This second ebook is for anyone struggling with symptoms that aren’t resolving with standard, alternative or other approaches. Or that keep recurring even though you lead a healthy lifestyle and follow every recommendation for optimal health. This is for those of you with chronic illnesses, mysterious illnesses with no name or diagnosis, symptoms that are holding you back despite showing normal, healthy-looking test results, or symptoms you know are serious and real that your doctors think are “all in your head.”
These kinds of symptoms, illnesses and issues may reflect symptoms of trauma, which are common in chronic illness. These symptoms of trauma are not “psychological.” They occur because subtle – or overt – trauma may have played a role in the development of your (very real) chronic illness.
Symptoms of trauma can include changes in blood pressure, cortisol levels, immune system and gut function; fatigue associated with feeling “wired but tired;” brain fuzz or difficulty concentrating; dipping in and out of depression, anxiety or sensitivity to even minor stressors; reacting to triggers; difficulty tolerating social interactions or relationships, and more.
This book presents unrecognized symptoms of trauma that are also diagnostic or well-known symptoms of many chronic illnesses.
Not because our illnesses or symptoms are psychological or psychosomatic.
But because trauma affects our brains, our nervous systems and our genes. Trauma also affects our bodies.
And because the research can now explain how trauma – including events that cause only very subtle perceptions of threat – increases our risk of developing chronic illnesses and other long-term health conditions.
Identify Symptoms of Trauma
Book 2 will help you identify symptoms of trauma in your life.
Knowing what such symptoms can look like gives you a new context for understanding health conditions that make little sense, respond poorly to treatment, and limit your ability to function. It also introduces tools for working with chronic illnesses and symptoms.
The kind of life events that affect our health are often so subtle that we miss them. They seem so much a normal part of the stress of everyday life that we dismiss them.
Most people, including myself and most medical professionals, don’t recognize these kinds of events until we gain a little more in-depth knowledge about trauma.
Symptoms of trauma are well-recognized in the scientific literature but have yet to be taught in medical schools. That’s part of why our doctors don’t yet recognize them. And why they are still in the old paradigm of thinking it implies a psychological origin to our symptoms.
Make Sense of Symptoms of Chronic Illness
Let me know what you discover in this book. Come back and leave me a comment. Or email me (The book also contains links back here to my blog as well as to my email.) I read every comment and every thing you share helps me to get clearer about the connections between symptoms of trauma, symptoms of chronic illness and more. It gives me a sense of what’s helpful and what makes sense to you. And how to keep refining the research and the links between trauma and chronic illness.
I hope book 2 is helpful to you as well as encouraging in offering new tools.
The Chronic Illness & Trauma Connection
Book 2: Making Sense of Symptoms
How Symptoms Help Us Recognize if We’ve Experienced Subtle or Overt Trauma & Offer New Tools For Healing
The first book of the series provider an overview of trauma. You can find it on the ebook downloads page.
Congratulations, Veronique! I know this will be a readable and important source of information for many. I loved your last book so I am really looking forward to delving into this one. Will share with my readers too.
Thanks so much Heather – for your feedback, for sharing, and being such a great colleague in the trauma-related blogosphere!!
Vero! I am on your awesome blog snooping around because today is a ‘me’ day. I wanted to forget that I am in nursing school. However, I have such an intuitive pull for trauma, illness, genetics and how they all inter-relate so when I saw your email come in about book 3, I decided to investigate this further!
Not only did I get to hear your beautiful voice and see your cute little face as my friend, I heard such tenderness and compassion. That alone is pulling me in a place or a direction to take my career as I finish this leg of it with a BSN in nursing. One of my HUGE interests is in mental health but I am not very excited at medicating without any direction for the root causes. As a clinical nutritionist, I had the privilege to be trained to deal with conditions like ADD and chronic depression with amino acids and detoxification with GREAT success. It is with that experience that I moved on to get this BSN and soon enough the MSN with an amazing pull towards mental health. I love, love, love people and desire that everyone I meet lives a full life. This is exactly what I heard in your beautiful voice. You choose to be vulnerable and it is out of that vulnerability that your empathy embraces others with your words and this hope! There is this deep compassion within you that needs to seek those root causes but you also want to help and that comes from this deep love that you have for people and this unrelentless compassion. You are so so precious! It may be that you will become one of my mentors as I continue journeying here………Bless you! xox
Dear Johanne, THANK YOU for showering so much love on me and my blog :-). It’s always so great to hear stories of what can be helpful – such as the amino acids and detox) you mention. We need all the stories of healing we can get. Congrats on your new path and what a gift it will be to have an MSN out there with your knowledge base and love of people. It’s nice to love those we work with, isn’t it? I look forward to meeting you sometime perhaps in the near future and it would be an honor to offer any kind of mentorship as you progress on your journey! Love, Veronique
Dear Veronique,
I like the idea of changing the rules that govern chronic illness in medical and health treatment arenas. It flips the traditional methods used for diagnosis and “prognosis” to a more dynamic approach with holistic cognitive methods key to the human factor realised and at the centre of care and consideration.
People affected by trauma can redefine and determine the “prognosis” through knowledge and empowerment.
Keep educating and developing resources.
Thank you :)
Dear Ann-Maree,
Here’s to changing the rules, redefining prognosis, empowering and accessing/developing resources!!