Dr. Diane Mueller, a mold and Lyme disease survivor, explains how chronic mold illness often triggers PTSD-like reactions. She describes "repatterning" strategies that train your nervous system to notice recovery after exposures, sharing how she practiced this during a 36-day meditation retreat in a moldy environment.
Hey everybody, I'm Dr. Diane Mueller, mold and Lyme disease survivor. And in this video we're going to talk about mold and emotions. Now, I had a client just today tell me about walking into her work and getting ptsd, feeling short of breath, feeling headachy, but knowing it was a clean environment and still having mold related symptoms come up. And this is a really important topic because when you've gone through major health issues, you've gone through a trauma. So having a level of PTSD is not only common, it's normal. When I first was going through mold illness, I would find that after I was, I was healed, I would get on a plane in order to go to, you know, travel around the world, wherever I was going, and I would wind up finding I was getting heart palpitations, I would break out in sweats because I just was so scared to travel and be in a moldy place and feel those symptoms that basically made me feel like I was dying. So what do we do? So one of the first things we do is we actually acknowledge that you, if you are suffering from mold illness, if you're suffering from chronic disease, you have suffered a trauma and some people don't have emotional responses to that, but many, many, many, many, many people, in fact, most people do. So the first thing to do if you have mold illness and you've suffered from it and you are worried about traveling and all of that, is to give yourself compassion. Make sure you don't gaslight yourself and tell yourself that you should be different or that this is a horrible way to think and what's wrong with you and why can't you get out of this, you know, circular thinking about being scared. Make sure you're not doing any of that. If you catch yourself doing that and catching yourself giving yourself a hard time, whenever you catch yourself, that's a good time to change it. Meaning the moment we can start to change our moment we catch what we're doing is the moment we can make change. So sometimes it's really difficult to rechange thought patterning. But what we can do is we can take a moment to say, oh, we caught ourselves. Maybe we're saying, my God, I shouldn't be thinking this or oh my, I'm so scared or whatever it is when we first take a moment to acknowledge ourselves and acknowledge the pain and the trauma, everything we've been in and tell ourselves like, you know what, this is freaking normal. It is normal to feel scared. It is normal to travel and not know what we're going to do and where we're going to stay in all of these things. So we first want to normalize it and that is a huge step in the healing process. From there, we want to start to repattern it. So in repatterning it, one of the things to do is to actually start noticing. First of all, if you do get into a moldy place in a moldy situation, start to pay attention to how fast you feel better. Once you have mold out of your system, you're going to find that you feel better after a mold exposure so much faster. You're also going to know what to do to bring yourself back to wellness. So it's really, really important that when you're going through this notice, like, oh, I remember I did a 36 day meditation retreat in a moldy place after I was mold recovered. And a couple days into it I was like, I tested the place so I knew there was mold there. And a couple days into it, I was about ready to jump on a plane, go back home, but I decided to stay. And I decided to stay because I thought it was an opportunity for me to basically be in a moldy place and work on my PTSD around it. Now that's an extreme example. Definitely don't need to do anything that extreme. But as you're around mold, if you smell it, if you have symptoms, pay attention once you're healed, especially to how quickly you recover from those mold exposures because it's going to be so much faster before. And what you're training your brain when you're noticing that you're training your brain that this is not the same situation, that your body knows what to do, that you know what to do. And the more we practice to train the brain to say, looks like this in many ways is this is not going to turn into that bad, bad, bad thing. The more we're training our nervous system that it doesn't have to have this same level of heightened response around being in a moldy place. So more on emotions later in another video. Again, subscribe to this if this is interesting to you, I'm Dr. Diane. See you in the next video.
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