Ep 18. Migraine Relief is Possible, What About Migraine Recovery?

In honour of Chronic Illness Recovery Day, let's talk about what recovering from migraine looks like.  The discussion emphasizes the fact that recovery is unique to each of us. I talk about what recovery means to me, the importance of seeing recovery through a wider lens, The key components of recovery (including three key questions to ask yourself and Dr. Schubiner's 7 Fs to avoid).  We talk about the truth behind recovery stories and finally why my new favorite phase is "I'm 100% imperfectly recovered".

Schedule a 25 min Free Consultation Call to discuss your recovery here

Migraine Oasis Blog Post on this topic
 
++++++++++
 
00:00 Welcome and Global Acknowledgment
01:22 Connecting with the Community
02:29 Introduction to Chronic Illness Recovery Day
03:38 Defining Recovery
5:41 - 🔎 Three Questions to Ask Yourself About Your View on Recovery: 
        - Is what you're striving for helpful to your journey or putting an added layer of pressure on yourself?
        - Would it serve you to identify smaller milestones or ways to recognize the glimmers of progress along the way in order to build upon a sense of achievement and safety?
         - What mindset are you carrying as you move toward your goal?
08:12 Understanding Pain and Safety
12:29 - 🔑 Key Aspects to Reducing Symptoms:
      🔑 understanding latest neuroscience of how pain works & becomes chronic
      🔑 nervous system regulation
      🔑 developing a felt sense of safety in the body
      🔑 brain re-training (rewiring neural pathways)
      🔑 emotional awareness and processing
      🔑 reducing overwhelm, internalized pressure, and stress (in its many forms) to create a felt sense of safety.
14:21 🛑 Dr. Shubiner's Seven Fs to Avoid in Recovery: Fear, Focus, Fix, Frustration, Fighting, Figuring, Forlorn 
17:34 The Truth About Recovery Stories
23:02 Personal Reflections on Recovery
26:00 - 📝  My list -How I know I've recovered
28:26 Resources and Support
31:14 Conclusion and Well Wishes

____
Thanks for listening - I hope you found this helpful.
FIND ME HERE @ www.migraineoasis.com/linkinbio

Let's continue the conversation...COME SAY HI!
✅ INSTAGRAM: Follow Migraine Oasis @MigraineOasis
✅ FACEBOOK: Join our Community @MigraineOasis
✅ YOUTUBE: Watch us @MigraineOasis
____

Education and techniques discussed in this Podcast originate from many sources, countless hours of research, training, and self-healing unless otherwise noted.

Music credit: MomotMusic, Kyrylo Momot
___

Disclaimer: Information provided by Migraine Oasis & Karen Ash is for general informational & educational purposes only & is not a substitute for medical advice, psychotherapy, or counselling. Utilizing any of the education, strategies, or techniques in the podcast is done at your own risk. Consult with a physician before engaging in any suggested movements. If in immediate danger, call a local emergency number or go to the nearest emergency room.

Transcript

0:52

Hello and welcome back. So before I start, I wanna just acknowledge all the people that are listening around the world. I don't know who you are behind these numbers. I don't know what your situation is. If you have migraine, how your life has been affected, that sort of thing. I want to know that though. And it sometimes feels like I'm talking into a black hole, but, knowing that 230 cities around the world are listening in 29 countries. Just gives me hope that people are finding this information and I really hope that it's been helpful to you in some way. So we've got the us, uk, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, Germany, Norway. We've got France, Israel, Netherlands, Brazil, Sweden, Peru, Ireland, Serbia, South Africa, Philippines, Singapore, Denmark, Chile, Japan. Austria. Belgium, India, Slovakia, Iran, Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Portugal. That is just amazing to me. So just a quick shout out to just say, I see you. Thank you so much for tuning in and come connect with me if you can. I don't know what the best way to do that is, but I guess on Instagram you can DM me there or you can also connect with me over on Facebook. I have a migraine Oasis page that you can comment on and follow or you can there is a Facebook group. It is small and not very active, so just be aware of that. I would love to have people come in and interact with me. It's called Migraine Oasis Community then in brackets it says healing from neuroplastic slash TMS pain. So that's the group. But yeah, I would love to know that there's people behind the numbers and to just know what you need. Yeah, come and connect with me. Come say, hi. I have one name behind this black hole that I talk into and that migraine guy, I am so appreciative that you reached out and said that you were listening because that gives me a person that I'm talking to. And thanks for that. You're gonna have to change your name though soon to that former migraine guy, but that's a whole other story. what I wanna do in today's episode is talk about recovery, and it's in honor of the first annual chronic illness recovery day, which is July 13th, 2025. The day that I'm dropping this episode, and it marks the first day of my blog, actually, I just started a blog and today's was the first, so it's launching in celebration of this inaugural chronic illness recovery day, and it's a day that was created by a group of passionate, recovery minded advocates, which I'm a proud part of, to celebrate full and progressing recoveries, acknowledge and thank those who have supported us along the way. Offer hope to anyone that is out there that is just either starting on the recovery journey or is wanting to know more about how to recover from neuroplastic pain and symptoms, which migraine is one of. I'm really proud to stand behind this day because it just recognizes all forms of long-term illness and the many, many ways that people are reclaiming their health and their peace and their joy. So what is recovery? It's a question I tell you I come back to again and again, and one that I know now does not have a single answer. Recovery looks and feels different for everyone, and that's because we are all different and what's unique to us, what's shaped us, our stories, our beliefs, our emotions, lived experiences, et cetera. All this factors in. So no human is alike. No. Journey is alike. And as a chronic pain recovery coach. I'm obviously passionate about recovery, but I'm equally passionate about expanding how we view it and how we talk about it. And so to me, recovery is when we no longer are controlled by, or a victim of our pain or our symptom, we're able to live more freely, more fully, more authentically, and with less fear and concern around the pain. So it kind of fades in the background as you start living your life and you start enjoying even life again. And a symptom flare no longer feels catastrophic because you know you have the tools to manage it, and you also have come to understand it as part of the MINDBODY connection, and it's now seen as a messenger versus an attack. This is kind my thoughts on it anyway, but we all have different expectations and goals when it comes to healing. So one person might be thrilled to have fewer or shorter migraine attacks. Another person might feel fully, I. Recovered only when they're symptom free. Another person might measure their success by reducing or eliminating medication, and another person recovers when they're able to spend more time with their children or reconnect with their partner or get back to work or hobbies that they love. So who am I to define recovery for you? All of those versions are valid and any other ones that you've come up with. as you define what recovery looks like for you, I invite you to reflect on these questions. Is what you're striving for in your recovery, adding an extra layer of pressure on you. And if so, how can you maybe soften that a bit. The second one would be, would it serve you to identify smaller milestones or ways of recognizing glimmers of the progress along the way in order to build up on this sense of achievement and safety maybe. And. If so, how could you do that? What could that look like? And the third one would be, what mindset are you carrying as you move towards this goal? And I'll get into that in a bit more detail later on. Recovery doesn't necessarily, to me mean that you're completely symptom free. If a symptom flares up, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're failing or that the healing has stopped. It simply means your brain is sending a signal, a message that it feels threatened by something in your physical or emotional environment. And the only true things that apply to everyone on this healing journey would be that it's never linear, as you've probably heard before, your path will never look like anybody else's and the harder you try to fix it. The slower it will go for you. The more sense of urgency, the more pressure you put upon yourself. The symptoms will stick around, and I'll get into that again in a little bit. There will be twists and turns and bumps along the way. Expect that it's completely normal and you're building self-awareness and looking through deeper roots of your pain. And this is just to be expected and normal. Recovery to me is not just about symptom relief. For most people, recovery starts with the desire to eliminate chronic symptoms, and at some point many realize that there's a deeper healing that's unfolding . Health Crisis can be a nudge from your core self, this, this soul level, if you will, asking to be seen or heard or healed. There's often something that's in your physical or your emotional or even spiritual environment that's not supporting you to live authentically. And this creates an internal tension and keeps the nervous system stuck in stress or a survival response, which the brain registers as danger and moves into protect. Remember, pain is a protection mechanism. A brain that feels safe does not fire pain. I pause because I want that to sink in. Pain is a protection mechanism. If you break your ankle, it moves in to stop you from moving on that so that you don't do more damage. It senses the heat on a hot stove so that you pull your hand away so that you don't do damage. Pain is there as a protection mechanism, so a brain that feels safe. Does not fire pain. So in the case of a migraine or other neuroplastic symptoms where there's no structural damage or disease is present, the brain is trying to protect you from a non-physical threat. But from what that, that's interesting, right? The brain doesn't distinguish between physical and emotional threats. So we need to ask what does it feel unsafe about? What deeper patterns or experiences might be driving that sense of threat to the brain? And the good news is we don't have to figure that all out. Healing doesn't require you to find and fix every single root cause. And I know there's some confusion with this, that everybody's going back in and processing their emotions and getting everything out and. And yes, while that's very, very helpful, you don't have to go back in and find and fix every single thing. I want that to be clear. We recover by helping the brain and body feel safe again, and it's not needed to fix everything in the process. At the core recovery is about creating this nervous system that can ride the waves of life without feeling or staying stuck in a chronic stress response. That becomes much more possible when we tend to our inner needs and cultivate the skills and an environment where we can live more authentically. While eliminating the symptoms as possible, it's this deeper work to me anyway. It's this deeper work that helps us return to wholeness and really greatly improves our quality of life and a lot of these things we are doing in the work that we're doing. So what I'm talking about is like the self-compassion work and this relationship with ourself. Maintaining healthy boundaries softening the inner critic, these type of things that are making this internal world feel more safe or it's our relationship with others speaking up for our needs. Saying no when we want to say no. A lot of times I was saying yes when I really wanted to say no, and that just created this inner world of a conflict. It's putting your needs. Equal to everyone else's. It's looking out for yourself and in your relationships, making sure that they're healthy and that you are getting your needs met. It's also the relationship that you have with your symptoms. Treating them with curiosity instead of fear and going about this work in a less intense, and I would say like pressurized way to lighten up about the symptoms and see them as even, you know, messengers instead of an attack on you. Once we start doing that, we're able to kind of relieve this inner world of tension. I see it as all these things that we start working on that yes indeed help us to reduce symptoms and recover also are helping us with our lifelong journey. They're helping us live a more authentic life. And this from a internal state just feels safer. It allows the nervous system to maintain this easy flow in and out of its stress responses. And it keeps the brain from going too much into a danger alarm. So this is what I mean by just recovery is not just about symptom relief, it's about it expanding our, well, our wellness, basically. Yeah, I guess it is. It's just expanding our wellbeing and. In turn, our happiness, our fulfillment, and our authenticity. That's how I see it anyway. The key components to recovery, while everybody's path is different, and there's many ways to achieve the same end result, the path to recovery always lies in this ability to help the brain feel safer in order to rewire the currently established pain neural pathways. In my experience, the key aspects to accomplishing this are understanding the latest neuroscience around how pain works and becomes chronic. And I'll list this below in the show notes so you don't have to scramble to get a piece of paper or anything. It's understanding the latest neuroscience, it's nervous system regulation, developing a felt sense of safety in the body. And what I mean by that is you feel it. You actually in the body, you feel safe. It's not telling your body in the analytical mind, trying to do it from the mind side saying, oh yeah, we're safe all's good. And you don't even believe that if you don't feel it in the body. That is the key. Developing this sense of safety within the body. The next one would be brain retraining. This rewiring of the neural pathways. many tools to help you do that. Emotional awareness and processing, and then reducing overwhelm, internalized pressure, and stress in its many forms to create this again, felt sense of safety. And one of the most detrimental things to recovery is this constant attention of trying to solve your situation and trying to let go of this urgent need to fix things is your key. You can't make your pain go away. It's impossible to force this. It's a brain's decision. Right, so we can positively influence this and support this by doing what we can to ensure the nervous system and the brain feel safe. Dr. Howard Ebner has come up with what he calls the seven Fs. You might see it as five Fs. He's expanded that since then to seven that can unintentionally keep symptoms alive, and when you're able to soften these, you'll know you're on the right path. The first one is fear, so worrying about the symptom. Over future disability or life without relief. You're just very stressed and you're worried all the time about the symptoms. The second one is if you're highly focused on it, you're focused on the problem, you're fixated and ruminating on everybody's sensation, every pain that comes up, you're just really hyper-focused on the problem. I. The third one is fix. So you're trying to solve the problem all the time with this sense of urgency and pressure. Trying to fix is never a solution. It's going to lead you to more problems because it creates tension within the body. All of these do four is frustration when you're feeling irritated and disheartened by this whole healing process, and you're just really irritated and, and you know, frustrated by the whole thing. Fighting is number five. Resisting or rejecting the symptoms instead of just accepting that this is the current situation, it is what it is, and we're working towards a better solution. But if you're fighting against it all the time, which, oh my gosh, I did all, from the moment I woke up, I was fighting against. Pain coming. Then when I felt it coming, I was fighting against it. I felt like I, I hardly ever say migraine attack. I only say that in the course of discussing it in say like a podcast or a blog post, like I was just doing. Because that's what people think of it as. But once you start getting into my work, you're gonna understand that I do not use that word because it's a fight word. It's you know, being a migraine warrior and you have to fight against your body is not going to help you in the sense of feeling a calm brain and the brain feeling safe, and the nervous system being regulated. That's kind of counterintuitive, right? So number six would be figuring. You're trying to figure this out. You're trying to overanalyze the cause. You're playing detective, you're trying to understand it more and more. You're reading all the books. You're being on the podcast. You're just loading your brain full, full, full all the time. Ugh. This was one of my big ones, and it still is actually. Now I'm doing it on the opposite side. I feel better, but I'm still trying to figure everything out and figure out a better way to explain it and figure out a system to explain it well. And yeah, I'm still in this figuring stage, which is not helpful. The seventh one is forlorn. So that is this feeling of hopelessness or loneliness or abandon in your journey. And this is a big one to have that sense of community. If you are feeling this hopelessness or that you have nobody to support you, I wanna encourage you to go over to my Facebook group, which is you could just Google it under Migraine Oasis. The next point I wanna make is the truth about Recovery stories. Have you ever heard of the children's story, Goldilocks and The Three Bears? If not, it's about this little girl, Goldilocks, and she's this curious young girl, and she wanders into a house of three bears while they're out for a walk and inside she kind of explores and she finds three bowls of porridge, one's too hot, one's too cold, and one's just right. Then she sits in three chairs. One's too big, it's too hard, one's too small, and it's too soft. And one's just right. Well, she ends up breaking that one, but, and then she wanders upstairs, I think it was upstairs. And there's three beds. And one's too hard. One's too soft, and one's just right and she falls asleep. And then, yeah, the story goes on that the bears come home, the story emphasizes this idea that things needing to be just right for her. Among other lessons, of course, about, yeah, lack of boundaries going into the Bear's House and the consequences of your actions when the bears come home. But if I'm honest, I rarely hear anyone talking about their recovery journey as just right. I mainly hear how it's too long, there's too many bumps in the road, or it doesn't look like somebody else's. So if you're feeling like that right now, let's take a look at that because it may be slowing down your healing journey, actually. Your path is perfectly yours. Try not to question it so much. There's just no such thing in recovery as just right. Goldilocks would be outta luck. There is no just right or a perfect way. Many tools can lead you to the same results. Just pick one. Try it consistently for a while and see how you feel, and then adjust as needed, but you don't have to do all of it. You don't have to get the right one. It's going to be journey that is going to take twists and turns and it's going to be in your perfect way. There's really a part of us in most of our stories anyway, that has to do with being perfectionist or very analytical up in our heads a lot, needing a sense of control, and we want to do this right. We even want to do our healing journey right. And in recovery, we have to let that go. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. But we have to, it's not helping. What it's doing is it's adding a lot of pressure and tension, and the best thing you could do is stop comparing yourself to others. It's never helpful anyway in any context, but letting go of this notion that it should be different in some way. During my healing journey, I relied on a few phrases that maybe will help you as well. One was a quote by Louise Hay, and it was, whatever I need to know is revealed to me at exactly the right time, and I just love that. That feeling that, yeah, everything is happening in due course. It's happening for a reason. It's, you know, my path is being guided and helped and laid out for me. Another quote that's attributed to Louise Hay, but I'm not sure that it's actually from her, is what is meant for you will never pass you by. And I had that written on a sticky note and posted on my. Mirror and I always just felt like, yeah, the, the information I need is coming. That made me feel like, everything is working out. It, it's all going to work out. It's going to be okay. And then another one was, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. You may have heard that it's commonly attributed to the Buddhist philosophy. That quote really was very real to me. I had so many synchronicities along my journey where a little bit of information would lead me to the next, and it was as if breadcrumbs were just being laid out for me to follow. Of course I see this more in hindsight, but at the time it was amazing because I would hear a term and all of a sudden I would see it in all these different places. And it was as if the universe was just kind of like opening up everything for me. And it's like yep, this is the next piece you need to learn. And at other times I was super frustrated because the breadcrumbs either dried up or they felt like they were scattered all over the place. But. At those points, I would just take a step back and go back to that first quote. Whatever I need to know is revealed to me at exactly the right time. It's going to come. Just trust the process. Trust the timing is perfect for your needs. In hindsight, of course, again, I look back and I think, yeah, I couldn't have done certain things faster or in a different way because I just wasn't ready for certain things or life events were going on. That just would not allow me to do certain things. I was in the US for a time. My father was sick. That was not a time to be going into my emotional, I. Themes and working on childhood stuff. For sure. I was just frantic that if my father was gonna make it, so, you know, there's times to do things. There's times that life will get in the way your, your timing is unfolding as it should is just what I wanna say. I believe that. I hope you can believe that. If you can't believe it, just try not to fight against it. How about that? Let's agree on that at least the last part I wanna say is just I feel like I am a hundred percent imperfectly, recovered. If you heard episode 16 with my guest, Anna Holtzman, she says something that really stuck with me, and that was, I'm a hundred percent imperfectly recovered. I just loved that because for so many people, I think this idea of being a hundred percent recovered or completely pain and symptom free can feel outta reach. And honestly, I think it puts an unnecessary pressure on this healing journey. And in my experience, that pressure often slows progress because it stems from fear and control rather than trust and compassion, and this felt sense of safety that I keep talking about, which remember is I. What is needed in order for the brain to feel safe? So as a recap, again, I mean, recovery to me isn't about eliminating every sensation and never having a migraine again. It's about changing the relationship to them. It's about no longer fearing them, and it's about that fear. As it softens, the symptoms lose their grip, and in turn they become less and less and they're less present in your life. So it's kind of funny how that works, but we are living in a MINDBODY system, living a human condition as Nicole Sach says. And if you don't know her, she is somebody who is big in this MINDBODY healing space. She has a podcast called The Cure for Chronic Pain and a journaling method called Journal Speak, which is a way to process your emotions in a way that just kind of dumps everything out on the paper and can get everything out and processed. So I like this phrase that she says, and I remember hearing her on a podcast actually at some point saying, yeah, I still get some symptoms. Sometimes I still get a tinge in my back. I still get a migraine. I still get little aches and pains or whatever, because I live in a MINDBODY system. It's going to happen. It's normal. It's part of the MINDBODY connection. Sometimes our emotions and thoughts and feelings are going to move through us into a physical sensation. It's not failure, it's life. That's what's called being human. For me what recovery is, and I, I have a list that I put on this blog post and I'm gonna just read them out because I hope some of them resonate. And if some of 'em maybe do, and you hadn't thought, oh yeah, actually that's happened to me as well. I want you to take those. If you haven't looked at them as really big signs of recovery, maybe you will now and if you haven't seeing the signs of some of these, maybe these are some of the things that you can look for. That can mean recovery to you as well, or you can make up your own. But these are some of the things that I feel like recovery is for me. So recovery is that migraine is no longer front and center in my life, but far in the background. It's the fact that they're no longer chronic and affecting 17 days out of the month. It's waking up not anticipating pain to derail my day. It's making plans and not fearing, I'll probably have to cancel. It's no longer ensuring I have medication every time I leave the house. It's no longer having a garbage can next to my bed in case I get sick. It's opening the blinds in the morning to let the sun in and not, you know, living half my life in a dark room. It's eating what I want. Wearing perfume, having a glass of wine, not tracking the barometric pressure. It's when I realized I had not had a migraine for weeks and hadn't even noticed. And I kind of was like, oh, actually I haven't had pain in a really long time. And then it went to months, and then it was, you know, and it's sort of surprising, but yeah, when you turn around sometimes and it's like, oh, actually I feel really well. That is a really good sign, obviously, of recovery. It's being kinder to myself and this sense of inner peace that I have on most days. It's getting back to hobbies and a social life. It's no longer catastrophizing every symptom or living in fear That pain's inevitably going to come. It's no longer keeping a migraine diary. It's building an entire notebook of evidence of times when the triggers I was so sure were the cause of my pain when they did not actually cause pain. It's traveling without having to figure out how I'm going to refrigerate my next injection. It's not crying in the pharmacy after being told that it's too soon to get my pain medication refilled. Oh gosh, that was a bad day. Years later, it's realizing that that same prescription for the medication expired months before, and I hadn't even noticed that. Was recovery. It's living my life on my own terms, and it's waking up excited to go to work because I know that I'm able to help other people on this recovery journey. So to me, that's what healing is. That's what recovery has meant to me. I actually had a big group of people on my recovery team which I know is not available for a lot of people, so I really am thankful. I was very fortunate to live in Switzerland where I was able to be off work with a full paycheck. I paid for the top of the line insurance when I got here because I was traveling a lot for work and I wanted to make sure that if I was in another country I would have healthcare. Because I had invested in that, I was very fortunate to be able to go to a private clinic during the time of my burnout and the things that they taught me there were instrumental in also recovering from migraine. So I really had every type of therapy and a lot of people really supporting me. I know that that's not the norm, and I know a lot of people don't have that time to take off of work in order to recover, and so, I do know that I have a very fortunate situation. That's why I am trying to do my best to have a lot of free information out there. Or very inexpensive courses and things like that that will come. I do wanna make that not out of reach for everyone so that you are able to access information and not spend the amount of time that I did going down all so many rabbit holes of the internet and being so confused about why is this person talking about it in this way and that person's using that term. And is that term the same? And, oh, it took me so long to figure all this out. So this is part of my goal and my mission for Migraine Oasis. If you want some inspiration. There's also a bunch of links on this blog post. If you haven't seen my interview with Dr. David Clark on his YouTube channel. It's called symptomatic on YouTube. And his podcast is called The Story Behind the Symptoms with Dr. David Clark, and I have a link to my interview with him there. And then there's other recovery stories that I have. This Cure for Chronic Pain podcast that I mentioned of Nicole Sachs. She's got a ton and I'm talking about everything from chronic pain, chronic pelvic pain, back pain, any kind of pain long COVID ME/CFS which is chronic fatigue syndrome all kinds of different things that people are recovering from. And another link to Living Proof, which is a UK nonprofit that I have recently met the co-directors and the founder of and they have Recovery Wall with all different types of stories on there as well, which I find really inspirational. So yeah, and if you wanna chat about your recovery path, know that there's also on my website, a free 25 minute consultation call that you can sign up for. Or email me, you know, I'm here to discuss this and I want to know what is going on with you and how I can support you better. And with that, I will just wish you well and wishing you a good week and more pain-free days in your future, and a full recovery. Until next time, be well.