From Hiding to Wholeness

The untold truth behind yesterday’s “madness to miracles” story

I remember the moment I pressed “publish” on my very first Deeper Cravings blog revealing my personal (decades long) struggle with emotional eating, weight yo-yoing and body shame.

I felt exposed, vulnerable, and strangely exhilarated all at once.

For the first time, I was telling the truth, admitting publicly the long-held shameful struggle I had carried with food and with my body.

And yet, even in that moment of courage and authenticity, I was still hiding big huge parts of my story — the fullness of the ‘weight’ that I carried.

Standing in that partial truth, I experienced both freedom and the subtle pull of incompleteness — I was using Deeper Cravings as a platform to tell others that their food and body struggles did not define them and yet I was allowing, through my shame, other struggles to define me.

Yesterday, I took another step, I shared a blog about my turbulent marital history but I left a big part of the story out — I have another layer of the story that I have kept hidden in my pocket.

Now, I see that standing in the fullness of my truth — the fullness of my story — allows me to invite you to stand in the fullness of yours and potentially allows a more powerful unmasking (and thereby healing) to unfold for all of us.

I have long known I was here on the planet to be a healer.

And indeed, I am — but I am a wounded healer

Perhaps it is through the unmasking, through acknowledging these giant imperfections — without letting them define me, that I can now do my most sacred work.

So here it goes… the truth, the whole truth.

In 2014, through a series of serendipitous events and a Deeper Cravings social media post, I was invited by Harpo studios to be interviewed briefly by Oprah herself at the Life You Want Tour on an arena stage in front of 10,000 people in Seattle (watch it here).

To say a dream was realized would be a huge understatement — my story, my voice, standing beside my hero, finally reaching big.

Around that time, I also felt the pull to write a book — to hold the full scope of my Deeper Cravings journey. However, that book was not ready to be written. There were chapters yet to unfold. The full story required not only embrace of my body but healing and embrace of my mind, my heart (relational life), and ultimately my Spirit.

You see, behind the scenes, other interconnected stories were unfolding.

Stories I had kept hidden for more than a decade. I had not only struggled with food and body. As I shared yesterday, I was also navigating a marital crisis, but what I left out yesterday was that I had walked through the fire of severe mental health crises as well — two hospitalizations for psychosis, seven years apart.

The first time, it seemed like an anomaly. It was months after our marriage in 2007. I was already in my 30s and I had no history of depression or anxiety, no signs of a condition, no context that made sense (at least to the outside world).

Doctors suggested stress or sleeplessness, and I told myself it was a one-time storm.

But seven years later (to the day! on 11/11) I was hospitalized again, it had returned. Four days exactly after standing on stage with Oprah, I found myself in a psychiatric ward experiencing an identity rocking hell again.

Sleepless nights, the unexpected death of my father the month prior, the weight of his impending burial, the intensity of a career all time high, and the toxic dysfunctional dynamics that I felt helpless to fix in my marriage — all converged into a perfect storm.

This time, I was not only a woman in crisis — I was a mother leaving two small children at home while I recovered in hospital. I was also a psychotherapist with a full and thriving private practice that would suddenly need to go on an unexplained hiatus.

The road ahead was hard but I recovered, I returned to regular life — no longer in a mental health crisis, but still in an ongoing marital roller coaster and in a deep deep crisis of identity. I wore a blanket of shame and disorientation that lasted for years. The stories got easier to integrate as time went on but clearly, as evidenced by the omission from yesterday’s blog, I still carry it.

How could I be a skilled and trusted psychotherapist and yet carry such a severe mental health diagnosis? How could I guide others while secretly deep down feeling like my own mind had failed me? The shame was heavy. And so I self-protected and I hid it.

If you noticed that my writing slowed, my presence with Deeper Cravings was a bit dimmed, in the years that followed — this is why.

I remained mostly open about my struggles with food and body, but silent about my mind and my marriage. I wore the mask of the capable therapist while carrying a wound I unconsciously believed would disqualify me, if people knew, from belonging.

It is a paradox: I serve in the mental health field. I am meant to protect people from this very stigma, yet I perpetuated it through my own silence. Now, I feel called to rectify that.

Hiding is not mine alone. We all carry wounds, often rooted in childhood, whispering untrue beliefs to us about us: I’m not enough. I’m broken. I’m unworthy. I’m alone in the world.

My experiences didn’t form my brand of these beliefs, they simply tugged on the ones already there, lodged deep in my unconscious, from the time I was little, silently waiting for their debut on life’s stage.

So much of my life became about masking them — proving the whispers wrong. Not only to others but to myself as well. However, healing does not come from proving. It comes from bringing the hidden into the light, looking at it and remembering the truth of who we ARE.

I learned this again in recent years when a couple different people in my life have also gone through psychosis. I know their brilliance, their radiance, their hearts of love. Nothing about their mental health experience diminished them in my eyes so why did I let it diminish me in my own?

In seeing them clearly, I can turn that same compassionate view toward myself.

So here it is, finally, in the open:

I have lived madness. Not only in my marriage but in my mind.

And I have healed.

My life has been shaped by a trifecta of struggle:

• A journey in and with my body
  
• A journey in and with my heart (my marriage and relationships)
  
• A journey in and with my mind

Each has led me to powerful transformation and to the only truth that matters;

I am not my body.

I am not my heart (relationships).

I am not my mind.

None of these stories define me.

Even now, my body continues its own story — shifts, changes, reminders that life moves through us. I have felt whispers of shame, and incogruence. After all, I birthed The Deeper Cravings Path, shouldn’t I have that part totally figured out?

But those ongoing shifts do not diminish me either.

They are life.

They are change.

They are human.

So if I am not my body, heart or mind…What am I?

I am a Soul.

I am Spirit Embodied.

I am the Light within.

I am.

Whole. Worthy. Unbroken.

This is true of me. And it is true of you.

No matter what you carry, no matter the masks, the diagnosis, or the history — your worth has never been in question. Your wholeness is unshakable.

I write this not only as a psychotherapist, retreat facilitator, or couples counsellor, but as a fellow human being — flawed, imperfect, still healing, still remembering to return.

Return to the truth.

The truth is I am only the Light Within. Nothing I could ever do could add to that Light but nothing that I could EVER do (or what has ever been done to me) can detract from it.

I am the Light within, same as you.

No better, no worse. One with you.

Light calling to Light. “hey all, let’s remember this, okay? Life is so much better when we remember”

No matter what you have lived, may you reclaim your sense of worth and wholeness. It IS your birthright!

May you return, again and again — always — to the truth of that Light.