Hello, amazing women and mothers and people who have migraine, who are interested in this topic of how to nourish mothers. You know, the topic of how to nourish mothers is a huge topic in and of itself, but when we’re talking about women with chronic migraine, this question of how to nourish ourselves as mothers and create a culture that is more supportive of mothers and families is more urgent than ever, and more complex to answer. So, I look forward to diving into this topic.
It’s a big topic that I’ve thought about for years. I’ve even written a few articles years ago when my youngest son, who’s now seven, was about two. I wrote a three-part series on motherhood and migraine, and I’ve decided not to read over those to get new ideas. Instead, I just want to do a fresh new dive into how I see this topic now. I have a lot of notes here I’m going to be going over, and we’ll see if I can finish this podcast within the 40-minute mark. This is the type of topic where there’s no formula, there’s no answer to the problem of mothers’ malnourishment.
Of course, I’m speaking about malnourishment of mothers on every level, not just on concrete nutritional levels, but also in terms of social nutrition. Of course, our society is very complex, our digital society, where a lot of our socializing occurs online. So, a lot of people are malnourished, not just mothers. But when we’re talking about mothers who have migraines, the need for personal space, the need for self-esteem and self-value, the need for us prioritizing ourselves becomes that much more important and also that much harder to do when you’re suffering from chronic migraine and you’re a mother. It can feel like you’re in a prison. I mean, migraine itself feels like a prison, but it feels like there’s these paradoxical questions that seem to have no answer about how can you really, logistically and practically speaking, get the space that you need to renew yourself.
That can be very complicated in a social scenario and setup where you’re probably mostly relying on one person, like your partner or spouse, for support if you are not a single mom. I’m a single mother now and am going through a divorce process. And so, I’m mostly just going to be speaking about my experiences raising children within a nuclear family unit, which was strained, as it is for many people. I realize some of you may have better community and family resources than I had, but for the most part, I’ll just be sharing my experience and I apologize if I generalize this to anyone who is maybe in a more resourced position as a mother with migraines. I certainly hope that you all are, but I believe that this podcast is really for those of you who find yourself in a nuclear family unit, wanting some tips and insights about how to prioritize yourself and your own needs more, so that you can heal, so you can rest and heal, which is so, so important. So, let’s dive in.
So, to start off, you know, the mother is the regenerative principle. We nourish the world and we regenerate and we amplify and magnify that which is given to us. So, you could really think about how the well-being of our society is really dependent on the well-being of mothers, not only because mothers, of course, take care of children and the children’s earliest imprints that later inform all of their lives are based off of mostly their relationship with their mother.
So, the more resourced mothers can be, especially early on, you know, the better our whole society is. I love this idea that, like, women are magnifiers because it’s true, you know, you give us a sperm and we create a human being and I think it’s also true that the more women are invested in, we’re kind of like a fountain that just overflows. I think women are inherently generous, inherently community-minded.
And so, when we’re in a position where we live in a patriarchal society that doesn’t really value mothers that much, it becomes this paradoxical question of how do we regenerate and renew ourselves and nourish ourselves. And, of course, we would never want to idealize or hope for a society in which everyone is so hyper-independent that they have to do everything themselves. That’s part of the sickness of our culture is this hyper-individualism. But part of the sickness of this hyper-individualism is also this belief that I think many women hold that they don’t have the value, they don’t have enough value to really deserve support. And I know that most of us don’t believe that consciously, most of us are feminists, we don’t really believe that consciously. But I do believe that, at least in my experience in my social circles and in my own experience, that mother’s work is largely undervalued and invisible.
And I don’t mean it’s not valuable just because it’s undervalued, but it’s kind of like mother’s work is so implicitly valuable that it’s easy to take for granted, right? And so, the work that we do in the home not only is invisible in terms of it’s happening inside the house, which is not the visible sphere of our society where things are acknowledged and seen and validated, but it’s also invisible because when you do the work, you do the cleaning, it is not seen by other people because it’s done, right? So, I think there’s all these ways that the implicit inherent value of women, which is so obvious, can be just kind of ignored or, again, taken for granted. And I think that women tend to undervalue themselves as well. Most human beings have issues with self-esteem and their value.
And a lot of men, this shows up as a feeling of inadequacy for not performing in the external world well enough. But for women, it’s a little bit more of a lack of value, inherent value. And I don’t want to get stuck on this too much because the point is to understand how to nourish ourselves. But it really is the key leverage point to doing well in our lives as human beings is to know our inherent value. Because when we value ourselves, we’re able to raise children who value themselves, and we’re able to advocate for our needs, we’re able to have better boundaries. These are the inherent sense of self-value and self-worth and warm regard to ourselves, which is basic self-esteem, is the foundation from which a good, healthy life is built.
And without that, it’s very difficult to have boundaries. And I think one of the biggest challenges that women and mothers face is this issue of boundaries. And any boundary failure externally is a boundary failure internally.
So a lot of times for women, it comes down to pacing, learning how to pace ourselves. And as I mentioned in the Repattern Migraine coursework, a lot of why women don’t pace themselves well is in part because of the way that estrogen affects our consciousness. Estrogen has an effect on consciousness in a way that’s very different than the way testosterone affects consciousness. This is the work of Alison Armstrong. She basically points out that estrogen causes diffuse awareness, and diffuse awareness makes it very difficult to tune information out. So I think that a lot of mothers, whether they have migraine or not, end up having a lot of sensory processing challenges.
Having young children especially is already very challenging in terms of sensory processing, sensory overload with the amount of screaming and chaos that may exist in a family where children are fighting. There will be more discord and chaos, of course, in the children when the parents are uncentered. And if you’re struggling with a chronic health condition, there may be a lot more chaos just because you’re not living in a super clear centered grounded place because of the way that chronic migraine is so dysregulating.
So part of the reason why mothers with migraine have even more sensory processing challenges than other mothers, than your average mother, right, is that the amount of sensory input internally in their body, in terms of pain, is causing them to be emotionally overwhelmed. It adds an extra layer, of course, of emotional and sensory overwhelm when you’re dealing with the feeling of an impending headache or migraine. And so part of the purpose of this podcast is to really just let you know that you’re not alone, that there are many other women going through this, and that I’ve been through what you’ve been through, and I can empathize with that.
But it really comes down to, I think, that women need space, right? And it’s so ironic because our bodies are space, right? Like our womb is a space. And the universe loves a void to fill, right? So in the spaciousness that we hold for other people, in the way that we maintain the spaces of the houses that we beautify, and that we make as a home for other people, we often find that we don’t have a lot of space. And learning how to take up space, which involves having boundaries and feeling that you are valuable enough to have space, is really key to emotional nutrition.
And I’m sure this is obvious, but it’s like, who’s really doing it? Because if we look around in our culture, there’s a lot of blogs and articles about self-care, and it’s kind of like this recuperative coping mechanism rather than a really solid way of life of self-care. And so I think a lot of us are asking ourselves, how can we really take care of ourselves? And it’s not just for the basic things, but for the deeper part of ourselves as well, not just getting enough sleep. And a lot of us don’t even have the basics covered, especially in the very early years of childhood development.
So if you think about breastfeeding and not getting sufficient sleep, and you add on top of that chronic migraines, it can be very difficult to heal on a tissue level. It can be very difficult to regulate the nervous system when there’s that much chaos and screaming with the children and sleep deprivation and all of that. So that’s what I went through as a young mom. My chronic migraine pattern coincided with a C-section operation with the birth of my first son. And so if I can do it, you definitely can. I pulled myself out of chronic migraine in the midst of early child-rearing years.
And I did this even with the challenges of a lot of moving. I can’t say it was easy. And I certainly hope that my Repattern Migraine coursework, for any of you who want to check it out, would help shorten the duration of time that you have to suffer from migraines. But even after I healed the chronic pain condition, there was a lot of healing that I had to do around my value in the world and the type of personality that I brought to motherhood and to migraine, the way I was very hard on myself, the way I was very driven and didn’t give myself permission to rest and undermined my own needs and was very self-sacrificing. And so I think that we have, you know, consciously we have these ideals, as many of us probably consider ourselves feminist, that we live in an egalitarian society and hopefully we live in a partnership where our partner believes in more of an egalitarian approach to partnership. But the reality is very different, right? And so there’s one thing in this book.
I think it’s the book Come As You Are by Emily Nogoski. It might be her other book on burnout, I’m not sure. But she mentions that there’s this system in our nervous system, and I forget the name for it, but it’s basically like how our anticipation and our reward circuitry works to have pleasure in life.
So if there’s something that we experience that we like, we enjoy the feeling of it, then if it repeats itself, we start to anticipate it and look forward to it and gain pleasure from looking forward to things. And I noticed that one thing that got really hijacked and scrambled and messed up in my journey as a mother was my ability to look forward to things was dampened. And I think this is in some way how mothers can become depressive or depressed at home is because if you rely on another person, essentially you’re dependent. You rely on your partner to be able to have free time and space away from the children. If they’re not reliable or if you’re not able to speak up for your needs or maybe you don’t know what to even do that’s pleasurable during that time, and this is probably more relevant for really early childhood, but it’s, you know, when you have multiple children, all those years of kind of having denied yourself pleasure and time and space can kind of accumulate into a personality type where you’re just so used to not having time and space and so used to not having pleasure and things to look forward to and space to look forward to that you kind of think, convince yourself you don’t really need it anymore. And sometimes, you know, if there’s so little support in the family that you, even when you get it, it’s so infrequent or it’s not long enough to really sink into who are you and what do you want.
It can be very easy to just kind of develop an attitude towards yourself of denying your needs. And so what I want to just highlight in this podcast is the importance of anchoring ourselves in ourselves. And I think that is the process of maturing. That is the process of growing up is reparenting ourselves. And we’ve heard about reparenting our partners, you know, which doesn’t sound sexy, but I think the bottom line is that most of the dysfunction that happens in our lives that leads to drama and stress and dysregulation in our lives as mothers is coming from, you know, the challenges and attachment styles that occur in a partnership, the way your partner’s attachment style will be triggered and attachment needs or lack of secure attachment as the case often is. And so we are trying to rely on our partner to meet and sometimes most emotional needs that were neglected as children, but we’re trying, at least in my case, I was trying to get something like love and being a priority and affection and things that I knew I felt I had a right to that I had expectations of that my partner just simply couldn’t provide.
And I was upset about this and hurt about this. This created a lot of drama and stress in my life. And it wasn’t until later that I got a lot of healing around that because I realized, you know, someone who doesn’t have self-esteem, who wasn’t shown up for in their childhood themselves is not going to be able to show up for you in a way that your inner child is seeking, right? So there comes a point where we have to reparent ourselves. And I resisted this idea for a long time because having studied, you know, interpersonal development and developmental neurobiology and understanding that our nervous systems develop in a dyad, all of us born to mothers, our nervous systems develop in relationship with others. And so I very much resisted this idea that self-regulation and the ability to be a functional adult just means becoming more hyper-independent and less dependent on others for these very human needs that we have. I resisted that idea because I know just how important social co-regulation is as mammals.
We need to be in a safe holding field of people that we know that we can trust and ideally have, right, secure attachments, which are a form of nutrition. To the extent that a lot of us don’t, and it’s all a spectrum, right? There’s many varying degrees of the degree to which we do or don’t have the social nutrition of a secure attachment with our partner. It actually is beneficial, I feel, to really stop spending so much time expecting others to give us what we need and just start to provide that for ourselves.
And I think that once we start to do that, which really is reparenting ourselves, then those around us, we attract and elicit that behavior from other people because we have the self-respect inside ourselves that makes other people like our partners want to respect us more. And I think it’s just such a chronic, normal thing that happens, the self-abandonment that many mothers have. But it’s not just emotional self-abandonment.
It’s like there really is a very tangible, logistical challenge in being a mother when you are the default with the children in getting the type of support that you need to have the space that you need. So I don’t want to downplay that and undermine it. I don’t want to pretend like that challenge is easy to overcome because it really is true that in order to ground and center in ourselves, at least in my case, we do need space, right? We absolutely do need space.
So space is a form of nutrition, and that’s something that boundaries provide. And so we can’t really even get the bandwidth to just let the world stop spinning for a minute and actually tune in to our own needs if we don’t have the self-value to establish the boundaries that we need to have the space that we need. And that involves getting support and help from other people.
And so ideally, I think that we broaden the spectrum of sources of support beyond our partner. And, of course, that’s difficult if you’re moving a lot, but, you know, of course, it’s building community, and that’s also very paradoxical. How do you build the community support that you need at the time when you need community support the most? That’s the paradox of early motherhood, and there is no simple, easy, straightforward workaround. But I think we can start very small, and starting small means having personal boundaries, showing up for ourselves by having personal boundaries with the things that drain us. That could include technology use. That could include not eating certain foods.
There are, you know, especially foods that trigger migraine. There are techniques like neurolinguistic programming where we can actually reprogram our habits so that we’re not having to use willpower to try to avoid certain things like coffee or things that we have these, like, these very love-hate relationships with. So there are ways to really take a stand in your life and really show up for yourself.
And I think that I’ve learned more and more about that. Definitely divorce has taught me the most about that, and I just think it’s so interesting that these really extreme kind of intense harrowing situations like chronic illness or divorce are the things that teach us the most of what we’re made of and teach us the most. They’re here to teach us lessons about how are we prioritizing ourselves? Do we really think that we’re important enough to do what we need to heal, right? If you have a chronic illness, I do believe it’s the universe’s way of asking you a very difficult question to answer, which is how are you nourishing yourself? How are you prioritizing yourself? And I definitely have noticed that I think that people with migraine tend to be more pushy, like internally pushy people.
They feel very obligated to meet others’ needs and they tend to be very hard on themselves. So the emotional spiritual nutrition is to have self-esteem, which Terrence Real defines as self-esteem isn’t something that we get when we do something right. It’s the warm regard that we have for ourselves in the midst of our imperfection, which means being a mother who, when we make any kind of mistake, we don’t stew in guilt, which is called the second arrow – when you feel bad about feeling bad. Self esteem is when you are compassionate and loving to yourself, and this is what our children need as well. They need us to model this behavior for them so that they can learn these same skills. So I want to transition now pretty soon here into talking about malnutrition on a more tangible biochemical level in terms of minerals and the way, the challenges in mineral balancing that mothers face.
But before I transition onto that, I just want to talk about being. When we talk about women being nourished and having space, it really is the space not only to do the things that we want to do, but also just the space to be and the space to receive, and we could call this the feminine principle and having enough space to really tune into what we want in life, but also to also get out of that driven doing mode. In my coursework, I talk about the difference between doing, driven doing, and being mode.
So doing mode is when you’re just, you know, trying to reach a goal and accomplishing it. Driven doing is when you’re trying to do something that actually can’t be accomplished, kind of spinning your wheels, or maybe a task that will never end. And then being, of course, is this receptive place of pure being. And the more we can show up for ourselves in pure presence, the more we can show up for our children in that way as well. I definitely noticed as soon as I started meditating twice a day, my children just calmed down. And if you think about the amount of time that we spend scrolling on our phones or doing any number of other things, it’s surprising that we have a hard time prioritizing meditation.
And I think the key is really to do it first thing in the morning and the first thing before bed. But, you know, 15 minutes twice a day can do wonders for feeling centered and for modeling that for our kids, and then they become calmer. And so then we become less overstimulated. But, you know, I feel like I haven’t talked about migraine that much. And so, like, as an example, when I was asking, how is your life with migraine asking you to prioritize yourself? If you think about a woman, a mother lying in bed who has had a chronic migraine for like two days, at least in my experience, I often felt that people thought I was resting during that time even though I was being tortured and that I needed to rest even more. So we really need support and we really need to make it clear to our partners without overly justifying that when we are having a migraine, we’re not resting and that we do need rest after that time.
And I think just being very specific about your needs, not only need for space away from the family when you are having a chronic migraine and also when you’re not, right? But reaching out and asking for touch. I know for a lot of women, touch and oxytocin is very calming to the nervous system. Asking for a massage, not feeling guilty for having needs and for asking for what you need.
I always just wish that my husband would just reach out with what I always needed, which was a neck rub and some water and just some affection. But he always asked me what I needed. He would never just give me what I always said that I needed. So just getting really, really comfortable with speaking up for needs and being more and doing less. And I do think that, in a way, chronic migraine, even though it is also caused by poisoning and caused by these very concrete external things, it is, on a spiritual level, it’s like, I think, for a lot of women with migraine, it’s like if you’ve become so obligated that the only permission slip you, the only thing that you can do that will give you permission to actually rest and stop is a migraine, then that needs to be a really big wake-up call for you. If you don’t feel like you can rest unless you’re so sick that you literally can’t function, that’s a sign that your system is in alarm and it needs to be a wake-up call that you need to start prioritizing yourself more.
So what are some of the reasons why women are malnourished on a more biochemical, mineral level? Well, there’s so many reasons and I want to go over them here, but I just do want to point out that when I’m describing these stressful situations that exist in motherhood, that stress and mineral balancing are synonymous because when we’re very stressed out, we have low stomach acid, we don’t absorb our food well, we don’t assimilate food well, and we don’t retain minerals from our food well when we’re stressed out. So when I talk about the importance of self-esteem, kindness, boundaries, and establishing space and getting support, all of these things will help on a very tangible physical level with becoming more nourished from our food. So of course, we have to choose food that is nutritious. In the Repattern Migraine coursework, I go all over which foods trigger migraine and how to basically stop triggering your system with toxins in the environment. You have to have boundaries in your environment between what kind of pollutants are getting into your system, whether that’s from your hair care products or your makeup or your water or your toothpaste. That’s where we start to establish space with ourselves is we say no to these toxins.
And many of you are probably already doing that just by way of making sure that you have a healthy home for your family and your kids and making sure that you’re feeding your kids healthy food and we’re not brushing our teeth with fluoride or stopping the toxins going in is the first step. But for a lot of women, their migraines are actually caused from nutritional imbalances that were caused by hormonal birth control. So in addition to water fluoridation and fluoride in medications that many women have been exposed to, hormonal birth control and the copper IUD both deplete important nutrients like vitamin C and zinc that women need to have healthy adrenal function to have a clear head.
And so even for mothers with migraine who used to be on hormonal birth control and are not now, they may still be recovering from years of, well, in the case of hormonal birth control, years of chemically induced menopause, which does have a mineral effect. So say, for example, you were exposed to a small amount of mercury. If you’re a woman who has been on hormonal birth control, which depletes zinc, you would have less of the mineral resources available to actually move out those heavy metals, right? So I do think that sociologically, women and mothers are really faced with some very serious challenges when it comes not only to the social malnutrition and the social fragmentation that has occurred in our culture, but to the way the compounding effects of birth control and medical interventions, often at birth, mixed with the sheer demand and intensity of the amount of mineral resources needed to make a baby and to breastfeed a baby for years, it’s no wonder that mothers are depleted, right? Their teeth start disintegrating and falling apart.
I know that happened to me with the sheer amount of output of breast milk year after year if you have multiple children. So it’s not surprising that so many women would have migraine if you look at the intersection of how our medical system is poisoning us, our food supply and our water is getting into our families and into our bodies and tissues, and our food is less nutritious. So we really have to take a stand here.
I mean, I really do think that cultural change comes primarily from the home and from mothers. And so, of course, you know, that revolution includes not only eating really well, which does include taking the time to cook your own food, which I know is very difficult in this fast and busy life that we have, but cooking your own food, you know, taking the time to actually assimilate it, and then being aware and mindful of your particular mineral dynamics in your mineral profile, and that’s what the hair tissue mineral analysis is great for in my Repattern Migraine coursework because it can identify heavy metals that are clogging your system and it can help you to rehabilitate your thyroid function since chronic migraine is an issue of hypothyroidism caused in part by fluoride, toxicity, heavy metals, and nutrient deficiencies. So, when women get nourished, you know, all of these systems start to work again.
And I think it’s just like women are scrambling looking for leverage points. Where are our leverage points? So, our leverage points are everything I’ve mentioned so far, you know, establishing self-esteem, boundaries, and space to be able to get a little foothold because once you start to get an edge on your life where you’ve got a little toe room to actually get some traction, you can start to make headway. And once you, you know, once your chronic migraine pattern has started to reduce in frequency and intensity, you can start to get more and more leverage and that happens through nourishment.
So, I, you know, while there are a lot of toxins in our society and in our environment, I definitely believe firmly that the answer is less about seeing everything as toxic and becoming more literate and aware of all of the toxins in the environment and it’s more about nourishing because the body really does know how to move out toxins when it’s nourished. There are so many minerals and nutrients like copper, iodine, all these other minerals I’ve talked about in previous episodes that are key leaders and they do support our detoxification pathways. So, while we do want to try to minimize toxin exposure, the real work of healing migraine, whether you’re a man or a woman, is nourishment but especially if you’re a mother and a woman, the work is nourishment because as the nourishers, as those who nourish, we need to be nourished and I think the main point I have to drive home here is that we’re going to be deprived if we just keep spending our whole life waiting for others to support and nourish us.
It seems contradictory because we want to be able to receive nourishment and I do think it’s important to tap into the receptive principle and receive that from any form of support that you can find but that can’t be the whole approach, right? We have to anchor in ourselves and provide for ourselves, provide what we need and that reduces the amount of expectation and disappointment when others don’t show up for us in that way. So it’s this balancing act, right? It’s a paradox between being active and receptive, between giving to ourselves and receiving from others, between knowing our limits of how much we give and then also reorienting to giving to and investing in the things in our lives that are really important to us and really do nourish us on a soul level.
I will say in terms of mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, many of you may already have spiritual practices but I’ve mentioned the presence process by Michael Brown numerous times. That has definitely helped me the most in terms of a very tangible concrete practice to show up for myself in my value with unconditional love, essentially reparenting myself through all the emotions of what it means to be human and means to be a mother. And I’ve grown so much in self-esteem and solidity and centering in my midline and so much better with developing healthy boundaries, not only externally but internally, not only with other people but with myself. Boundaries, internal boundaries within myself about how much I can do knowing my capacity and checking in with myself and being tuned in with myself.
And it can be very difficult to do that without a daily spiritual practice. So whatever your daily spiritual practice is, I hope that you can commit to that and invest in that so that you can have the presence of mind to be able to more clearly see other areas in your life where you may be overextending yourself and malnourishing yourself and to rein that back and really value yourself to receive support to treat yourself well. I know that’s maybe not as concrete as some of you wanted, but I don’t think we’re going to dismantle patriarchy overnight.
I do recommend the work of Terrence Real. I highlight some of his work in the Repattern Migraine coursework about boundaries and self-esteem and relational health. He also has coursework on relational life parenting. So the cool thing is there’s consistency between how we can improve our relationship with ourself, with our partner, and teach our children all simultaneously. So it’s very elegant in that way. So check out Relational Life Therapy with Terrence Real.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this podcast and feel inspired to remain grounded in yourself and your value and do what you need to do to be nourished. So much love your way, mothers, and check out the Repattern Migraine coursework if you need any support from me in balancing your minerals. Take care.
