I’m excited to talk about this topic of getting out of victim mentality to heal migraine. I hope this will be relevant to you. In episode two, the last podcast episode, I really got into a lot of nitty-gritty details of mineral dynamics, talking a lot about fluoride and iodine, and today I want to kind of zoom back out to look at more of the emotional ways that being a victim to our disease state can affect the trajectory of how rapidly we heal, and also what we learn about self-responsibility in the course of healing ourselves of a chronic condition.
And right now I’m actually going through separation and divorce, so I’m having a lot of opportunity to examine the ways in which I allow myself to be a victim, and I think this is a really interesting topic to me, because it’s true that power imbalances exist, and it is true that abuses of power do occur, some of them conscious and some of them unconscious, and I’ll go into that. And I think it is also true that many of us have been victimized by the medical system, that’s certainly my area of contention where I have a lot of blame and a lot of victim mentality, and it’s been a really interesting process being honest with myself and really looking at my anger and blame, and kind of sitting in the paradox of this reality that when bad things happen, there is a need to know who was responsible, and yet in this process of pointing the finger and blaming, while it is sometimes appropriate, sometimes that bitterness that goes along with it is something that actually poisons ourselves. And while I certainly feel that in my case, where I got poisoned by the medical system with fluoride, which I talked about in the last episode, and while there is a place for healthy blame there, it’s also true that the degree to which I still feel upset about that event has a lot to do with the story that I’ve made up about it.
Another person could have very easily told the story that she was just so happy that the medical system saved her from potential death through birth, because in my case, I had a C-section operation that basically occurred after I induced with castor oil because my midwife’s scope of practice ran out. In other words, there was nothing wrong with my labor process, but by inducing with castor oil, I ended up in this cascade because it was essentially an induction. We know inductions are more likely to lead to C-sections.
And I got transferred to the hospital for a dysfunctional labor pattern, and I ended up getting anesthesia and antibiotics, both of which contained fluoride and developed chronic migraines afterwards. But another woman who had gone through the same thing may have had a story that the medical system saved her and her baby. So I think it’s very interesting the way that we make meaning of our life, and blaming and pointing the finger really kind of prevents us from taking responsibility, although maybe there is some way to do both.
So in my case, I still have blame of the medical system. I also understand that the medical system isn’t aware that it’s poisoning people with these fluoride-based antibiotics and anesthesia. But I’ve also taken a lot of responsibility, and I have definitely not been a victim in the sense that I fully took the reins and found a way to heal myself of a very complex condition that most medical doctors don’t have a clue how to treat.
So I did take responsibility and learned a ton. I mean, in a way, the hardest things that we go through sometimes are the biggest blessings in life. We learn so much about ourself.
We learn about accountability. We learn about who we really are. We learn resiliency in the face of life’s challenges.
But in the case of migraine, I mean, I see people every day in my coaching practice that are just so incredibly discouraged, and I know that feeling. It’s easy to feel a victim, not necessarily of the medical system, because not everyone has that same history as I do, but some people feel like a victim of their condition, as though migraine were a discrete thing, which it’s not. It’s a process.
And some people feel a victim of their genetics. Some people feel that their migraines have come from their family line. And there’s all different ways that we disempower ourselves by putting the power, by attributing the responsibility of our condition outside of ourselves.
So I do believe that healing involves looking at the ways that we’re doing that, the ways that we’re displacing our power. And even while it’s natural and normal to do so, it’s also necessary if we want to heal to own as much of that personal responsibility as possible. And part of that means looking at the way that we are choosing to be a victim and really examining what that’s all about.
So a victim gets hurt, and the victim feels overpowered by another force greater than themselves. And the victim often holds resentment, and in order to get out of this resentment, we need to really find our core and examine the stories that we’re telling and just ask if there are any other stories that we could embody. And I think most people, when they come to me, some part of them has a story that they can heal from migraine, and another part of them feels very discouraged and hopeless.
And so part of healing is coming back to our wholeness by recognizing these different parts and really embracing them. And that’s an act of healing and responsibility alone, is to also embrace the part that’s blaming and the part that feels that way. You know, legitimately feels that way, legitimately feels upset about something that happened.
So in this podcast, I’m not trying to judge the part of ourself that feels like a victim, but rather to ask ourselves, instead of getting poisoned by that bitterness, how can we really soothe that part of ourself that feels wronged, that feels hurt, and that actually maybe was wronged and hurt, right? And I think that’s an act of grace to have the power and discernment to be able to see that there are parts of ourselves that are suffering, but that the parts that are going to lead us into healing are not the victim, right? The part that’s going to lead us into healing is the part of ourself that is able to integrate what happened, accept what happened, and that includes integrating the anger about what happened. And you know, people have a lot of trauma, people with migraine have a lot of trauma, so maybe their victim mentality isn’t about the fact that they have migraines, but they’re maybe not connecting the dots between how they act like a victim in other parts of their lives and the stress of being caught up in that victim-victor dynamic and the way that that mentality is and the stress associated with it and the drama associated with being a victim in another area of their life is contributing to their migraines. And there’s a lot of power dynamics in politics, especially when it comes to, for example, being a mother, being a stay-at-home mother.
For me, that’s where a lot of the victim mentality came about. And that was based in a very real power differential. When you’re financially dependent on someone because you’re raising children, there are ways that the privilege of time that the man usually has or whichever parent is not with the children, the way that that can be abused and misused.
And I very much believe that we have a long way to go when it comes to balancing the power between men and women and the sexes. And I’ve talked about the ways in which serotonin, which is a critical hormone for women to have a clear head, serotonin pathways, I mean, we get serotonin by being seen and acknowledged. It’s about status.
And so if women are at home taking care of children and they’ve just had this medicalized birth and they feel invisible and they never have the free time to be able to get out and maybe their partner is unreliable and they feel trapped, this is, I’m essentially telling my story. I felt trapped and invisible and I’m trapped in a pain condition and trapped with my children without any help, without the village. And all of this led to very low serotonin levels and hence migraines.
And certainly the stressors in my life and the power dynamics in my life and the struggle with my husband played a big role in my tendency towards getting migraine. So I think we really need to look at the way we feel like victims or we feel trapped elsewhere in our life. Because if you feel like I did, and I think many mothers will resonate with this because I’ve coached enough mothers to know that this story will probably resonate with a lot of you.
If we feel trapped in our life at home as mothers or maybe you feel trapped in your job and you wish you could spend more time with your family, whatever the trap is, migraine can act as a way to give you a break from the way that you feel overwhelmed and exhausted in your life. And so the challenge here is to have the personal agency to take responsibility for having the better boundaries and better pacing to be able to actually retain our energy and not need a chronic migraine to be the only thing that would allow us to actually feel like we deserve to have a break. I think the level of depletion that’s occurring in modern mothers is super, super profound.
Like all good traps, migraine and stay-at-home motherhood are not easy to get out of. It’s not straightforward. It’s not just like, oh, well, if you just switch your mentality and you just have a really good perky attitude about all this, that all of this will go away.
The point here isn’t to blame you for not being able to have a better mentality because the reality is that we need a village and we need social nutrition and forms of support to raise our children. And a lot of women simply don’t have that. So it is unrealistic to expect women to feel fulfillment when they feel trapped at home and they don’t have the means of support that they would need to be able to have some space and time to do something else or have some diversity of experience.
So migraine is very much an experience of compression. We feel very compressed, but a lot of this is internal. So while there are things outside of our control that we can’t control, there are a lot of things within ourselves that we can take agency and control over.
And a lot of that has to do with knowing our value. So the victim, and this is all based off of like Michael Brown’s work in the presence process, the victim often feels that they don’t have enough value and that’s why they don’t have good boundaries. And then the victor or the perpetrator who is grandiose feels they have more value.
And so there can be these power struggles that exist in relationships. And I do think that a lot of those stressors in male-female relationships are playing a role in women’s migraines. If we can improve the health and quality of our relationships, we can reduce our stress and be less prone to migraine.
But this is the battle of the sexes. In order for women to heal migraine, I do think that they need to find ways to have more equality. And you would think that we have more of it these days, but I really think you can’t have equality if you don’t think that you’re of value.
So it comes down to an issue of self-esteem. And if you don’t believe you’re of value and you don’t have good self-esteem, the likelihood that you’re going to be victimized is much higher. So I’m just kind of meandering around on this topic.
People feel victimized by their genetics. People feel victimized even by the diagnosis of migraine itself. Some people actually really super over-identify with migraine as a pathology or a disease and so they victimize themselves by taking on migraine as an identity.
So there’s many different ways that we can become victims, but how do we get out of this? That’s the question. It’s this question of like, what is the migraine teaching you? What is this health crisis teaching you? What is its purpose? And I think that’s when we start to get out of victim mentality, is when we start to just assume that things are happening for us. And also when we start to accept that anything that can happen to a human can happen to me, and I accept the truth of this, that is a Buddhist principle and saying.
And I think it’s really, really wise because it’s basically recognizing that a lot of the suffering that we have as we feel victimized in our life comes from a concept we have about how things were supposed to be. And that there’s this gap between the way things are and the way things are supposed to be. And actually, life isn’t supposed to be any way other than how it apparently is.
And that’s a really hard thing to come to terms with when what your reality is is chronic pain. Of course, we all want it to be different and wish it would be different, but that doesn’t change the fact that because it isn’t, we have to face it, right? And part of what we have to face is this realization that as humans incarnating in a body, I believe we came here as souls to explore certain themes. And I’m not sure what your spiritual orientation is, but for me, I definitely believe that part of what life is about is waking up to this realization that many, many things happen to us that are less than what our mind says should be happening.
And that part of what growing up emotionally and spiritually means is really having the stamina and the resiliency to be able to stand up to and face what life actually is, rather than getting caught up in what we think it should have been and or our judgments about how and why we aren’t measuring up to these ideals we have. So for example, I mean, I think they call that the second arrow. I’ve heard that said before where, let’s say you had a migraine for a few days and you’re lying in bed and you didn’t get any sleep.
And so then you feel super exhausted and devastated and you get some more sleep, but then you feel guilty for getting more sleep. That would be called the second arrow. It’s like when we judge ourselves for having an emotional experience, that’s the primary feeling, right? So we have another example would be like, if I feel blame of the medical system, and then on top of that, I judge myself for blaming.
That would be a second arrow. The second arrow is the judgment we have about our emotional state. And so I want to bring up emotional integration because I really think in order to stop being a victim, we need to emotionally integrate that which is unintegrated.
And this is why I promote the presence process in my online coursework. The presence process is an incredible process of emotional integration by Michael Brown. Check out the book.
And the whole point of this is that we keep getting victimized by our life or triggered into stress by our life situations because our life is trying to bring up a scenario for us that will trigger the unresolved emotion of something that happened to us in the past that we’re unresolved about. And then that will allow us to have the opportunity to emotionally integrate it. But because most of us react as though that thing out there is just a bad thing that’s happening, we don’t take the time to stay with the uncomfortable emotion that it triggers.
And instead we just blame the outside circumstance. Or we try to manipulate and change and rearrange the circumstances. Or we get off on the story about why this is happening rather than actually just feeling the feeling that we’re feeling.
So I really do believe that getting better at feeling, getting better at emotional integration is a huge act of self empowerment and self responsibility to really be willing to feel the discomfort. And I know a lot of people with migraine have reached points of so much pain that they’ve just surrendered to feeling it. I had one Christian client who described it as feeling that Christ was teaching her how to surrender to kind of being crucified, like the pain she was experiencing became almost like a spiritual teaching of surrender.
Because at a certain point, there’s nothing you can really do about the pain, right? I mean, sure, you can try to fight it. You can take suppressive medications and all that. But to the extent that those do or don’t work, or to the extent that your migraine is just showing up as a rebound effect from all those attempts to suppress, at a certain point, you’re faced with facing the pain and actually just feeling the pain.
And what Michael Brown says is there’s a huge amount of friction and heat that is generated when we’re resisting, we’re resisting feelings, or when we’re resisting anything. But if we’re resisting migraine, which is, you know, resistance is different than being proactive to try to get a different outcome. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to heal migraine and being super proactive.
I’m hugely in favor of that. But if the way that we’re healing is coming through a lot of resistance, that’s going to create even more friction. So what we need to be invited to do when we’re healing from something as serious as migraine is to invite ourselves into really coming into relationship with what this pain is, being willing to sit with it and talk with it and try to understand more what this is.
Because I think a lot of the stress that people with migraine feel is coming from these internalized pressures of the way that this migraine type of personality really pushes themselves. And this obviously comes from childhood, but people with migraine are very driven people who feel things should be a certain way or who believe they need to show up in a certain way and they have a hard time surrendering and not constantly giving, right? We always feel we have to be productive. And so to come into emotional integration means to face our fear, anger, and grief.
So I’m looking at my notes here, and this is also part of Michael Brown’s presence process work. If we feel grief, anger, and fear, we could be victims of the way that we tell ourselves the story that all of these feelings are being caused by an outside person, place, or thing. But these are just core essential human feelings.
And I think that fear, anger, and grief are really interesting because if we learn how to emotionally integrate them, which basically means actually feel them, right? Actually feel them instead of going into the blame or the story or manipulating our outside circumstances to change things. If we actually feel them, we find that these feelings are huge gifts and energy sources. And I love this, the way that Michael Brown talks about these emotions.
So he says that the healthy aspect of fear is caution. The healthy aspect of anger is assertion, and the healthy aspect of grief is depth of feeling. So getting away from that second arrow where we’re judging ourselves for the feeling or trying to get away from the discomfort of the feeling, anytime we feel fear, anger, and grief, we can actually start to inquire as to how we could have a healthier expression of that.
So whenever we feel fear, we can validate the feeling of the need for caution. Whenever we feel anger, we can validate our need for assertion. And whenever we feel grief, we can validate the depth of feeling that we feel in our life.
And I do believe that starting to honor our sensitivity, honoring ourselves for a true sensitivity is where a lot of emotional healing happens. And we can really reduce our stress when we start to show up to ourselves in that way. And that is taking ultimate responsibility because again, we’re not blaming our emotional state on other people.
Michael Brown says that basically fear is the doorway to getting to grief. So really, almost all emotions can be seen as fear, anger, or grief, and yet all emotions actually go back to grief. So I think this was super fascinating what he said is that we fear certain things happening in the future because something hurt us in the past, and we don’t want to experience that hurt again.
And we’re angry because certain things were done to us or happened to us that we didn’t like that hurt us. And so both fear and anger go back to hurt, they’re secondary emotions. They go back to grief and hurt.
And so whenever we are emotionally dysregulated, it’s because we’re hurt, even though we may be acting like we’re angry, or we may be fearful of something in the future. It’s really the problem is that we got hurt. We got hurt.
And so how do we attend to this pain? Feeling it and taking responsibility in this case is like a type of re-parenting where we show up for the emotion with complete and total love and compassion in a way that probably no one has ever done for us. That’s probably why we don’t do it because not only has no one ever really shown up for us in that capacity, I mean, depending on your parents, but maybe our mother has, but most of us have come to believe that love is conditional, and that’s why we push ourselves so hard, right? That’s why we become victims of our own drive and our own desire to please other people and our own desire to have our self-worth be based in the value that we provide to other people. And while there’s certainly a lot to be said for the fact that in our roles as parents, and in whatever our role is in our jobs, that we need to show up to those roles, we also need the space and the time to nurture ourselves and to do what we love so that we can show up to our role with more energy.
Otherwise, we end up getting too compressed and too overextended, and then we end up developing feelings of anger, grief, and fear, and resenting our uncomfortable state and blaming it on other people or circumstances. So whether that’s another person we’re blaming, or we’re blaming our genetics, or we’re blaming the medical system for poisoning us, the bottom line is that we have to come back to our center, integrate our emotions, and take responsibility for our own well-being and stop waiting around for other people to do that, or for the medical system to find some kind of quick fix technology that’s going to fix migraine. We need to be our own saviors, and that’s what migraine invites us to do.
That’s what any chronic illness invites us to do. So this has been a kind of all-over-the-place talk about these many aspects of being a victim, but I want to just end with a few words on grace, and I feel like grace is not something that I’ve had particularly much of in my life. I have a lot of pride and less grace, but I’ve been thinking a lot about grace, and I’ve heard grace be defined as having an open heart in hell.
So how can we let something that is actually painful open us up to life even more and open us up to our tenderness so that we don’t become jaded and shut down and angry and bitter and resentful at life for the pain that we experience? How can we rise to the occasion, which this is a spiritual challenge, and it is not easy to do because naturally when we feel pain and discomfort, the tendency is to shut down or fight or defend or flee or pretty much anything other than open. And so I think that the grace that we can bring to the healing process is the grace of showing curiosity for what our body is trying to teach us through this condition. Show curiosity about what we can learn about taking better care of ourselves and being more tender and loving towards ourselves, which does include having good boundaries.
What we can learn about letting go of resentment and letting go of anger, pain, and blame, which doesn’t mean that we’re sanctioning the things that were done to us that were inappropriate, but how can we release built-up tension in our system so that our system can work better? These are acts of grace and they’re acts of human spirit, and migraine can teach us about these things. It’s a long journey and these are just a few of the questions and insights that I’ve had along the way. And I am very grateful ultimately for what I went through with migraine because it’s been one of the greatest teachers, although certainly a very uncomfortable teacher, but definitely the one that has taught me most about what I’m made of, who I really am, what I’m here to do, and how resilient and amazing my body is.
So thanks for listening. Hope you enjoyed this. Tuning into your authentic self and honoring it and empowering yourself to be devoted to your healing migraine for the long haul.
You don’t have to be an expert to heal migraine. My own journey is a testament to that. Stay tuned for more upcoming episodes and be sure to check out all of my resources, including the Repattern Migraine Masterclass on my website, mineralsformigraines.com. I care about you and I’m here as an ally to help you thrive.
