I was away this weekend, at a conference, rushing from one talk to another. During a lull, I checked my email on my phone and saw this:

My heart skipped a beat. I’d just had blood taken for testing THE DAY BEFORE, and now I was getting a message from my doctor. I left the presentation and rushed up to my hotel room, really glad I’d brought my laptop. I logged into the portal.

There it was. The diagnosis that explained so much of what my body has been going through the last few years, and even more so in the last couple of months (like constantly shivery skin).

My thyroid has apparently given up. It’s not just stunned. It’s dead. It wouldn’t boom if I put 4,000 volts through it.

And I’m really not surprised. For years now, I’ve been feeling tired and foggy, forgetting words, struggling to lose weight, and then piling on pounds the second I even look at a packet of salt-and-vinegar chips or a donut. I thought it was menopause, stress, overwork, lack of sleep, trauma.

And yes, it was likely many of those things. Just not in the way I thought. It wasn’t all in my head.

It was in my head, yes, but it was in my body too. Because chronic stress doesn’t stay in your head. It moves through your body in ways that are measurable, studied, documented, and sometimes irreversible.

Research suggests that chronic trauma, including coercive control and PTSD, can dysregulate the stress-response system and the immune system. When you experience severe stress for a long period, your body can get stuck in alarm mode. It’s like having a smoke detector that keeps going off even when there’s no fire because the battery’s running low.

Over time, altered HPA-axis signaling, inflammatory activity, and reduced sensitivity to cortisol can worsen inflammation and even possibly increase autoimmune risk in susceptible people. Population studies have found associations between PTSD and later autoimmune disease, including autoimmune thyroid disease. The relationship is complex and it’s not the same for everyone. My doctor told me, when I saw him (yes, I rushed to make an appointment first thing on Monday morning) that women have higher rates of auto-immune diseases like hypothyroidism. Go figure…

None of this means abuse directly causes these conditions in a clean, linear way. But the body accumulates the cost of sustained threat exposure. And at some point, the bill comes due.

I left my husband in October 2012 after nearly 25 years together (we started dating when I was straight out of high school), 18 of them as a stay-at-home mother, during seven moves between six different countries.

In my first year out of my marriage, my income was under $7,000. In my second year, $17,000. I had full custody of four children and a pittance for child support. My children and I had lost access to Canadian health coverage because of how our immigration status was structured. I was working two minimum-wage jobs and building a freelance translation practice from nothing, after my first client ghosted me without paying for several thousand dollars of delivered work.

A month after I left, my ex hacked into my email account and had his flying monkey send a defamatory message to all my contacts. I later discovered that he’d posted intimate images of me all over the internet. A stranger on Facebook sent me some of those images after he apparently sent them to her (they were both permanently removed from Facebook for that) and threatened to show them to our children.

I took him to small claims court and, despite him trying all sorts of extortion to make me drop my case, I won, in what was the first civil judgment for revenge porn in Canada.

But by then he’d emptied his bank account and left the country. He’d already stopped paying child support after losing his job two years earlier. When I applied for permanent residence for myself and my children (completing the whole process myself because I couldn’t afford an immigration lawyer), he refused to sign the required consent forms, called my lawsuit “bullying,” and told me he’d email Immigration Canada to block my children's emigration.

And through all of this: chronic hypervigilance, disrupted sleep, no health coverage, financial precarity, four children depending entirely on me, and an ex who paid for nothing and treated every bureaucratic process as another front in the same war.

My body is responding, correctly and predictably, to years of sustained threat, starting with my childhood, where I almost never felt safe and throughout my marriage, where I constantly walked on eggshells as I navigated escalating abuse of all kinds. Things didn’t let up after I left my marriage, when I should have felt safe for the first time in my life. Instead, I felt more unsafe than I ever had before.

The system wants us to think that our health belongs in one column and our legal situation in another. Not true. Abuse doesn’t respect these neat little boundaries. I see the effects of coercive control and post-separation abuse in my clients every day. The sleep disruption, the weight gain, the hypervigilance, the brain fog, the physical exhaustion, the anxiety, the body that never really comes down from the alarm state.

Too many women are forced into extended sick leave, and some end up on disability or social assistance. It’s not because they’re weak. The constant abuse has worn down their health and their energy. It impacts on their ability to be available for their kids and to provide for them.

Most of them hide it. They don’t tell their lawyers, and they don’t put it in affidavits or mention it in court. They’ve learned, and rightly so, that anything that looks like weakness will be used against them. They’ll be painted as unstable, as unfit mothers. The damage that the abuser caused is weaponized by that very same abuser.

It’s time to take control of the narrative. That starts with knowing what you’re dealing with. First of all, if you’re experiencing any symptoms, it’s important to advocate for yourself. I know that healthcare is either expensive or dependent on access to a doctor. If you have this privilege, don’t waste it.

Too many protective mothers power through when their bodies are telling them something’s wrong because they don’t have the time or the bandwidth to make that appointment, or they think they’ll be dismissed. Unfortunately, women’s symptoms are dismissed all too often. I have female relatives whose doctors ignored or misdiagnosed serious illnesses (including a terminal form of cancer). That’s why it’s so important to document what’s happening and advocate for yourself

The moment you document your health history, you take control of your health, and you change who holds the story. Right now, it exists in fragments: in different parts of doctors’ portals, in your body, in your memory. Your doctor needs to know the whole picture. It’s up to you to make sure they get it.

How often have you felt brushed off at a doctor’s appointment and walked away thinking, “Shit, I should have told them about that!”? Having it all written down, along with questions to ask your doctor, is vital. I always felt brushed off by my doctor. I’m famously hypochondriac, and I know he probably rolled his eyes internally several times during my appointments.

It also meant that I second-guessed what my own body was telling me. But blood tests don’t lie. And maybe me insisting on them a bit earlier would have meant getting treated earlier.

Also, in the family courts, fragmented stories get owned by whoever assembles them first. If you don’t construct the narrative, your ex will.

So construct it yourself. Not as a confession, not as an apology, not as evidence of weakness, but as a timeline of consequence. Symptom onset: when? Separation timeline: when? Post-separation harassment, financial sabotage, legal abuse: when? Put those columns next to each other. The story will tell itself. This is what sustained coercive control does to a human body. These are the medical records that prove it happened.

Information is power. A documented health record, with dates and supporting records attached, is information you hold. It’s harder to spin than a health history your ex hears about from your kids and frames his own way. You don't have to lead with your health in court.

But if it comes up, you’ll be ready. You’ll be able to show that you’re not an incapable mother. You’re a mom whose body has taken a beating from your ex’s abuse. There’s a difference, and when you’re the one holding the pen, you can show it.

If you know someone who needs to hear this, share it with them. And if you want to talk through your own situation, I'm here. You’re welcome to book a free 30-minute consultation below. There are two things that, especially in the last few months when my energy levels have been so low, always energize me. One is writing, and the other is helping people like you get more clarity.

Want to know more about what I do?

This article from Healthline, on advocating for yourself at the doctor’s office, has some handy tips.

If you want to take a deeper dive into this issue, here are a couple of books that address it more comprehensively (click on the images to see the books on Amazon.com and switch to your own country’s Amazon page if you need to).