By Christine Arseneau, Pharm.D., FMCHC

My Lyme diagnosis came 20 years after that fateful tick bite — a revelation that answered countless questions about the mysterious health issues plaguing me for years.

Determined to regain control of my life, I embarked on my new full-time job: concentrating on my health.

I had made a lot of progress. I had fortified my gut and embraced mindfulness as a way of life. Yet, four years into my journey, pain, fatigue, and mental exhaustion persisted.

Desperation set in, as I grappled with the disheartening reality of slow progress and wondered if my life would be forever defined by Lyme. I felt disempowered. I had done so much to overcome this and now wondered, When is this going to end? Is the rest of my life going to be like this? 

Unwilling to accept defeat within the confines of conventional medicine, I stepped outside of the box. Despite my pharmacist background, I knew there was more to explore.

I was willing to do anything. I had explored all the options within the box, and they had only gotten me this far. So I started to think outside of my Western medicine training.

Outside of the box

Out of desperation, I found myself at a spiritual ceremony with a shaman.

I was very vulnerable, begging for an answer. Why am I not getting better? Will I ever see the results I am looking for in my health? How can I overcome this?

I put it all out there to the universe. I was asking for the answer. Begging for the answer.

Then suddenly, a deep-rooted belief surfaced that the little girl inside of me had held onto her entire life. I could see with absolute clarity how her needs were connected to this sickness that had become my identity. After all, I had been sick for 20 years before it was acknowledged, validated, diagnosed, or understood.

Recognizing this, I purged this old belief with a physical and emotional release that left me with a renewed energy, a sensation palpable in every cell.

This marked the beginning of my exploration into the power of the subconscious mind and its role in healing — a journey I now share with others.

Using the subconscious mind to heal

Now I know what it takes to fully recover.

My philosophy centers on more than eradicating pathogens.

It’s about rebalancing the whole person — the terrain — where these organisms thrive. The key is not only killing the bacteria. We must also ensure the terrain becomes uninhabitable for their return. Otherwise, the bacteria come back, since they thrive in weakened systems.

This is why building up the foundation of your body instead of only focusing on killing bacteria is crucial. For lasting recovery, you must look at gut health, building resilience in the body, and decreasing inflammation. Environmental factors, including the internal environment of thoughts and emotions, are also pivotal and often overlooked.

Harnessing the power of mind-body medicine is often disregarded in traditional treatments however it’s a crucial component to reaching full recovery.

Our thoughts can actually turn certain genes on or off – so we can have thoughts that aid our healing and thoughts that are destructive to our healing. Learning to manage our mindset can create results in our physical body.

Our emotions can directly affect our immune system. In fact, a study in Psychology Today showed that participants who had their “happiness levels boosted” by watching humorous videos before being exposed to rhinovirus and influenza virus were less likely to get the cold or flu and if they did get the virus, they reported their symptoms as less severe.

Brain retraining

This is why brain retraining should be included as part of a comprehensive Lyme protocol. There are just a few simple steps you can take today to get started retraining your brain.

The first is becoming aware of thoughts that hold you back or cause discomfort for you. Just this awareness alone starts to separate us from our thoughts, so we begin to realize we have thoughts, we are not our thoughts.

Secondly, once you have labeled the thought that is causing discomfort, you can begin to interrupt the thought pattern with mindfulness. If you become fully aware of the present moment, your mind can not be stuck in those thoughts that aren’t serving you.

This pattern-interrupt starts retraining our brain to build new neural pathways to counter old pathways we have developed.

Lastly, we can create new positive habits like crafting a practice of gratitude. This gives our brain a new path to follow after we’ve interrupted patterns of limiting beliefs. Mental fitness is increased when new mental muscles are strengthened through positive habits.

As important as the conscious brain is, it is responsible for about 10% of the results in your life compared to the subconscious mind which is responsible for about 90% of results! You can see why including this step creates lasting healing.

If your protocol does not include subconscious mind retraining, you are missing out on a huge opportunity.

The subconscious mind can impede healing

We all have blocks and obstacles that get stuck in our subconscious mind and can impede our healing. Once we address these blocks, we are able to get our body into the parasympathetic state where we can heal, rest, and digest.

If we are stuck in the sympathetic, fight-or-flight state, our bodies are simply unable to heal.

Doing the subconscious mind work allows us to regulate our nervous system, rewire the trauma response, and reprogram the limbic system. Until we are able to get into a parasympathetic state, nothing we do on the physical level will have much benefit as we need to turn the healing mode on first to see results.

Full recovery begins with a foundational approach to rebalance the terrain of your body. Systematically building up the terrain of your body allows you to be more effective in overcoming Lyme and ensuring these organisms don’t come back.

Holistic protocol

A holistic comprehensive protocol must include the following things: mitochondrial support, replenishing redox-signaling molecules, subconscious mind work to regulate our nervous system, rewire the trauma response and reprogram the limbic system, brain retraining, opening drainage pathways, decreasing inflammation, supporting your gut including balancing any dysbiosis and removing parasites and pathogens, supporting and strengthening the immune system, replenishing nutrient deficiencies, deeper detoxification work and supporting the immune system to kill off the pathogens that don’t belong there.

Once we do all of this and set up the foundation of the body for success, the process of killing off the Lyme bacteria and co-infections becomes much more manageable and leads to more successful results.

I believe holistic is the way. I see amazing results when I combine physical and mind-body techniques, addressing root causes while removing mental and emotional blocks. Making the body’s terrain as resilient as possible makes full recovery from Lyme an achievable reality.

The journey is holistic, the solutions are multifaceted, and the transformation is profound.

Christine Arseneau, Pharm.D., FMCHC, CCHt is a pharmacist, clinical hypnotherapist and functional medicine health coach specializing in Lyme disease. To learn more about her work, visit lymesupport.com.