Changing Perspective with Anie Boudreau
Show Notes:
As brain injuries are invisible their nature is often difficult to understand. Today we speak with Anie Boudreau, who conquers the symptoms of her injuries by using mindfulness techniques and much more. To open our conversation, Anie shares how she received her injuries and we learn about how her lifestyle led to several concussions. She also reveals some of the symptoms which slipped past medical professionals. As time went on, Anie began feeling huge lapses in energy. After her doctor at the time waved it off as depression, one episode saw her lose consciousness and wake up with a migraine that has now lasted two decades. Yet, all was not lost for Anie. In the time since, she has learned about her injury and has found ways to rise above her symptoms. In this episode, you will hear Anie’s thoughts on the interconnectedness between mind and body, as well as helpful techniques and resources to ease the pain and discomfort which so often accompanies head injury survivors. To hear more on Anie’s inspirational journey and how she has become a champion of her own life, be sure to join us today!
Key Points From This Episode:
Introducing today’s guest, Anie Boudreau, a specialist in pain science, nervous system regulation, and more.
Hear about how Anie’s brain injury occurred and the ways it affects her.
Anie tells listeners how she manages the perceived relationship between head injuries and stress.
We learn about how Anie keeps advocating for herself in the right ways.
Anie shares her mindset around fixing versus managing her symptoms.
Find out how mindfulness training has helped Anie overcome the symptoms of her brain injuries.
How the brain and body are interconnected, and pain is oftentimes shared between the two.
Anie shares her thoughts on pain management and which methods can be most effective.
We talk about how brain injuries are affected by past trauma and hardships found in the present moment.
Links Mentioned in Today's Episode:
School of Reverence
Follow Anie on Instagram: @good.fortune.lady
Follow School of Reverence on Instagram: @schoolofreverence
Like School of Reverence Coaching and Consulting on Facebook
Follow Post Concussion Inc on Social Media to stay up to date on the podcast
Transcript - Click to Read
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:05.3] BP: Hi, I’m your host Bella Paige and welcome to The Post Concussion Podcast. All about life after experiencing a concussion. Help us make the invisible injury become visible.
The Post Concussion Podcast is strictly an information podcast about concussions and post-concussion syndrome. It does not provide nor substitute for professional medical advice diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on this podcast. The opinions expressed in this podcast are simply intended to spark discussion about concussion and post-concussion syndrome.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:04.1] BP: Welcome to today’s episode of The Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest, Anie Boudreau. Anie has lived with a brain injury after suffering from multiple concussions as a downhill mountain biker racer and snowboarder.
It’s been a journey to say the least. Learning how to maneuver through pain every day while living a joyful life. Anie is also a certified yoga therapist and an advanced level addiction recovery coach and trainer and certified contemplative psychology educator.
She is a specialist in pain science, nervous system regulation, movement for resilience, psychedelic treatment for addiction recovery and the psychology of the mind and how to have difficult conversations. Anie created the Embodied Wonderment Method and embodied integration technique to empower people to embrace turbulent times with curiosity, authenticity and compassion. Welcome to the show, Anie.
[0:01:58.7] AB: Thank you. Happy to be here.
[0:02:01.2] BP: Can you tell everybody a little bit about your injury and how it occurred?
[0:02:07.5] AB: When I thought it all started is what I’ll tell you but then I found out later that it started probably way before. I was a downhill mountain bike racer but also mountain bike guide so I spent a lot of time on a bike and also hitting my head and I was living in Whistler, British Columbia at the time where I started just getting these weird drops of energy. I didn’t quite know what was happening and I went to see the doctor and of course, I’ll say of course, there is not of course for everyone, just like, well, you must be depressed.
What? I’m not depressed and this great life and it just kept getting more and more, until one day, I passed out at work and I just lost consciousness and then I woke up with a crazy migraine and I’ve had it ever since for 20 years now. The extent of what I found out later is that I was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome but at the time, it’s not the same as now and he just said, “Well, it should be gone in a year so you come see us in a year.”
I’m in my 20s, I didn’t know better. I didn’t know how to advocate for myself at the time so it’s like, okay, of course, it got worse and worse, you know? That had the snowball effect. What I understood is I had accumulated concussion syndrome. I hit my head, I had at least, what I know now is a concussion because before, concussions were just seen as, you have to pass out, roll your eyes behind your head but now we know that a concussion doesn’t have to look like that.
When I started paying attention, I probably had like 20 concussions over my career.
[0:03:38.3] BP: I think the statistic is about nine out of 10 concussions actually don’t involve a blackout. People don’t realize that most of the time, you don’t completely pass out so you don’t always realize how injured you are. It’s like you totally see you realizing and you start counting like how many falls have I had, how many times had this happen?
It adds up to a lot, especially if you did it for a while. Something that you kind of mentioned was being told it was depression but being told it’s stress is something that a lot of people get told. I got told. I got told that a couple of times. Maybe if you reduce your stress, you’ll be better and stress definitely does affect my symptoms but that wasn’t the only cause, how did you manage that perception?
[0:04:21.9] AB: I feel blessed that there’s some part of me that called bullshit every time that I wasn’t fully believing what I was being told. It wasn’t easy at first, especially in my 20s to tell a doctor, “I think you’re full of BS” you know? I don’t think this is it. Although I wasn’t believing what was being told, it was definitely wearing on me that, “Well okay, maybe I am stressed but I don’t think that that’s what’s happening.” I know that this injury is causing me stress but I don’t really feel like that’s the root cause.
Like I said, my integer was 20 years ago where the conversations wasn’t happening at all, even about stress management really and so, it took a while for me to start advocating for myself and for me to get to the point where I could say “You know what? The stress is not the cause, It’s a symptom of the cause.”
I actually had to do a lot of self-care and understanding, a lot more understanding my body and trusting that I understand my body and a lot more about understanding my nature of mind and trusting my innate health that even if I’m having all these symptoms that there’s clarity in me somewhere and I do know what’s going on.
That took a while, you know? I feel like I could finally be like, “You know what? Stress isn’t the cause.”
[0:05:33.7] BP: It’s hard because you’re telling doctors or specialists how you're doing and then they’re looking at you like, “No, this is what’s going on” and trying to trust you had been told it would be gone in a year. How many years later, that definitely wasn’t the case so it’s hard to accept that how do I tell you know you’re wrong when you’re the one who is supposed to be the educated specialize on this.
[0:05:58.8] AB: Yeah, well, what I do want to name is what I understood because you know, I was in where there’s a lot of athletes, you know, Whistler. I did see a difference between males being diagnosed in emails and a lot of the times, most of my female, myself and my female friends automatically were being told we were anxious or stressed whereas a lot of the males were actually getting helped and were believed.
It’s important to name the sexism in the medical world too, you know? Because we experience that as females that we’re just told that we’re anxious when there’s actually something going on.
[0:06:32.5] BP: Well, that’s still a thing today, let alone when you started, it happens all the time, there’s so many other causes. Advocating for yourself is really hard, do you have any tips on how to go about that properly?
[0:06:45.0] AB: I feel like advocating for myself is not a strategy. It can be like “Okay, here’s what you do…” it’s a practice actually of coming back and back to my own inner strength, my own worthiness. Knowing that this is my body, therefore I know what’s going on with it and so that’s quite a practice, right?
We all have different ways to come back to ourselves that way. I do a lot of yoga, mindfulness, practice, a lot of yoga, mindfulness practice, a lot of movement, creative things that bring me back to this place. For me, practicing my curiosity muscle, staying as curious as possible about what’s happening for me so that I don’t go in states of judgment or states shame, you know?
If I can stay curious and be confident in that curiosity, then that’s where I’m coming from when I’m advocating for myself and for others, you know? There is a lot that – that people that you don’t – might not have the same privilege as me that can even have a voice and so, it’s important that once I can advocate for myself, I speak for others, I can’t speak also, you know?
[0:07:47.3] BP: No, I really like that, it’s not really a process really. It’s just being able to, as well and believing that what you feel is real, you’re not making this up and you have to keep pushing for that no matter what, someone’s looking at you funny or telling you that it’s something completely different and you do know your own body.
If symptoms are still occurring and someone’s telling you they aren’t, they’re definitely wrong because you're not making this up. It’s really common that people think that their symptoms like, “Oh well, maybe they’re not, maybe I am making them up.” If you’re going through it for a few years or even a few months, it’s very unlikely that this is just in your head, in the way that they’re saying it is.
[0:08:34.5] AB: Well, I was diagnosed with a newer version. I can’t even remember what they call it now, “Soma” basically hypochondria, you know? Where this male doctor is like, “You’re making this up” and that gives me the time like what? No. It definitely a strong practice to stay with what’s true for us, it’s definitely against the stream. There’s some endurance needed and we’re already freaking tired we have post-concussion syndrome symptoms, you know?
[0:09:01.1] BP: Well and something I always like to say is like, “I don’t want to be at the doctor.” I will be the first person to tell you that I don’t want to be here so I’m not coming here because there’s not something wrong. I’m not a big doctor-hospital kind of – I never liked going to hospital as a kid so I’m not willingly coming here all of the time because there’s not something wrong.
It’s important to remember that and our first human instinct is to fix it. With concussion recovery, it’s like, “I want to get better, I want to get 100% back to where I was” because you don’t think, I think that’s just the solution is to get better.
How did you change your perspective from that fix to manage the symptoms instead?
[0:09:44.1] AB: Yeah, I wouldn’t use either of those words. What really helped me was shifting my focus from, how will I get better? which was so exhausting, right? How will I get there, how will I get there, how will I get there, how will I live a joyful life even with this happening.
That really broaden my view because there’s lots of places where I have joy in my life and so if I could reorient myself to the places that bring me joy, that reduced somehow the overwhelming pain. I feel like, it wasn’t about managing pain or taking pain out, it’s actually working with the overwhelm of the pain, which was – that I was hyper focusing on it really, right?
I just want to say that that’s a normal human experience when we’re experiencing pain. Our pain system wants us to hyper focus on it so it’s quite a practice to be like, “I hear you pain, thank you” but I’m also going to notice all of the things that benefit me and my life and focus on that and I feel that that’s what regulates my nervous system, that’s what helps reduce my overwhelm. I don’t know if that makes sense to you.
[0:10:45.8] BP: No, it does and that different outlook can be huge, especially like, it’s a lot of a mental game while you’re going through it. Being able to change your perspective into that way sounds like it definitely would have helped.
[0:10:58.4] AB: I know, I’ve been like, I just did it. One day, I was shifting away, at least I came back and back to the question like what am I asking myself? Could I live a joyful life even with this happening? I come back and came back to that question so I don’t want to make it sound like it’s super easy, you just flip your script and all is well. It’s not like that, again, it’s this practice of coming back.
I wonder if you experience this too. When I stayed curious about this, what brings me joy and when I stay with it, I was always blown away that when I’m really engaged with something I loved, I actually don’t feel that much pain, you know?
[0:11:32.5] BP: I call it, your escape, like riding horses, when I’m on, I feel absolutely zero pain, like negative. There’s nothing and then I would feel pain later that day but while I was doing it, there was nothing, you can actually refocus your brain on something else so you don’t feel that.
[0:11:51.1] AB: It’s beautiful, right? How can I keep practices that or reorient me to things that engage me and bring me joy so that I can have a little less pain in that amount of time? Even me spending this time with you, I’m more engaged and so I’m already feeling my symptoms less than when we started, you know?
[0:12:10.1] BP: For sure. Actually, me too. Funny how that works.
[0:12:13.1] AB: Funny how that works.
[0:12:15.8] BP: You can find Anie at schoolofreverence.com, which will also be in our show notes as well as Anie’s other contact info with that, let’s take a break, be sure to stay tuned to listen in on our discussion on regulating pain.
[BREAK]
[0:12:41.1] BP: Want to create awareness for concussions? Want to support our podcast and website? Buy awareness clothing today on postconcussioninc.com and get 10% off using “listen in.” That is “listen in” and be sure to take Post Concussion Inc. in your photos. We’d love to see them.
[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]
[0:13:06.3] BP: Welcome back to the Post Concussion Podcast with myself, Bella Paige and today’s guest Anie Boudreau. Something that we haven’t mentioned a ton yet is mental health, which is one of the biggest missed problems among individuals recovering from a brain injury. Anie has some mindfulness trainings. How do you find that helped you?
[0:13:25.1] AB: Yeah, I think first I wanted to say that I got goosebumps when you talk about it because it feels like something big and how mental health is talked about and how it separated from physical health and that causes damage. What I really understood throughout the years of mindfulness training but also just embodiment, you know? Getting to know my body more is that I actually see no evidence that there is a difference between, that the two are separated, like mental health, things and physical things that our systems have separated them.
You either have a physical injury or you have a mental something, illness or whatever we want to call it but what I’ve understood getting to know the nervous system where as the brain doesn’t actually differentiate between physical pain and emotional pain. It lights up the same parts of the brain, so I feel like that’s important to speak to because that was helpful for me to understand. Also, I want to speak to the fear, the stigma around mental illness and so if doctor decides, “No, you don’t have a concussion, you’re just mentally ill.”
How that can let’s just say F-up our life, right? You just put me in a category where my health will go down because people tagged with mental health disorders or illnesses are not getting the same quality of care. That’s what I’ve seen anyways and so there is a danger in being tagged that like a true one sometimes, you know? That’s messed up, let’s end that okay?
[0:14:53.0] BP: It is, no I agree. They’re connected. I always say like did you not realize that all of the physical pain is also definitely causing the mental health. There is not a split like I agree, there is no I have mental health problems and I have physical problems like they are so intertwined that people don’t realize how connected they are.
[0:15:11.2] AB: Yes, and it is not like this death sentence like mental health has talked about like if you have it once and that’s it forever. If you break your arm you don’t have a broken arm forever. It’s just spoken about this thing and it’s tagged on you forever when really it’s a spectrum we all go in and out of different states of our mental health you know? One is like just talking matter of factly about this. That’s one thing that helped me in that awareness, mindfulness way, you know?
Without an actual mindfulness practice but mindfulness practice definitely helped me work with difficult emotions a hundred percent, which come along. What I noticed was interesting is it wasn’t hugely difficult emotions towards the pain actually. It was difficult emotions towards relating with my world because I’m in pain, relating with other people, relating with just my environment because I feel trul to you – you know it is not usually about the pain itself.
It is about like, “Well, I don’t want to make somebody else uncomfortable because of my pain” or I don’t want to feel somebody else’s discomfort because of my pain. You know, so we’re working with discomfort all the time and mindfulness practice really helped me with that where I could work with the energy of the emotion itself and not pile on a bunch of stories about it. First you just have the sensation of shame, you’re like, “Uh-oh” but then you’ve highlighted a bunch of stories and then you feel ashamed that you’re feeling shame and then you pile on a whole bunch of things.
What I love about mindfulness practice is it keeps me very present with what’s actually happening without either completely shedding it out and pretending it’s not happening or making a whole bunch of stories up about it and I feel like the healing happens in the moment. In the present moment so if I can stay out of future tripping or past your thing or at least just having curiosity and reverence for those states and trying to stay as much in this present state as possible that’s very helpful for my mental health.
I really feel like sometimes I wonder how I’m still alive, how I haven’t become super addicted to painkillers or even gone the route of suicide and I really feel like the curiosity muscle that my famous practice has helped me with has really kept me loving life even with all of its discomfort you know?
[0:17:28.2] BP: For sure that mindfulness practice is what allowed me to stop the spiraling like you explained it a little different but your thoughts start going and going and then all of a sudden you are thinking about you physically and mentally, you can’t handle it. It is so many thoughts going through your brain and the mindfulness allowed me to like calm that down and then go back to where I am now, how I’m doing what’s in front of me versus what I created in my brain, which is not proper thoughts and things like that. It can make a big difference, it made a huge difference for me.
[0:18:02.1] AB: It was still kind of missing something like the mindfulness practices that I was learning with missing nervous system education and it was really helpful for me to also understand the states of my nervous system so I can normalize when I’m in a loop or a transfer spiral. It is actually normal that I am going in spirals when I’m in survival mode. That is kind of the nature of survival mode. It wants us to hyper focus on something and so we kind of hang out there a little too long for our benefit you know?
It was really helpful to be like, “Oh this actually is a normal human experience and when I can name what’s happening and be like, “Okay, I’m in survival mode” and so I need to resource myself a little bit more so I can get back to a different part of my brain not just the limbic system and that is very empowering, right? I found that somewhat from this practices just we’re missing that language that was also very helpful for me.
I really appreciate mindfulness teacher that also integrate nervous system education you know? That we can normalize that and so it’s the same thing where I am not actually being lazy right now. It’s just that I’m in freeze mode. You know my nervous system is so out of whack that I can’t even move forward and there are things that I can do for that. When I know that I’m in freeze mode there are little things I can do for that so that type of mindfulness.
That awareness of a whole system and that’s also what was helpful for me to normalize what’s being called mental health when we’ve experienced trauma, you know? Whether physical trauma or emotional trauma is the nervous system education allowed me to understand that trauma affects me on a physiological level right? Trauma will change the way I see, the way I taste, the way I hear, the way I feel and so that was helpful for me to understand as I work towards recovery, you know?
[0:19:49.1] BP: For sure and understanding just makes a big difference in like everything even like seeing a doctor and they tell you something like I always like to ask why. “Why am I taking this, why am I doing this?” because that next level of understanding can make a big difference just mentally as well because you actually know what’s going on, why you’re doing something rather than just blind fully kind of going through different recovery processes, which can often happen.
Something Anie had mentioned is luckily not becoming addicted to pain pills and pain is a very common symptom in post-concussion individuals. It was one of my largest problems. It is one of the issues that I deal with, definitely not as often as before but I’ve had a lot of pain management like there is so many different options out there to be really ineffective and some I found worked but what are your thoughts on pain management.
[0:20:42.8] AB: Yeah, that’s a big topic I could talk two hours on it but I mean you like you were 50. Some people go right away and demonizing pain meds and I don’t want to go that route because they do really help a lot of people when it changes to addiction now is because a lot of times these pain meds are given as the only thing, the only resource. Here you go and nothing else is given, right? The way the brain works is it needs to know the resource is out there.
If it only has one that will only go to that one and the thing is, we have a lot of resources around this but they might not have been named right? Like doing a podcast with you that’s a really great resource for me right now and so I need to make these things for myself. What I find as the downfall of the medical system is they just have a pill but not a whole bunch of other resources for people or the resources that are given they’re hard to really integrate like well, how does this relate with what’s happening for me.
There is even no opportunity to even integrate the resources that have been given to us, you know? People that are frustrated are like people have been told to tell me to do this and try this and try this and it is not working. For me what I found is that it’s my capacity to integrate what the resource that’s actually going to be helpful and so that’s what’s lacking. I don’t want to say that meds are bad but meds can turn into addiction when we don’t have other resources around.
[0:22:07.5] BP: I myself, like I do have pain meds and then sometimes that is the option for me but I also have alternatives to those pain meds. I don’t just take pain meds every day or every time I have a headache. There is lots of other things I’ll do or try to manage the pain or prevent the pain rather than just going to the medication right away. If you are taking it daily then maybe there is something else that you can be doing to help prevent that pain because that is like your constant then that is a very likely way that you are going to become addicted to those pain meds.
[0:22:41.0] AB: Yeah and it is important to name the trauma in early childhood like adverse childhood experiences and how that plays into our recovery and our pain levels and all of that and so that will determine too like if your brain will gravitate more towards one resource than the other if it is already a very traumatized brain even before you have a concussion or anything, right? If you’ve had a lot of trauma growing up your brain is already in high alert.
Then you hit it and a few times like me, concussion after concussion, that’s why I said I thought it started there but I realize that it started before. My brain is on high alert much before I even started mountain biking but then it just snowballed, you know? It’s important to know that within myself and to know that when I’m holding space for others or helping others because that’s really going to contribute to what extent I can even integrate any resources to even get back to regulate my nervous system is going to be a quite different journey for me if I’ve had a lot of trauma before I even had the concussion, is that making sense? That was really helpful for me to understand and like, “Okay, why is it taking me so long but my friend that’s had the same injury is not taking them so long, what’s up with that?” That all depends on brain resilience, right, and the environments that we’ve grown up in and so racism, oppression, all sorts of things play into that, right?
[0:24:04.9] BP: Well, that is something else I like to point out that a concussion and your symptoms can totally affect you differently also not just in the past and what you’re going through right now. If you’re a parent or a child who is trying to go through school or you’re in a job like all of those outside factors can affect the way you recover or the way you – like how you feel about a symptom like loud noise wouldn’t affect you so much if you lived a really quiet life but if you have really loud kids at home or you work at a busy loud environment, it can completely change the way you think about things.
It is important to remember when you are not someone recovering from a concussion or if you are that everyone’s situation is very different and it is hard like you shouldn’t just be comparing yourself to others because like you said, why are you recovering and I’m not. That happens all of the time, there are so many different factors out there than just the hit itself.
[0:25:01.9] AB: Yeah, it’s very complex right? It’s not this linear things like I found the difficulty with the medical system has worked very linear, so you have this, you should be able to take this and then this will happen what it will take. No, it is very web like and because we are talking about addiction, what I recognize is that actually trauma, chronic pain and addiction are all kind of intertwined together and they’ll just show up in different ways but they are very much in this web together, right?
To try to address post-concussion syndrome or any kind of chronic symptoms that you might have, if you try to address them linearly, you’ll get really freaking frustrated and down on yourself like why isn’t this working? They should be like do-do-do-do-do but that’s like you think. It’s not really a strategy. It is more of a practice of coming back and back and the other part that was really helpful for me to understand and with addiction too is that it is a normal human experience to disconnect from our bodies when we’re in pain.
Yet, the healing happens in our bodies, right? We have to find these ways back and so sometimes these meds take us even further away from our bodies, so it is very important that we have these practices to bring us back to our body and that’s not necessarily easy because when we are in pain our body might be the battleground, right? We don’t want to go in our bodies. Now there is more resources than ever to slowly get back to that. To tie to it back into a relationship with your body.
[0:26:25.8] BP: Is there anything else you would like to add before ending today’s episode?
[0:26:30.1] AB: Nothing, it’s just a pleasure. Thank you. I feel like, let me see, what would I like to add? I feel like I’m really grateful for this podcast that you are creating because one of the resources is community, you know? We need community. We need people that just get it without saying anything and to really normalize their experience and to break stigma because the reality is that many people with post-concussion syndrome are committing suicide.
We need to name that and so creating community like this is so important and I am really appreciative of you creating this podcast and just having these conversations.
[0:27:07.3] BP: Yeah, well thank you. Thank you so much for joining, sharing your story and a lot of your perspective on living with post-concussion syndrome.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:27:18.1] BP: Has your life been affected by concussions? Join our podcast by getting in touch. Thank you so much for listening to The Post Concussion Podcast and be sure to help us educate the world about the reality of concussion by giving us a share and to learn more, don’t forget to subscribe.
[END]
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