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1: Didn't See It Coming
196 Plays3 years ago
Nobody plans for a crisis of faith, a mental health struggle or a stress-induced breakdown. That’s why we often ignore the important SOS signals that our bodies send to warn us of impending disaster. In this first episode of the Seeking The Still podcast, Laura Fleetwood shares the experiences and warning signs that ultimately led to her life spiraling out of control.
If you are beginning to experience physical or mental anxiety and stress-related symptoms or you are a loved one of someone who does, this episode just may change the trajectory of your life.
Seeking The Still Website: Seekingthestill.comSeeking The Still Instagram: Instagram.com/seekingthestillSeeking The Still Facebook: Facebook.com/seekthestill
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Transcript
Introduction to Seeking the Still
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Seeking the Still is produced by Jill Devine Media. Season one is brought to you by Altered Ministries. Jane Patton and her team are transforming the lives of women and children all over the world, including orphanages, recovery homes, and more. Learn how you can support them and be part of these life changing ministries at AlteredMinistries.com. Welcome to the Seeking the Still podcast with me, your host, Laura Fleetwood.
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In this safe space, we come together to seek the still amid chaotic lives. To get honest about what overwhelms us, to become connected to one another and to the divine, to step into who we were created to be. Always real, never perfect, and forever on your side.
Laura's Battle with Anxiety
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I don't know how to prepare to tell the story of the darkest time of my life.
00:01:03
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There's no guide for this. There's no manual. So I have taken a few days away from my life to sit in an A-frame cottage in the middle of the woods to gather all of my journals from the past six years and books that have spoken to me and different collections of items that have brought me comfort. And I'm here to tell my story.
00:01:31
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I'm here to tell it because I know there are those of you who are going through similar journeys of breakdowns of anxiety, of mental health diagnoses, and you feel like you're the only one.
00:01:47
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I'm telling my story because I know there are those of you who are loved ones of people who struggle with anxiety and you have no idea how they feel. You find it impossible to try to put yourself in their state of mind and to empathize with what they're dealing with. So this story.
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is for all of you. This story is true. It is raw. It is hard at times. And it is beautiful at times.
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Right now it's been over six years since the start of this journey.
The Illusion of Perfection
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So I'm telling it from a place of great healing and great perspective in many ways. And I've got to admit it's been hard to let myself go back. Last night and this morning I was reading through my journals and going over my notes from therapy and
00:02:46
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reading blog posts and all of the ways that I shared during the times of struggle and I started to get weepy but not for the reason you might think it wasn't sadness it wasn't even the pain that I was reliving it was a sense of awe and
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at how God has stepped with me every bit of this way and even in the darkest moments made a way out. So as I share you guys listen through a lens of hope
00:03:27
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I pray that this story would not create triggers for you if you are someone who struggles with anxiety, but rather just give you a sense of companionship that what you have gone through, others have gone through and have made it out the other side.
00:03:47
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So no going in that while I still struggle, I have experienced so much healing. And as I share my story, I'll be sharing what I've learned along the way and really praying that it will be a blessing to you as you listen.
00:04:05
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So the year was 2014. I was 37 years old. And for all intents and purposes, it looked like I had the picture perfect life. Married to a handsome man, two beautiful daughters, a great job working at a church of all places. My career path had crisscrossed from the corporate world where I enjoyed
00:04:30
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a decade of traveling the world and working for amazing corporations and working my way up the ladder. And then when I had my girls, I knew I couldn't travel as much and I wanted something more flexible and got open doors for me to work at my church and also to do some college teaching and speaking. So I had lots of great experiences. My family is amazing.
00:04:57
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Um, somewhat of an idyllic childhood, although as I would soon find out, uh, there were things that happened that I hadn't dealt with. But for all intents and purposes, if you looked at my life in 2014, you would have thought that I had it all together and everything possible going for me, all the blessings that so many people hope and pray for. I had.
00:05:25
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at my fingertips, I was living it out. And yet, I had been living a lie in many ways because nobody's life is perfect. Nobody has everything they want or need at their fingertips. And it was,
00:05:48
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only by the grace of going through this journey that I was able to learn what truly mattered, to learn lessons of how the things I was clinging to weren't really the things that mattered at all. And it all started back in, actually in 2010 was the first time I had an anxiety attack.
The First Anxiety Attack and Its Consequences
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I did not know it was an anxiety attack.
00:06:17
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But it was a crazy busy day. My daughters had dance recitals. And if you have daughters who are in dance, you know that recital day is very stressful, especially when your daughters are ages, I think they were two and four or three and five, something like that.
00:06:39
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So there's the rehearsals and there's the costumes and all of the things that go along with it. So it was a busy day, a stressful day. And after the recital, my sisters and I were going to leave to drive to a funeral of my uncle who died in a horrific farm accident.
00:07:00
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And in my naivety, I thought that that was perfectly fine to have a stressful day, to go to my daughter's dance recital in the evening and to leave late at night at 8 p.m. and drive overnight to Nebraska a good five or six hours away. So we're all in the car driving, driving, driving. And I got so fatigued and tired
00:07:27
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that I couldn't drive anymore. And so we thought, okay, we will stop at a hotel on the side of the highway and we'll just get up super early in the morning and drive the rest of the way. Well, that evening was the first time that I experienced severe insomnia. And when I experienced insomnia, I also experienced anxiety.
00:07:51
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I was nauseous. I couldn't sleep. The more I tried to sleep, the more nauseous I became fretting about how I was gonna get up and drive to this funeral and all of the stress around this accident and knowing how my family was feeling and how my mother was feeling. It was intense and yet I didn't know what was happening. I just thought I was having a hard time sleeping. So anyway, my sisters got up in the morning and I said, I'm so sick, I didn't sleep.
00:08:20
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I'm going to have to stay here at the hotel and you guys are going to have to go without me. Complete failure is what I felt like. And eventually had to call my husband to come get me and pick me up and take me home. So that is my first serious experience with an anxiety attack. And it came surrounding insomnia, which would later play a big role in my breakdown
00:08:50
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A few years later, I was in the middle of a new business venture called Spark Workshops with a friend and again started experiencing insomnia. When my insomnia would hit,
00:09:06
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It was horrific. It was not just insomnia, but I now know it was panic attacks because I couldn't sleep and I would be up all night throwing up because I couldn't sleep and it was a really stressful time.
00:09:22
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And finally, I realized that I needed to get some kind of answer for why I couldn't sleep. So I scheduled an appointment with my primary care physician. And I remember sitting in her office explaining that I couldn't sleep. And she looked at me after asking me all the standard questions and she said, you know what this is? This is anxiety. And I laughed.
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because I didn't have anxiety. Did she know all of the things that I was doing in my life, all of the accomplishments that I had made in my life?
00:09:58
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I did not struggle with anxiety. So I kind of dismissed it. She prescribed me a light medication that was essentially an antihistamine, but could also help with sleep. And I started taking it. It didn't really work. But after the workshops that we had, you know, I started being able to sleep again and things were fine.
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until I traveled to a third world country on a mission trip. I went to Uganda with my church and once again was unable to sleep and was wretchedly sick and nauseous the first night that we were there. And the crazy thing is you guys like I just thought
00:10:40
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This was a problem with sleeping. I thought I had some kind of sleep disorder. I had not yet connected the threads that all of this was due to stress and anxiety. And that was the reason I couldn't sleep. So I kept on keeping on and I would take medication from time to time when I couldn't sleep.
00:11:04
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But for the most part, just kind of shrugged it off. And around this time, I started doing the Whole30 diet and started feeling so great. Just so much energy. They call it tiger blood when you're on the Whole30. And life was fine and dandy. Like for the first time in a long time after having kids, I felt great. I was looking great. I had so much energy. Things were clicking along.
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and I remember driving the kids home from school one day and this song came on the radio called Make Me Broken.
00:11:41
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It was a sunshiny day and I was feeling great with my tiger blood and had all these ideas running through my head. And I remember thinking, gosh, make me broken. Like, Lord, is there something in my life that I'm going to go through so that I have a testimony someday? Like I couldn't really think of a time in my life when I had been broken. And that was all about to change.
00:12:08
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My story has been marked by special places all over the country that have inspired me and fostered the creativity that I needed to step into my purpose. And one of those places is the Phasaurus Chapter House in Jackson, Michigan.
00:12:24
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It's founded by Dr. David McDonald and he took this old Victorian home and he restored it and recreated it into the headquarters for Christian ministerial innovation. Dr. McDonald is one of the most fervent supporters of women in ministry that I know. I've had the honor of participating and staying at the chapter house
00:12:49
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being part of one of his retreats and in his women's online cohort. If you are in need of coming back to life, of being supported in a creative way by other people who get this passion that you have been given to bring hope to the world, check out the Phosaurus Chapter House. You can go to phosauruschapterhouse.com, F-O-S-S-O-R-E-S, chapterhouse.com,
00:13:18
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and let them know that Laura sent you. The year was 2013, the fall, just after I had heard that song and had that thought, gosh, will I ever experience anything in my life in brokenness? When our school needed somebody to chair the annual school auction,
00:13:42
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And this is not just a simple little event. I liken it to running a political campaign with all of the moving parts. And generally this auction raises anywhere from $75,000 to $100,000. School relies on it for budget. There's a lot of weighty pressure coming from this one fundraising event.
00:14:06
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And I remember thinking, I can do that. That would be fun. That would be one more accomplishment to check off my list. I could share the auction. So I talked about it with my husband, Justin, and he immediately threw up the red flags. Justin had just gotten a new job where he was traveling internationally for three weeks at a time.
00:14:31
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several times a year. So he knew he was not going to be around. He knew that my tendency in life is to take on more than I can handle. You guys, I was a perfectionist. I was an overachiever. It is part of how God made me to be. I'm an Enneagram seven. So I get excited about new possibilities and conquering new things.
00:14:57
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He also knew that I had had some struggles recently, you know, with sleeping and the like. I'd also had some bladder issues.
00:15:07
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When he was traveling, I would get this really strange bladder pain and didn't know what it was. Now I know it was all related to stress, but he knew that all of this was in the mix. And he said, no, you can't take this on right now. You don't have the bandwidth. And you know what? I said, yes, anyway.
00:15:28
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I threw caution to the wind. I didn't understand why he didn't think that I was capable of doing this. And I signed up. I said, put down my name. I am all in. And immediately it was like the ideas were flowing and I was just really relishing this new project.
00:15:51
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But I was also working full time and, you know, being a single mom three weeks at a time with my girls. So it was a couple months after I had started planning the auction. It was about March of 2014 when I started having significant.
00:16:11
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nausea in the mornings, nausea and diarrhea. And once again, you know, I thought, what is going on? I would get nauseous when I woke up, have diarrhea, and it would kind of go away by mid morning once I got to work.
00:16:28
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And then it would sometimes come back in the evening and sleeping issues were starting up again. And it was getting to the point where it was really difficult to go about my day because I was so nauseous and I was losing weight. So I went to a new doctor after sharing in a Bible study what was going on. A friend said, hey,
00:16:52
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I went through something similar, go see my doctor. So I did, and guess what he said? Laura, this is anxiety. This is stress. This is your body responding to too much pressure and overwhelm in your life.
00:17:08
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And this time I listened a little bit harder because things were much worse than they had been before. And he wrote me a prescription, an emergency prescription for Xanax. I think it was 10 pills and an old kind of antidepressant that was supposed to help with sleep. The thought of taking an antidepressant was so difficult for me because I didn't think that I needed
00:17:37
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any kind of medication, I just wanted the stomach issues to stop and for my insomnia to go away. So I took as little as possible of this medication, like would literally break the pills in fourths or in half and would only take it on days that I thought I needed it or days after, you know, a rough night's sleep.
Acceptance and Diagnosis
00:18:00
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So I didn't want to accept that I needed medication. The issues didn't get any better. And in addition to the physical symptoms of nausea, weight loss, and diarrhea, and insomnia, I started getting really crazy thoughts.
00:18:21
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racing thoughts and out of control thoughts of things that I might do or ways that I might hurt people. And it was so uncharacteristic for me and so scary because I couldn't control them. And for somebody who has always been a straight A student and has always known what to say, has always been the person that people run to,
00:18:47
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to solve a problem that was so alarming that I couldn't control my thoughts.
00:18:55
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So one day after things had gotten significantly worse, I mustered up the courage to talk to my boss and to my pastor and tell them what was going on. They were so kind and recognized that I was kind of at a crossroads and that I needed a little more help. So my pastor recommended a counselor for me to go see. Now,
00:19:19
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I was 37 years old. I had never seen a therapist or a counselor in my life ever. And although now I know I should have a long time ago.
00:19:31
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So this was an entirely new experience. I can tell you the exact day that I saw him for the first time because I have the little patient health questionnaire in front of me, March 17, 2014. And it asks, over the past two weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems?
00:19:50
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little interest or pleasure in doing things. I circled three nearly every day. Feeling down, depressed, I circled two, more than half of the days. And he has written here, overwhelmed.
00:20:06
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Three, trouble falling asleep or staying asleep or sleeping too much. He wrote, she can't shut her head off more than half the days. Feeling tired or having little energy more than half the days. Poor appetite or overeating. He wrote, lost five pounds in two weeks plus nausea nearly every day.
00:20:28
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feeling bad about yourself or that you're a failure if you let yourself or family down more than half the days trouble concentrating on things such as reading the newspaper or watching television more than half the days
00:20:40
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Moving or speaking so slowly that other people have noticed, or the opposite, being so fidgety or restless that you have been moving around a lot more than usual. More than half the days he wrote, why can't I get it together? So I must have said that. Thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way. Not at all.
00:21:03
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That was the first mental health questionnaire that I would ever fill out, but it wouldn't be the last. As a matter of fact, it would be the first of probably a hundred. I didn't know it yet, but I was on the cusp of getting diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and the worst was yet to come. But I had asked for help. I was seeing a counselor.
00:21:29
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I'm just glad that I did not know at that time what the future held.
00:21:39
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I mean, I don't know about you, but I always learn something and feel so much better and so much more relaxed after I listen to Laura.
Introducing the TWIRL Method
00:21:49
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I'm Jill Devine, and as her producer, her coworker, and most importantly, her friend, I can tell you that she has some amazing resources to help you seek this still in your life. In fact, Laura would love to send you a completely free video masterclass that helps you learn how to twirl your way through your next difficult day.
00:22:07
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It's five short videos from Laura herself that will land in your inbox, and in her calming voice, she'll explain what that acronym TWIRL means and how it will help you transform your hard days. All you have to do is text the word TWIRL to the number 55444.
00:22:25
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These videos are perfect for the girls in your life too, so make sure you grab the free Twirl Masterclass while you can. Text TWIRL, that's T-W-I-R-L, T-W-I-R-L, to 55444, that's 55444.
00:22:41
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or sign up for it at SeekingTheStill.com. You will be so glad you did. And make sure you've subscribed to Seeking The Still because Laura will continue her story and her journey with you in a new episode that launches every Wednesday.
00:22:57
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So again, subscribe to Seeking the Still on the podcast platform of your choice. And then you will be notified when a new episode releases, but just know every Wednesday you will get a new episode and new inspiration from Laura. And she's going to leave you right now with an inspirational quote.
00:23:18
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Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is in its deepest essence something helpless that wants our love. Rene Maria Rilke Be still.