It was a messy but beautiful process #alzheimersawareness #preventdementia #memoryloss #alzheimers #heavymetaldetox #mildcognitiveimpairment #dementiaawareness #dementiacaregiver #alzheimersawareness

How do you handle a new diagnosis, whether your parent or your loved one is diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment or dementia? First and foremost, I will share with you my process. It was not a very clean process. It was a very messy process. For the first few years, I was in denial that my mother was actually having cognitive decline or any sort of memory issues. I also ran from the situation for a long time. So I lived in Colorado for four and a half years, basically trying to pretend like the situation wasn't happening, avoiding it and trying to pretend like it wasn't there. But the more I avoided the situation, the louder the situation got. My mom would end up in the hospital because she passed out from low blood sugar levels. She would end up just in really not good situations. And it was like, God was screaming at me, like, Erica, you can't avoid this. It's here in your face now. So after I realized that I couldn't avoid it and it wasn't gonna be going away, I started getting really angry at my mom. Angry because she didn't take care of her mental health. She didn't take care of her physical health in the ways in which I've dedicated my life to. And I've dedicated my life to my health because my father had a heart attack when he was 35. I've seen other family members experience health issues. And I said, that's not gonna be me. So I started getting mad at my mom that my freedom was being taken away because she didn't take care of herself. So I had to go through a whole process of somatically healing my mother wounds and the resentment and anger that I had towards her and the way that she conducted her life in the past. This is super vulnerable because a lot of people won't admit this process. But once I was able to give myself the space to somatically process the anger, get it out of my cells, out of my tissues, and I was able to come into a place of forgiveness for her, then the process of the research behind what was happening started. I started to take control of what was happening in her life. Every time I would go home, there would be little bouts of triggers that would happen and I would go back inside and I would do the healing to heal my own self in the way that I saw my life and her life and other people that were involved. I was then able to free myself from any anger, any shame, any resentment that was happening inside of my body and within my own mental health. So when you see all that's happening here on this page, I just wanna share with you so vulnerably that it hadn't always been this way, that it's taken a freaking ton of inner work to get myself to a space to be fully and completely compassionate, heart-opened, present with my mother. I've had to practice a lot of patience. I've had to heal a lot of inner child wounds. I've had to do a lot of grieving of my past self. There's a lot of work that gets to be done. If you look at your loved one's diagnosis as part of your soul's contract, I see it that I chose a mom that was gonna have this type of experience so my soul could evolve in ways that it wouldn't without this experience. So instead of running from the experience that's happening with your family, ask yourself what can you do to learn yourself more and to heal through whatever it is that this experience is triggering within you. What's happening for you is gonna be different than what's happening for me, but the tools to do the healing can be the same. So what do you do when you first get a diagnosis that your loved one, your parent is losing their memory? It's to take care of your own inner work. This is coming up for you and triggering things within you like the pain, the trauma, the wounds, because it's here for you. It's happening for you, not against you. If you really need support in terms of where do I start to prevent my own cognitive decline and to heal my relationship with whoever it is that is experiencing the cognitive decline so I could be a better support system for them, this is the work that I do on the daily. I am a somatic practitioner. I do help with nervous system regulation, healing traumas, wounds inside of the body so you can free yourself from your own mental health challenges because being a caretaker is not easy. It exacerbates the things that were already happening inside of you and act as a megaphone to scream at you that there's something within you that is still needing to be healed. So if you wanna make the most out of this experience that you're having with your loved one's cognitive decline in addition to supporting them by supporting you, tell me in the comments, I support me, and we can have a conversation.