Gut Healing Chapter 5: A Mindset Shift That Changed Everything
This post is Part 5 of my Gut Healing Journey series. If you’re just joining, I’ve been sharing my story step by step, documenting the lessons, breakthroughs, and struggles I faced while piecing together my healing. Today, instead of focusing on a protocol or supplement, I want to share a mindset shift that made all the difference for me.
The truth is, gut healing takes time. Sometimes a long time. And while you wait, while you experiment, while you face setbacks and dead ends, you need something that will hold you steady. For me, that anchor was a mindset shift:
Everything is happening for me—not to me.
From “Victim” to “Victor”
In the early months of my illness, I constantly thought: “Why is this happening to me?” I felt trapped, powerless, and at the mercy of my symptoms. Every new flare-up reinforced that sense of victimhood.
Then I heard this idea: What if it’s happening for me?
At first it felt like staring at one of those optical illusion pictures. At first, you only see one image, but when you shift your perspective, a whole new picture emerges. That’s what this mindset did for me—it helped me reframe my circumstances in a way that gave me relief, even hope.
Just like this optical illusion, your circumstances can be seen in two ways. At first glance, all I saw in my illness was loss and frustration. But when I shifted my perspective, I started to see hidden blessings. That’s the power of the mindset: What if this is happening for me?
What It Looked Like in Practice
One of the first times I practiced this new mindset was early on in my illness. I remember thinking, what if this whole health crisis is actually a wake-up call? Almost like the universe was firing a warning shot, saying: “Pay attention—something bigger could be coming down the line unless you figure this out.”
My mom died of pancreatic cancer at 70, and my whole like I’ve worried that this could be my fate. I couldn’t shake the thought: what if this is happening for me so that I don’t repeat that story? The more I researched bio-hacking and functional medicine, I saw evidence that these chronic illnesses are simply the result of cumulative damage to multiple systems over time. If I can change my diet, heal my gut, and care for my body now, maybe I can rewrite that future. That thought brought me so much peace. I began to say, thank you, God, for giving me this hard season, because it’s forcing me to face things I’ve ignored—my pace, my over-self-sufficiency, my tendency to carry tomorrow’s anxieties today. It’s a gift that will give me a rich life.
It made me let go, ask for help, and restructure my businesses to run with more margin. On the other side of it, I can see the wisdom: I don’t need to work so hard to prove my value. I can rest, receive, and trust that God will provide. That realization never would have come unless I chose to look at my illness through this new lens.
Whenever I ran into a roadblock, instead of spiraling into “Why me?” thinking, I’d pause and ask, “How could this be happening for me? What might this teach me? How might this be used for good later?”
And over time, I started seeing answers because I was looking for them!
- My kids are more mindful about food now—they read ingredient labels and eat healthier.
- My husband shifted his diet and is experiencing his own health improvements.
- I have radiant skin, more energy, and look years younger.
- I spend more time with my family and guard my margin more fiercely.
- My spiritual life has deepened—God feels closer than ever. I feel like I can handle anything life throws at me if I keep my eyes fixed on Him.
- I do things from a place of “fun” instead of “have to.”
- And I’ve been able to guide others through their own health struggles, offering hope I didn’t have at the start.
If you’d told me a year earlier that these blessings would come out of my illness, I wouldn’t have believed you. But now I can see: it really was happening for me.
I am now so grateful that I got sick. (!!!!)
The truth is, your circumstances are neutral. They just are. It’s us who assign the label of “good” or “bad” based on how we choose to look at them. And here’s the powerful part—when you decide to call something “good” and believe it’s happening for you, your brain immediately starts looking for evidence to back that belief up. That changes your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, and ultimately your results. In other words, the meaning you give to your circumstances can end up shaping the outcome itself.
This is how you become a new identity.
A Challenge for You
So let me turn it to you: what would it look like if you practiced this mindset in your own story?
Take your current challenge—the one that feels like it’s suffocating you—and ask: “What if this is happening for me? What could this be teaching me? What doors might this open that I can’t see yet?”
Here’s a practical exercise: write down 5–10 possible ways your current struggle could turn out to be a blessing—both now and in the future. They don’t all have to be realistic. Just practice imagining. Because once you believe it’s possible, you’ll start seeing evidence of it everywhere.
Do this every day for a month. It will take practice. Then start noticing how you LOOK FOR EVIDENCE that it is manifesting.
By golly, you’ll start to see things shifting in your favor.
Final Word
I won’t pretend I always get this mindset perfect—there are still days I slip back into frustration or “why me?” thinking. But choosing to see my illness as something happening for me instead of to me has changed everything. It gave me hope on the days when healing felt painfully slow. It helped me keep taking one more step when I wanted to quit.
And here’s what I want you to know: the same can be true for you. Whatever you’re facing right now, you don’t have to stay stuck in the role of victim. You get to choose how to see your story. And when you start looking for how your struggle could actually serve you, you’ll be surprised by how often you find evidence that it already is.
So don’t give up. Keep going. There are gifts hidden inside this season that you may not see yet—but one day, you’ll look back and realize they were there all along.
I’ll be back next week with another insight from my story. If you’re looking for a guide to navigate you through your healing quest, I am here for you.
Want to read the story from the beginning? Start here with chapter 1 of my gut healing story >> How I Healed My Gut, The Beginning