He Was Sick at 5 and No One Helped — A Story of Narcissistic Abuse, Chronic Illness, and Healing

Elisha's Space: What does it feel like when your body is trying to tell you something is wrong? And the people who are supposed to protect you look you in the eye and act like nothing is happening? For today's guest, that wasn't a question. It was a childhood. He was five years old. He was sick, genuinely physically sick. And instead of being held and cared for, he was in the kitchen. Cooking for himself, because no one else was going to do it. This is not a failure of parenting. That is a specific kind of harm. And today we're going to call it what it is. And the reason I chose to bring Dr. Brad into this space is this. Some of you will hear his story and see yourself in it, the body that kept asking, the home that wouldn't listen. The survival that looked like strength, and I need you to hear what healing looked like for him. So stay with me. Welcome to Elisha Space, a sanctuary for healing growth and for the kind of honest conversations that actually change things. I'm Elisha, your host, a counselor, an author, and someone who has sat in the same stuck places you have. If you're new here, welcome home.

Dr Brad: Thank Thank

Elisha's Space: If you've been listening for a while, I see you and I'm glad that you're back. Today's episode is practical, clinical, but pastoral. And it is going to go places that some of you have been waiting years for someone to name out loud. We are talking today about what happens when a child's body is sick, genuinely medically sick, and the home they live in not only fails to help them.

Dr Brad: you

Elisha's Space: But teaches them systematically that their body's pain is not real, not valid, not worth attending to. This is the specific form of childhood trauma. It has a clinical name, medical gaslighting inside a narcissistic family system. My guest today grew up inside that story. He didn't just survive it, he became an expert in the very thing that was done to him.

Dr Brad: Thanks.

Elisha's Space: So he could turn around and help others find their way out. So let's do it. I'm so honored to welcome Dr. Brad Montaine to Elisha Space. Dr. Brad is a functional medicine practitioner with decades of research, clinical study, and real-world application behind him, specializing specifically in restoring health to people with chronic illnesses, people who have often been everywhere else first. People who have been told there is nothing more to do. And Dr. Brad has been able to give them their life back. But here is what makes him different from every other clinician I could have put in the seat today. He is not speaking to this from the audience. He has been there. His compassionate understanding of chronic illness And the damage that comes from a home that will not see it comes from years of his own struggle and from what he would describe as the Lord giving him the tools not just to help himself get free from the prison of ongoing sickness, but to walk with others in that same process. He has been there, he cares, and he walks with you. So Dr. Brad, welcome. I am genuinely glad that you're here.

Dr Brad: Yeah, well, thanks for the invite.

Elisha's Space: before we go anywhere in your story, I wanna ask you something simple. When you look back now with everything you know as a healer and a clinician, what do you see when you look at that little boy who was sick at five years old and had to figure it out alone?

Dr Brad: I'll start with a story because this started with a young girl, same age. She was five years old. Spent five days, five and a half days in a research hospital doing scans, tests. That research hospital is connected to two medical schools, one of them, one of the top world renowned medical schools. And the end of five and a half days, the girl couldn't walk. She just laid in bed and cried. She's so much pain. That's all she could do. At the end of five and a half days, the doctors came into the room and told the parents, we have no idea what's going on with your daughter. I think maybe you need to see a rheumatologist. We were working with a family member from their family. They begged their parents to get a hold of me. They... called me on a Wednesday, I think it was a Wednesday afternoon, had him fill out our paperwork to do a consult. We did a consult, did an evaluation with her that evening. She started doing what we directed. The next morning she was out of bed. Three days later she's outside. And six months down the road, she's healthier than she's ever been. That girl was over a thousand miles away. We never saw her face to face. We outdid the diagnostics of the best medicine can possibly offer and figured out what the real root problems were and helped that girl have a better health than she'd ever had in her life. That's what my own background with my own studies has given us the ability to do. He's in the center of all of that. He's the one that directs, pretty much directs my life. He got a hold of me at the end of my teen years and completely turned my life completely around and told me to quit work, go back to school and do a bunch of other things that have been really interesting. But he shows us what's going on and then he gives us wisdom on ways to test those things out. them out to figure out what root causes are and how to restore those. So that's what is brought to me.

Elisha's Space: Well that is amazing and I appreciate you sharing that story. I You had mentioned that around seven years old your symptoms were significantly worse. Could you let us know what change and what that did that look like from the inside?

Dr Brad: Okay, yeah. A five-year-old woke up in the middle of the night with gut-wrenching pain, rushed off to the emergency room, and that was the first of I don't know how many visits. I think was told I had inflamed intestines. They shoved something up my rear and told me that's going to help. That's just odd. That's just totally odd. No cause, no reason why it's there. no indication of what to do to make it go away or not come back again. And I have no idea how many visits I went to that. it was back in the days when Carnation came out with their instant breakfast. You take these packets, you mix it with milk, and that was your breakfast. You had it off to go to sleep. That made me so sick. just so sick I couldn't do it. So I started cooking to make myself feel better. I'd cook breakfast instead of what everybody else in the household did because I did what they did. It was pretty bad. We went on a family vacation probably a couple of years later. Something happened up there that I didn't figure this one out until 60 years later. went on, but the whole world started spinning around me. And I'm not kidding. If I turn my head like this and the whole world was going around in circles around me, had vertigo so bad, I was hard to stand up. To me, it felt like I was walking like a drunken sailor with a real wide stance, bent at the knees. You know, years down the road. A friend of mine's hooked up with some Junior Olympic ⁓ downhill ski racers and people had asked me, we started doing things that nobody did back then. It's called extreme skiing. And people had asked me, what are you going to working on today? I tell them form and people go, that's really, that sounds boring because it's not boring. It's not boring because there's a certain stance where if you throw your hands forward, down and forward. It makes you bend at the knees and that'll keep you balanced in almost anything. You get back here and you're falling all over. That's how I walked for years. I was extremely athletic, extremely coordinated, but the whole world's spinning around. All the time. Ready to puke my guts out all the time. It wasn't until about 60 years later I got exposed to some mold again that All of that stuff came back. And it's like, that's what it was. My oldest brother came home with strep throat, passed it through the household and how many rounds of antibiotics I had, I have no idea. But by the time I was in middle of the grade school, my tonsils looked like blue cheese, literally. Deep fissures, this white milky with blue streak. just yuck in the tonsils, typically like half the year round. And at this vertigo, it was spinning around 24, 7, 365 days a year for many years. It was bad.

Elisha's Space: I'm so sorry that you went through that. I just want to pause here because what you're describing, I want every listener to hear this, is a child whose nervous system is in a state of prolonged physiological distress. So around seven and above, we're seeing significant worsening. We're looking at a system that is already dysregulated. And when there is no safe adult available to co-regulate with, no one to say, I see you, I've got you. Let's figure this out together. That nervous system does not calm down. It escalates because it has to. And this is not weakness. This is a biology doing exactly what it was designed to do. So you said that you started cooking at five, specifically to manage your own symptoms. So kind of walk me through that. What does a five-year-old understand about food? And his own body that the adults around him apparently couldn't see.

Dr Brad: It's a real simple process it starts off with. You eat one thing, like if I had the carnation as a breakfast like the rest of my family had, I'd feel sick. How many times do you do that? How many times will you keep doing that when shortly after you eat it, you feel sick? So you start experimenting. by the time I was a teen, I had a lot of people telling me I needed to open a restaurant. I'm just a really creative cook. I don't use recipe books. And this is probably why, because this is where I started combining things, testing things, trying things out. I was told by my sister when I moved out of my folks house, my mom cried for three days. And I just kiddingly said that's because nobody was left in the house to clean out the refrigerator. It's always cleaned out. made leftovers into soups and things like that, just creatively doing all kinds of stuff with it, really a wide variety of ingredients. So. You eat something and you see how you feel. And if that makes you feel good, you try that, you expand on that. You have something else that makes you not feel good. And that's just not the case. Anything that was sugar based made me sick. And so I was never a person like Halloween, you know, go out and get a whole bunch of candy. I'd eat one, maybe two pieces a day. It lasts me weeks. the sugar just turned my world upside down.

Elisha's Space: Yes, there's all kinds of studies about sugar too, you know, about increased inflammation and things of that nature. So absolutely. I think everything has to be done in balance. Well, I just want to describe what you're naming in the research. It's called interoceptive awareness, the body's ability to read its own internal signals. So some children who do not have attentive caregivers actually develop Heightened interceptive awareness as a survival adaptation. So because no one is monitoring your body, you have to become your own monitor. Now I want to be careful here because there is a way to hear that and call it a gift. And in some ways, yes, it can become one, like you were mentioning, but I want us to sit with what it actually was first. That is a five-year-old doing the job of an attentive parent alone in his own body. That is not a gift. That is a burden no child was ever designed to carry. And that wiring, that hyper awareness, it does not simply disappear when you grow up. It either becomes the root of deep dysregulation or in Dr. Brad's case, the foundation of extraordinary purpose. But it takes a long time to tell the difference. If you're listening right now and something in you just went quiet. I need you to stay with me because what's coming next is going to name something that some of you have been carrying a very long time without language for it. Dr. Brad, you grew up in a home with you with what you stated was some narcissistic abuse. And I want to be careful with the language because I want to use it with clinical precision, not as an accusation. A narcissistic family system is one in which the child's needs exist primarily in service of the parent's narrative. The child is not seen as a separate person with his own interior world. He is a function, a reflection, a role. And when a child in that system is sick, when his body disrupts the narrative, the parent does not respond with care. The parent is responds with minimization, with denial, sometimes with anger at the child for even being sick. Does that description fit what you live?

Dr Brad: Somewhat, you know, not only was it parents, nor siblings also. So it was all the way around and I was the bottom of the pile. So you just had that influence all over and you learned to scrap. But it gets to the point where you realize there's no point in even bringing up something. because it's not going to be addressed and it's just another stressor. So you don't even say anything. You don't even convey what's going on. You go through your life, your world with the world spinning around. And it amazes me that no one notices that from the outside. Not friends, not teachers in school, not parents, not people in the family. You know, and you would think when somebody turns their head and it's just one of these things of trying to hang on to hold something to keep yourself from falling over. You think somebody would notice when that's 24-7 for years on end, but it wasn't the case.

Elisha's Space: What did the adults in your home do or not do when your symptoms were most severe? Like what did their response teach your body about whether it was safe to be sick?

Dr Brad: ⁓ I'll just put it this way. After 30 years of prison ministry, every time the inmates had act up about how bad their upbringing was, I'd talk about my own for less than a minute and never failed to shut everybody's. talking in prison for 30 years. The background was that bad. and it's not... In a prison, it's worthwhile to explain what that is because those people think they come from the ⁓ worst. 75 % of the people in prostitution, drug abuse, prison, all the dysfunctional things have no father in them. ⁓ And there was just so much abuse, just so much abuse at every single level. It's the things that children should never see, nobody should really ever see. And it's just pointless to voice a need or concern in a situation like that. It's just pointless.

Elisha's Space: So what you are pretty much describing is what I call medical gaslighting inside of a narcissistic family system. And because the minimization is just so The minimization is so profound. And also when you start showing symptoms and it's basically not even noticed, you know, it's like there's a silence around the illness. So here is why this is so profoundly damaging on a neurological level. And I want to be specific because I want audience you to understand what was was happened was not disturbed was not abstract. So when a child's body signals distress, pain, nausea, fatigue, inflammation. And the attachment figure not only fails to respond but actively communicates your body is lying, something very specific happens in the developing brain. The child cannot hold two truths at the same time. My body is real and my caregiver is safe. One of those has to give And because the child cannot survive without the attachment figure, because they are literally dependent on that person for food, shelter, safety, the child sacrifices the body. They override the signal. They learn to doubt their own physical experience. They learn to function as if the distress is not happening, as if their symptoms are not real. That is not resilience. That is the beginning. Of chronic dysregulation. And in many cases, it is the foundation of illnesses or an illness that will follow that child for decades. And here's what I really want to ask you. And we're going to get to the happy parts later, I promise. At five years old, cooking for yourself, managing your own illness in a home that wouldn't acknowledge it.

Dr Brad: you

Elisha's Space: What did you believe about yourself? What story did you feel like, you know, you were telling yourself what your nervous system wrote about who you were and what you deserve?

Dr Brad: I don't know if at that age... I don't even remember processing that question. It's just simply a matter of... If I ate the way everyone else in the household ate, I felt sick. If I managed my own food, I felt better. Not well, better. And it was just simply a survival issue. But I got really creative with my cooking. And now, just off the top of my head, I don't know how many different ethnicities I cook of food, but it's a lot. And just off the top of my head, I'll take a look at a recipe for some ideas and then close a book and go do my own thing. And that's just, that's who I've been. it was way beyond what most people do just as a survival issue. I made food an adventure and made it fun and enjoyable at a very, very young age. became my world.

Elisha's Space: And we eat to live. So it it really matters, you know, as far as eating and and being able to be creative in the kitchen with food and stuff like that, you know. So I love hearing these stories about how you were able to create dishes ⁓ that were good for you and that you're still able to do that today. In regards to what had occurred, I wanna say something ⁓ to you in the audience and to everyone who's listening who's lived some sort of version of this. I just want to reinforce to you that nothing is wrong with you. Your body was doing exactly what it was designed to do. It was trying to tell the truth. It was asking for help the only way it knew how. It just lived in a home that was determined not to hear it. And so you did what you needed to do just to survive. And I want you to know that God saw every single moment of that. The kitchen at five, the body that kept asking the child. who kept showing up, he saw it all. And one not one moment of it was lost on him. I'd like to think that he was guiding you at five years old, that maybe one of his angels was showing you different things so that you could survive and handle that well.

Dr Brad: That's really well said. ⁓ I didn't know him back then. And it seems, you know, when I was a young age, my parents split up and that was a short season ⁓ when I to church with my mom, me and my next oldest brother, not the rest of the family. It seemed like that became a close thing, but that... and grew up close to San Francisco. My teen years were in the 70s and I just totally went the other way. And it's really kind of funny how Lord got a hold of me. I was. Partying with a friend of mine and he goes, hey, I'm going skydiving tomorrow. You want to go with me? Just go, yeah. And it was funny. We close the bars down that night. We went out and still drunk the next morning. You know, it was really hard to jump out of an airplane with 120 mile an hour when coming at you and do what you need to. And I got this revelation that maybe if I start partying afterwards, maybe then I'll be able to perfect this. And that stopped my drinking. It cut it in half in like a week. And Lord got a hold of me in that time. It's really funny. It was a recession time. was in construction. We're carpooling this, there was a spirit-filled Lutheran in the vehicle, and we're carpooling back and forth. And you just talk about these stories that perked my interest, and that started an inquiry that... Lord, all of me dramatic way.

Elisha's Space: ⁓ I'm glad you brought that up you go into the workforce pretty young. You were seventeen ⁓ and you went into construction and then at eighteen you were cruise. So I just want to ask you about that, not the career itself, but ⁓ who were you like what brought you to that place? Like were you trying to prove something and To whom are you trying to prove something to?

Dr Brad: What do

Elisha's Space: Or did it just organically come up that way?

Dr Brad: You mean as far as the work situation, run and cruise? It's just one of those organic things. Different people have different skills and abilities and all that. My mind can flip things around. I can read something, I can find the principle behind it. You give me a principle, I can apply anything to it. And I taught my son to think that way too.

Elisha's Space: Yes, yes.

Dr Brad: background as much the same as mine. I'm just one of those creative people that where I've always drawn teachers to myself to just challenge me to the core. you've done things in schooling that seem like they're totally impossible. Like to get into grad school takes most people at least four years, oftentimes six to eight to get in grad school. Took me 14 months. It's an insanely intense schooling for 14 months and got into grad school with that. And that's just me. I'm not. I'm not like most people in the way that I learned and all that. It's just one of those ability issues. So I think I was either 19 or 20, I got lent out to a different company that was union. I was working non-union. And after first day they sent me out, he sends me out to do something. I call him up about six hours later. Okay, I'm done. What do want me to do? And he goes, what do you mean you're done? I said, I'm done. He goes, well, did you do this? I was forming it for some concrete. He you got it all formed in place? Yeah. Integrated? Yeah. Is the wire set in place? Yeah. You got screws in place? Yeah. And he goes, I thought that was a three-day job. I go, no, it wasn't a three-day job. It's not even a day job. I'm done. What do want me to do? And he came to me and asked me, I'm 19 years old. He said the union audited his books and asked if he could talk me into coming down, taking my journeyman's test and keep working, running crews in the union company. At 19, there was no way to go through the apprenticeship programs and all that. So I go down to the union hall and never studied a book, just all work and biology. They hand me the test. I knew what everything was except for this really poor mimeograph copy of all these hand planes. It's like... who knows and who cares, you know, as far as that. But all the other stuff, I could write essays about all of it, just from work experience. Handed me my Journeyman card and I just kept running crews. And you know, that's been my life.

Elisha's Space: So I wanna bring something to the attention of the audience because we're following your journey step by step. Okay. And so and I am a big believer in like there's n I surviving is what we do. Okay. So I wanna come to something where the requ where you've had this recurring cycle in your life. Innovation meets advert adversity. You try something new. Something that works, something that genuinely helps people, and you hit s maybe some type of resistance and then again. So before we get to the turning point, I want to name that pattern out loud because I know there are people listening who are living in that type of cycle. And yes, it was probably ⁓ foundationally occurring when you were young, when you were a little boy. And They are doing the right things, they're being creative, they're being c courageous, and maybe they hit walls. What I'm hearing, and what I want every listener to track this, because the pattern is extraordinarily common in narcissistic abuse recovery, is what we call a fawn achievement pattern. And this is what happens when a child who has been required to be competent beyond his years in a home where incompetence was punished. Or rendered invisible, they learn to survive by performing. You don't just work hard, you run the cruise, you see everything, you anticipate problems before they happen. You are the one everyone depends on. And here is the clinical reality underneath that. That is not ambition alone, while that is honored. This is a nervous system that learned very early that safety lives in being indispensable. It works by the way, it works extremely well because you become someone people depend on. You build things, you lead things, you are genuinely exceptional. And the entire time it can be ⁓ a survival technique that you're that you're facing and that we are dealing with. And some part of you may still be that five year old standing in the kitchen because performance, no matter how extraordinary. It doesn't heal what was broken at the body at five. And I do recognize that you've come out of that, the that the Lord has healed you and that He has brought you out of that. But I think letting the audience know where that comes from, that that was something foundationally that came as a result of of of ⁓ of what you went through as ⁓ a little boy. I often tell people that sometimes your trauma is your superpower because it forms and it formulates you to become someone who you didn't think you could ever be able to do or or be in another in another lifetime. And clearly that is what it did for you. You know what did you learn about perseverance? Not the grit your teeth and push harder version But the kind that actually sustains who you are over the years. What did you learn?

Dr Brad: Now, ⁓ It amazes me the wisdom that you have and the insight and that's God thing. And it's really neat when you see someone with a true mantle of counsel. And that's obvious that that's one thing that he's given you. And that's pretty rare. It's really rare. It seems that those...

Elisha's Space: Mm-hmm. Amen. I give him all the glory and praise for that.

Dr Brad: Yeah, but it seems that the people that I know who have that mantle well developed are the people who've had very traumatic lives themselves. And it's neat where he turns everything in the world in their life and allows them to be a fountain of life in all aspects. You know, it's been interesting. I said I've been given some very, difficult teachers that have taught me more than other peers, and really anyone that I've known. And it's an amazing thing when you are in the presence of someone who recognizes something that's beyond what the normal teacher-student relationship is, and you challenge each other to rise higher and higher and higher, as much the way Jesus talks to people. Whenever you see somebody ask him a question, he never answers it straight. He gives them something that's way above what they asked to see if they'll rise up out of this natural state and dialogue in the things that are really important and really, really real. And I've, since grade school, I've always... had somebody like that in my life that has just challenged to insane levels, pretty much. just never hear of anybody else doing that. ⁓ I remember two incidences, well, actually three. One, I was in first grade and I was out on the playground and about 10 boys jumped me. You know, and they're just going to try and trash me. And the lady who was the monitor, she saw what was going on, but she saw because I grew up on the bottom of the scrap pile. had three older brothers, you know, and it was pretty brutal that I was getting the best out of those boys that jumped me and they weren't doing me. So the teacher just let that go. You know, that was a huge thing because that was the last time that ever happened. Now we try that again. That was pretty funny. so I'm like six years old. But down the road. Lord told me to quit work and go to school. I started working when I was 11 years old. ⁓ told me a few things, but that was one of them. That was really hard to do. And I'm going to college and did one quarter, I think it was last quarter of the year. He gave me direction on what he wanted me to do and I transferred to another school. I went up and talked to one of my teachers and asked him if I could take both years of chemistry together. Inorganic is the first year, organic is the second. I didn't realize this, but chemistry is a weeder class, it's not educational. They put it there to weed the best of the best out. There's a 75 % failure of everybody that makes it through the first year, and 25 % that makes it through the second year, 75 % of those fail. And it just cuts. top, you know, there's only 5 % of the people that get into that system ever make it. So I transferred down to a different school because the teacher told me first I was too stupid to be able to do that. And besides that, I was that course was on the class schedule, but they hadn't offered it in over a decade. So I transferred down to another school, not knowing anything about it, but transferred down to another school and I studied a little bit of chemistry over the summer and I took second year before I did first. I was, and that was one of five research chemists that taught in that school. Word came out of that school, people that went to UCLA and Stanford to not take the major courses in the community college I was at. They were easier at UCLA and Stanford. So was one of the hardest schools you could possibly get to. I think I was the best student he'd ever had. Came into, it was around Thanksgiving. Life went into labor. We had a midterm, went into the midterm, open up, you start doing the first page, open the second page, there's a bunch of elements on there and you run it through these diagnostic things, you react it with this and you get this. And then you react with something, you run it through these diagnostic things and... You hear everybody turns a page and everybody's sucking wind. And I look at that and go, wow, this is a puzzle. And so I take these graphs of all these diagnostics and I circle the graph and I label what they are. And nobody else is doing that. And about five, you know, I go through like four pages of all this stuff and I label all this stuff and then start from the back and backwards and I write everything out. And I'm done with the test in like 10 minutes. Nobody is even done with the second page. And I walk up and hand it to them and say, I came in here, next time you see me I'm gonna be a dad. So I don't know when that's gonna be, but baby's coming. And we got really, really, really close.

Elisha's Space: Yeah.

Dr Brad: I don't think you'd ever seen anybody like me. And when I went to go challenge the first year, it blew them away. It's like, how can somebody be this adept in this difficult class that didn't even have the background to be here? How could that possibly be? And later in life, Lord told me to go get a pilot's license. This one was really wild. So I went through schooling. I went took my license with just a bare minimum of stuff and a year or two later I went in to go get an instrument rating so you can fly in the clouds and the guy gave me a test that I'd never heard of before. He just put the screws to me and tried to get me vertigo, stars going through my vision, you're ready to puke your guts out, recover the plane, do all of these things you never do when you can't see outside of an airplane. She me do them all. Just get me totally screwed up. And I realized then that because the conversation that happened earlier, he knew I was going to be flying in the weather and the cloud. And he wanted to prove to himself and to me that I knew what I was doing before I got there. So I'd still be alive on the other side. And I've just always drawn that type of interaction. with teachers.

Elisha's Space: And you know something, when as you're sharing your story, I think this is the time when things were shifting, you know, because when you were directed to go back to school, you didn't want to rush past that, you know, you went ahead and you went to pilot school and it probably felt like some like, you know, it it it couldn't be denied that God's hand was on you during that time in that season, you know. ⁓ Did you know what he was sending you toward when you were doing these things? ⁓ or did the clarity come later as you moved into it?

Dr Brad: It's, I grew up in such dysfunction that... I knew what that was, and I knew what that offered. And I didn't want anything to do with it. I really didn't want anything to do with it at all. the Lord brought me to a place... where all that really mattered was obedience. And he says that we know in part, we're prophesying in part, we don't know everything. You look at ministry, he never meets you until you open your mouth. I remember the Lord healed somebody in doing prison ministry at one time and the whole, all of the staff came rushing to the monitors because a Southern Pentecostal was in there three weeks before and he's pushing people over like they're slain in the spirit and they scrambled the whole prison. And so you see this situation arise and I never got any closer than 30, 40 feet to this person in Lord Hill. And so everybody's watching, ready to scramble and nothing happened, none event. And next time I go in there, the lady's asked me, what are you gonna share about today? I said, I have no idea. She looks at me funny. Yeah, I know, that's pretty vulnerable, but the Lord doesn't allow me to prepare anything. Those things, what He wants me to share comes out in the dialogue where He inlays. And yeah, that's really vulnerable, but that's who He's made me. And that's one of those things you learn in life, is you trust. You get a direction, you head that way, and you trust.

Elisha's Space: Very much so. The very much so. Especially ⁓ when you're in doing ministry, like he might give you just a few words and then you just have to speak it through and trusting it's a it's ⁓ it really is like a partnership and a relationship that you're developing. In that I wanna mention that as you're sharing your this part of your story, the pattern that I see consistently in lives of people who've survived narcissistic family systems, particularly those whose bodies have maybe carry the history of the survival. When you allow yourself to be redirected by God, rather that be driven by a wound or the direction he gives ⁓ them is almost Always back to the very thing that was done to them. It's not to relive it. ⁓ he doesn't waste what you did. Nothing is wasted. He doesn't waste that five-year-old who had to figure out food and body on his own. It doesn't waste the interceptive awareness that was developed, obviously, because of the meals that you currently cook now. He takes all of it and he gives it language and a framework. And a practice that helps to heal other people. And that is not a coincidence that is calling. An audience, you hear me say this so often. His peace is not dependent on your circumstances being resolved. It is a regulated nervous system in the presence of a safe God. So tell me about the work you do now. I know you pursued educational in functional medicine. ⁓ some of it is traditional academia, some of it outside. For our listeners who may not be familiar, give us the accessible version of what functional medicine actually is and more importantly why it matters specifically for someone who has chronic illness and a trauma background.

Dr Brad: Really, simply, most people have been seduced by a medical system to get a diagnosis, which is a placard of identity. And that's how most of society accepts that. In a doctor's eye, it's just an insurance code for him to get paid for what he does. But it gives no access to cause of what's going on. nor does it give access to health. It only gives access to managing symptoms and eternal sick care. Functional medicine is one that was started by some very creative souls who did a lot of clinical nutrition, were doing amazing things that no one else could do. The whole idea is to find what the root cause of something is. The symptoms let you know there's a problem, but you need a completely different set of diagnostics to find root cause. And that's not in the traditional systems of lab testing. So those were more intuitive skills that were developed by very creative minds, which that system has been lost. And it's those people have been seduced to do lab testing, which cannot give you what those real issues are. But if you take somebody with any kind of chronic illness, like we deal with people who can't walk, can't talk, can't communicate, can't get out of bed. I had one farm boy who was 21 years old. He spent 23 and a half hours a day in bed. Couldn't get out of bed, couldn't function at all. He'd... been to traditional care, he'd been to homeopaths, his mom brought him in to see me. And it took a while to get him to comply with what he needed to. And once he did, he started getting out of bed and he was healthy and working not long after that. That's because the Lord gave me the tools to develop, really highly develop these intuitive loss skills. from yesterworld into a system where we evaluate every function inside of the body, every metabolic function, hormonal function, detox function, immune function, every single function along with food intolerances, ⁓ microbial, infective issues, toxic issues. to find out what's going on inside the body. And then you can use the same system to test to see what it takes to restore that. And we've... In 40 years of doing functional medicine, I've shared different patients with multiple other docs, oftentimes more on renowned specialists. In every single case we've shared a patient with, we've outdone their systems. And this is whether we're talking natural doctors or medical doctors. We've outdone them all in diagnostics to find out what root causes are. We've outdone them in care and we've outdone them in resolution in every single case for 40 years. And that's not a statement of braggadocia. That's a statement of broken humility. God honors our integrity with a level of success that's not natural. It's not statistically possible. And I just accept that because he's in it. He's the one who directs all that. But debilitating Lyme disease, chronic issues. We've had families that have had that for three decades. Get them all ⁓ healed up and well and living life again. Candida, leaky gut. I was full of fungal infections. A lot of people are. And people think they can go after the fungal infection. People think when Lyme disease they can go after the Lyme bacteria. That's not why they're sick. What allows those things to grow is the key to helping them get well again. And you've got to deal with the things that beat them up so much that these sick processes start to develop. And that's what functional medicine does.

Elisha's Space: So I want to thank you for that answer, ⁓ because it was so thorough. ⁓ part of what is being described is exactly what the research is now catching up to to confirm. The connection between adverse childhood experiences, what clinicians called ACEs, and the development of chronic physical illness is not metaphorical. It's is not stress makes things works, it's biological and it's measurable. So the foundational, if you go really into this, if this is something that's it interests you audience, ACE research by Faliti and Andas showed a different dose dependent correlation between the number of adverse childhood experiences and the likelihood of developing chronic illness, audioimmune immune disease, And cardiovascular disease. When a child lives in a home with narcissistic abuse, their HPA axis, their stress response system is in a state of chronic activation. Cortisol, adrenaline, the emergency systems are running continuously. And that chronic activation does have physiological consequences. It can affect the gut, it affects the immune system. It affects the inflammatory response. It is literally in the cells. So when someone tells you your chronic ill illness is just anxiety, what they're actually identifying, often without knowing it, is a nervous system that has never had permission to come down from emergency. And that is something that Dr. Brad helps people with. With his scientific knowledge, his schooling. And also his time, because I believe what I'm hearing him say is that he takes us all to the Lord and is guided step by step within that as well. So I just want to reaffirm for you all that it is not in your head. This is not visualization, this is physiology. And I want to ask you something right now, audience. Before we move to the close, is there a chronic symptom in your body that you have been told is just stress, just anxiety, just something you have to manage? I want you to stay with me for a few minutes because what Dr. Brad is about to say is speaking directly to you. For the person that's listening right now who spent years chasing a diagnosis, I get I get it in my practice too. Who has been dismissed? Who is exhausted and does not have language yet for the connection between their history and their body? What do you most want them to hear or to know?

Dr Brad: It's a really good question and it always has to start with affirmation. We are so accustomed to being gaslit that when you hear a clinician, whether it's a doctor or just a clinician, pull out what I call the sight card and tell you it's all in your head. You need to understand that, first of all, what the doctor just admitted is he has no idea what's going on with you and you need to find another, a different clinician. So what people experience is real. What's going on is real. You just haven't found a clinician that can figure out what it is. And what Alicia's talking about, she's got a tremendous amount of insight, which is huge. There's something called epigenetics, which she is describing. Every gene that we have has 30,000 different potential ways to express itself. How we live, how we think, how we believe, what our lifestyle is, how we eat, sleep, rest, exercise, everything. has a huge impact in the term determination of genetic expression. You can have good genes with a bad lifestyle and have all the bad expression. You can have bad genes with a good lifestyle and have all the good expressions. Your genetic code does not determine your destiny. The way out of this prison is to find people who understand what we're talking about. who spend, who have a different set of skills that are not what's typical, because that's not going to get you anything better and work with them. to help rebuild your health. And that's what we do. Essentially, we have a higher percentage of getting other doctors' failures healthy than they do of people coming in off the street. And that's only because of the skill set the Lord's developed in us and that he's a part of what's going on. There's no way I could ever teach what I do to a non-believer, someone who doesn't hear the voice of the Lord and have his spirit flowing through him. He is a huge part of who we are and what we do, but the level of healing is just completely next level. We do things that I know top docs all over the place that can't come close to doing what we do.

Elisha's Space: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You move differently. Most definitely, you move differently. So, audience, I want to take a moment to speak directly to you because everything that Dr. Brad shared today, I want to make sure you leave with a framework, not just a feeling, a framework. Here's what we know clinically and spiritually. When a child grows up with chronic illness inside. Our narcissistic family system, three specific things happen simultaneously. First, the body learns to carry what the home will not acknowledge. The illness becomes secret, the symptoms become shame, the child's interceptive signals, the body's way of saying, I need help, gets overridden so many times. That he eventually learns not to trust his own physical experience. That's the beginning of medical gaslighting, long term damage. And for the person listening, many of you received that same lesson from the same kind of home. Second, the nervous system adapted to protect him. He became competent, indispensable. He learned to perform health and capability. Capability, even while his body was telling him a different story. That is not strength, it is a survival strategy. And eventually it does cost, but it brought him to the place where he is today. And third, this is the part I do not want you to miss: God does not waste what was done to him. He takes the very terrain of suffering, the kitchen at five. The body that learned to read itself because no one else would, the skills built to survive a home that couldn't see, and he turns it into the landscape of calling. Knowledge isn't just power for trauma survivors. Knowledge is safety. If you have a chronic illness in a trauma history, hear this. That connection is real. The dismissal you have received is. Is not a verdict on your body or your mind. Your body has been telling the truth your entire life. And there is a path forward. And it begins with one thing being believed. So before we close, I want to do something with our bodies together. This conversation has gone to so many heavy places. And I don't want us to leave Carrying it in our chests. So wherever you are, if you're driving, please stay alert and just breathe gently with me. If you're sitting, take a moment to feel your feet on the floor. Feel the weight of your body wherever you are. And breathe in through your nose slow for four, one, two, three, four. Hold for two, one, two. And release through your mouth slowly for six. One, two, three, four, five, six. One more time. In slowly through your nose. Hold. And out all the way through your mouth? Now I want you to place your hand on your chest, right over your heart. And I want you to say this out loud if you can, or just let it be true in your own body. My body has been telling the truth. I am safe to hear it now. Let your nervous system hear that you are not running from it. Let me pray with you. Heavenly Father, we come to you with bodies that have been carrying stories that they were never meant to carry alone. We come with nervous systems that learned to be vigilant before they knew how to rest. We come with the residue of homes that did not see us, and we ask you to be the seeing that was missing. Father, I am grateful that you made these bodies, that you knit together the very nervous systems that we are learning to regulate. That you did not design us for chronic suffering. I praise you for that. That you created us for shalom, for wholeness, for the kind of peace that holds the body and the spirit at the same time. For every person listening today who has been sick and dismissed, for every person who had to figure out their own body because no one else would show them their how, for every person who ran the crew and held everything together because they did it know that they were allowed to put it down. Give them the courage to be believed, to believe in themselves, and to let their bodies speak without shame. And we thank you for Dr. Brad, for the five-year-old boy he was in that kitchen reading his own body because no one else would, for the decades of faithfulness in the work, and then for your redirection, Lord, that turned a wound into a calling. And for the clients who get their lives back because he refused to stop. May every person who hears this story today. must find one step forward towards being believed. In Jesus' name, amen. Audience, here's your challenge for the next seven days. I want you to practice something I call body testimony. Once a day, in the morning when you wake up, or at night before you sleep, place your hand on your chest and ask your body one question. What are you trying to tell me today? Don't fix it. Don't override it, don't analyze it, just listen. Write it down if you can, even one sentence. That is body testimony. That is the beginning of reclaiming the signal that your nervous system has been sending your entire life. Dr. Brad, where can our community find you? Where can they connect with your work, get support, and reach out to you directly?

Dr Brad: My website's the best place to do that. It's healthfullyu.com, H-E-A-L-T-H-F-U-L-L-Y, the letter U, dot com. And we work with every aspect of chronic illness. Most of the time, the root causes in the gut. I've never seen an exception to that. It's our work in that arena that allows us to resolve every kind of chronic thing that's out there. I think you can tell I'm not someone who just brags a whole bunch about what they do. I'm actually pretty broken. And that's just one of the things the Lord does with anybody. This really is servant. He just brings them to broken humility. But I don't live where I grew up in. And I took an ACE test a while back, which is about childhood trauma. I scored so low, they had nothing to offer me.

Elisha's Space: Amen. And look at you now.

Dr Brad: And it's simply because I've allowed the Lord to bring me through the processing to get on the other side. And that's part of what we work with too. ⁓ We address every aspect and you have to. So if you're really struggling with something and you want to get on the other side, get your life back. That's what most people that work with us say. I finally have my life back.

Elisha's Space: Amen. Amen. Amen. Audience, if this evidence, if this episode helped you, if it names something you've been carrying, I want you to share it. Text it to one person you know who is struggling. Not because you have answers for them, just because they deserve to know that they are not alone in this. And if you are new to Elisha Space, welcome home. We are here every week. Going into the places that are hard to go with clinical tools and with spiritual anchoring because you deserve both. You can find everything at elishaspace.on podium dot com. The start guide is there. It is a free somatic regulation resource designed specifically for trauma survivors, and I want you to have it. Subscribe so you don't miss what's coming. And if this episode moves something in you. Leave a review. It takes 30 seconds and it places this content in front of someone who needs it. Until next time, you are not too much, you are not too far, and you are not alone.