170: Beyond Mold: Healing the Mind After Exposure

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis, and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Let's talk life after mold. A lot of what we talk about is, you know, currently, like, how do we handle a problem? How do we find a problem? How do we deal with a problem? How do we remediate a problem? How do we deal with our health? Like, how do we do all this stuff? There's a portion after all of that. And sometimes it can be really hard because, you know, this mold thing is like a trauma, right? And so it's almost like you now have to heal a trauma that happened in your life. Uh, and, like, what do I mean by that? Like, if you're somebody whose health was impacted and it took you time, it took you a year, two years, three years to get through all of this. You've basically been training yourself to be on edge, to be constantly, like, afraid of something, to be in your fight or flight, you know, side. You know, the. The sympathetic side of your nervous system all the time. And when you finally are able to reduce your exposure, start the healing process, like, actually start getting better, you know, your brain doesn't always know that that's happening, right? Like, our body and our brain are two very different things. Like, our body feels stuff, it reacts to stuff. Our brain isn't so black or white. Like. Like, if you. If you cut me, I'm gonna start bleeding, right? My brain doesn't have to think about me bleeding. You cut me, I start bleeding, right? You eat something bad for you, you get food poisoning, you throw up. Your brain has nothing to do with that, right? But your brain is, like, taking stock of all this stuff that happens all the time. So now your brain is like, oh, that sharp thing, that sharp thing's gonna cut me. I gotta stay away from that thing. I'm gonna start looking around for sharp things, right? Like, I don't want sharp things to get me, right? Or you ate, you know, some bad sushi or something, and that got. Got you food poisoning. Now your friend's like, hey, you want to go for sushi? And your brain's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't think I want to go eat sushi. Like, I need to be on A sushi break. Last time you ate sushi from this place, you threw up. We're not eating any more sushi ever again. And all this stuff is happening in your brain. And so what your brain is doing is taking all of these things that have happened to you and it's creating like self defense mechanisms that you don't even think about it. And what I see happen a lot with people is they actually physically start healing the mold issue, right? They fix the house, they start fixing the body. And you start seeing the reduction in the clinical test, right? Your urine mycotoxins are down, your inflammatory markers are down. Like, like whatever else you were looking at is get, is, is improving and you're getting better, right? And then off of that, I then see kind of two things. Well, I guess three things. The, the first thing is the best thing, which is your brain looks at all of that stuff and says, okay, we're getting better. I'm feeling good about stuff, right? I'm gonna allow us to now transition into the next part of our life where I'm not freaked out all the time, right? And that does happen for some people, right? Then you get this secondary piece that can maybe happen where your brain like looks at it and is like, I don't believe this. I'm scared. My brain is just scared. And so even if I'm technically getting healthy, I'm still gonna be freaked out all the time. Cause I don't want it to happen again. And so you end up on the second path where now your brain and your mind and your mindset has been shifted so much that there's like this whole secondary thing that you have to do to allow your, to allow your mental capacity to release the trauma so then you can move forward, right? And that, that's a tough thing for some folks. And, and you know, for some people it's just, I'm going to avoid, avoid, avoid, avoid. And you're in your place. And as long as you're in your place and you know your place is good, then your mind is sought, is released, right? And you say, okay, I know that this is here, but I'm kind of like, I don't want to go anywhere else. And you kind of become heavy avoider. Then there's like this third path where even in your own space where you have testing that's showing that your home is clear and your clinicals are getting better and all that stuff, your brain still can't release it because this stuff was invisible in the first place, right? It's not like moles growing all over your walls. Right? It was invisible in the first place. How do I know that it's not coming back? How do I know that we got all of it? How do I know that my house still isn't making me sick when I breathe 20,000 times a day? Like, how do I know? How do I know? And that becomes the third path. And then you can't even be in your own place, even though your own place might be better than it was and even though your health might be better. And so I see this a lot. It's like, gosh, how do I. How do I stop worrying about this? It consumes my life now. How do I have a normal life and not think about cross contamination from going to the grocery store and looking up at the. At the air conditioning system over there and seeing this black around the air conditioning system? And then my mind is like. And I'm like, oh, no, there's multiples flying around the, The. The grocery. It's going to get on my clothes. I'm going to come back to my house. I have to take all my clothes off where I walk into my house before I could get there. Right. I've had people that have that. That have felt like they needed to do that. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that necessarily, but what I'm saying is that that is something that can happen. And so we have to apply the same type of approach to healing that. That you do with healing your body, because your mind and your body are two completely different things. And so you can heal your body. And if your mind hasn't accepted the fact that you've healed your body and that the thing that was causing the problem is also handled, then your brain is just gonna hold onto it forever. And said, I'm not a. I'm not a brain doctor. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a trauma expert. Like, I'm not gonna claim that I'm any of those things. But what, What I will say is if you find yourself in this. In this boat where you feel like you're on constant alert all the time, and it's really detracting from your quality of life, then what I would suggest is to start looking into how to handle your. How you're mentally able to kind of move past the trauma that you've had, which will allow all the work that you've done to really kind of set in, and you can be where you want to be right now. There's a balance Here, there's nothing wrong with being concerned about the sharp thing that cut your arm, right? Like, if I walk into a place and so, you know, there's a sharp thing, like I'm not going to walk into it. And having that level of awareness is amazing. Otherwise we would keep walking around stabbing ourselves all the time when, you know, when we're doing things. So there's a level of awareness that you always need to have, right? And I actually think that once you go through this and you understand it, your awareness is there. It's kind of, you know, it's kind of like the Matrix, right? Like you didn't know about it until you knew about it, but now you know about it, right? And for some people, that they can't handle that. And for some people, they're okay with that, right? And I think the same thing happens in real life with us. I am constantly aware of it, right. I don't let it run my life. But I also was not as significantly impacted as maybe some of you listening, right? So this isn't saying that, like, it's right or wrong or you should, hey, just get over it, right? Like, that's not what we're talking about here, right? But if we're not able to get over it, right? If we're realizing that, gosh, I'm just constantly in this world and I can't release this, then we need to start exploring ways to work on traumas to help, to help remove that. Some of it can be more therapeutic stuff. There's even technologies, you know, technology, things that can help with that. There's limbic retraining. There's. There's like, like brain training programs that you can do, and it helps your brain sort of release things and sort of reconnect, you know, the connections. So you, so you're not always, like, immediately flipping to that response. There's, you know, breath work, there's regulating your own nervous system without having to go through one of those processes, right? So if you're in a healthy enough space, for example, breath work, cold, plunging, right? Cold water, those things really stress your. Your. Your nervous system right away. And then through breathing and through managing your nervous system, you can start to gain control of how your body reacts to things, right? Like, for example, like when I get a cold plunge, man, the first, like 30 to 45 seconds, I could feel it. Everything's tight. I can feel. I'm, like, trying to breathe harder. My body feels like something crazy is happening and I can breathe through it. I could think through it. And I can shift and I could even see it in my whoop. When I do it. I can see where, like the stress, a log, like my cold plunge session. And my stress spikes really high and then it tanks down low after I'm able to regain control of my nervous system, my reaction. And so we are able to do that. It takes training and there's so many different ways to do it. You can do neural reprogramming. You could do cold plunging. If your body is able to handle that. I would suggest, like, if you're listening to this and you've had like a lot of health issues, cold plunging might be way too much for you to do. Um, and that's fine, right? I'm not telling you to do that. It's just an example, um, breath work. You know, I do a lot of the Wim Hof breathing technique, which is where you do 30 breaths in really, really deep and fast. So it'd be like.

So that's what it sounds like. You do that 30 times and on the 30th one, you blow out completely. And then you hold your breath after you've blown out as long as you can. I can get to like 2 minutes and 15 seconds without having to breathe in again. So I can hold my breath for about that long. And then when you feel like you need to breathe in, you take in one more deep breath. You go, and then you hold that for like 10 seconds. And then that's like a sequence and that process because you are feeling how your body is working and transitioning through kind of like over oxygenating yourself, and then you're kind of hyperventilating yourself when you take your two minute, you know, however long it could be one minute for you. That's just what it is for me. You're holding your breath when it's out and then you're replenishing. And so you're, again, you're kind of taxing your immune system in these, or not your nervous system in these different ways. And it's just a way to like, for you, to feel control of you. Right. So like, those things let me feel that I am in control of external things that are happening to me and I can control my response to them. Right. Meditating is another great way that you can do that. Right. So there are things that you can do on your own. There's other things you can like, seek out. But for those of you that aren't that far along and you actually are getting better, but you're just constantly like, I don't want to go to my friend's house because I think they have something. I don't want to go here. I'll tell you guys a story. One of my best friends that I've known since high school, that was my roommate, like all through college that I. When I moved out to la, we lived together for a while before I got with my wife. His apartment that he lives in, in West Hollywood has a massive mole problem. And I won't go there. I. I just don't go there. And I tell him. He knows, like, listen, dude, I know too much about this. I'm not sitting in here with this big old mole problem right under your air conditioning system. I'm just not going to do it. So, like, let's go meet somewhere else. Let's go hang out somewhere else. I'm totally up to go somewhere, but I'm just not going to sit here on your couch with your air conditioner blowing on me when I can see how big the problem is, right? And he has no problem with it, and it's fine. And so we kind of come up with other ways where you can still, like, maintain relationships with somebody that you want to without feeling like you have to go to their house right now it's easier for maybe me and a friend as opposed to, like, family, right? Like, maybe, like, how do I not go to this place or that place? And everyone's going to kind of have to forge their own path there. But what I would say is that, like, it is okay for you to set boundaries for yourself, for you to be healthy without feeling guilty about it, right? It's okay for you to do that. And it's okay and really necessary for you to be aware of the things that you need to be aware of. Now, the other thing I will say is that not every small exposure to a mold issue is going to completely relapse you. Now, for certain people in their healing journey, maybe it will, right? So I don't always want to be talking in generalities here, but if you've made some progress and you've kind of boosted your immune system and you've reduced your exposure, you become a little more resilient. Walking into the bathroom somewhere and seeing, you know, some mold in the grout on a shower doesn't mean that you're going to completely tank again. But there are people that when they see that, their mind rehashes all of the symptoms. I actually had Dr. Lauren Tessier on one on, on an episode a while back. I. I don't know what the. What the episode number is here, but you can maybe search it on Google. Lauren, Tess and Mofenators radio and we were talking about this where she would have patients that were healing. We knew the home was good because we inspect one through the house. We knew the home was good. She knew the home was good because we inspect one through the house, right? So we knew the home was good. We knew that her, that the clinicals on the patient was getting better. Yet the patient was still getting symptoms that were triggered by something their eyes saw. So they went into a bathroom and saw mold in a grout. And then this is like one of those scenarios I talked about earlier where your mind is like holy shit. And it freaks out. And it recreated all of the symptoms when it was actually triggered by the nerve by, by like a trauma. Right? And so I want to be really careful because I think some people will hear that and say, oh, you think I'm crazy? And that's not at all like, you're not crazy, right? It's not, it's not like some sort of like psychological crazy thing that's going on. It's a real mental reaction to a real trauma that happened. And you are really feeling the symptoms of it. It is all real, right? But the trigger isn't being triggered by a real thing anymore. It's being triggered by the, by the remembering of a real thing in your mind, right? And then that triggers the symptoms. And so what she's basically said, she's like, if we've gone through and we feel like that these things are good, then the next step is now addressing the trauma stuff, right? And I think, you know, social media, like all these things, all these ideas and stuff, they almost get recycled by everybody all the time. It's like, oh, I'm now starting to see a bunch of people talk about trauma. I'm now starting to see a bunch of people talking about mold. And it's like, it almost feels like everyone just starts talking about it. Cause everybody else is talking about it. Um, and that's how I felt about trauma. I didn't understand it, I didn't really know what it was. Um, I thought it was just like physical trauma, cuz that's all that I've ever heard of. Um, and I kept seeing it come up and then I started talking to doctors and stuff and they started explaining it to me. It's like, oh, it actually like really, really makes sense. So we all have gone through some level of trauma tied to this, right? And some of us can handle it. And process it. And some of us are not able to process it. And so what we need to do is we just need to kind of try to figure out, like, what side of the fence we are there and then try to take actions that can be most effective for us where we are. Some of us can do things on our own. Like, for me, sometimes if I just hear something talk, like, spoken about, and I'm like, oh, I understand that now, right? Cause your mind doesn't understand everything either, right? Like, you gotta be taught stuff. It has. And even if you're taught stuff, it has to be taught in a way where you. Where, like, the light bulb goes off in your head, right? And so there are a lot of times where, like, I will just hear something and all of a sudden the light bulb goes off. And then my complete perspective of it just changes just like that. And everything is different from how I look at it. And that happens to me sometimes, right? That might have happened, you know, to somebody who's listening sometime with something that happened in life, right? So there's the possibility of just hearing this might trigger that light bulb for somebody. Man, I hope that just hearing this 15 minutes would trigger that light bulb for somebody. If that's all that it is, that's really holding them back, right? But if it's not, then I would encourage you to like, really kind of dive in and understanding more on the kind of almost the mental acceptance and transition after some sort of traumatic experience, because that might be the thing that's creating more of a consistent, like, anxiety worry, not feeling like you're living a normal life after you've gone through this whole journey to the point where physically you actually are able to get there. Right? Like, isn't that the worst? Like, you go through this whole thing. When I take infusion, I finally got my body there. The clinicals are good, the house is good. Yet I'm not able to move past this. And it's not something I think that anyone expects to happen. And it's. Honestly, it's pretty crappy. Like, when you kind of realize that that is like, another thing. It's like, ugh, now I gotta deal with this. But you're so close. You're so, so close. Like, that's the last piece and then you're there, right? Like, the hard stuff almost has happened already. And not saying that this is easy, but this is like, this is now just a piece where you can work on yourself and there's not an external influence anymore, right? And so I think, you know, for anyone listening and feeling like that, hopefully that it feels a little more hopeful than maybe it feels, you know, hopeless. And that's my hope. So anyways, hope this one hits home for you guys. If it does, let me know in the comments of the episode. If you wouldn't mind, rate the episode, give me some comments, let me know if this landed for you guys. All right, till next time.

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