Angel Hiles Interview Transcript
Updated: May 12, 2022
[00:00:00] Laurin: Welcome to the curiously wise podcast. I'm your host, Laurin Wittig. This podcast is all about women supporting women, mind, body, and spirit. It's a place where we will honor celebrate and share women's natural and experiential wisdom through Curiosity, provoking conversations, shared stories and tips.
We've all gathered along this journey. I invite you to join in the fun as we uncover the unique wisdom. We each carry within us. Ready? Let's get curious.
Hello, friends and welcome to the curiously wise podcast. I'm so excited to have a new friend of mine here, Angel Hiles. She is a holistic brain health coach and she has been a therapist for many years. I'm going to let you know.
Say hello and introduce herself to you. She can do a far better job than I can. So welcome angel.
[00:01:07] Angel: Thanks Laurin, you basically said just what I would say. So I am a licensed therapist and the state of Ohio and West Virginia. And yes, I have been a therapist for eight years now. Very much enjoy it. But recently I have branched out into incorporating. Brain health coaching, and I do have a holistic approach in both therapy and coaching.
And I just love teaching people about brain health because. As I struggled for most of my life with an impaired brain without knowing it. And it impacted most of my functioning. And so I love to teach that element because I never knew that. And it's very helpful in one's healing process of, empowering and giving you a sense of control of where you can improve your brain functioning.
So therefore all areas of health improves.
[00:02:01] Laurin: Yeah. So, can you tell us a little bit about your journey to discovering that you had an impairment?
[00:02:06] Angel: Sure. I wish I would've known so much sooner, but Hey, that's just how life happened, but you know, so basically through childhood, I had struggles in learning, but not all the time. Pretty much. I think coming out of my elementary years, sometimes like reading and comprehension was always difficult.
Just because of how my brain was processing to struggled with impulsivity basically just never making great decisions. Right. And that then kind of incurs shame, right. Because. I, without my knowing was kind of telling myself, I must be stupid. it's hard for me to read or I make these stupid decisions and then I'm embarrassed and I get in trouble and so I must be bad.
All of this just snowballed. And then I had digestive issues and headaches and Basically into adulthood and struggled with relationships because of this impairment and in addition to the brain impairment. But because I wasn't able also to have a healthy attachment, I always felt unsafe and insecure and didn't know how, because I didn't feel safe at me. An impaired nervous system. And then therefore, then I experienced. Relationships, if you will, you know, they didn't feel safe. So it just continued. And I was unaware of that also for most of my life. So it was very much a long journey.
It started with going to a holistic chiropractor who was treating more of. Route. using supplements and nutrition and asked me about my diet and I was slowly trying to give up bread, like these things and sugar, you know? And then I was doing a moderation and now I'm doing a lot better, but it is a hard process when, okay.
I know these things aren't agreeing with me, but it's not so bad that. I want to give them up completely. And the same thing goes for these other habits that I had created through life that helped. in life before, but then it was just causing harm. So very unhealthy habits, but they were created out of survival and, you know, just making sense and getting through life, but then they became very problematic.
And so now with knowing how the brain works and regulating my nervous system, it has strengthened my ability to function in a very healthy way.
[00:04:37] Laurin: Yeah, it's the brain gut connection is really, is very interesting to me. I had an allergy to egg. through my childhood and early adult years, and I didn't realize that it was expressing as anxiety, I would get teary and I would have anxiety, panic attacks, and I did not. Connect the two until much later.
I, well, much later I was in my twenties when I figured it out. Thank goodness. But the brain gut connection is amazingly strong and hard to, I think the hard to separate, you know, what's, what's going on because of what you've ingested versus what's going on because of the emotions that would otherwise be going on. so you worked with chiropractor. What was your next step?
[00:05:23] Angel: Well, you know, so the natural supplements he used they, there was multiple doctors there, but standard process and some other people use them as well. So they did muscle testing and just checked how you reacted to certain foods or. You know, nutrition, for example, a lot of the times though, they were able to recognize that I had adrenal fatigue or it was digestive so my Like the valves and the intestines or whatever, sometimes, they would do pressure points and close them because they weren't closing properly. So a lot of that bacteria and stuff was escaping. I know people are listening. Like she is not able to describe that effectively, but
[00:06:04] Laurin: Yeah.
[00:06:05] Angel: I'm not a doctor, but Basically though, all of those things helped me tremendously and it wasn't medication because not that there's anything wrong with that.
There's a place for that, but they couldn't ever pinpoint. Right. So it was very psychosomatic and nutrition related for me.