When I first started reading what the medical medium had to say, I was really excited. And I’m still kind of enamored by it all.
He was and is offering information that no one has ever shared with me.
What’s more, what he has to say makes sense.
It has been incredibly uplifting throughout my struggles with anxiety and depression, to be offered information that validates my experiences and empowers me.
I’ve never received any form of validation from a doctors office. And I’ve never left there feeling empowered.
All the medical system ever seemed to offer me was: “We don’t know why you’re experiencing this – here are some pills.”
I’ve gotten really tired of “treat the symptom” medicine. Relying on the modern medical system over the years to help me get a handle on my mental health has made me incredibly unhealthy.
Every time I was given a prescription, I was being told that there was no hope – that covering up the symptoms was the only option.
That kind of belief harms your spirit.
It convinces you that you’re inherently flawed for not being able to live in a severely dysfunctional world with a big smile on your face.
Suffice to say, 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.
So I did a lot of research outside of the doctor’s office, and learned something profound:
Feelings have something to tell us. They exist for a reason and it is incredibly harmful to try to stamp them out. (I share more about this later in the post).
When the medical medium wave hit social media I really connected with it.
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 – that was really profound to me.
I learned a lot through the medical medium.
Read one of his books and you’ll quickly learn that he has a lot to say, and a lot of it is quite revolutionary. It always surprises me when I find information that acknowledges my symptoms.
Through the medical medium I learned the importance of plant-based eating and how toxins in the food we eat can affect our health.
I ate the way the medical medium suggested; I took all the supplements I could get my hands on. I was ALL IN.
I rode the wave for a long time and invested a lot of time and money, purchasing and pouring through his books, buying supplements he recommended and preaching the benefits of his suggested way of eating.
Why? Because I was desperate for Anthony’s insights to be THE way to heal myself of depression and anxiety.
Until the day I realized it wasn’t.
In early 2019 I courageously faced the truth of my experience: I was still struggling with intense anxiety, along with some other super fun symptoms.
I realized I needed to take off my rose colored glasses I had been wearing about the medical medium way being all I would need to heal myself.
Yes, the medical medium’s suggestions made a difference in my life. Yes, his insights are incredibly innovative, and they validated my experiences.
But I was still in rough shape and couldn’t continue to solely rely on his suggestions when it came to healing from depression and anxiety.
It was around that time that I started to take note of his messaging and 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.
– Heavy focus on food and supplements, with much less emphasis on emotional healing requirements.
The “OMG – the medical medium is the shit!” bubble started to deflate for me, big time.
I mean – yes, he’s a powerful medical intuitive. But he’s also a dude really motivated to make money.
Straight up: I have zero qualms about wanting to make money. Money is freedom. But when someone offers misleading marketing copy? That’s a HUGE red flag!
Transparency is really important. It SAYS something about your willingness to be honest with the people you are marketing your product to.
Most of the people seeking his insights are really struggling and desperate to get better. Not being clear about his intentions does not honor them.
So I started to feel like I was being manipulated, in order to serve his agenda of making a lot of cash off the information he was selling us all.
But at the same time, I felt like what he shared was helpful. So I felt conflicted.
I wondered, Is it possible that someone can offer you information that helps you while also taking advantage of your vulnerability?
As I’ve learned over the years on many occasions, hell yes it is!
Wherever there exists a desire to make money there exists a capacity to manipulate. Especially when a human being is involved.
I value the information Anthony Williams shares, while also seeing his capacity to capitalize on people who are vulnerable and desperate to be healed.
Adding to that: He’s putting ALL the focus on things he can’t seem to run out of things to write books about: foods and supplements.
He’s not giving other powerful aspects of healing their due emphasis, like processing trauma.
Anthony Williams is a powerful intuitive AND a human being with an agenda.
It’s important to question the intentions of people in positions of power.
That’s what I began to do when I didn’t experience any degree of long-term healing via his food and supplement suggestions.
Straight up: plant based eating will do miraculous things for your health. Fruits and vegetables CAN heal you.
Studies have proven that plant-based eating can transform your health. And Anthony’s books offer a lot of details into how they can heal you, which is great.
But what happens when you’re munching on dates and apples and popping supplements like a boss, yet denying the existence of trauma? YOU DON’T HEAL.
After stepping away from the medical medium eating and supplementation suggestions for a while, I started to unpack some of the stuff that had happened to me earlier in life (You know, the stuff we push down and deny out of shame, guilt, & fear).
I realized how powerful the memories of my past experiences were. They were so alive within me, like they happened yesterday.
I was still living from the space of abuse and trauma.
I was afraid to look at what had happened, and feel the disappointment, which created an incessant loop of emotional turmoil.
I was so jacked up about trying to deny the strong feelings of anxiety and depression – what society and my caregiver taught me to do. Yet every time I tried to stamp them out, the little kid inside of me who was still reeling from abuse felt even more abandoned, and my feelings just came on even stronger.
Meanwhile, I still ate really well, which made my emotional experience better than it had been when I used drugs and booze to numb myself.
But regardless of how many apple slices and detox smoothies I consumed, I was still suffering from trauma.
For me, healing from invasive anxiety and debilitating depression has been about acceptance of my emotional experiences.
I spent 20+ years trying to deny my inner experience.
I tried over and over again to snuff out how I felt, through both legal means (pharmaceuticals, pot – yep it’s legal in BC, and excessive supplementation) and frowned upon ways (alcohol, drugs, denial, shopping, judging other people, acting aggressively towards myself and others.)
My caregivers taught me, and society affirmed, that it was wrong to feel the way I felt, even though my feelings were trying to tell me something.
My feelings of anxiousness were related to my inner child saying, This home you are being raised in is toxic, unhealthy and unsafe. Get me out of here!
My feelings of depression were related my inner child saying, I give up – there is no one here who is willing or able to help me make the changes that need to be made. So I’m shutting down in order to survive.
My seemingly out of nowhere anxiousness was telling me, “Yo – stop hanging out with that person. They don’t have good intentions and you know it!”
I am a deeply empathic and intuitive human, capable of picking up on every single energy in the room. As a child, if someone in my family was angry, I felt it.
If someone was depressed, I felt it. If someone wanted to harm me, or didn’t like me, or didn’t believe I deserved to be happy, I felt it long before the words or actions confirmed it.
I still feel all these things, which greatly influences my emotional experience.
As a kid I was also repeatedly abandoned by the people society taught me were meant to protect me. They didn’t know how to relate to me so they taught me I was wrong for feeling the way I did.
I was told I was too sensitive. I was taught to believe there was something wrong with me because how I felt didn’t suit the familial agenda.
Because I knew something was wrong with what was going on in the family, I was taught that I was bad.
Being given a prescription for anti-depressants affirmed my learned belief that I was bad, wrong, and inherently flawed.
The prescription* taught me something toxic about my capacity to empathize and pick up subtle energy systems: how I felt was wrong, and the pills were my only option to survive in life.
(*I’m not saying don’t take pharmaceuticals. I’m saying investigate what you are trying to cover up by taking them.)
On top of having a heightened capacity to empathize, and being a strong Aries woman in a patriarchal world and home environment, I had to deal with physical and emotional abuse.
Anxiety came from always being on high alert, feeling like I had to constantly protect myself from the people who were supposed to protect me.
Depression came when my brain and body couldn’t take the trauma of being in that environment anymore – the toll it took on my body – and forced a shut down of my emotions.
As hard as the depression was, it helped me survive the emotional experience of living within an extremely toxic family dynamic.
I was a kid trying to process the emotional experiences my parents refused to accept or process themselves. I was stuck in an environment that was zapping my life force energy.
That experience expressed itself through severe depression and anxiety.
I’ve had to learn to accept that traumatic experiences occurred instead of trying to deny them.
Allowing myself to feel the disappointment of not being supported or protected has been a powerful step in my healing journey.
As I’ve courageously allowed myself to acknowledge and validate my past experiences, I’ve healed immensely.
My health has improved. Anxiety doesn’t destruct me anymore, or stop me from saying yes to opportunities. Depression occurs far less frequently.
When I do experience depression it’s often a result of not looking after myself: My body and brain need a day off from being hyper productive.
So I give them what they want and enjoy a little Netflix, some yoga and an amazing meal.
Choosing to believe that there is a reason my feelings exist – that they have something to tell me – is what opened the door to me being able to heal myself.
Yes I believe that what we eat makes an impact. Everything in our body – including neurotransmitters involved in brain function – is made from what we eat.
But the beliefs you hold and the feelings that eat at you deserve just as much attention and examination as food.
Examining my feelings and beliefs taught me a lot of things, namely:
Hey – you’re not a piece of shit – a loser – 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. And because of that, you’re living in that space still, when you were abused. Every day you wake up, you’re giving your life force energy to those memories. FACE THEM AND HEAL.
We need to allow ourselves to feel the disappointment of our traumatic life experiences.
If we don’t acknowledge our feelings, they manifest into physical experiences, like illness and disease.
I ask a lot of questions about my feelings these days. The most asked?
Why do I suddenly, out of nowhere, feel out of my skin anxious?
The more I wonder instead of trying to squash how I feel, the more I realize these symptoms have a purpose, that they have something to say, and they came from somewhere (Fun fact, not always from me.)
Questioning has led to some difficult truths.
For example, I can say I’m anxious for no reason, but I can also choose to do some inner work, and connect the dots:
I just spent an hour in the company of someone who is very manipulative. I wonder if that had anything to do with these intense feelings? Maybe I should stop allowing that person into my life, even though it would be uncomfortable to set that boundary…eek.
The more I work and train as an intuitive, the more deeply I understand the need to look beyond the obvious when trying to find the source of anxiety and depression.
Energy transference and heightened empathy 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? Am I allowing someone in my life to suck the energy out of me? Does someone in my life NOT want the best for me, and need to go?
What cannot be seen by the human eye has an impact on how we feel.
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?
Shame transference happens a lot. We take on other people’s beliefs or energy and then we wonder why we feel anxious or depressed.
Think of all the expectations you try to live up to that are impossible.
Those aren’t inherent beliefs, they are learned from a society that capitalizes on you not knowing about this kind of stuff.
If we avoid the work of detaching from destructive belief systems, we WILL experience mental health disturbances.
We are connection-centric beings who unconsciously absorb other people’s energies. Believe it.
Those energies disrupt the body’s natural flow, and the body will do what it needs to do to tell you of the disruption.
We are also diverse in our nutritional and emotional needs, and the amount of inner healing and re-parenting we need to do.
Some of us can pack back a ton of supplements and they work great; some of us can’t.
Some of us can eat cheese and gluten; some of us experience strong physical and emotional responses to these foods.
We all have diverse needs in relation to the energetic and emotional boundaries we have to set, too.
If we come from families that had none, or family structures that are steered by abuse of power, boundaries will be harder to set (There is no structure when an abuser is running the show – just fragmentation.)
And if we are inherently empathic to the max or intuitive, we will need to learn how to work with our capacity to connect with others, reigning it in when necessary in order to protect our health and vitality.
Suffice to say that all of these variables are going to affect your health.
The seeking of inner balance – of holistic wellness – is a freaking journey. How do we figure out what to do?
Trial and error. Self-compassion. Restructuring our inner and outer foundations to ensure that WE are supporting our capacity to heal, and that the people in our lives are in support of our healing, too (If someone doesn’t want the best for you, it’s very important that they have limited to no access to you.)
Dedicating time to activities we love, allowing ourselves to feel joy, is part of healing.
Proving to ourselves that we deserve to feel joy by doing things we love to do is healing. As is proving that we can be there for ourselves.
WE MUST PROVE TO OURSELVES THAT WE CAN TRUST OURSELVES.
We cannot create inner trust if we stay in toxic relationships, allow ourselves to be victims, or enable abusive behaviors.
It’s our job to say no to people who are abusive. If we don’t, we enable them, giving them the A OK to try to abuse others.
See how these powerful and courageous acts of self advocacy resonate?
Consistently questioning how our experiences resonate within us, how they affect the health of our bodies and minds, is key.
Even putting in all that work, you may still feel varying degrees of anxiety throughout your life. And depression. They may go away and come back.
This is part of what it is to be human. The challenge is to stay with your feelings, to commit to being open to understanding what they are trying to tell you.
To not try to stamp it out, to not believe that it means you’re flawed or fucked up: That is where your power lies.
Symptoms exist for a reason. It is imperative that we de-condition ourselves from believing our inner experiences are random.
All that said, here are my suggestions for healing from depression and anxiety:
- Eat plant-based. Pay attention to how your body and mind feels after eating certain foods.
- Learn how to be with your feelings. Get curious about the source of them. Question what they are trying to tell you about your inner and outer environment. Try automatic writing. Ask some questions of your higher self. There are no wrong answers or bad insights. It’s all information that can be useful to you.
- Acknowledge the inner nudges you receive. Your intuition has a lot to say and is on your team. It speaks subtly. Ie, it’s not loud and is more like a whisper. It won’t come at you with ferocity all the time. That’s only in times of danger or when it really wants a message delivered to you. It’s normally quite subtle but you will be rewarded if you listen to what it has to say. You were just taught from a young age that it shouldn’t be trusted. Commit to unlearning that toxic belief. You are now being called to do the work of learning how to honor and respect the wisdom within you.
- Be willing to do the work. Getting guidance from others is a powerful part of healing, but the change happens when you put the healing suggestions to work in your life. This about doing the work and realizing no one else can do it for you.
- Question the belief that you need someone else to fix you. This way of thinking has created the “treat the symptom” medical system. You can’t outsource your healing. You have to be willing to do the work.
- Learn how to calm your nervous system through meditation. 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. You need to learn how to assist your body and mind, by giving your nervous system a break from running high on adrenaline all the time from anxiety. 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 on Spotify or research some breathing techniques for calming the nervous system (This post offers some suggestions). When you meditate those results resonate through your nervous system throughout the day. It makes life more doable. Your nervous system is less jacked up.
- Investigate events from your past which may be affecting your physical and emotional health. Write a letter to yourself as a young kid. Did anything happen that you don’t like to think about? How did the child within you feel back then? Honour your child self by letting them speak to you and listen to what they have to say.
- 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. Something to consider. Link to some amazing cleanses at the bottom.
- Remember that emotional healing is not a one-off act. Strong feelings can and will return to be processed at a higher level of consciousness.
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 your body which is telling you via 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. 💗
***
You’re here for a reason. Nothing is coincidental in life. N O T H I N G. 🌀
If you have Qs, reach out. 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.