The Blanket of Sadness

I have struggled my entire life with depression.

When I was young, I didn't fully understand it. I didn't know why I would wake up feeling sad, completely

unmotivated to get anything done. I'd wake up, sit up in bed, swing my feet around to touch the ground, and then freeze. I'd stare off into Lala land. I remember thinking to myself, "What are you doing? Why don't you move and start your day?" And still, I was stuck.

Eventually I would "snap" out of it and get up, and typically after eating breakfast I would gain more energy. But some days I felt sad… all day. In my adult years, through many therapists and coaches, I began to refer to this as "a blanket of sadness." It laid on me like a weighted blanket, bringing with it the feeling of wanting to cry.

I was raised in a house that loved supplements and would also use prescriptions if necessary. I was put on SSRIs for the first time when I was around 19. I remember my doctor — my dad's doctor, who became our PCP — said to me, "Of course you're depressed, your family is going through really hard times right now." And I took his word as truth. I trusted him, because he was the doctor, right? Well, the SSRIs did little to nothing to help, but for some reason I continued to stay on them for years. Probably out of fear that if I stopped taking them, I would get worse.

I began seeing a chiropractor when I was about 21, and he helped me with supplements and detox protocols that helped me enough that I came off the SSRIs. But I still struggled.

Pregnant with baby #3 and finding it hard to smile.

Obviously there is a lot of varies factors here that I do not want to discount. My parents did go through a whole trial with the IRS and ended up in prison. I got married. We started having babies — lots of hormonal and life changes. None of this should be discounted in the path to healing.

Finally, after three babies, and the third one making it through six months of cancer treatment, I decided to go see a naturopath, because the fatigue was unbearable and my hair was falling out. She ran some genetic testing and found that I had hypothyroidism, Hashimoto's, and MTHFR and COM-T gene mutations. From there started a journey of thyroid medications, supplements to help with methylation and detoxification, and changing my diet. (Out with gluten and dairy.)

This all helped… a LOT. But something was still missing.

I cannot confirm for certain, but I am pretty confident in my assessment that the gene mutations are from my father's side of the family. There are reasons why I assume this, but I won't go into them here. What is important about this information, though, is that I knew which side of my family was carrying the energy, frequency, and vibrations that have kept this pattern going through the generational lineage.

This is where the energetic modalities came in. I began my ancestral healing journey to clear my line of this pattern.

The improvement I experienced from this was the next level of healing I had been longing for. A pain in my back, between my spine and shoulder blade, finally went away after years and years of chiropractors, massage therapists, and physical therapists. The blanket of sadness is nearly nonexistent now. If it does happen, I check in with my nervous system, my stress levels, the food I've been eating, and the amount of sleep I have had. If any of those things are falling short of what is required for my physical health, I take the necessary actions to fix it — and the blanket of sadness goes away.

My energy is higher than it has been in my entire adult life. I am happier. I move through my days with so much more ease. Hard things are still hard, but they don't take me out the way they used to.

And I don't sit on the edge of my bed and freeze anymore.

So what is the moral of the story here?

Healing happens in layers. Not one modality can fix everything.

And although we are spiritual beings having a physical experience, we still need to take care of the physical body to support the spiritual growth and changes that we make.

This is why I love what I do. I want to help people experience lasting change. I look at the whole Be-ing — the mind, the physical body, and the spiritual etheric body. You cannot heal one aspect without looking at the others.

This is why problems come back and persist. Year after year. Generation after generation.

If you've tried a lot of things and something still feels missing, I'd love to talk with you. That "something missing" is usually just the next layer.

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