CIRS (Chronic Inflammatory Response System) affects people who have a background of developmental trauma, and whose nervous systems are dysregulated.
If you have been diagnosed with CIRS, you can benefit from learning how to regulate your nervous system.
If you haven’t already charged down the path, please don’t spend a boat load of money chasing medical solutions or trying to remediate mould from your home without knowing more. You can easily spend $75,000 a year on medical care, and another $75,000 tearing down walls in your house. Chances are high that neither approach will bring you back to health until you also address your nervous system dysregulation.
Slow down, educate yourself, and then make a plan.
The statistic is that 50% of buildings are water damaged. I walked through a narrow strip mall in Banff last winter and was struck by the powerful smell of mildew (i.e., mould) coming off the carpets. The smell of mildew is a signature of hockey arenas. The smell is in change rooms at outdoor swimming pools. Is there mould in the walls at your office? Have you been exposed to mould because you garden? Have you travelled to a humid country where mildew is pervasive?
So, please don’t be in a hurry to spend your hard-earned money. Rather, take several weeks or even months to explore what really needs to be done to heal.
One of the big questions you will want to ask yourself is, Why am I vulnerable?
I’m guessing, because you have been diagnosed with CIRS, that you also a history of developmental trauma. Complete the ACES, or Aversive Childhood Experiences Scale, which you can find online, and then do some reading if you want to quantify that a history of childhood trauma and health problems later in life are strongly correlated. The higher your ACES score, the more vulnerable you are to illnesses like CIRS. You’re also more vulnerable to Lyme Disease, Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, MAST cell activation, as well as a whole host of autoimmune illnesses.
The common thread between developmental trauma in childhood and illnesses in adulthood is nervous system dysregulation.
A host of terms are often used to describe nervous system dysregulation. You can say you find it hard to remain ventral vagal. Or that you find it difficult to maintain homeostasis. That you get triggered easily. In simple vernacular, you find it hard to remain calm.
The mechanism is pretty straight forward.
Because of your developmental trauma, your body had to deal with too much stress when you were young. Your baseline cortisol level was higher than it should have been, and you experienced too many adrenaline spikes because your environment was dangerous. Once your baseline level of these stress hormones gets turned up, it doesn’t settle back down without substantial and directed effort.
You experience fear all the time.
Most mental health professionals use the term anxiety when they describe someone whose nervous system is dysregulated. I choose to say, more and more, that you experience fear all the time because the term fear feels more articulate. To illustrate this point, when you were told you have CIRS, I expect that you reacted with fear.
Since being diagnosed with CIRS, and likely long before because it takes time to obtain the diagnosis, you worry about your health. You fear all sorts of physical and social situations. If you’ve educated yourself about toxins in the environment, then you feel vulnerable just breathing at a gas station. You’re afraid to drink out of a Starbucks cup, to buy food from Costco, or to eat at a restaurant. You were told CIRS is often diagnosed with Lyme Disease so you’re afraid to walk barefoot in the grass.
Become aware of your fear.
I would like you to focus your attention on your fear, rather than on whether it’s safe to walk barefoot. Become aware of your fear. And I will add something else to your list to ponder. Why is it that you got sick when you were exposed to mould when seas of people all around you didn’t?
If you’re aware that you’re always afraid, then you’re ahead of most people who have CIRS. If you’re aware that you have high anxiety, then that’s good. Have you ever viewed your anxiety as fear? You’re afraid of pretty much everything.
Your medical team doesn’t help you address your fear.
It’s noteworthy to me that functional medicine doctors (MDs) and naturopathic doctors (NDs) focus solely on addressing your physical symptoms without addressing your fear. I found an analogy that nicely illustrates this gap in your treatment. It goes like this.
Someone noticed that people were routinely drowning at one section of a river, so they brought in help from the police department and the fire hall and created a permanent station on the river so that the drowning victims could be pulled out the water around the clock.
This looked like a tidy solution to the problem, but no one bothered to figure out why people were drowning at that spot in the river. Shouldn’t they investigate what’s happening upstream? What’s throwing people into the river in the first place?
Your fear is driving your illness.
In this story, the police and firefighters are functional medicine doctors and naturopaths. And what’s throwing people into the river? That’s your history of developmental trauma. It’s this history that causes you to be vulnerable to CIRS. So instead of only treating the symptoms of CIRS, let’s address what’s causing your symptoms in the first place, which is your dysregulated nervous system. Let’s calm down your nervous system and get you regulated.
Three examples of fear driving people’s health downward.
I worked with a client whose husband had been diagnosed with CIRS. She said they had to travel to the US for treatment, which was costing them a fortune. She had changed jobs to give her more time to focus on her husband’s health crisis.
But wait. Where was her husband in this? He was so terrified that he couldn’t research or attempt to understand his own health issues. He couldn’t schedule his own appointments. He couldn’t coordinate his own treatment. He was paralyzed with fear. Ironically, it was this fear that kept him stuck.
I watched another client with CIRS slowly melt down in front of my eyes. She had been ordered by her benefits provider to return to work from medical leave, even though she wasn’t physically able. She didn’t try to fight the order. Instead, she said she had to do as she was told. Her fear was palpable. I watched her physically collapse in the process. She had been healing up until this point, but her fear absolutely took hold of her.
A third client was an accomplished professional who had a profound history of childhood trauma and worked crazy hours. She grew up in an active war zone. I observed a direct correlation between her episodes of fear and the downward trajectory of her physical health.
The first step to recovering is being able to see your fear.
It’s only by being aware of your fear that you can overcome it. Don’t push away the idea that fear might be a factor in your health trajectory. Ask yourself, several times a day, what you are afraid of in the moment. Are you afraid you’re going to die? Are you afraid of having no energy? Are you afraid of brain fog? Are you afraid that you are going to run out of money? Are you afraid of your spouse’s response to your illness?
Document everything you are afraid of.
Start journalling. Become aware of your fear moment to moment. Ask yourself questions such as:
- Am I afraid?
- What am I afraid of?
- Who am I afraid of?
- How much of the day do I spend afraid?
- When and where am I afraid?
- Do I ever feel calm?
- Are you afraid of contaminants in our air and water? In our food? In our meat supply?
- Are you afraid of plastics? Of pesticides sprayed on the park down the street? Of gasoline leaking through the ground water in your yard?
- Are you afraid to watch the news?
- Do you get triggered by a scary tv show?
- Do you have to turn away from an article about Trump because you become dysregulated?
Get a good handle on how pervasive your fear is.
Yes, some of the things you fear are real and there is cause for some level of concern. But if you are afraid when you have to deal with an issue, then the problem becomes doubly bad because your fear, and not the situation, is holding you down and driving your illness.
If this is the case, then yes, you have a problem with fear. You will benefit if you can get ahead of the curve with your fear. Fear can hold you down for a long time. We all hear about people who have been ill for ten or fifteen years.
Being able to see your fear is the most important step in overcoming it.
Once you are aware of your fear, congratulate yourself. You can’t address a problem that you aren’t aware of. Once you are aware of your fear, you can start working to better regulate your nervous system, which in turn will help your body to start working properly again. Once your nervous system is regulated, you will be better able to heal whatever is out of whack.
One approach to becoming better regulated is to meditate.
Meditation is about achieving a calm, relaxed mental state and learning to maintain that state. Meditate if you can for an hour a day. If you can’t because you find it boring, or you can’t find the time, then meditate for ten minutes a day. Ideally, you will find those ten minutes to be so helpful that you will gradually increase the amount of time you dedicate to meditation.
In the hours between when you meditate, something magical starts to happen. You observe that you can better self-regulate. Of course, you can work with a psychologist to help you learn to better self-regulate, but you will recover more quickly if you also add meditation to the mix.
You don’t need to address all your childhood trauma to recover from CIRS.
You don’t need to address all of your childhood trauma to recover from CIRS. However, you need to learn to put down your constant fear about your physical state, and your fear of the world around you, and your fear of everything else that is driving your dysregulation.
It’s people who don’t learn to self-regulate who are at greatest risk of not recovering from CIRS. Many people opt to chase fixes that promise quicker and easier solutions. If this describes you, you might want to keep the idea that fear may be keeping you ill in the back of your mind. If the other approaches you explore don’t work over the longer-term, then you will be able to come back to this idea.
Address problems with people in your life.
You may need to address other significant problems in your life as you work to better regulate your nervous system, such as your relationships with people. Your fear might be exacerbated by your parents, your spouse, your friends, or your job.
It feels really great to be regulated.
I have observed that meditation can be a big piece of the way back to health from CIRS. Yes, meditation can be boring until you practice enough and discover that it feels really great to not be dysregulated all the time.
It’s possible you will say you like feeling regulated so much that sitting down twice a day for 30 minutes to meditate is worth the effort. You may conclude that you will give it the time it needs because if you don’t, you quickly become dysregulated again for the better part of the day.
With enough practice, I anticipate you will look forward to meditating because you enjoy the benefit of having a regulated nervous system. Meditation can become the drug you need. If you give it enough months and you have CIRS, you’ll notice that your health is improving, and that it continues to improve.
You can make a full recovery from CIRS.
I know people who have made a full recovery from CIRS, even after a decade of being ill, by addressing their fear and their underlying nervous system dysregulation. I watched one woman recently complete this journey. Understanding the degree of fear that she dealt with, and then learning how to step out from under it, made all the difference in her recovery.
I wish you well in your own recovery.
— Dr. Patricia Turner, Registered Psychologist, Calgary, Alberta