How I can help you

It is the not too distant past, and I am unable to walk and even stand. As soon as I try, my entire body begin to shake, my limbs become weak, I am overcome with dizziness, nausea and an incredibly strong headache that makes any type of thinking useless. I feel that i am about to pass out so I lay down again. Once I am in bed, the symptoms are better, but not gone. For months, I am barely able to move and to function 'normally' as a human being and I question every day whether I will ever be able to do so again.

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How did this happen?

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• Seven months earlier, I quit my well-paid stable consulting job to launch my new company.

• Six months earlier, my father, who lives in France, becomes paralysed due to a metastasized cancer in his body. I leave Berlin temporarily to take care of him while putting my mother in a specialised home due to her dementia.

• Three months earlier, my father dies.

• One month earlier, my mother dies.  I am now experiencing very high levels of stress and anxiety with strong symptoms in my body.

• Finally, three days earlier, my partner leaves me after eight years together, due to the high stress and pressure of living with someone with a highly disregulated nervous system.

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But my story actually already began several years earlier with my first burnout. I ran a small digital agency in Berlin and we experienced financial problems that led me to feel high levels of stress. I also had problems at home (previous relationship). A bacterial infection triggered an immune reaction, which led to all kinds of issues, which my already over-stressed mind and body could not cope with. I began to experience chronic fatigue and pain, my blood sugar was all over the place and I simply could not function normally for several months. After visiting twenty different doctors and finding almost no answers (except for one diagnosis of Fibromyalgia), I went on with my life and learned to 'live' with all kinds of symptoms. I continued almost as I did before, thinking this was the new normal. I learned a bit, but not enough. I did not change my ways enough. More importantly, I did not change my beliefs and mental patterns enough. I did not learn to listen to my body with trust and love. I tried to solve my problems cognitively, which means that I did not solve them at all.

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The events that happened to me more recently would destabilize most people. But perhaps not to the point that it did me. Such a strong somatic reaction happened because my nervous system was already unstable. I never took care of myself well enough to reset my nervous system to an acceptable level. I just applied 'band-aids' and assumed (and hoped) that I had done enough.

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If I go back far enough in time, I can see clearly now that my inability to deal with stress goes back to my childhood, even to my birth. How I wish now that someone would have taught me how to deal with my stress better and how to regulate my nervous system earlier.

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Each one of us is different. We all have different ways of reacting to the same triggers. But it is not wise to overestimate our ability to deal with stress. Or to minimise the potential impact of a disregulated nervous system on our well-being. Stress can be beneficial, but not in the way many people experience it today, in a society where we feel the need to constantly 'be on' and to 'toughen it up'.

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Today, I am much better. I work, I travel, and I am fairly active. I found a way out through different tools and techniques. I have built new pathways in my brain and broken some of my old patterns. If you see me, you will see a normal, healthy looking person. But I would be lying if I said that I am 'normal' (what is normal anyway?). All these years of stress have left their marks.

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I want to use my experience (the good and the bad) to help you. 

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So that you do not have to go through what I went through.