We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christina Santini a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Christina, appreciate you joining us today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

I have never liked boxes and have always had a strong desire to be able to be creative and see how my efforts could shape my own destiny. And those are traits I deeply value today, as I see how afraid many others are of taking risks, using common sense and standing up for what they believe. There is a lot of pressure to fit in, and we are doing a disservice to not have more nuanced and open discussions of differences of opinions. This leads to sandbox-level arguing and segmented societies. This has also to a large degree been how we have practiced health care: conventional vs. alternative medicine rather than a more integrative and cross-disciplinary approach.

Both my mother and father have been very independent, hardworking, loving and relatively low-complaint types of people who have focused on ideas, concepts and values. While I lost my dad while I was still a kid, a lot of the later upbringing and responsibility thus landed on my mother,

After my dad passed away we didn’t have much, yet my mother worked hard and made sure we could travel and have experiences rather than “things”. I look back today and realize she was particularly focused on that I develop skills to navigate in life, that I was able to stand up for myself and unafraid to go against common concepts, if they seemed questionable/ clashed against my own values along with that I have compassion for all living creatures.

I never heard my mother complain much in life, and this is something I deeply value today: people who act rather than complain endlessly. And I have come to realize that way too many of us need to stop playing the victim and take action. Rather than sulk around in our misery, we need to act our way out of it – regardless of however small steps we might be taking. We just need to start walking and stop talking so much.

That said, of course we need to make room for being broken and to have self-compassion and to allow ourselves to fully feel the pain of whatever has happened to us, otherwise our trauma will become our destiny, and far too many of us live lives shaped by a traumatic incident that happened when we were young. And instead of working through it consciously and revisiting what happened and allowing ourselves to fully process it emotionally, we choose to repress it and thus end up with emotional instability and anger management issues that affect the rest of our entire life and pushes people away from us. This is very sad, because while we might have been the victim in the past, now we are creating disharmony in our future by reacting from a place of hurt in a our past which keeps the cycle alive.

We also need to realize that almost every single person has been or will be going through gut-wrenching suffering in their life, and it is not a competition of who has it the worst. While it can be part of the healing to talk through pain – if this goes on for years, we are making a choice (conscious or not) to stay stuck in our misery, rather than take action and create a better life. And we will choose to stay stuck as long as the pain of change seems greater than the comfort of staying stuck.

This is something that is deeply ingrained in me, and I recognize in my own life when I am getting sucked into this mind-trap of victimization. If I allow this sometimes reasonable feeling to linger for too long, it will impact me negatively and drain the daylight out of me. It doesn’t make me feel empowered in any way, it makes me feel weak, lethargic and incompetent. I think this is important to remember as we as a society are going through a collective victim-mindset at the moment. While speaking up for ourselves if we have been wronged is certainly important, we do need to realize that if we want what is best for ourselves, we need to stop being the victim at some point and act the way, we want to be treated. Actions and responsibility create self-worth and empowerment, being a victim for extended amount of time does the opposite. As humans we need to feel empowered to thrive – and this is only something we can do ourselves. No one can rescue us from our own limiting beliefs – we need to get real tired of our own none-sense and get a healthy feeling of entitlement: we are worth more and we will create the life we want for ourselves. At the very least start walking towards it, and certainly something else will come out of it, rather than the mud we have been stuck in. A little bit of healthy entitlement combined with anger is typically what can get us out of that lethargic poor-me victim mindset. And we need this to move. Anger can be a powerful force to get unstuck – although it should be calmed down once we get moving, otherwise we end up with narcissistic personality traits that are equally as toxic, if we “over-entertain” entitlement and anger. Nevertheless I think it key to figure out how to use various emotions as tools to get moving – and then step back and balance it out by doing an opposite action. This is part of the rhythm of nature – we move, we act – and then we retract and reflect. We need to reflect after acting to understand what is our why for doing in the first place – otherwise we are just acting like busy bees for no real reason. Currently, we also have issues with many of us being addicted to always doing as a means to prove our self-worth and get validated, which is a sad, disconnected and stressful way to live – never being able to relax and just be. Always this need for external validation – and it is a trap I think quite a few of us a prone to fall into if we are not aware of stepping back nd reflecting more.

The fact is, change is doable when we want it bad enough, and when we can let go of black-white thinking and accept that the most important thing is simply to start walking and stop talking so much. I feel grateful that both my parents have been doers rather than talkers. Even though I sometimes struggle as a human being with walking the talk myself, at least I am aware of the slippery slope and know I need to walk back at some point unless I want to create my own misery. In the majority of cases we have a lot of control of our life – of choosing to create a better life with more harmony and happiness. But a lot of us refuse to take account for our actions, and don’t want to face the consequences of our inactions – and so we complain.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am a certified Clinical Nutritionist with ongoing education in biological medicine, and have worked with functional medicine for medical doctors in The States and in Europe and in my own private practice The Nutrition Clinic for 15+ years. I specialize in chronic illnesses and advanced lab testing: understanding how things like environmental toxins and mold play a huge impact in many of these so-called “chronic” illnesses, whether that be something is “simple” as migraines or digestive disorders. Accepting a detoriating health is simply unacceptable in my view – oftentimes we can make things a lot better if not reverse it. But change takes effort, consistency and faith. Change is never easy but it is possible in the majority of cases.

My work allows me to think creative, analyze cause and correlation and piece the “health puzzle” together: to do the best we can today to attempt to solve complex issues for my clients by combining conventional health care with newer scientific findings.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Satisfied customers. I know how important good customer service is and have made a priority out of understanding how to best meet clients’ needs and anticipate them before they happen.

While humans can be very complex beings, especially when they are sick, I have found that the more structure, routine, expectations alignment, reliability and small thoughtful details you integrate into your business practice, the less hassle you’ll have down the road. And when clients can see improvement happen after 3 months when we do a thermography scan of follow-up labs that is key to keep them going, as symptoms can take longer to improve. So it is critical to have some factual measures in the interim otherwise we lose motivation.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

Compassion, boundary-setting and patience. As a female I think a lot of us struggle with both being compassionate yet also setting boundaries. Health care practitioners are notoriously known to struggle from practitioner burnout, because it is emotionally demanding to handle sick people as humans are unfortunately not machines that you can hand over a set of guidelines and then expect them to follow. Humans are complex, messy and complicated – and when you work with humans you have to learn how to set boundaries and understand human psychology, if you are not going to burn out in the field.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.christinasantini.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/forkmedicine/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/christina.santini/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinasantini/