The Invisible Injury: Champion Cyclist Rebecca Rusch On Healing From A Traumatic Brain Injury, Concussion Awareness & Why Acceptance Is Strength｜The Rich Roll Podcast

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This podcast is in partnership with Airbnb.

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And to find out just how much, visit Airbnb .com slash host. Rebecca Rush is an absolute legend in the world of ultra endurance With cross -country running and I've been a rocket climber, a kayaker, adventure racer, and most recently ultra endurance mountain bike racer.

Nicknamed the Queen of Pain, Rebecca has set course records across some of the world's most grueling events.

But today we're not here to talk about Rebecca's incredible athletic achievements.

Instead, we're diving into what might be her most challenging adventure yet, recovering from a traumatic brain injury she sustained four years ago.

I just had a huge crash, oh my bike's up there.

My helmet is broken pretty hard right?

I'm excited to talk about it today because it has been the hardest thing I've done in my whole life, and my goal with talking about it as raw as it is, is to help more people with brain injury recover better than I did.

Rebecca is extraordinary in so many ways.

And today, she really opens up on what everyone should know when it comes to injuries of this nature, which more often than not are invisible.

I'm now glad that the injury happened because not only am I recovering from an injury, but I'm becoming a more whole and complete person.

Quick note near the end of our conversation, I suggested that Rebecca put together are a concussion toolkit with resources and pertinent information on the various healing modalities she has found most beneficial.

Well, she ended up doing just that, which you can download for free at rebeccarush .com.

Now, without further ado, enjoy.

So when we first sat down, that was 2019?

I think so. Pre pandemic.

It was right pre pandemic.

At my house and when I walked in and saw you, the first thing that I saw was this metal bracelet that you're wearing.

And I remembered instantly like, oh, you gave me one of those.

And then I remembered like, oh, I don't wear it all the time.

It's a little big for my wrist, but I keep it near me.

And I remembered that it was in my car.

So I rushed out to my car and I got it at night and I put it on.

So you didn't intentionally bring that today, you just had it around.

Yeah, it's just like in the little you know, what is that called the boot in between the seats like underneath.

But maybe - Thanks for carrying it with you.

Maybe remind people, because there's a really amazing story behind these bracelets.

Yeah, these bracelets are made from a war craft aluminum bombs that were dropped during the Vietnam American conflict that my dad was part of.

And we work with a company that is clearing the bombs that are still there 50 plus years later from a war that ended a long time ago, clearing the bombs, Wow villagers repurposing them into jewelry and bracelets that we engraved with my dad's words be good.

And I share them with everyone I know and I'm happy that you still have one and each bracelet goes to clear up more unexploded ordinance in Laos along the Ho Chi Minh trail.

So it's a. And that, is that work still ongoing?

Are they still doing that?

Yeah. There's a lot of unexploded ordnance still there, yeah.

The estimate is that in Laos, it's the most bombed country in the history of our world.

An estimate is that the current rate it will take another hundred years to clear up all the unexploded ordnance still there.

And of course, we're doing that in other countries now and leaving that in the wake of our Wars.

So yeah, but I love that you wore the bracelet and it means a lot and thank you for wearing it.

That's cool, I appreciate it.

And, you know, last time you were here, we discussed that work in the context of you retracing your father's steps where he passed away in the context of the war and the documentary that that you created as part of that experience called Blood Road.

We talked about all of your amazing achievements, world domination, world records, all the like, right?

But today we're gonna talk about a different kind of adventure and perhaps your most challenging adventure to date.

It is. And it's pretty emotional and pretty raw.

The hardest thing I've gone through in my life is the recovery from a concussion that happened on Veterans Day, 2022.

Is that right? No, 2021, see?

Okay, yeah. November 11th, 2021.

November 11th, 2021.

And yeah that was a crash on my mountain bike and I'm still almost three years later going through recovery from that injury.

The only injury I've really had as a professional athlete, the only serious injury I've had.

And so, yeah, I'm excited to talk about it today because it has been the hardest thing I've done in my whole life.

And my goal with talking about it as raw as it is, is to help more people with brain injury recover better than I did.

And I had no idea what I was in for that day in 2021.

Yeah, it's been quite a learning experience.

You have this limited series podcast that you've released and it goes into all aspects of brain injury, brain health, the various healing modalities, what you've discovered on this path of discovery for yourself, and it's a real public service, I think that you're providing and doing that.

Thank you, I hope so.

I wish I had had a public service when I got injured because really my journey has been really messy and confusing and arduous and frustrating because there isn't really good clear health for brain injury, tons of it is unreported, and when you do report it and go to the doctor, quite often they don't know where to send you or what to do.

In my case, for example, I was repeatedly prescribed SSRIs as the solution without looking at all of the other modalities of your body, a holistic approach to healthcare, and so my goal with this, talking about it, is not to present as an expert, but to have the conversation because it is an invisible injury.

I probably look fine to you and people can't see that you're injured.

And often it's invisible from those around you, but it's often a hidden injury as well that people aren't comfortable talking about the fact that they have a brain injury because we don't know what to do about it and the doctors aren't helping us.

And it's a field that's only emerging in terms of what we understand and don't understand.

That's true, the brain is super complicated, it's not as simple as getting a knee replacement or you know, you break your arm, it's not as straightforward as that, but it's so critical because our brain is really the command center for every thing that we do.

And I think in this three year learning process, what's been really interesting for me is I'm now glad that the injury happened because not only am I recovering from an injury but I'm becoming a more whole and complete person by the inward journey I'd had to go on and the learning I've had to look at all the parts of my life, instead of the athlete in me who would just push harder, forge forward, just go harder, longer, faster and you'll get through it.

I mean, not even, not just as an athlete, but that has been my lifestyle, MO of like to accomplish something.

I just work harder.

This is just a hidden gift in the whole thing, right?

Like I just need to heal my brain so I can get back to doing the thing that I was doing before.

But what you get instead is a deep confrontation with self that then kind of confronts you with having to untangle all of these psychological knots and revisiting your childhood and you know why you are the way you are.

And that's very scary because as someone like yourself who's a very successful professional athlete and knows how to do the thing that you do, the idea of kind of looking in the rear view mirror and addressing those things might mean that it will undermine what you must consider to be your superpower and how you make a living.

Like what happens if I actually go to those places is am I still gonna be able to be the person that I've always been and not knowing what's on the other side of that door?

This is partially why for three years, I didn't admit what was going, well, really, not quite three years, but for a year and a half to two years, I didn't admit what was going on for me because I feared losing my job.

I feared losing my sponsors, but more than that, I feared looking weak and vulnerable to my persona is, strong, resilient athlete.

I can do anything. And if I admitted that I couldn't, and that I needed help, and that I was really in a dark place, then how would people view me?

Who am I if I'm not the athlete?

Yeah, you're jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.

Yeah, and I landed, I mean, I'm still here, there was a period I thought I wasn't gonna be here.

Well, let's start at the beginning, like walk us through the inciting incident, the crash.

Yeah, so 2021, thank you for remembering the date on a three -day self -supported mountain bike bike packing adventure, which is normal for me.

I wasn't trying to set any records or do anything fantastic.

I wanted to go ride my bike for a few days in Arizona and was having a great time and sailing long in the afternoon.

I was actually singing and it was warm afternoon, having a great time.

And I just clipped my handlebar on a rock that was sort of extending into the trail.

It sent me flying sort of torpedo down a 10 foot Rocky embankment, the first impact.

And I was completely aware of everything was happening.

I was like, Oh, I'm falling.

I'm flying through there.

The first impact was the left side of my helmet on a real sharp pointy rock.

And then I bounced another time onto the back of my ribs, rolled a few more times down this ravine and sort of stopped down in the bottom and took stock.

I had been filming just to like share my adventure with other people.

So it was, I turned my camera on, which was actually pretty interesting because the footage is quite telling.

But I turned the camera on I was like, okay I can breathe I can move my fingers and toes I got up I started kind of self assessment because I'm an EMT and I was out there alone no cell phone coverage so I kind of started like okay this is serious I need to get out of here it took a picture of my face I looked at my pupils and kind of began making sure my bike was okay but I was probably 15 miles from a trailhead so I sent a satellite message to a friend like meet at this trailhead, I didn't tell him what was going on cause there was nothing anybody could do.

And the really impactful part for me, and this is feel that things happen for a reason and that my dad has been sending me messages my whole life.

I looked at my helmet just to see the impact and the impact from this sharp pointy rock was right on the map coordinates of his crash site that I have painted on my helmet.

So right smack in the middle of that, It was November 11th and as soon as I put my helmet on a plane flew overhead and my dad was a pilot.

And so it was just sort of like, okay, he's with me.

He's sending me messages.

And I've thought about all of those things together a lot since the crash.

But at the time I'm like, okay, dad's with me.

I got this. I'm gonna get myself out of here.

Got on my bike. I like, made my way out and, you know was going through all the things like going into shock, you know, my pupils are dilated.

Like I know exactly what's going on as an EMT. I'm like, I might have brain, I bleed, I might have punctured ribs or punctured lung.

Like, I need to get out of here.

So it was like this ticking time bomb.

I got myself out to safety, met a friend and quite honestly, I thought that that was like, sweet.

I did it, I got myself out.

I'm good, you know, sort of rest and get back to the rest of my life.

And I even was gonna continue the ride.

There was part of me that was just like, Yeah, I'm okay.

I'll get some food, I'm okay.

Sorta like, you know, those cartoon characters where they like shake it off, and like, and then they're like fine, and there was that mentality of me like, I'm fine.

Okay, I'm gonna just keep going, and I'll get a new helmet, and I'll be good.

And I had no idea that basically that was the start of the journey, Not the end of the journey.

Right, well, a couple of reflections on that because I watched the video and then each episode of your four part series podcast starts with clips from you, it's audio only, but you hear yourself kind of reflecting on what just happened.

And in the immediate aftermath, you definitely look a little shook up, but you're talking, you know, it's all fine.

And then in the later parts, it's like, okay, like this is all like, okay.

And in reference to like, yeah, that cartoon thing where you just kind of shake your head and you're fine, it's like, we grew up in a time where we sort of laughed at brain injuries.

It's like, oh, you got his bell rung, and football practice or whatever.

This is just what happens.

And in the intervening decades, there's been a lot of greater awareness around brain injury and now everybody wears a helmet when they ride a bike and skateboards skiing and the like, like so much has improved.

but in the back of our minds, I still think like, oh yeah, well that just kinda happens to everybody and you move on, right, unless it's like really bad.

And your story, and I think part of what your message is, is trying to help people understand like, these are not small things and sometimes the symptoms are severe, sometimes they're subtle, but oftentimes people don't connect the dots.

it's like if they have a depressive episode later or they're suffering from headaches, they don't necessarily reflect back on like the incident that caused it.

They're looking at something else entirely and never really kind of confront, you know, the reality of their predicament.

It's so weird that we look at brain injury in that way, or you think, oh, I wore a helmet, I'm fine.

You know, not considering that you can still shake your brain even if you're wearing a helmet and there isn't a visual impact on your skull.

There's still the internal impact of the trauma of being shaken or bruised and it it's bizarre to me that we don't look at brain injury as injury but I'm the same way I did exactly the same thing my mountain bike friends were like oh I'm glad you're okay are your ribs broken that was the first question and it wasn't how is your head?

And I think there's the assumption if you can put words together and you know what date it is, that you're okay.

And what I'm learning now is many of the concussion symptoms, depression, anxiety, eye fatigue, headaches, just general malaise or not feeling like yourself, we don't associate those with a brain injury, but that's exactly what a brain injury is.

And yeah, I'm learning a lot.

I had no idea. I went home and just thought okay, I'll rest up a bit and I'll be back to normal and I'll go back to my hard charging life and do things exactly as I always have. Life had a different plan for me.

Like this is a massive pattern interrupt and to get a little bit esoteric on this, I don't think it can be ignored the fact fact that this happened on Veterans Day, your dad is a figure that looms large in your life as just a human being and also as an adventurer, the fact that you did that bike trip that you did and made that documentary and your connection to him and his crash.

And then for this to occur on Veterans Day and for you to land right where you have the coordinates on the helmet is wild.

It's like the universe has been very clear, there's something here that you need to look at And in order for us to direct your attention towards it, we're gonna have to basically derail your life so that you can stop what you're doing and finally pay attention to what we're trying to tell you.

It's wild, it's really wild.

This might add talking to me.

And through, I want to put a pin in it cause I want to get to the healing that you've done around that and your childhood.

But I want to tell a quick story and it's gonna sound like a crazy unrelated tangent, but it is related to this.

We have a mutual friend, Willie Walker.

You know Willie, right?

And I was texting with Willie today.

Oh my gosh. And he had texted me out of the blue about something else.

And I said, Oh, Rebecca's coming in.

And he's like, oh, he sent me a bunch of photos from a recent ride that you guys did.

And so Willie is, he's a very successful business man, real estate guy, but a very avid cyclist. Like just loves cycling, travels all over the world, does lots of events, is very good at cycling.

And I didn't know him until this past year where we were both on this trip to Dharmshala invited by Arthur Brooks to convene with the Dalai Lama.

Like he was part of this small group.

Willie was on that trip.

He was on this trip.

And the evening before the first session with the Dalai Lama, Arthur introduces me to Willie, he's like, you gotta meet this guy, you have a lot in common, you guys should talk.

And he was there with his son who he brought with him, and we immediately, oh, cyclists, yeah, cool, we should talk or whatever, but it wasn't until, and I spent time with him over the course of the next couple of days, but it wasn't until the whole thing was over with.

and we were waiting for our ride back to the hotel to leave. And my wife and I and Willy were like waiting in the lobby of this hotel and I'm chatting with Willy.

And it just comes up, oh, where are you from?

And we hadn't even talked about that kind of thing.

And he's like, oh, I'm from Washington, DC.

I was like, oh, me too.

Where'd you go to high school?

Turns out he went to like my rival high school and he's my exact age and we know all these people in common. and I was like, where in DC did you grow up?

Oh, I lived here, I lived here, and then I moved here.

But, and then he says this, he says, my grandmother was sort of a well -known figure in Washington and Georgetown, and she lived in this townhouse in Georgetown for most of her entire life.

And I used to spend a lot of time there.

And I said, oh, my parents live in Georgetown.

I said, where in Georgetown?

And he literally said da -da -da -da -da -da this street, I'm not gonna say it out loud.

He gave me the address and I literally felt like this flush and then I said to him, that's my parents' house.

So my parents bought this house from his grandmother.

And so I have this connection with this guy who I had never met and didn't know, who knows all these people that I know from childhood, who my parents know his family, like this crazy weird thing that I could have never predicted.

And then I'm like, why are we both here in Dharamsala?

We just had this experience with the Dalai Lama.

And this is a guy who also is part of my world through the outdoors and stuff like that.

And is like a good friend of yours.

I don't know what the message is in any of that, but I guess I'd bring up the story only to say that these kind of subtle synchronicities or messages that we get, like are real and important to examine and evaluate.

And I think you got a resounding message from the universe that gave you something very deep and important to explore within yourself.

Well, to add to that story about Willie, we were texting with him this morning because he was asking for a certain photo of us during my recent event that I just had, Rebecca's private Idaho, that he rides that and we were together and he's like, Oh, can you send me that picture?

So that also just happened this morning.

He did that so that he could text him to me.

Okay. Cause he sent me a bunch of photos you guys together.

Well, I love that you brought that up because while the world is big it's really small and connected if we listen.

And I only have started listening and hearing those kinds of things since 2015 is when I went and rode the Ho Chi Minh Trail and sort of started hearing my dad's voice and messages and looking at what is appearing around me is sort of instead of the horse with the blinders on, you know, running a race, that trip really sort of made me look around a little bit more a lot.

It sort of started the journey of being instead of this self -centered athlete what am I going to do to achieve my goals.

That really started me like, how can I use my talent and what I do, but looking around a little bit more.

And there were things that started happening on that trip.

And it was a beginning of the slowing down.

And I even said at the end of the ride to my teammate, Huen, Vietnamese woman.

I said, thank you for teaching me how to slow down because she was slower than I was.

She wasn't as experienced.

and that was a frustration for me.

About halfway through.

You want to race the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

I would have. And I'm really grateful that I didn't.

You missed the magic as well.

I would've missed all those messages, all those things.

And fast forward now to, dad started to try to talk to me then and I didn't really quite listen a little bit, but then I do believe he literally threw me on my head on November 11th to say, you know.

He's like, I need to knock a little bit harder.

Yeah. What's gonna really do, what's gonna really cause her to pay attention?

Well, I just have to create a situation in which she can't like ride away from everything on her bike.

And I never would have said I was running away from anything through my sport.

I thought I was running two things, but I can look now and, and see that I was filling a void with sport, with metals, with accolades filling a space.

And not to say that I'm so proud of what I've done in my career.

And there are strategies that we use that work for a while.

And I really think his message was like, okay, this hard charging masculine strategy of like pushing through everything, maybe that's not the strategy for the second half of your life.

Maybe there's a more feminine, a softer side that you can develop.

And when I look at my mom and my dad, it's actually interesting, my mom embodies more of the masculine traits because she had to as a single parent.

And what I know about my dad is he embodied more feminine traits of being an artist and things like that.

And so, there is this flip that's happening for me because of the concussion.

And it started with Blood Road of developing into a more whole human being.

But it did take throwing me on my head and putting me in the hardest thing I've done in my life to listen.

Well, I wanna work our way up to that epiphany, but maybe let's go back to kind of the timeline here.

So you have this incident, you make it through the day, no broken ribs, but let's go kind of step -by -step through the realization that maybe something more is wrong.

Like your travels through the Byzantine healthcare system, et cetera.

So obviously, like no broken ribs, no broken collarbone, like do you go to ER?

Do you go to, you know, urgent care or you just go home?

I just went home, I just went home.

It's fine. It's actually amazing that you haven't been in this situation prior.

I mean, all you do is ride your bike.

Like if you're gonna, if you're riding your bike and you're, especially if you're riding it competitively and you're riding it over, you know, rough terrain like you do, I would think like you've probably crashed a lot and landed on your head a number of times.

I had a bad crash a couple of decades ago.

And really that's where I did land on my head.

That was maybe 2013, but other than that, they've all been small.

And I mean, you do endurance sports, it's a little different than somebody who is doing like downhill mountain bike racing, they're falling a lot more.

And so yeah, and it's more like tip over, or maybe you hurt your shoulder or you spring your arm.

But like I said, I haven't had a broken bone.

I haven't, anything's the style of what I do with ultra endurance stuff.

It's probably more common that you'd have an overuse injury or something like that than a traumatic injury, but yeah, I haven't really fallen that much and I only hit my head, you know, twice.

And the same thing the other time it was during a race, a 24 hour race, and I torpedoed off my bike, landed straight on my helmet, and it was sort of like, okay, shake it off, keep going, and I kept racing.

Luckily both times, I mean, I didn't fall again on my head And that's one of the things multiple impacts really do multiply.

But yeah, I haven't fallen that much. So you had no reason to believe like anything was terribly wrong after this, you go home.

So when do you first realize like something's off?

Probably a couple of weeks, you know, I took a week off work and, you know, I have a great business partner who kind of took care of everything.

But yeah, it was like take a week off, rest. It was really interesting because I could see the sleep disruption with like zero deep sleep.

And I chocked my sleep in my metrics.

But I really started paying attention.

It was like, Oh, that's interesting.

There's zero percentage of deep sleep or REM sleep, zero.

Zero REM? Zero of anything.

Wow. Or wait, initially it was like zero deep sleep and really high REM.

And then it flipped and it started to change where it was like a different sleep metric but either way it was really off.

And deep sleep as we know is when your brain is needs to recover and heal.

And so that wasn't happening in the initial impact.

And now I know later that there is this immediate sort of energy crisis in the brain where it's like shaken.

it's not getting the nutrients it needs, it's working really hard. And I don't know the science behind it, but it's working really hard in the first like 48 hours to a week to sort of stabilize.

And that's why people are super tired, their eyes are really fatigued.

And so I kind of just thought, yeah, I'll rest a week.

And then it was two weeks and I was like, oh, maybe I should go to the doctor.

So I went to the doctor a couple of weeks in, my primary care physician and they just looked I looked at my ribs, really, and I said, I fell on my head and they're like, you know, have you had any, are you having headaches or anything?

Actually, no, they didn't even ask me that.

They didn't even ask me anything about my head.

And so I was just like, okay.

You know, and they checked my ribs.

You're like, I crashed and I fell on my head and they didn't ask you anything about your head.

They didn't ask me about my head.

Wow. And I went back again two months later where I was still like, I have no energy.

I don't wanna train, I don't wanna be outside.

I can't look at screens and it sounds ridiculous.

Now, it sounds so obvious, but I was just like, so I went back to the doctor and that's when she prescribed antidepressants and when you have a brain injury, I mean, I can say, now I'm well enough to look at the internet and do research and read some of the studies.

at the time, I wasn't well enough to know what to ask for, I just wasn't myself.

And were you, did you have the self -awareness to connect this to your crash or are you thinking, maybe this is something else?

No, I still thought it was the crash and it was like, something's not right, something's not right.

As it went on, then I started to think, well, I'm just crazy and I sort of disassociated it from the crash and like, well, is it menopause?

Is it my age? Is it like what I'm going through in my life?

Is it that I'm losing my mind?

There was no one to guide me and say like, these are normal concussion symptoms. Because for me, that would've normalized it and it would've given me a little bit of a trail map of like, okay, this is why I'm feeling the way I'm feeling.

But I really didn't know why I was feeling the way I was feeling.

At this point, nobody in this traditional medicine paradigm said maybe you should get an MRI or maybe we should do some scans.

I asked for an MRI and she said, no, she said, you don't have a baseline, you're not on the ski team, we do this for the youth, but since it won't help you to get an MRI.

What does that even mean?

That's where I was sitting there with a head injury going, well, what does that even mean?

Why can't I get a baseline?

It would at least show me where I am now for a baseline later.

And so yeah, I just kind of went back confused.

And I talked to my coach. My coach has been really helpful in all of this, but he also has no experience.

And so I had a couple of really good people to talk to, but they were not professionals in concussion recovery.

I asked, and I'm a professional athlete, I asked sponsors, I asked partners, Like what's your concussion protocol?

What do I do? I know a lot of people in the sports network and most people are saying, well, we're working on it.

Or football has this or the UFC has that or the military has that.

But like, you know, there are these research studies that are like thousands of pages long.

Like, what are the cliff notes?

Yeah, you're not gonna read that.

But you're a Red Bull athlete, right?

I was for 22 years.

Yeah, and I mean, they're in action.

You would think like they have plenty of athletes who've had TBIs.

They have, but there isn't a clear protocol, and eventually, Red Bull did refer me to a clinic in Salt Lake City that works with Sports Concussion, the Kutcher Clinic.

But this was a year in, where I finally got a concussion specialist to go to, But I've been asking, asking, asking.

So prior to that, your symptoms are sleep disorder, depression, sensitivity, eye sensitivity to screens, to light also.

Some pretty serious headaches that were positionally induced and were part of the fear of me going and training again for fear of eliciting, like really sort of like like knock me to the ground headaches.

Physically induced means what?

Like if I would try to get down and do yoga or stretch or so, if my head was like not up upright that would elicit headaches.

I know now that all of those symptoms that I had fall into categories and they can tell a caregiver oh, you have vestibular or ocular or balance.

so they can start to look at your symptoms and then figure out your treatment, but I just wasn't getting that.

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So for an entire year...

You're swinging in the wind and the only thing they're saying is maybe go on SSRIs for depression.

That's all you're getting out of this.

And are you exploring like alternative modalities?

Like, you know, I mean, there's lots of other stuff out there, acupuncture and all that or does that come later?

No, I was exploring that stuff.

So I explored hyperbaric chamber.

I did go to some eyes open EEG, where they look at your brain waves and that was pretty cool.

And they could see that basically my brain was just being super hyperactive and that it wasn't communicating well the front to the back, like what's coming in to the front wasn't sort of making it to the back.

And that's all really interesting, but the treatment was is to come, like stay at their facility for six weeks and like that sort of out of reach. And so, yeah, I was trying a lot of different things.

I did really look at my diet and started supplementation.

So there's some things that were probably working and helping a little but it wasn't a holistic approach of like, here's what you need to do to heal your injury.

And I mean, I'll be honest, I call a small handful of friends and it was like, I don't know what to do.

And people are trying to help of like, you know, try CBD, try this, try that, you know, take fish oil, but it was all over.

Just the scatter shot approach. Well intentioned, scatter shot.

Well intentioned, and me spending money on stuff that like I just don't know and I wasn't seeing like any big change or it didn't feel intentional and it didn't feel prescribed to what was going on with me.

It just was like, oh my aunt tried this one thing and it helped them.

And so I did some of that, but quite honestly, I got really, really fatigued and really frustrated and really kind of lost hope that I could ever be normal again or that I could ever heal.

And that was a pretty dark time.

Yeah, a year in and the symptoms are persisting.

There's no, they're not relenting.

And I'm hiding them from the people I work with, a bunch of my friends, haven't heard the story yet, even...

You've got the mask on, you're fronting like everything's cool.

Are you getting out on your bike and doing any training or that was, you're not interested.

You don't have the energy for that.

I kept trying in fits and starts like, okay, I need to, And that also became sort of like this checklist thing that I needed to do for work because training has been my job.

And so then that also became something that was like, I'm not training, I'm not doing this, I'm not doing that.

And it sort of kept eroding my confidence.

And I tried to go out on the bike and either would get a headache or not have the motivation or just kinda be going through these motions.

Like there was no joy in going out and, and exercising or, or being in nature.

And I mean, I had to walk my dogs.

So some days that was the only time I went outside was to walk my dogs for 10 minutes.

And sometimes as, as far as I got and I sit in the grass I'd walk them and sit in the grass and just cry.

Yeah. And God forbid your sponsors find out.

Yeah. Or the people that think, I'm invincible, the people that I inspire, I'm supposed to inspire people.

I'm supposed to like show people who I am.

Who are you if you're not that person who's always stronger than everyone else?

Yeah. And that's a lot.

That's like a huge burden to shoulder that you always have to be the unshakable one.

Yeah. Yeah, I've done really well at it for 50 something years.

And prior to this, did you just think, well, this is just the way it's always gonna be all the way to the end.

I'm gonna be the one who stands firm and tall and be the strength for everybody else.

Yeah, I mean, there's been glimpses of fatigue.

Like do I always have to be the one who's...

Am I gonna do this at 75?

Yeah, like, can somebody else come be a teammate, And I do have teammates, but yeah, no. I just kind of did figure that I would have to always be the leader, and if that is my gift, and I'm the strong one, like, okay, I'll do it.

There've been times in my life where that's pretty fatiguing, but not at the level of this, where I literally couldn't be the person that I've been my whole life.

And your sense of self -worth being totally tied up up in that identity?

Yeah. So, you're in this state of teetering on hopelessness, you're a year in.

And then what was the first marker for the next chapter?

Was it this clinic in Salt Lake City?

Yep, that was the first kind of hopeful impetus.

I went there, they gave me the MRI, they looked at my brain, said, Your brain structure's great.

They explained, they explained concussion to me and - I mean did they say how come you haven't gotten an MRI?

He did say, this is the first thing we're gonna do.

Do you have, and I said, okay, great, thank you.

So it was the first time I felt heard with my injury.

It was the first time somebody trained in this was asking me about my symptoms and was sympathetic and looked at my eyes, looked at my neck, explained how when you're taking in information through your eyes and through your body that your brain is processing all of that.

And if your neck, or your eyes, or if something's not quite right, your brain is working overtime to make sense of the world around you.

Even if your eyeglass prescription is off, like that puts a huge burden on your brain.

And so he explained how that communication works.

And he was the first person one to hear me out and not just say, you know, here's drug for what you're going through.

He got an MRI, so I got objective measures.

We did eye tests. We did things that were on the bike, the same kind of tests, under load, not under load to see if they could elicit headache symptoms. And so I came away with a really clear picture of an understanding what was going on, and explanation of brain injury, cause I've never had one, a clear MRI.

And I remember when he was so excited, like pulled up the screen and he said, your brain looks great.

And I actually started crying, cause I was like, well then what's wrong with me?

Right. And he had - Hoping the MRI would reveal an answer.

I mean, I didn't want to have a brain swell or lesion or anything like that - Clarity and he just, all he said is the communication system's off.

And I was like, okay.

And I asked him, do I need to take, so I should just take SSRA?

And he said, no, I wouldn't prescribe that at this time.

And I was like, what would you prescribe?

And, you know, he gave me games to play, gave me stuff to do, there were check -ins.

And so that was the first turning point of like, you have an injury, here's how it can be treated.

And then I went home, I had some follow up with him.

And that was a big turning point.

it wasn't the complete picture for sure.

It was the structural picture and it was the beginning of me healing physically, but it wasn't what I needed emotionally.

Like there was more to the picture.

So I came home from that clinic, started working on my neck, started, you know, got a new eyeglass prescription, could be on the computer more.

I was like existing, you know, at 50%.

Maybe, which was way better than 10 % or whatever I was at. But that was a big turning point.

I was about a year in, and then right around the same time, I was doing acupuncture and ended up starting to go to therapy.

And that really was the ongoing therapy and talking to someone, kind of like with the sports neurologists I saw.

Being able to tell somebody what I'm going through and they're like, oh, okay, I understand this.

And so, yeah, the therapist, she worked in trauma.

She's worked with military and PTSD and childhood trauma.

And I just, from the first session, I could tell, I could talk to her and I could tell her there was no barrier of, she didn't have an expectation of me being a superhero.

I didn't need to be a superhero in front of her.

And I could just say, this is what I'm going through, kind of the same as I did with the other doctor physically, is what I'm going through.

And he's like, okay, do this stuff.

And then the pairing of that emotional support was really what I needed.

What was your previous relationship with therapy prior to that?

Just dribs and drabs, you know, a little bit as a child, not on a consistent basis of like, and I've always believed it was great.

I've had really good success a couple of times in my life, but they were short term, like you've got this like small trauma.

Let's move back. Actually the early childhood, you know, it wasn't impactful.

I was just forced to go.

And I was kind of like, well, this is dumb.

You were forced to go as a kid?

I was. What was the inciting incident for that?

I had eating disorder as a kid.

And so my mom, you know, not knowing what to do.

She's like, you're gonna go.

we're gonna go see this family therapist. And we went a few times, but there wasn't this connection that I felt, it was sort of kind of like being forced to go and it was okay, but it wasn't impactful for me.

And then many years later, a little bit of relationship therapy that really helped.

But that was also a short term thing.

And so this was my first real deep dive into regular therapy every week, tools, journaling, talking about it, probably looking back, I never really journaled until Blood Road and the film and the creative director, Nicholas Schrunck, he asked me and Hu -EN, he asked us to journal every day of the ride.

And that was really, and then I had to turn my journals over to the creative team, which was really interesting.

But that sort of started me in sort of my own self processing and writing things down.

And that was 2015. So I've continued that exercise, but I've never had anyone guide me, guide me through it and give me tools, you know, for the mind.

I mean, my therapy's always been outdoors, like moving, going, and being in nature for a week.

We all develop our own bespoke coping mechanisms and defense strategies for survival, right?

Nobody emerges out of childhood unscathed, we all have stuff and our brain in that formative stage develops ways for us to kind of feel okay in the world.

And for some it's drugs and alcohol, for others it's relationships, for people like you and I, it's like getting outside on a bike or on a trail and going all day, you know?

And that idea that you don't feel like yourself until you do that.

And then you get successful at it and you're like, well, this is awesome, right?

And it prevents you from having an honest reckoning with why you started to do that in the first place.

And so I suspect like going into therapy, be on the one hand, what a relief, like perhaps part of your exhaustion is just carrying that burden of being super human for so long for so many people.

No idea. And then you can like let go of that and you can like relax your nervous system.

I mean that in and of itself must have been revelatory.

And then on top of that to say, well let's look at all this.

Why is your dad such a towering figure in your life?

Like what is that about?

And let's maybe look at those journals from the Ho Chi -Men trail and kind of get to the bottom of this relationship, which seems so formative and important in your life.

Yeah, the crown, the cape is really heavy, super heavy.

Right, and a cape that you thought you were just going to have to wear your whole life, right.

And that it worked for a long time, but yeah, this superhero cape is off.

As they say, it works until it doesn't.

Yeah. And you're right, that we all learn how to move through the world as children.

And then what's really interesting as we become adults, the people who continue to learn, they're the ones who are gonna evolve.

But if we take the same, and that's why I say I'm happy the concussion happened.

If you take the same skills you learned as a child, a young adult into your 30s, and you keep using the same tools for coping and success, eventually those tools are dulled and they don't work anymore.

And so either you can keep trying to use those which is a lot of the frustration for people in midlife of what am I doing?

This has worked up until now.

And so it's an interesting timing of all of this happening with what I think a lot of people concussion or not go through when they reach midlife of like, what am I about?

What am I for? Like, what is the second half gonna be?

I needed to shift the way the tools I was using and the identity that I created instantly was smashed in my eyes, if I can't do that sports thing, then what am I?

if I'm not superwoman.

Yeah, it's an existential threat to who you are and it can be, and it's devastating, but the growth opportunity also is right beneath the surface there.

And if you have the courage to grab onto that and walk through the fear of what might be on the other side.

Yeah, and I needed people to like take my hand and pull me to the other side, really.

Because I didn't know how to get there.

Well, I mean, few walk willingly into that bear trap.

You know what I mean?

It's like, I guess there are people out there who say, well, this isn't working for me anymore and I'm gonna volunteer for this new way.

God bless those people.

Like, I'm pretty stubborn.

Like, I don't wanna change the way I do things unless, you know, something intervenes that forces me into that kind of, you know, growth curve, but it's, cause it's not fun and it's not easy, like, who wants to do any of that?

I don't wanna do it.

It's much more fun to do.

And what's interesting about this is that the perception is that all these endurance races that you've done in which you're so successful, like you're the, oh, you're the icon of suffering.

Like, you know how to do hard things.

But what they don't realize is that doing that version of hard things is actually the easy thing, right?

Like that's the easy.

The hard way is to not do that thing and go in the other direction.

That's much harder than just doing what you've always done.

Physical work is easy for me.

I mean, it's very clear and very linear of, you know, you wanna run a marathon, you do this process, you just try super hard, and I'm good at that, trying super hard and just keeping going.

The pain cave, really getting out of your comfort zone, the pain cave, is to not do the thing.

Yeah, and that's exactly what happened during concussion.

I wasn't riding, I wasn't running, I wasn't exercising, I wasn't doing what I've always done in my life.

So there was this huge void of physical exertion.

And then what's left?

This pile of goo for a while until some people started to help me restructure and look at what is left when you take away your physical being?

Well, what's left is your emotional being, your spiritual being.

There's like a whole other part of you that is underdeveloped, that I've honed and skilled and crafted my physical being my entire life.

I have not done that work with my emotional or spiritual being.

It's interesting that you use the word goo that reminds me of another story.

Our beloved dear friend, Alexei Pappas, who's been on this show a couple of times.

Olympian, writer, filmmaker.

she has a new podcast out that we're working with her on.

But she calls this glop not goo when she tells the story, this lovely story about the truth of the Caterpillar becoming the butterfly.

And we think it goes into the cocoon and it emerges as a butterfly, but it doesn't do so until it completely dissolves first into like glop, right?

So you can't become the butterfly until you've had that moment of total dissolution, right?

And for you to be reduced to that goo becomes the kind of formative substance from which you can emerge stronger and more whole.

That story, I remember that episode has really resonated with me.

And I've heard that same analogy through Chip Conley and some other people about that.

And the interesting thing about the butterfly is when I did that ride on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and we arrived to the place where my dad died and this beautiful tree where the Lao Villagers had buried him under, and I hadn't seen any butterflies for a month in Laos and in the film, you see this butterfly was there and you can see it in the film and it was there with me the whole time I was at the tree, flying all around me, doing all that and then the remaining days on the trail well butterflies kept landing on me and like, they were all over.

And I was like, how could that be real?

Ew, and two years later I went and I rode my bike up and down Kilimanjaro and there was a butterfly at like 19 ,000 feet.

And our African guide was like, there's no butterflies here.

I've never seen, they don't exist here.

And there was one. And so these butterflies just kept showing up for me.

And I thought at the time, like that moment at the tree and that ride, like I'm the butterfly now.

Like I have evolved and like gotten out of my cocoon.

How little did you know?

Yeah, I was like, no, now I know the butterflies dad and I'm still gonna be a pile of goo.

It's your future self?

It might be, I think it's my dad, but I was also like, no, I'm not the butterfly yet.

I had to become literally the pile of goo, glop, that has to transform with still the same materials.

It's just misshapen and you shape that into a new thing.

And I love that you brought up that story because I do feel like the last three years as me is this pile of goo, glop, reshaping, reforming and into the butterfly.

On the physical healing side, there's this idea that when you suffered a TBI that you need to rest the brain.

It needs rest, you know, you need to let it rest. I'm not sure what that means, and I know in your case, not only did you have like the lack of will or the lethargy that prevented you from being out on the bike, but there was also kind of this message that you shouldn't be doing that.

that you shouldn't be exerting yourself.

And it was only later that you could make the connection between that and some aspects of the depression that you were experiencing.

Yeah, the whole rest thing, and we've talked to some experts now since, the whole like, you should rest after a brain injury really comes from that you don't wanna have an impact on your head again.

but that's been misinterpreted to kind of return to play.

Like you shouldn't go back to the football field, you just shouldn't and it's kind of interesting.

People assume that football players or high impact sports are the only people getting concussions, but that is absolutely not true.

Like 30 % of Americans in their life will report a brain injury.

50 % will have long -term symptoms. So 15 % of the population then has some kind to have long -term brain injury.

Yeah, and I mean, people are coming out of the woodwork with the same story as I had of like, I didn't get any care, I didn't get any help.

I've been dealing with this for seven years and women are.

Women are getting gaslit then, right?

Women are getting gaslit, but women also have a higher proclivity to having more severe and more long -term symptoms. They don't necessarily know why, but yeah, there are a lot of people suffering.

There's such a long tail, like these symptoms exist, for months and years after the injury itself that you can just imagine like going into your GP or whatever and just being dismissed.

Like you're a crazy person or you're imagining - Dismissed or, yeah, yeah.

And I mean, I don't have the stats for the military, but that's also a really, really high level of concussion.

Even if they didn't hit their head, But it's from the blast and the noise and the sound.

So there are a lot of people dealing with this, I had no idea.

And you think it's, yeah, you think it's football players or skiers or elite athletes, it's actually the general population.

You have a car accident, you fall off your bike.

So there are a lot of people going through this.

I don't remember what your question that led us to this that we're on - The question was, was this idea that you need to rest. Oh yeah, about rest. You realizing like I've misinterpreted this and getting back on the bike.

And, I guess, it's a leading question towards like actually moving your body again, helping you with some of the symptoms. Yeah, what I was saying is it came from the history of return to play and not wanting athletes to hit their head again.

So they say, oh, rest, pull them off the field, but that was never meant to be past a week or a short term till you're asymptomatic for what it does mean, and there's actually some cool tests, like there's this Buffalo treadmill test, returning to movement in a safe way is actually part of the protocol that I didn't know, that you get moving, you start to get that blood flow through your body, through your brain, you're releasing all these neurochemicals that make us feel good, as you know, when you run.

And so stopping all that cold turkey is actually the last thing that anyone needs, an athlete or a non athlete.

But especially for someone who is used to sort of having that steady drip of those dopamine and serotonin and all that my whole life.

And so you stopped those things.

And all of a sudden you stop the thing that makes you feel good and what was really strange.

And I knew this, like, I need to go out and ride.

I need to go out and do something, but I just didn't want to.

And then the longer it went, then I just felt bad about myself.

And I was like, I can't even ride the same, why did I used to or I can't?

Then I started like comparing myself.

That's the burden of the professional athlete.

You're out there training, comparing yourself to, who you think you should be or where you used to be looking at those numbers.

This is why I started running again.

And I did it, my first alter run this summer because I have no expectation of a time or a performance.

Nobody expects me to be good at running.

And so slowly getting back into it, I've actually, I've taken the garment off my bike.

I'm not looking at a head unit, if I am on my bike, I'm not recording any metrics because it actually started to become detrimental and a judgment on myself.

And then I had to add in a different sport, Which was my first sport, which was trail running.

And so that has been, even now like, I'm not back to training.

I would say I'm exercising like maybe a average person might do, but like going and running for half an hour, 45 minutes, maybe an hour.

You know, that that's kind of the level I'm at right now.

And it feels good, but I've had to take away all of the measurements and the metrics because I have that expectation on myself and I don't really show up publicly to go to races or do that because I don't wanna be judged in that way cause I'm not well enough to sort of take that yet.

Yeah, what does it mean if you're a middle of the packer and is there a way to do this thing that you love that you're so good at but not do it for performance reasons and instead do it not just to honor your physical vessel and your mental wellbeing but for just the joy of it.

That's where I'm at.

Which is harder. Like that's like more out of the comfort zone than doing it with a specific performance goal in mind.

Like to let go of all of that and just do it because it's who you are without any kind of agenda, other than the thing itself.

That's why I'm not the butterfly yet.

I'm still working on that.

It's hard, right? I mean, since I was 14 years old, cross -country running in high school, I have been a competitive athlete.

And it's not to say I haven't loved doing all the things I've done, but there's always been a finish, a measurement, a placing, an expectation, a coach, a race I'm going for.

there has always been that external validation of you're good enough, you're worthy.

And then you win again, and then okay, you're even more worthy.

And your worthiness is completely tied to how you perform.

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Obviously, as you age, you're not gonna be able to hit the numbers that set aside the injury.

like let's just say no injury, you're just continuing on your path.

Obviously when you age up, you're not gonna be able to be as fast as you once were, but you can always be the fastest 65 year old, 70.

You can still win your age group, right?

So you can still be in that performance mindset.

But letting go of that entirely, that's a whole other thing.

I've never really entered age group ever.

And yeah, I can recognize intellectually that that is a natural progression of life.

I'm not there yet, which is why I'm running a little and I'm riding my bike by myself so that my friends don't see like, oh, you used to be way faster.

But everyone's self -obsessed.

You know, they're not doing that and everyone loves you.

And they just want they want you to be around and to be out there having fun.

No one actually cares.

No, I realize that's my reflection.

And I think that's a big part of talking about this and talking about the injury and talking about how I feel.

It's not for my own therapy, although it is therapeutic.

It's actually to put this out into the world that like, hey, we're our own harshest critic.

And to ask yourself the question, like, what if I had value outside of this and I don't need to do all these things and that love doesn't need to be earned in that way.

That's what I'm working on by loving myself first. So what's going on in therapy then?

I want to get to the dad stuff.

I feel like that's the heart of it.

It is the heart of it.

And, you know, maybe it's a bit cliche that we all want to, you know, blame whatever woes we have on our parents, you know, and our upbringing.

But quite honestly, it's a formidable time in life and how we come into this world, you know, it shapes us.

Through therapy, you know, I've been able to uncover that quite honestly, I was abandoned as a child, abandoned.

How so? My father was killed in the Vietnam American conflict and my mom had to work.

How old were you when that happened?

Three years old. Oh, you were that young?

Mom had to go to work and commute to Chicago, Like she was gone from 6 a .m. to 7 p .m. or 8 p .m. every day.

And so not abandoned by neglect, but by circumstance.

And my sister and I were alone all the time.

And I've learned now, it's like children need like...

I think there's some statistic of like eight physical touches a day.

You know, they need to be held and physically touched and hugged when they fall down and we didn't get that.

And it's not to throw shade on my mom or my dad.

Like it was circumstantial, but we were alone.

And so we were left to get up, dust ourselves off, and take care of things ourselves.

And that independence and grit that served my sister and me really well in our lives.

My sister's a two star general.

Oh really? I know that, oh wow.

Recently retired. So we both went towards high achievement.

Yeah, full on. And that high achievement, those accolades, the achievement was a replacement for love.

It's I'm good enough.

Oh, I won this. Oh, I achieved that in school.

Well, and a cry for attention.

Yeah, and mom was there on the weekend.

She went to my track meet, she went to my stuff, but she was a working mother, just trying in the 70s and 80s, trying to raise two kids, and - And this was, we're the same generation, I mean, we were the latchkey, it was a latchkey generation, and that was not abnormal.

It wasn't abnormal, And you know, we were not neglected, but we were abandoned.

Like there wasn't anyone there.

And the example that my mom showed us through modeling was, you work hard, you don't complain, you just do it.

And that is a super valuable skill set that my sister and I have learned, but it's not the whole picture.

And when you ask what's missing, is that part of the influence of my dad was missing?

And the gentleness and kindness.

And perhaps if my mother hadn't, if he wasn't gone, my mom might've been more of that nurturing personality, but she couldn't be because of circumstance.

And so we never learned, we learned to take care of ourselves, take care of everyone else around us, make sure everything's okay, but no one was gonna take care of us.

Yeah, and that's exhausting.

Still is. And so with this self awareness, then where do you put it?

Like, what do you do with it to heal and move forward and take that goo or that glop and get it to congeal so you can emerge the butterfly?

Like what's happening in therapy to drive you towards that result.

It's starting with acceptance.

Me, accepting myself, you know, as you said, you know, no one else is judging me in this way, but I am.

So me sort of being okay with accepting myself, and I kind of mentioned my therapist, like but acceptance is giving up, acceptance is failure.

And we actually talked about it last week where I was like, if I accept, as I said to her, I've never not achieved anything that I set my mind to.

And so if I accept something that's happening, it's failure.

And she was like, no, no, no, acceptance is the strongest thing you can do.

Because everyone is gonna go through pain and suffering.

I mean, do you accept it or do you push against it or you deny it?

It's a little bit like, if we think about the Vietnam War era and the people that came home and either whole or not whole as humans, nobody talked about it.

Nobody looked at it.

You pushed it under the carpet.

That was our generation of, you know, you don't talk about bad things.

You just pretend like they're not there, but then they become a festering wound that later needs to be scrubbed out and looked at.

And I mean, that's kind of the point I'm at now is looking at what happened, why am the way I am, appreciating the things I've done, but like, okay, maybe that skill set or those coping mechanisms aren't gonna serve me going forward. Is that resonating with you?

I mean, this is like right out of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Is it? Yeah, I mean, this is the journey that every person in recovery must go on when they're confronted with this notion of acceptance and surrender.

and have to take to task their own willfulness because it's really like it's, you know, in A they would say it's self will versus God's will.

So it's about wreck.

Like you're somebody who has tremendous self will.

When you direct yourself, well, you know, in a certain way you can get the result and that's led to great accomplishments.

It's led to self -esteem.

It's led to validation by strangers, all of these things, right?

And I, and I, and I share this from my own personal experience as well.

Like this I'm on the same journey with you.

But then yourself will crashes you into a wall and you have to, you have to kind of come to terms with the fact that it's no longer the solution for you.

And what you're looking for actually requires you let go of that strategy of pushing, pushing, pushing, which is about self and ego.

And kind of embrace what it would feel like to put your trust in something greater and unknowable.

And the surrender, the acceptance piece is to your point, taking the blinders off and looking at everything objectively, your past, your actions, your behaviors, identifying patterns that have led you astray and trying to understand why you do the things the way that you do.

And then turning it over like letting go, surrendering, like this is no longer working for me, like, let me be directed in a new and different way that transcends the ego, what I want, my self obsession, my idea of what success and love looks like.

And that's a very scary thing to do, which is why surrender isn't giving up.

It's actually an act of tremendous courage.

It's pretty hard. Yeah and then we do what we call together trudge the road of happy destiny, right?

Which basically means it sucks and it's hard and it never gets easier, but it's this journey of self discovery towards wholeness, right?

There's this missing piece that we all have, and I don't think this is unique to addicts or alcoholics or you know, this is like, this is the human condition, right?

Yeah, yeah. We all have coping strategies and mechanisms and they work until they don't, and then we have these opportunities to grow.

We can become a victim and say woe is me or we can grab the reins and say, well what is this gonna teach me about how I can be a better person, a more self actualized person.

Yeah, I think we reach adulthood and we sort of think, you know, you went to college, you went maybe got a master's degree, you did your learning early in life, and then you know how to live life.

I got it figured out, you know, and then you got slammed.

And then you're like, wait, I did all the things.

I did everything I would thought I was supposed to do.

Like, what do you mean?

Right, you get thrown on your head.

Do you know the hero's journey, of course?

Sure. Do you know the heroine's journey?

Tell me more. So the hero's journey, I mean, the warrior goes out, he slays the dragon, you know, he experiences obstacles and then he comes back, you know, and it's very linear, it's very sort of male energy, masculine energy of like physical prowess.

The heroine's journey is very similar, but it's an inward, it's an inward exploration of a journey.

And instead of slaying a dragon, you're actually finding balance between the masculine and the feminine.

And you're having this internal adventure, so to speak, discovery, exploration, and you sort of then come back into the world as a more whole being.

You didn't conquer something, you actually looked at yourself and became a more whole, if that makes sense.

No, that's great. I love that.

I don't know why. And it's much more of a feminine.

Sure, but it's also a lot harder.

Like on some level, it's easy to go out and slay the dragon because you know what the job is.

That's what I've been doing.

But you go do it and then you come back and everybody applauds, right?

But then the heroines journey, it's like, okay, now you gotta go inside and like figure all this stuff out?

like that's murky and confusing and there is no like concrete dragon for you to go and cut its throat.

Like what does that look like?

Like, how am I supposed to do this?

And what are the steps towards that?

Like much harder. It's much harder, but you talked about the Dalai Lama answering every single question with the same answer.

It's love. It's so annoying.

But it's super annoying.

You're like, what is the meaning of life?

Love, yeah but you're right.

It's a harder journey.

I've been slaying the dragon, doing the hero's journey my whole life.

Like tons over and over and over again.

But the heroin's journey I feel like is what I'm on now.

And it is, I've been pretty aggressive, pretty masculine most of my life.

And I think it is a connection to a softer side and appreciating the feminine side of me, instead of the sports I've done.

There haven't been a lot of men or women taking part.

And so I really have had to sort of model after model masculine energy.

Even the model that my mom gave us and it's not working anymore.

And, Blood Road started it, but like me stopping and softening and saying, Okay, I don't know.

Here I am. Fully exposed, very vulnerable.

Is super vulnerable, but what I'm seeing is that people still love me, people still respect me.

Shocking. And it's me who put that armor up and it's starting to come down, but it's like you take the armor off and the skeleton maybe isn't as strong as it should be because it's been kind of sort of scaffolded by the protection that you put around.

So I take the scaffold off and all of a sudden I'm a little gooey, like that butterfly caterpillar.

And that's what I'm trying to strengthen right now is the stuff that I haven't learned how to strengthen.

What are some of the other modalities that you've explored on this journey towards healing?

Yeah, I would say if there were, some big critical factors was, finding a medical professional in the concussion space, getting moving again, getting to therapy and eventually the massive accelerator has been psychedelic assisted therapy.

And I'm about maybe a year into that journey.

And that has really, taken all the therapy, all the things I've kind of known or intuitively known and really accelerated and made sense of things for me.

To be able to articulate what we've been talking about wouldn't have happened without therapy and then psychedelic assisted therapy.

And it's been really interesting.

I mean, a journey into your brain and your psyche that is fascinating.

this is like my version of your butterfly.

Like every podcast, somebody comes on and starts talking about their positive psychedelic experiences.

Why is this? You know, there's a lot of people being affected by it.

And it is interesting.

It's coming up. And that's what was happening to me in my recovery.

It just kept coming up and coming up and coming up.

And I was so desperate that I was like, yeah, I'll try anything.

How did you figure out?

Because there's a lot of practitioners out there, there's also many different types of compounds and experiences you can have. Like who guided you towards whatever ended up being a positive value add for you.

Yeah, I mean, it was coming at me kind of like you organically from all these people, and I was like the initial recovery.

I don't wanna just throw a dart against the wall and hope that it helps me, even though I'm kind of desperate.

And so I started doing a bunch of research on my own watched there's a Netflix series from Michael Pollack in a book that were pretty good where he actually took all the compounds himself and talks about how do they affect your brain?

And I'm not gonna be the kind of person that's just gonna sort of dive into something without researching it.

So I did a fair bit of research, but to be honest, I was exhausted.

I was so tired and the therapy was working.

But I was like, man, if I can just accelerate what's going on or really understand it better.

And so I started with MDMA and the reason I started with that was because there is a lot of research it's in clinical trials at this point.

Um, and there are, there's a lot of research showing that it's helping people with PTSD and helping people with trauma.

And so that seemed like the most logical place to start.

And it's also from what I understand, like the least trippy, you know, of all of the psychedelic compounds.

And you know, I'm a pretty analytical person, a pretty controlling person.

And so there, there was fear of going into it, but I also felt like, okay, all these people can't be wrong.

And all these people who've suffered trauma have had really good effects from it.

So I went through that.

It's a three -part thing, space six weeks apart, paired with therapy, which is the main part.

And the journals and the intention and you go through the experience and then you talk about it a lot with your therapist after it and with the person who is guiding you through it.

And so I wasn't interested in a party drug or I wasn't interested in in escaping.

And I will tell you, like there were parts of my concussion recovery where I was drinking just to mask alcohol, just to mask the pain and self -sabotaging and making all sorts of bad choices just to escape.

This was entirely different.

This was me wanting to have agency in my recovery and to be part of the solution.

And so there's a lot of stigma, of course, around any kind of a drug or a medicine, whatever you want to call it.

But yeah, I went down that route and did three sessions of MDMA and then two sessions of ozylocybin.

And I'm completely changed.

Now, I wanna rearticulate that.

I'm not completely changed.

I feel like a more complete human being and the parts of me that I've shielded and covered and stuff down inside, those are now open and available for me to understand and look at and make sense of.

It's been quite an opening of stuff that was already there.

Help me. as somebody who's never done this before and whoever's listening or watching who has no experience with this, help me understand what it was about those experiences that gave you that clarity.

So I will direct people to episode three of the brainstorm podcast because we actually have my therapist on there who explain and one in particular, she's a chemist And she talks about what exactly is happening in the brain.

And my talk therapist talks also about what are the modalities, what's happening in therapy.

And when you you use things like touch or you, you know, journal or you do art or you draw like what's happening in the brain, and really then explaining in the psychedelic space, the same things are happening, but it's accelerated.

and from what I understand is that things like your default mode network and your your logical rational brain is kind of disrupted for a while so it's like the armor that you've built and the Your lifetime of like how you operate in this world is sort of Removed for a minute.

You know the you throw the windows open the light comes in and then your or what they call your limbic brain, or really like who you are, is no longer shrouded in the world around you, the expectations, all of your experiences.

And it is sort of like, for me, it was like somebody opened the windows in a dark room and I could see in for the first time.

Like I've been kind of trying to look through the blinds And somebody just flew, pulled them open and all of a sudden the light shone in.

I was like, oh, I can see what's in this room now.

And so I think of it sort of that way.

Like we've got these blinders and then the compounds removed that.

And so MDMA for me was very cerebral.

I remember all of it and I was fully conscious But it was like, I could look at my childhood.

I could look at the way I am in the world with an unbiased eye.

I could just say without getting upset.

Oh yeah, this is what happened to my dad and my mom.

And this was me as a really young girl, like feeling super alone.

And I could look at that almost from an outsider point of view without getting sad about it.

I was like, wow, that makes a lot of sense, you know?

she must've been really scared and alone.

And that's why she's so protective of herself now is because she had to do it.

And so I was looking at myself like, but without all the baggage and the protection and like we talked about the coping mechanisms that we build over a lifetime.

I was just kind of like reading a storybook almost of my life, and going, wow, wow, that person really needs a hug.

Wow, like, okay, how do you want to be in the world?

Do you want to be defensive and aggressive?

Or do you want to just give other people a hug?

Because that's all that you needed.

So those were the kinds of things that were coming up for me in MDMA, and the three sessions took a very interesting arc of past, present, and future, even though I didn't really know that was gonna happen.

And so the first session, I really was looking at myself as a child and my upbringing.

And then the second session, I was really looking at how I show up in the world right now.

And then the third was like, well, how do I wanna be?

How do I take my experience, who I am now, and then what I wanna be in the world?

And what came out of that is that I wanna be a nurturer and a mother and a caregiver, not a mother in the biological sense, but I've always taken care of people.

And that that is nurturing for me and that's rewarding for me instead of like trying to take care of myself the whole time, that there was this real obvious arc of like, well you felt alone, so help other people not feel alone and scared.

Right, so it's a reaction, and it's sort of like you had this emotional need that wasn't met and so you wanna prevent people from.

Instead of fighting and just being like, nobody loved me, elbows out.

It's more like, oh, okay, well, like you said, we're all in the human condition.

Everyone wants to belong, they wanna feel purposeful, they wanna feel loved, me included.

and so maybe part of the story of the next chapter is opening up to more people, bringing them into bike races, bringing them into an athletic healthy lifestyle instead of proving and showing and winning more things, it's like how other people would reach a podium.

Yeah, that's also back to Chip Conley like this age that we're at, right?

Like where we turn our, like if we want purpose and fulfillment, we need to stop looking, you know, at our own career trajectories and shift our focus on other people.

Like that's the source of, you know, kind of meaning.

It is, and look, you get to that place.

You don't need to take psychedelics, get to that place.

That just happened to be what helped me and to Chip's point.

And actually, I called in.

You were doing a podcast with Michael Gervais.

And I actually called in a question when I was in a really dark place in my concussion recovery.

And I called in the question of when does self care become self absorption?

And I was so fatigued of trying to heal myself.

And I was just like, I'm so tired of dealing with myself.

And I wrote that question.

and you answered it, I was really excited to hear my question come up.

I don't remember, I'm fearful of what I must have said, but I'm sure Michael had a very good answer to that.

You both did and it came back to service and it came back to giving to other people, eventually heals you, giving of yourself.

I will say I was not at a point in this concussion recovery.

At that point, I wasn't at a place where I could give of myself.

Yeah, if you're in that hole, Well, you're not supposed to be giving any.

I wasn't strong enough.

And I kinda heard the answer, but now it's like, so yeah, strengthening, fortifying yourself so that you can actually be in service to the world around you.

And so people who are in that really deep dark suffering space, they first need to heal.

And then it starts to expand to the people around them.

Yeah, because you can't give something you don't have. Right.

You have to be healed yourself or you have to take care of yourself in order to be able to give.

Enough, I don't think you have to be perfectly whole or perfectly, no, no, no, but you have to have enough strength to get up off the floor.

Yeah. And I mean, at the time that I called in with that, like, I didn't have that.

It's hard for, like, I can talk about all this now.

So it's hard for me to articulate.

And I don't think people believe how dark it was and how weak I was because I didn't articulate it.

And even - And you were just hiding.

I was hiding and I'm well enough to be able to talk about it with some sort of articulation and knowledge.

But I fear that people won't understand how dark a brain injury is when you're in the throws of it.

So you're three years out from it, like where are you now?

Like do you still have the headaches?

Do you still have the bouts with depression?

Like, what does it look like?

I do still have those things.

They're less. I have more tools now, more coping mechanisms, but I'm not through it yet.

And I think that is, it's kind of the dangerous part of an injury.

Like if you've had an injury, then you're not in the trauma stage of like, a cast on your leg or whatever.

You're like getting through this therapy, you're starting moving again.

I think that's actually the hardest time because from what I know of my PT friends, we're like, that's when people start slacking off a little in their recovery, because they feel better.

They're kind of back to doing what they're doing.

And so I think I'm in that place where, I'm moving again, I'm able to work, I'm excited about some of the things in my future, but there is this easy slide back that I recognize, maybe a little bit of a slippery slope like I'm still sort of like finding my way.

I'm not just machete through the jungle, like trying to figure it out, like there's a trail, but I'm still on it.

And who keeps you honest and on that path so that you're not slipping backwards.

A therapist does, but now it's also me, which is really cool.

You had a guest on recently, when you were talking about how gurus come in many forms and teachers come in many forms, and I feel like the beauty of what my dad's teaching me is that I can be my own healer and that I'm the one who can give myself a hug.

You don't need to chase a ghost for that.

Yeah, he's right there.

But I have to really implement some of the practices of self -care for myself because yeah, while I'm not chasing a ghost and I feel my dad is really part of me, I still feel like an infant in this sort of spiritual, emotional development part of my life.

So I'm like this kid who's like, oh yeah, I'm gonna run and just recess.

I'm gonna run and play, but I'm also unsure of myself, if that makes sense.

I mean, even talking about this is actually really hard. Of course, because that's part It's part of the journey, right?

You're not really supposed to know the uncertainty.

Yeah but I wanna know.

You can't have it without the uncertainty.

Of course you wanna know, we all wanna know.

That's the controller, yeah.

I don't get to know.

Yeah, you don't get to know.

And what are some of those self care tools?

I got really, I got into breathing exercises.

I really got into meditation and you know, I dabbled kind of same as therapy.

I dabbled in all that stuff but I never really needed it.

And so breathing, meditation, journaling, I'm doing some art.

I've never done art ever in my life.

Like painting? Painting, yeah, painting.

Yeah, a little bit of sculpture type stuff, which is I'm not good at it.

I started playing a little bit of music in honor of my dad.

I have a ukulele and I can play like four notes.

But they're all brand new experiences where I'm not very good at them.

But what I'm understanding about the brain and the nervous system, and this is part of all the therapy, is when we use all of our brain in different ways, it strengthens, you know they're neurotransmitters.

It strengthens different pathways, and I've developed certain pathways in my brain and some are neglected.

So a lot of that therapy is again opening up, you know, the other side of my brain, the feminine side of my personality.

I'm having a hard time articulating it and this is one of the symptoms of the brain injury is that something is often very clear in my head and I can't quite get it out.

Right, perhaps an analogy might help.

It's sort of like these grooves, right?

These like neural pathways.

It's like, you like to ride your bike, you're really good at riding your bike, you like riding your bike, and like, I just want to ride my bike.

But if all you're doing is riding your bike, then there are other muscles in your body that are gonna atrophy.

You're gonna over develop some and these underdeveloped ones are gonna ultimately lead to an instability or an injury, right?

So like doing sculpture or painting is a way of developing other aspects of your brain that are underdeveloped because you've just been doing this one thing for so long.

And I get that, like, I just wanna do what I wanna do.

I don't really wanna do something I'm not good at or have never done before because that sounds hard. And like what I like to do is like get on my bike and ride all day or go running or something like that.

Like can I just keep doing that?

I was trying to keep doing that and then I got thrown on my head.

And what's interesting again going back to Psilocybin in particular is that they do - So you got that experience also on top of MDMA.

Yeah, MDMA first then Psilocybin.

And they do say that, whereas MDMA is a little bit of like pulling a veil off so you can look around the house.

psilocybin is like a whole new way of looking at things.

And they actually say that it develops different neural pathways in your brain that you haven't used.

And so what I understand is there's even this window that's open, you know, for a month or a while where you practice those pathways.

And you can kind of get those using again in and develop kind of the cross country ski tracks of a different way of looking at things.

And so that's really fascinating to me that.

And again, you can get there with therapy, you can get there with breathing, you can get there with a lot of things.

those compounds were just accelerators for me.

And really, like literally I saw in psilocybin like animal figures and like strength, and I saw my family and like all these women nurturing me around me, taking care of me, like people who were dead alive, you know, felt and saw that kind of energy in my dad's energy.

But then I also saw actual like neural pathways, like cool lights.

And I was sitting there going, okay, my brain can heal.

It was like reassurance to me that I'm not broken and that while I might be injured, that I can heal.

And the science, there's a lot of research to be done, but that's what it made me feel like.

Like there's hope. I'm loved and I can heal and actually seeing those visual representations of like those pathways, just like pew, pew, pew.

It's like, you know, Star Wars or something.

And that's exciting to me to know that I don't have to accept that I'm injured and I'm never going to be the same again.

Or, you know, I probably, I never will be the same again.

I actually believe I'll be better, that I will be more cognitively, emotionally, spiritually aware person.

what an incredible journey you've been on.

I'm just here thinking like, what if you just happened to be in LA?

Like this hadn't happened and you called me up and you're like, I'm in LA, do you wanna have me back on the show?

And you were sitting across from me and had just progressed on your track, your route, whatever that looked like, taking the whole head injury out of it.

Like what would our conversation have been like?

We would be talking about, the Iditaro trail or the next - There's no expedition I was doing.

And, you know, there's still a part of me, like I hope that's not gone in my life.

You know, I hope I'm not mourning the loss of like that person that goes adventuring and exploring.

But right now, yeah I'm on a different exploration, but we would have been talking about something entirely different, which to me maybe isn't as interesting.

I think that you may and may in fact may probably find your way back to those sorts of experiences, but it's not gonna happen until or unless you completely let go of that.

Like, if you're still holding onto that, like, that's right, I'm gonna find my way back to that.

Then it's unlikely.

You have to completely say, that's not who I am anymore.

And then that will lead you back to that, but with a whole different perspective as a different version of yourself.

Yeah, sport and athletics with a completely different mission or goal.

When you say that it made me think back to when I was a little kid, I would like play in the dirt in the backyard and dig around and hide in the trees and camp in the backyard. Like that's the explorer I wanna get back to that curious kid who wanted to be outside instead of the high achiever who needed to win and needed to do what no one else has done before?

You did all that. I did and I want to return.

You don't have to prove anything else.

Right. But I want to return to that kid.

Honestly, like even if you were, it's like, okay, she did another one, you've already done a bunch of those, like what else?

There's always something longer, harder, further, whatever.

And there's always other people or all that are doing crazier and crazier things.

Like on some level, it's a hamster wheel.

It is. It's like a heroin addict who's chasing the first high.

Like you proved yourself, there's nothing left for you there.

And literally - Those experiences can still teach you, but not, that's not the lesson you need to learn.

There's other lessons I think.

Which is why I was thrown on my head by my dad too, because I was so stubborn, I wouldn't stop.

But you're right there's another frontier for me.

And instead of feeling hopeless and desperate, and I can see like some excitement in that which is why I'm talking about this because I know there are a lot of people who are really, really suffering from brain injury and our medical system is not supporting those people.

And they're trying to just give them a drug and mask the symptoms instead of looking at the whole person and looking at how to heal a whole person.

And my goal with this conversation is to pull some of those resources together in a better place for somebody to access, whether it's breathing or therapy or movement or whatever healing modality works for them.

Because yeah, like there was, there's no trail map And so I guess I'm gonna try to help people navigate that a little bit better because it makes me really sad to think about what I went through and to hear the stories that are coming up for me.

I mean, I'm thinking about the journal entries I wrote and I went back and read those for this podcast series.

And like I almost couldn't read them myself, like I don't know who that person was.

And I know there's a lot of people suffering.

So my hope is that this frontier that I'm on is for me, but it's also for a lot of other people who have this injury.

Well, it's a great act of service, as I said, at the very beginning.

The podcast is called Brainstorm.

It's four parts, yes, but for somebody, and so obviously, you know, everybody should check it out, particularly if you, or someone you care for, has suffered some version of a brain injury and by your account, that could be as high as 15 % of the population, which is like astonishing.

But for the person who's listening or watching right now and is reflecting on, you know, that thing that happened, maybe I feel the way I do because of that thing that happened a year or two, three years ago, I just didn't realize that.

What are some of those resources and where can somebody find some hope with some of these tools and modalities like who's in a place where my GP just sent me home and everybody thinks I'm crazy?

Well, I'm gonna say first of all, the brain is very neuro regenerative, very neuro plastic.

And so the brain can heal many, many, many years later.

There's a lot of people who were like, oh it was four years ago, five years ago.

there are healing modalities.

If, you know, you need to find a concussion specialist, first of all, you need to involve your family members because if you're injured, it's really hard to navigate this when you have a brain injury.

You're literally, yeah.

The thing that you need to solve the problem is the thing that is the problem.

And we do have resources in the Brainstorm Podcast, but by no means is it exhaustive.

I've already had people come in and bringing more resources to me.

So my hope is that on my website, we'll just have this ongoing resource list of studies of modalities that people can try.

But ultimately, you know, somebody needs to get to a concussion specialist. And I will say a lot of this stuff, a lot of this stuff that I'm doing, yes, I had a concussion to put me in this space to really work on my brain health, but this is a lot of the supplies to cognitive health for any human.

You know, our brains are such an important part of what we do every day.

And so taking care of them.

And a lot of the things like breathing and meditation and all the things, those are neuroprotective.

You know, even if you haven't had an injury or some of the supplements, there's a lot of good stuff out there that actually protects even an uninjured brain, but you know, wards off aging and and makes your brain as strong as it can.

Vitamin D, those are kind of the big threes that have a lot of research behind for cognitive health concussion or not concussion.

Momentus has a really good concussion protocol that we've listed on my website.

And in the podcast that there is, within 48 hours a week, six months, but then also neuroprotective supplements you can take which are creatine, omega -3 vitamin D.

We work with Momentus as well.

And they work with so many athletes like football players or those who are suffering these types of injuries all the time.

And yeah, I just want to emphasize again that it's not just high impact sports of people who are getting brain injury.

Like it's everybody.

And I want people to take care of their brains and their hearts and their bodies, the whole package.

Yeah, in the meantime, wear a helmet.

Yes. Of course. We've come a long way with that and get a good helmet.

but that's not where you skimp, you know, in your budget, right?

I mean, I remember skiing, it was like super uncool to wear a helmet, you know, not too many years ago.

I never wore a helmet skiing growing up.

I mean, I remember, I mean, it wasn't, how long ago was it when the guys in the Tour de France were not wearing helmets?

I mean that was during Lance's era, at least on the climbing stages they were.

Yeah. That's insane when you think about it.

It's kind of insane.

And I like we said at the beginning, I had no idea how one crash could have really altered three years of my life and had no idea.

And so it's not to say people shouldn't go ride their bikes or go have fun, but I'm getting checked out and getting care more quickly than I did and specialized care is pretty essential.

Even if you think you're fine, go get checked out.

Any other final thoughts on maybe some misintruths about brain injuries, common misconceptions.

Well, it's invisible.

So people think you're fine.

If you're speaking, you're moving about in the world, people think you're fine.

And then in turn you mask it because you're ashamed or embarrassed or don't wanna admit that you're not fine.

I mean, there's a lot of mystery around the brain and I'm really excited.

You know, athletes and Olympians, they're talking about mental health right now, but quite honestly, we're in a physical and mental health epidemic in our world.

And the conversation around mental health is pretty awesome that's happening.

A brain injury can look a lot like depression, anxiety.

I mean, those are some of the symptoms. And so I think what's hard for people to understand is I had an injury.

These are my symptoms. They can heal with other modalities instead of maybe you need medication, maybe you don't.

But medicine can come in the form of exercise, can come in the form of breathing, can come in the form of community.

And I guess the main thing I'll say is that it's really lonely with a brain injury and and the people around you, they don't know what to do and you don't know what to ask for.

And so that kind of sort of care with someone who's injured and maybe even doesn't know or think they're injured is really, really critical.

You know, yes, you can find a specialist, you can find a therapist, but the people closest to you are really the ones who are going to see your symptoms and see that you're a little off, or maybe you didn't remember that thing that you talked about.

I mean, I actually had my coach and my business partner, they were keeping notes for me during my recovery.

And we actually have a spreadsheet of like all the things because I kind of was like, no, I think I'm good, I'm okay and trying to push through it.

And so I think it's really important that the people around you gently sort of, take care of you and try to get you to some specialists and educate themselves.

They're the ones who then bear the responsibility for trying to get help, right?

A little bit, but knowing that maybe the person who needs the help is gonna push back or say they don't need it, or yeah, it's really tricky because you can't see it.

You can't see blood, you can't see a broken bone, but yeah, there's a lot of injured people out there.

This is really powerful.

And I'm just thinking like this is, you could have gone out and done some insane race and won or conquered some fantastic distance.

But your power to impact people with what you just shared today and this podcast and what you experienced is exponentially greater in comparison to whatever you do on a bike.

and so I just want to commend you and applaud you for having the courage to not only go on this journey for yourself, but to come to a place like this and open up about it so publicly.

Like that is an active service.

And even though you're still in it, you're already part of the solution, not only for yourself, but for a lot of people.

And I think it's a remarkable and beautiful thing that you're doing, so thank you.

Thank you. Here's the butterflies.

That's really cool.

And nobody go out and land on their head on purpose so they can go on their version of your journey.

No, I don't recommend it at all.

Yeah, and also my final thought was in the compiling of all of these resources, I gather this is kind of like an ongoing thing, right?

Like maybe put together a PDF or something that somebody could download if they give you their email address or something like that.

So you have everything in one place for people.

Yeah, we've got a small version of that on the brainstorm podcast that's on the Feisty Media platform.

And then we're developing sort of a more robust version of that that people will be able to download from my website.

We'll probably have that ready early October and it'll continue to go and be a resource that's available for everybody.

Cool. Yeah. Thank you for the advice on that too.

No, it's good. So, all right, so everybody check out the Brain Storm podcast. We'll put links up in the description below and then on the episode page for this episode at richroll .com and the show notes, and is there anywhere else you wanna direct people?

My website, rebeccarush .com, is probably the easy place to find everything and social media, the usual spots.

All right, awesome, thanks again.

And keep me posted.

I will. If there's anything I can do for you.

Well, we should go on a bike ride.

Yeah I know you said that last time, still haven't done that.

But now it feels like, oh well like now it'll be chill.

So now I'm not intimidated anymore.

Maybe we can do that.

All right, cool. Peace.

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[레베카 러시: 뇌 손상의 보이지 않는 고통과 회복을 향한 여정]-[The Invisible Injury: Champion Cyclist Rebecca Rusch On Healing From A Traumatic Brain Injury, Concussion Awareness & Why Acceptance Is Strength]

📋 Summary

레베카 러시의 뇌 손상 회복기: '고통의 여왕'이 마주한 가장 힘든 모험

보이지 않는 부상과 의료 시스템의 한계

정체성의 붕괴와 자기 직면

회복을 위한 다각적 접근

결론: 더 온전한 인간으로의 성장

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript