This page used to be home to one of the most popular posts on my wellness blog. I recently decided to revamp it. Here’s why:
I was excited about the medical medium way for a really long time.
It was uplifting, to be offered a potential way to heal myself that didn’t involve masking my symptoms with pills.
My experience with “modern medicine” over the years has been all about being dished out pills that don’t work, with zero discussions as to WHY I suffered from such extreme anxiety and depression.
I got tired of being told I had a chemical imbalance they didn’t know the source of, with little to no research being done on who I was beyond a 10-minute appointment.
When the medical medium wave hit social media I really connected with it.
Particularly the bits about some mood disorders being the result of mineral deficiencies or toxin overloads, which could be addressed by eating certain plant-based foods.
I learned a lot through the medical medium.
I learned the importance of plant-based eating and how toxins in the food we eat can affect our health. And how some things we believe are healthy could be contributing to our ailments (natural flavourings – whoosh! That surprised me!)
I ate the way the medical medium suggested; I took all the supplements I could get my hands on.
I rode the wave for a long time and invested a lot of time and money, purchasing and pouring through his books, going broke buying supplements he recommended and preaching the benefits of his suggested way of eating.
I wanted so badly for Anthony’s message to be the answer – to be THE way to heal myself from depression and anxiety.
Until the day I realized it wasn’t.
In early 2019 I faced the truth: I was still struggling, a lot. Around that same time, I became hyper-aware of the medical medium’s marketing tactics:
- Heavy focus on suggesting supplements for sale on Amazon via affiliate links;
- Sending emails promoting products he claims directly in the copy to have zero stake in, yet linking to said products via obvious affiliate links;
- Zero accessibility – neither he or his team can be contacted. It’s like a brick wall of inaccessibility.
Something didn’t feel right.
An undeniable feeling within me came to the surface and it told me that this man’s intentions needed to be questioned.
Combine my intuition with the fact that I didn’t experience any degree of long-term healing via his food and supplement suggestions, and I had to pull the plug on endorsing him as THE WAY to heal from anxiety and depression.
I associate the changes I did experience with the focus on plant-based eating.
The medical medium endorses plant-based eating via a crafted and marketed message.
But Anthony Williams didn’t invent plant-based eating.
Studies have proven that plant-based eating can transform your health – it’s nothing new.
That’s not to say his message hasn’t helped people. I know it has. But it fails to highlight key factors outside the realm of food and supplementation which impact mental and physical health in powerful ways.
The medical medium sticks very close to covering topics he can never run out of things to write books about: foods and supplements.
But food and supplements aren’t the sole contributors to your health issues so…?
In following the medical medium way of eating I often felt confused and even a bit ashamed. I wondered what was wrong with me if this all-knowing spiritual healer who Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert De Niro say is the real deal couldn’t give me the answers to why I struggled so badly with my mental health.
Sick of feeling sick and ashamed, I decided to push his books aside for a while.
Through some synchronistic events, I ended up being introduced to an intuitive. I felt drawn to book a reading with her immediately, so I did. And when we chatted she was quick to share the source of my mental health issues:
Unaddressed trauma.
She was able to articulate that while plant-based eating was important and necessary for the longevity of health, so was acknowledging the thinly veiled unaddressed trauma causing the depression and anxiety I was suffering from: emotional and physical abuse from childhood.
The intuitive also shared that I had a HUGE buildup of candida and parasites that I needed to cleanse, like yesterday.
My body hadn’t been getting the nutrients it needed because the parasites and candida were eating up a lot of what I was consuming.
Parasites and candida also feed off dairy, meat and energy from trauma, hence the need to go plant-based full-time.
Parasites being fed by energy from trauma?? Whaaaatttt??
Think of the stress response process in the body, and what it pumps out when we keep trying to push down how we feel about the past. That’s a lot of fuel – a lot of dispelled energy. Something’s benefiting from it, but not us.
Having parasites and candida overgrowth impacts everything – neurotransmitter development, brain function, digestion.
It’s really important to cleanse not only the physical self but the emotional self too – whatever is feeding those suckers needs to get dealt with. More on that below. Just need to finish this bit:
The medium I worked with suggested cleanses I could order on my own immediately. No affiliate links were involved. She just shared the name of a website that sells products that have helped her and her clients.
⚡️ link to where I got these cleanses at the end of this post ⚡️
She also offered strategies for processing the trauma residing in my body, which has been helping me heal and feel less burdened by anxiety and depression (I share some of these below).
Now – I would like to openly acknowledge that this is my journey. What I have found to be the answer might not be the answer for you. But I will say that anytime someone is recommending products they make money off, without acknowledging that they are making money off them, you MUST question their intentions.
Misleading marketing copy is a red flag and a powerful insight into someone’s intentions.
Also: if something isn’t working for you, look elsewhere.
Yes, Anthony William has a gift. I’m not denying that. But something doesn’t feel pure about how he’s choosing to use it.
I’m not saying don’t investigate what he is sharing. Just be wary of his messaging, and know that there is more to healing than food and supplements alone.
I’m going to share a few things that have worked for me.
(Note = this has been recently added and probably needs editing but I just can’t right now so yeah…)
I’m not the only one who is frustrated with this whole medical medium thing or the “modern” medical system, with all its dysfunction and illogical “treat the symptoms” practices (I like air quotes today – it suits my mood). I get a lot of emails asking me what I did to heal/what has worked for me.
I usually reply in way more of a woo way than I’d like and I think I freak people out a bit. But the truth is, I am super woo – I’m out of the woo closet now – so if you’re asking me Qs about what helped me heal it’s not going to be a simple or conventional reply.
For me, healing from invasive anxiety and debilitating depression has been about acceptance.
If that’s annoying to hear, I get it. Just hear me out.
I spent 20+ years trying to deny my mental health experiences.
My caregivers and society taught me that it was wrong to feel the way I did, even though my feelings were in response to being a child who felt unsafe within the context of the family environment (and a lot of other ones).
When I say acceptance I’m not talking about believing there’s no hope. I’m talking about choosing to believe that there is a reason these feelings exist, and then following up with the question, “What are these feelings trying to tell me?”
Mine told me a lot of things. “Hey, you’re not a piece of shit, someone else just taught you to believe that;” “Hey, you deserve to be loved, someone just convinced you that you don’t;” & the piece de resistance: “Hey, you were abused and manipulated, and you’re trying to pretend like your feelings about those experiences have no right to exist – like they don’t exist.”
I ask a lot of questions about my feelings.
Why do I suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, feel out of my skin anxious? The more I wonder why instead of trying to squash how I feel, the more I realize these symptoms have a purpose, that they have something to say, and that they came from somewhere – from something or someone.
Questioning has led to some hard truths. I mean, I can say I’m anxious for no reason, but I can also choose to connect the dots: I just spent an hour in the company of a manipulative narcissist. I wonder if that had anything to do with these intense feelings? Maybe I should stop allowing that person into my life, even though I’m not quite sure how to do that at the moment?
That’s not saying we don’t get anxious for unknown reasons. But I look beyond the obvious when it comes to responding to unknown anxiety or depression. Energy transference and my capacity to absorb other people’s feelings is a legitimate source of surprise anxiety.
Did I walk past someone who has some dark shit going on in their head and tap into it? Is someone in my life unknowingly sucking the energy out of me?
Or, does this anxiety come from the effects of conditioned shame, ie someone else taught me to be ashamed of who I inherently am because someone taught THEM to feel ashamed of who they are?
This energy/shame transference happens a lot. We take on other people’s beliefs or energy and try to live by them and within them, then we wonder why we feel anxious or depressed.
If we attempt to avoid the work of detaching from destructive belief systems, we will experience mental health disturbances.
Those energies disrupt the body’s natural flow, and the body will do what it needs to do to tell you that.
We are connection-centric beings who unconsciously absorb other people’s shit. Believe it.
We are also diverse in our nutritional and emotional needs, and the amount of inner healing and re-parenting we need to do (check out the holistic psychologist on Instagram).
We all have diverse needs in relation to the boundaries we have to set, too.
If we come from families that had none, or family structures that are steered by abuse of power, this will be harder to do (I don’t feel like anything can be structured when an abuser is running the show – just fragmented.)
Suffice to say that all of these variables are going to affect your health.
The seeking of inner balance – it’s a freaking journey. How do we figure out what to do? Trial and error. Self-compassion. Restructuring our foundations so our efforts aren’t being siphoned from by destructive energies like narcissism or manipulation. Dedicating time in our lives to activities we love in some capacity, ie allowing ourselves to feel joy. Proving to ourselves that we deserve to feel it. And consistently questioning how our experiences resonate within us – how they affect the health of our bodies and minds.
I’m also being strong-armed to mention the need to ask the question, “Did this feeling come from something within me – an unhealed trauma perhaps?“
Moving along to the area of self-compassion, I find I need to ask myself quite often if I’m anxious because I need to eat. Or if I ate a trigger food.
For me that’s dairy. I can’t eat animal products for reasons I won’t get into here cause it’s kinda wild. But If I eat any of it I get anxious AF.
I also feel the need to call out a conditioned fear of mine which affects my mental health: a fear of sugar in any form.
I’m always trying to find the balance when it comes to eating fruit because conditioning tells me that all sugar is bad and I’ll get fat if I eat too much (thanks for that, low carb diets from the 90s. You all suck.)
Truth: there are some chunks of time when I need more sugar-from-fruit than others. Case in point, did you just do an audition? OK, cool. Eat some dates ’cause that took a lot of adrenaline to pull off and you need to replenish your body.
Through all of this, I’ve learned that the more you listen to and respect the messages your body is trying to share with you, the more it assists in opening up your awareness of what it wants you to feed it.
If I want chips I need more sodium in my body. But like the good stuff – Himalayan salt – not table salt. And if I want cake my body wants sugar, from fruit.
If I’m tired I probably need to sit down for a bit, or eat an apple, not drink caffeine. And if I want pizza and cake and lasagna and garlic bread I am feeling hella vulnerable and need to nurture myself ’cause I’m dealing with some emotional turbulence (which is a normal and necessary part of being human, and not something we need to try to repress or stamp out.)
I will reiterate that symptoms exist for a reason. And I’m going to add some sauce to that and share that it is imperative that we de-condition ourselves from the belief that our depression and anxiety experiences are random.
We are here to learn. For some of us, our lessons revolve around health and healing. And the acceptance of what might be causing extreme mental health symptoms.
Do I want to believe that being molested as a little girl was the reason why I lived in a state of perpetual fear for 20 years? No. But is it possible? Yes.
It feels awful to accept that this happened. But in choosing to, I’ve been able to heal to the point that I don’t have a perpetually distressed digestive system, insomnia, or night terrors. I mean, I can sleep through the night now. Do you know how long it’s been since I was able to do that? A long freakin’ time!
After all of that babbling, here are my suggestions for healing from anxiety and depression:
- Eat plant-based. Gluten-free as much as possible.
- Learn how to be with your feelings and get curious about the source of them. Question what they are trying to tell you about your inner and outer environment. Try automatic writing. There are no wrong answers or insights.
- Start acknowledging the inner nudges – your intuition. It has a lot to say and is on your team. We are taught from a young age that our instincts are silly and shouldn’t be trusted and are now being called to do the work of learning how to honour and respect the wisdom within us.
- Be willing to do the work. I know what it’s like to convince yourself you need someone else to fix you. Getting guidance from others is a powerful part of healing, but the real change happens when you put their suggestions to work. When you start asking questions about the source of your beliefs and consider how the energetic blueprint of those beliefs affect your body. Our bodies speak to us every day. Learn to get curious about the messages they are parlaying through your feelings.
- Meditate. If you say you don’t like to meditate or can’t, you need to meditate. If you want to heal you’re going to have to do some stuff that’s not in your comfort zone. And if you suffer from extreme anxiety you need to give your nervous system a break from running high on adrenaline all the time. Meditation can help you do this.
- You don’t need to be a Tibetan monk about meditation. Dial your expectations of how it needs to look and feel waaayyy back, and just sit down at least once a day by yourself and breathe. Try listening to some binaural beats or research some breathing techniques for calming the nervous system. When you meditate those results resonate throughout the day. It makes life more doable. Your nervous system is less jacked up.
- Investigate hidden and not so hidden events from your past which may be affecting your physical and emotional health. Write a letter to yourself as a young kid. How did you feel back then? Let your inner child speak. It is the keeper of all wisdom.
- Read books about Internal Family Systems & The Body Keeps The Score. If you want more suggestions contact me.
- Cleanse the body of parasites and candida. I can’t recommend this enough. Link to some amazing cleanses at the bottom.
- Work with a medical intuitive, if possible. Feel free to contact me if you want to know who I worked with.
A note to the people who reach out with more intense symptoms after integrating the medical medium’s suggestions or plant-based foods:
SLOW DOWN THE DETOXING
It’s shocking the shit out of your body, and your body is telling you that via your increased skin issues and anxiety.
Your body is used to running the way it’s been running. It needs some time to adjust to this new way of eating. So ease up on the detoxing for a bit. Or else do what I do and remember that with every symptom that comes up, something is shifting and healing. ‘Cause it is.
Thank you for reading this. Nothing is coincidental in life. N O T H I N G. 🌀 You’re here for a reason. If you have Qs, reach out. I’d love to hear from you. I might even send you a reply with TMI (I will.)
Much love to you on your journey.
xo
PS: The cleanses I used were happy colon and happy gut from Alkaline Herb Shop. They are really gentle (at least that was my experience). I took them both at the same time, but I started by taking one for a couple of days to see how I felt, then added the second (make sure you do this!)
I also used (and continue to use) sea moss & bladderwrack to support my adrenals and thyroid, organs that go through the wringer when there’s chronic anxiety in the body.
FYI: I don’t make money off the link to Alkaline Herb Shop. I just believe in the product.