Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #17. The Emotional Pattern Driving PCOS and Endometriosis That Most Women Are Stuck In Right Now Without Knowing It
Transcript
- 0:00[SPEAKER_00]: Endometriosis and PCOS are two of the most common chronic conditions in women.
- 0:05[SPEAKER_00]: They are also two of the most emotionally loaded, and the emotion at the center of both has nothing to do with stress.
- 0:13[SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
- 0:16[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Teclody Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
- 0:21[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, endometriosis, migraines, fiber myalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
- 0:36[SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week, we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
- 0:40[SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
- 0:44[SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
- 0:47[SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
- 0:52[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
- 0:55[SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to complement, not replace your medical care.
- 1:01[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
- 1:03[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover the specific emotional pattern behind endometriosis and PCOS that nobody in medicine is talking about.
- 1:12[SPEAKER_00]: You'll learn why this pattern is so common in high-functioning women and why it is so easy to miss and also one practical shift that begins to address the emotional root of both conditions.
- 1:25[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about what endometriosis and PCOS actually have in common, not homonally or physiologically, emotionally.
- 1:33[SPEAKER_00]: Because when you look at the women who come to me with these diagnoses, the pattern is super consistent, and it has nothing to do with how they eat, how they sleep, or how stress they are in the conventional sense of the word.
- 1:46[SPEAKER_00]: It has to do with who they stopped being.
- 1:49[SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere along the way and for most women, it starts early.
- 1:53[SPEAKER_00]: They learned that certain parts of themselves were too much, too loud, too creative, too emotional, too feminine, too expressive, and so those parts got quieted down.
- 2:05[SPEAKER_00]: Pushed away, traded in for something more acceptable, more manageable, less threatening to the people around them.
- 2:12[SPEAKER_00]: The ambition that got redirected into achievement instead of passion.
- 2:17[SPEAKER_00]: The creativity that got shelved because it just wasn't practical.
- 2:21[SPEAKER_00]: The deep emotional life that got labelled as dramatic and just learned to stay quiet.
- 2:27[SPEAKER_00]: The feminine power that got mistaken for weakness and buried under competence and control.
- 2:33[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what I want you to sit with.
- 2:35[SPEAKER_00]: Your reproductive system is not separate from your emotional life.
- 2:40[SPEAKER_00]: It is one of the most emotionally responsive parts of your body.
- 2:44[SPEAKER_00]: And one of woman has spent years suppressing her creativity, her power, her femininity, dismissing those parts of herself as too much or not practical enough.
- 2:54[SPEAKER_00]: That shows up somewhere, with endometriosis, what the mind-body literature consistently points to is insecurity, frustration, and self-denial.
- 3:04[SPEAKER_00]: A woman who has learned to override her own needs so consistently that her body has started doing the same thing, growing, expanding, pushing into spaces it was never supposed to reach.
- 3:17[SPEAKER_00]: The body expressing outwardly what she could never express inwardly.
- 3:21[SPEAKER_00]: With PCOS, the pattern that keeps coming up is suppressed creativity and loss of personal power.
- 3:27[SPEAKER_00]: A woman who has stopped trusting herself, who gave up on something that mattered to her, a creative pursuit, a version of her life she wanted but didn't allow herself to have, and whose body's own rhythms and cycles have become as irregular and disrupted as the life she never let herself fully live.
- 3:46[SPEAKER_00]: I know that might sound confronting, but in my experience working with women with both of these conditions, it lands as truth, and deep down most of them already know this is true in some capacity.
- 3:59[SPEAKER_00]: Let me give you a personal example because I was diagnosed with PCOS myself, and when I look back at who I was during that time, the pattern is impossible to miss.
- 4:09[SPEAKER_00]: I was living almost entirely from what you might call masculine energy, and now before anyone switches off, this has nothing to do with gender politics and everything to do with how we are wired as human beings.
- 4:22[SPEAKER_00]: This concept is referred to as again and young in ancient Chinese culture, and I know that term is familiar to most of you.
- 4:29[SPEAKER_00]: Let me explain.
- 4:30[SPEAKER_00]: We all have both energies available
- 4:38[SPEAKER_00]: Feminine energy is about receiving, feeling, creating and allowing.
- 4:44[SPEAKER_00]: I was operating almost exclusively from one of them.
- 4:47[SPEAKER_00]: I was constantly producing, achieving and climbing.
- 4:52[SPEAKER_00]: My entire identity was built around output and performance.
- 4:56[SPEAKER_00]: I had no space for emotion because it felt inefficient.
- 5:00[SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't let anyone do anything for me because I was convinced it wouldn't be done right, and I would just have to redo it anyway.
- 5:06[SPEAKER_00]: Even in my romantic relationships, I was the one managing the finances, making the decisions and holding everything together.
- 5:13[SPEAKER_00]: There is nothing wrong with being driven, independent, and capable.
- 5:18[SPEAKER_00]: But as a woman, living from that energy, all of the time is deeply draining, because what it means is that you
- 5:29[SPEAKER_00]: The part that needs to feel and receive, the part that needs to create rather than just produce.
- 5:36[SPEAKER_00]: The part that needs to occasionally let someone else step up, especially in romantic relationships.
- 5:42[SPEAKER_00]: Rather than doing everything herself because it's just faster and easier, and she knows it will get done right.
- 5:50[SPEAKER_00]: That is not strength.
- 5:51[SPEAKER_00]: that is a woman who has stopped trusting that she is enough without the output.
- 5:56[SPEAKER_00]: And my body was reflecting exactly that.
- 6:00[SPEAKER_00]: The hormonal disruption, the irregular cycles, the reproductive system completely out of rhythm, because I had been out of rhythm with myself for years.
- 6:10[SPEAKER_00]: I see this in the women I work with with endometriosis too, a deep pattern of self-denial, of giving everything to everyone else and having nothing left for themselves.
- 6:21[SPEAKER_00]: Of caring so much for so long that they have completely lost touch with what they actually want, feel, or need.
- 6:28[SPEAKER_00]: And the body eventually makes that impossible to ignore.
- 6:32[SPEAKER_00]: Here's something most women have never been told about their own biology.
- 6:35[SPEAKER_00]: Men run on a 24-hour hormonal clock.
- 6:39[SPEAKER_00]: Women run on a 28-day one.
- 6:42[SPEAKER_00]: That's right, 28 days.
- 6:44[SPEAKER_00]: It is called the InfoRadion rhythm, and it governs far more than your period.
- 6:50[SPEAKER_00]: It affects your brain, your metabolism, your immune system, your stress response, and your reproductive health.
- 6:58[SPEAKER_00]: Here's the problem.
- 6:59[SPEAKER_00]: Everything women have been told to do.
- 7:01[SPEAKER_00]: Work the same way every day.
- 7:03[SPEAKER_00]: Push at the same pace every day.
- 7:05[SPEAKER_00]: Produce the same output every day.
- 7:07[SPEAKER_00]: Is based on research done on men.
- 7:10[SPEAKER_00]: It is built around a 24-hour clock.
- 7:13[SPEAKER_00]: And if her women, living that way, does not just feel exhausting.
- 7:17[SPEAKER_00]: It biologically disrupts the hormonal rhythm the female body depends on.
- 7:22[SPEAKER_00]: When a woman is in relentless output mode, not resting, not receiving, not allowing her body's natural rhythm to move through its phases.
- 7:31[SPEAKER_00]: She is working directly against her own infraredion clock.
- 7:35[SPEAKER_00]: And the hormonal systems that depend on that rhythm, the ones that regulate her cycle, her ovulation, the conditions inside her uterus, start to break down.
- 7:46[SPEAKER_00]: That is not bad luck.
- 7:47[SPEAKER_00]: That is biology responding to a woman who has been living out of sync with her own nature.
- 7:52[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the why, this is why we care about this.
- 7:55[SPEAKER_00]: Because endometriosis and PCOS are not just hormonal conditions.
- 8:01[SPEAKER_00]: They are the body's loudest signal that something much deeper is out of alignment.
- 8:06[SPEAKER_00]: A woman who has abandoned her feminine nature, suppressed her creativity, denied her emotional life, and pushed her body to operate on a rhythm it was never designed for.
- 8:17[SPEAKER_00]: Her reproductive system is one of the first places this shows up and that is what no blood test, no scan, no prescription is ever going to show you.
- 8:26[SPEAKER_00]: So what actually starts to interrupt this pattern, it starts with something that sounds simple and for most women feels genuinely uncomfortable.
- 8:35[SPEAKER_00]: That's receiving.
- 8:37[SPEAKER_00]: Not in some abstract sense, but in a very practical everyday way.
- 8:46[SPEAKER_00]: And then, this is the part most women's skip, actually allowing the help without correcting how it was done.
- 8:53[SPEAKER_00]: Because here is what I see constantly.
- 8:55[SPEAKER_00]: A woman asks for help, someone steps up and within five minutes, she has either read on it herself or given a detailed list of how it should have been done differently.
- 9:04[SPEAKER_00]: And the message that sends to the people around her and to her own nervous system is that no one else is capable and she has to do everything herself.
- 9:15[SPEAKER_00]: That loop is exhausting, and it keeps her permanently in output and production mode because she has unconsciously made herself the only option.
- 9:24[SPEAKER_00]: So, the practical shift is this.
- 9:26[SPEAKER_00]: This week, identify one thing on your plate that someone else could do.
- 9:30[SPEAKER_00]: Not perfectly, just adequately, and handed over.
- 9:34[SPEAKER_00]: No instructions, no follow-up, no redoing it afterwards.
- 9:39[SPEAKER_00]: Then notice what comes up.
- 9:41[SPEAKER_00]: For most women, what comes up is not relief.
- 9:44[SPEAKER_00]: It is discomfort, a sense that things are out of control and this quiet anxiety about whether it will be done right.
- 9:50[SPEAKER_00]: That discomfort is the pattern showing itself and being able to sit in that discomfort rather than immediately take that control is where rewiring this pattern begins.
- 10:01[SPEAKER_00]: Receiving is not weakness.
- 10:04[SPEAKER_00]: For a woman whose body has been running in relentless productivity mode, it is one of the most physiologically powerful things she can do.
- 10:12[SPEAKER_00]: Let's recap what we talked about today.
- 10:14[SPEAKER_00]: Both endometriosis and PCOS are consistently linked in mind-body research to a disconnection from femininity, creativity, and self-worth.
- 10:24[SPEAKER_00]: Secondly, the female body runs on a 28-day inforadian rhythm, and a woman in permanent production mode is working directly against that.
- 10:34[SPEAKER_00]: And thirdly, the shift starts with receiving.
- 10:37[SPEAKER_00]: Something most high-functioning women have never actually allowed themselves to do.
- 10:41[SPEAKER_00]: If you recognize yourself in that production control mode and also the inability to receive, the next question is what else is underneath that?
- 10:52[SPEAKER_00]: I created a free chat GPT prompt in the show notes that connects your specific symptoms to the emotional patterns that may be driving them in under 30 seconds.
- 11:01[SPEAKER_00]: Go and check it out while it's free.
- 11:03[SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the show notes, and I'll see you in the next episode.