When Healing Doesn’t Happen
GOING DEEPER…..
After treating chronic illness for many years and experiencing my own healing struggles, I strongly believe that a large contributor to chronic illness is energetic, psychological and emotional factors that compromise the individuals capacity to heal. Those underlying factors in the psyche that impair our physical chemistry include:
Trauma
Being Highly Sensitive/Over-stimulation
Denial of our physical body/Ungrounded/Type A behavior
Not living in accordance with our Truth
Repressed memories or feelings
Trauma is known to cause memories held in the physical body. These memories may have occurred in utero and pre-verbally. They become imprinted on our nervous system and are playing in the background of our unconscious. We are adaptable as humans, able to disconnect from pain or traumatic memories that are too challenging. Trauma affects our nervous system causing sympathetic dominant hyperarousal and dysregulation keeping us from being present in our own body and often preventing us from satisfying our core needs. The disconnect from the body can continue in many forms such as numbing out with drugs, exercise, ambition, “over-doing” or becoming overly mental to name a few. This keeps the triggering emotions at bay and un-integrated, affecting our life force. We become locked into our survival coping mechanisms which becomes our “normal” state. For instance, “Muscular contraction, bracing and collapse are the body’s physical mechanisms of adaptive survival styles.” but we all develop our own unique ways to cope. The end result is a disconnection from the body which often results in a body trying to get attention through physical symptoms. Trauma cam affects the vagus nerve, which is necessary for many body processes such as slowing the heart rate, blood pressure, regulating the digestive secretions. Without the parasympathetic effect of the vagus nerve, we stay in a chronic state of “fight or flight” which lowers our immunity, increases inflammation and causes anxiety, panic and depression. We become defensive in our approach to the world seeing it as “not safe”. This negative feedback cycle keeps our bodies from being present as the body is being triggered by subconscious memories of the past.
In my opinion, most chronic illness has a mind/body component. When you fail to respond to different therapies and proceed over time with little success, it is imperative to look at underlying imbalance in the mental/emotional body and necessitates a need to go deeper. When we deny the needs of our body, our symptoms are a way the body gets our attention. Sleep, food, and water are the core body needs. When we add chronic stress, trauma, self-defeating thoughts to that equation, our body’s coping mechanisms break down and physical illness results. Our predominant cultural narrative is about over-doing. “More is Better,” “No pain no Gain”. “Super size me” “Petal to the metal” are some familiar slogans. To heal it may be necessary to actively separate and disengage from this narrative, listening to the voice of our body. Rarely are we taught at a young age to listen to our bodies, accept ourselves “as is”. We are routinely told to deny our feelings, hold our bladders, eat on a prescribed schedule, which may not be reflective of our body’s natural rhythms. Chronic illness can be a sign that we living a life not in alignment with our inner needs. The One-Size-Fits-All approach to medicine serves some but denies our unique history of trauma, genetics, personality differences and nuances in physical variation. I see chronic illness as a journey back to the Self. This requires discovering unmet needs, letting of of self-negating patterns of thinking and righting one’s relationship with the Self through acceptance and love.