After graduating with an MSC in Forensic Psychology, many years ago, I worked in the prison service, then alongside the police, in the private sector, then within the NHS. My specialisms were Family, Developmental and Adolescent Abnormal psychology, so my work was mainly with teenage substance abusers and their families who were involved in the criminal justice system. After a time the operational problems within the system started to feel overwhelming, and the support just wasn't there to enable me to keep working at a very tough coal face. I began to feel demotivated and frustrated with a system tied up with endless red tape that prevented me from making a positive difference to people's lives, and I burned out.
So I went into business for a while but then I got really sick and none of the medical people who examined, tested or tried to treat me could really tell me why. I struggled very hard to manage and then everything suddenly got exponentially worse. My adrenal glands collapsed, my blood pressure went through the roof, I was three stone overweight, and my mind was completely fogged up. My organs were failing and all the medical profession wanted to do was keep medicating my symptoms, and increasing the meds as the symptoms worsened. It seemed they could not get to the root cause of my problems - not that they'd admit it! I had to give up my business and I literally started losing the will to live.
What got me well again was going to a Complementary Therapist - a Kinesiologist - who quickly identified through a process of muscle-resistance testing what decades of mainstream medical practice had failed to find. The root cause of my long-standing problems was actually surprisingly simple yet terrifying in its capacity to literally destroy my health.
It was a severe intolerance to wheat and gluten.
Well, as it turns out, I've been gluten intolerant my whole life, and while I always thought I was eating a healthy diet, containing good quality seeded breads, pastas with lean sauces etc, and consuming all manner of other so-called healthy foods that contained wheat and gluten, I was unwittingly killing my own body. My digestive system was under so much stress, trying to process what it couldn't deal with, it eventually caused my organs to react, giving rise to all kinds of symptoms that have plagued me, in one form or another, for pretty much my whole life. Looking back, I've had the kind of problems that ultimately led to life-changing operations that I may not have even needed to have, if my food intolerance had been discovered early enough. But here's the thing ... GP's are not trained properly in nutrition. They are also not trained to link a bunch of what appear to be be unrelated symptoms to one particular underlying cause they can't even test for. And they simply don't have time to sit and think about it, and wait for a lightbulb moment.
A Kinesiologist set me on the road to recovery and I'm now in a much healthier place. I now see various different health professionals on a regular basis who help me stay on track - because I have learned the hard way that paying to stay well is far more sensible than waiting to get sick and then hoping someone can make me well again. That's a mighty big gamble I'm no longer prepared to take.
Making myself fully well was my goal. I wasn't interested in existing uncomfortably on management medications I didn't even need, while my symptoms continued to get worse. I saw so many different GP's, and none of them knew what they were looking at, but that was no excuse for me staying sick. It was no skin off their nose to keep me on medicine they told me I'd have to take for the rest of my life, so I knew I had to sort it out myself if I wanted to change that, and I did, and I haven't looked back.
What my own and other people's similar journeys have all convinced me of is that we ALL hold the keys to our own well-being and it starts with taking responsibility for our health, including what we consume (or offer to others to consume) and realising that NATURAL and HEALTHY is now the way forward if we want to be cured of the medical problems that plague us or the discomfort we feel after consuming or using certain things that our bodies and our environments repeatedly try to tell us, in subtle ways we may not even be fully aware of, that they can't handle.
So I went back to school. I retrained as an Aromatherpist, Herbalist and Nutritionist, because I want to help other people like me, who know they are unwell but who are not getting the results they hoped to get from traditional medicine and wish to achieve better health by more gentle and natural means. I am also a qualified Sleep Disorder Practitioner, Crystal Healer, Chromotherapist and Counsellor. I'm very interested in vibrational medicine that successfully prevailed for thousands of years in different cultures, before the 'drug boom'.
I truly do believe that most of us, in fact all but the most seriously ill of us, don't need drugs or other 'hard chemicals' for anything at all; for our bodies, for our brains, for our environments or for our health.
I believe we absolutely do NOT need them for our sleep.
I also believe that much of what is wrong with many of us is directly attributable to what we consume, in one form or another, and if we can eliminate substances from our diet that create real problems for our health, and keep chemicals out of our homes and our personal hygiene by substituting them with gentler and more supportive natural products, we can all be healthier, happier and live significantly longer. I also believe that everything that happens within the body has an impact on the mind, and vice versa. So healing the whole person involves healing both, and addressing and modifying attitudes and behaviours that act as barriers to good health.
Since good sleep is the fundamental cornerstone of health and wellbeing, addressing the barriers to it clear the way for all aspects of health to be significantrly improved.
