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My Story + How Trauma Causes PCOS
360 Plays1 year ago
In my first episode, I tell you my story of living with adenomyosis and PCOS, how I started my company and came to a major realization that something was terribly wrong with my life. And how I healed and became a first-time mom at 42. I also outline the science of how trauma can be at the root of PCOS.
Get my Free PCOS Thrive Guide Here! These are all the supplements I was taking when I got pregnant and more than 40 pages of research-backed information to help with hormone balance.
The Life Detox is brought to you by Bubble & Bee Organic
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Transcript
Introduction and Content Warning
00:00:00
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This podcast may contain adult themes, discussion of domestic violence, and frank conversations of the female reproductive system. Listener discretion advised.
Stephanie's Background and Health Journey
00:00:21
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Most of you know me from my company Bubble and Be Organic. Now, if I knew it was good for me, I'd make this podcast all about cosmetic chemicals and how they affect our hormones and health, because that's how I started my company and what I've been doing for the last 15 years. But in recent months, I've found there's something more important, something more toxic than any environmental chemical, that toxin, emotional trauma.
00:00:47
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In today's episode, I'm going to tell you exactly how trauma messes with our hormones on a biological level and ends up manifesting as conditions like PCOS that I have. I'll also share my personal story of how I came to this discovery after becoming a first-time mom at 42. My name is Stephanie Greenwood and this is The Life Detox.
00:01:18
Speaker
In 2005, I was diagnosed with adenomyosis. I was really not given any answers as to why or really any great solutions. The doctors told me my options were to have a baby or a hysterectomy. I was only 25 and neither of those were an option. So I took matters into my own hands and started learning about chemicals in our food and cosmetic products that act like estrogen in the body.
00:01:43
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In my efforts to avoid xenoestrogens, I ended up launching my company, Bubble and Bee Organic, in 2007 at the Salt Lake Farmers Market. What started out as a weekend endeavor ended up turning into a real business with employees and leasing a commercial building, and then two. Going organic helped my health a lot. My acne cleared up, my asthma disappeared, my periods were better, but still not regular.
00:02:10
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In 2013, when I was 34, I started having dizziness. I'd sit at my computer and feel like I was on a roller coaster. I went to doctors and specialists and no one could really tell me what was going on. I had no answers and just kind of learned to live with the dizziness. My sister and I just called it the Diz. How are you doing today? Oh, I've got the Diz. In trying to figure out my dizziness, I ended up getting blood tests that confirmed I also had polycystic ovarian syndrome.
Personal and Business Struggles
00:02:40
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something I had suspected for years but never had an official diagnosis. The blood test showed that despite my organic diet, low BMI, and active lifestyle, I was insulin resistant and had high testosterone and high cholesterol. I redoubled my efforts, joined a gym, and went on a strict low carb diet.
00:02:59
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I managed to get my cholesterol down and even my weight down a little more, but it didn't really help my dizziness and I was still having missed periods. And when they did show up, they were extremely painful.
00:03:11
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In 2015, I hit a crisis point in my life. I was paralyzed with anxiety and depression, as I was hit with one major stressor after another. I was faced with a non-compliance with our organic certification. The USDA changed how they calculated organic percentages, and we needed to quickly change about 50 of our product labels. Then I had an unexpected tax bill, and then the next month my grandma died.
00:03:39
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These things were just pushing me off the edge and I really felt like the world was going to end at the end of 2015. You can ask my friends, I was acting really weird. My life had become completely out of control and out of my control. I was starting to realize that I was in an abusive relationship and had been since I was 22.
00:04:08
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Maybe I'll do a full episode about it someday, but without going into too much detail, the man who called himself my partner had gotten me into a huge financial hole. He had torn apart my house, torn apart three commercial buildings that were leased in my name, then convinced me to purchase an investment property, which he promptly moved into and started demolishing, all in the name of, we're going to renovate. Renovations were never completed.
00:04:36
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I had mortgages and leases all under my name and because the buildings were damaged I couldn't get out of any of these contracts. I could tell that the internet was changing. I could tell that my business was peaking and starting to decline because I wasn't able to keep up with the changing marketplace and I couldn't put money back into the business because my personal debts were draining all the money.
00:04:59
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This is not how I wanted it to be at all. I was on a path of destruction and risking losing everything I had worked so hard to build. For the next two years, I spent my time learning about abuse and trying to get myself out, trying to break that trauma bond that kept me pleading to him to change, pleading for him to see how his decisions were literally killing me, trying to get him to understand, but it never worked.
New Beginnings and Health Improvements
00:05:25
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Finally in 2018 after couples counseling and getting myself into therapy I was able to break it off with him.
00:05:44
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I had an employee named Nick who had worked for me for about three and a half, four years. For several months, he had been helping me clear out and fix one of the commercial buildings that I was working to get back to its landlord. We'd become good friends over that time, and he knew a little bit about what I was going through. A few days after my breakup, he invited me over to his house. His family was having a backyard bonfire, he said, and he knew I was having a hard time. So I went.
00:06:12
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Well, it ended up his family wasn't there, just the brother he lived with, so he had a nice night to ourselves. We built a fire, went for a walk in the summer night and just talked about trauma and life and had a good time. As it started to get dark, I decided to leave. He walked me out to my car that was parked on the street and we witnessed that my car had just been hit with so much force that it actually had been pushed up over onto the curb and was sitting on the grass.
00:06:39
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A woman in Asari was standing in the middle of the street looking in horror at the situation. Her car had pieces scattered everywhere as though it had exploded on impact. I asked if she was okay and gave her a hug as she trembled. We called the police and helped her get in contact with her husband who could translate for her. She only spoke Swahili.
00:07:01
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As Nick and I stood there in the road surveying my dented car, the weight of everything just hit me. The breakup, all of the changes in my life, and now my car was out of commission. Nick gave me a hug. I found myself going back for another hug, and then another. Soon I was holding onto him for stability.
00:07:21
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We found ourselves sitting cuddled together on the grass in the summer night as the police and ambulances came to handle the situation. His arm around me, our hearts racing at the possibilities of what was happening between us. Suddenly the car didn't matter. Nothing else mattered. That week I found myself in a new exciting relationship with Nick. Things went fast. After a couple dates we were officially a committed couple.
00:07:47
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It turned out I wasn't so hard to get along with after all. There were no hours-long arguments or screaming matches, no manipulation or pressuring me into buying things I didn't want. I didn't have to walk on eggshells around him. We got along as perfectly as two people can, laughing at the same things and truly enjoying each other's company.
00:08:10
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After a while I started to notice that my periods were completely regular. The dizziness had gone away. The cramping was much more manageable. I still had a lot of brain fog from so many years of abuse, but I was getting my life back. I did a quick sail of the second house to get out from underneath it.
00:08:29
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Nick fixed my home, putting the walls back that had been torn out. And I worked and worked and got out of the commercial leases that I didn't need. I was back in control of my life again for the first time in a very long time. In January 2020, I took a hormone blood test just to check in with myself. The results weren't surprising. I had all the markers of PCOS.
00:08:52
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But despite the imperfect blood test, I finally for the first time was having periods, regularly.
Hormonal Health and Podcast Plans
00:08:58
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And I'll admit, my diet had gone off the rails. No longer was I eating a pristine organic low-carb diet. We were drinking beer and eating grocery store frozen pizza. It turned out I didn't need a special diet or workout regimen to manage my PCOS. I just needed to not be abused.
00:09:19
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So part of the hormone blood test that I took, they told me my chances of fertility. They said that with my age being 40 and with my PCOS diagnosis, I only had a 20% chance of a successful pregnancy. I was okay with that. I had already made peace with the idea that I wouldn't be having kids.
00:09:39
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A year later, January of 2021, I was 41, and I realized that my period was a day late. It had been so regular in recent years, it made me pause. Just for kicks, I grabbed a pregnancy test I happened to have in my cupboard. There was no way it was going to be positive, but I might as well use it since I had it. The positive line instantly glowed bright blue. There was no question. I was pregnant.
00:10:09
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We were both shocked as it wasn't something we were planning on or even thought that was possible. For the next nine months I held my breath fearing the worst would happen. Every morning in those first few weeks I would check websites that calculated my miscarriage risk. Every day the number going down a little bit but starting at about 30% risk. I was anxious about the baby's health but also knew that stress would hurt the baby which made me stress more.
00:10:35
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I loaded up on antioxidants and supplements to protect what we learned early on was a heat. As the months went on, my pregnancy was pretty uneventful. My body, which I'd been told was so flawed, so dysfunctional, did exactly what it needed to do. And on September 30th, we heard our babies cry for the first time. They took our breaths away.
00:11:03
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With the new baby, I was able to work at home with Nick acting as my assistant manager. Well, assistant to the manager. I had a lot of time cluster feeding and contact napping with the baby. It was a lot of time for me to be alone with my thoughts.
00:11:18
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I found that creativity helped me stave off the fears and negative thought patterns that always seemed to creep in. So I decided I wanted to produce a podcast. But what about? Should I make it about narcissistic abuse and everything I've been through? But so many podcasts covered that. And even though I had acquired a depth of knowledge on the topic, I wasn't a psychologist.
00:11:40
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What about health and hormones and environmental chemicals? That would align with the articles and content I'd been producing for my website for so long. But, uh, that was boring. I'd been doing that for 15 years. I wanted something new. A creative outlet. I thought maybe I could intertwine the two in some poetic way. But wait, what if the two were related?
00:12:02
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Could trauma be at the root of hormone imbalances like PCOS? And if so, how? My periods had regulated as soon as I left that abusive relationship. I found out that both cortisol and progesterone are created from the same building block called pregnenolone.
00:12:17
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So what makes sense that if your body has to create a bunch of cortisol from being in distress, it could steal the building blocks to make cortisol and thus can't make progesterone. This is a concept called the cortisol steal or the pregnant alone still. I'd actually heard this concept over the years and read about it in many credible places. We're literally stealing progesterone using it to make our stress hormone cortisol.
00:12:39
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uses the pregnenolone to make cortisol. The cortisol steal. That progesterone is going to feed the cortisol pathway. We only have a certain amount of pregnenolone. The progesterone is stolen. And he's got a pregnenolone steal going on. The idea that cortisol production could steal the building blocks for progesterone explains everything I'd gone through. The problem? It's totally wrong.
00:13:04
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There's no evidence that there's a limited pool of pregnant alone in the body. Stress does affect our hormones, it turns out. It's just way more complicated. And pretty cool science, which we'll dive into right after this.
00:13:25
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If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider checking out bubbleandb.com. We have more than 150 different products to choose from, like soaps, insect repellent, facial care, and the world's largest selection of USDA-certified organic deodorants. These are all products I've formulated myself to avoid dinoestrogens and not interfere with our hormone health.
00:13:45
Speaker
and we make everything in our own facility so we know exactly what's going in our products. So visit bubbleandb.com and support this podcast and my little family. That's bubbleandb.com. Okay, back to the show. I found a study that helped back up my hypothesis that stress could be at the root cause of PCOS.
00:14:06
Speaker
It came out just as I was starting research for this podcast in November 2022. It's called the impact of childhood maltreatment on women's reproductive health with a focus on symptoms of polycystic ovarian syndrome. This South African based study found that emotional abuse was significantly associated with PCOS. Even more than sexual or physical abuse, emotional abuse was associated with PCOS.
00:14:35
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So if emotional abuse can cause PCOS, how exactly does that happen? Well, it turns out it's all connected by one part of the body, actually the brain, the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus in the brain is a control center for our hormones, our appetite, our body temperature, and our stress response.
00:14:58
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In a normally functioning female hypothalamus in her reproductive years, neurons called GNRH neurons send a chemical signal called gonadotropin-releasing hormone to the pituitary gland.
00:15:12
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Depending on the frequency of the chemical signal, kind of like Morse code, the pituitary then makes either LH or FSH. In healthy signaling, we'll have some mild waves of FSH and then a surge of LH that stimulates ovulation.
00:15:29
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In response, an ovarian follicle matures and releases an oocyte, an egg. And then the follicle in the ovary turns into something called the corpus luteum, which then makes progesterone for the second half of our cycle. The progesterone supports the endometrial lining that's grown in our uterus during the first half of our cycle.
00:15:48
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If pregnancy doesn't happen, that corpus luteum shrinks, progesterone dwindles, and we shed that uterine lining, or as we call it, we have a period. And then it starts all over again. So what happens with PCOS?
00:16:02
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I found out that the GNRH signaling in the hypothalamus is off. That Morse code is hyperactive. The hypothalamus is continually sending gonadotropin-releasing hormone to the pituitary, so instead of a nice balance of FSH and an LH surge that causes ovulation, we have a chronically high level of LH.
00:16:24
Speaker
This causes several follicles in the ovary to mature, but never release an egg. The follicles then turn into cysts. These cysts then start to produce cortisol and androgens, male hormones like testosterone. Testosterone promotes insulin, which promotes testosterone, which promotes insulin. And then inflammation ensues.
00:16:46
Speaker
Now, I could go into a lot more detail about PCOS, and I just may in future episodes, but I'll try to simplify the discussion here as I don't think it's signed up for a three-hour physiology lesson. But the bottom line is this, that simple signaling in the hypothalamus, when it's off, it creates a cascade of events that lead to all the symptoms of PCOS, inflammation, insulin resistance, androgens, the lack of ovulation, and it's all a vicious cycle that feeds on itself.
00:17:14
Speaker
So what's going on with the hypothalamus in PCOS? Why is it signaling off? Well, another thing that the hypothalamus does is handle much of our body's stress response. When we experience a stressor, the hypothalamus sends a chemical signal to the pituitary, which sends a signal to our adrenal glands to make cortisol and other stress hormones. This is called the HPA axis, hypothalamus pituitary adrenal, HPA.
00:17:44
Speaker
In a healthy HPA response, cortisol reaches the hypothalamus and turns the signaling off, so we're not continually making cortisol. This is a process that takes about 10 minutes and is an example of a negative feedback loop in physiology. But if we've experienced trauma, this stress response signaling gets hijacked, and that shut-off mechanism doesn't work properly.
00:18:08
Speaker
or your HPA access might be triggered quite easily and you might be jumpy or startle easily, like me. This constant flood of cortisol and other stress hormones actually leads to insulin resistance. Our stress response is the same whether we're being chased by a bear or worried about what someone meant in a text message.
00:18:30
Speaker
When cortisol floods our body, it tells ourselves, hey, we're gonna need your glucose. When the body isn't fight or flight, it's preparing us to run or fight, so it needs quick energy stores in the bloodstream. If you end up fighting or running, this gives you the extra energy to survive. But if your stress response happens because somebody shamed you, that blood sugar will rise, but it has nowhere to go.
00:18:55
Speaker
If you didn't run or fight, that glucose is sent right to the liver and then stored as fat under a state of chronic stress or trauma. Over time, your cells develop insulin resistance. After all, you constantly need that glucose in your bloodstream for survival, your cells have learned. So our cells lose their insulin receptors and we become insulin resistant. And it makes it really hard to lose weight and control our blood sugar.
00:19:24
Speaker
High levels of insulin then also keep the liver from making sex hormone binding globulin, which helps deactivate our body's hormones. Sex hormone binding globulin has a higher affinity for testosterone than it does for estrogen, so effectively sex hormone binding globulin reduces our active testosterone.
00:19:44
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So if our liver function is impaired due to high insulin, our free testosterone levels increase. Insulin resistance is a huge part of PCOS and researchers have gone back and forth trying to decide which came first, the insulin resistance or the testosterone levels.
00:20:02
Speaker
I say it happened at once because of trauma. Trauma has been found to affect our GNRH signaling. Remember that Morse code that controls our ovulation? Emerging research has found that trauma affects our GNRH signaling. So if we look at trauma as the root cause of PCOS, everything starts to make sense.
00:20:27
Speaker
As I've researched, I've found that so many other chronic health conditions have roots in trauma. Immune system issues like psoriasis, Crohn's, MS, Hashimoto's, chronic pain, eczema, fibromyalgia, PMDD, endometriosis.
Upcoming Guests and Resources
00:20:45
Speaker
There's a lot of focus out there about healing the gut, but you can't have gut health if you're in a state of chronic fight or flight.
00:20:55
Speaker
I've reached out to the actual researchers who have published some of these papers and I hope to have them on future episodes. I have a lineup of some great guests this season that I'm so excited about. We're going to be talking about treating chronic pain, insomnia, emotional healing modalities, narcissistic abuse, attachment theory. I have award-winning author Donna Jackson not
00:21:17
Speaker
Zawa who's been writing about the mind-body connection for years. Okay and we will talk about hormone disrupting chemicals. I have toxicologist Dr. Yvonne Burkhardt lined up to give us her fresh perspective. This is science and I'm so excited to be bringing this to you to take a deep dive into how trauma affects our bodies and to hopefully encourage you if you're out there and you're in an abusive relationship.
00:21:43
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Use this as motivation to get out and to heal your trauma, to detox your life.
00:21:53
Speaker
In my show notes, I have linked up my PCOS Thrive Guide. If you have PCOS or other hormone imbalances, this is 45 pages of information for healing, basic dietary principles, the exact supplements I was taking when I got pregnant, environmental chemicals to avoid, and a big list of emotional healing modalities so you can treat your trauma, treat your hypothalamus, and get it functioning properly again.
00:22:18
Speaker
this is all free information i'm not selling a healing system or classes some of my guests might and that's okay that's what they do for a living but i want my information to be free i don't want it to be behind a paywall anything i learn i want you to learn too i want to share it with you
00:22:35
Speaker
I also have a free class that I have posted on YouTube that's over an hour long. If you want to learn more about what's going on with the body with PCOS, it's a little rough around the edges production wise, so I don't have it as a public video. But if you'd like access to this class, just email me info at bubbleandb.com and I'll send you the link.
00:22:56
Speaker
And yes, please do check out bubbleandbeorganic, bubbleandbe.com. This is what supports my family and this podcast.
Next Episode Preview
00:23:03
Speaker
I would love if you left me a review or subscribe to our show, follow us on social media, Life Detox podcast on Instagram, and please tell your friends, this is life saving information. Let's help get people out of abusive relationships. Let's heal our minds and heal our bodies.
00:23:21
Speaker
The Life Detox is produced by me, Stephanie Greenwood, and brought to you by bubbleandb.com. Stay well. Next week on The Life Detox.
00:23:45
Speaker
Insomnia. So many of us, especially with hormone imbalances, have it. We'll be talking with Martha Lewis, founder and CEO of The Complete Sleep Solution and a certified holistic sleep practitioner. She'll give us tips for how we can start sleeping soundly again. Oh, that sounds amazing. I wish my toddler would let me do that. One day with Martha's information, I will have a good night's sleep again. If you have sleeping problems or know someone who does, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
00:24:45
Speaker
with grits and journey of your mind.