Why We Finally Give Up After a Lifetime of Showing Up with a Permasmile
In Honour of Another Firstborn: Gone Too Soon, Claude Lemieux.
The hockey world is in absolute shock. Just days ago, Claude Lemieux was standing on the ice at the Montreal Canadiens game, smiling, laughing and carrying the ceremonial torch. To the untrained eye, he was full of life.
To his teammates and friends, he was the ultimate, unbreakable Type A warrior.
But I have spent 50 years as a peace pathologist of the human condition and a root-cause Buddhist biohacker of my own health. I can see behind the smile. It is the exact reason the late Shaun Simpson and I connected back in the day before we lost touch while I was fighting to save my own life since 2013.
When an intense, hyper-vigilant athlete suddenly exits this world, society rushes to label it purely as a “mental health crisis.” They tell people to “reach out.” But what happens when the system itself completely ignores the physical, inflamed engine driving the dark thoughts?
This article is specifically for those who are suffering with dark thoughts right now and are wondering why—especially when you have clean labs, live clean, eat clean, lead a life of love, have a genuine joy for life, movement and spend your days in service to others.
Raised in the Fire: My 58-Year Biological History
Since the age of five, I have had an inflamed brain. I grew up on a mouldy military base after being raised in a toxic womb and having my tonsils out at just six months of age.
As the firstborn in my family, I received the highest toxic flush in the womb, inheriting a nervous system primed from day one for hyper-vigilance.
On top of the environmental poisoning, I suffered unspeakable traumas from a young age. I was raised in a very tense home with an absent, abandoning father. My childhood was not rooted in love; our family didn’t say “I love you” or give hugs. To make matters worse, every single home and gym I ever lived and worked in had mould in it.
I also have learned that when you have mould illness and sick building syndrome that Canada’s Capital is the mouldiest place to live for our lungs all year round.
Learn more in today’s video and dbm-5 deep dives on Spotify.
My mom had exactly what I had. It is a physical, cellular reality: histamine overload, the HLA-DRG gene, the MTHFR gene mutation and POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome).
This is Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS). This is what I have been dealing with my entire life and it is what millions of you are suffering through without even knowing it because the doctors keep pointing to your head and telling you it is mental.
It is not mental. It is environmental illness.
For most of my life, I could only eat five foods because of severe digestive stress. I lived with constant mental distress, loving dark souls who betrayed me on the regular, chronic stress as an athlete and a type-A working 3 jobs as a single mom.
Chronic stress is the absolute root cause of all disease. Athletes are at great danger and why MS is on the rise and why I had MS type symptoms that I reversed in 4 months. No meds needed.
Many high sensing souls also have misophonia—a severe sensitivity to sound linked to a specific gene in the brain—your brain is locked on high alert 24/7, making you an incredibly light sleeper. Misophonia is directly linked to dark thoughts because the nervous system never gets a single second of biological stillness.
For decades, I thought my lifelong depression, acute anxiety, deep fear and being completely petrified all my life was simply because of C-PTSD and my childhood traumas. But it wasn’t.
My body is a highly sensitive biological instrument and those dark thoughts were my brain on fire, warning me of danger.
Out-Running, Out-Playing and Out-Loving the Trauma
For thirty years, I tried to out-pace the noise. High-achieving, Type A firstborns do this naturally—when the internal pressure builds, the default response is to push harder, train longer and out-perform the darkness.
We try to out-play, out-run, out-lift, out-work, out-eat or drown our sorrows in booze, out-shop and out-love trauma.
But you cannot out-manipulate biology. Eventually, the body runs out of resources to suppress the exhaustion. In 2017, I decided I wanted to live in c-ptsd peace. I reversed all of my lifelong symptoms.
How? I stopped trying to out-play or out-love toxic souls who greedily take your energy when they need you but are nowhere to be found when you need them. I stepped offline, cooled my nervous system and built a strict, non-negotiable rule to protect my inner child, my cells, my soul and Mother Earth:
The Compost Rule: If it doesn’t go in the compost bin, it doesn’t go within or on our human animal.
You cannot heal in the same environment that is making you sick. Many of you are sitting in homes, offices or rehab facilities right now that are filled with mould in air tight containers and you will never get better if you have CIRS and the HLA-DR gene until you change your environment.
Be mindful reno work is very toxic for your brain because of all the dust. I presented MAID papers to my doctor Thanksgiving 2022 because I hadn’t slept in months because of a major reno for months to remove mould on all levels of my home.
Mould loves dust and will cause souls to want to expire before we desire because doctors can’t find what is wrong with us.
You can’t heal in the same environment that is making you sick.
The Firstborn Burden and Sibling Responsibility
While we do not have an official obituary confirming if Claude Lemieux was the absolute oldest child, records show he was the older brother to fellow NHLer Jocelyn Lemieux and they had a brother, Serge, who required institutional care for cerebral palsy.
If he was indeed the firstborn, he carried that exact same double burden. He was a parentified caretaker who learned early on that he had to be the strong one who never cracked.
Once the initial shock of this sudden loss wears off, give yourself absolute grace and the time to cry a lot. Grief is simply love in motion but it takes an immense amount of physical energy to process and heal.
I know this exhaustion intimately. In September 2024, after a lifetime of keeping a stiff upper lip, my system experienced a total body collapse. I cried for seven straight weeks. My body was finally forcing me to release what my mind had been suppressing.
This is why I teach biological stillness—to show you how to safely detox stored grief, emotional trauma and physical toxins from the cells up. The heavy armour you have worn for decades to survive does not need to stay on anymore. To heal the soul, we cannot keep fighting outward; we must drop the shield, let go and go within.
If your cells are currently screaming for stillness, please know that you do not have to out-run the darkness alone.
Below is the video I uploaded today—the Coles Notes version of my DBM-5 method path to C-PTSD peace. Let your human animal finally rest.
Sending a 21 second hug from my heart to yours,
You are not alone.
Dee Anne Berry
Geese for Peace filmed under the rare double moon today.
PS: I am uploading a song most Sundays at 7pm for Geese for Peace, our mission to change MAID, disability and create a No Scent Law, finding fellow rare birds who do no harm to our cells, soul and mother earth’s soil, living the Buddhist Way.
Be mindful addiction peace begins with the parents, my son hasn’t had a drop of booze or a puff of anything because we had the conversation daily since he was 7.
DBM-5 provides the path to addiction peace.