Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #21. Dismissing Energy Healing as Woo Is Costing You — Here's the Science Women with Chronic Illness Need to Know
Transcript
- 0:00[SPEAKER_00]: Energy healing has a reputation problem.
- 0:02[SPEAKER_00]: But strip away the crystals and the candles, and what you're a left with is something that mind-body research has been pointing to for decades.
- 0:10[SPEAKER_00]: And once you understand it, the way you think about your chronic illness will never be the same.
- 0:15[SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
- 0:17[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Teclody Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
- 0:23[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast is for women living with chronic illness, autoimmune disease, IBS, chronic fatigue, PCOS, andometriosis, migraines, fibromyalgia, or persistent symptoms that no one can fully explain.
- 0:37[SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
- 0:41[SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
- 0:45[SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
- 0:49[SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
- 0:55[SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
- 0:57[SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to compliment not replace your medical care.
- 1:02[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
- 1:05[SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover why the emotional state you operate from every day is shaping your body's ability to heal in ways no particle has ever addressed.
- 1:15[SPEAKER_00]: What energy healing actually is when you strip away the spiritual language and why it matters for chronic illness?
- 1:22[SPEAKER_00]: and one practical shift that begins to raise the energetic state your body is trying to heal from.
- 1:27[SPEAKER_00]: Let's talk about what energy healing actually is, because energy healing has been branded as crystals and moon retools.
- 1:36[SPEAKER_00]: And while there is nothing wrong with any of that, the science underneath it rarely gets talked about.
- 1:42[SPEAKER_00]: Everything in your body is energy, your cells, your organs, your nervous system, all operating through electrical and chemical signals that are measurable, trackable, and responsive to your internal environment.
- 1:57[SPEAKER_00]: And your emotional state is part of that internal environment.
- 2:01[SPEAKER_00]: Different emotional states produce different physiological outputs.
- 2:06[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a spiritual claim.
- 2:07[SPEAKER_00]: It is measurable biology.
- 2:09[SPEAKER_00]: When you're in a state of fear, your body produces a specific hormonal and neurological response.
- 2:16[SPEAKER_00]: When you're in a state of joy or safety, it produces a completely different one.
- 2:22[SPEAKER_00]: The body is literally operating at a different frequency depending on the emotional state it is running from.
- 2:27[SPEAKER_00]: And here is where chronic illness enters the picture.
- 2:30[SPEAKER_00]: The women I work with are almost universally operating from what you might call low energy emotional states.
- 2:38[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not because they're negative or weak, but because the emotional patterns they have been carrying, like guilt, resentment, fear, chronic depletion, the constant filling of not being enough.
- 2:50[SPEAKER_00]: Our states that the body finds deeply costly to sustain.
- 2:54[SPEAKER_00]: These are not just feelings, they are physiological environments.
- 2:59[SPEAKER_00]: And a body that has been operating from those environments day after day, year after year, is a body that is constantly spending energy, it does not have on emotional experiences, it has never been able to resolve.
- 3:13[SPEAKER_00]: And that is the pattern.
- 3:15[SPEAKER_00]: Not the illness itself, the energetic state, the illness is growing inside of.
- 3:20[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what this actually looks like in real life.
- 3:23[SPEAKER_00]: When I was first diagnosed with chronic illness, I couldn't see any of this objectively, okay?
- 3:29[SPEAKER_00]: From the outside, my life looked fine.
- 3:31[SPEAKER_00]: I had a career, a relationship, a life I had built.
- 3:35[SPEAKER_00]: But when I looked back now, it's all very clear.
- 3:39[SPEAKER_00]: I was a director of product for an organization selling market research solutions to Fortune 500 companies.
- 3:46[SPEAKER_00]: The kind of role that looks incredibly impressive on paper, but felt hollow every single day.
- 3:52[SPEAKER_00]: I was living in Denver, Colorado, 12,000 miles from the family I had in Sydney, Australia.
- 4:00[SPEAKER_00]: I had built a life in a city that was never really mine.
- 4:03[SPEAKER_00]: In a job that never really felt fitting, telling myself it was all going to be worth it eventually.
- 4:08[SPEAKER_00]: I had a partner who was genuinely good and supportive, and we were together for almost three years.
- 4:15[SPEAKER_00]: But deep down, I knew he wasn't the one, and I wasn't willing to admit that to myself because admitting it meant dismantling everything I had built around it.
- 4:25[SPEAKER_00]: I had friendships that I knew weren't right for me either.
- 4:28[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew that because I never opened up to any of those people.
- 4:32[SPEAKER_00]: I never told them what was actually going on.
- 4:35[SPEAKER_00]: It never felt safe enough to do that.
- 4:38[SPEAKER_00]: So I showed up.
- 4:39[SPEAKER_00]: I performed and I kept the real version of my life to myself.
- 4:43[SPEAKER_00]: And underneath all of it, I felt completely disconnected from my own body.
- 4:48[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't like how I looked.
- 4:50[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't confident in my appearance.
- 4:52[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't feel worthy of love or happiness or anything easy or good.
- 4:57[SPEAKER_00]: I'd also gotten so good at performing a version of my life that looked okay that I had lost touch with how deeply I felt none of it.
- 5:06[SPEAKER_00]: I kept going because that is what you do when you have built a life, you keep going.
- 5:10[SPEAKER_00]: But what I was actually doing was operating from a sustained low-energy emotional state every single day for years.
- 5:19[SPEAKER_00]: Unfulfillment, suppressed truth, loneliness disguised as independence.
- 5:24[SPEAKER_00]: Friendships that never went below the surface.
- 5:26[SPEAKER_00]: A quiet but persistent belief that I wasn't worthy of anything different, and my body was living in that state every single day.
- 5:34[SPEAKER_00]: The diagnoses didn't come out of nowhere.
- 5:37[SPEAKER_00]: They came from a body that had been operating in that energetic environment for long enough that it started to break down.
- 5:43[SPEAKER_00]: And when I look at the women I work with, the story is different in the details, but it is remarkably consistent in its pattern.
- 5:52[SPEAKER_00]: A life that looks fine, maybe even envisage to other people, but an internal experience that feels anything but.
- 5:59[SPEAKER_00]: Here is the piece, most women with chronic illness have never been told.
- 6:04[SPEAKER_00]: The body has two operating modes.
- 6:07[SPEAKER_00]: The sympathetic state, which most people know as fight or flight, and the parasympathetic state, which is sometimes called rest and digest.
- 6:16[SPEAKER_00]: Here is what is critical to understand about those two states.
- 6:20[SPEAKER_00]: Healing happens in the Paris-Sympathetic state, almost exclusively, the rest and digest mode.
- 6:27[SPEAKER_00]: Cellular repair, immune regulation, hormone balance, inflammation resolution, all of it requires the body to be in a state of genuine safety and rest to function properly.
- 6:38[SPEAKER_00]: The body cannot run its repair processes and its threat response at the same time.
- 6:44[SPEAKER_00]: It has to choose, it has to prioritize.
- 6:47[SPEAKER_00]: Now here is what sympathetic dominance actually feels like day to day.
- 6:51[SPEAKER_00]: That's the fight or flight mode.
- 6:53[SPEAKER_00]: And please know that goes further than fight or flight.
- 6:56[SPEAKER_00]: There are a few other responses, but we're not going to talk about those today.
- 7:00[SPEAKER_00]: It's not always obvious what it looks like.
- 7:02[SPEAKER_00]: It's not always a racing heart and panic.
- 7:05[SPEAKER_00]: For most women with chronic illness, it is much quieter than that.
- 7:09[SPEAKER_00]: It's this inability to fully switch off.
- 7:12[SPEAKER_00]: The feeling of always being slightly on edge even when nothing is technically wrong.
- 7:17[SPEAKER_00]: The difficulty sleeping deeply.
- 7:19[SPEAKER_00]: The body that never feels rested no matter how much rest you get.
- 7:24[SPEAKER_00]: The digestive system that is never settled.
- 7:26[SPEAKER_00]: The immune system that overreacts underreacts or swings between both.
- 7:35[SPEAKER_00]: And what is keeping it there is not always external pressure.
- 7:39[SPEAKER_00]: It is the sustained internal environment of low energy emotional states.
- 7:44[SPEAKER_00]: Fear, guilt, resentment, chronic depletion, unfulfillment that the body reads as an ongoing threat.
- 7:51[SPEAKER_00]: Because the nervous system does not evaluate whether the threat is real, it responds to the signal it gets.
- 7:58[SPEAKER_00]: And sustained low-energy emotional states can generate the same signal as a genuine external threat.
- 8:04[SPEAKER_00]: Which means the body stays in sympathetic dominance, not because something dangerous is happening.
- 8:10[SPEAKER_00]: But because the emotional environment it is operating from, tells it that safety hasn't arrived yet.
- 8:16[SPEAKER_00]: And in sympathetic dominance, specific biological processes get suppressed.
- 8:22[SPEAKER_00]: Immune regulation becomes compromised.
- 8:24[SPEAKER_00]: Inflammatory responses stay elevated.
- 8:27[SPEAKER_00]: Hormone production gets disrupted.
- 8:29[SPEAKER_00]: The gut, which is directly connected to the nervous system, becomes reactive.
- 8:35[SPEAKER_00]: Cellular repair slows down significantly.
- 8:38[SPEAKER_00]: Which means a woman who has been operating from low energy emotional states for years is a woman who's body has been a physiologically locked out of its own healing capacity for just as long.
- 8:51[SPEAKER_00]: She can follow every protocol perfectly and take every supplement and do everything right on paper.
- 8:57[SPEAKER_00]: But if the energetic state choose operating from keeps her body in sympathetic dominance, she is trying to heal in a state that makes healing physiologically very difficult to access.
- 9:09[SPEAKER_00]: This is not a mindset issue.
- 9:11[SPEAKER_00]: It's biology.
- 9:12[SPEAKER_00]: And it's the reason energy healing, when you understand what it actually means, changes everything about how you approach chronic illness.
- 9:20[SPEAKER_00]: This is the why.
- 9:22[SPEAKER_00]: This is why we care about this.
- 9:23[SPEAKER_00]: And to another important note, this is where most approaches to chronic illness get it wrong.
- 9:30[SPEAKER_00]: They focus on relaxing the nervous system and I know you've heard that 5,000 times.
- 9:35[SPEAKER_00]: nervous system work is trending, breath work, meditation, yoga, cold water plunges, and while those things have value, they address the surface.
- 9:45[SPEAKER_00]: They temporarily shift the body into a parasympathetic state without changing the emotional environment that keeps pulling it back into sympathetic dominance.
- 9:55[SPEAKER_00]: The moment the meditation ends, the guilt is still there.
- 9:59[SPEAKER_00]: The resentment is still there.
- 10:01[SPEAKER_00]: The on-for-filmant is still there, and the body goes straight back.
- 10:05[SPEAKER_00]: Real energy healing is not about relaxing the nervous system.
- 10:09[SPEAKER_00]: It's about addressing the emotional states that keep activating it in the first place.
- 10:14[SPEAKER_00]: So what actually begins to shift this?
- 10:17[SPEAKER_00]: If there's one practice you do ever from this podcast, let it be this.
- 10:22[SPEAKER_00]: Take a piece of paper and write down five areas of your life.
- 10:26[SPEAKER_00]: your relationship, your job, where you live, how you feel about yourself, and how much you actually enjoy your day-to-day life.
- 10:33[SPEAKER_00]: Five things.
- 10:35[SPEAKER_00]: Then I want you to rate each one from one to ten.
- 10:38[SPEAKER_00]: And here's what those numbers actually mean.
- 10:41[SPEAKER_00]: A ten is an area that genuinely energizes you.
- 10:44[SPEAKER_00]: When you think about it, something in you expands.
- 10:47[SPEAKER_00]: You feel good.
- 10:48[SPEAKER_00]: It gives you something
- 10:52[SPEAKER_00]: A one is an area you dread that you have been tolerating or pushing through for so long that you've stopped noticing how much it costs you.
- 11:00[SPEAKER_00]: That when you think about it, honestly, something in you contracts.
- 11:05[SPEAKER_00]: Most women find several areas sitting between three and five.
- 11:09[SPEAKER_00]: They're not obviously bad, but they're not good enough to feel nourishing.
- 11:13[SPEAKER_00]: They're flat, just okay.
- 11:16[SPEAKER_00]: Just something you've learned to live with.
- 11:18[SPEAKER_00]: And that flatness across multiple areas of your life is exactly the energetic environment that keeps the body in sympathetic dominance.
- 11:28[SPEAKER_00]: Look at your lowest two scores.
- 11:30[SPEAKER_00]: Those are almost certainly where your most training emotional states are being generated from.
- 11:36[SPEAKER_00]: Then ask yourself one honest question about each.
- 11:40[SPEAKER_00]: What is one small thing I can change, address, or move toward in this area this week?
- 11:46[SPEAKER_00]: We're not looking for a big overhaul or a dramatic life change.
- 11:50[SPEAKER_00]: Just one small on a step in the direction of a life that feels better from the inside.
- 11:56[SPEAKER_00]: Because that is what begins to shift the energetic state.
- 12:00[SPEAKER_00]: And that is what begins to give the body something different to operate from.
- 12:04[SPEAKER_00]: Let's wrap up what we covered today.
- 12:06[SPEAKER_00]: Energy healing is not crystals and candles.
- 12:09[SPEAKER_00]: It's the science of what happens to the body when the emotional states who operate from keep it locked out of its own healing capacity.
- 12:17[SPEAKER_00]: Healing happens in the Paris empathetic state.
- 12:20[SPEAKER_00]: low-energy emotional states fear guilt, depletion, umphulfilment keep the body in a sympathetic dominance.
- 12:27[SPEAKER_00]: And no protocol is going to address that.
- 12:29[SPEAKER_00]: The starting point is the honest inventory.
- 12:33[SPEAKER_00]: Five areas of your life, your two lowest scores, and one small step towards something better.
- 12:39[SPEAKER_00]: The inventory will show you where energy is being drained, but the emotional patterns underneath your specific symptoms go deeper than five scores on a page.
- 12:48[SPEAKER_00]: I developed a free chatGBT prompt that connects your physical symptoms to the emotional patterns that may be driving them in under 30 seconds.
- 12:56[SPEAKER_00]: And right now, it is completely free.
- 12:59[SPEAKER_00]: That will not always be the case.
- 13:01[SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the