Rachel's Story with Migraines
Recovery stories from Menda participants
My main concern was that I was having chronic migraines. I had migraines on and off through my forties and fifties. I went through a divorce like eight years ago and then everything about my life changed. There was the trauma of the divorce, but I also had to sell the house that I raised my children in, I was facing an empty nest for the first time, I had to go back to work full-time after 20 years, and my dog died. It was one sort of traumatic event after another. That triggered a lot of old trauma for me and I just started having these migraines.
At that point that I entered this program, I was having anywhere from 12 to 20 headache days a month. I just couldn't do anything or go anywhere without thinking, is today a day?
I was afraid of everything. Everything was a possible trigger. Food, alcohol, exercise. Things like sunlight and staying in a store for too long and certain kinds of interactions with people. I was always really into fitness and I completely stopped exercising because I had it, my mind that an elevated heart rate would put too much blood into my head. It was affecting my life in every possible corner but I had just lived with it for eight years.
I had some success with medications that could interrupt the headache, but they would knock me out for a day and make me depressed, so that wasn't a great solution either.
This work interested me so much because it had to do with the underlying causes. Since I've been engaged in this work on this program, I've had a 96% reduction in incidences of migraine headaches.