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Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.
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Katie: Hello, and welcome to the Wellness Mama podcast. I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com, and this is the first episode I’ve gotten to do with a mother and daughter duo. And I’ve had Lauren, who’s the daughter in this conversation on before to talk about her amazing health journey and the work that she does now. And in this conversation, we bring in her mom as well to give a mother’s perspective on navigating childhood illness and recovery, how she was able to follow her intuition, even when there weren’t as many resources available for researching as there are now, and so much more. So Marsha Vaknine was just 30 when her not-yet-two-year-old Lauren was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. And at a time before the internet, she leaned into treating Lauren holistically alongside conventional treatments. And this decision took them on a long journey that allowed Lauren to eventually fully recover. And it’s quite the incredible story. We hear from Marsha and also Lauren in this episode, who is Lauren’s now a leading master holistic health and life coach, a wellness educator, and a writer, speaker and host of the popular podcast, Reconditioned, and is a mom as well. She’s one of the leading voices of wellness in the UK. And she uses her experience from her three-decade-long journey of healing to help many other people as well. So like I said, first time I’ve gotten to have a mom and daughter on together. I very much enjoyed this conversation. So let’s join Lauren and Marsha now. Lauren and Marsha, welcome. Thank you for being here.
Marsha: Lovely you invited us.
Katie: Well, this is super exciting because you are the first mother-daughter duo that I have ever gotten to interview together. And I think this is going to be such a helpful conversation because you guys have both navigated some incredible parts of your journey and of course navigated that together. And I think there’ll be a lot of inspiring parts of that story that will resonate with a lot of moms who may, maybe have children navigating different but similar circumstances or just moms who are navigating anything related to their children’s health.
So I know Lauren, you’ve been on before. We had incredible conversations and I’ll link to those in the show notes. But for this episode, for context, I would love to start the story, Marsha, from your perspective and hear what that was like, maybe even before Lauren’s early childhood memories of what that diagnosis and what your journey with her looked like.
Marsha: So it all started when I saw a swelling. And she’d been at a child-minder because I was at work full time. And when I got home and I saw her ankle, it was very hot, very swollen. I thought she’d knocked it. I called the child minder and, you know, I asked her if she’d been playing and fallen or knocked it and she said no, not that she was aware of. And I left it over the weekend to see how or if it improved and it did not. So I made an appointment at the time. We had an amazing GP, general practitioner, who was really good. I went to see him, made an appointment, went to see him. And he just touched her ankle, which was still hot, very swollen. And we went, he’d sent her straight away to the orthopedic hospital. So that kind of it went from there. That’s how it all started and how she was diagnosed. So that was the story from the very beginning. And she wasn’t quite two.
Katie: And that had to be, as a mom, such an intense and probably scary time, especially when your child is not able to fully communicate or explain things yet. And just that sort of helpless feeling of knowing something’s wrong with your little one and wanting so badly to just resolve whatever it is. I can also know from hearing Lauren’s story that this was like quite a winding journey with a lot of specialists and a lot of recommendations that it sounds like you were very in touch with your mother’s intuition from the very beginning, which I think is something that all of us have as moms, but often don’t necessarily pay attention to. Does anything stand out to you in what made you able to really listen to your intuition and to figure out what was best?
Marsha: Yeah, I mean, it was always, and I’ve always said this, it was a gut instinct. And when I took her to the GP, he actually said something that always very much resonated with me and that always stuck with me. And I said it to like, you know, so many mums since that journey started, always go with that gut instinct. Because he actually said that he was talking to a student and he said to the student, the mum always knows better than you will ever know. And it’s so true. You don’t know how you’re going to do it or how you’re going to cope with it. But you do know inside something that very strong gut feeling is okay, so where do I go from here?
Lauren: I think also like something to mention was that, you know, from our conversations over the years, that you also knew it was more than growing pains. You had that gut instinct that it was something else, that it wasn’t just. You knew it was something kind of chronic or systemic, even though you didn’t have that terminology at the time. And I think that’s why you kept on just to get the diagnosis, which we then did get the diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis quite quickly after that.
Katie: And Lauren, from your perspective, I know you told this in our interviews together, but this certainly throughout your childhood, this was something that was kind of like a big part of your life experience and that you struggled with a lot. And I believe you said in the first episode, at one point you were even essentially like in a wheelchair from the intensity of that.
I would love to hear a little bit about what that was like navigating from a child perspective. And then also, Marsha, from you, I would love to hear kind of what was recommended by the medical institutions at that point that you said no to or which things you said yes to. It seems like you were like far ahead of your time in researching alternative things and understanding that there might be other ways to support her body than just the conventional methods.
Lauren: I’ll let mum go first because the wheelchair came later. So actually I’ll let her take that and then I’ll go on to that after.
Marsha: Okay. So I think this is, you know, and I think every mother’s going to feel that, you know, so when we were given the diagnosis of JRA, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, you think, well, although they’ve said juvenile, only old people get this. It was the most terrible. Whatever illness you’re told your child has, whatever it is, is going to be, it’s going to have a big effect on you and the whole family. Okay, but where do we go from here?
And I think how if you’re open and things are sent to you and you accept them, and it started with herbal and then went on to homeopathy. But I was standing out, I went to a shop that sold ice stuff, like Iceland here in England. And I was standing outside, and next door, that shop was a big, massive sign that I’d never seen before. And I’d been to this shop many, many times. And it said the Edgware Center for Natural Health. And I could smell all these weird smells. And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. I’ll go in there. And I did. And there was an amazing herbalist there. I burst into tears. He started asking me what was wrong, et cetera. And I sat down. He made me a cup of tea, a cup of herbal tea. And I started talking. So that’s how it kind of started. So it started with herbal remedies and then we went to homeopathy and healing and various sorts of therapies.
Lauren: I want to take Katie through what, first of all obviously the hospital were recommending certain things and so that kind of came after so the hospital were recommending things and you didn’t feel that was right so then you went so do you want to take it well.
Marsha: The only the only recommendations at that time 40 years ago, or 38 years ago were very high dose steroids and I didn’t even know what steroids were, you know, really didn’t know what they were. I’d never come across steroids or with family or anything else. And I went to the library and I looked up what are steroids. And when I read about them, I just thought, no, I can’t, I just can’t put this in my child. You know, listen, they might help other kids, and I’m sure that they do, or people or whatever. But for me, having read actually what these long, I didn’t know, so this is the thing. I didn’t know, was she going to have this condition for a month, for a year, for a lifetime? We didn’t know that. At the very beginning, the doctor said that she had palsy arthritis, which means in one or up to three joints. And it could burn itself out. But they weren’t definite that it would, you know. So basically it was, okay, I’m not going to give her this steroid stuff, whatever it is they want to give her. What am I going to do? So that was really what it was about. What am I going to do?
Katie: And that’s amazing because you were navigating this in the age before Google or online support communities or access to Reddit threads of people who had had similar experiences. So you were really actually delving into research, finding written resources, and then being able to trust your intuition. And I wonder if now maybe it’s a double-edged sword of we have access to the entirety of information on the internet, which can help us find resources we wouldn’t have found before. But I also wonder if that makes it sometimes harder to listen to our intuition when we have so much competing for that attention and so much information at our fingertips.
Marsha: I think I’d definitely go with you on that one because I was listening to whatever messages were being sent to me from wherever they were being sent to me or whatever was directed to me. And, you know, various sort of kind of spiritual things happened. I have to say that because they did. You know, my husband was worked in markets selling clothes. And one day opposite him, when Lauren had just been diagnosed, literally, I think it was a week later, he was standing in the market.
And he was opposite a bookstore. And that guy with the books had never been there before. And he wasn’t there after that. And a book sort of jumped out. And it was, I remember it was sort of red and white. So it kind of jumped out at us. And it was, diet in arthritis for children or juveniles, something like that. And I went over to this store and I said, you know, can I can I have this book, please? And whatever I paid for it. And it was all about dieting arthritis and how you know what you shouldn’t give children. And it was all things, unfortunately, that Lauren at the time as a baby loved.
So I had to stop milk products, which she loved, you know, actually her, the strange thing was she, all that she’d loved yogurts and milk and suddenly she stopped wanting them. She wouldn’t even, I couldn’t get them near her. And afterwards I was told by a homeopathic dietician, it was because children that are so young are listening to their bodies. So she was going through, you know, but I was at a stage where you don’t have all the products you’ve gotten today. There was very, very few, you know, in the natural shops, really, I think maybe there was soya milk. And there wasn’t very much else, probably an oat milk of some kind.
Lauren: No, there was goat’s milk, wasn’t there?
Marsha: I never saw that.
Lauren: No, you used to give me like a goat’s cheese thing, but they weren’t very nice at the time.
Marsha: They were horrible, really, really horrible. Not like now.
Lauren: So this was like, this was 1986. So it was, you know, even homeopathy and herbalism and all those things were very fringe. But I think that book was what led you to seek out a homeopathic dietician, wasn’t it?
Marsha: That was the first thing, yeah.
Lauren: But I agree with you, Katie. I know that you and I both agree with this and have spoken about this, that there is often so much conflicting information. And when people ask the question, which I know is a question you get a lot, how do you know what to listen to? The answer is always check in with your gut, you know, which there’s going to be enough evidence on that side and just as much evidence on that side, you know, of conflicting arguments.
It’s like, you know, the vegan versus meat argument. There’s just as many arguments on each side. And it’s what suits your body, what suits your family, what suits your, you know, what’s your intuition telling you. And I think that that was the benefit that mum had at the time that she was just being led by intuition. However, it was still quite profound, even though there wasn’t the internet, she still had, you know, the 1980s was this massive time for, you know, trusting authority and doctors and very few people, you know, it was the age where like formula was, you know, really pushed on mums and, you know. We were really, you know, a lot more mums in the 80s specifically were going to work and, you know, really getting their careers, you know, really high-powered careers, maybe for the first time ever. And so women were really coming away from intuition. And I think that, you know, Mum just had that in her where she got that from, I don’t know that was, that was something that was divinely guided, I think, because everyone around her was telling her including the doctors, you know they told her you know that she was a bad mother and not to try this it’s all voodoo and don’t trust this.
Marsha: And your own parents you know your own parents are saying well you’ve got to do what, and in back in the day, you know, it was really very much about that. You’ve got to do what the doctors are telling you, you can’t, you know what do you think you’re doing you can’t, you can’t, but I just I just knew I couldn’t give her this stuff, so yeah.
Katie: Yeah, I think that’s so incredible. And the jokes online circulate every once in a while about a concerned mother can do better research than the FBI. But I think there’s actually some truth to it.
Marsha: So true.
Katie: There’s the added benefit of mother’s intuition that I would guess the FBI doesn’t get to take advantage of. But it really stands out to me how amazing it was that you were able to really hone your intuition and make those decisions when it went against the conventional authority. Because I say so often, and I think Lauren, in our episode, I even said, at the end of the day, we are each our own primary healthcare provider. And as moms, until our kids are old enough, we’re their primary healthcare provider.
And that doesn’t mean we don’t work with amazing practitioners as partners in that process. But I think often it’s easy to forget that we are the ones in the driver’s seat. And it’s really scary as a mom when you’re the one going against the conventional wisdom being given to you from an authority figure like a doctor, even in small ways. I hear from so many moms who maybe know the statistic that most ear infections are not caused by something that can be treated with antibiotics. And they still get nervous about going against doctor’s advice to do antibiotics, even though they know that it’s not going to be that effective. So I just think you were kind of a pioneer in that. And I have so much respect for you for being able to trust yourself and trust your research and trust your intuition, despite going against all the conventional.
I’m also curious because I have now four teenagers, soon to be five teenagers in my house. And I know that despite being raised with a good foundation of healthy habits and a clean diet, they, as teenagers, sometimes still make choices that are outside of what maybe I would pick for them. And I try to take the mindset of letting them be their own infinite autonomous beings, let them learn from those experiences and not overly control their food choices. But I’m curious for you, because it seems like the stakes would have been very high for Lauren as a teenager or throughout childhood to keep inflammation down, to really support the body nutritionally. So I’m curious if there was any kind of teenage rebellion phase and how you both navigated that.
Marsha: Big time, I mean really big time she got to a stage where, she was a teenager, and she wanted to be like everyone else. And she wasn’t quite like everyone else because, she would have you know really long periods of time when she was fantastic, but there were also periods of time when she wasn’t fantastic. And swollen, and couldn’t walk properly, and sometimes wheelchair, you know, what how it went, and she rebelled, yeah, like a lot of teenagers that don’t have any, you know, health conditions. And she rebelled big time.
And that was a very, very difficult period for us as parents. It was very difficult to navigate. And you kind of have to go with that flow. There were various, various situations where actually, you know, one time I had to, I think it’s called tough love now. And it was, it was definitely a situation of tough love. And I, and I had to really, and I’m not that sort of person, I’m very emotional, as far as my kids are concerned, you know, you’ll go to the ends of the earth, you’ll kill for them, whatever you need to do for them. But I had to be very, very tough with her. And, I mean, it could have gone the other way, really. It could have gone the other way. But I think there was just a trigger somewhere that Lauren, realized that I tried, I’d spent many, many years keeping her body as healthy as with the everything or the limited things that we had then as healthy and pure as I possibly could and she was just going like against the whole lot of it.
Lauren: Well, so I, how I dealt with that was when I got to high school, those were my best years. So I had maybe one flare up a year. So a lot of my friends wouldn’t eat, close friends did, but a lot of, I mean, my husband was in my class at school and he didn’t even know I had arthritis. So I would keep, you know, keep it from people. And my primary objective during high school was to be normal, fit in, and do everything I can to fit in. So I just stopped eating when I was 13. I just decided I was just going to stop eating. And I found it came quite easily to me, which was quite worrying as well. It’s worrying now. And that when my weight dropped, really dropped, and it took Mum a while to cotton on. And then she did. And she spoke to the school and found out I wasn’t eating at school.
And it went on for about nine months. And I would literally have like an apple and maybe some sort of like shake that I would pick up at, you know, the station, the train station on the way to school. And then one day she just sat me down and she said, you know, all this, everything we’ve tried to do to keep you healthy and now you’re ruining all of that by doing this. And I don’t know what to say about that. And it was like sometimes, I was 14. And, but even being so young, something switched in me that I was like, oh, I can’t do this. I don’t, I didn’t have the full understanding of I was doing it to control because I needed, because I’d never had control over my body. And this was something I could control, obviously. That’s something I’ve learned later in life. But I did know that it was wrong and I had to snap…
Marsha: I think it was when I cried.
Lauren: Yeah, we were sitting down on the couch together and she was telling me how she felt and she cried. And then I just felt such immense guilt from everything she’d done for me. Knowing that she had done everything and, you know, having been there, you know in my childhood witnessing her and remembering all the traumatic times I had she was there with me and there were many traumatic moments which you know we can go into if you want to talk about any of those from Mum’s perspective of you know surgeries or anything like that but that moment was definitely switched something.
But then I had another year or two when I was 17, I felt that, we knew that things were getting worse. I was really going on a downward spiral with the health. It was all coming back, and I had a condition in my eye, as well, that was connected to the arthritis called uveitis. And I was losing my sight and everything was getting really bad. And I was meant to go to performing arts school, to university. And I got in with a really bad crowd. And that felt exciting at the time because it felt dangerous. And that was what I needed. I needed distraction and, you know, danger and anything that was nothing to do with hospitals or homeopaths or herbalists or anything like that. Just, yeah, let me just get in with a bad crowd and smoke weed and do, you know, whatever I need to do to forget.
And that was a really hard time because I really put myself through some horrendous situations. And, you know, Mum had to kind of watch that happening and didn’t know how to manage that. And it was just something I had to come to the end of and, actually it was the arthritis that got so bad that I just couldn’t do that anymore, and I just then just became bed bound and that was the end of my social life. But, yeah, it was, those were really hard times and I think from the perspective of the teenager there’s not much you can do to stop a teenager going down that road. I think what we’ve learned in retrospect is to always let the teenager know that you’re there for them and that, you know, there’s no judgment and there’s no, you’re just there and you love them regardless and you’ll support them and obviously there have to be boundaries.
You know I’ve got a friend going through similar at the moment with her 15-year-old and there has to be boundaries. But I think that knowing that you if you do get into trouble, you do make a huge mistake, you can come and tell your mum and you know it could be that in that situation then everything, you’ll kind of realize what’s happening and move away from it and just kind of slowly come back to it. I felt like I wasn’t myself in that time because I was trying so hard to be something else, to escape what was happening, and I think, I just needed something to bring me back to myself.
Katie: Yeah, I think that part of the story, especially, probably can resonate with any parents and teenage experience, regardless of if they’re going through health challenges or not. And I know as a mom, that’s such a delicate time to walk through and that balance of realizing when kids are little, especially the toddler years, they look for boundaries to know and they feel safe when they find what are the boundaries of my existence. But that switches, and in the teenage years, they’re wired for autonomy. And as a mom, I can say it’s a hard transition to have done all these things for them in their life to hopefully give them a healthy foundation and then to let them slowly take the reins of that. But realizing that it has to come from their own internal motivation long-term if it’s going to stick.
But I can only imagine for you, Marsha, what that letting go process was like, because I know it’s tough for me sometimes, even without navigating the extra circumstances of a health challenge. So I’m curious what your advice would be to moms in two situations. One, have a child diagnosed with a health condition and navigating that. And then secondly, from your perspective in the teenage years, even if there’s not a health condition involved, like finding that balance of letting them have autonomy while still always making sure they know that they’re loved and having the appropriate boundaries when they’re needed.
Marsha: Well, I think, I’ll take the second thing first. When they’re teenagers, you’re navigating a very, very stormy sea. And you, as you say, you’re there. They have to know that you’re there, whatever you’re going through with them. I think when I kind of lost it because this and we’re all going to do that, you know, as much as you want to be the perfect mama, you’re going to lose it with your teenage kids. It’s just going to happen. And I, you know, at that stage where I knew this had to change. I didn’t know how I was going to change it for her. That had to come from within herself. And at that age, it’s only going to come from within you. So all the things that, you know, one had done to keep her, and I think that was what it was. I think it was when I said to her, I’ve tried everything to keep you healthy, and now you’re just destroying everything. So that was, I think that really, I think that got to you, didn’t it?
Lauren: Yeah, it was a shock.
Marsha: You know, and also…
Lauren: I hadn’t thought of that.
Marsha: I think that to get, I was actually going to throw her out the house. And that if you knew who I was, you would not believe that I could do that and that was the tough love thing because to somehow get through to her that what we had done was the right way. It might not be the right way for everyone, but I knew it was for us. So that was, I think that was when she got it, yeah.
Katie: In hindsight, if you could go back and do things differently, is there anything that you would change or any lessons you could tell your younger self that would have shortened the process? I’m a big believer kind of in that stoic idea of it couldn’t have happened any other way because it didn’t. But I’m just curious if there were like sort of key lessons looking backward that you would give as messages of like encouragement or hope to other moms who might be navigating that now.
Marsha: Well, you just, like I’ve said all along, keep going with what you believe is right. And if you are told another way, you just have a slight feeling that that may not be right for it, as I say, it could be right for another child, but not yours, just keep going with what you feel is right. And I’ve had other mums speak to me, you know, over the years, obviously. And I won’t give them any direction because at the end of the day, they have to make their own decisions. But, and I think as time’s gone on, particularly one mum called that because she did everything naturally, the hospital had said they, they will refer to social services. And she phoned me in tears and said, you know, they might, I don’t know what to do. And I, so I said, look, you know, you’re going to have to play the game. You know, some, I kept Lauren on the radar of hospital because I did need the x-rays done, and I need, did need to know what her bone density was. So, you know, I just used to smile sweetly and take it all in and say, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And whatever they were going to say, you know, I knew how I was treating her and that, that I was very, very adamant. And that was the only way for us. Just go with it. Just go with what you feel. That’s, that would just be my advice because I think mummy always does know best. And I’ve got to be honest about that.
Katie: I think that’s so wise as well to not, to give support and love to people in those situations, but not direct advice. Because another thing I’ve realized in all the years of being in health and wellness is, you know, each person we encounter in their story and their advice and their wisdom and their knowledge can be so helpful in the research phase and in the experimentation phase to figure out what works for us. But at the end of the day, we’re each going to respond differently to all of the inputs. And so I try to approach it with curiosity of everyone’s approach, but realize none of those things are a prescriptive blueprint that will work exactly the same for me or for someone else.
And so for that reason, I don’t share ever exactly like what supplements I take per day or exactly what my diet is like, because I’m like, that won’t work the same for someone else. It’s not the specifics. It’s the foundational fundamentals of figuring out the pieces for you that are going to work the best. I think like N of one anecdotal data often gets dismissed in the scientific community and people tend to lean on the double blind, placebo controlled, et cetera, et cetera. But those are those have to be funded. So that’s its own whole category. But also, if the N of one is you, that’s actually the most valid scientific data you can ever get is on your own biology or in your case, on your daughter’s biology. So I think this is another area where you were so ahead of your time and so wise to be able to tune into that and to navigate that. And I think that’s so encouraging for anybody, whether we’re navigating health conditions or not, is to sort of like view your experience of life as an amazing experimentational study and figure out for you, what are those most impactful things?
I’m also curious now looking back, are there any resources you wish you had had back then when you were navigating that and/or resources?
Marsha: The internet. Although, you know what, as you said, I don’t know if that would have been the answer because I did sort of stick with how I was feeling. You know, if I’d have seen stuff, I mean, yes, of course, it would have helped in a lot of ways, obviously. But again, I may have been thrown in a million different directions. So maybe it’s not such a good thing. You know, I had to read books and go to the libraries at the time and find out in different ways. So maybe, listen, it was all kind of meant to be as it was meant to be. And I’m a great believer in that anyway.
Lauren: I think there are some things like that we, were missing pieces.
Marsha: Always.
Lauren: You know, like with the diet, you know, we had, you know, quite a healthy Mediterranean diet, but we’d have other like diet Cokes that we didn’t know that was bad or, you know, things that were just part of life in the 80s and 90s. And I think having the information on that probably would have helped. And also now, like just from my perspective, in hindsight, what we, though I was kept off the oral steroids, I had quite a lot of steroid injections, which I’m not actually sure you had a choice in at the time. Like that, unless, you know, I would have got better without it. But knowing now, you know, we were told that steroid injections don’t have the same impact in the body, but they absolutely do have an impact in the body. And I had quite a lot of them into my eye and in the joints. Aside from the trauma of many of those, like the eye ones when I was six and one that I had to have without sedation in both knees when I was eight…
Marsha: And the fluid being drawn.
Lauren: Yeah, the fluid, them removing that. I mean, we had a very traumatic experience when I was eight because we were going to, we’re meant to go to Disney World in Florida on the Monday. And I woke up on the Friday with extremely swollen knees, which was very common for me to have a psychosomatic, psychophysiologic reaction to something exciting coming up. That was what my body and my brain did.
And so I had this huge amount of swelling in my knees. I was eight years old. Mum rushed me straight to the hospital to our clinic. And they said, she said, well, you know, if we need to drain the fluid out of the knees and inject it with steroid, but we have to book her in for sedation, we can’t do it here and now. So you either have it done here and now without sedation, or we book you in for next week, and you don’t go to Disney World. And I’m this eight-year-old having to make this decision about how brave I want to be. And so I had it done. And it was hugely traumatic, like the needles are like that, you know, and they drain takes ages to drain the fluid, they’re moving the needles around, and then you have a second needle with the, with the steroid.
And those experiences in themselves caused a lot of, a lot of cortisol. So I’ve learned that, you know, my cortisol after that shot up, it’s taken a lot a lot to kind of trace the steps back to, to that, but that really affected my cortisol levels, specifically, that experience. And also the impact of the steroid being injected, has actually had major impacts, major effects on my body that the some of which I’m still living with today. So I think having the information on that, would it have helped? I don’t know, because I’m not sure we would have known what else we could have done. So, we’ll never know.
Katie: And I think it’s also just, it’s so incredible that hearing your story and now both of your stories that you were able to navigate from this seemingly very extreme diagnosis in childhood, being bedridden or wheelchair bound at different points. And now to be as an adult, absolutely thriving. And something I talk about on here a lot is the piece that was missing for me for a long time was that inner experience, the emotional mental side of healing and sort of the idea of, as Dr. Courtney Hunt says, like, see yourself well. The first step is actually to see yourself well and to have the hope and hold the vision of yourself thriving and well. And it sounds like Marsha, you did that for her in all the years when she wasn’t yet able to do it for herself. And now Lauren, you help so many other people to navigate that journey too.
Lauren: Well, she did that for me. I didn’t have that vision. I had no frame of reference for what life was like without pain and discomfort. So much so that Mum used to say I never complained about pain. And she used to say to the doctors, she never complains. She never says she’s in pain. And we only realized it was because I thought that was normal. I thought everyone was experiencing that until I got old enough to realize that that wasn’t normal. But she always had that vision.
What we haven’t gone into yet, which I’ll let Mum take, because from her perspective, it’s quite interesting and we did similar on my podcast not long ago. And me hearing it that time of my life when I was about 18, and I was at my very worst, from Mum’s perspective was hugely profound. But even in those moments, it was Mum that knew that I would get better. And I would say, stop saying it. I don’t, but why do you even believe this? Obviously, I’m not. I’ve never been better. It’s never going to go away. Why do you think it’s going to go away now? Look at me. And she’d say, it is. And that’s one thing about her. She’s just has this, this strong resolve, like it just is, if she wants something to be it just is and that’s it. And that’s something that comes naturally to her doesn’t come naturally to me. It’s something I have to work at. But that’s a lesson that she’s given to me. That’s a gift she’s given to me. Because in seeing how she’s done that and how she did that for me, I wouldn’t have had that belief at the point where she kind of, I suppose, passed the baton to me.
And I started doing the research and making a choice to heal myself. I had to take that belief and say, like you say, I see myself well, and I had to see that before I was well. But if you want to go into the, you know, the 18 and the, I was put on a chemo-based drug, and there was no kind of escaping. At that point, we went down the conventional route.
Marsha: You did.
Lauren: I did. And everything got really bad. And like I said to you earlier, I could feel everything coming on and the eye was really bad. And they said to me that inflammation in the eye was so high, and that I’d grown multiple cataracts, and they were pushing against the optic nerve, and the pressure had dropped to zero, and it was hugely dangerous. And they had to remove the cataracts, but they couldn’t because there was too much inflammation in the eye. So they couldn’t operate. So I had to get the inflammation down as soon as possible. And we’re going to give you this chemo drug, and you need to take it.
And I was like, oh, great, because what’s this homeopathy done for me all my life? Clearly nothing. Not realizing, and this is probably the most important point of our story, that it had done so much, because the homeopathy started when I was four. And what that had done was it kept my immune system strong. So had I been on the steroids all those years, which we now know compromise immunity, you know, leave you with lower bone density, hormone issues, the whole multitude of things. The homeopathy was keeping my immune system strong. It was allowing me to grow properly. It did so many things.
And though it didn’t, quote unquote, cure the arthritis, it was because we hadn’t found all the missing pieces yet. And I always say there’s never one modality in isolation that’s going to heal you if you haven’t found the other missing pieces. But it had done so much for me. Had I not have been on homeopathy all those years, I wouldn’t have been able to heal as deeply as I have done now. Because, you know, for example, I may have had joint deformities, like all the other kids I knew with arthritis do, have grown properly.
Marsha: I think that was the thing that made me realize at the time we were, Lauren was invited to give a talk at the House of Commons in London. And we went, got to this beautiful, massive room. And there were 25 children between the ages of 5 and 28. And the very first thing I noticed, I said to Lauren, what do you see? She said, Mum, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I said, what do you see? What do you see? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mum. I said, every child here has a physical deformity, but look at you.
Lauren: And I wasn’t well at the time. I went in there on crutches. I hadn’t completed my healing yet, not that healing is ever complete, but I hadn’t got to that point of homeostasis yet, but we were well into my holistic route. And that was only because of the homeopathy and because of taking the natural route and not doing the steroids all those years. But then getting to that point at 18 and thinking, what on earth has this homeopathy done for me? Clearly nothing. I’m going to take this chemo drug. And then everything went downhill from there. The arthritis spread to every joint in my body. The inflammation in the eye didn’t go down. So I couldn’t have the operation anyway, but you can tell this part from your perspective of what happened at that point.
Marsha: Well, at that point, it was the worst time because I’m begging her, you know, we’ve done all this. Please don’t undo it all because it’s going to undo everything. And she was an adult now and it was taken out of my hands completely. And she did take the chemical drug. And from the moment she took it, it just, you know, I don’t even know what to say because it didn’t work for her. Now, I’ve spoken to other people that have taken this drug and it’s worked miracles. But it didn’t for Lauren. And I just think in some ways that maybe because her, again, the purity of everything in her, this kind of just didn’t agree with her. But as I say, it has agreed with other people. But that time was the most difficult to see what it actually did to her. And then it was where we go from here. And then Lauren kind of took over, really. And I think maybe that was the turning point.
Lauren: Was that?
Marsha: One of the turning points?
Lauren: There was a big bit of kind of how sick I was at that time. So, you know, navigating.
Marsha: Yeah. How do you do that? How do you get better? How do you?
Lauren: I mean, I was completely bedbound then. It had spread to every joint in my body. Mum had to feed me. I had to be taken to the toilet. I couldn’t do anything. And being a chemo drug, my hair was falling out. It had damaged my liver, which we didn’t know why I was feeling so sick but it damaged my liver. Anything the drug could have done to a person it did to me and I think when Mum says you know it works for it worked for other people I don’t, I think there are some people that don’t react as badly and that again you know you’ll know Katie isn’t like an epigenetic thing it was finding out I had MTHFR that was a massive learning curve, understanding why the folic acid they were giving me was alongside it was playing such a part in making me feel so ill as well. But I think for Mum, that was the hardest time because although I’d always been, I’d always had this illness, she’d never seen me that ill.
Marsha: So it was, yeah, I mean, to look at your child, and I think, the thing that always sticks in my mind was that she was in so much trauma and pain. And I remember both of us falling on the floor, and we were both crying. And I said to her, you’re either going to stay on the floor or you’re going to get up and fight this. So you have to make that choice as an adult now. She’d made the choice of having this other thing. And I said, you’re either going to do this. You’re either going to be on this floor for the rest of your life, or you’re going to get up and fight. And I just, that was, that was the biggest turning point.
Lauren: That was the turning point. Because that was 10 months after taking the drug. And we could see it was just making me sicker and sicker. Mum wheeled me into the rheumatologist’s office in a wheelchair. She’d never seen me in a wheelchair, this rheumatologist didn’t bat an eyelid, just said it didn’t work for 30% of people, but it did work for the other 70%. And I just, that was…
Marsha: She didn’t get your name right after 70.
Lauren: She didn’t, because she’d been seeing me since I was four, and she called me Laura. And all of that together, I was just like, I’m not a statistic. I’m not going to be treated, I’m going to find another solution to this and I’m not going to come back to you ever again. And I got really angry. Mum had to calm me down, but she wheeled me out. And that was when we started looking for other solutions and when that was when I took you know, control myself and started going down, going into the journey of holistic, full holistic healing myself.
Katie: That’s incredible and quite literal, the passing of the baton of like taking ownership for your health in that moment. And then of course, I’ll link to the episode where we detailed your side of the story beyond that and the incredible healing that you’ve now had and experienced. And then now how I love that you’ve translated that into helping so many other people as well.
And Marsha, I would also love to hear as we get to the end of our interview, were there any ways that you supported yourself, kind of like put your own oxygen mask on in the years of that and navigating, I’m sure taking care of Lauren so much and all that went with that? Or was it just like an intense time for you? I know that’s like the self-care question gets brought up a lot for moms.
Marsha: I think, we were not so much into self-care back in the day. And we have a thing, you just got on with it. And you just got on with it. So I didn’t, you know, I, oh, I sang. Okay, so that was my, my outlook, was I sang in a choir and that was my therapy. Once a week, whatever happened, however, Lauren was. And don’t forget, she also had a sister. So you’re navigating another child and the needs of another child. And to make sure that that child feels that they’re getting the same attention as the sick child. So you’re navigating, you’re juggling all the balls. And I was a full-time working mom. So you are juggling and then you’ve got to keep your husband happy. There’s all different aspects to it, isn’t there? So, you know to think my therapy was singing that’s, that was my therapy, that was the only thing really and I’d go for the occasional sort of massage.
Lauren: And you had good friends. Mum always had…
Marsha: Amazing.
Lauren: Mum always had an amazing group of friends, who she’s had, since she was a child.
Marsha: Five.
Lauren: So that was always your what she said that was her therapy. Therapy didn’t really make it to England like it did in America. You know, back then and, Mum, was the, you know, you keep calm and carry on generation. And she just kind of…
Marsha: I don’t know about calm.
Lauren: No, not calm. Just carry on then. But that was kind of her. She just got on with it, you know, and I don’t know if that’s had any effect on you now, how you didn’t really kind of process anything at the time.
Marsha: I don’t think so, because we were that generation of, you know, we didn’t analyze every single thing that happens. And in some ways, it’s good to do that. And in some ways, it’s too much sometimes. So I think too much analysis of a situation is not always a good thing. But you have to analyze it to a certain degree.
And I think I had a balance as well. I always think I had that balance somehow of all the things that I did have. Lots of things I didn’t have, that’s for sure. But what I did have was a balance and how to just navigate everything. I just did get, you know, I got on with it.
Katie: Well, it sounds like you had a strong community, which we now know, it’s funny that we even needed data to tell us this because I think humans have known this intuitively since the beginning, but that strong community is actually one of the biggest factors in both your ability to navigate and be happy through life and also your physical health. Like it’s not having community around you can be more dangerous than even smoking or some of the worst lifestyle habits we might think of. So that’s what I’m so glad you had friends that have been with you for life through that experience.
And I know we could probably go a thousand more directions in this conversation, but as we get to the end of our time, Lauren, you help so many people online now. Can you let us know where people can find you, connect with you, and keep learning from you?
Lauren: Sure. Yeah, thank you. So I’m on Instagram @laurenvaknine. My website is laurenvaknine.co.uk. And if you go to forward slash rise, I have a membership program specifically for women, all about holistic healing and living. It’s basically my life’s work, everything I’ve been studying, researching for two decades now, everything that contributed to my own healing, the culmination of the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of self to help women either heal from disease, keep their families healthy, create or cultivate holistic lifestyles, and craft their own holistic lifestyles, and learn how to like you say, you don’t want to ever be too prescriptive in what you tell someone to do.
It’s a very comprehensive membership program that enables women to learn how to create that for themselves with basically everything they need from, from all the way from the inner child healing, to the self-love, to the health optimization, to the nervous system regulation, and shadow work, everything in between.
And, one of the most important parts of the membership is the community, the incredible community of like-minded women from all over the world on a journey of holistic healing and holistic living so that is what really speaks to people, I think. Kind of a lot of women that come to me, I’m sure the same with you always say you know I just I feel very isolated, I feel alone I want to go deeper into this world of holistic living, and I don’t have enough people around me that are doing it and I need a tribe. And so I wanted to create some sort of tribe so that’s what we’ve done and that’s that you can find that through my website.
And then there’s also my podcast, which is Reconditioned with Lauren Vaknine. And just to say as well, if anyone wants to get in touch with Mum, because we have a lot of requests for people to speak to Mum, they can email support@laurenvaknine.co.uk and we’ll forward that on to her.
Katie: Oh, that’s wonderful. And I will link to all of those in the show notes. But like I said at the beginning, this is the first time I’ve gotten to talk to a mom-and-daughter duo on this podcast. And this has been such a fun conversation. Thank you both so much for the time today.
Lauren: Thank you.
Marsha: Thank you for having us. Thank you.
Katie: And thank you, as always, for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re all so grateful that you did. And I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the Wellness Mama podcast.
If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.
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