What to Do After Years of Symptoms and No Answers | 189

Welcome back to Follow Your Gut. I'm Juniper, founder of ōNLē, and today we are talking about what to do when you've had years of symptoms and no real answers. This is really the heart of what we do here. Learning to stop seeing symptoms as random and start understanding the body through the lens of the gut.

We live in a really ironic time. Maybe you've been struggling for years to figure out your own symptoms or your child's symptoms. But every answer that you've received from a professional, it feels partial. It's more confusing. It feels very temporary. It's not enough. And then you go online, you look at social media, and you're inundated with the next trendy thing to try. 

This feels especially vulnerable when you're looking to heal your child symptoms. Maybe you've done all the lab work, and I'm saying this in quotations, all of the results, you look normal. Your child looks normal. Great job. But you know something's not right. Maybe you've cut all different kinds of food groups out. You've tried every elimination diet. You've added things in, you've tried different supplements and protocols and detoxes, maybe prescription medications.

Maybe you have been to practitioner after practitioner. You've spent countless hours searching late at night. You've been in Facebook groups and reading comment threads and saving posts and comparing symptoms. Maybe that's even how you found your way here. I see you and I know very dearly what you've been carrying.

Whether you're here for yourself or for your child, maybe you've been experiencing stomach aches or constipation or chronic diarrhea, mucosy or maybe even blood in the poop, eczema or skin flares, food sensitivities, picky eating, behavioral shifts, sleep struggles, anxiety or mood changes, constant congestion, immune issues, maybe.

You just don't feel right in your body. Something feels off. Maybe you can just tell your child isn't behaving or isn't feeling like who they really are. And when it is your child, the searching takes on a whole different weight because you're not just trying to feel better. You're trying to help them feel safe and well in their body too. And we live in a culture that doesn't always nurture that safety.

Instead, the focus of our culture is what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong. And symptoms are so often something wrong with you, wrong with your child. Symptoms are actually a beautiful gift. Symptoms are the body communicating that it needs help on a deep level.

But as time goes on and you see so many different professionals and you're brushed under the rug, or at best you're handed a prescription for a medication that's only going to mask the symptom. And maybe you accept it. There's no shame in that. You're doing your absolute best, but then the symptom jumps, it becomes something different.

After enough time, you start to question yourself. You wonder if you're overreacting, if you're making it up. You're wondering if maybe it's just your normal or your child's normal or just how it's gonna be. You wonder if maybe everyone is this tired, or maybe everyone feels bloated. Maybe every kid has stomach aches or skin issues or tremendous meltdowns. Maybe this is just everyone's life.

And when you've tried so many things without feeling better, without truly healing, it's really easy to stop trusting your body, to stop trusting yourself altogether as a woman and as a mother.

But what if nothing has actually gone wrong? What if your body isn't failing you? What if your child's body isn't broken? What if these symptoms aren't proof that something is wrong, but proof that the body is communicating.

Maybe the issue isn't that your body or your child's body has been speaking. The issue is that no one has given you the right map to understand what it's been saying.

I know this feeling deeply because I lived in it for years. My child was born with the longest list of symptoms, from colic to reflux to eczema, really sour-smelling poops that were often full of mucus, or as he started eating solid foods, chunks of undigested food. Sometimes his poops had blood in them.

He literally breastfed around the clock. It wasn't only his deepest comfort. His body wasn't absorbing nutrients.

As he moved into toddler years, he had this fire of anger in his eyes. The most explosive behavioral meltdowns. You could see that he was intentionally doing things to defy me and my husband and his sister. And Over the course of his first two and a half years of life, I took him to 17 different healthcare professionals. I was constantly trying to connect the dots. In the rare hours where he slept, I was researching. I was desperate to find answers because every healthcare professional told me, this is just how boys are, or this is just new. You're just a new mom. You're worrying too much. This will pass.

He'll outgrow it. Or at best, they gave me a prescription for a steroid cream or a reflux medication. At one point we landed in an allergist where he tested severely allergic to nine different foods. And even though we strictly eliminated all nine of those completely from our entire household, his symptoms didn't get better.

I was constantly searching for answers. His symptoms consumed me for those two and a half years. I remember those dreadful nights sitting on the cold tile floor of my bathroom sobbing because I knew our life could be better. I knew I was going to lose my son if we didn't heal him. His symptoms kept stacking one on top of another, and they were getting worse and worse. And he stopped looking at me in the eyes and he was shutting down and no one was taking me serious. My marriage was completely on the rocks.

My husband couldn't understand why I didn't accept the little bit of help that the professionals did offer, which was the prescriptions for steroid creams or antacids or mirroracs.

For him, those were answers. But for me, my intuition was screaming at me. The that there was a root issue, something deeper than the symptoms was happening, something was going on, and that those prescriptions were only going to exacerbate the deeper root. So I kept digging.

But eventually I started to question myself because when symptoms are present and slowly stack over time, Your brain tries to normalize it. You normalize being tired, you normalize digestive issues, you normalize needing caffeine or feeling inflamed, you normalize skin issues. Poor sleep, mood swings. You normalize your child's symptoms because they become part of your daily life. And when you don't have a clear path to follow, when you've tried so many things, it can feel easier to surrender by normalizing the symptom than continuing to seek help. And then one day you realize. It's not okay. You hit a rock bottom. Your child has a tantrum, or you see a symptom in them, or it just gets so bad that you remember, okay, this isn't normal. This cannot be how we are supposed to live our life.

Right now, I want to lovingly challenge you here. At some point, when symptoms became normal, we stop expecting to feel good. We stop expecting to wake up with clear thoughts and feeling alive in our bodies. We stop expecting.

Our digestion to feel easy. We stop expecting our skin to be clear and radiant. We stop expecting our energy to last. We stop expecting our children to feel and show up regulated, comfortable, and at ease in their bodies. Instead, we start managing.

So, what do you do when you're in this situation? The first thing that you need to understand is that your body doesn't work in separate rooms. Your body isn't segmented. It's all connected. Your skin isn't disconnected from the rest of your body, your hormones or your nervous system, your mood, your food cravings, your child's eczema, their sour smelling poops, or their chronic diarrhea or constipation.

It's not all separate. It's all connected to the very root of the body, your gut.

But the reason that you find yourself here is because we live in a medical society that medicates. They medicate when you have a skin issue. They medicate when you're not sleeping. They medicate when your mood feels off, or your hormones are dysregulated, or you're bloated, or you're experiencing constipation. Medicate, medicate, medicate. The focus isn't on healing. And so no wonder.

It took me two and a half years to get to the bottom of it for my son. No wonder you or your child have been struggling for so long because we live in a culture that is designed to medicate each symptom individually and not actually heal the body as the one whole ecosystem that it is.

The medication, it may bring temporary relief. And sometimes relief matters. There is no shame if you have taken medication. If you are on 10 medications right now, or if you've tried the longest list of medications for your child, there is absolutely no shame. You have done your absolute best, but if we only look at one symptom at a time, we're gonna miss the deeper pattern that's underneath it.

This is why so many women feel exhausted trying to heal. Because they're managing fragments instead of understanding the full picture. This is why I was utterly depleted. Every doctor I went to, are you sure this head-to-toe rash is not connected to his allergies? Nope. Nope. Are you sure that?

These behavioral issues that we're seeing, it's not connected to these unhealthy poops. Nope. Nope. And they would hyperfixate on whatever symptom they seemed to think was the most severe, which always ended with his skin because it's visual, because you can see it. And so every single professional would send me away with a prescription for a steroid cream.

It even got to a point where I had multiple f professionals tell me that it was ⁓ me, it was my fault, it was my milk. He was having a reaction to my milk. Okay, well what can I change in my diet? No, not the food that you're eating in your diet, your milk. I was the problem.

If you're experiencing this, you are 100% absolutely not the problem. Your milk is specifically designed for your child. You are not the problem.

So I want to ask you what if the symptoms that you're seeing, what if they're not random? What if your body has been communicating very clearly with you this entire time? Your symptoms are not your body betraying you, they are communication. The goal in healing is not to shame the symptom.

The goal is to understand the message. The symptom has never been the problem. The symptom has always been a form of communication of your body asking you for help.

Now I'll tell you, most people find their way here to the podcast not knowing the depths of our gut and how significant it is to our entire body and how an imbalance in our gut can show up as any one of these symptoms that we've talked about.

I was the same way. I always assumed my gut was healthy. I pooped regularly, so I never paused to consider if my gut was anything but healthy.

But gut health is so much more than whether or not you go to the bathroom every day. Your gut influences your immune system. 70 to 80% of your immune system actually resides in your gut. So if you have a gut imbalance, which unfortunately most people do, your immune system is greatly compromised. Your gut directly influences your skin, your energy, your nervous system, your hormones. how optimally your body is able to absorb nutrients. It directly influences your mood, your food cravings, inflammation levels, your brain function, your bowel movements. your resilience to stress, how your child regulates, how they eliminate, how their skin responds, how their immune system functions. This is why supporting the gut really creates a shift in places you may not have expected. Not because it's magic, because the body is all one interconnected, beautiful ecosystem.

Okay, so your symptoms or your child's symptoms are rooted in your gut. What do you do with this information? First, I want you to take a big breath because this clarity is the most powerful component to your healing. Your healing can actually begin now. I don't want you to go panic buying another supplement or start another extreme protocol. You don't need to overhaul your entire life overnight. You don't need to add 10 more things to your child's routine or stop all of the prescription medications.

You don't need to spend another long restless night spiraling through Google searches and Facebook groups though.

This is the work. Clarity is the first step. Once you're able to connect the pieces, once you have this knowledge of, ⁓ my gosh, are you kidding me? My child has all of these allergies, or I have the most severe seasonal allergies, or this autoimmune disease, or this toenail fungus, or why do I keep getting yeast infections?

You're connecting the pieces in your life. You're connecting all of the symptoms back to the one root issue. Because remember, your symptoms, they're not the problem. Our culture demonizes symptoms. Symptoms are wrong. No, symptoms are beautiful. I invite you to give your body the most tremendous loving hug. Look at how well she's taking care of you. Look at how beautiful.

She's been trying to ask you for help and now you get to listen. I want you to hug your child so tightly and tell them how strong and brilliant and resilient their body is and that they're going to heal. You have the answers now.

Because healing is not just about having fewer symptoms. It's about feeling alive again. It's about waking up with so much clarity and purpose and passion. It's about trusting your body. It's about feeling calm in your skin. It's about having energy that doesn't feel borrowed. It's about watching your child feel so happy and comfortable and radiant in their body. It's about seeing them regulated and nourished, rested, and able to enjoy being a child. It's about not living in constant reaction mode. Healing is about coming back into relationship with the body, yours and your child's.

This is the reason I created onle because after spending years in survival mode watching my son suffer and finally learning that all of his symptoms were connected to his gut and then how to actually heal his body by healing his gut, I knew I needed to share this.

No one knows.

That they have a gut issue. They see the symptom that they are experiencing and they want to heal the symptom. You can try and try and try and spin all the wheels in your house, and you're gonna keep ending back up right where you are if you don't go straight to the root. Trust me, I tried over and over and over again. Once I had this clarity.

I had to share it because, as women, we are inundated with noise. I wanted to share the simplicity, the connection, the framework that makes sense for your body as a whole. You don't need 20 random products. You don't need fear-based wellness. You don't need more confusion. You need a clear starting point.

Which is exactly why we've just rebuilt our quiz because Your situation is unique. Your child's symptoms are unique. Your healing journey is unique. So the quiz gathers what's actually going on, what you're noticing, what keeps repeating, what life stage you're in, and then gives you custom recommendations based on your experience. It's a simple place to begin when you are tired of guessing.

If there's one thing I hope you take from this episode, it's this. Symptoms are not the body betraying you. They are communication. Your body has been speaking to you.

Now you finally have the awareness so that you can listen differently.