When Your Body Becomes the Enemy and What It Takes to Call a Truce

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from fighting your own body. Not just the pain itself, but the effort of trying to be believed. Of going back, again and again, to a system that keeps sending you home with nothing. Of learning, over time, to distrust your own experience.

Both guests in this episode know that exhaustion from the inside.

Two Stories, One Familiar Pattern

Carla Cressey, founder of The Endometriosis Foundation, spent years in severe pain before receiving a diagnosis of endometriosis at 25 by accident, during emergency surgery for what doctors had assumed was appendicitis. By that point, the disease had progressed so far it had affected her bowel, bladder and reproductive organs. The years between her first symptoms at 13 and that diagnosis were years of being told, repeatedly, that nothing was wrong.

Sheren Gaulbert, pain and trauma therapist and trustee of the Vulval Pain Society, spent nearly a decade with unprovoked vulvodynia. Years in bed, sciatica as a secondary consequence of barely being able to move, a law degree abandoned. She kept a diary through that period and when she came across it years later, it was full of red scrawl. Nines and tens, day after day.

"I can't go on like this. Why is this happening again." ~ Sheren Gaulbert

Both stories paint the same picture: chronic pelvic pain and mental health are not separate concerns. They are completely entangled in the body, in the nervous system, and in the long-term consequences of not being heard.

The Body You Learn to Hate

One of the most honest moments in this episode comes when Carla describes her relationship with her body during the worst of it.

"I just felt like it completely failed me." ~ Carla Cressey

What followed was years of suppression. Busyness as a coping strategy. Flying to America to give a talk on endometriosis when her surgeon had told her not to, collapsing on arrival. Going to parliament with surgical staples across her stomach. Driving herself forward because stopping felt like losing.

It makes complete sense. As Sheren explains, adrenaline has a pain-suppressing effect. When you stay in motion, stay busy, stay focused on what's next, the body can hold the pain at bay, at least for a while. The cost comes later. For Carla, it came after her final surgery, when the physical pain finally lifted. That's when the panic attacks started.

"All these things just tumbled out of me." ~ Carla Cressey

This is what emotional suppression in chronic illness actually looks like. Not weakness. Not failure. Just a body doing the best it could for a very long time, finally putting down what it had been carrying.

We Are Not Our Pain, But It Takes Time to Believe That

The episode spends real time on something that gets said too quickly in clinical settings: the idea that a person is more than their illness. Sheren is clear that jumping straight to "who are you without the pain" is the wrong question. The more useful starting point is what matters to you: what you would be doing, how you would be moving through the world, if things were different.

That reorientation away from the illness as identity and towards the life that still exists alongside it, is part of what makes the nervous system and chronic pain picture start to shift. Not because the pain disappears overnight, but because the person begins to exist in more than one dimension again.

Endometriosis, vulvodynia, bladder pain syndrome are all conditions that have a way of consuming everything. Recognising that they don't have to be the whole story is not a simple thing. But it is, as this episode makes clear, somewhere to start.

Listen to the full conversation with Carla Cressey and Sheren Gaulbert to hear how both of them arrived at that starting point, and what changed when they did.

Listen to the full episode with Carla Cressey and Sheren Gaulbert to hear how both of them arrived at that starting point, and what changed when they did.

Resources and research discussed here