About My Blog

My name is Veronique Mead (pronounced Vair-uh-neek’ Meed). I’ve had a debilitating chronic illness for 20 years that worsened very slowly and left me almost completely bed-ridden for 9 months in 2009. I have been gradually improving as a result of discoveries I made after leaving my career as a family doctor and assistant professor at the New Hampshire Dartmouth Family Practice Residency Program (here’s my bio and my onset story).

When I retrained as a body-based psychotherapist, I learned about trauma and discovered that it’s so much more than I ever realized as a doctor.

Trauma is not just what happened to people who served in Vietnam, were abused as kids or needed emergency care after a car accident.

Trauma is so subtle that I never knew I’d experienced it myself. It’s vastly under-recognized in our culture as well as in medicine. And most of us have experienced some form of trauma without realizing it, including the experience of having and being diagnosed with a chronic disease.

I write about the vastly under-recognized types of trauma that are risk factors for all kinds of chronic physical illness. Because it offers a new perspective as well as powerful new tools.

In this video I describe some of the perspectives I write from on my blog.

What I Never Learned as a Doctor

This blog is about research I’ve discovered from around the world.

 Some of these studies are found in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Huffington Post, on PBS and NPR and in other news outlets. Some are in the prestigious journals such as Nature and Science. Others exist on websites such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH). And research is beginning at Universities such as Columbia and Harvard.

Most of this research, however, has yet to reach our medical schools, hospitals, clinics or health care professionals.

I’ve tested the research findings and found it made sense of my own chronic illness, my symptoms, onset, and flares. It helped my psychotherapy clients make sense of their diseases too.

I continue to be awed and humbled by how profoundly the effects of life experiences long gone affect my symptoms in the present.

And how my symptoms can change and improve.

These perspectives may help you make some sense of your illness too. And offer new tips and tools to work with your symptoms.

It’s Not a Quick Fix

I don’t have any quick fixes – I’m not sure any exist for most of us living with a chronic illness.

And I’ve found the journey of being sick and working to heal to take a tremendous amount of patience and self-compassion because it really can be quite difficult, trying, and challenging.

The tools I recommend, however, are gentle. Empowering. Not as difficult or scary as I imagined.

While these tools have rarely been tested with chronic illness, this is because it is a new paradigm and it’s not yet how most medical professionals are thinking. But that is beginning to change.

The tools I link to are known for being effective in healing the effects of trauma, which most people don’t know is possible.

And if trauma is a risk factor for chronic illness – which is what the research is showing in increasingly clear and understandable ways – then healing the effects of trauma appears to be a profound and powerful way of working with physical as well as emotional symptoms. And there are some remarkable stories of how these tools have lead to great improvements as well as full recoveries for some people. Their journeys are important to learn from and not to dismiss or disbelieve as meaning that they must never have been sick in the first place.

It’s Not in Your Head

I write this blog because those of us with chronic illness need the data that explains what we know from experience – which is that our chronic illnesses and symptoms are real. And not in our heads.

I write about trauma because it’s where the research took me. Not because chronic illness is psychological, but because the science shows that adverse life events – subtle or overt and vastly under-recognized – affects our bodies, our cells, our brains and our genes.

Making Sense of Symptoms & Patterns

The science offers new tools.

Tools to better understand our symptoms. And ways to recognize patterns in our symptoms.

To explore why symptoms started when they did, why flares seem to come out of the blue or with seemingly tiny triggers, why non stressful events can affect symptoms, why treatments sometimes help for a while and then stop being effective, and why they sometimes make things worse.

Stop the Blame: It’s Not Your Fault

Having a chronic illness is not something we choose. And it’s not your fault.

Understanding the intelligence that drives symptoms and the role of trauma – including subtle, unrecognized events that elicit perceptions of threat – takes the shame, blame and self-hatred off the table.

The Limitations of Medical Perspectives

Our understanding of trauma in medicine and in our culture is limited, judgmental and one-dimensional.

It’s also out of date and inaccurate.

Over a 100 years of published research show that the effects of trauma go far beyond the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other emotional symptoms.

Trauma – which I also refer to as adverse life experiences because most of us don’t think of what we’ve experienced as traumatic – is also a risk factor for chronic illnesses of all kinds, including type 1 diabetes, asthma, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, lupus, inflammatory bowel disease and others.

Having a chronic illness and a possible history of trauma do not mean we are weak, crazy or lacking in courage.

It’s because many types of life experiences that we’ve overlooked, been told to throw under the rug or have buried so we could move on – affect our genes and consequently, our health.

My View of Chronic Illness

Research and personal experiences have taught me that chronic illness is the result of an intelligent process gone awry rather than a demon bent on screwing up our lives. That while illness may seem to start out of the blue there is often a way of making sense of the path that lead to onset. This alone can be helpful in recovering from the shock of getting diagnosed. And it can offer clues on how to work with our health.

This is not because we caused or illnesses. It’s because events outside of our control affect our health.

My emphasis is on being gentle and kind with ourselves and our bodies. On recognizing that we are not to blame for getting sick. And on acknowledging how much intelligence and wisdom our bodies have, because being sick comes from our bodies’ best attempts to help us survive circumstances beyond our control, not because they – or we – are broken.

You Can Heal the Effects of Trauma

 There are effective ways of beginning to heal the effects of trauma, even if it happened years or decades in the past. Even if it occurred when you were in the womb. And even if it happened in your parents’ or grandparents’ lives.

Healing trauma can make a big difference in your symptoms, how you work and live with symptoms, and more.

This is not because it’s all in your head. It’s because healing trauma is a way to shift your genes and heal unconscious perceptions of threat that drive many kinds of entirely real physical and physiological symptoms.

Start Here With My Survey

I’ve developed a survey of different types of trauma that we rarely recognize but that research has shown affects risk for chronic illness. The survey also asks about resources and support in your life, which can delay or prevent the onset of chronic illness and help with healing if we do get sick. You can see the results of all responses at the end of the survey. My blog post also gives you links to tools and what you can do. It takes about 10 minutes to complete.