166 - "I'm Not Broken": Finding a New Perspective on Illness with Rebecca Tolin

Rebecca Tolin shares her transformative journey from chronic illness to recovery and self-discovery. Her insights into the mind-body connection, the impact of trauma on health, and the importance of self-compassion offer listeners a path toward healing.

• Introduction to Rebecca's journey with ME/CFS 
• The effect trauma has on physical health 
• Searching for answers and the limitations of traditional medicine 
• The role of mindfulness and somatic awareness in recovery 
• Embracing self-compassion and its benefits in the healing process 
• The shift in identity away from being defined by illness 
• Finding hope and possibility in the face of struggle 
• The importance of connection with oneself 

Rebecca encourages you to embrace self-compassion and kindness towards yourself on your healing journey. 

Links:

Rebecca's Website: https://www.rebeccatolin.com/jackie (this includes info about her "Be your own medicine" course) 

Info about next "Be your own medicine" course: https://courses.rebeccatolin.com/courses/be-your-own-medicine-spring-2025?ref=ec478f

Free Meditation: https://www.rebeccatolin.com/newsletter 

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7gpLhnQU8NaC9fzlEmxIVw

For more information about Long Covid Breathing courses & workshops, please check out LongCovidBreathing.com

(music credit - Brock Hewitt, Rule of Life)

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Lung Covid Podcast
• 2:05 Welcoming Rebecca Tolan
• 6:25 Rebecca's Life Before Illness
• 17:45 The Impact of Trauma on Health
• 26:09 The Long Road of Diagnosis
• 37:48 The Mind
• 51:21 A Shift in Perspective
• 1:01:03 The Role of Self
• 1:10:18 Wrapping Up and Key Takeaways

Transcript

Jackie Baxter: 0:55

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Lung Covid podcast. I am delighted to be joined today by Rebecca Tolan, who has recovered from ME-CFS after a monster 13 years, and we're going to dive into that and her sort of transformation, I think, as you describe it, and also maybe dive into a little bit about your work as a coach as well well as a research consultant as well, which you've added to your CV. So a very warm welcome to the podcast. I'm delighted to have you here.

Rebecca Tolin: 1:28

Oh, it's so good to be here, Jackie.

Jackie Baxter: 1:32

I'm really excited to kind of dive into all of this. Maybe before we start can you just say a little bit about yourself and maybe what life was like in the before times, like before you got sick.

Rebecca Tolin: 1:45

Yes, it was quite a monster of a recovery journey, as you mentioned in the beginning. But before I got sick with ME-CFS I was a very healthy, active broadcast journalist. So I worked as a TV news reporter covering nature and science. I traveled the world quite a bit, I was athletic, I hiked and jogged and lifted weights and swam and was very social. And then I went through a really traumatic experience and after that experience I became really ill for many years and that recovery journey with ME-CFS and a number of other chronic symptoms really took me places I never would have imagined personally and professionally in the work I do. And I'm at the point now it's been about six years or so since I felt I recovered from really debilitating ME-CFS migraines, insomnia, interstitial cystitis and some other symptoms I can finally say I actually really just feel grateful for all that I've gained from the experience.

Jackie Baxter: 3:06

Yeah, and like I'm going to totally derail us very briefly here, because the whole gratitude thing really interests me, because listeners will have heard the story before, where I interviewed somebody who'd recovered and I was, as it turned out, about halfway through my journey although I didn't realize that at the time and she said something along the lines of being grateful for her experience and, oh my goodness, did I want to hit her. Um, I was in the middle of this horrendous experience that I didn't know if I was going to come out of. I felt completely hopeless. I hadn't found anything that helped and this person was grateful for that. You know, I just felt so angry for that.

Jackie Baxter: 3:49

And what I found really interesting is how my perspective on that has changed. And I don't feel grateful for the experience as such, but I do feel grateful for what it's taught me and where I now am. And you know, I think everyone has their own little kind of individual spin on this, but a lot of people do say that gratitude for some part of it. So I find it really interesting that that was something you brought up very early there.

Rebecca Tolin: 4:17

Yes, and I can so relate to what you're saying. There were several people that suggested this was a great opportunity to grow and learn earlier on and I definitely wanted to slug them and I was not ready to receive that message, and I also really relate to what you're saying. It's not that I'm grateful for all the suffering per se, but I am grateful for what that cultivated in me and for some of us, suffering is a portal into more authentic connection with ourself, and that's been true for me.

Jackie Baxter: 4:54

Yeah, yeah, I think that's quite a nice way of putting it actually. Yeah, yeah, I think that's quite a nice way of putting it actually. Yeah, okay, back on track. I love a good tangent. So you know, you said that you had this traumatic experience and then, shortly after that, became unwell with all of these. You know what we might call mystery, mystery symptoms, or mystery illness, or unex unexplained symptoms, or all these kind of quite big, scary words for something that actually feels pretty big and scary in your body as well at the time, doesn't it? Can you talk a little bit through, I don't know, maybe some of that.

Rebecca Tolin: 5:38

Yeah, exactly. Well, I experienced a sexual assault and it was very traumatic, so much that I really just kind of shut down and blacked it out and didn't tell anyone and didn't get therapy for a long time. But shortly after that I became very ill with a series of viruses and after those viruses my system really crashed. So it's kind of familiar to a lot of people with long COVID or ME-CFS that these really extreme symptoms can start after a viral episode. And I went from, as I said, being this kind of world traveling, really active young person in my 30s to not being able to leave my house. The symptoms were just like extreme flu, like symptoms insomnia, everything ached and burned. I had lightheadedness, dizziness, lots of brain fog, I felt like I couldn't even remember the name of a close friend or colleague and the tired and wired was really challenging because I couldn't sleep and I had normally been a very deep sleeper. So I went to many doctors and practitioners over a 13 year period and in the beginning of course I was quite frantic to figure out what was going on and there just wasn't any clear explanations.

Rebecca Tolin: 7:07

I did start getting the diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome or ME-CFS post-viral syndrome and for many years I really chased a lot of the labs that doctors pointed out. Which was Epstein-Barr virus was a big one. I really targeted that with antiviral IV medications, which really just crashed my system. More I was taking lots of different supplements and herbs for things they were finding like heavy metal or mold exposure. Chronic Lyme was another thing. I was diagnosed with Doing all the really restrictive diets for candida and leaky gut, I think. For three years I just ate either fish or chicken and green vegetables. That's how strict I was and I was more bloated than ever and just also had lots of digestive issues. So none of those interventions were working and they really felt like doctors were just kind of throwing supplements or medications at me and weren't clear on what was happening.

Rebecca Tolin: 8:17

Over the years I did start getting some psychotherapy and I think that was helpful, but I again wasn't really linking that to my symptoms and it went on like that until I just first of all kind of ran out of money and I couldn't work. I was on federal disability. I lost a career that I loved and really my ability to function much in the world, which was a very lonely place to be, and I just started noticing though, over the years. Of course, none of these things are helping and there really weren't podcasts like this back then. There weren't YouTube channels, there weren't people sharing their recovery stories at least that I knew of.

Rebecca Tolin: 8:59

So I was in the biomedical model but I realized that that just wasn't helping and the only thing that gave me a little bit of relief was gentle yoga, meditation, just being out in nature. I liked listening or reading a little bit of Eckhart Tolle. I couldn't actually read much because of the brain fog, but I really kind of integrated that message of being in the present moment and that's really all I had, because I couldn't plan much in the future, given how I felt and that those practices really just started giving me a little bit of emotional and mental relief. And so I just sunk into those and I got off this biomedical roller coaster. And interestingly, that's when I took an online poetry class and I met a woman who recovered from ME-CFS and she told me about her experience and I got it. I actually had a real breakthrough just from listening to her recovery, that this was possible for me too.

Jackie Baxter: 10:06

Yeah, and you know I think you know you've made such an important point there. You know about hearing that someone, even if it's just one person, has recovered from something like what you had. And you know I remember having a similar experience. You know you're very, very lonely, you're very alone. You know there might be other people out there suffering very similar things to you, but because you can't get out there and you can't engage in life and you're completely cut off from everything, you've no idea about that.

Jackie Baxter: 10:39

I mean, I found that even with long COVID, where actually many, many, many people were experiencing the same thing at the same time, I didn't know that because I was so deep in my horror show of my own experience that I hadn't joined any of those dots. Um, you know, and maybe that did happen a little quicker because of the situation there, um, but you know this, this hearing somebody else, that validation of what you're going through, I think is so important. But also knowing that it is possible, you know it may seem completely impossible to you in that moment. You know how can I ever recover from this? But knowing that somebody has, I think there is so much power in that, isn't there?

Rebecca Tolin: 11:26

I'm so glad you spoke to that power of the story, because I don't know if I ever thought of it quite that way, that here I had seen 50 different practitioners, many of whom were doctors, and then it was one woman who actually wasn't any kind of a therapist or a physician, who just told me her story.

Rebecca Tolin: 11:46

And it was a long conversation it was three hours but I'll always remember it because she told me all her symptoms and they were my symptoms and she also listened to me and she explained some of the science too, even though she was a lay person I had been a science journalist and I love that and so she shared the work of Dr John Sarno and Howard Schubner, who described that a lot of really severe and real physical symptoms can be caused by the brain and nervous system when they're in a state of heightened stress, and that there doesn't have to be a physical or pathological reason.

Rebecca Tolin: 12:26

And it just a light bulb went off, both with that knowledge and with the empathy and the understanding and the recovery that she modeled for me, and I actually got up and ran around the block after that conversation, which I had not ran in 13 years, I mean, I remember at the end of this conversation, jackie, she said Rebecca, you're not broken, you're not irrevocably sick.

Rebecca Tolin: 12:54

Yes, you feel sick, but these symptoms are a result of the state of your brain and nervous system and you can shift that and I just realized I'm not sick. I stopped seeing myself like having a disease process that I couldn't actually impact and that shift made a huge difference for me, so much that I filled with energy. Now, that was not the end of the story. I will say I did not have one of those book cures or recovery story cures where all the symptoms just went away after that, but it was enough of a moment where I had a new understanding about what was happening in my body and I had that new possibility from someone else's recovery that I felt it in the body.

Jackie Baxter: 13:43

And therefore I knew I was on the right track and I think, yeah, the word possibility there, you know there is. You know, know we don't see that possibility, I think, often when we are so in the experience. But if we find a way to see, you know, any little possibility, even if it's just like, okay, today maybe I don't spend my whole day in bed, you know that there might be a possibility of that. You know it doesn't have to be running a marathon tomorrow, kind of thing. Um, you know, I think that again can have that amazing, um, I don't know some sort of shift or power. You know, even if it's not now, maybe it's at some point, kind of thing absolutely.

Rebecca Tolin: 14:25

I mean possibility and and hope are so important, and I think that you also are pointing to something else that was really impactful for me was I had been told by a number of doctors that I had adrenal exhaustion and I needed to carefully pace or I would actually hurt myself.

Rebecca Tolin: 14:47

So my world became very small in terms of restricting activity. But what this lovely woman named Kathy explained to me, and which I later learned through the books of Dr Schubner and Dr Sarna, was actually I was training my brain into this state of fear and hypervigilance with the restriction, with the restriction, and I did have to start moving out of my little bubble and start expanding my window of activities, very slowly but as a way to retrain my brain and body for what was possible and that these living again was actually safe for me. But I had to know and understand that I wasn't kind of damaging myself to do that, and I think that there's a lot out there now around neuroplasticity and understanding how the brain works and that our subconscious mind is very much responding to our environment and giving us signals through our body in the form of symptoms, and we can play a role in shaping that experience.

Jackie Baxter: 15:59

Yeah, now, you said something a moment ago. Actually, you said something about I'm not broken, and again, I love this. You're not broken. It doesn't mean you're not sick, because you clearly are, but you're not broken, you're dysfunctional, and I thought that I love that. I need, you know, post-it note that one. But you know you mentioned that these symptoms being a byproduct of, you know, dysfunction in the brain and the nervous system and not some sort of pathological process. But for some people, whether it's relevant or not, you know there are all sorts of tests and things that are showing things like viral persistence, or you know you were talking about epstein-barr and some of the other things. So how does this all link together for the sort of people who do have tests that say these things and people who maybe don't have those tests because they haven't had the tests but maybe do have some of that pathology underlying?

Rebecca Tolin: 17:07

Absolutely.

Rebecca Tolin: 17:08

I'm so glad you brought this up and of course, I'm now a mind-body coach and I work with a lot of people with long COVID and ME underlying viruses, the damaged mitochondria, the Lyme bacteria and having that not work, I very much believed those things were causing my symptoms, because I was told that by doctors, or at least they said well, these treatments might help, but none of them did and they typically made me worse.

Rebecca Tolin: 18:41

And so what I came to learn and experience and believe through my studies and also my own journey was that these underlying pathologies were not the root cause of the symptoms. Now, it is true, when our brain and nervous system is in flight, fight or freeze, it's not working optimally and so our energy is going towards creating stress hormones, for instance, instead of digesting our food. So we may have poor digestion, poor immunity, and the mitochondria aren't working as well. But what I found was that actually learning ways to create a sense of somatic safety in my brain and nervous system then impacted all the other systems and cells in my body in a downstream way.

Jackie Baxter: 19:31

To come back into balance, so it's using the nervous system to influence everything else. I'm picturing it as like one of those weeping willows where the the kind of leaves float down over everything else, like I'm a very visual person. Um, that's how that happened for me willows yeah, um.

Jackie Baxter: 19:54

So yeah, I mean that that does make sense to me. I think where people tend to get quite I'm going to say, upset or, you know, push back against this idea of mind, body medicine or nervous system or whatever you want to call it is this idea of it being quote unquote all in your head and possibly I'm spitballing here but the idea that, because you have power over it, it means that you're making a choice to be sick. And I think that's where a lot of people can get quite, you know, upset about that. They're choosing to be ill rather than not choosing to be ill, and I would be really interested to hear your kind of take on that, because it's not an easy journey either way exactly.

Rebecca Tolin: 20:51

But again, I really appreciate you bringing this up because I understand that there will be people listening who could perceive that that's what we're saying, that it's in your head and that you have some conscious control. And I just want to say from my own experience with 13 years of ME-CFS and now also studying and training in this field and working with many people, this is a completely subconscious process. This is how our subconscious brain and our autonomic nervous system work and we actually do not have any conscious control over it. That would be like if I would say, oh, I want my heart to beat faster now, or I want it to beat slower now. I have no control over that slower now. I have no control over that. I can't actually just speak to my subconscious brain, which really is 90, 95% of our brain and nervous system are unconscious, so we absolutely don't have control over it.

Rebecca Tolin: 21:45

And it is not our fault for having these symptoms. And I think we're really on the cusp of a shift in understanding from this biomedical model, which works really well. If you have a broken arm or a cancerous tumor, there is actually physical and structural damage in the body that needs to directly be treated but that biomedical model doesn't work really well with a lot of these so-called medically unexplained symptoms like lung COVID and ME-CFS and even things like migraines and irritable bowel syndrome, understanding that there are some conditions created by the brain and then they manifest in the body rather than the other way around. But that is in no way our fault and we don't have immediate control over that. But what I found for me was kind of learning this knowledge and then learning ways to retrain my brain and regulate my nervous system as well as tend to my inner emotional world, which is actually driving the entire state of our perception of safety in our nervous system.

Rebecca Tolin: 23:03

Those things led me to recovery and they also brought so many beneficial side effects, like there were no negative side effects in the way I recovered, as opposed to the way I was trying to recover with the diet, supplements and medications for 13 years. There were a lot of negative side effects and for me they didn't work. Now, if they work for someone, I think that's fantastic utterly. If you can find a pill or a diet or something that works for you, go for it. That's that. That's wonderful.

Jackie Baxter: 23:38

Um, but I'm just speaking from my experience and and what I see with a lot of people with these conditions yeah, and I think you know, speaking to what you just said there about, you know, if you find a diet that helps or what whatever, you know an insert protocol here? Um, you know that I mean from my experience I could, you know, I had all these multitude of things where overnight, practically, I'd suddenly become unwell in so many ways that I'd never even imagined. And you know, for me it was finding something that would take the edge off. You know, for me the breath was the thing that helped me, the first, which was you know why I feel so strongly about it, but you know, and that then allowed me to kind of see a little bit more of what was going on. And I think you know that's the experience, I think, that quite a lot of people have. And you know, for me it was the breath for some people that might be finding that they have an intolerance of food or something and they need to take that out, and that allows them a little bit of space to be able to see what's going on.

Jackie Baxter: 24:42

Or, you know, whatever it is for each individual person, maybe it's even a, you know a pharmaceutical that brings their heart rate down a little bit. You know something like that. So I think you know it's this kind of jigsaw puzzle of things, isn't it? Um? But what I've sort of started to understand is, whatever the method of doing that is creating that sense of safety in our body, and how do we allow ourselves to feel safe? Um, and you know, I, that that's different for everybody, isn't it? Depending on their history and their environment and their whatever.

Rebecca Tolin: 25:46

Those were exactly the words I was just going to say is it really is about creating a sense of safety for yourself, and that really is different for everybody.

Rebecca Tolin: 25:56

And I think part of the reason for me having some scientific knowledge helped is because I was already pretty scientifically oriented and I had just seen 50 doctors who told me all these kind of science-y scary things.

Rebecca Tolin: 26:11

So that was an important modality essentially for me, but for some people they may not need that that like perhaps you could go right to the breath and notice these shifts. And I would say after that I definitely needed, and have benefited from a lot of somatic work a real felt somatic connection with my body, because many of us who have been through trauma or even just really uncomfortable symptoms are either disconnected or completely disassociated from our body and that is not actually a sense of felt somatic safety. Right, it is a really important coping mechanism when our body feels like an unbearable place. But as we get practices that give us a little bit of relief, it's really powerful to come into the body right, because this is where we feel emotions, this is where we feel the symptoms or what I would call sensations in the body, and we can shift our entire state of our nervous system and our emotional state through different practices.

Jackie Baxter: 27:20

Yeah, and I'd love to talk a little bit more about some of the things that you found that were helpful, but before we do that, can you just explain a little bit about what somatic actually means?

Rebecca Tolin: 27:31

Right, great question. Well, soma means the body, so it's essentially a connection with the body. So it's essentially a connection with the body, but really I would say it's a. It's a visceral, tangible, felt connection. And so for me, somatic tracking, for instance, was a practice that was really pivotal in my recovery and that style of medication, meditation.

Rebecca Tolin: 27:59

We are feeling sensations in the body. So instead of just saying, you know, I'm tired or I'm in pain, it's really noticing oh there's burning, oh there's tingling or shooting or dullness or even numbness is a sensation. There's warmth or there's coolness sensation there's warmth or there's coolness. There's sensations that are really widespread or they're localized and actually becoming curious about what they feel like and when. We can watch these sensations in our body with mindfulness. It actually shifts our relationship to our body. It gives us some information about what they're signaling, but it also turns down this danger response in the brain and nervous system, because we're not pushing or fighting them anymore, we're just sort of noticing these sensations. So that would be an example of what I mean by somatic is kind of feeling the sensations from the inside rather than just thinking about them in our brain and I think, again, we can find it very easy to get into the, the what and the why can't we?

Jackie Baxter: 29:08

you know, I mean I, I want to know why. I'm a logical person in a lot of ways and you know, I want all the answers and you know, and in some ways that's probably a bit of a defense mechanism, because I don't want to feel, um, you know, because it doesn't feel, does it, when you have all of these awful things going on inside of you. So I think, you know, we do become, I think, very disconnected from our bodies, you know, because we don't want to be connected to them, because they're horrible. But then that creates a problem of its own, doesn't it? Where we have no connection with ourselves. I think.

Rebecca Tolin: 29:41

Exactly exactly. Of course, we would disconnect from a body that is in so much pain, but we also then disconnect from the underlying emotions when we do that. And I found that it was really important for me to get back in touch with the emotions beneath the symptoms. To get back in touch with the emotions beneath the symptoms, Basically the whole tender, emotional part of me that had been left behind in this very long biomedical model where no one ever asked is there anything stressful or traumatic that happened to you before you went from being this very active, young, healthy person to being homebound. And so I spent months and even years and I would say this is still part of my daily practice really tuning into what different emotions feel like in my body.

Rebecca Tolin: 30:31

Like anger, At first it might start out just feeling burny and hot, but then, when I would stick with it, I would actually realize it was the emotion of anger and I had experiences where that would kind of move up and out and sometimes it would have a memory associated with it. Sometimes it wouldn't, Sometimes it would completely dissipate and I would feel relief and other times it would just stick around. But I started feeling some storehouse really of grief, of anger, of shame. I started feeling the fear, but not letting it overcome me, really in a similar way I was describing earlier, by kind of tracking these emotions in my body, and then what I started realizing is they often did have a message. They would often be saying you know, pay more attention to this part of me, or you need more connection, or you need more solitude, or you need to set a boundary, or whatever it is. These emotions really are vital life messengers.

Jackie Baxter: 31:40

And, of course, you know you said earlier that prior to your illness you had had a horribly traumatic experience, and I think this is quite common with a lot of people. You know, whatever that trauma looked like for them, that they had had something that was maybe traumatic or a big stressor, maybe in the lead up to their illness. Oh, so common, yeah. But there's also so many people and you know, I sometimes wonder. You know my reaction when someone said did anything stressful happen? No, but you know also, I then learned over several years that actually the life I was living prior to illness was not just one.

Jackie Baxter: 32:17

You know, it was one big stressor in itself, um, but, um, you know, there are a lot of people who say, well, I was living a very good life beforehand. You know, I didn't have big stressors. Um, you know, I mean, maybe some of those traumas went back longer ago, um, or maybe they weren't, maybe aware of them. But, you know, does everybody have some sort of stuff in the lead up? Or, you know, is it for some people that this really does come right out of the blue for a cut of, you know, apparently no reason?

Rebecca Tolin: 32:50

I just love that you asked this because it is really important to express that not everyone has what we would consider capital T trauma. Like you know, I experienced a sexual assault or somebody losing their house in a fire or even going through a divorce. But I don't think I've found a single person yet and maybe they exist who hasn't had higher levels of stress leading up to the onset of long COVID or ME-CFS or any of these conditions that the system really kind of crashed and had a sudden shift in the state of well-being. And so I think sometimes it's a lot of little stressors that catch up to people.

Rebecca Tolin: 33:38

There was one woman I was working with who was saying something similarly to you like, well, I had an okay childhood, I wasn't really stressed prior to getting covered, but then, you know, my whole system went haywire.

Rebecca Tolin: 33:50

But then what we really noticed as we worked together was she was feeling so disempowered and weak when she had COVID and it actually reminded her of when she was a child and when she would get sick.

Rebecca Tolin: 34:05

Her parents were not very sympathetic with her and she always felt like she was kind of dismissed and weak and you had to, you know, kind of recover very quickly and get on with things, and so it did bring up some old childhood wounds that were unresolved in her because it brought up that state of powerlessness.

Rebecca Tolin: 34:26

So I do think there are often, usually, maybe always, even though I don't like to say always you know psychological stress, as I always. You know psychological stress and of course we just know COVID itself and the pandemic was one of the most stressful global events that could happen to human beings in terms of being very isolated from each other and afraid of this unknown virus and so many other things that were happening at that time. That's plenty of emotional stress to send the brain and nervous system into a threat response and when it's in a threat response, just getting flooded with stress hormones alone is going to make you feel really crummy and then that can compound on itself, especially when we have a lot of fear and we don't have the right supports that help us feel safe and kind of bring us into the state that breathwork probably does for you, Jackie.

Jackie Baxter: 35:24

Yeah, and I think that's a really good point. You know the pandemic was. You know it was a major stressor, even for someone who wasn't ill at the time. You know, and then when you catch this horrendous virus that you've been, you know, sin all over the news and you get it, you know, on top of it being a horrible virus, you know it was such a scary experience, the pandemic and um, you know that that, yeah, is a fairly major stressor for anybody, before you even look at anything else going on prior to that. I guess you know it's.

Rebecca Tolin: 36:02

And there was actually an interesting study that was done with people who ended up developing long COVID that a high percentage of them said that they had been experiencing anxiety prior to that and perhaps even at different times in their life. So it seemed like anxiety was one predisposing factor for COVID turning into long COVID and I think we didn't even realize how much stress we were under. But kind of to go back to your previous question, I do find a lot of people say that when they look back, yeah, I've actually maybe been anxious on and off my whole life or I've had other mind-body symptoms and this could have just been the straw that broke the camel's back. And another thing we could talk about is something that you and I chatted about before a bit are some of the coping mechanisms we develop which you could call personality traits, which John Sarno describes in his books as being the so-called TMS personality.

Rebecca Tolin: 37:09

But over 50 years of clinical practice with people who had chronic pain and chronic fatigue and these other medically unexplained conditions, that they all had some similar personality traits and they didn't all have these traits but they generally all had some of them, like the people pleasing or perfectionism or putting a lot of pressure on ourself, being self-critical, also just holding in our emotions and trying to make others happy without really acknowledging the full extent of our needs. Being goodest, trying to do a lot of good in the world and these qualities all have lots of benefits, right, I mean there's positive aspects to them. But those coping mechanisms or personality traits alone can create a lot of internal stress on our nervous system. And then if we have a big external stressor like a big virus and certainly like a pandemic, that can be enough to turn on this danger response in our physiology.

Jackie Baxter: 38:14

Yeah, and what's really interesting is that every single one of those traits that you just named I could tick off in myself. You know, I'm a lot better at a lot of them now, but I still notice them occasionally in myself. And that is where the gift of boundaries comes in, I think which is something that I always laugh, because I didn't even know what a boundary was, um, and then you know, through through illness, you kind of have to learn them, don't you? Because you just can't. You know, it's maybe more that the boundaries present themselves, rather than that you have to put them down in some ways, because the body just says no, um, but it it's definitely been something that I find quite liberating to do occasionally, maybe more than occasionally now. You know, it's like you know what I need to stop. Sorry, guys, you know I don't need to explain myself. Actually, you know time's up, you know, um. So yeah, it's, it's.

Jackie Baxter: 39:13

It's interesting, isn't it, how we see these things as as good things. You know, someone described before as uh, you know, putting perfectionism on a cv is something that you know you'd get a job because you're a perfectionist. That's great, you know, we want one of them, we want them. And staff. We want them to, you know, be able to do all of the stuff, and you know, um, and yeah, it's interesting how I see that very differently now that you know having an eye for detail, wanting to do things well, there's nothing wrong with that. But when it takes over your life and stops you from being happy and well, that is where it is obviously become much more of a problem. And I think you know we were chatting, weren't we? About how we both have some of these perfectionist tendencies and definitely still recovering perfectionist right.

Rebecca Tolin: 40:07

I mean, I certainly wouldn't say I've mastered the perfectionism habit, but there is so much more awareness and what I find is that I really enjoy striving for excellence and I just have a very kind of meticulous mind. But I'll be enjoying it up until a certain point and then I'll just start noticing that I'm getting tense in my body. My muscles are tensing up, I'm getting impatient. You know my mind's just tired from sitting at a computer so long and so I'm much more tuned into all those body cues. That's another reason to notice what's happening in our body, because that's a message for me.

Rebecca Tolin: 40:48

Now, like I've had enough computer time, I'm done.

Rebecca Tolin: 40:51

You know we need to check out and just kind of let go of you know all the perfect little details. And that is empowering because you're right, when you are so sick, literally you can't socialize, you might not be able to even go to the grocery store. I remember if I would just like maybe visit with friends or family for an hour, I would be so drained for a few days. I would have to kind of plan getting groceries before that visit because I wouldn't have any energy to do it after. And I do think there's something empowering about learning about your own kind of mind, body, heart and how it best thrives, what it likes, how much extroversion, how much introversion, what you really need to thrive as a human being. And we learn these lessons in a very hard way when we're sick with these symptoms, because we really can't function. But as we learn about ourselves through this healing journey, we can take these with us just in the way you do and you say okay, I'm done, guys, in a way you never would have before, right.

Jackie Baxter: 42:04

No, you would have been insulted if you'd even thought of saying something like that, wouldn't you?

Rebecca Tolin: 42:10

That's not what you know nice people do.

Jackie Baxter: 42:13

No, that's definitely not, and I love what you were saying about this kind of, you know, greater awareness in your body and you know the way that also that the journey is ongoing. You know I've said this before that recovery is kind of the start of a new journey, and I sometimes have to be a bit careful about saying that because it almost sounds like you know oh, I don't want another journey but for me, you know, the recovery journey was out of necessity.

Jackie Baxter: 42:43

You know it was this horrendous experience I'd been put into that I didn't ask for, I didn't want, I didn't feel like I deserved. You know it was, it was awful and I had to kind of claw my way out and you know it really wasn't a fun experience. And then you get to the end of that and it's just like, oh, my goodness, thank goodness for that. But then, you know, for me anyway, you know, over the next sort of few weeks, few months, even the year and a half since it's since I've recovered. Now, you know, I've been on this new journey of, okay, who am I now? You know, because I'm not the same person I was before.

Jackie Baxter: 43:17

I'm far better than I was before, but I'm not the same person and I kind of have to work out who she is or who she wants to be, which is incredibly exciting, but it's also quite scary. It's that kind of choice, isn't it? You want to have choice, but we don't want to have too much choice, and I kind of have too much choice to start with, um, but um, you know, I think I don't know. I see that as being a very empowering thing. It's exciting you have this choice. You know, you spent so long being sick where you don't have choice, and now you do have that choice and I really love the way you were talking about this kind of ongoing journey and. But you are a recovering perfectionist. You're not perfect at it. Irony of that.

Rebecca Tolin: 44:00

No right, exactly I'm a perfect at recovering from perfectionism. I know I've fallen back in it, right exactly, and I so relate to what you're saying, because it's like bringing all these unconscious assumptions and belief systems into our more conscious awareness. So we may have been raised in a way that we hold in our emotions and we just, you know, act kind to everyone else, or we may have been raised in a way that you always just give it your all and do your best, whatever it was that that worked for a certain period of time. And then I think what happens to so many of us on this healing journey and I know you talk to people on your podcast like this all the time is there becomes more awareness. It's like what's?

Rebecca Tolin: 44:44

Just an old program that was given to me by my family of origin or by my culture, but that's actually not working anymore. That doesn't serve me, that doesn't really feel authentic and alive inside of my body, inside of my life. And so you realize, wow, I really get to choose, and it's not as easy as just turning a switch, because our brain loves efficiency, it loves the known, it loves sameness, it doesn't love a lot of change, and so we can use. I mean, I found I've used a lot of the same tools that I retrain my brain into understanding that my body was safe. So it stopped. It stopped generating symptoms. I use with these personality traits, like you know, just bringing in more awareness, more mindfulness and slowly stepping out of these patterns and realizing this actually feels much freer yeah, yeah, I remember the first podcast episode I put out without editing it.

Rebecca Tolin: 45:45

Oh I mean once I got over the absolute terror of it.

Jackie Baxter: 45:49

It did feel incredibly liberating because I had like three hours that week to do fun stuff, so that felt pretty good. But yeah, it didn't feel comfortable to start with, not at all. So again, yes, work in progress for me as well. So I think maybe. Finally, what do you wish that you'd known 10 years ago?

Rebecca Tolin: 46:18

Oh, I wish I had known this wasn't my fault. The traumas weren't my fault. How I reacted to childhood stressors weren't my fault. The fact that I got sick wasn't my fault. The fact that it took 13 years to recover, and actually even longer once I discovered kind of the path for me None of that was my fault, and actually I wish I had learned.

Rebecca Tolin: 46:42

What I have since is that I am deserving of compassion, just like every other human being on this planet who is suffering which is everyone, which is every one of us and that a really helpful and life-giving response to suffering is self-compassion, and also an antidote to perfectionism and people-pleasing is also self-compassion, and so that's become really part of the way I live now is this whole inner dialogue is very different from one of criticism and blaming myself for not recovering or for not doing things perfectly, to like oh, I'm here with you, I know you're scared, I know you're suffering and I believe in you anyway, I love you anyway, and so that would be the message and that's what I love to convey to people on this journey is that you deserve that warm, safe listening ear and you can give yourself that and you are not to blame for any of this.

Rebecca Tolin: 47:49

You really just need to be loved, and I feel that so much of what ails us certainly a lot of the inner emotional struggles that we go through on the recovery journey really are parts of us asking for acceptance, acknowledgement and love. That is medicine, and I'm not saying that that is the only answer, but I found that it also led me to any other answers I needed when I was beginning to treat myself with kindness and even with a form of reverence.

Jackie Baxter: 48:32

And that all of those things are things that we can give ourselves.

Rebecca Tolin: 48:37

We can all give it to ourselves, and the truth is, we're really the only one that can, because I've never found another person that could say the exact same words that I want to hear in the moment. I want to hear them in the way I want to hear them, except myself. And so, of course, we need other people and we need connection, and this is not a replacement of that, but we are living inside our minds and our bodies 24-7. And it's just this built-in internal medicine. We have to cultivate self-compassion.

Jackie Baxter: 49:12

Yeah, I think that's a beautiful place to leave it. Rebecca, thank you so much for coming along and chatting and sharing your story and so much wisdom, and hopefully it's helpful for some people who are listening.

Rebecca Tolin: 49:27

I so appreciate you having me. I love your podcast and just all the heart you bring to this space. So thank you, Jackie.