Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #39. Chasing the Word 'Healed' Is Tightening the Grip Your Chronic Illness Has on Your Body

Transcript

#39. Chasing the Word 'Healed' Is Tightening the Grip Your Chronic Illness Has on Your Body · Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took one appointment for a doctor to slap a chronic label on you and tell you it's for life.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you've built your entire recovery around waiting for them to take it back.
• 0:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Tecla de Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease.
• 0:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, andometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
• 0:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
• 0:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shares mind-body education.
• 0:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to complement not replace your medical care.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
• 1:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover why the goal of reversing your diagnosis can stall your healing progress more than the diagnosis itself, how waiting for a doctor to call you healed is impacting your ability to actually do that and how to recognize real healing in your body without waiting on anyone else to confirm it or validate it.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Almost every woman who gets a
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Heal it, reverse it, make it disappear completely.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on the surface level, there's nothing wrong with that.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the most natural thing in the world to want your body and your life back.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: But look closely at what that goal is actually built on.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's built on hearing one very specific thing, and you're relying on a very specific person to say it.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about how the label got there in the first place.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took one appointment.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You walked in, you described what was happening.
• 1:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: They ran tests, and they handed you a diagnosis, and told you it was chronic.
• 2:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Forever, for life.
• 2:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is what doctors are trained to do, and they're good at it.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They identify what is wrong, and they prescribe what helps to manage it long-term.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is their wheelhouse.
• 2:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But here is what that same training means.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside that mainstream model, chronic means lifelong.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not a word they tend to take back.
• 2:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unless you happen to be working with a functional or holistic doctor who sees the body differently, reversal is not really a verdict their framework is built to issue.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even if you are working with those types of doctors, they are hesitant to do so anyway since they didn't diagnose you originally.
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So sit with what you've actually done.
• 2:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have set up your entire recovery around hearing a word that the people who labeled you were never set up to say.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like you're waiting patiently outside a door that doesn't even open from that side.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that changes how you measure everything.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It turns healing into something that's very black and white.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: All or nothing.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're either healed or you're still sick.
• 3:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no in-between.
• 3:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no gray area.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: So every real improvement that happens along the way, every week that's better.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every symptom that came and passed without taking you out, you dismiss it.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't count.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because nobody official has confirmed it.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because your body has not yet snapped perfectly into that one fixed picture of reversed or healed that you have been holding in your head.
• 3:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the pattern.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have outsourced the definition of healed.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have taken the single most important measurement in your own recovery.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The call on whether your body is actually getting better and you have handed it to someone whose role was only ever to manage the symptoms.
• 3:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not to give you your life back.
• 3:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Just to manage it.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as long as that definition lives externally outside of you, you'll likely never achieve it.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have this conversation with so many of the women I work with, and it came up again a few weeks ago.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A woman I'm working with has an autoimmune disease.
• 4:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you know anything about autoimmune conditions, you know that nobody in conventional medicine is going to tell her one day that she is completely totally 100% healed like it never existed.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not language they use.
• 4:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: If anything they use the word remission, and still remission doesn't mean perfectly healed, it means that right now the symptoms aren't prevalent.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're not coming up.
• 4:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're not consuming your day.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But she never thought about it that way.
• 4:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I asked her a simple question, what does healed actually mean to you?
• 4:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And without missing a beat, she said, I get the old clear from my doctor.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I asked her the thing that almost nobody considers.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: What if that moment never comes?
• 4:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: What if the all clear you're waiting for is not something your doctor is ever going to hand you?
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Does that mean if you're symptoms settle completely?
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: If they show up maybe once every few months and post quickly that you are somehow still not healed.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the real question, what do you actually want?
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it came pouring out of her.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to go back to normal life.
• 5:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to stop being consumed by my symptoms.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to stop thinking about my body all the time and want to eat whatever I want.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I told her their truth.
• 5:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every single one of those things is completely possible without that label ever being formally removed.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: not one of them requires a doctor to sign off on it.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can have all of it.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've just been told it doesn't count until someone official says it's real or valid enough.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want to tell you where I've lived this myself because it's not as clean as people think.
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was actually fortunate enough to find a doctor and who said and I'll never forget this.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was looking at my labs, hundreds and hundreds of tests and said, if I was seeing her labs today as a brand new patient, I would tell you that you are perfectly healthy and send you on your way.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I walked out thinking, I did it, it's done, and then life kept happening.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I took a trip to mark a big transition between two very different chapters of my life, and while I was away without knowing it, I was exposed to toxic black mold for months.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: That triggered an entirely new condition, Marcel activation syndrome.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: That condition was in remission for many, many months after that, and then this year has been a hard one for me.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've had flare-ups and it has been more
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I'm not sitting here believing all of that progress was not real.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not waiting for someone to walk in and announce, done, reversed, gone.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not what healed looks like for me.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It looks like managing the actual root of it, immunotherapy for my allergies.
• 6:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Looking after my nervous system, so emotional stress and turmoil do not set off a flare.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because from a cell activation, the mind-body link is enormous.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It looks like learning to handle stress better than I used to.
• 7:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: My skin clearing and no longer being something I have to think about every day.
• 7:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are things I want for my life, and I've had them for months and months at a time.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is what I consider healed, and it's not coming from a doctor.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when I tell you that you get to decide what healed means, I'm not saying it from the far side of some perfect finish line.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm saying it as a woman who's been there and is also now reliving it in real time, the ups and the downs and everything in between.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's also coming from a woman who stopped tending that definition to someone else a long time ago.
• 7:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So why does this become physical?
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why does we're fusing to count your own progress actually cost your body?
• 7:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your brain is a prediction machine.
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every second of every day, it is running a model of you.
• 7:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: An internal picture of what your body is and what it can expect.
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it keeps that picture up to date using evidence.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: New information comes in and your brain decides what to do with it based on how much weight that information is given.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Strong, trusted evidence updates the picture.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Evidence has been told not to trust, gets set aside.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the part that matters for you.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: You are the one who decides how much weight your own experience gets.
• 8:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most people never realize they have that power, but you use it constantly, and somewhere along the way you handed it over.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: You decided that your own experience of your body does not get to carry much weight at all.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The better week is real, but it doesn't count because a test has not confirmed it.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The symptom that came and paused is real, but it doesn't count because a doctor has not signed off on it.
• 8:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've quietly made a rule for yourself.
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing about my body is real until someone outside of me validates it.
• 8:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what what happens to the evidence?
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The progress shows up, exactly the information your brain needs to update the picture, but you have stamped it as not trustworthy, not yet not official.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So your brain gives it almost no weight.
• 9:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: An evidence that carries no weight doesn't have the power to change anything, so the update never happens.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your body is improving in real time and the one system that needs to register that improvement has been instructed to ignore it.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the only evidence you have allowed to count is a judgment from someone else.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the why.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why we care about this.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not that your progress is too small to matter.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's that you have given every bit of authority over what is real about your body to people outside of you.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a brain that is only allowed to trust an outside verdict is a brain that keeps your body waiting.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: indefinitely for a permission to be okay again.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So here's what I want you to do this week.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is the thing that starts handing the authority back to you.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: take 15 minutes, somewhere quiet on your own.
• 10:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want you to write down the answer to this one question.
• 10:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is healed actually look like for me?
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not talking about the diagnosis being formally reversed or the all-clear from your doctor.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: What I want from you is the actual picture of your life.
• 10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Get specific because the specifics are the whole point.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe healed means you can go out to brunch and order what you actually feel like eating without running through a list of what's anti-inflammatory or not in your head first.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it means you can go away with your partner for the weekend and not be packing a bag full of supplements.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not mentally protecting your healing routine the entire time, just actually being away with them.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Maybe it means you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think about is your skin care and what you're going to wear and the coffee you get to have.
• 10:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not your symptoms or the protocol, just your day.
• 10:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Write all of those moments down, every piece of what you want your life to look like as vividly as possible.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because here is what happens when you do this.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the first time you have a definition of healed that does not belong to anyone else.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not a verdict someone in a white coat has to hand you.
• 11:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a picture of a life and it's yours and you can actually look at it and see how close you already are to parts of it.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of you might be living already and have never let yourself count it or notice.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The definition you write this week is where it starts, but there's a reason you handed your power away to begin with.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is an emotional pattern.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as you have come to learn throughout this entire podcast, emotional patterns are linked to real physical symptoms.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not the only one.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: My free chat GPT prompt is how you identify the others that are specific to you, your symptoms and your experience.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It takes 30 seconds to find out because you can't change what you can't see.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the show notes.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's recap what we talked about today.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Waiting on your doctor to call you healed hands your power to a person and a moment that may never come.
• 12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your brain can't update its picture of your body using evidence you don't consider real or valid enough.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And healed is yours to define.
• 12:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Write the picture and measure your recovery against that.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you in the next episode.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Goodbye for now.