Validate Before You Regulate
The nervous system has to be believed before it can be calmed. On why validation comes first.
Valencie Exceus·Recent·♥ 124💬 18
In the field of mental health and recovery there is a saying. Heal out loud so that another does not die in silence. I carry that saying into everything I build. My commitment is that all of my work stays a safe space and a destigmatizing space for anyone living with mental illness or mental health challenges. This page is where I keep that promise out loud.
In July of 2023 I developed a urinary tract infection. The infection traveled to my brain and caused delirium. I was misdiagnosed. A psychiatrist gave me an antipsychotic in the place of an antibiotic, and that single decision almost permanently ruined my life.
The antipsychotic depletes dopamine. I suspect my dopamine was already low, and the medication pulled it down to a place my body could not tolerate. I developed akathisia, alongside Parkinsonism and intermittent states of medication-induced psychosis.
Akathisia is a neurological injury, and it is most often caused by the very medications meant to settle a person. It lives in the body as a ceaseless inner restlessness, an inability to be still, a compulsion to keep moving that brings no relief. It is one of the most unbearable states a human nervous system can be forced into, and it has cost people their lives, because the torment is constant and stays invisible to everyone standing outside of it.
Akathisia is not anxiety.
That single distinction is the line between being believed and being dismissed, and it is the line my own care fell on the wrong side of.
When I went to ask for help, the new doctors at the new hospitals decided I was on drugs. My toxicology screen came back clear. Instead of reconsidering, they decided I was a psychiatric patient who had stopped taking her medication, and they medicated me further. I had already been injured by medication, and the system answered my injury with more of the same.
I had to advocate for myself with everything I had left. I already knew I had akathisia. By the time they had drugged me enough, I could no longer remember the name of the thing that was happening to me. I described every symptom to the letter. The doctors walked in with a god complex and their prejudice already decided. One told me he already knew it was drugs. My clear tox screen did not move him. The drugs were real. They were legal drugs, prescribed to me, and I still cannot believe that medications permitted to alter a body in this way are handed out the way they are.
My medical records state that the patient had severe anxiety. I had described akathisia to them precisely, and they wrote down anxiety. Everything I told them was true. They came in with their own god complex and their own prejudice, and they did not listen.
You believe me.The first doctor who listened
It was that second experience that left me with a diagnosis of PTSD. I almost got stuck inside that system. One doctor is the reason I did not. When she finally diagnosed me correctly, I asked her that question, the one I had stopped expecting to ever ask. I had come so close to giving up, because being disbelieved by the people holding your care is its own kind of harm.
I did trauma therapy for the PTSD. On a day-to-day basis you would not know I carry that diagnosis. I am left with very few triggers. The one that still reaches my nervous system is fireworks, because the medication injured my nervous system and some imprints remain. Using everything I have, Tending to the Inner Garden, meditation, and somatic work, I have healed a great deal. Small flare-ups still visit. I know them now, and I know what to do with them.
The injury stretched my nervous system to its furthest edge, and in the healing it gave me the capacity to hold space for very big things.
I also know the moment I am approaching the edge of my own window of tolerance, and I slow down without apology.
My work is somatic emotional processing and nervous system regulation, held within Chinese medicine. I work within my scope, and I refer out everything beyond it. When therapy is what serves you, I will help you find a licensed therapist. I am not the right match for personality disorders, and I name that plainly, because I do not have the training to assess in that area. Whatever lives outside of what I can safely hold, I will help you find the right hands for.
I share this story so that anyone who arrives here knows what kind of place this is.