Veronique P Mead

Veronique P. Mead

1:1 virtual Chronic Illness Consults globally with health professionals, SE students for all levels of credit, and people living with chronic illness. Exploring the role of trauma in specific diseases and physical symptoms.

Using SE, nervous system and polyvagal perspectives to strategize avenues for healing tailored to you as an individual or health professional. Benefits include making sense of symptoms as being driven by intelligent, typically old threat and cell danger responses. Also looking at symptoms as generated by a body doing its best to protect you but now caught in states of fight, flight and freeze. Together we use this trauma informed non-pathologizing framework to orient to symptoms to better work with and heal them. These nuances provide opportunities to increase capacity, decrease symptoms; reduce frequency, slow onset and prevent flare-ups; and to identify roots that drive symptoms so you can more easily address them and find avenues that resonate best with your unique situation.

Pioneering research finds that environmental factors, including trauma, contribute 70% to 90% of risk for chronic illness. These non-genetic risk factors influence genes through mechanisms such as epigenetics, which show reversibility with trauma therapy (Rachel Yehuda, PhD, 2013).

I'm a retired family physician and assistant professor who retrained as a Master’s level somatic trauma psychotherapist and SEP. I have been developing and refining a model on trauma’s role in chronic disease for over 25 years that is founded in the research literature and refined through personal experience and what I've been learning from readers of my blog since 2014.

Personal experience with disabling chronic illness informs this model. At my worst I was essentially bedridden for 9 months. I have greatly improved using SE and other trauma-informed tools and perspectives. My primary disabling symptom has been fatigue (labelled as ME/CFS/ chronic fatigue syndrome), which I see as reflecting a body caught in freeze. This translates to supporting and empowering you on how to work gently and powerfully with freeze states in particular.

Not Offering Psychotherapy or Supervision: After many years of offering psychotherapy and medical care, my practice is now devoted to consulting. Sessions focus on nuanced details, deepening context from an SE lens, education, and strategizing rather than working directly with symptoms even as my experience as an SEP offers tools for facilitating and being with states of activation that may arise during a consult.

Consults can be for any kind of chronic illness or physical symptom, including:

- autoimmune (type 1 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, ...)

- asthma

- chronic fatigue

- diseases associated with insulin resistance such as metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes as well as Parkinson’s, heart disease and fibromyalgia

You can find a large amount of information at no charge on my chronic illness and trauma blog. Resources include free ebooks, fact-sheets, podcasts and presentations, and detailed posts describing the role of trauma in specific diseases backed by research studies. You can subscribe for free to receive blog posts.

Specialties

• Adults
• Chronic Illness
• Complex PTSD
• Developmental Trauma
• Early Childhood Attachment Disturbances
• Birth Trauma
• Intergeneration Trauma