6 minute read
Mel Abbott
From trauma to TRIUMPH
A head injury and chronic fatigue robbed Mel Abbott of a decade of her life. Now fully recovered, she’s helping others overcome their own health challenges.
For Old Girl and keen Dio Today reader Mel Abbott (PY 1996) life hasn’t turned out at all as she had imagined.
After leaving school, Mel started a BSc in biology. Her goal was to become an environmental scientist, but a head injury at the end of her first year of university ripped away any plans for a normal life.
“I spent 11 years on an invalid’s benefit with chronic fatigue and pain, crawling through one uni paper a year towards a psychology degree,” she says. “It was all I could manage amidst the fatigue. I attended only a quarter of my lectures – I was hardly ever well enough to get there.”
While her friends were partying, travelling, falling in love, and starting exciting new jobs, Mel was virtually housebound battling ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome.
“I would lie on the couch all morning and sleep every afternoon from 3 to 6pm. I could barely walk up one flight of stairs and was in a neck brace for six of the 11 years. I couldn’t go flatting, travel, have relationships or have a job. I limped through my degree one paper at a time. I couldn’t read or drive.”
The very worst thing, she says, was the fear that she might never recover, coupled with the despair when every treatment failed and the sadness that her twenties were slipping away while she lay on the couch.
But Mel’s isn’t a story of anguish; it’s one of hope, healing and inspiration. Her life has turned a full 180 degrees. Now completely recovered, she’s helping others overcome a huge range of conditions from fatigue, anxiety and insomnia to eating and autoimmune disorders, multiple sclerosis and depression.
“I used to say that if I ever got well, I’d dedicate my life to helping others do the same. And that’s exactly what I have done.”
After trying a raft of treatments, Mel travelled to London at the age of 29 to attend a three-day NLP course. NLP, short for neuro linguistic programming, uses the mind to calm the body’s stress response and enable it to heal itself. It changed Mel’s life. Having spent a decade with chronic fatigue, she was fully recovered within two weeks.
“From the first day, I stopped having afternoon sleeps. A week later, I danced till 4am. Two weeks after the course, I knew I was all better! I’ve now been well for 12 years and have never had even a hint of a relapse. People often comment that I’m the most energetic person they’ve ever met.”
Mel trained as an NLP Master Practitioner and lived in England for two and a half years, working as a social worker and catching up on all the travel she’d missed.
In 2010, having returned to New Zealand, she set up her Auckland-based company, Empower Therapies. Since then, she’s helped around 2000 people recover from chronic illness.
“Around half of my clients suffer from fatigue. I’ve seen more than 200 different conditions, but the other big four I help clients with are anxiety, depression, chronic pain and bowel disorders.”
Mel is now president of the NZ Association of NLP. For eight years she ran the same NLP course that helped her recover, and became the busiest practitioner in the world with the longest waiting list. Passionate about spreading awareness of mindbody health to the medical community, she’s spoken at the National GP Conference many times and was even voted ‘Best Speaker’ out of 200 Conference speakers.
In 2017, Mel consolidated all her training and NLP experience into her own chronic-illness recovery programme called The Switch. Based on psychology and neuro-linguistic programming principles, it’s helped hundreds of people in different ways.
According to Mel, many things can prevent your body from healing – among them: being stuck in a stress response or in habitual brain pathways by illness thinking patterns and beliefs; or having unresolved trapped emotions, or a negative physical or social environment that drains your energy.
“The Switch helps you to switch off your stress response so your body can start healing naturally. Patients can get stuck in the stress response due to physical or emotional trauma, illness, Type A personality, cancer treatment, burnout, anxiety…”
That stress response sends energy to the heart, lungs, thyroid and adrenals so more blood and oxygen can be pumped to the limbs to fight or flee a physical threat. In doing so, it steals energy from other systems and organs, including those involved in digestion, immunity, reproduction and detoxification. Our thinking and belief patterns can feed and maintain that stress response, leading to chronic illness.
Mel also helps clients resolve and clear deeper emotional issues without having to re-experience the trauma that caused them.
She has dozens of astonishing success stories. Many of Mel’s clients say they didn’t just get their life back;
they got a better life than they’d ever previously imagined.
She helped a woman recover fully after 38 years of chronic fatigue. Her food intolerances also disappeared. There’s the man who endured three migraines a week for five decades and has never had another since Mel treated him six years ago. A teenage boy in hospital for four months being fed through a tube because he was too weak to swallow, was not only discharged but went surfing the day after attending Mel’s course.
“I’ve helped teenagers get out of wheelchairs, and others – including Dio girls – with anxiety, depression, anorexia and chronic fatigue. Many adolescent girls have come to me with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS). They arrive on crutches with a foot that they can’t even touch to the ground. We watch their leg turn from purple to normal skin colour through the course of a session, and they leave walking and running, no crutches required.”
Mel follows up all her clients for a year and says around 80 to 90% of them recover.
“I absolutely love helping people recover from chronic illness! It’s a dream job really. It all turned out well in the end, even though it was a very traumatic journey to get there. Through being so ill for so long, I’ve learnt more empathy and discovered spirituality. I now trust that my head injury happened for a reason and that every curse has a silver lining.”
And there has been another silver lining recently too. As it has done for many of us, the lockdown as a result of Covid-19 forced Mel to adapt quickly and rethink the way she operates her business.
“I always thought my courses had to be attended in person, and clients travelled from all over New Zealand, Australia and South Africa to see me. But with Covid-19, I was up and running on Zoom in no time and was fascinated to see that the course worked just as well online!”
Mel will continue to offer Zoom as an option so that people don’t need to travel to Auckland if they don’t want to. She’s just moved into a new well-being practice and is developing a series of webinars so that she can help a larger number of people all over the world.
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