Wendy K. Laidlaw

If you've grown up in a stressful household and your mother or your main caregiver was unavailable to you for whatever reason, illness, abandonment, divorce, loss, whatever, in your times of reassurance and need, then it teaches you to become self-sufficient, which of course is no bad thing.

But when you then feel separate and alone and lost, that again impacts your body.

If the spiritual teachers profess that we are all connected via atoms and subatomic particles, think energy and matter, it is no wonder that so many people feel extra lost and alone when they've grown up in a hostile home and never felt safe enough to connect with the very people who were supposed to provide protection and safety for them.

Some of these teachings, sadly,

steeped in religion are very outdated when you compare how much trauma, mistreatment and upset has known now to occur in many homes.

I do have to say that some studies state that if a child has grown up in a secure, safe and stable and nurturing environment with, in inverted commas, a good enough mother,

then even upsetting events and traumas and dramas later on in years are not as devastating to the immune system and the nervous system as a feeling of abandonment in early infanthood.

You see, the neural pathways set up in early years provide a cognitive structure and baseline support to enable a human to deal with the external events, make sense of them and to process them in a healthy manner, enabling the body systems to recalibrate and rebalance.

But if a child has never experienced safety, never experienced a love or security that she needed, then the physical body then adapts and is built for defence and protection from perceived attack and uncertainty.

This is where a professional woman may appear very successful on the outside on the surface having learnt incredible coping strategies to compartmentalise any fear or anxiety in her mind and her body yet suffer emotional overload or overwhelm more often as the old coping strategies that used to work sufficiently for decades start to fail.

You see it takes a lot of energy to compartmentalise

disapproved feelings and emotions like fear and anxiety, especially when you're working in a high pressure corporate environment, which may be male dominated workforce who have never encountered the pain of a period, let alone endometriosis.

You may feel the pressure to be better than your male colleagues because deep down you feel inferior due to the pain that racks your body recklessly and regularly without warning.

This tension, fear and anxiety in the mind can lead to cognitive overload where your brain literally shuts down like a computer and limits your ability to process and deal with what the external stimuli and environment and all that's coming in.

If the body has been trained from birth to compartmentalize any emotions and sensations or forms of distress and switch off from it, then like the cogs of a machine, they start to wear and tear with perpetual use.

So the key to providing the right healing environment for your body is to start looking at your home environment, have another look at your work environment, pay attention to your friendship environment and of course your intimate environment with your closest partners, husbands and relationships.

Over and above the food you put into your body and the products you put on your skin,

And recognizing how tonic or toxic your environments are will also have an impact on whether you thrive and flourish like the plant that still resides now in the kitchen.

or your cells will perish like in the plant that was in the hole.

I hope that you are smarter than me.