You’re Not Broken
And neither was I when I crashed and burned in my thirties and no one knew what was wrong with me. Sound familiar? Yah, I’ve been there too.
Much like you, I’ve lived through big health challenges, work-life balance smack-downs, burnout, and the struggles of life. While the challenges never stop, my healing journey has led me to create deep wells of resilience, and a joy for life that I would not otherwise have, through self-care that’s been my foundation.
Chronic Fatigue Helped Me Clarify What’s Most Important
My journey of healing from persistent fatigue and frequent injuries to muscles, tendons, and ligaments made it crystal clear to me what’s most important:
Nothing Else Will Do
Because, now that I’m here, and know what I know, nothing short of that will do. I must have what fills my resilience tank to support me as I step up to whatever my life calls me to do—in work, play, and love. I must do what makes me most happy.
My Smackdown
For many years in my early life I thought I was healthy. I ran miles every day. I ate a low-fat, mostly vegetarian diet because like many of us then, I thought that was the healthiest way to eat! I worked hard and played hard. I burned the candle at both ends. I thought I had limitless energy and lived like there was no tomorrow.
Until I couldn’t.
That life became unsustainable as I entered my thirties. While I was an essentially “healthy” adult woman by conventional standards, I reached a point of losing critical reserve. With two small children, a home to manage, a job to tend to, I was bone-tired and in pain. More than just lack of sleep or overwhelm, my body had shut me down.
Not only was my lifestyle unsustainable, I was challenged by frequent “unexplained” injuries to muscles, tendons, and ligaments. I’d get hurt doing virtually nothing. Following a shoulder surgery to repair a rotator cuff tendon, I discovered I had severely low blood pressure—no wonder I was exhausted all the time! I was diagnosed with a rather common but frequently overlooked condition known as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) with hypermobility and low blood pressure.
During this time I felt lost, frustrated, and broken—literally. I had family and work I loved so much, but I was exhausted and in pain, and nothing I knew from my conventional medical training could help me. I couldn’t fix myself. And my doctors, seeing me as ‘many parts, many problems’ couldn’t fix me either.
Healed: My New Path of Life, Health, and Medicine
This period of struggle led me to intensive exploration of a whole person approach to healing, including Functional Medicine, nutritional biochemistry, trauma science, and what I call the “21st century sciences of Directable Human Potential”: epigenetics, neuroplasticity, core functional systems biology, and transformational psychology.
Gradually I healed myself. I learned I was unbroken, wise, already whole.
I learned to support my hypermobile body through smart strength training, physical therapy, and savvy sports medicine techniques like prolotherapy and PRP.
I was able to normalize my blood pressure through intensive hydration, electrolytes, acupuncture, and regulation of my nervous system.
I profoundly changed the way I ate, giving up food irritants (like sugar, gluten, and dairy) and intensifying nutrition (protein, fats, and micronutrients deficient in my previous eating strategy). I put more emphasis on sleep and creating work-life balance that suited my needs. I dove deeply into reducing stress and nourishing my spirit through journaling, meditation, time in nature, and yoga.
Key to my healing was giving myself permission to put myself into more of a priority position in my own life. No longer could I put myself last—after my family, clients—everyone! And I had to let go of others’ expectations of me as a mom, a physician, a friend. I had to define my own priorities, values, and expectations. These were foundational to recovering my energy.
My Strong Core Sustains Me
I was able to strengthen the core of who I was. Not just who I was as a person, but the core of my energy and wellbeing. From this place of strength, I’ve been able to better manage new challenges to my health and wellness as they’ve come along—unexpected injuries, surgeries, and constellations of problems for which my conventional medicine colleagues have had no answers.
I’ve not only survived, but thrived, taking on new challenges (like writing my first book!) and experiencing a deeper joy in life than I ever thought possible.
To do this, I had to become the expert on me. And create a new lens to see my problems—one that sees the connections, the individual nuances, and takes me deeply into the complexity of it all, not trying to “fix” with a magic bullet. For this I’ve had to stay vigilant with reverent self-care every day.
Beyond relying on myself, I also had to learn to ask for help. In doing so, I created a team to help me—an amazing team of healers who have stepped up for me, see me as the unique person that I am, who love and support me, and have helped me heal. Oh, yes, it takes a team sometimes!
What Healing is All About
But it’s all worth it. Every bit of it. Because this journey of self-discovery has led not just to the energy I need to feel my best, but to the life energy that sustains my soul—the curiosity that leads me to spectacular places, the people (and dogs) I get to love and feel loved by, the work and play that give me joy … all the elements that nourish my life’s purpose.
This, to me, is what healing is all about.
My Healing Changed My Medicine
My Life School learning about how to heal (for myself and my clients) has deeply influenced how I practice medicine. While my early roots in conventional Western biomedicine were valuable, providing me with tools I still use today, they are wholly insufficient to help any of us heal by addressing our complex and dynamic needs as humans.
I’ve had to learn, define, and create a new medicine. A medicine inspired by the sciences of human potential—epigenetics, neuroplasticity, core Functional Medicine systems biology, transformational psychology, and trauma science—and the revelatory journeys of my many clients who have healed from chronic complex illness over more than three decades of practice.
How I Demystify Chronic Illness
My work with clients and intensive study of the medical literature for over three decades has led me to a new way of understanding chronic illness. A critical new way of thinking about human beings and how we operate that demystifies chronic illness.
First and foremost, being ill is not a character flaw. It’s not something that’s wrong with you. You’re not broken or need to be fixed.
Further, as we now know from the 21st century sciences of Directable Human Potential, illness is not your destiny.
Illness is a Story of Hope
As flattened as you may feel, illness is actually a story of hope—of your great untapped potential.
How?
When you’re ill, your body is doing precisely what it was designed to do within its unique set of circumstances.
You’re Not Broken
It works like this:
When illness occurs, what’s happened is a collision between your unique genetics, your lifestyle, and the environment within which they all exist.
The response of your body to that collision—to that unique gene-lifestyle-environment relationship—is utterly precise, elegantly orchestrated, and meaningful. Not just a random train wreck.
So, no, you are not broken. You’re just not getting what you need to heal.
Yet.
Epigenetics: The Science of Human Potential
This gene-environment relationship is the science of epigenetics—the science of human potential. No longer does the “illness is my destiny” story hold up to the scrutiny of science.
The epigenetics story of illness is one of hope. It puts our healing right into our own hands.
We can change our lifestyle and environment to change gene expression—to reverse illness.
Epigenetics: the Promise We Can Heal.
Epigenetics is the science of how our genes are expressed (and lead to our unique structure and function) depending on the environment they’re in. Everything from how we sleep, eat, and move, to how we think, feel, and love will affect our gene expression.
Therefore, all illnesses we can possibly experience are modified by what we do to nourish the healing environment: food, movement, sleep, stress, love, our thoughts, our feelings, our sense of safety, and so on.
And most chronic illnesses are reversible by creating a healing environment in which we can thrive.
This story of hope is our human story. It’s our potential to heal that sits squarely in our own hands.
What Do You Need to Decode Your Healing?
You need mentors (like me), fellow travelers (we’re all healing with you), and a roadmap with directions that you choose based on where you are and where you want to be. Not a one-size-fits-all protocol manual, but a nuanced roadmap to show you the bird’s eye view of the terrain of your healing. A roadmap that knows your path won’t look like everyone else’s but will be unique to your strengths and challenges.
This is my job as a physician. To hear your story. To show you the roadmap. To help you decode your healing and find your unique path to find it. To help you decode the illness-to-gene relationship. To help you answer the question: what do I need to heal?
How Do We Heal?
We carefully observe the story of our illness. We ask our bodies to show us the root causes and the directions we must go to heal.
Our health is always a simple balance between two things—what nourishing things do we need to thrive and what toxic things do we need to get rid of? So, we ask 2 essential questions of our illness story.
Our 2 essential questions of the illness story:
- Are there unmet needs stalling our healing (nutrients, sleep, movement, love, feeling safe, and so on)?
- What must be gotten rid of to unleash healing and vital energy (infections, allergens, toxins, bad habits, toxic emotions, and so on)?
It’s Not Simple
This is not simple. No, this is work. But it’s the work of your healing—the work of your life. You are complex. It takes time. And there are no magic bullets anyone can promise you.
But this is the only path to sustainable healing. It’s the only path to the energy, vibrancy, and untapped potential that we all really, ultimately, seek in our healing.
This work of our healing, though hard, is what allows us to glide sometimes … it creates the energy we need to thrive and experience the miraculous lives we were born to live.
The Beauty in Illness
The beauty of this work is how we’re called to a healing life.
Illness is our call to discover and live a healing life. Not a quick fix. Not to slap a band-aid on our problems. But to create changes in our lives that are lasting and lead to the deepest level of healing and energy.
Thought of in this way, illness becomes our wakeup call. Healing is what happens as we step up, claim our power, and take responsibility for our own healing.
Illness is a Story of Hope
Illness is a story of hope. Always. And it’s accessible to us all.
Is there a story that keeps you sick and tired and stuck?
My free ebook, Your Healing Story, will show you how to write a new one.
More About Karyn
Karyn Shanks MD is a board-certified physician, author, and pioneer in the field of root-cause healing, with over forty years of experience helping clients recover their lives from chronic, complex illness. A graduate of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, she is board-certified in both Internal Medicine and Functional Medicine, and a founding diplomat of the American Board of Integrative and Holistic Medicine. She is also trained in trauma-informed psychotherapy through Dr. Gabor Maté’s Compassionate Inquiry Professional Training Program.
Dr. Shanks brings together the sciences of directable human potential—epigenetics, neuroplasticity, systems biology—with the deep wisdom of lived experience, spiritual inquiry, and narrative transformation. Her work centers on the belief that people are not broken, but wise and whole, and that sustainable healing begins with reclaiming that truth. Her private practice, teaching, and writing are deeply influenced by her own journey through illness and recovery.
Karyn is the founder of the Unbroken Academy, an online educational platform for healing through story, self-trust, and embodied resilience. She is the author of two previous books—Heal: A Nine-Stage Roadmap to Recover Energy, Reverse Chronic Illness, and Claim the Potential of a Vibrant New You and The Wisdom of COVID-19—as well as dozens of essays published in Thrive Global, Holstee, Huffington Post, and MindBodyGreen. Her voice is known for its clarity, warmth, and fierce compassion.
Through her work, writing, and lived wisdom, Karyn is trusted by both patients and professionals alike—as a guide, mentor, and visionary voice in a new healing paradigm.
Website: www.KarynShanksMD.com
Instagram: @karynshanksmd
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Books by Karyn Shanks MD
Karyn Shanks MD is the author of Heal and The Wisdom of COVID-19.
Contact her at [email protected].
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