Our pain and illness are not randomly created. We are all complex, multidimensional organisms. We know that a physical ailment affects us emotionally, but left unattended an emotional or spiritual wound can also manifest itself physically. All processes in this dynamic, multi-layered system occur at the same time, every event in every cell of our body is known to every other cell at the same time. Even our memories are stored not only in our brain, but in every cell.
Biological Responses to Emotional Trauma
Our biological responses to emotional trauma and stress are very sophisticated. At the same time, we need to understand that our targeted areas of pain and illness are not random. Our specific pains and illnesses are the result of life’s emotional trauma and our responses to them, all beginning in childhood.
An example to illustrate this phenomenon is the way your body freezes when you are severely traumatized by violent emotional and/or physical abuse. For example, imagine that as an infant, rather than having an emotional and energetic welcome into the world, you are met with a threat of annihilation. Time stands still, your biological systems go on high alert and you can’t feel anything. Your infantile perception diminishes and you can hardly breathe. Our frozenness indicates that our body has gone into a state of shock and the dissociation indicates that a part of our spirit has left our body.
Frozenness and dissociation are the ways we survive the violence. Frozenness becomes an actual reality in our body as we have to lock our joints against the threat of annihilation. Imagine an overwhelming threat coming toward you. You can feel how you shrink in your body and contract your muscles and joints as a response to the threat. These negative experiences are now frozen in time and still live in your body. They create chronic tension and stress reactions, which, if left unattended over time, will lead to muscular pain or a breakdown of joints. Perhaps later in life we discover we now have developed arthritic symptoms.
Body Centered Psychotherapy
Body Centered psychotherapists understand that energy and matter are convertible. That is, energy can be converted to matter and matter can be converted back to energy (Einstein’s theory: E=mc2). To illustrate this, let’s look at tumors, breast masses, and other illnesses and diseases which are results of energy that has been blocked and left to stagnate. With the introduction of healing energy, light, love, comfort, or acceptance into the area of blocked matter; In-Depth Body Psychotherapy and Subtle Energy Healing therapists have had significant success in converting matter back to energy. This has resulted in masses disappearing before scheduled surgery as well as the remission and/or cure of many illnesses and diseases.
We hold the belief that every illness and disease is a message from spirit about either the physical, emotional and/or spiritual healing that needs to take place. The illness and disease are also messages about the location where energy is blocked in the body and a way for our spirit to direct our attention to the block. As spirit seeks to heighten our awareness of where we are blocked, we have the opportunity to heal a spiritual/emotional wound and thus allow the blocked energy to be converted back to flowing, healthy energy.
Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Nervous Systems
Let’s take a quick look at the Parasympathetic and Sympathetic Nervous Systems, whose balance is negatively affected by chronic stress. So many of us in this rushed world suffer damaging effects of stress, such as high blood pressure, insomnia, anxiety, fatigue, and autoimmune disorders, to name a few. Healing energy can help regulate our adrenal system, which is taxed by stress. It can calm the automatic fight or flight response that stress induces in our brain. In fact, healing energy can even create an increase of neural connections to the pre-frontal cortex. The pre-frontal cortex is the part of the brain which mediates the response of the limbic or emotional brain with the fight and flight response of the reptilian brain. This allows us to know when something is truly dangerous rather than automatically responding as if everything is potentially dangerous.
Rewiring Our Brain and Healing
Unfortunately, we tend to get stuck in our past habit of defending against experiencing our “old trauma” and instead living as if we are in constant danger now. As we work with and heal our past trauma we can rewire this unhealthy old outdated way of defending ourselves. The rewiring of our brain and the rebalancing of our nervous systems enables us to live in a more balanced and healthy manner. We now find ourselves in a healing state of being, connecting to a higher level of functioning, and to our own deeper place of wisdom that also connects us to universal consciousness.
Although our therapists can help to guide clients toward deep healing, a full physical healing is not always a certainty. Sometimes the healing is of an emotional or spiritual nature. The extent of the physical healing depends on several factors, the message our Spirit is sending to us and the pre-existing level of physical deterioration. Also critical is our ability to live into and through our resistance and into our emotional hurts and trauma and the old embedded negative energies from the original emotional abuse.
As we begin the therapeutic process, improvement is possible even when there is physical deterioration. We don’t know in advance the nature and extent of the healing that can and will occur. In order for any healing to take place we need to suspend judgments and obsessions about what can be accomplished and allow our body and emotions to realign into a quieter, calmer state of being.
Submitted by Stuart Alpert, Psy.D., LCSW. A more complete understanding of this topic can be found in his book “Roads Back in Time, Seeing the Invisible and Healing the Impossible.” This book can be purchased through the Hartford Family Institute website: www.hartfordfamilyinstitute.com, or on Amazon.
For more information about the HFI training programs you can also call 860.236.6009.