Latest / Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women / #59. Your Body Stops Showing Up For A Life You Don't Truly Want & Chronic Illness Is One Way It Pushes Back When You Won’t

Transcript

#59. Your Body Stops Showing Up For A Life You Don't Truly Want & Chronic Illness Is One Way It Pushes Back When You Won’t · Why You Got Sick: How Emotion Drives Chronic Illness & Healing in Women

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: You were trapped in a life you didn't want and couldn't see a way out of.
• 0:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Getting sick was your body's way of walking away.
• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not the path you would have consciously chosen, but the one it took because you never would.
• 0:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Today I want to offer you a completely different way of looking at your illness.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stay with me on this one.
• 0:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a new way of thinking about why you got sick.
• 0:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And all I ask is that you stay open.
• 0:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why you got sick.
• 0:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Teclody Francesco, certified mind-body practitioner, and certified holistic life coach.
• 0:33
  [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.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twice a week we look at how emotion drives chronic illness in women.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: One episode goes deeper into the pattern beneath the symptoms.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other gives you a quick way to interrupt the cycle.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you're done organizing your life around symptoms and flare-ups, this is where that changes.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: This podcast shows mind-body education.
• 1:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not medical advice and is designed to complement not replace your medical care.
• 1:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin.
• 1:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode, you'll discover why your body stops showing up for a life you don't truly want.
• 1:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: You'll learn what your emotions have actually been telling you about the life you're living.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'll share how to read what your emotions are pointing you toward instead of pushing them away.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some are along the way you ended up living a life that isn't the one you actually want.
• 1:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It probably happened slowly.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: One reasonable sensible decision after another.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each one making sense on its own until you looked up and the whole thing had taken a shape you never really chose.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The job that pays well and costs you everything else.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The relationship you've outgrown but can't picture a leaving.
• 1:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The town you live in now but you never meant to settle in.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on paper there's nothing wrong.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing you can point to and call the crisis.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody would look at your life and say you have a reason to complain, so you don't.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: You just tell yourself this is just how it is.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is being an adult.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everyone feels this way and you keep going.
• 2:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But underneath the keeping going you know there's a version of your life you actually want and there's one you're living and they're not the same.
• 2:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The gap has been there a long time.
• 2:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most women do nothing with it because closing that gap feels impossible.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leaving the relationship, changing the career, uploading the life you've built is terrifying and huge, and you have no idea how you'd even begin.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you stay.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You override the part of you that wants something different.
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: You get very good at not looking directly at it, pushing it all the way down, and for a long time you got away with it.
• 2:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: You kept functioning.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You kept showing up and holding it all together and nothing seemed to break.
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you assumed there was no real cost to staying.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Your body was keeping tabs the entire time.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It knew you were living a life you didn't want.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It knew you weren't going to change it.
• 3:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a body that's asked every single day to show up for a life it has every reason to walk away from is a body under a very specific kind of pressure.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That pressure is what eventually showed up as chronic symptoms and chronic illness.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the pattern.
• 3:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The slow cost of staying in a life that is in an alignment with what you truly want, and expecting your body to keep caring at like nothing's wrong.
• 3:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not theory for me.
• 3:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's the exact life I was living before I got sick.
• 3:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I climbed to the corporate ladder all the way to the top.
• 3:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: a director, senior title, the salary, the role that impresses people at a dinner party.
• 3:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's what I thought I wanted.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: More than that, it was what everyone around me told me I should want.
• 3:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Work hard, get the title, and you've made it.
• 4:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I got there.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the job was unfulfilling, unexciting, and something I did not actually care about at all.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd sit at my desk and feel the hours drag, going through the motions of a career I'd fought hard for, and feeling almost nothing about any of it.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I told no one that, because how do you complain about the thing you're supposed to be grateful for?
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was in a relationship I thought I wanted to, and I could not leave it.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I couldn't see a white out, so I did the thing you do.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I kept ignoring what I already knew underneath, that it was wrong for me.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That we wanted completely different things out of life.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: that the future we were quietly building was small, smaller than the one I actually wanted, and I was shrinking myself to fit inside it.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then there were friendships, a few that were genuinely toxic, and the thing I'm least proud of is what it turned me into.
• 4:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It wore me down until I became that way too.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bitchy, gossipy, judgey, quick to think the worst of people instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt.
• 5:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not who I was, and it's not who I wanted to be in a hated who I became with those so-called friends.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And underneath all of it, I was struggling with my own self-worth.
• 5:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had handed my validation to other people entirely.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether I felt okay about myself on any given day depended on them, on being chosen, validated, approved of, being told I was doing well.
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So look at what that actually was.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't one thing that was off.
• 5:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was everything.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: A career I didn't care about.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A relationship I couldn't leave.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Friendships that turned me into someone I didn't like.
• 5:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way I couldn't hold my own worth without somebody else handing it to me.
• 5:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: every single area of my life was wrong for me at the same time.
• 5:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the outside, it looks like a woman who had it together.
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the inside it was a life I didn't want to be living in almost every direction I looked.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's the part I want you to notice because it's the part I miss completely while I was in it.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't in a crisis.
• 6:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing was on fire.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was no single catastrophe I could point to.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was just a slow, comprehensive, wrongness across my whole life that I had gotten very good at ignoring.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I kept functioning.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I kept performing.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I kept telling myself this was normal and everyone felt this way and had no right to want more.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is exactly when my body started to break down.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not one system, not one symptom.
• 6:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It started coming apart in several directions at once and then came the diagnoses.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the time, I was blindsided.
• 6:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought it came out of nowhere.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know now that it didn't come out of nowhere.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: My body had been showing up day after day for a life I didn't want for years.
• 6:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: at some point it stopped being willing to.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The breakdown wasn't random and it wasn't bad luck.
• 6:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the most logical thing my body could have done given everything I was asking it to carry and refusing to change.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So here's the different way of thinking about your emotions that I want you to sit with.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every emotion you have is a signal.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like a reading on a dial.
• 7:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that dial is measuring one specific thing.
• 7:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: How close the life you're living is to the life you actually want.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about what your good emotions actually tell you.
• 7:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joy, happiness, excitement, love.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: You feel those when you're in alignment with what you truly want.
• 7:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: When you're with people you feel safe with, spending your time in a way that means something to you.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those emotions are the reading that says, this is right.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the life you want.
• 7:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And your negative emotions tell you the opposite.
• 7:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frustration, resentment, anxiety, sadness.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are the reading that says something here is off.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not quite the life you want.
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now I need to be clear about something.
• 8:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Feeling negative emotions on occasion is just part of being human.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Life has hard moments, hard days, hard weeks.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The issue is when those emotions become the state you live your life in day in and day out for many weeks, months, and sometimes years.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: When frustration, resentment, anger, fear, guilt, shame, and dread are the background of most of your days and most of your time.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are signals telling you something important about your life.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something is off and you need to pay attention.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's the part I want you to sit with.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those emotions don't tell you where your life is off though.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They only tell you that it is off.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The feeling is the alarm.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Finding what's actually setting it off, that's your job.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to be willing to dig underneath it and look honestly at what's not right.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: So now go back to a woman whose whole life is off.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The career she doesn't care about, the relationship she can't leave, every area wrong at the same time.
• 9:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is she feeling most days?
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The hard emotions, on repeat, because the reading is accurate, her life really is far from the one she wants.
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the why this is why we care about this, because most women spend years trying to unpack and process and explore the hard feelings so they go away without ever reading what they're telling them.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: They treat the signal as the problem and try to silence it.
• 9:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: but you can't correct the signal that way.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The feeling keeps coming back because the thing it's measuring hasn't changed.
• 9:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The life is still wrong.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a body that is handed that same reading every day for years is a body being told constantly that the life it's living is not the one it wants to be showing up for.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what do you do with all of this?
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's your one practice for this week and it's simple.
• 9:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're going to practice reading your own emotional dial.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Open a note on your phone right now, create a table with two little columns.
• 10:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you don't know how to do that, it's super easy, just Google it.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: One side is your grid of motions.
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The other side is your negative ones.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the next seven days, you catch yourself in the act.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anytime you notice a genuinely good emotion, the lift of relief or joy or ease or happiness, you stop and you write down two things.
• 10:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: What you were doing and who you were with.
• 10:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's it, it goes on the good side.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And anytime you fill a hard one, frustration, anger, dread, heaviness, you do exactly the same thing.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: You write down what you were doing and who you were with.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it goes straight onto the other side.
• 10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not analyzing any of it in the moment.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not trying to fix it or explain it or talk yourself out of it.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're just catching the reading and writing it down.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the whole exercise.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: A few seconds, a few times a day.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Here's why this works and why it's different from just knowing your life feels off.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right now, all of this lives as a vague feeling.
• 11:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A general sense that something isn't right, that you're tired, that you're not happy, but nothing specific enough to actually do anything with.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a vague feeling is easy to ignore, and you might have been ignoring it for years.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: When it's written down day after day in your own words, it stops being vague.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the week, you sit down and you look at both sides, and the pattern is right there in front of you.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The same person shows up on the hard side over and over.
• 11:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The same part of your day.
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The same room, the same task, the same commitment you keep saying yes to, but you want to say no to.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And on the good side, you start to see the opposite.
• 11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The things that were right the whole time that you never gave any thought to, but just genuinely let you up and made you happy.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the digging I talked about.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is how you find where your life is off instead of just knowing that it is.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're not guessing anymore.
• 12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've got a full week of real evidence showing you exactly where the dial keeps dropping and exactly where it lifts.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is a starting point for change.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everything I've shared with you today was undoubtedly a huge part of what made me chronically sick.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The career I didn't care about, the relationship I couldn't leave, every area of my life wrong at the same time, and the body that finally broke down under the weight of all of it.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I lived it, and I now know that I couldn't see my way out of any of it on my own.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was too deep inside it.
• 12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the whole reason I built now she heals.
• 12:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: My four-month healing experience for women with chronic illness where I help you stop being a full-time patient and become a full-time person again.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Together we identify and resolve the emotional patterns, like people pleasing, perfectionism, the need for control, fueling your symptoms.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: We do this, or your body can finally shift out of survival mode, and into a state where rest and repair is actually possible, and you stop forcing yourself through a life that's draining you, and you start building one you actually want to be in.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: You get your days back.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: You get to feel like yourself again.
• 13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and you do it with me beside you the whole way and a small group of women who understand exactly what you're caring because they are too.
• 13:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right now the weight list is open and it's important you're on that because I'm only taking 10 women and this may be the last time I opened the doors this year.
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Spots go to women on the weight list first.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reason I'm only taking 10 women is because part of this experience is meeting with me one-on-one every single week for four months.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I can't give you personal attention like that with a big group.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you know you're living a life you don't want, don't wait to deal with this later.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Get on the wait list and learn more.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The link is in the show notes.
• 13:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll see you in the next episode.