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in_seclusionNew Year, New Me
Maybe that means I write more things LOL
Anyway. Starting 2025 hibernating because the holidays wore me out beyond belief. I'm resting but somehow my days just keep getting filled; I really need to learn how to say no without feeling bad, but also most of these things are also health-related so it's... it is what it is?
In many ways 2025 does feel like a new slate. It looks like I'll be working with a new team of doctors to figure out my SIBO/IBS issues through a more aggressively planned detox and diet monitoring plan, as well as further testing in Bangkok. My parents have agreed to take care of the costs because frankly I'm broke and unemployed. My dad in particular has really been helping me out; he was shocked at how high my medical bills were in December and I'm dealing with the shame surrounding the cost. When he asked why I couldn't do these tests in 2023 I just told him it was just way too expensive so I've been taking tests I can afford and basically patchwork stitching treatments and supplements and diets as best as I know. But now they're helping me out with the costs so I can actually focus on getting better with guidance instead of Dr Google.
I'm hoping this works because it's been really tough, and I'm tired of living a life of deprivation because at this point I can barely eat anything because anything outside my regular stuff bloats me or triggers stress because I'm scared of bloating. The doctors have decided to just reset my body by doing a detox and really eating clean, then build up from there. It's tough because I have developed medical trauma surrounding my digestive issues and eating itself; the thought of diets stresses me out, so we're working on getting a provider that can make meal plans for me with the caloric intake required so I don't lose weight but it still doesn't inflame my digestive system. What's cool is that they're integrative doctors so it does combine medical science and more natural stuff like my traditional Chinese medicine diet -- supplements plus clean eating to help my system get back to the point where I can function normally. At least that's the goal.
I also have to incorporate more light movement into my daily routine and that is mentally the hardest one because my nerves are so frazzled that getting out of bed requires a lot of energy -- I'm trying to be patient with myself and understand that I am simply recovering from the holidays, 2024, 2023 -- all of it. But trapeze gets me out of bed because I love it, so I'm trying to think of movement as something I can enjoy doing again, and as a means to get stronger for trapeze. When I get my back muscles and my abs back it's all over for y'all jk
I'm also onboarding with a new therapist to help with nervous system regulation, as surprise surprise! my nervous system is shot and my stress tolerance is probably the size of a matchstick. She said all the previous trauma work I've been doing is really good, but it's still work, and my system is already overloaded. So just like the medical doctors advised, my new therapist is saying let's go back to baseline and reset my nervous system so I can handle the stress that comes with doing the work.
It feels a lot like new beginnings, which is a good thing.
I am, however, incredibly overwhelmed with everything. A lot of my illness is due to stress; when I get anxious or stressed emotionally I can literally feel my intestines grind to a halt. It takes me a long time to get out of it; I realize now that's my body being unwilling to stomach what I'm going through. I've realized that due to the trauma anniversaries of Q4, my body feels like it's back in 2023 instead of in 2025, so I have to do some work to get it back to a place of safety. But! That's what the new therapist is for, and what the medical doctors are helping me with too.
I received a lot of interest when I reposted something about the chronic inflammation, stress, and self-abandonment. Nervous system regulation is a hot topic now in therapy and movement circles both, and dysregulation is a new buzz word. I understand all of it on a very personal level, because the breakdown of my body is partially because of long COVID, partially mistreatment of IBS, and mostly the effect of trauma and stress on the body.
I have an alphabet soup of diagnoses, and healing my issues has gone beyond the usual diet and exercise. I have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from my old job in the humanitarian field, complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) from childhood issues that are probably incredibly familiar to many Asian households compounded by some circumstances in my family and a ton of self-abandonment; Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and depression (both are symptoms of CPTSD). Physically I have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which is a catch-all for "you have digestive issues which we can't diagnose" and am going to get re-tested for small bacterial intestinal overgrowth (SIBO).
By the way: SIBO causes serious bloating, irregular bowel movement, and as it progresses, fatigue, brain fog, and weight loss due to malabsorption of vitamins and minerals into the body. It will seem like no matter what you eat, you are bloating -- especially if you eat carbs and sugars. The bloating can be extreme and last for a few days. When it's serious, you bloat from drinking water. If this is happening to you, I suggest doing a SIBO test.
Western medicine is learning they are all connected, much like how they're learning what Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine knew thousands of years ago: the body stores trauma, which blocks the flow of life/balance within you. At the moment, I'm living proof of that, and I'm working to undo it.
People are learning about the gut-mind connection, which means that whatever stresses you have going on mentally will impact the development of your gut bacteria, which is responsible for your digestion. If you are super stressed emotionally, physically, psychologically -- all of this impacts the gut microbiome, causing some to die and others to take its place, causing an imbalance in the composition of the gut flora. Any imbalance is called dysbiosis, and leads to the development of IBS, SIBO, candidasis, fungal infections, etc. (I had all of them at some point). Compound this with trauma, like I have, then we have a body that cannot handle the stress and breaks down completely.
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk outlines what happens when people don't talk about trauma: it gets stored in the mind, and in the body. That's why sometimes you'll forget a traumatic event, but on certain days you'll feel sad, or your hands start trembling, or you feel like you want to run when you see something or someone. The memory fades, but the body remembers the feeling.
In Chinese medicine, emotions are stored in different parts, and this wisdom is found in some English idioms: grief is in the heart and lung -- my heart broke into a thousand pieces, letting go in the abdomen -- i couldn't stomach it, fear is in the gut -- my gut tells me there's something wrong.. Instability is in the feet -- my knees gave way. The front of the body holds the things you know; the back holds the things you don't. Frozen shoulder is explained as holding on to grief and responsibilities -- i felt the the weight of the world on my shoulders. Lower back issues indicate emotional stress unexpressed -- I can't stand this. This often manifests in stiff muscles, scoliosis, tight hips, and increased likelihood of injuries in those areas.
In my case, the body kept the score alright: it couldn't stand the life I was living, the betrayal and self-abandonment of not being honest with myself. Self-abandonment comes in many forms: in small things, like not keeping promises we make to ourselves, deciding to do what others want even if we hate it and it actively harms our self-esteem (dealing with invasive questions during a reunion you don't want to go to but go anyway because it will make your family happy) -- in bigger things, like pursuing degrees we didn't want, or continuing in career tracks we don't enjoy because it gives us a decent amount of fuck you money and it pleases our parents; giving up on childhood dreams because it's not what everyone else expects or wants from us. Some of it is even bigger: staying in unhappy relationships and marriages because of sunk cost fallacy or fear or never finding someone else; or, in my case: repressing my sexuality so hard I never realized I was lesbian until I was 33 years old. These are all things I did to myself. Not out of malice, but to keep myself safe.
Developing a sense of safety is intrinsically tied to our childhood, and while I won't go into details, I will say my childhood was a lot less stable than others. This led to unintentional instances of neglect, childhood instability, and the pursuit of academic excellence at all cost despite the love my parents had for me. I also grew up in the 2000s, at a time when gay people were far less accepted than now, when it was much safer to be in the closet. I went to a co-ed and people would be bullied for being gay; I know my parents would have disowned me if I realized it earlier. I was also bullied for being a goth girl in my high school in the year 2005, and also for being strange and ugly, which made high school blatantly miserable. It was just much safer to keep quiet and keep my head down and do everything everyone else expected me to do, because even if I was miserable, at least I was alive.
And how did this manifest in my body? A frozen shoulder, for responsibilities that were placed on my shoulders and guilt at being unable to fulfill them as a child; a frozen spine: inability to express emotions, fear, rigidness, loneliness, isolation, inflexibility, helplessness, inability to accept life's circumstances. Weak hamstrings: shame surrounding my circumstances, that I couldn't be honest with myself. A disordered gut: fear, and the inability to accept something is wrong, being unable to stomach my current reality. In 2024, when my lung collapsed, the Asian doctors I consulted with sighed and said: it's because of stress. One of my therapists, who is a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner said: it's also the grief.
My reality before 2022 was, by all accounts, an amazing feat. Associate director at 29, earning a lot, good family, had my own office, etc. At work I was very successful but truth be told is that I was in a high-stress career in a high-stress industry that demanded overtime to meet client deadlines; running an office and managing my own workload; managing a team of 20+ at its peak. I had no time to myself and almost no personal life; I disappeared for ten years, and looking back that was on purpose. It was so I didn't have to face the feelings of loneliness at home, the isolation from society, my own sexuality. By keeping busy I had money and a career but it was at the expense of my personal life and my health. I had the feeling I was miserable but I didn't listen; I was a functioning alcoholic until 26 but rationalized it as something we all do to cope when we work too hard. At least I have money, was what I always though when I was lonely, when I couldn't get out of bed because I was so miserable. But I had not answer to the question: why.
When I came out at 33, it set into motion a series of internal events that lead me to the literally disastrous revelation that this was not the life I wanted to lead. I already had a feeling something was deeply wrong. It was harder and harder to get out of bed to go to work, and I drowned myself in mobility training, pole, and trapeze. My body was still frozen in time, but targeted mobility training helped thaw a lot of it -- with thawing comes movement, and with movement comes release.
Perhaps the best illustration of this is: I started splits training in 2022, and no matter what I did I could not get that final inch down. It wasn't until my trainer and friend suggested that I might be lesbian that I had to really think about it -- and then I realized, after a funny series of events, that I was. I said "you know what, I think I am lesbian" in the middle of routine splits training and suddenly I felt a muscle in my hips loosen and I touched the ground seconds later.
The body truly is a funny thing.
It's why somatic release is the next big buzzword right next to emotional regulation: because the body does keep the score, and our trauma is stored, waiting for us to be ready to unpack it. Sometimes we are ready, and our body slowly releases on its own to bring us to fresh hells that is healing; and sometimes we are never ready, and we remain frozen, and our digestive systems give way.
So, if the release happened, why am I still sick, and in some cases, you could argue, worse?
Turns out dealing with stored trauma isn't a one time thing. Who would have thought right! But the release is only the beginning, and many other things happened in 2023 that has put me in such a state that I am still recovering. Trauma recovery is a process that takes months, and even years in some cases. Because of the stress of traumas from my past but also new traumas incurred during 2023, my body has been overloaded to the point of shut down. While I was diagnosed with depression in 2012 and GAD in 2020 -- my earlier therapist suspected I had CPTSD as early as 2011 when it wasn't even in the DSM, and the PTSD was a fresh hell from the humanitarian aid job in 2023. Further emotional traumas due to abandonment were also incurred in 2023 due to interpersonal relationships changing in all areas of my life following my coming out. All of this compounds already existing issues, which were starting to show themselves anyway.
Because even before all of this happened -- in 2022, I suffered from dysbiosis and long COVID, which did not affect my lungs but instead affected by GI tract. I already had dysbiosis due to being prescribed medication that caused my stomach to stop producing acid, which also leads to SIBO. It appears that this one change, on top of all of *waves up at the wall of text above* That, just caused a collapse in my system which I am paying dearly for.
I have been patchworking my recovery, because unsurprisingly the Philippines is not equipped to deal with either trauma or gut disorders. However, to be fair, the mind-gut connection is an emerging one, and trauma therapy requires specialist training that we don't have much of. We have like, three therapists I know of lol. My SIBO tests are in Thailand, the IBS diagnosis was done here. To get a full understanding of my dysbiosis, I did a test with LifeScience in BGC, who advised me on recovering from the two other infections I had at the time.
I guess, for easy reference, here are the things I have tried for diagnosis:
Physically
Endoscopy
Organic Acid Test (identifies general gut makeup and gut mapping; received diagnosis of candidiasis, fungal infection, general dysbiosis)
Hydrogen breath test (Bumrungrad hospital, Thailand) for SIBO
Mentally
DSM diagnosis test through WeThrive
Talk therapy
To recover, I have tried a few things over the years. It's all patchworking, trying to figure out what works, which is why I've been in essentially an elimination diet for two years. My strength has been affected, and mentally, it is another stressor. But these are:
Physically
Antibiotics
Antifungals
Acupuncture (1000% recommend)
Decoctions from Longkang TCM Clinic
Mobility exercise
Magnesium citrate
Apple cider vinegar
Vitamin D
Probiotics
Enemas
Maintaining strict heating diet (traditional Chinese medicine)
No alcohol/limited alcohol
No complex starches (potatoes, bread, noodles)
Rest
Mentally
Talk therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy
Somatic therapy
What I will be trying:
Detox and elimination diet
Enemas
Acupuncture
Mobility training
Strength training (lol)
Increased cardio
Emotions Focused Therapy (EFT)
Emotion Freedom Techniques (EFT Tapping)
IFS
Somatic therapy
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) for increase in stress tolerance
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
For CPTSD and PTSD, it is highly recommended to go into somatic therapy and EMDR, and for anyone burnt out and working in high-stress fields, or have high levels of anxiety or emotional destress including those with bipolar and borderline disorders, it is recommended to do DBT. I am doing DBT to increase my stress tolerance so I can do IFS and EMDR. Acupuncture has also helped keep my stress in line and has been a great somatic release as well when I simply do not have the spoons or vocabulary to express my emotions; it just releases the emotion from the muscle, I remember, I cry, have a breakdown, and recover. It's not easy, but I have found it invaluable in my sanity maintenance.
All medical doctors have all acknowledged that no matter how they heal me physically -- I had SIBO in 2023 and it was treated in 2024; I am about to go back to Thailand to see if I have it again -- unless I deal with my trauma, the IBS will continue because the root of my digestive disorders is stress. Emotional stress due to CPTSD from the past and relationships of all kinds that I have to heal from, physical stress from PTSD from a career that burnt me out to the point physical symptoms; mental stress from doing most of this on my own while managing the rest of my life.
Stress is a killer in so many ways, and it doesn't escape me that my generation is suffering from a lot of hyperacidity and gastrointestinal disorders -- and that IBS and SIBO disproportionately affect eldest daughters. There are things we are being forced to swallow, struggles that previous generations are unfamiliar with, worsening economic stresses, a dying world, in addition to social pressures found in Asian society. And if we dare speak up, we are considered brats or spoiled or whatever else. We are swallowing a lot of stress and keeping it to ourselves, and it's slowly killing us inside.
But perhaps the most important thing I have learned that will help heal is: safe spaces around people with compassion and care. It was only when I found friends that treated me with love and care instead of coldness and shame about my conditions that my body relaxed and began to accept love, care, and change. It sounds strange, but because i have protected myself all my life, softness is difficult to accept. It was only after I found friends that have cared for me, after my dad and I spoke for a long time and he has since really taken care of me, after I found therapists who I could trust, after I found spaces that let me fly and dance and move in ways that felt good for me and my body, that I began to have energy and courage to really heal.
A lot of the influencers these days love to throw around somatics, nervous system regulation, trauma recovery without compassion. I will be the first to tell you: shame will only make everything much, much worse. It will retraumatize the patient, and undo whatever progress they have made. Compassion in all forms - from others, and towards the self - is really the key to healing all of this.
+
All of this is to say: the only real way out of this for me, at least, is to look the traumas in the eye and face them. To take radical responsibility for the decisions I have made, for the state of my life; to acknowledge the pains that were done to me and how deep the hurt runs -- the pains that I subjected myself to because I did not know any better or because the alternative would have been too much. It is, in the most literal sense, getting to know who I am as I am without fear, regret, judgement, or shame.
In the end, all of this happened because I betrayed myself so much in the effort to protect myself from an unstable childhood and an society unforgiving towards unusual women. I have done what I could to survive, but I promised myself in 2022 to live for myself, and that promise snowballed into me blowing up a life I thought I wanted and in the end didn't actually. I came out in 2023 and my world collapsed because it was built on straw -- a world I didn't actually want, but a life I constructed to keep myself safe. All the ghosts are out of the closet, making themselves known; the state of my body is far from what I want it to be, but my body and my mind are now more honest with each other, and I now know where I stand within myself. I may be worse off physically but I now know the real recovery point -- and while mentally I am still in hell and will be traversing thorny roads as I rebuild my world, I am also freer than I have ever been to be myself. It is a world I am choosing to build, a life where I can be happy, and while I will have to manage trauma for the rest of my life, I know I can be happy if I continue to just trust myself. I am rebuilding that trust, forgiving myself for such self-abandonment and self-betrayal, and learning to be who I am.
I am already much farther than where I was last year, and that's progress enough.
A long time ago my cousin told me something that keeps me from spiraling into self-hate whenever I have to deal with all of this: never regret what you did in order to survive. For a long time I blamed myself for the collapse of my world, but I realized that I should not. I simply rejected a world I no longer wanted to make space for a life where I do. A life which I don't have to recover from. I would have lived differently if I had the choice. The reality is that I did not, and I only did what I could in order to survive. I cannot regret or blame the me aged 15, 23, 25, 29, 32, 33. That me only did what she had to to keep herself alive. It is only because of her that I am still here.
Things are not the easiest, but it is a new year. I am still overwhelmed at all these changes, and I suspect I'll need even more time to myself this year. But I am healing in all ways, little by little. Recovery is a long ways away, but if I healed from SIBO once I can do it again lol. I hope that in a few months I can eat my favorite pastries again in a small cafe with my friends; I hope I can spend time with them without the shadows of the past haunting me so much. I hope I'll be healthy again, and not have so much anxiety around what I can and cannot eat, without having to live in quiet shame and fear of being a burden on my friends or those who would have a meal with me. Those two things are correlated, after all.
I have no idea how things will turn out, but I can only hope that I will find the way out of all of this. But for now: it is January 2025, and I am choosing to believe in the new year. :)
Maybe that means I write more things LOL
Anyway. Starting 2025 hibernating because the holidays wore me out beyond belief. I'm resting but somehow my days just keep getting filled; I really need to learn how to say no without feeling bad, but also most of these things are also health-related so it's... it is what it is?
In many ways 2025 does feel like a new slate. It looks like I'll be working with a new team of doctors to figure out my SIBO/IBS issues through a more aggressively planned detox and diet monitoring plan, as well as further testing in Bangkok. My parents have agreed to take care of the costs because frankly I'm broke and unemployed. My dad in particular has really been helping me out; he was shocked at how high my medical bills were in December and I'm dealing with the shame surrounding the cost. When he asked why I couldn't do these tests in 2023 I just told him it was just way too expensive so I've been taking tests I can afford and basically patchwork stitching treatments and supplements and diets as best as I know. But now they're helping me out with the costs so I can actually focus on getting better with guidance instead of Dr Google.
I'm hoping this works because it's been really tough, and I'm tired of living a life of deprivation because at this point I can barely eat anything because anything outside my regular stuff bloats me or triggers stress because I'm scared of bloating. The doctors have decided to just reset my body by doing a detox and really eating clean, then build up from there. It's tough because I have developed medical trauma surrounding my digestive issues and eating itself; the thought of diets stresses me out, so we're working on getting a provider that can make meal plans for me with the caloric intake required so I don't lose weight but it still doesn't inflame my digestive system. What's cool is that they're integrative doctors so it does combine medical science and more natural stuff like my traditional Chinese medicine diet -- supplements plus clean eating to help my system get back to the point where I can function normally. At least that's the goal.
I also have to incorporate more light movement into my daily routine and that is mentally the hardest one because my nerves are so frazzled that getting out of bed requires a lot of energy -- I'm trying to be patient with myself and understand that I am simply recovering from the holidays, 2024, 2023 -- all of it. But trapeze gets me out of bed because I love it, so I'm trying to think of movement as something I can enjoy doing again, and as a means to get stronger for trapeze. When I get my back muscles and my abs back it's all over for y'all jk
I'm also onboarding with a new therapist to help with nervous system regulation, as surprise surprise! my nervous system is shot and my stress tolerance is probably the size of a matchstick. She said all the previous trauma work I've been doing is really good, but it's still work, and my system is already overloaded. So just like the medical doctors advised, my new therapist is saying let's go back to baseline and reset my nervous system so I can handle the stress that comes with doing the work.
It feels a lot like new beginnings, which is a good thing.
I am, however, incredibly overwhelmed with everything. A lot of my illness is due to stress; when I get anxious or stressed emotionally I can literally feel my intestines grind to a halt. It takes me a long time to get out of it; I realize now that's my body being unwilling to stomach what I'm going through. I've realized that due to the trauma anniversaries of Q4, my body feels like it's back in 2023 instead of in 2025, so I have to do some work to get it back to a place of safety. But! That's what the new therapist is for, and what the medical doctors are helping me with too.
I received a lot of interest when I reposted something about the chronic inflammation, stress, and self-abandonment. Nervous system regulation is a hot topic now in therapy and movement circles both, and dysregulation is a new buzz word. I understand all of it on a very personal level, because the breakdown of my body is partially because of long COVID, partially mistreatment of IBS, and mostly the effect of trauma and stress on the body.
I have an alphabet soup of diagnoses, and healing my issues has gone beyond the usual diet and exercise. I have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from my old job in the humanitarian field, complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) from childhood issues that are probably incredibly familiar to many Asian households compounded by some circumstances in my family and a ton of self-abandonment; Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and depression (both are symptoms of CPTSD). Physically I have irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which is a catch-all for "you have digestive issues which we can't diagnose" and am going to get re-tested for small bacterial intestinal overgrowth (SIBO).
By the way: SIBO causes serious bloating, irregular bowel movement, and as it progresses, fatigue, brain fog, and weight loss due to malabsorption of vitamins and minerals into the body. It will seem like no matter what you eat, you are bloating -- especially if you eat carbs and sugars. The bloating can be extreme and last for a few days. When it's serious, you bloat from drinking water. If this is happening to you, I suggest doing a SIBO test.
Western medicine is learning they are all connected, much like how they're learning what Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine knew thousands of years ago: the body stores trauma, which blocks the flow of life/balance within you. At the moment, I'm living proof of that, and I'm working to undo it.
People are learning about the gut-mind connection, which means that whatever stresses you have going on mentally will impact the development of your gut bacteria, which is responsible for your digestion. If you are super stressed emotionally, physically, psychologically -- all of this impacts the gut microbiome, causing some to die and others to take its place, causing an imbalance in the composition of the gut flora. Any imbalance is called dysbiosis, and leads to the development of IBS, SIBO, candidasis, fungal infections, etc. (I had all of them at some point). Compound this with trauma, like I have, then we have a body that cannot handle the stress and breaks down completely.
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk outlines what happens when people don't talk about trauma: it gets stored in the mind, and in the body. That's why sometimes you'll forget a traumatic event, but on certain days you'll feel sad, or your hands start trembling, or you feel like you want to run when you see something or someone. The memory fades, but the body remembers the feeling.
In Chinese medicine, emotions are stored in different parts, and this wisdom is found in some English idioms: grief is in the heart and lung -- my heart broke into a thousand pieces, letting go in the abdomen -- i couldn't stomach it, fear is in the gut -- my gut tells me there's something wrong.. Instability is in the feet -- my knees gave way. The front of the body holds the things you know; the back holds the things you don't. Frozen shoulder is explained as holding on to grief and responsibilities -- i felt the the weight of the world on my shoulders. Lower back issues indicate emotional stress unexpressed -- I can't stand this. This often manifests in stiff muscles, scoliosis, tight hips, and increased likelihood of injuries in those areas.
In my case, the body kept the score alright: it couldn't stand the life I was living, the betrayal and self-abandonment of not being honest with myself. Self-abandonment comes in many forms: in small things, like not keeping promises we make to ourselves, deciding to do what others want even if we hate it and it actively harms our self-esteem (dealing with invasive questions during a reunion you don't want to go to but go anyway because it will make your family happy) -- in bigger things, like pursuing degrees we didn't want, or continuing in career tracks we don't enjoy because it gives us a decent amount of fuck you money and it pleases our parents; giving up on childhood dreams because it's not what everyone else expects or wants from us. Some of it is even bigger: staying in unhappy relationships and marriages because of sunk cost fallacy or fear or never finding someone else; or, in my case: repressing my sexuality so hard I never realized I was lesbian until I was 33 years old. These are all things I did to myself. Not out of malice, but to keep myself safe.
Developing a sense of safety is intrinsically tied to our childhood, and while I won't go into details, I will say my childhood was a lot less stable than others. This led to unintentional instances of neglect, childhood instability, and the pursuit of academic excellence at all cost despite the love my parents had for me. I also grew up in the 2000s, at a time when gay people were far less accepted than now, when it was much safer to be in the closet. I went to a co-ed and people would be bullied for being gay; I know my parents would have disowned me if I realized it earlier. I was also bullied for being a goth girl in my high school in the year 2005, and also for being strange and ugly, which made high school blatantly miserable. It was just much safer to keep quiet and keep my head down and do everything everyone else expected me to do, because even if I was miserable, at least I was alive.
And how did this manifest in my body? A frozen shoulder, for responsibilities that were placed on my shoulders and guilt at being unable to fulfill them as a child; a frozen spine: inability to express emotions, fear, rigidness, loneliness, isolation, inflexibility, helplessness, inability to accept life's circumstances. Weak hamstrings: shame surrounding my circumstances, that I couldn't be honest with myself. A disordered gut: fear, and the inability to accept something is wrong, being unable to stomach my current reality. In 2024, when my lung collapsed, the Asian doctors I consulted with sighed and said: it's because of stress. One of my therapists, who is a traditional Chinese medicine practitioner said: it's also the grief.
My reality before 2022 was, by all accounts, an amazing feat. Associate director at 29, earning a lot, good family, had my own office, etc. At work I was very successful but truth be told is that I was in a high-stress career in a high-stress industry that demanded overtime to meet client deadlines; running an office and managing my own workload; managing a team of 20+ at its peak. I had no time to myself and almost no personal life; I disappeared for ten years, and looking back that was on purpose. It was so I didn't have to face the feelings of loneliness at home, the isolation from society, my own sexuality. By keeping busy I had money and a career but it was at the expense of my personal life and my health. I had the feeling I was miserable but I didn't listen; I was a functioning alcoholic until 26 but rationalized it as something we all do to cope when we work too hard. At least I have money, was what I always though when I was lonely, when I couldn't get out of bed because I was so miserable. But I had not answer to the question: why.
When I came out at 33, it set into motion a series of internal events that lead me to the literally disastrous revelation that this was not the life I wanted to lead. I already had a feeling something was deeply wrong. It was harder and harder to get out of bed to go to work, and I drowned myself in mobility training, pole, and trapeze. My body was still frozen in time, but targeted mobility training helped thaw a lot of it -- with thawing comes movement, and with movement comes release.
Perhaps the best illustration of this is: I started splits training in 2022, and no matter what I did I could not get that final inch down. It wasn't until my trainer and friend suggested that I might be lesbian that I had to really think about it -- and then I realized, after a funny series of events, that I was. I said "you know what, I think I am lesbian" in the middle of routine splits training and suddenly I felt a muscle in my hips loosen and I touched the ground seconds later.
The body truly is a funny thing.
It's why somatic release is the next big buzzword right next to emotional regulation: because the body does keep the score, and our trauma is stored, waiting for us to be ready to unpack it. Sometimes we are ready, and our body slowly releases on its own to bring us to fresh hells that is healing; and sometimes we are never ready, and we remain frozen, and our digestive systems give way.
So, if the release happened, why am I still sick, and in some cases, you could argue, worse?
Turns out dealing with stored trauma isn't a one time thing. Who would have thought right! But the release is only the beginning, and many other things happened in 2023 that has put me in such a state that I am still recovering. Trauma recovery is a process that takes months, and even years in some cases. Because of the stress of traumas from my past but also new traumas incurred during 2023, my body has been overloaded to the point of shut down. While I was diagnosed with depression in 2012 and GAD in 2020 -- my earlier therapist suspected I had CPTSD as early as 2011 when it wasn't even in the DSM, and the PTSD was a fresh hell from the humanitarian aid job in 2023. Further emotional traumas due to abandonment were also incurred in 2023 due to interpersonal relationships changing in all areas of my life following my coming out. All of this compounds already existing issues, which were starting to show themselves anyway.
Because even before all of this happened -- in 2022, I suffered from dysbiosis and long COVID, which did not affect my lungs but instead affected by GI tract. I already had dysbiosis due to being prescribed medication that caused my stomach to stop producing acid, which also leads to SIBO. It appears that this one change, on top of all of *waves up at the wall of text above* That, just caused a collapse in my system which I am paying dearly for.
I have been patchworking my recovery, because unsurprisingly the Philippines is not equipped to deal with either trauma or gut disorders. However, to be fair, the mind-gut connection is an emerging one, and trauma therapy requires specialist training that we don't have much of. We have like, three therapists I know of lol. My SIBO tests are in Thailand, the IBS diagnosis was done here. To get a full understanding of my dysbiosis, I did a test with LifeScience in BGC, who advised me on recovering from the two other infections I had at the time.
I guess, for easy reference, here are the things I have tried for diagnosis:
Physically
Endoscopy
Organic Acid Test (identifies general gut makeup and gut mapping; received diagnosis of candidiasis, fungal infection, general dysbiosis)
Hydrogen breath test (Bumrungrad hospital, Thailand) for SIBO
Mentally
DSM diagnosis test through WeThrive
Talk therapy
To recover, I have tried a few things over the years. It's all patchworking, trying to figure out what works, which is why I've been in essentially an elimination diet for two years. My strength has been affected, and mentally, it is another stressor. But these are:
Physically
Antibiotics
Antifungals
Acupuncture (1000% recommend)
Decoctions from Longkang TCM Clinic
Mobility exercise
Magnesium citrate
Apple cider vinegar
Vitamin D
Probiotics
Enemas
Maintaining strict heating diet (traditional Chinese medicine)
No alcohol/limited alcohol
No complex starches (potatoes, bread, noodles)
Rest
Mentally
Talk therapy
Cognitive behavioral therapy
Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy
Somatic therapy
What I will be trying:
Detox and elimination diet
Enemas
Acupuncture
Mobility training
Strength training (lol)
Increased cardio
Emotions Focused Therapy (EFT)
Emotion Freedom Techniques (EFT Tapping)
IFS
Somatic therapy
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) for increase in stress tolerance
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
For CPTSD and PTSD, it is highly recommended to go into somatic therapy and EMDR, and for anyone burnt out and working in high-stress fields, or have high levels of anxiety or emotional destress including those with bipolar and borderline disorders, it is recommended to do DBT. I am doing DBT to increase my stress tolerance so I can do IFS and EMDR. Acupuncture has also helped keep my stress in line and has been a great somatic release as well when I simply do not have the spoons or vocabulary to express my emotions; it just releases the emotion from the muscle, I remember, I cry, have a breakdown, and recover. It's not easy, but I have found it invaluable in my sanity maintenance.
All medical doctors have all acknowledged that no matter how they heal me physically -- I had SIBO in 2023 and it was treated in 2024; I am about to go back to Thailand to see if I have it again -- unless I deal with my trauma, the IBS will continue because the root of my digestive disorders is stress. Emotional stress due to CPTSD from the past and relationships of all kinds that I have to heal from, physical stress from PTSD from a career that burnt me out to the point physical symptoms; mental stress from doing most of this on my own while managing the rest of my life.
Stress is a killer in so many ways, and it doesn't escape me that my generation is suffering from a lot of hyperacidity and gastrointestinal disorders -- and that IBS and SIBO disproportionately affect eldest daughters. There are things we are being forced to swallow, struggles that previous generations are unfamiliar with, worsening economic stresses, a dying world, in addition to social pressures found in Asian society. And if we dare speak up, we are considered brats or spoiled or whatever else. We are swallowing a lot of stress and keeping it to ourselves, and it's slowly killing us inside.
But perhaps the most important thing I have learned that will help heal is: safe spaces around people with compassion and care. It was only when I found friends that treated me with love and care instead of coldness and shame about my conditions that my body relaxed and began to accept love, care, and change. It sounds strange, but because i have protected myself all my life, softness is difficult to accept. It was only after I found friends that have cared for me, after my dad and I spoke for a long time and he has since really taken care of me, after I found therapists who I could trust, after I found spaces that let me fly and dance and move in ways that felt good for me and my body, that I began to have energy and courage to really heal.
A lot of the influencers these days love to throw around somatics, nervous system regulation, trauma recovery without compassion. I will be the first to tell you: shame will only make everything much, much worse. It will retraumatize the patient, and undo whatever progress they have made. Compassion in all forms - from others, and towards the self - is really the key to healing all of this.
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All of this is to say: the only real way out of this for me, at least, is to look the traumas in the eye and face them. To take radical responsibility for the decisions I have made, for the state of my life; to acknowledge the pains that were done to me and how deep the hurt runs -- the pains that I subjected myself to because I did not know any better or because the alternative would have been too much. It is, in the most literal sense, getting to know who I am as I am without fear, regret, judgement, or shame.
In the end, all of this happened because I betrayed myself so much in the effort to protect myself from an unstable childhood and an society unforgiving towards unusual women. I have done what I could to survive, but I promised myself in 2022 to live for myself, and that promise snowballed into me blowing up a life I thought I wanted and in the end didn't actually. I came out in 2023 and my world collapsed because it was built on straw -- a world I didn't actually want, but a life I constructed to keep myself safe. All the ghosts are out of the closet, making themselves known; the state of my body is far from what I want it to be, but my body and my mind are now more honest with each other, and I now know where I stand within myself. I may be worse off physically but I now know the real recovery point -- and while mentally I am still in hell and will be traversing thorny roads as I rebuild my world, I am also freer than I have ever been to be myself. It is a world I am choosing to build, a life where I can be happy, and while I will have to manage trauma for the rest of my life, I know I can be happy if I continue to just trust myself. I am rebuilding that trust, forgiving myself for such self-abandonment and self-betrayal, and learning to be who I am.
I am already much farther than where I was last year, and that's progress enough.
A long time ago my cousin told me something that keeps me from spiraling into self-hate whenever I have to deal with all of this: never regret what you did in order to survive. For a long time I blamed myself for the collapse of my world, but I realized that I should not. I simply rejected a world I no longer wanted to make space for a life where I do. A life which I don't have to recover from. I would have lived differently if I had the choice. The reality is that I did not, and I only did what I could in order to survive. I cannot regret or blame the me aged 15, 23, 25, 29, 32, 33. That me only did what she had to to keep herself alive. It is only because of her that I am still here.
Things are not the easiest, but it is a new year. I am still overwhelmed at all these changes, and I suspect I'll need even more time to myself this year. But I am healing in all ways, little by little. Recovery is a long ways away, but if I healed from SIBO once I can do it again lol. I hope that in a few months I can eat my favorite pastries again in a small cafe with my friends; I hope I can spend time with them without the shadows of the past haunting me so much. I hope I'll be healthy again, and not have so much anxiety around what I can and cannot eat, without having to live in quiet shame and fear of being a burden on my friends or those who would have a meal with me. Those two things are correlated, after all.
I have no idea how things will turn out, but I can only hope that I will find the way out of all of this. But for now: it is January 2025, and I am choosing to believe in the new year. :)
