CIRS affects people with a history of developmental trauma, 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 is a signature of hockey arenas. It’s in change rooms at outdoor swimming pools. Is there mould in the walls at your office? Have you been exposed because you garden? Have you travelled to a humid country where mildew is pervasive?
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 for you 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, and the whole host of autoimmune illnesses.
The common thread between developmental trauma and illnesses in adulthood is nervous system dysregulation.
A host of terms are used to describe nervous system dysregulation. You can say you find it hard to remain ventral vagal. Or it’s difficult to maintain homeostasis. That you are easily triggered. In simple vernacular, you find it hard to remain calm.
The mechanism is pretty straight forward.
Because of your developmental trauma history, 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 that you experience fear because the term fear feels more articulate. To illustrate this point, when you were told you have CIRS, I expect you reacted with fear.
Since being diagnosed with CIRS, and 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 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 on your fear, rather than on whether it’s safe to walk barefoot. Become aware of your fear.
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 haven’t?
If you’re aware that you’re always afraid, then you’re ahead of most people with CIRS.
Your medical team doesn’t help you address your fear.
It’s noteworthy that functional medicine doctors (MDs) and naturopathic doctors (NDs) focus on addressing your physical symptoms but don’t help you address your fear. I found an analogy that 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. They created a permanent station on the river so that 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 causing people to be in 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. 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. Instead of only treating the physical symptoms of CIRS, 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 crisis.
But wait. Where was her husband in this? He was so terrified that he couldn’t research or attempt to understand his own issues. He couldn’t coordinate his own care. He was paralyzed with fear. Ironically, it was this fear that was keeping 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. She had been healing up until this point, but her fear took hold of her and down she went.
A third client was an accomplished professional with a profound history of childhood trauma. He worked crazy hours. He grew up in an active war zone. I observed a direct correlation between his episodes of fear and the downward trajectory of his 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? Of having no energy? Of brain fog? Are you afraid you’re 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 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?
- Am I afraid of contaminants in our meat supply?
- Am I afraid of pesticides sprayed on the park down the street? Of gasoline leaking through the ground water in my yard?
- Am I afraid to watch the news?
- Do I get triggered by a scary tv show?
- Do I have to stop reading about Trump because I become dysregulated?
Get a handle on how pervasive your fear is.
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 driving your illness.
You will benefit if you can get ahead of the curve. 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, you can start working to better regulate your nervous system, which in turn will help your body work properly again. Once you become regulated, you will be better able to heal what 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 don’t have 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 begins 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 hold the idea in the back of your mind that fear may be driving your illness. If the other approaches you explore don’t fully work over the longer-term, you will be able to return 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 not to 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 can find yourself dysregulated for the better part of the day.
With enough practice, I anticipate you will look forward to meditating. 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 away from it, made all the difference in her recovery.
I wish you well in your own recovery.
— Dr. Patricia Turner, Registered Psychologist in Private Practice, Calgary, Alberta