Mold and Emotions Series Part 2

Hey, everybody. Dr. Diane Mueller here, Lyme survivor, mold illness survivor. And in this video, we're going to talk about mold and emotions, and in particular mold and relationships. This is so important, you guys, because one of the things that typically happens for most people with mold is they're genetically susceptible to mold building up in their body and having all of these symptoms and being super reactive to their house and, and it's very common that their partner is not. So it's oftentimes already right out of the gate trying to explain to a partner that's healthy that there's a problem with the house. Making you potentially unhealthy is a really difficult thing. And so it can be very difficult sometimes to get partners to even believe us when we are feeling bad and it's the house, and we've done research and know it's the house. It can be very, very difficult for our partners even believe us sometimes it happens. But in a lot of my clinical practice, I see this happen a lot where relationships get really stressed because it's really difficult from a level of not understanding how mold works. And that's a genetic disease. Oftentimes it's very difficult for our partner to truly understand a live in household partner to truly understand why one person's sick and they are not. So that's problem number one. That creates a lot of relationship stress. Now, if we've made it over the hump of problem number one and there is that belief and there is that understanding, that is wonderful. That's a great start. And oftentimes this is also problematic beyond that, because mold and the mycotoxins secreted from mold will actually enter the olfactory, the olfactory bulb. They'll enter through our sinuses. When they enter through our sinuses, they go, they basically have a straight route through the skull up into the brain. And so we get mold and mold toxins into our brain very, very easily. This causes a lot of depersonalization, this causes a lot of brain fog, dementia, all sorts of various things, but it also causes rage, it inflames the nerves. And the way I tell people about this is in order for our nerves to flip fire, there has to be enough stimuli, meaning we can focus, say, on our job at hand, whatever we're doing, doing our work, taking care of kids, whatever it is, so we can focus on our job at hand. And here in the background, maybe trucks driving by, maybe a siren, it's not for us, we know it's in the distance. So basically a nerve's going to fire up here when it gets enough stimuli and day to day stimuli that I'm talking about, background noise is generally around here. It's not enough to fire the nerve to say we need to take action, there's a problem. So when we get enough stimuli built up or we have a stimuli that's really, really strong, like seeing somebody in a car accident and needing to rush to help them, right. We get that firing of the nerve because there's enough stimulus, either through enough little things or one big thing. With mold, because of the neuroinflammation, the inflammation to the nervous system, the nervous system from a stimuli perspective, from all of the inflammation is already sitting right here getting ready to fire. And so this is one reason why we can have rage, why light or sound can sometimes just throw you over the threshold, is because your nervous system is sitting here. And therefore it can be just a look. A partner gives something, a kid says something, a kid does. Sometimes as simple as like something is like you told a partner to pick something up at the store and they forgot or whatever and you're sitting up here the whole time and then the little sink throws you into a threshold and then all of a sudden there's rage, there's anger, there's crying, all these things. And all those things are valid, right? So it's not saying that although that whatever triggered you isn't valuable information and maybe was problematic, but oftentimes when we have mold illness, the amount of say the rage or the upset is not justified with the trigger. Meaning a lot of times it's a much bigger expression than typically needs to be for say somebody forgetting to bring home that gallon of oat milk or whatnot. Right? So somebody's, you know, doing this, they forget to do this. We have this huge rage, yada yada. So that's a huge potential problem. Okay, so beyond that we want to think about then. Okay, how do we deal about, deal with that? Well, one thing thing is to help make sure that we are communicating with our partner to at least allow them to know that this is what's happening, that you have a short fuse. This is why the more you can lower any other thresholds of any other stimuli while you are healing, the better response you're going to have to not going over the edge. Right. Like I want to be careful that we're never gaslighting. We're always acknowledging emotions and feelings and all of this. So this isn't to say that oh, if somebody forgot something or said something or looked at you in a certain way, it's not to say that that was, like, not hurtful and that you might have emotion coming out about it. And in a healthy way of expressing emotions, you know, we are able to not rage out about little things that don't deserve rage and to have a discussion on how it felt. And that's where we want to get easier said than done with mold. But know that as we lower some of these inflammations and lower these stimuli, so. So even things like making sure your blood sugar stays stable, making sure you're not using too much bright light, making sure you're scheduling breaks in your day, if at all possible, to just rest, turn lights off, and basically lower this threshold can really help when you are going through this whole process. And I will say this again and again and again, be gentle with yourself. There is a level where you have control. There's also a level where you don't, meaning you don't have control right now, of the fact that your threshold is probably sitting up here most of the time. You do have control over finding ways to manipulate your day to say, you know what, every hour you need to go find a quiet place where you can just close your eyes and get your threshold down a couple notches by just breathing. The more we can do that, the more we can remind the nervous system, the more we can do these little tiny changes. Breathing, breath work, closing our eyes, visualization, even doing certain forms of exercise that are very attuned to the moment, any of these types of things, we're lowering our threshold so we have a little bit more wiggle room to navigate our life while we're healing from mold illness. So be gentle with yourself. Hopefully get your. Any sort of partner or friend or anybody that's supporting you really to into a conversation like this where they can actually understand that why this is happening and that it's not you going crazy, that there's really something that is driving this on a very physical level. And oftentimes when people understand this, they can also cut you some more slack and some more compassion, which is also a useful thing as well. I'm Dr. Diane. See you next time.