Latest / Migraine Healing Oasis / Ep 16. Anna's Healing Journey:"100% Imperfectly Recovered" from Chronic Migraine and Stepping into Visibility

Transcript

Ep 16. Anna's Healing Journey:"100% Imperfectly Recovered" from Chronic Migraine and Stepping into Visibility · Migraine Healing Oasis

• 0:51
  Today I am talking to Anna Holzman.
• 0:53
  Anna is a licensed psychotherapist, certified coach, and an expert in nervous system healing, and she's trained in somatic experiencing pain reprocessing therapy and nonviolent communications as well.
• 1:06
  She's helped hundreds of people heal from chronic pain and symptoms, both in her private practice, as well as working for the company that produces the Curable app as a curable group leader.
• 1:16
  She's currently shifted her business from helping people out of chronic pain to helping them thrive once they're feeling well again.
• 1:23
  So she uses those same tools to help high level creatives and entrepreneurs melt through fears, expand their impact, and own their voice with confidence.
• 1:33
  I met Anna in Boulder, Colorado last September at a conference, and she and I have similar backgrounds of navigating migraine while holding down high pressure and fast-paced careers.
• 1:44
  I've asked her to come here to talk to us, to share her insights about healing and to let us know more about this exciting new chapter of moving past, being so focused on recovery and being at the mercy of our symptoms to thriving and getting to create this life on our own terms.
• 2:02
  And that's the stage that I know that you'll be in at some point.
• 2:05
  It is possible.
• 2:07
  So our conversation is full of great insights on what Anna did to heal.
• 2:12
  What the turning points in her journey were and a good discussion around what recovery means to us.
• 2:19
  So let's dive in and see what bits and pieces might just be helpful for you.
• 2:23
  I am so excited that you're joining me here today.
• 2:26
  We met in Boulder actually, and had a great chat.
• 2:30
  It was very clear that our backgrounds were a bit similar and then with the migraine.
• 2:35
  I've been watching the things that you've done since then, and just so excited that you're here to talk with us and give us some insights.
• 2:43
  I wanted to first talk to you about your story.
• 2:46
  I don't feel like there's a lot of migraine stories out there, and I want to be able to have this be a place where people are seeing that success can happen, healing can happen, and so can we start there.
• 3:00
  Tell me about your journey and your experience with migraine or other symptoms if you had.
• 3:05
  Absolutely.
• 3:06
  And Karen, it's so great to see you again.
• 3:08
  It was wonderful meeting you in person in Boulder.
• 3:11
  And, thank you for having me here.
• 3:13
  I'm happy to tell my migraine recovery story and I just wanna start by saying, I find it surprising that there aren't more migraine recovery stories out there that are accessible.
• 3:25
  I know there are a bunch.
• 3:26
  So many people have recovered from migraines it's absolutely possible.
• 3:31
  And when I say recover, I don't mean that I have zero symptoms anymore, but I'll get into that.
• 3:38
  Recovery doesn't mean perfection, and that's a part of the story.
• 3:41
  So I experienced my first ever migraine attack, when I was I think around 30 years old, and it happened on the very first day.
• 3:54
  I started a new job and I had changed careers.
• 3:58
  So part of my story is that I've changed careers many times and I changed from, journalism to film and TV editing.
• 4:06
  And I got my first job on a reality show.
• 4:10
  It was a very high stress, high pressure.
• 4:14
  It's like playing a video game for 10 hours straight with somebody looking over your shoulder and telling you that you're doing it wrong.
• 4:22
  And you have to be creative.
• 4:23
  So it is very high stress, high pressure.
• 4:26
  And I experienced my first migraine attack on my first day of doing that kind of job.
• 4:34
  And I was obviously very nervous that day.
• 4:38
  It was clear to me that this was a stress response.
• 4:42
  I didn't think, oh gosh, I'm having a major health problem.
• 4:45
  I was just like, oh, wow.
• 4:46
  I'm so stressed out that I got this unbelievably horrific headache that I've never had before.
• 4:53
  I stumbled outta the office, somehow went to a drug store, was scanning the shelves.
• 4:58
  'cause I wasn't used to getting headaches, so I didn't know what to get.
• 5:01
  And I just saw a bottle that said like something extreme migraine on it.
• 5:07
  And I thought, that's gotta be what I'm experiencing.
• 5:09
  I took that over the counter and thankfully for me it worked.
• 5:16
  Meaning, the headache dissolved and I was able to go back to work.
• 5:19
  It was just like, wow that was awful.
• 5:22
  But moving on.
• 5:24
  After that, I worked in Reality TV as an editor for 10 years, starting from that day.
• 5:31
  After that experience, I got another migraine and then another, I continued to experience these migraine headaches, but they were very far and few in, in the beginning.
• 5:40
  I would never have thought of myself as someone experiencing chronic pain.
• 5:44
  It wasn't chronic during that time.
• 5:46
  So for several years it was just like, once in a great while this would happen.
• 5:51
  Then gradually it started to become a little bit more routine to the point where it would even occur to me to mention it to my doctor, my GP, and the doctor said you should go see a neurologist, and the neurologist diagnosed it as migraine and gave me a prescription medication.
• 6:09
  So basically nothing changed for me.
• 6:12
  I just swapped the over the counter drugs for the prescription as needed drugs.
• 6:16
  And that's how I managed it for years, many years.
• 6:20
  After working in television for 10 years, they gradually became, again, more frequent, but still I wouldn't have called it like a big part of my life really.
• 6:31
  Then after 10 years in TV, I decided it was time for yet another career change and I wanted to become a therapist.
• 6:38
  So I left my job in TV and I went to grad school to become a psychotherapist.
• 6:45
  And during those two years of grad school, I had thought that the migraines would subside.
• 6:51
  'cause I thought, I'm leaving this very high stress, high pressure field, and I'm going into a field where we talk about feelings.
• 6:59
  'Cause I knew I just knew it was like related to stress and pent up feelings and stuff, but I didn't know really, what to do about that.
• 7:07
  I thought, we'll be talking about feelings.
• 7:09
  I'll be able to exhale and maybe the migraines will subside.
• 7:12
  I didn't exactly experience grad school that way.
• 7:15
  It was stressful in ways I didn't expect.
• 7:17
  And actually the migraine headaches, really that is when they took over my life was when I was in grad school.
• 7:25
  It went from being once in a while to a little more frequent to then when I was in grad school, three times a week I'd be completely knocked out.
• 7:34
  Have to, stop everything I was doing.
• 7:36
  If I was at my clinical internship working with clients I just had to leave.
• 7:41
  Sorry, I've gotta go home.
• 7:42
  I have a migraine.
• 7:43
  And, lie down in bed, turn all the lights off and take a painkiller.
• 7:48
  But sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn't work.
• 7:50
  I was started to run out.
• 7:52
  You can only take so many painkillers safely per month.
• 7:55
  And I was starting to run out.
• 7:58
  I think a lot of people, when they get a migraine, the first thing they do is Google what's happening and how do I, but I somehow never really thought of doing that until I reached my rock bottom with the migraines.
• 8:11
  That's when I finally thought there has to be another way.
• 8:15
  Oh.
• 8:15
  Because also I went to a new neurologist,'cause I was in grad school, so I had the student health plan and the school neurologist said that he thought I should start going on daily preventative meds.
• 8:28
  Ummm I was, I don't know, like no judgment on anyone else's choices, but for me, I just thought this seems like a route to like staying in this place forever and I don't want that.
• 8:38
  So there's gotta be another way.
• 8:40
  I'm gonna do my own research.
• 8:42
  And it was very fortunate because this was 2018 and at that point there was something called the Curable app, which probably a lot of your listeners are familiar with.
• 8:53
  If they're not, the Curable app is an app that teaches you how to recover from chronic pain through mind body medicine.
• 9:02
  And the app was only two years old at that point.
• 9:04
  So if I had Googled five years ago, I wouldn't have found it.
• 9:07
  But my Googling led me to this app and I downloaded it and instantly it was like, this is the missing puzzle piece.
• 9:17
  This is, a set of educational materials that helped me make sense of what I already knew.
• 9:25
  I already knew that the migraines for me were stress and emotion related, but now I had tools that I learned through this app that helped me understand what to do about that.
• 9:36
  I can talk about what that looked like.
• 9:38
  But maybe I'll pause there in case you have questions.
• 9:41
  It's very interesting that you're saying this.
• 9:43
  I'm dating myself a bit, but when I first started getting the migraines, I was 17 and there was no such thing as Google even.
• 9:51
  So I just listened to the doctor.
• 9:52
  So I had a very different path as far as my message was, it's incurable.
• 9:57
  It's because of your heredity.
• 9:59
  And that's it.
• 10:01
  Pain management is your goal, Yeah.
• 10:03
  Until you die, basically.
• 10:05
  I used the curable app as well and went into a curable group at one point.
• 10:09
  I think now there's so much more information coming out about it being a neuroplastic symptom.
• 10:15
  I do wanna ask you one question actually.
• 10:17
  You've mentioned a couple times about it being stress related and you knowing that there was this underlying stress component.
• 10:24
  And I felt the same way.
• 10:27
  But I find that when, now I'm explaining this to people that when you start talking about stress, it gets a little, even when my doctor actually said that, it's felt a little bit dismissive.
• 10:38
  Like it's not just stress, like it's, there's more to it.
• 10:41
  You know what I mean?
• 10:41
  So how do you explain that?
• 10:43
  I always say it's stress in its many forms.
• 10:46
  Stress is not just your day to day.
• 10:48
  Wasn't just the work, right?
• 10:49
  It was so many other components of stress.
• 10:53
  And so is there a just a way that you can, so It's interesting.
• 10:58
  A couple things come to mind.
• 11:00
  One is that, for the last five years I had made chronic pain recovery the focus of my work as a therapist, and I've since pivoted, but we can talk about that in a bit.
• 11:12
  But the people who would come to me for that generally were already bought in and that's why, that's how they even found me.
• 11:19
  I didn't have to do a lot of convincing, so to speak.
• 11:23
  And, when it came to my own experience, I had maybe the opposite of what you're describing, because I felt that the pain was related to stress and emotional stuff and past trauma.
• 11:37
  My experience was that I'd go to the doctor and they'd say, yeah, take this medicine try not to skip a meal, this, that, and the other, ways to avoid triggers.
• 11:46
  And I'd say, yeah, but I feel like there's an emotional component.
• 11:50
  And that would get dismissed.
• 11:53
  So I felt dismissed on the flip side of that, where I'd say I, I feel like this is stress and emotion, maybe trauma related.
• 12:00
  And what I would get in return is yeah, that's probably a factor anyway, here's your prescription.
• 12:07
  Yeah.
• 12:07
  Or or they'd say, sure, try meditating, but they'd brush it off.
• 12:11
  To me, that was a very integral part of the whole experience.
• 12:16
  It reminded me of, during my teenage years, I had gone through a pretty severe depression when I was in college and I experienced the same thing.
• 12:28
  In that case, it wasn't a physical pain, it was clearly emotional pain.
• 12:34
  And same thing, I was given medicine.
• 12:35
  I felt like I didn't get validation or curiosity for what was really going on inside.
• 12:40
  I just got a prescription and it felt like the same thing happening again for me when it came to the migraine, which with the understanding that I have now, that emotional invalidation is such a core ingredient of many cases of chronic pain.
• 12:59
  I always understood it to be stress related.
• 13:02
  I was working in pharma at the time for the last 10 years before I went out on sick leave.
• 13:07
  I knew the cortisol, the adrenaline, all the things that were happening in my body from the stress response.
• 13:13
  So it was clear to me.
• 13:14
  But I have talked to many people that feel dismissed by the word stress, and it's what the stress does, how the stress is managed, and what it does to the body and the nervous system.
• 13:25
  When you start looking at it like that, it makes perfect sense or the mind body connection, what this is all doing.
• 13:31
  It makes a lot of sense once you start going into those components.
• 13:35
  I also have a take on this, which is, my take, and some listeners might relate to it and others might not, but my feeling is that often people feel dismissed by that term stress not necessarily because it's about stress, but because the implication is that the stress is your fault and you go deal with it by yourself.
• 13:58
  And I'm not gonna give you any tools or help or validation to support you with this, stress or you're not managing it.
• 14:06
  Stress, no.
• 14:06
  Go deal with it.
• 14:08
  Yeah.
• 14:09
  Yeah, that's a good point.
• 14:11
  So you're at this point in the recovery and you find the Curable app and you're making headway.
• 14:16
  Was there any kind of specific learning or shift in, I don't know if it was a mindset or something that stands out as a turning point of, this was needed.
• 14:26
  Yes.
• 14:27
  Looking back, I feel there were about four turning points for me, so I'll try to go through them in a brief way.
• 14:34
  The first one, was immediate when I started listening to the little education modules on the app.
• 14:41
  The first one was a shift in my understanding of what pain is and how it functions, because I went from really not understanding what pain is, just knowing that I hate it, and it's terrifying to understanding that pain is a dangerous signal and it's just a signal that my nervous system is feeling unsafe.
• 15:03
  So that gave me something to do because then I was like, oh.
• 15:07
  This signal means that my nervous system feels scared.
• 15:10
  So think about if a child felt scared or a puppy felt scared, what would I do?
• 15:14
  I would comfort them, and I have, I instinctively know certain things I would do to comfort them.
• 15:20
  So now I can apply that to myself and it gives me something to do.
• 15:25
  I can comfort myself and just knowing that, just that framing was immediately somewhat calming, and then I would take action on it, do things to help myself feel safe.
• 15:37
  Instead of what I used to do, which was completely understandable, is I would just start freaking out, which is, why wouldn't I?
• 15:45
  It's oh no, the pain's coming, and I'd ramp up into fear.
• 15:49
  So with this new understanding, it helped me have a different perspective on oh, I actually could comfort myself and that actually could help.
• 15:58
  So I'm not completely in the dark here as to what's going on.
• 16:01
  So that was turning point number one.
• 16:04
  Turning point number two came about a year in, so I was practicing all these brain retraining tools to help my nervous system calm down.
• 16:14
  And that helped a lot.
• 16:16
  But about a year into that, I was still getting flare ups and like pretty severe attacks here and there.
• 16:23
  I got a really severe one about a year in and I just thought, I must need to add another tool to my toolkit here.
• 16:29
  That is when I started to explore journaling, which I discovered through the work of Nicole Sachs, who has this great podcast called The Cure for Chronic Pain.
• 16:39
  Her focus is on using journaling as a tool for emotional release.
• 16:44
  So I practiced her method daily for a good part of a year.
• 16:49
  Then I, when I started getting comfortable and confident with it, I began to improvise my own journaling method that I later taught to people, and still teach.
• 16:58
  But that gave me a way to release the emotions that I didn't even realize I was so accustomed to bottling up.
• 17:09
  I didn't think I was bottling them up 'cause I had been going to therapy for years and I even was a therapist at that point.
• 17:15
  Through journaling, I found a way of letting the emotions out without censoring them.
• 17:23
  Without judging them.
• 17:26
  And then meeting them with care.
• 17:28
  Treating my own emotions the way I would treat a friend's emotions, which it's something I hadn't learned in all those years of therapy.
• 17:35
  And I'm still not perfect at it, but I deepened into that and that made a big difference.
• 17:42
  Then the third and fourth turning points were, actually they might be the same thing.
• 17:47
  I'm I thought of them as two, but I think they're just one.
• 17:49
  It really was about perfectionism.
• 17:53
  I realized that I had become perfectionistic about healing.
• 17:58
  I was tracking how many painkillers I was taking.
• 18:01
  Yeah.
• 18:01
  And if I was taking less, I felt good about myself.
• 18:04
  If I was taking more, I felt bad about myself.
• 18:07
  So yeah, being very judgmental toward myself about getting a gold star or not getting a gold star on healing.
• 18:16
  And that obviously creates a lot of stress.
• 18:18
  Yes.
• 18:21
  Yeah.
• 18:21
  That was, it's an ongoing process.
• 18:23
  I can say I've fully let go of perfectionism around symptoms, I've found other things to apply it to in life, and I continues to be a process of unraveling that.
• 18:35
  Yes.
• 18:36
  Oh my gosh, that is so helpful.
• 18:38
  Oh, I love that.
• 18:39
  And all of those kind of stem back to this self-compassion, right?
• 18:43
  That, yeah, without that you can't do some of these things.
• 18:46
  That was the other thing I was gonna say.
• 18:48
  That's it's funny actually, it's telling that we do move on eventually.
• 18:53
  It's telling that I forgot that component.
• 18:55
  'cause that came before the perfectionism was the self-compassion.
• 18:59
  That was maybe actually the biggest turning point was when I realized that I was bullying myself in my self-talk.
• 19:07
  Not just about healing.
• 19:08
  There was a very particular turning point when I was far along in my recovery and I don't, I was not getting severe migraine attacks anymore at that point, but I reached this phase where I was waking up with a mild headache every day, and it was really annoying.
• 19:25
  And one day I said to myself, you know what I've got tools for this.
• 19:29
  I've got inquiry tools.
• 19:31
  I'm just gonna stay in bed and investigate this with curiosity until I discover something.
• 19:40
  And so I ask myself, what am I thinking about the minute I wake up every day?
• 19:45
  What's going through my mind?
• 19:47
  And it was, oh, you didn't get this done yesterday?
• 19:50
  Oh, you didn't get that done yesterday?
• 19:51
  What about this, all these things I didn't get done yesterday.
• 19:55
  So I was like, oh.
• 19:57
  So I'm waking up and the first thing I'm doing is yelling at myself about what a failure I was yesterday like, okay, this needs to change.
• 20:07
  I need a different script for when I wake up.
• 20:10
  So I practiced again, like it takes repetition to change an unconscious habit like that.
• 20:16
  For the next however many months, I'd wake up, catch myself doing the self-criticism, and then I would replace that with a mantra.
• 20:26
  I had different ones over time, but the first one was, I am Worthy.
• 20:31
  And I would just say that to myself over and over again before starting my day.
• 20:38
  Love that.
• 20:39
  Love that.
• 20:40
  Yeah.
• 20:40
  Oh, that's so good.
• 20:41
  And now you're on the other side of this recovered.
• 20:45
  We can talk about what that word means.
• 20:47
  Healed.
• 20:47
  Yeah.
• 20:47
  That's always a tricky one, right?
• 20:49
  I never know how to, Yeah, position that.
• 20:51
  But I want to know, now that you're on the other side, you have shifted your business model, as you said, and you are helping people get back to living.
• 21:01
  This is such an important part.
• 21:03
  We have to get back to life and thriving and.
• 21:07
  At first, we don't even know what that looks like, or our whole identity is tied into this being ill and being, unproductive because we can't be productive and all these different aspects of the healing journey.
• 21:18
  And so tell us what you're up to now and how things have shifted for you and Yeah.
• 21:24
  Yeah.
• 21:25
  And it's all intertwined like you're saying because, and yet another.
• 21:32
  There was another turning point in my recovery was that I realized I needed to shift my focus elsewhere.
• 21:38
  Now that didn't mean that I couldn't, be doing chronic pain therapy anymore.
• 21:44
  I wanted to shift away from there because that's where just my interests and my heart were leading me.
• 21:50
  But it meant I had to shift my focus from my own recovery.
• 21:55
  I decided, you know what?
• 21:57
  I am a hundred percent imperfectly, recovered, and that's it.
• 22:02
  Love that word! Recovering from symptoms is not my job or my focus anymore.
• 22:06
  I am a hundred percent imperfectly recovered, and I'm turning my attention now to other things.
• 22:13
  Including my work . And for a while that continued to be doing chronic pain therapy and coaching.
• 22:21
  Then I got to a point where I was like, you know what?
• 22:23
  I really wanna make a shift here because I just loved working with a lot of the people I would work with would stay with me beyond the point where symptoms were a focus anymore, and they would then, start blossoming into shifting their focus to other things.
• 22:43
  So one of my clients wrote a book, a memoir while we have been working together.
• 22:49
  Then that was this whole journey to go on with each other because that process brought up.
• 22:56
  Also these like fears of visibility.
• 22:58
  What will people think of me if I publish these words, say this stuff out loud.
• 23:04
  I had a client who, stepped into a new role of leadership in his professional field.
• 23:12
  He had gotten past the point where symptoms were a focus anymore, but now taking on this new role of authority and kind of, stepping into bigger shoes can bring up a lot of fear.
• 23:23
  Ooh, am I gonna get blow back?
• 23:25
  What are people gonna think?
• 23:27
  I just love walking with people through those exciting challenges.
• 23:34
  You're stepping into something that you feel drawn to, that you wanna step into.
• 23:39
  That's a goal and it's scary.
• 23:42
  And the nervous system's is this really safe?
• 23:44
  I don't know, I'm gonna try to throw all these speed bumps in the road.
• 23:49
  I'm gonna throw in imposter syndrome.
• 23:51
  I'm gonna throw in, fear of visibility.
• 23:54
  I'm going to throw in maybe another flare up of symptoms because I'm scared of stepping into this expanded role or this, letting myself be seen.
• 24:07
  It's just a real joy for me to walk beside people through those journeys.
• 24:14
  And I'm on that journey myself too, so I find it really interesting.
• 24:18
  I love that you're saying that even though the symptoms have subsided or have shifted now, when you're going into other aspects of life, you've shedded this different identity.
• 24:30
  You're building a new identity, you are able to do things.
• 24:34
  Now my family knows that I feel better and if I had a migraine at all then it was like, oh, what's the matter?
• 24:41
  I thought you, I thought this was done.
• 24:42
  This goes back to this, like what's healed?
• 24:45
  I put so much pressure on myself to be medication and pain free.
• 24:50
  How could I be credible as a coach and helping others if I wasn't?
• 24:54
  And that obviously didn't feel very safe to the brain.
• 24:56
  There were so many aspects coming out of this or getting to the other side, I guess you would say, or I don't know if it's another side or it's just part of the journey, right?
• 25:05
  I don't know if there's ever a side.
• 25:08
  You're just along the path, I feel like it's both and because my life now is, yeah.
• 25:12
  Utterly completely different than it was when I was in the thick of the migraines.
• 25:17
  It's also completely different to how it was before I ever got a migraine.
• 25:22
  'cause I was 30 when I started experiencing them.
• 25:26
  And it's both.
• 25:27
  Yeah.
• 25:27
  Like it's been years since I've had what I call a knockdown, full-blown migraine.
• 25:33
  It's been years since I've had to cancel anything due to a headache, unless it was because I had a headache, 'cause I had COVID I and I was sick, like that happens.
• 25:44
  And my head is where I feel tension when I'm stressed still.
• 25:50
  And that wasn't the case for me years ago before I experienced the first migraine.
• 25:54
  There's still these lower level symptoms that I do experience and they come and go and, sometimes it's more and sometimes it's less.
• 26:04
  But it doesn't get in the way of my life.
• 26:07
  So that's completely different to what my life was before discovering these mind body tools.
• 26:15
  I think that's the biggest difference for me as well.
• 26:17
  I have a quality of life back and it doesn't derail and is not the focus.
• 26:22
  There's other things that now you get your life back.
• 26:26
  Yeah.
• 26:26
  Yeah.
• 26:27
  And, but, and just regarding the medica, like taking painkillers, I totally relate to what you said when I was in the earlier starting out as a chronic pain coach and therapist, I was really embarrassed that I was still taking painkillers for my own headaches and I was trying to hide it or I'd say, oh, I do take a painkiller once in a blue moon.
• 26:51
  But the truth is I was taking it about once a week and I still do on and off.
• 26:58
  And I realized at a certain point the fact that I feel this is unacceptable about myself.
• 27:04
  Projects that I feel it would be unacceptable of my clients, and that is judgment and constriction and stress and it's the opposite of self-acceptance.
• 27:17
  So I need to just let go of that.
• 27:21
  Nicole Sachs said it on one of her podcasts that I loved is just that we are living in a mind body system that is going to have mind body sensations or things come up because it's just part of being in the human condition.
• 27:35
  As a human, we're going to have things come up.
• 27:38
  And so sensations will come up every once in a while.
• 27:40
  And this doesn't mean that this is something that should be like, oh, I did something wrong, or, I'm failing in some way.
• 27:48
  And that I think I didn't hear that message though, Anna, until maybe three years into, I was feeling really well, but then there was some flare up, some symptoms, and I just thought, what am I doing wrong?
• 28:00
  What?
• 28:00
  There must be something I'm doing wrong.
• 28:02
  And when I heard that message, it was like, oh, even she says that.
• 28:05
  Okay.
• 28:06
  That made me feel a lot better that, okay, this is a journey.
• 28:10
  And I always hesitate oh, I don't wanna scare people and say this is a lifelong journey.
• 28:15
  But what I mean by that is that.
• 28:17
  We now have skills that are going to last us a lifetime, that are making our lives infinitely better and more fulfilling and more authentic and we're moment to moment creatures as Dan Ratner says, and.
• 28:31
  Today I'm gonna be completely different than maybe a month from now.
• 28:34
  There's gonna be different circumstances.
• 28:36
  So we're always navigating that.
• 28:37
  And that's what I mean by it's just a journey now from here.
• 28:40
  And now we've got the tools though.
• 28:41
  That's the key.
• 28:42
  Now we've got this toolkit and know what to do about it.
• 28:46
  And it doesn't have to derail things.
• 28:49
  Absolutely.
• 28:50
  And I will say, I'm open to the possibility that there will be a point in my life when i'm not experiencing any head tension.
• 28:58
  Who knows?
• 28:59
  I'm not like, I don't have an agenda about that.
• 29:02
  But at present I do feel head tension when I'm stressed and I feel like it, it keeps me honest with myself, if I am overriding my own needs or my own desires, I know, because my body will talk to me.
• 29:21
  And while it might feel annoying it's also like a helpful roadmap for me.
• 29:29
  That's how I see it now as well.
• 29:30
  Yeah.
• 29:30
  It's messages now, it's, yeah.
• 29:32
  It's helping to guide.
• 29:34
  Yeah.
• 29:34
  Yeah.
• 29:35
  That's great.
• 29:37
  And so what I would like to know is how people can find you and what you're up to.
• 29:41
  I know that you have a podcast ,I want you to mention where people can listen to you and you've got some workshops coming up, so great.
• 29:49
  Yeah, so I, I do have a workshop coming up.
• 29:52
  I ran it last month and it was so great and people really loved it, so I'm excited to run it again soon.
• 30:00
  It's called Let Yourself Be Seen.
• 30:02
  This is a workshop for sensitive creatives, entrepreneurs and coaches, or really any human being that has something that they're passionate about and they wanna bring it out into the world.
• 30:17
  But there's that fear of visibility, being seen can feel both enticing and terrifying at the same time.
• 30:25
  So this workshop is about working with the nervous system, using all the same tools that we learned through pain recovery and applying it to visibility.
• 30:36
  You can get notified when the next workshop will happen by going to my website, anna holtzman.com.
• 30:44
  And there's on the menu you'll see free workshop and you can sign up there to get notified.
• 30:49
  You can also find me on Instagram.
• 30:53
  I'm there quite a lot at Anna Holzman and you can find me on my podcast, which is called How to Trust Yourself.
• 31:03
  Perfect.
• 31:04
  And we'll have all the links in the show notes below.
• 31:07
  Great.
• 31:08
  Thank you.
• 31:08
  I'm so excited about this conversation 'cause I think there's so many great tips and nuggets of information that will be so helpful.
• 31:17
  And just to capture another recovery story of somebody that's walked the path.
• 31:21
  It's just such an isolating thing sometimes.
• 31:24
  And so to hear other people, two of us that are saying, yes, we've had this journey, but we've been able to feel better now and to have such a different quality of life.
• 31:35
  It is one of the things that really made a difference in my journey when I heard this for the first time and just thought, what are they talking about?
• 31:43
  This isn't possible.
• 31:45
  And then I dug in and it was like, oh my gosh, this is actually happening.
• 31:49
  People are healing.
• 31:51
  The more we can get that word out, it's just so helpful.
• 31:54
  So thank you very much for your time and for sharing your wisdom with us.
• 31:59
  Thank you so much, Karen.
• 32:00
  I so appreciate you inviting me to chat with you.
• 32:03
  It's just so fun to connect with you again.
• 32:05
  And I just wanna briefly dovetail on that last thing you said, which is if you, to the listener, if you're listening and you're like, I wanna get what you're talking about, but I just don't get it, that's a completely normal stage.
• 32:18
  Karen and I were talking about all these different stages and phases that we've been through and that is a completely normal stage to be in.
• 32:28
  Yeah, and I think probably I can speak for you as well, this is part of the reason why I started doing what I was doing with the Instagram and the podcast and all this, to try to help give people information because there's so many people.
• 32:41
  People are talking about it in different terms and different ways, and the amount of hours that I spent going down the rabbit holes of the internet was unbelievable to just try to piece this all together.
• 32:52
  Definitely follow Anna.
• 32:54
  She's got tons of great content out there.
• 32:56
  And yeah, there's a lot of people doing great work, which is, becoming more and more.
• 33:00
  And the more we're talking about this as a mind body, issue and a stress related illness and the neuroscience behind it now and the studies that are going on.
• 33:08
  It's just so exciting that hopefully this becomes more and more mainstream as we go along.
• 33:14
  Yeah.
• 33:14
  Thank you so much for putting your voice in this podcast out there.
• 33:18
  It's so needed.
• 33:20
  Yeah.