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A Wilde Story: PMDD, Cancer, Abuse, and Thriving Through it All
225 Plays1 year ago
Chelsea Wilde, famous in the PMDD community for her PMDD Memes Instagram page, is an avid snowboarder and passionate singer-songwriter. In this episode, she tells us her story of escaping an abusive marriage, having cancer during the COVID pandemic, and living with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. She’ll tell us what she was most thankful for during her cancer treatment, her tips for living with PMDD, and how her passions helped her through difficult times.
This episode also features Chelsea Wilde’s original music, that you can stream at Chelseawilde.com
For help with PMDD, visit IAPMD Global
The Life Detox is brought to you by Bubble & Bee Organic that offers the world's largest selection of USDA Certified Organic Deodorants, organic facial care, toothpaste, and so much more!
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Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The following episode contains adult language and frank descriptions of domestic violence, listener discretion advised.
Meet Chelsea Wild
00:00:13
Speaker
I found Chelsea Wild through her Instagram page that I followed for several years called PMDD Memes. Her relatable memes about premenstrual dysphoric disorder spark discussion, give validation, and create community for those suffering with this hormone related mood
Impact of Abuse on PMDD
00:00:30
Speaker
disorder.
00:00:30
Speaker
In addition to speaking out about PMDD, Chelsea is an avid snowboarder, songwriter, breast cancer survivor, and escaped an abusive marriage. She'll tell us why she was filled with gratitude during her cancer treatment, how chronic stress from abuse affected her PMDD, and her strategies for resiliency through life's many challenges while living with a chronic illness. This episode also features Chelsea's original music.
00:00:58
Speaker
I'm Stephanie Greenwood and this is The Life Detox.
Marriage and Abuse
00:01:17
Speaker
Chelsea thought she had met the man of her dreams, but it turned into a nightmare. I got married and it only lasted two and a half years. I thought I had found true love. I met him on a chairlift and I am an avid snowboarder. I build my whole life around snowboarding and he was really into snowboarding too. He was the same way. I thought he was good looking.
00:01:40
Speaker
and he displayed a lot of the characteristics of the classic narcissist, but I didn't even know what that was, right?
Escape and Recovery
00:01:50
Speaker
I had never even really heard of that. So I fell head over heels because he love-bombed me and was buying me things, trying to frame it as
00:02:03
Speaker
Chelsea, you need to take better care of yourself. Oh, you don't, you don't have the nicest clothes. So here, let's get you this. Or we had a lot in common and I just felt so taken care of. Before him, I'd been in a number of relationships with people who are mismatched, maybe not as motivated as me when it comes to the relationship specifically.
00:02:22
Speaker
Stuff where relationships where I didn't feel very taken care of, I felt like I was putting in more effort than them, that type of thing. So when he came along, he was putting in all this effort. I was like, oh, this is how it's supposed to be, an equal partnership. So we continued, we dated for a year and a half and he popped the question and we got married.
00:02:46
Speaker
Please don't try to make a ghost out of dust. The first time he called me a name, he swore at me, called me a bitch, was two hours after we took our vows. He was mad at me because I was telling him that we had to move from one reception to the next. I was like, hey, we're going to be moving to the other reception in like 20 minutes. And he freaked out on me and called me a name. And that was alarming and weird.
00:03:15
Speaker
that set the tone for the rest of our so-called marriage. And I went through everything from physical abuse, significant emotional abuse, and even sexual abuse in this relationship.
PMDD and Abuse
00:03:28
Speaker
And so I escaped. I was like, no more of this.
00:03:33
Speaker
but doing it glad yeah even doing that though was a trauma in itself like the whole relationship was a huge trauma and then getting out of it was a trauma in itself i had to uproot my entire life and put a country between us like i picked up everything packed up my car while he was out with his family i knew i had like two hours i put everything i could pack into my car my little kia spectra
00:03:57
Speaker
and drove to Michigan from Oregon where I was living. I drove to Michigan to be with my family because I knew that if I would have stayed anywhere near him, he would have kept convincing me to come back. I didn't have any tools to deal with him and his ability to convince me to do things. So I was like, I need my mommy and my daddy. And I am so fortunate that I have a family that can support me when I need help.
00:04:21
Speaker
But I had a place to go, like holy mackerel. And we didn't have kids. We didn't own a house. I didn't have a lot of ties to him. So that process, although very traumatic, could have been a lot worse. I was done, done by 2016. So it took about 10 months for us to actually get divorced. And my life has been so awesome ever since.
00:04:50
Speaker
Chelsea had struggled with PMDD pre-metrial dysphoric disorder for years and the abuse only made it worse.
Understanding PMDD
00:04:59
Speaker
I've had a PMDD diagnosis since I was 22 and today I am 38.
00:05:05
Speaker
And before that, I definitely had PMDD. I have had PMDD ever since I started menstruating. We just didn't get a formal diagnosis until I was 22, 23 after years of trying to figure out what the heck was going on with me. So PMDD can cause dysphoria.
00:05:25
Speaker
Which, in a nutshell, dysphoria just means that you wake up and you're like, ugh, everything's bad. Everything's wrong. I need to change everything. Something's not right. It's not psychosis. It's not a personality disorder, but it's a general feeling of dissatisfaction with your life. It's your dysphoric.
00:05:48
Speaker
So with that comes physical symptoms and other emotional and mental symptoms. It is a trip and it happens every month. It can be tracked on a calendar, which is great. If your menstrual cycle is regular, you can track your symptoms and you know when your bad days where you feel really depressed and anxious or really exhausted are going to happen. So in that,
00:06:14
Speaker
That's a gift because I can plan for it. But it doesn't negate the fact that these things happen. There are many treatments for PMDD, which we can talk about later. But as far as my life was going, when I was married, I had a pretty good treatment plan for my PMDD. And I was doing all right before I got married. When I got married and was faced with an abusive relationship every hour of every day, it really exacerbated my symptoms. It made things even worse.
00:06:48
Speaker
PMDD is already debilitating. It's already a chronic illness that is exhausting to deal with. It takes a lot of work, a lot of self-knowledge, a lot of humility, and a lot of suffering to deal with PMDD. But then you add into that living with somebody who is toxic, somebody who is constantly trying to knock you off your balance, you know?
00:07:11
Speaker
Somebody who's constantly trying to control you. And then on top of that, dealing with all the normal life stressors. And then on top of that, dealing with PMDD, which is incredibly difficult to deal with. Holy cow, that was unreal.
00:07:27
Speaker
It felt like a crushing weight all the time on my body, on my mind. I couldn't be creative. I couldn't problem solve. I could barely work. It was awful. Other things that contributed to that was that my husband at the time, he didn't necessarily believe PMDD existed. My theory is that he could not control this. My health was something he could not control.
00:07:56
Speaker
whether that be a subconscious thing for him or a conscious effort. If he couldn't be in control of it, he would dismiss it. So he was dismissive of how I wanted to treat my own chronic illness. I had this great system in place. That system had a lot of components, but it included things like making sure I rested really well during the times that my symptoms were the worst, making sure I took an antidepressant that has worked for me, making sure that I ate really healthy,
00:08:24
Speaker
He would try to sabotage everything. If he knew I was doing anything to help me with PMDD, he would try to sabotage it. So like I said, we used to snowboard together. That was a huge component of our relationship. And if I felt super exhausted during ovulation or before my period or I just felt anxious and just brain fog and all the other symptoms of PMDD,
00:08:47
Speaker
A healthy thing for me to do would be to not go put my body under a ton of stress and snowboard down double black diamonds down a mountain that day. My heart wants to do that, but my body says, no, you have to rest. And so I've put all this work, I put all this work into listening to my body and like being proud of that process. And then all of a sudden I'm married to somebody who then shames me till kingdom come about
00:09:12
Speaker
not wanting to snowboard that day because I wanna take care of myself and my body. He would say things like, you're not the girl I married, I thought you were strong, yet you know all the stupid stuff that somebody can say to belittle you, or I'm just gonna find another woman out there to snowboard with, all of these things. Oftentimes I'd give in and go, and then I would be so exhausted, or I'd have a panic attack on the mountain, or I'd have out of control symptoms. It was awful.
00:09:40
Speaker
when I could have avoided the whole thing just by staying at home and resting, you know? What I've found with PMG-D is when I fight through the symptoms and force myself to do crazy things on days when I'm exhausted or be in extreme social situations during days when my anxiety is like
00:10:01
Speaker
through the roof because of PMDD. If I push through those days and do those things anyway, it prolongs my symptoms because of stress, right? So it prolongs my symptoms. When I might have just been good after two or three days of rest, now I'm looking at a week of feeling awful because I really pushed myself during those first few days. And his
00:10:23
Speaker
influence on me constantly created that environment for me to be constantly pushing, not listening to myself, not listening to my body, but listening to him, and then prolonging my symptoms.
Lessons from Divorce
00:10:38
Speaker
And the more stress, the more stress, the more stress, the worse my symptoms would become. They were already bad with no stress.
00:10:48
Speaker
And then you add the stress of a man or partner who is doing things like threatening to kill himself if you don't do ABC with him that day or anytime somebody threatens harm to themselves. That was one of his main manipulation tactics, by the way. My body was constantly being inundated with stress hormones and
00:11:11
Speaker
fight or flight and survival mode. And then on top of that relationship causing all of that, it was like other things happen in life, you know, that my boss died of cancer at the job I was doing who I loved him. He was a great boss. So that's like,
00:11:29
Speaker
you know, but I've got this craziness happening at home. My dog died that, you know, but I got this craziness happening at home and PMDD, you know, I had to start a new job. Like all the normal hard life things that happened were like end of the world disasters because I already had this really debilitating chronic illness and this absolutely horrific home life.
00:11:54
Speaker
After the break, we'll hear about Chelsea's battle with breast cancer. She'll tell us what she was most thankful for during this time and the tools that keep her going despite enduring so much trauma.
00:12:12
Speaker
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00:12:32
Speaker
and we make everything in our own facility so we know exactly what's going in our products. So if you'd like to support this podcast, visit bubbleandb.com. That's bubbleandb.com. You ended up with breast cancer a couple years later.
00:13:01
Speaker
How was your COVID? My COVID experience included breast cancer and I smashed my nose into five pieces. I don't know if you can see how crooked it is on our video chat here, but I got out of that relationship and I learned a lot. I learned to be a one strike person.
00:13:21
Speaker
If you show me who you are, you're going to be a manipulative, crazy, mean person, then I'm going to listen to you and not engage with you anymore. Maya Angelou said it wonderfully, right? She said, I'm going to misquote our
Coping with Cancer and Therapy
00:13:34
Speaker
sorry, queen. But when somebody tells you who they are, listen to them and believe them the first time. I found happiness in my friends, in myself, and in learning. I love psychology. I read all these books.
00:13:50
Speaker
I got tons of therapy, different kinds of therapy, because I was like, I want to learn all the things, you know, learned about meditation. I learned different ways to treat my PMDD. I began to thrive. So I moved back out West. Remember, I had moved from Oregon back to Michigan to escape
00:14:09
Speaker
this relationship and to heal with my family. Thanks, Mom and Dad. I finally got a job back in the Pacific Northwest where the good snowboarding is. I got a job back and I moved to Washington, which is just above Oregon for those of you who aren't West Coasters. I moved to this beautiful house right by the mountain. I'm close to surfing. It's like my dream and I've been living my dream having a blast. Fast forward, COVID hits and I get a breast cancer diagnosis.
00:14:38
Speaker
I want to tell you, breast cancer at age 35? Yeah, 35. That sucked. But the entire time I had breast cancer, Stephanie, every day I just kept thinking, you know what would make this so much worse?
00:14:56
Speaker
if I was still married to him. Imagine having breast cancer during a global pandemic and being in an abusive, controlling, crazy relationship. I would lay on my couch in pain, worried about COVID, trying to figure out work from home, dealing with breast surgeries, and I would just breathe easy because I knew there wasn't somebody screaming at me for cutting an apple
00:15:26
Speaker
incorrectly. It made it so much easier to focus on healing when I was able to focus on myself and my friends and my community. So that breast cancer diagnosis
00:15:42
Speaker
You know, it wasn't a death sentence. Obviously I'm still here. Thank you God for medical technology because we caught it early and it had not spread. I didn't lose my hair. I didn't need chemo. I just needed radiation and a few surgeries and I'm oversimplifying it. It was a long process, but it was manageable. I used all the tools that I learned during my divorce.
00:16:04
Speaker
crisis management, mindfulness and meditation, dealing with trauma, all of these things to help me get through what would have become an incredibly traumatic experience. And it helped. Like for example, when I got my diagnosis, my surgeon called me on my cell phone and I saw that she was calling and I was like, huh.
00:16:25
Speaker
Why is this person calling my cell phone? And I answered it and she was like, you have breast cancer. And I was like, all right, thank you for that. I will call you back. And the first thing I did was I turned off my phone. I turned off all my electronics that would distract me. And I meditated for an hour. A half hour of that was silent meditation in my room. And a half hour of that was walking meditation around my neighborhood because
00:16:51
Speaker
This was a skill I learned. I was like, what do I do in a traumatic situation? Oh, I've got all these skills I learned from my awful, awful marriage. Let me just go down my list and just number one, think, meditate. And in doing that, I actually came up with a plan of who to tell first and who to ask first. Originally I was going to call my mom, but during that hour of meditation, I was like, you know, what might be better is to call a friend's mom who's been going through it, who I've been recently in contact with. And I did that and that was great because
00:17:19
Speaker
She gave me tips on how to deal with family and boundaries and made me feel a lot better and whatnot.
PMDD Memes and Community
00:17:26
Speaker
Through all of this, I've realized that I'm quite grateful for the experience of my abusive relationship. Of course, if I could do it all over again, I wouldn't go back and do that. I would like to know the signs before I get married to somebody who's going to blow my life up. Through the cancer diagnosis, I realized that I'm really grateful for how I handled it.
00:17:48
Speaker
I'm grateful for what I learned from it because those are skills I can apply to all sorts of things and they work. Music has been a big tool for you for coping with all of this. Yeah, music is my life and I am music. There is not a, it's just who I am. I was raised with music. Everybody in my family plays music. I've been writing music since I've been able to write music. I think I started when I was like 10.
00:18:14
Speaker
maybe younger music is a great coping mechanism for somebody who's an athlete you know i told you i build my whole life around snowboarding but then you get a cancer diagnosis you can't snowboard for a little while and instead of like losing my mind i can't snowboard i can't go running i can't do the things i normally do i can't go surfing
00:18:31
Speaker
I wrote a music album and released it. That took up my time. It helped me deal with my emotions. It gave me a huge project to work on. I still think about that. If I get an injury or something because sports are my number one, I get this rush. I hurt my ankle not too long ago and I was like, oh no.
00:18:51
Speaker
What if I could never snowboard again, you know? And three seconds later, I'm like, well, it looks like we're gonna be making a bunch more music albums. It's gonna be great. And it's a piece, you know? And just like anything in your life, you practice it, right? Like a skill. You practice meditating. Meditation practice. It doesn't mean you're good at it. It means you keep trying to learn things. It's the same thing with music and having music as part of your daily practice or even just weekly practice.
00:19:18
Speaker
has been a beneficial part of my life when it comes to healing and focus and just being who I am. We can shout that out at some point. You can listen to my music online. One day she woke up and realized all her feelings were just thoughts migrating across the sky. One day
00:19:43
Speaker
I realized she could start all over, all she had to do was try She had high hopes, high hopes For life's steep slopes, steep slopes
00:20:03
Speaker
So you have your PMDD memes, Instagram account, how has that been part of your healing journey? Okay, PMDD memes, I've learned two things from PMDD memes. Number one, humor is an incredible way to help educate. Humor and education, perfect couple. I have learned so much through the people I've connected with on there.
00:20:29
Speaker
but I've also been able to be an avenue of education for thousands and thousands of people, which is hilarious to me because it's literally a meme page. The other thing I learned is that community can be built around suffering by bitching.
00:20:48
Speaker
And sometimes these memes are kind of complaining about PMDD and people love it, right? They're like, yeah, I can relate to that. Yeah, that's what's up. And they share those memes and they use it to talk to their friends about the chronic illness and
00:21:05
Speaker
they talk to each other in the comments. Some of those memes, the comments like go off. There's like a hundred comments and it's just people sharing what's worked for them and talking and criticizing and complimenting. And it's like amazing. People have made friends through the page. Like it's like unbelievable. As far as how it's helped me in my healing process with PMDD, when I made that page, I had already been divorced and I already had a good grip on how to treat my own PMDD. I,
00:21:33
Speaker
have a great system in place for treatment. I feel confident. I am able to work full time without any problems. I'm able to have stable relationships. That PMDD definitely still affects me, but I'm able to handle it pretty well. So I started that account after I had this great system in place. But I just wanted a place to say the F word without people knowing who I was on the internet, honestly.
Advice for PMDD Management
00:22:01
Speaker
It was kind of a joke. I was like, I just want a place like for when PMDD does kind of derail me for a day or two. Like I want to like have a place where I can just like say it really loud. And originally it was all anonymous. Now I'm like, look, it's me. Let's connect.
00:22:16
Speaker
But like, so I started that page and you know, it's cathartic complaining about things, making jokes, making inappropriate jokes, you know, these meta memes that where it's like only people in the community would understand. That's cathartic. It's fun. It's silly. It's a vibe, you know, and I was never expecting it to like be more than me, but it has like 17,000 followers now.
00:22:44
Speaker
Oh my gosh. I can't even tell you. I get so many. I'm actually, I haven't even like really updated that. It's, I go through phases. I go through phases where I'm updating memes, original memes every day. And then there's months where I don't even look at it because I'm busy with other things. I mean, it has become, if I let it, it would take up a few hours a day with the messages I get. People send me memes. They make me vetting things. I consider it like my volunteer work.
00:23:10
Speaker
because I'm like answering messages and pointing people towards resources. I can't even explain to you how many messages I get people. Okay, this is wild. So the world is connected. Social media is how we communicate. I get dads who are millennials and have teenage kids messaging me on PMDD memes. And they're like, yo, this sounds like my daughter. What do I do? And I was like, excuse me, sir. I'm a meme page. Excuse me. Why are we asking medical advice from a meme Lord?
00:23:41
Speaker
Excuse me, sir. But it's like, realistically speaking, I'm like glad they messaged me because here I am trying to do my like volunteer time every week managing this page and I talked to them and I I've called them up. I'm like, let's chat, you know, and I've sent them to websites that are great resources with evidence based treatments for PMDD and
00:24:00
Speaker
People ask me all sorts of stuff on there or just say they need somebody to talk to because they feel suicidal. You know, PMDD has a high rate of people trying to take their lives because it is such a exhausting, horrible illness to have. So anyway, yeah, it's been fun. It's been fun to connect with people, communicate with people.
00:24:20
Speaker
share other people's content and memes. And you know, I hope it just keeps on thriving. And oh my gosh, I'm so proud. When we reached 10,000 followers, we raised $1,000 for IAPMD Global. And then just this last April, we were part of a campaign where we alongside a few other people
00:24:39
Speaker
raised $6,000 for that nonprofit organization. So I'm really proud of that. What advice do you have to people listening if they're struggling with PMDD? If you're struggling with PMDD, listen to Stephanie here and check to see if you're in an abusive relationship.
00:24:59
Speaker
You know, do a little life check. Like, is your husband forcing you to have sex with him? This might be a problem that is making your hormone issues worse.
00:25:11
Speaker
Can you not cut an apple correctly without getting yelled at? Maybe you should leave. Just kidding. But anyway, I would say if you have PMDD, the best thing is education. So check out IAPMD global, get on PMDD memes and look at the memes and see what people say. There's so much information out there and there is real resources. 10 years ago, there wasn't.
00:25:36
Speaker
Now there are real resources like, oh my goodness, IAPMD Global has a list of doctors that people with PMDD have submitted saying, this person helped me. So if you can't find a doctor in your area to help you, you can literally look on their directory. Like I think that's amazing.
00:25:55
Speaker
So, if you suspect you have PMDD or maybe somebody you know has PMDD, start getting educated and remember that you are the captain of your own life. You can make a difference for yourself. You can make different decisions. After my whole cancer experience during COVID, I realized that the job I was doing at the time was contributing to significant stress in my life. So, I at age
00:26:19
Speaker
37 changed careers completely from being a youth program director to being a corporate writer. It took me a lot of work. I had to apply to 221 jobs and I was looking for project management jobs, like all these different things until I kind of landed in the area of
Pursuit of a Stress-Free Life
00:26:36
Speaker
writing.
00:26:36
Speaker
and found an incredible company that allows me to work remotely. I designed my life. Now I used to design my life like around snowboarding, but now I also incorporate as much of a stress free living situation as possible because I have a chronic illness that sucks. So I should have an easy life.
00:26:54
Speaker
This was another thing while I was listening to your podcast, I was thinking about not everybody has a choice to have like a really simple, easy life. I have a pretty simple life. I don't have any kids. I have an incredible boyfriend who is the kindest man ever. I didn't date anybody really for like seven years until I met him because I don't have time for people who aren't wonderful. So I have a stress-free relationship. I have a stress-free job where I work at home. I don't have any dependents other than my adorable old man dog
00:27:23
Speaker
I like to eliminate as much of the daily stress in my life as I can because inevitably crazy things are gonna happen. You might get in a car accident. You might lose your job. Somebody you love might die. So if you, with PMDD, if you build as much as you can, a life that's already stress-free, then when PMDD hits or when other big catastrophes hit, you have energy to deal with those.
00:27:51
Speaker
I think if I've taken anything away from the last decade of my life, trying to minimize the stress in my life as much as possible, including where you live, your job. And I'm not saying it's easy, yo. I know. All right. I know. It took me a year almost to find this new job. And I would have just kept looking until I found it. It is exhausting. But once you can start getting those building blocks in place of a healthy life, then when
00:28:18
Speaker
Shit hits the fan. Hopefully you aren't already stressed out by all the other things in your life. Those things are filling you up as opposed to draining you. And you can deal
Conclusion and Credits
00:28:28
Speaker
with it. And it's worked so far. But that speaks a lot to the stress reduction. You know, like you in your very first episode of this podcast talked a lot about the science behind how stress can cause illness or make illnesses that might be caused by other things worse.
00:28:45
Speaker
I say stress, but we're talking about emotional trauma and all these things. I listened to another podcast of yours where a wonderful woman talks about her experience with pain and how her body manifests pain when it goes through emotional stuff. That's always very interesting to me because my body doesn't really lean that way. It hasn't. Everybody's a little different, but I was listening to that and I was like, that's fascinating. It's brain science.
00:29:09
Speaker
So like the more you detox your life and try to focus on good things and that are stress free or at least as little stress as possible, then when the things come up that you can't control, you can deal with them with the help of your entire community, all your friends and family and your therapist.
00:29:31
Speaker
If you have PMDD and want to join in the fun on Instagram, follow PMDDmemes. To learn more about Chelsea's music, visit chelseaewild.com, which I've also linked to in the show notes. I've also linked to IAPMDglobal, where you can find resources for PMDD help. Chelsea's story is so inspiring. Her humor and her laugh is infectious, and her strength is beyond measure.
00:29:59
Speaker
I'm so glad she had her own life detox and came through it with many skills and lessons learned. And like she said, if you have a chronic health condition and diet and lifestyle changes aren't helping, have a talk with yourself because you might need a life detox.
00:30:25
Speaker
The Life Detox is produced by me, Stephanie Greenwood, and brought to you by Bubble and Be Organic. The views and opinions expressed are the speakers' own and do not necessarily represent those of myself or my company. Material and information presented here is for general information purposes only and is not medical advice. Being a guest on this show does not imply endorsement of Greenplay LLC or any of its projects. Stay well, friends.