Sixteen years ago I was out of shape, in a "bad marriage", working a very high-stress job, and although I didn't realize it I was physically, mentally and spiritually unhealthy.
Let me back WAY up. Stay with me here....
My parents got divorced when I was very young. My biological father was an electrician who worked out of state...in any state but the one we lived in. When he was home, he and my mom argued...angrily, loudly and non-stop. They got divorced when I was in kindergarten. We moved from Garland, Texas to North Little Rock, Arkansas. My mom started dating a man who I called my father after they got married a few years later. I'll skip the details of my childhood story. I mean, an evil witch didn't send me into the woods, put me to sleep, or feed me a poisoned apple, but suffice it to say it was the worst part of my fairy tale...
I had TERRIBLE stomach issues. In the third grade I was put on a special diet. The main thing I remember is that I wasn't allowed to drink milk and I couldn't eat my usual bologna and cheese (food) sandwich. I was also a bedwetter. I would have thought it was caused by a physical issue, but it finally stopped when I wet the bed of a friend I had spent the night with! I was MORTIFIED...and I tried, in vain, to lie saying she did it. I'm sure she told everyone in school. Thankfully she moved away and, that I know of, that reputation didn't follow me.
My "father" prevented me from having any semblance of a "normal" youth experience so making friends was exceptionally hard. And, although I was smart, I wasn't part of the really smart crowd. I dated a few guys in high school and had a few "friends" but I was more or less, for all intents and purposes, alone.
I joined the Army National Guard as a senior in high school. Both of my parents were in the Guard (my mom was a Warrant Officer and my "dad" was a Command Sargent Major), so that path seemed natural. A couple of years later I met my first husband. He was (is) a big man...a big teddy bear who loved me fiercely. We didn't know each other long but I saw him as a protector and a way out of a very bad situation at home. We got married and the stomach issues from years before came crashing back. I did every test the doctors could think of. I took several kinds of medicine. Nothing worked to calm the debilitating pain I experienced daily....until I met a doctor who explained to me my issue was stress-related. I tried to tell him I was not a stressed individual. I was handling my life "just fine thank you very much".
After all I was going to school full time with a really good GPA. I was in Officer Candidate School. I was newly married. And I was working full time. ...all withOUT being stressed about any of it. I can still hear him calmly telling me my body was trying to tell me how stressed I really was. I did try to listen but I simply didn't know what to DO with that information. How could I fight this invisible stress monster?
Well...I started by ending my military "career", finishing school, having two kids, moving out to the country, getting divorced and taking a job I really didn't want but paid the bills. Along the way, I started what would be a lifetime of therapy trying to undo the knots of my existence. Shortly after ending my first marriage, I started my second one.
Here's the thing, when someone says a marriage is bad what they really mean is the people in the marriage are unhealthy. Don't pounce on me here, but even if one spouse is abusive, the abused spouse is obviously NOT healthy or they wouldn't be in that relationship in the first place! My marriage wasn't abusive, but it was far from healthy because neither of us were healthy individuals. In 2006 that marriage ended.
Allow me to take an important side trail for a moment. When I was little my parents took me to church on the requisite holidays-Easter and Christmas. When my mom remarried, my step-sister took me to church with her almost every week. It was a "walk the aisle now and be washed in the holy water so you don't go to hell" kind of church. Naturally, I walked the aisle...but I realized the next morning I was still in hell. That water didn't do anything for me. Some very life-changing experiences pointed me to the God I would eventually come to know but that relationship started out more like an awkward blind date that didn't gain any traction for years to come. When I got married I wanted us to "have a church family" but the truth is I had no idea what "family" was even supposed to look like, and church was not the place to find out! When I married my second husband we settled into a routine that involved going to "God's house" every week but He was never fully invited into ours...
...until the night I came home to a half empty shell. I had taken my kids to their dads for the weekend and on the way home it started snowing. My husband had texted me several days earlier (on Valentine's Day no less) to tell me he was leaving. While I was at work and dropping off the kids he was dividing our property.
That is the night I finally surrendered my life to my creator. I've spent the last 15 years laying my burdens at the foot of the cross (and taking them back up...and laying them back down...depending on how strong I'm feeling at any given moment!).
God has led me to the healthiest relationships I've ever had in my life (including a wonderful Prince Charming of a husband!)...this has happened because I've continued to become a healthy individual...in mind, body and spirt.
But, as I have been reading in "The Body Keeps the Score" (written by Bessel van der Kolk), childhood trauma (or big-T Trauma) stays in your body and wreaks havoc. Combine that with years of a Standard American Diet and you have a recipe for all kinds of gut/brain/body malfunction.
My personal malfunction came to a massive exploding head in 2016 when I was diagnosed with Autoimmune Encephalopathy. I had previously been diagnosed with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis (autoimmune thyroid disease). It seemed my body was now attacking my brain!
I had spent the seven years prior to that horrible disease and crushing diagnosis trying to figure out why my body would want to attack itself. Doctors kept telling me "it just happens" but that didn't make sense in my world. I went back and forth between "wanting to take control" of my health and believing there was nothing I could do about it. Through this process, I was introduced to triathlon and to Functional Nutrition. I became an Ironman triathlete, an ultramarathoner, a triathlon coach, started a kids triathlon non-profit (Omni Kids Tri), and (when the disease and it's treatment coupled with Covid took the fullness of all of that away from me) I became a nutrition coach.
One more little side trail and we'll come full circle to the title of this post!
I remember when I started coaching. I had just discovered triathlon and was loving it. I "knew" there was no way I could coach THREE sports I barely knew myself so I took the RRCA run coaching certification course (actually after taking on two paying clients, but they knew I wasn't a "real coach" yet...actually they knew I was a real coach but I didn't feel like I was because I didn't have that piece of paper to confirm it yet!). With just a little encouragement I realized it was silly to think I couldn't do what I felt called to do and quickly obtained my USA Triathlon Level One and Youth Junior certifications.
This same kind of thing happened last year when I got my Precision Nutrition Level One nutrition coaching certification. What I really wanted was to be a Functional Nutrition Counselor but felt like that was too big of a leap...until the distance between where I was and where I wanted to be was made shorter by the stepping stone of the PN course!
And...here we are...why I started this post!! If you are still with me I hope the ride was worth it...
Last year when I started the Functional Nutrition Alliance Full Body Systems course I spent days praying and searching for the perfect name for my new business that had not yet taken shape. I REALLY wanted to call it Sophrosyne but my trusted confidants STRONGLY advised against it.
And then God led me to "Autobioghray in Five Short Chapters" by Portia Nelson.
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