February 7, 2025 • 12 mins
In this episode, I dive deeper into my personal health journey, sharing insights about taking control of my health, understanding my body, and learning how connected our bodily processes are. I also discuss the transformative role of trauma therapy in my healing process and I share the importance of questioning symptoms, the impact of the MTHFR genetic mutation on my health, and why I strive for harmony over balance in life. Join me as I reveal how holistic self-care, flexible priorities, and creativity contribute to my well-being.
00:00 Introduction
00:11 Discovering the Impact of Lifestyle Choices
00:56 The Role of Trauma Therapy
01:34 Future Chats with Madeline
03:01 Treating Symptoms vs. Root Cause
10:43 The Concept of Balance in Healing
13:07 Striving for Harmony Over Balance
16:46 Conclusion and Gratitude
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Golden Girl, a space where we dive deep into health, healing, connection, and
(00:06):
community.
I'm your host, Becca Golden, and this podcast is all about sharing and documenting my journey.
Each episode, we'll discuss topics like health and wellness, what I'm learning in therapy,
work-life balance, relationships, community, and all the ways I strive for more aliveness
and presence every day.
Let's dive in.
(00:28):
Now that I've recorded the entire episode of my health journey, we can start to dive
into more detail, but I did want to clear up some things about the way that I'm planning
to do the podcast.
A huge part of my healing process involved me taking my health into my own hands and
really discovering so much about my body that I didn't know I had the ability to affect.
(00:53):
There were different lifestyle choices and behaviors that I had no idea were impacting
my health as a whole.
Obviously, I'm not a doctor.
I don't have any medical qualifications.
I'm just a person with a body.
So all this information is just what I have learned as someone without medical training
and I don't think you should have to have a medical degree to understand how to support
(01:17):
your body.
So for a lot of the episodes, I want to focus on the different things that I've learned
about my body and how to support it, but a huge part of my health journey was also trauma
therapy.
I'm still going to trauma therapy.
I get so much out of it and it's not because anything horrible has happened to me in my
life.
I haven't had any specific traumatic event that I'm having to unpack.
(01:40):
It's really just the way that my body perceives stressors in my environment has influenced
so much of the way I experienced the world around me and I'm unlearning a lot of behaviors
that just weren't helpful for me.
So because that element was so important to my healing process, I want to incorporate
(02:00):
that into the podcast as well.
My friend Madeline, who is in episode two with me, she comes over a lot and we have
good conversations about various things in life.
And so some of the episodes are just me chatting with Madeline and there won't be a lot of
structure to them.
But in those conversations, I'm unpacking the ways that I'm practicing these lessons
(02:23):
that I've been learning in trauma therapy.
Madeline's experience is so different from mine.
And so it's kind of cool to hear us talk about the ways that we are so different and how
we navigate life.
All right.
So to begin, for the majority of my life, I don't think I questioned where my symptoms
were coming from or what was causing them.
(02:45):
There is absolutely no shame in wanting to treat your symptoms and make your symptoms
go away.
But for me personally, I also want to understand what's causing my symptoms.
On my health journey, I was striving to find answers because my natural curiosity, like
I just want to understand.
And so if you are having symptoms, it's your body's way of communicating with you.
(03:07):
But I never really thought of my body as a connected thing.
I used to think of my body as having all these processes in it and every process works, however
it works.
But I never thought about how your body is a group of connected processes.
In my head, all these processes were so segmented and unrelated to each other.
(03:31):
Any ailment that I had, I would just immediately take whatever remedy would make that symptom
go away.
And I never used to ask a lot of questions about it.
But I'm now starting to ask more questions and simple behaviors could be influencing
your bodily processes without you even knowing.
But it's like, we never learned that.
Nobody ever teaches you that.
(03:51):
What I've learned is that your body is connected.
Every bodily process in your human body is connected.
And the reason it's called a body is because it's connected.
When you think of a body of water or a body of work, it's a collection of things that
are all connected.
A body of water is one flowing connected thing.
(04:14):
And your human body is like that too.
And I never thought about this stuff that way before.
I've always had lots of different health symptoms, but I never thought about them as
being connected.
And then over the course of my health journey, I started to hypothesize that everything was
connected.
I have this genetic mutation.
It's called MTHFR.
(04:35):
It stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase.
And it's a really common genetic mutation.
I found out I had this genetic mutation in 2014 when I was looking into getting a breast
reduction.
And before I did that surgery as part of my due diligence, I went to an endocrinologist
and got all my hormone levels checked.
And she flagged that I had this genetic mutation.
(04:57):
As soon as I found that out, I started taking a methylated form of vitamin B and folate.
And I stopped getting sick as much.
It changed so much about my health because before that, I felt incredibly fragile.
And that is a part of my health and healing story is that I have this genetic mutation
that makes my body less efficient at detoxing.
(05:18):
And so knowing that I had that genetic mutation definitely opened my eyes to the fact that
you can have a foundational part of your bodily processes that impacts so many other things
in your body.
Each process within your body is not happening on its own.
It impacts everything.
Every single thing you do in your day to day life actually impacts the way that your body
(05:41):
works, whether it's your toxic burden that you're trying to detox on a regular basis,
whether it's your tolerance for stress, your energy levels, it can really be anything.
But that works both ways.
That means that if you do something that's harmful to your body, it's going to cascade
throughout.
But that also means that if you do something that's helpful for your body, it's going to
(06:03):
cascade throughout.
Your body is so connected.
And so for anybody to say that they can get to your root cause, it feels like a lie to
me because I think there is no one root cause.
I was so desperate to decide what was the root cause.
And at first I was like, oh, it's my birth control is the problem.
(06:24):
Then I thought it was trauma.
Then I thought it was my hormones.
Then I thought it was mold that was the problem.
And I'm not here to say that any one of those things wasn't the problem.
I think they were all contributing to the ultimate picture of my health.
But I could not in good conscience say that mold was the root cause of my problems.
(06:45):
There are so many foundational elements.
I'm in a particularly fragile place right now with my health.
And so I'm making it my full-time job to take care of my health and body and well-being.
It's a lot of work and a lot of time.
And treating any one of these root causes is not going to fix everything.
(07:06):
You have to treat your body like it is a full connected body because all of your processes
are connected.
So the last point that I wanted to make was about balance.
I think a lot of people are striving for balance in their lives.
And honestly, the idea of balance doesn't appeal to me because I hate routine.
(07:29):
I hate repetition.
I hate anything that has to do with the mundane.
It feels lifeless to me.
Like responsibilities and being consistent and showing up every day.
The idea of balance sounds like a punishment.
I'm the type of person.
I'm so creative.
I have to be creating.
(07:49):
I need to have fluidity.
I need flexibility.
I need a dynamic life.
I do not want things that are repetitive and boring.
Like that makes me feel crushed by life.
I have to have spontaneity and creativity.
I need to have some kind of flowy aspect to things.
And the idea of balance makes me think of a pie chart with even slices of pie.
(08:16):
And that makes me filled with hatred.
People talk about balance all the time.
And why would you want that?
If you think of this pie chart of life, let's say one of the pie slices is financial health
and another pie slice is family and relationships.
Another slice is your health.
So finances, family and relationships, and then your health.
(08:39):
I don't want those three things to be in balance all the time because I'm not a balanced person.
I am an extremes person.
I'm all or nothing.
I'm in or out.
I commit to whatever it is or I don't do it.
And I love that about myself.
That's a really fun part of life for me.
I would hate to have everything be in balance all the time.
(09:00):
For me, the idea of harmony is way more appealing because harmony implies flexibility.
If I'm striving for balance, that means that your finances, your family and relationships
and your health are all going to have equal importance.
And you're going to spend time equally in each area.
That just doesn't sound practical to me.
(09:21):
So for me, what I strive for instead of balance, I strive for harmony.
And that means that at different times in my life, I'm going to have different importance
placed on each pie within the pie chart.
Sometimes I might have all of my focus on my finances.
And I think a lot of us have been there.
There's certainly been times in my life where I put all of my time and energy into my finances
(09:43):
because I didn't have any money, I was broke.
So in order to make money, I put all of my time and energy into the finance category.
And everything else came second.
I certainly sacrificed my health for my finances for many years.
I don't even think my health was part of the pie chart for most of my life.
And right now, my health is taking up a lot of the pie chart.
(10:04):
And within that health category, I have creative goals.
I have spiritual goals.
Like there are things that I do for supporting my well-being.
The creativity is a huge part of my pie chart right now.
And if I neglect that aspect of my pie chart, then all of my health goals are going to crumble.
(10:24):
And right now, the way that I can support my well-being is by putting tons of focus
on my health.
I have limited energy and I want to dedicate all of that energy to my health right now.
So maybe that means my social life is not a huge priority.
And maybe that means that work is a lot less of a priority than it used to be.
But I want to have that kind of flexibility in my priorities.
(10:48):
I don't want to strive for balance.
What I want to strive for is flexibility to adapt to whatever demands my life has for
me at the moment.
So harmony means supporting each area of your life at the time that it makes sense to support
that area and giving it the attention that it needs at that time so that you have the
(11:09):
bandwidth, whether it's physical bandwidth, emotional, spiritual bandwidth, whatever it
is, so that you have that bandwidth to show up in the other areas of your life.
And over time, eventually, when I become more resilient, my creative endeavors are going
to make me show up better in my other endeavors.
So if this podcast continues to bring me so much healing and purpose, then maybe I'm
(11:33):
going to show up as a better employee in my job at work.
And maybe I'm going to show up as a better sister.
Maybe I'll show up as a better friend because the podcast is giving me this outlet of healing
and creativity and purpose and connection with other people, which helps make me a better
person.
So I strive for harmony, which means that all the things that I spend my time on make
(11:56):
me a more grounded and recharged person so that I can better show up in all the other
areas of my life.
So that's it for today's episode.
I'm having so much fun with the podcast.
And I hope you continue tuning in because I'm having a great time and it's been very healing
for me.
So make sure to like, subscribe, follow, share, do whatever it is that you want to do to show
(12:20):
your support.
I really appreciate you listening and continuing to be a part of my journey.
I'll see you next time.
Welcome to Golden Girl, a space where we dive deep into health, healing, connection, and
(00:06):
community.
I'm your host, Becca Golden, and this podcast is all about sharing and documenting my journey.
Each episode, we'll discuss topics like health and wellness, what I'm learning in therapy,
work-life balance, relationships, community, and all the ways I strive for more aliveness
and presence every day.
Let's dive in.
(00:28):
Now that I've recorded the entire episode of my health journey, we can start to dive
into more detail, but I did want to clear up some things about the way that I'm planning
to do the podcast.
A huge part of my healing process involved me taking my health into my own hands and
really discovering so much about my body that I didn't know I had the ability to affect.
(00:53):
There were different lifestyle choices and behaviors that I had no idea were impacting
my health as a whole.
Obviously, I'm not a doctor.
I don't have any medical qualifications.
I'm just a person with a body.
So all this information is just what I have learned as someone without medical training
and I don't think you should have to have a medical degree to understand how to support
(01:17):
your body.
So for a lot of the episodes, I want to focus on the different things that I've learned
about my body and how to support it, but a huge part of my health journey was also trauma
therapy.
I'm still going to trauma therapy.
I get so much out of it and it's not because anything horrible has happened to me in my
life.
I haven't had any specific traumatic event that I'm having to unpack.
(01:40):
It's really just the way that my body perceives stressors in my environment has influenced
so much of the way I experienced the world around me and I'm unlearning a lot of behaviors
that just weren't helpful for me.
So because that element was so important to my healing process, I want to incorporate
(02:00):
that into the podcast as well.
My friend Madeline, who is in episode two with me, she comes over a lot and we have
good conversations about various things in life.
And so some of the episodes are just me chatting with Madeline and there won't be a lot of
structure to them.
But in those conversations, I'm unpacking the ways that I'm practicing these lessons
(02:23):
that I've been learning in trauma therapy.
Madeline's experience is so different from mine.
And so it's kind of cool to hear us talk about the ways that we are so different and how
we navigate life.
All right.
So to begin, for the majority of my life, I don't think I questioned where my symptoms
were coming from or what was causing them.
(02:45):
There is absolutely no shame in wanting to treat your symptoms and make your symptoms
go away.
But for me personally, I also want to understand what's causing my symptoms.
On my health journey, I was striving to find answers because my natural curiosity, like
I just want to understand.
And so if you are having symptoms, it's your body's way of communicating with you.
(03:07):
But I never really thought of my body as a connected thing.
I used to think of my body as having all these processes in it and every process works, however
it works.
But I never thought about how your body is a group of connected processes.
In my head, all these processes were so segmented and unrelated to each other.
(03:31):
Any ailment that I had, I would just immediately take whatever remedy would make that symptom
go away.
And I never used to ask a lot of questions about it.
But I'm now starting to ask more questions and simple behaviors could be influencing
your bodily processes without you even knowing.
But it's like, we never learned that.
Nobody ever teaches you that.
(03:51):
What I've learned is that your body is connected.
Every bodily process in your human body is connected.
And the reason it's called a body is because it's connected.
When you think of a body of water or a body of work, it's a collection of things that
are all connected.
A body of water is one flowing connected thing.
(04:14):
And your human body is like that too.
And I never thought about this stuff that way before.
I've always had lots of different health symptoms, but I never thought about them as
being connected.
And then over the course of my health journey, I started to hypothesize that everything was
connected.
I have this genetic mutation.
It's called MTHFR.
(04:35):
It stands for methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase.
And it's a really common genetic mutation.
I found out I had this genetic mutation in 2014 when I was looking into getting a breast
reduction.
And before I did that surgery as part of my due diligence, I went to an endocrinologist
and got all my hormone levels checked.
And she flagged that I had this genetic mutation.
(04:57):
As soon as I found that out, I started taking a methylated form of vitamin B and folate.
And I stopped getting sick as much.
It changed so much about my health because before that, I felt incredibly fragile.
And that is a part of my health and healing story is that I have this genetic mutation
that makes my body less efficient at detoxing.
(05:18):
And so knowing that I had that genetic mutation definitely opened my eyes to the fact that
you can have a foundational part of your bodily processes that impacts so many other things
in your body.
Each process within your body is not happening on its own.
It impacts everything.
Every single thing you do in your day to day life actually impacts the way that your body
(05:41):
works, whether it's your toxic burden that you're trying to detox on a regular basis,
whether it's your tolerance for stress, your energy levels, it can really be anything.
But that works both ways.
That means that if you do something that's harmful to your body, it's going to cascade
throughout.
But that also means that if you do something that's helpful for your body, it's going to
(06:03):
cascade throughout.
Your body is so connected.
And so for anybody to say that they can get to your root cause, it feels like a lie to
me because I think there is no one root cause.
I was so desperate to decide what was the root cause.
And at first I was like, oh, it's my birth control is the problem.
(06:24):
Then I thought it was trauma.
Then I thought it was my hormones.
Then I thought it was mold that was the problem.
And I'm not here to say that any one of those things wasn't the problem.
I think they were all contributing to the ultimate picture of my health.
But I could not in good conscience say that mold was the root cause of my problems.
(06:45):
There are so many foundational elements.
I'm in a particularly fragile place right now with my health.
And so I'm making it my full-time job to take care of my health and body and well-being.
It's a lot of work and a lot of time.
And treating any one of these root causes is not going to fix everything.
(07:06):
You have to treat your body like it is a full connected body because all of your processes
are connected.
So the last point that I wanted to make was about balance.
I think a lot of people are striving for balance in their lives.
And honestly, the idea of balance doesn't appeal to me because I hate routine.
(07:29):
I hate repetition.
I hate anything that has to do with the mundane.
It feels lifeless to me.
Like responsibilities and being consistent and showing up every day.
The idea of balance sounds like a punishment.
I'm the type of person.
I'm so creative.
I have to be creating.
(07:49):
I need to have fluidity.
I need flexibility.
I need a dynamic life.
I do not want things that are repetitive and boring.
Like that makes me feel crushed by life.
I have to have spontaneity and creativity.
I need to have some kind of flowy aspect to things.
And the idea of balance makes me think of a pie chart with even slices of pie.
(08:16):
And that makes me filled with hatred.
People talk about balance all the time.
And why would you want that?
If you think of this pie chart of life, let's say one of the pie slices is financial health
and another pie slice is family and relationships.
Another slice is your health.
So finances, family and relationships, and then your health.
(08:39):
I don't want those three things to be in balance all the time because I'm not a balanced person.
I am an extremes person.
I'm all or nothing.
I'm in or out.
I commit to whatever it is or I don't do it.
And I love that about myself.
That's a really fun part of life for me.
I would hate to have everything be in balance all the time.
(09:00):
For me, the idea of harmony is way more appealing because harmony implies flexibility.
If I'm striving for balance, that means that your finances, your family and relationships
and your health are all going to have equal importance.
And you're going to spend time equally in each area.
That just doesn't sound practical to me.
(09:21):
So for me, what I strive for instead of balance, I strive for harmony.
And that means that at different times in my life, I'm going to have different importance
placed on each pie within the pie chart.
Sometimes I might have all of my focus on my finances.
And I think a lot of us have been there.
There's certainly been times in my life where I put all of my time and energy into my finances
(09:43):
because I didn't have any money, I was broke.
So in order to make money, I put all of my time and energy into the finance category.
And everything else came second.
I certainly sacrificed my health for my finances for many years.
I don't even think my health was part of the pie chart for most of my life.
And right now, my health is taking up a lot of the pie chart.
(10:04):
And within that health category, I have creative goals.
I have spiritual goals.
Like there are things that I do for supporting my well-being.
The creativity is a huge part of my pie chart right now.
And if I neglect that aspect of my pie chart, then all of my health goals are going to crumble.
(10:24):
And right now, the way that I can support my well-being is by putting tons of focus
on my health.
I have limited energy and I want to dedicate all of that energy to my health right now.
So maybe that means my social life is not a huge priority.
And maybe that means that work is a lot less of a priority than it used to be.
But I want to have that kind of flexibility in my priorities.
(10:48):
I don't want to strive for balance.
What I want to strive for is flexibility to adapt to whatever demands my life has for
me at the moment.
So harmony means supporting each area of your life at the time that it makes sense to support
that area and giving it the attention that it needs at that time so that you have the
(11:09):
bandwidth, whether it's physical bandwidth, emotional, spiritual bandwidth, whatever it
is, so that you have that bandwidth to show up in the other areas of your life.
And over time, eventually, when I become more resilient, my creative endeavors are going
to make me show up better in my other endeavors.
So if this podcast continues to bring me so much healing and purpose, then maybe I'm
(11:33):
going to show up as a better employee in my job at work.
And maybe I'm going to show up as a better sister.
Maybe I'll show up as a better friend because the podcast is giving me this outlet of healing
and creativity and purpose and connection with other people, which helps make me a better
person.
So I strive for harmony, which means that all the things that I spend my time on make
(11:56):
me a more grounded and recharged person so that I can better show up in all the other
areas of my life.
So that's it for today's episode.
I'm having so much fun with the podcast.
And I hope you continue tuning in because I'm having a great time and it's been very healing
for me.
So make sure to like, subscribe, follow, share, do whatever it is that you want to do to show
(12:20):
your support.
I really appreciate you listening and continuing to be a part of my journey.
I'll see you next time.
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