy and who is toxic in any given scenario. Then move forward creating rules they call boundaries and condemnations they call standing up for themselves to keep out the people they deem to be bad.
But maybe, like I did, you go deeper.
Asking questions like why your energy drops out of your body after a fight, why your stomach tenses up when someone is talking to you in a certain way, why you cannot come back once you are already going.
You learn a new language. Trauma response, stored pain, energy blocks, trigger.
You pick up new ways of thinking too. Like, this is what the body physiologically looks like after a trigger, and you just need to relax, and you need to do work on yourself.
It’s not all wrong. The work of repairing the relationship your body has with pain, stress and memory is valuable work but it can create other problems too.
The last year of my life was a total reset.
I had a personal crisis, a bunch of weird relational moments, another business that took off faster than I was ready for and then I got married, and then I had some time to reflect on what happened. Not just what happened in the last year, but what happened in the last ten years. Maybe even in the last 20.
Did I get, as I would say, a little blue pilled or a little man-hating in ways that actually drew in men who couldn’t really show up for me. Yes.
I think man-hating therapy culture actually attracts men who will play some kind of a weird game, a pretending game, follow rules, agree to behave and be sorted.
I have been looking back across who made those rules. What parts of what I picked up in the past few decades have been me? What parts of my early life I want to return to?
The wellness industry is very good at teaching you to pick people apart, and then to pick yourself apart, and then to treat the picking as the path forward toward buying ways to solve those problems.
I had to work my way out of that in order to re-create my relationships.
The man-hating phase and the labeling language that I have had to let go of would not be the thing I would change first.
If I was starting over on a wellness journey, or a path-to-me journey, or whatever we call it, I would start with a blood test.
Something really interesting happened to me over the past few years. I realized I was severely anemic. Anemic to the bone. My iron was never tested through three births. You have to be anemic for some time in the U.S. for your iron to be tested because it has to start to impact other more standard tests.
My ferritin levels were so low for so long that it finally showed up in other ways. I requested an iron panel. You have to remember, otherwise I am super healthy. So I wouldn’t have seen it. I drink tons of water and I don’t eat any sugar, my BMI is stellar.
So I didn’t know that I was anemic. I wasn’t researching what was causing it either.
When I did my first iron infusion to treat anemia, a lot of the things that I was told in traditional therapy were trauma responses magically went away.
The way I thought I was getting triggered: I would get upset, and then I’d have this emotional drop, where I couldn’t come back from it. It was like I was riding down a hill. Once I was on it I was on it. There was no climbing back while I was still going down. I just had to wait until I got to the bottom, and then do more work on why I was the kind of person who went down hills.
What if I knew a large part of it was due to anemia, not because of my trauma, not because I am some label but because of a really treatable issue?
This isn’t really about anemia or my health journey it’s about perception and story. It’s about how easy it is to start re-organizing your entire life in a way that won’t solve anything.
How much of my perception of my reality was changed through therapy stories? How much of yours is being changed?
What if I had just started my wellness journey with a full blood test. A really good one that checks 200 markers. You just buy it yourself, you spend a couple hundred bucks each time, and you create a baseline. Then of course now we have AI, and so with the data I knew to go in asking certain questions.
How dangerous is it to think that you’re just triggered? Or you have a label like autism or ADHD or depression. Or that your partner does. When there is another problem going on.
I have spent a lot of time evaluating everything, and two things have happened for me lately.
I have brought back more of my religious beliefs. Not spiritual but actual ancient texts. My husband and I study the intersection of Christianity, Buddhism and more modern frameworks. What these texts give me are a feeling of not being responsible for everything, but being responsible for how I interplay with the circumstances offered to me by a force outside of my control.
A faith that things are the way they are, and there are lots of things I can’t change, but I’m only responsible for how I interplay with them.
When trials show up I find myself leaning towards older ideas again. Like love needs to be tested. Faith needs to be tested. Not seeing everything as my fault, but also not being the victim of it.
I am in a period of that.
Second, I am going to spend my next year answering my questions.
Who made the rules, what was me, what was sold to me in a very expensive vocabulary? What did I toss out as toxic that I need to go find again?
I am going to pull back the veil a little bit. You can expect lots more new things here, and of course on Medium.
This is where I’m at.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I have a women’s class on somatic faith starting soon email me for details:
christina @christinaelaine.comI am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.
"What these texts give me are a feeling of not being responsible for everything, but being responsible for how I interplay with the circumstances offered to me by a force outside of my control." - Thats the key move there. Its a fundamental shift in how most people relate with "reality".