Your Secrets Make You Sick: Sobriety, Somatic Screaming & The Power Of Your Words | Elle Macpherson

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Elle Macpherson has been on this podcast more than any guest — more than the doctors, the scientists, the researchers. And every time, we go somewhere I didn't plan.

We recorded this one the morning after a dinner that went late and got real. Some of what Elle shares in this episode she's never talked about publicly. The conversation moves into childhood, which is where some of the most important things in this episode live. Elle grew up with very young parents — her mother was seventeen when she got pregnant, her father was building a business and working constantly, and Elle was the eldest of three absorbing responsibility from a young age. She went to the Hoffman Process in her forties and describes two days of silence as the first she'd ever practiced. What she found there didn't hit immediately. About two years later it became the trigger for getting sober. And what sobriety opened wasn't just the obvious physical things — it was the ability to finally say what she actually meant, to stop suppressing, to experience food and presence and relationship without the buffer of numbness in between.

She talks about screaming in the car. About how you can start the process with no emotional content attached — just the act of screaming — and then the sobbing comes, and then the memory or the person or the situation comes, and then there's an opportunity for forgiveness. And forgiveness, she says, is the part most people skip. The cellular memory of unresolved trauma is, she believes, one of the underlying causes of inflammation in the body. I believe that too.

We also talked about words. Not in a vague way — in a very practical way. She would never say "my cancer." She would say she was healing through an imbalance in the terrain of her body. There's an Aramaic root of the word abracadabra that means "I create as I speak." Trillions of cells are listening to how you describe yourself, your body, your illness, your life. That's not magical thinking. That's biochemistry.

A few of my favorite things we cover in this episode: 

• Elle's most-frequented guest status — more appearances than any doctor on the show — and the first Instagram Live they did together during COVID
• Growing up with young, overwhelmed parents — childhood responsibility, fight or flight as a baseline, and why most people are carrying imprints from zero to eighteen they haven't addressed
• The Hoffman Process: five to seven days, two days of silence, mapping family behavior patterns — and how the clarity she found two years later became the trigger for getting sober
• Sobriety: how it shifted her friend group, calmed her parasympathetic nervous system, changed how food tasted, and created the space to say what she actually meant
• "Your secrets make you sick" — how not numbing forced her to face what she'd been suppressing, and why that messy process refines over time into real communication
• Screaming in the car as a somatic release — how it moved into sobbing, then into forgiveness, then into freedom — and why forgiveness is the critical step most people skip
• Healing as rebalancing — not fixing something broken, not a linear moment of arrival, but a gentle ongoing process of returning to yourself
• "Stay in your own lane" — what came through in meditation, and why it's still the hardest practice
• The power of words: never saying "my cancer," reframing illness as "healing through an imbalance in the terrain of my body," and the Aramaic root of abracadabra — "I create as I speak"
• Perimenopause as a beginning, not an ending: moving into the wise woman phase, burning off the old self, and why focusing only on symptoms misses the gift
• The WellCo Three Steps Well protocol: Super Elixir (morning), Clean Lean Protein (lunch), Sleep/Evening Elixir (night) — and how it resolved her menopausal symptoms within six weeks
• Morning routine: Dr. Rangan Chatterjee's three-question journal (morning and evening), Therasauna with ozone and castor oil pack, outdoor cold plunge for three minutes, mini trampoline for ten minutes
• Methylene blue drops for mitochondrial support — and the blue teeth and ruined clothes problem
• Intuition as an urge, not a voice — and why it gets louder the more you use it

Products Mentioned:  

• WellCo Super Elixir — 50-ingredient greens powder (multivitamin, mineral, probiotic, prebiotic, adaptogen) — wellco.com
• WellCo Clean Lean Protein — hydrolyzed beef protein powder — wellco.com
• WellCo Sleep/Evening Elixir — magnesium, potassium, skin blend — wellco.com
• WellCo Goddess Elixir — medicinal plant formula for menopause support — wellco.com
• The Plunge cold plunge (Elle's outdoor cold plunge in Miami)
• Hoffman Process — hoffmaninstitute.org (trauma clearing program Elle recommends for anyone starting a family)
• Dr. Will Cole's methylene blue article

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Happy listening, and we hope you learned a little bit more on the art of being well!

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In Health,

Dr. Will Cole