Rachael Brown BSc (Hons) MSc Dip Clin Hyp NLP Coach
Southsea, Portsmouth, UK
My Story
There’s always going to be more to my story than what I can summarise on my webpages. I’m sure the below will give you a flavour of my lived experience. Let me know which parts of my story you can relate to!
The depths of my chronic dis-ease
The most debilitating dis-ease I suffered with was chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). It had been particularly bad for ~3 years before I found nervous system healing & CFS School. There were periods of time when I was very much sofa-bound, with two long sickness periods from my job in health. I’d spent so long pushing in so many aspects of my life, my body essentially go to a point where it said “NO, stop” – then I was left with little choice but to listen. Aside from the CFS I also had experienced: depression, anxiety, chronic daily headaches, occasional panic attacks, dizziness, POTS-like symptoms (though not diagnosed formally), chronic pain, frequent sore throats, binge eating ‘disorder’… Then there was also the inflammation ‘stuff’: perennial rhinitis/hayfever, acne, asthma, IBS. I rarely have issues with these now. From memory, it was from around my pre-teen age that all of these layers of dis-ease began to accumulate for me. So I’d been living with what I later came to understand as a dysregulated nervous system for 20+ years!
I had 2 particularly significant ‘crash’ / ‘bust’ episodes, which also meant two long-term periods of sickness from work. The first happened in the summer of 2019, which I refer to as my breakdown. I buckled physically and emotionally while away on holiday with my partner after pushing in every way for a number of months. At that time, the depression was a bit more present than the fatigue. The second was in November 2021 after I was infected with Covid. Neither of these came from nowhere for me. Looking back, the layers had been building with significant ‘fighty-flighty’ behaviours and reactions to life’s challenges, pushing through for a number of months until I couldn’t anymore.
The tsunamis that flattened me
Scary tests & searching for answers
In January 2019 I knew I wasn’t ok. For months I had been feeling lethargic & spontaneously sleepy with my eyelids closing throughout the day. It was as though I was stuck in some kind of auto-pilot, but regularly zoning out of where I physically was! At work I was often unable to listen to, process & respond to what colleagues were saying to me. My strength and energy to exercise was becoming more and more variable. Getting out of bed was a hard task when I’d been a ‘morning person’ most of my life. Looking back I was existing in a constant cycle of ‘boom-bust’/’push-crash’ throughout my waking hours each day. Sleep was becoming more and more unrefreshing. As the daily headache symptom onset, never being one to have suffered with headaches, I just couldn’t push through and ignore how I was feeling. I would wake with a headache every day, despite excellent hydration, which would often worsen as the day went on. I just couldn’t live like it anymore. This was a push for me to book an appointment with my Doctor. I had the routine blood tests & checks. I understood the purpose of the various tests – to rule anything out. On reflection, it all came from a Western-medicine stance place of ‘let’s find what’s wrong’. The tests and checks went on for a number of months. The MRI on my brain was probably the scariest among them all. Interestingly, about a year earlier I’d had some urgent in-depth heart checks (echocardiogram) after breathing difficulties. It was all pretty concerning at the time, as well as surprising, given I was in my mid 20s and very active with all of the swimming, cycling, running I was doing. When nothing was found by the tests (aside from ‘sports asthma’), that landed me with the label of chronic fatigue.
Where I live in Portsmouth, England (UK), the local health service actually has a support team specifically for ‘long term conditions’ & chronic pain. That’s where I was signposted and I was pleased to be seen pretty quickly. Once on their patient list I had consultations and assessments with an Occupational Therapist, a Physiotherapist, as well as a Psychologist. The treatment plan I committed to involved pacing, resting, graded exercise therapy, as well as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy/Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. I definitely found the empathy and support of the service beneficial. Diligently following their protocols also meant my symptoms lessened in severity. After a while I was able to get by with doing a bit of work again and basic daily tasks. As soon as I tried to become more active again, things started going downhill. It also didn’t help that I was stuck in a fear loop of ‘doing too much’ because I had an ‘illness’. I began to look to other things that could help me. Some other treatments & methods I dabbled and tried included (not an exhaustive list here!): acupuncture, lymphatic drainage, The Perrin technique, various supplements, massage, reflexology, meditation, restorative yoga, cognitive behaviour therapy, osteopathy cranial treatments, pain medication, anxiety medication… and probably a few more. For a long time my approach was that the CFS was an illness I needed to ‘beat’, to ‘fight off’, to overcome… that there was something wrong with me and I needed something or someone external to repair me. There were a couple of different medications I tried too to help with both pain and low mood. I really believed I had to live a moderated life, differently to others, just to survive day to day with less energy than everyone else. There was however a small part of me that refused to believe that I would be stuck having to live that way for many years to come and I began searching for a something else I’d not found yet.
Attempting to fight & fix the fatigue
The fresh splash of hope – finding brain retraining & Mindbody healing
Despite being warned off ‘Dr Google’ I began to type words like ‘recovery’ and ‘hope’ into the search engine. I then came across Raelan Agle & her ME/CFS Recovery, Support & Inspiration Facebook group. I dipped in and out of that forum space over a few months. Something about ‘brain retraining’ kept being mentioned. After initially dismissing the idea, I did a little more digging into it and before long I had gathered a list of ~10 different CFS recovery programmes. One day on my Instagram Jennifer Mann popped up and I was curious about her story, her message and a new course she was offering. Of course I booked myself in for a free Discovery Call, which was in November 2021. That initial conversation with Jennifer was life changing for me. She helped me to realise that I didn’t actually have a long list of things wrong with me, but that my nervous system was stuck in survival mode. That all of the symptoms I was experiencing was my body’s way of expressing that it wasn’t feeling safe. In January 2022 I resigned from my day job, focused fully on my healing with CFS School and here I am now!
I was 6 years old and my family (it was just me, my Mum, & my Dad) had recently moved to a new house. I remember finding the new house pretty scary. I have a vague memory of a stomach ache/pain. My folks took me to the hospital and nothing physically wrong was found. That’s the earliest seemingly unexplained physical symptom I remember experiencing, that was likely Mindbody dis-ease.
My earliest unexplained Mindbody ‘thing’
Pushing for perfectionism & teenage ‘M.E.’
In that first year of secondary school (age 11) my Mum had recently stopped working for her own health reasons, I’d just been moved up to the top squad at my swimming club (training 10+ hours a week), and I was working hard academically trying to be top of the class in everything. I caught a virus, followed by another, then another – and just couldn’t seem to shake them off. Swimming training was not possible, though I tried. I was getting close to the national qualification time and all of my actual friends were at the swimming club, so the set-back was gutting for me. My body just didn’t seem able to fight off the viruses. After about 6 months of struggling on, a paediatrician told me that the post-viral fatigue was now called ‘M.E.’ and that I just needed to rest until I felt better. That was all the support and help there was. Over a couple of years it subsided, but little did I know that was the start of being stuck in boom & bust cycles…
Secondary school was a tough time for me. I was ‘highly sensitive’, anxious, regularly tearful – generally on edge about achieving highly in every sense. Which I did. After each next biggest thing, whether that be exams/ a dance audition /whatever else, I was always left flattened and exhausted after pushing myself to the limit. It was the same pattern repeating over and over again. This continued to sixth form college when I did my A-levels, as well as to University. Unfortunately, a new coping mechanism came into play…
The boom & bust train
Body image, tummy & eating problems
Aged around 17 I began to restrict my eating, which later led to binge eating cycles. Food was a comfort to soothe my uncomfortable emotions, especially in my first year of studying at Exeter University. I was really ashamed and ate in secret a lot of the time, until I confided in a close friend who encouraged me to speak to one of the University’s counsellors. That helped a little but didn’t resolve the pattern. It was also around that time that acne sprung – which has came & went during stressful times in the years that followed. In my mid 20s I experienced a lot of bloating and suffered with tummy pain for IBS. At the time I blamed the 6 months of anti-biotics I had taken to address the acne for messes up my natural gut balance (yes, this may well have had a little part to play). I saw a specialist Dietician and did the low FODMAP plan. That helped manage the symptoms a bit. At another time I had some emotional eating support from a different Dietician, which was a new approach of looking at my beliefs around food and helped me get to a place of eating more intuitively. Overall it has actually been regulating my nervous system that means IBS/bloating is no longer a regular occurrence for me!
I’d got the academic degrees (yes two!), I’d got the grown-up job, I’d moved out of the family home, was renting somewhere to live - I’d ticked all of the boxes of all of the things I was supposed to have achieved. So why did I felt on edge and uneasy? I was constantly in search of the next achievement to have a sense of self-worth. Always searching for more & better, pushing all of the time. I was often tense and anxiety was the main challenge when I started in the workplace after my MSc, aged ~23. My flippant reactions to things were disproportionate and I knew deep down that something was ‘off’. I self-referred to a local service for help with anxiety (which in was very embarrassed about at the time). I joined a group course for CBT. 3 cycles of that therapy later, with a mix of group/individual/focus on low mood or anxiety… I was a bit better but still in those boom & bust patterns. A noteworthy bout of depression came next, for which I saw a private therapist and had talking therapy for a whole year. Each of these helped at the time, but none went into the body to connect to the nervous system and the root cause of all of my dis-ease.
An initial reach for the life-raft out of a stormy sea