Thank you Tammy! Quintessential Story

Hi Daren,

I wanted to share my testimony with you in case you'd ever like me to share it with the organization.

I was born in Bad Kreutznach, Germany to a US Army officer, in a division called Strat-Com which stands for strategic command. As a  young child, my father taught me to be a strategist and I'm very good at it. I have bipolar disorder and the way it affects me is that I get extremely excited when good things happen to me—so excited that it quickly escalates to mania. When I was a young child I used to charge people with my head down and butt them in the stomach really hard if I was excited to see them. My bipolar is genetic. My father was also bipolar though he was never diagnosed. He served in two wars and developed severe PTSD that he medicated with alcohol. He ultimately died of liver disease from the alcohol poisoning, but before he did, he became a deadly monster and all of us were constantly traumatized, abused and were in danger of our lives all the time. My maternal grandfather was a pedophile, so my trauma was in triplicate. I developed severe PTSD and dissociative disorder, so I've dealt with three different mental illnesses. I started self-medicating with marijuana in 2000 and it made the mental illness much worse instead of better, but I was addicted.

I hit bottom in 2007, after making a series of terrible business decisions in manic highs and became suicidal. I sought help and entered into a very intensive mental health and addiction recover program, which is how I became so intricately involved in the Montana mental health system and serve on local and state boards. I suffered a setback in 2009 and I was prescribed psych meds, but the side effects were extremely traumatizing and I took myself off after two weeks. I did my best to function in society without meds, but it has required 15-25 hours a week of counseling, support groups, dialectical and cognitive behavioral therapy.

Then I recently found out that the owner of a very strategically located live theatre in my community was going to allow me to use the theatre and foyer to open a visitor center, fine art gallery, house my multimedia company and have the chance to execute my economic development strategy, (with no money upfront) I became manic. No amount of behavioral and cognitive training I had could stop the intense flood of adrenalin and energy that surged through me. My friends started warning me about the mania, but it was too late. My body went into survival mode and my amygdala took over, shut down my frontal cortex, and told me I needed to smoke pot. Even though my experience proved that pot made it worse, my brain was convinced that it would be different this time. But it wasn't. I thought I might need a a psych nurse to prescribe a low dose of something to manage the mania. That's when Gregory told me about Q96. Within three days, my brain fog lifted (which I had no idea I had) and in six days the mania had subsided dramatically. I noticed that the mania had subsided when I was in Salt Lake City, at the time I met you.

Since I've been back, the mania subsided even more and all of my plans started coming together like magic. I have lots of very exciting things going on, but absolutely no mania. I've also noticed that it's also eliminated my fear. I used to have fear surge through me (for no apparent reason) and I would have to literally counsel myself that it was only chemicals and I didn't need to be afraid of it. It would eventually pass. That's how I dealt with my emotions on a regular basis. Now it's gone. And I'm completely clean from the marijuana and it's the only time I've ever been able to quit smoking pot without assistance from a chemical dependency program.

So you can see why I'm so on fire about Q96 EMPower Plus. It's made a miraculous difference in my life in a very short time. If it wasn't for Q96, my theatre/gallery multimedia opportunity would have been sabotaged by my illness.

Thanks for letting me share this story with you.

Tammy K.