Meet Annie
Healing from CFS/ME and Chronic Pain/Fibromyalgia with CFS School in 2022 has led me to fulfilling my dream of working with fellow self healers with similar chronic illness.
It is my honor to offer them the validation, support and guidance I so badly needed when I was in their shoes. To that end, I am training to be a certified Mind Body Practitioner and Holistic Life Coach.
I am passionate about empowering self healers to know the super powers they possess innately when they tap into the mind body connection. I draw from my lived experience of a long laundry list of symptoms over a decades long journey of trial and error to recovery.
I continue to deepen my personal and professional understanding of healing trauma and have a special interest in Early Developmental Trauma. I am working towards my Yoga Teacher Training qualification, such has been the positive impact of yoga on my own healing journey.
I am a mum of two and appreciate that my healing ripples far beyond just myself. I swim in the cold Irish Sea year round for fun! I love to hike in the Wicklow mountains and I adore traveling abroad.
My decades-long ill health began in my early teens when I got glandular fever (Epstein Barr virus) and was sick for months.
Thereafter, a host of various symptoms ensued culminating in being bed bound and in chronic pain with no answers or support for recovery. However, I never stopped searching for a way out as I believed full recovery was possible, having watched others who had recovered before me share their story.
I tried everything under the sun within my reach, even achieving 70% recovery after brain retraining (Lightning Process) but plateaued. It was not until I turned my attention to the Nervous System and Trauma did I find CFS School which resonated deeply with me.
I am driven to share that healing is possible as I am my own living proof! Completing the CFS School Program (now HEAL) was life-changing for me and so many others I’ve had the privilege of working with since.
I am forever grateful to the program and ultimately to myself for never giving up hope that one day I’d feel like I do today; peaceful in my mind and body, with an understanding of what caused the dis-ease and the tools to fine tune wellness, health and happiness, mind, body, and soul.
My professional background is in Project Management in the Banking industry in Ireland, prior to which I worked and traveled in the USA, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Africa and India. Now, I live in Greystones, Wicklow, Ireland with my husband and two young daughters.
From 10 Years of Living Hell to Healed
Anne joined CFS School in January 2022 and is now one of our Program Mentors. She generously shared her story with us.
Here’s how she describes her journey to being healed.
Life was hell for 10 years.
It was basically a slow, terrifying, tortuous downward spiral just into complete and utter shutdown and collapse and being bed-bound for days and weeks at a time.
I have two kids who are now 12 and almost 10. All of their life, they had had an ill mom, a sick mom, a mom that was in bed, or a mom that couldn’t do the things she wanted to do. I lost my career. I lost my ability to work. And I led a very closed off isolated existence.
There was so little understanding and there was so little support. Like actual support from a GP or from a consultant or from anybody in the medical field that I went to.
It was very much… “No, you can’t recover. You’re broken. There’s no hope. It’s only going to get worse. Accept it. Deal with the disability.”
I railed against that. Never accepted that. I was going to find my way out.
I found the lightning process – a brain retraining program – and had really good success with it but reached a sort of a plateau around the 70% mark and was really frustrated.
I’d been given a glimpse of recovery and freedom and wellness. But boom! There’s this wall that I can’t seem to get through or past.
Through self-inquiry, trial and error, and looking up everything I could on the Internet, I had a slow-burning realization that actually there is trauma that is at the root of my illness. There’s definitely nervous system dysregulation and that’s a whole other area that I’ve never tapped into or dealt with.
That’s when I found Jen and Karden. What they were sharing really resonated with me.
So I was really excited that they had this program – CFS School. I signed up to it quicker than I’ve signed up to anything.
In CFS School, I really appreciated that I was the self-healer, empowered to heal myself.
Jen and Karden were guiding me and teaching me, which is amazing. But at the end of the day, I don’t have to look externally anymore.
For the first time, I felt like I was back in the driver’s seat. That I actually have influence over my nervous system.
All of this stuff blew my mind.
About six to eight weeks after the program finished, I got to a point where it was just undeniable.
I was in a place where I could say: I AM HEALED.
I was no longer doing chronic symptoms. I wasn’t chronically dysregulated. My ability to do stuff in life was back to a normal range.
The day I knew I was fully on the other side was when I spontaneously took my girls – who are into art – to an art exhibition in the city. We piled into the car, went into the city, walked around town seeing everything, and drove home.
Only months before, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that. I never could have got up the next day and carried on like it was nothing.
And this is sticking.
My daughters say to me, “You know, it’s like two lives. There was this period of 10 years, and there’s this life, and it’s completely night and day.”
They have a mom who is fully engaged and active and happy.
I’m so glad they get to see the other side of it.