MY STORY, PART 2: THE ROOT CAUSE THEY NEVER TOLD ME ABOUT
If you read my original story you know that panic attacks turned my world upside down after my twins were born. You know about the Vitamin D deficiency, the dismissive diagnosis, the refusal to accept a prescription that did not fit. But there is more to that story — layers I did not share the first time because I was still processing them myself. This is the part that goes deeper.
The Night Symptoms Nobody Could Explain
During the height of those panic episodes I was also dealing with something physical that terrified me and that no one seemed to have answers for. As soon as the sun was going down and dark was near I would feel a crushing sensation in my chest, difficulty breathing, and a feeling like I was about to pass out. It was worse after eating. It was worse when I was stressed. It would wake me from sleep and send me into a spiral of fear that something was seriously wrong with my heart.
It was not my heart.
Eventually someone described a similar experience to me and mentioned a hiatal hernia — a condition where part of the stomach pushes up through the diaphragm, causing pressure, breathing difficulty, and that terrifying sensation of nearly losing consciousness. Nobody had suggested this to me. Nobody had connected it to my symptoms. I had to find it myself through conversation with someone who had lived it.
Once I understood what was happening I began learning how to breathe differently — diaphragmatic breathing, intentional slow exhales, meditation to release the tension holding everything in a grip. I learned to manually coax it back down. I learned that stress was a direct trigger and that my nervous system and my digestive system were in a constant conversation I had not known how to listen to. Slowly it resolved. Not through medication. Through breath, through awareness, through learning to work with my body instead of fighting it.
That experience taught me something I carry into every client interaction today. The body is always communicating. We just have to learn its language.
The Layer Beneath the Layer
Here is what I did not fully understand at the time. The Vitamin D deficiency was real. The hiatal hernia was real. The hormonal shifts after pregnancy were real. But underneath all of it was something that no lab test could measure.
I was living in fear.
Not surface level worry — deep, cellular, bone-level fear. Fear of dying. Fear of losing control. Fear that if something happened to me my children would fall apart because no one could care for them the way I did. That belief — that I was irreplaceable in a way that made my absence catastrophic — sounds like love. It felt like love. But it was also a cage.
I had built that belief a long time before I became a mother.
I lost my father to suicide when I was a teenager. When you lose a parent that way it rewires something fundamental in you. It teaches you that the people you love can vanish without warning. It teaches you that life is not safe, that control is fragile, and that the worst can happen at any moment. I did not walk around consciously thinking these things. But my nervous system had learned them. My body had stored them. And for decades I had been living and making decisions and loving my children through that lens without realizing it.
What broke everything open was this — my body began to fall apart right as I was approaching the same age my father was when he died.
That is not a coincidence. That is the body holding a story it was never given permission to release.
When I finally connected those dots something shifted. I began doing the inner work alongside the physical healing. I began examining the beliefs I had been carrying since childhood — about safety, about control, about what my presence meant to the people I loved. I began learning that healing a limiting belief is not about pretending it was never there. It is about understanding where it came from, thanking it for trying to protect you, and choosing a different story.
One by one the fears lost their grip. The panic did not just lessen — it dissolved. Because the root had finally been addressed.
An Important Note on Language
One thing I want to share that has become central to how I approach healing — be careful what you claim as yours.
We say my anxiety. My panic attacks. My chronic illness. And every time we do we are telling our nervous system that this belongs to us. That it is part of our identity. That it is here to stay.
I stopped doing that. I stopped claiming these things as mine. They were experiences moving through me. Signals asking for attention. Not permanent residents I had invited in and given a room to.
That shift in language is small. The shift in the body is not.
The Healing That Followed
Once I addressed the physical root causes — the Vitamin D, the cofactors, the hiatal hernia, the nervous system dysregulation — and combined that with the belief work and the grief I had been carrying, the transformation was complete in a way that supplements alone never could have created.
That is why at Cardinal Roots Wellness I do not just run labs and hand you a protocol. I look at the whole picture. The physical, the emotional, the stories stored in the body. Because sometimes the root is in the gut. Sometimes it is in the lab. And sometimes it is in something that happened when you were fourteen years old that your body has been trying to process ever since.
Your body is not broken. It is speaking.
Are you ready to listen?
If you missed the first part of my story you can read it here: https://www.cardinalrootswellness.com/blog-1-1/my-reason-my-why
