Can my mood or emotions present as physical pain or symptoms? Can my past traumas, fears, emotions affect my health now?
These are questions that you may have never thought of before, but they are valid ideas to ponder while you are putting the puzzle pieces together on your healing journey.
There is a theory that your cells have memory, meaning your cells have their own experience of life and can remember events that have occurred. In other words, what has happened to you in your life is not only stored in your mind, but also in your body.
Most often we think of PTSD as the manifestation of physical symptoms caused by mental or emotional traumas. However, this is truly the case with ANY trauma, negative emotion or fear. As written in The Body Keeps Score, “Ever since people’s responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response. Intense emotions at the time of the trauma initiate the long-term conditional responses to reminders of the event, which are associated both with chronic alterations in the physiological stress response and with the amnesias and hypermnesias characteristic of PTSD.”
Wounds, whether physical or emotional, get stored in the body if they’re not fully healed, and manifest as physical symptoms or disease. Additionally, long term suppression of emotion, tension or stress can lead to depression, anxiety, pain, thyroid imbalances, fatigue, menstrual changes in women and can cause dissociation with our true authentic selves.
For example, when people experience depression, it is often known to cause hopelessness and helplessness in the mind, but in the body it reveals itself as weight and pressure. This is the same idea as when you want to buy a certain car and then notice it everywhere all of a sudden! Your thoughts bring about your reality. Understanding the full picture of the mental, emotional and physical experience allows for great understanding and healing. Tuning into the body allows for greater clues to help you through any health situation that presents.
Was there an event in which all of your symptoms started after? Or was there a trauma that you experienced early on in life that you can connect your current fears or anxieties to? Consider how different life events changed your mindset and habits to avoid that certain situation from ever happening again. How can we retrain the brain and find awareness of those triggers? It’s important to acknowledge how we’re truly feeling at any given time.
One of the hardest things you will do is create boundaries. Boundaries for yourself, for friends, for family members, because you have to know your limits so that you are not spread too thin, get into a situation where you are uncomfortable, or begin to feel resentment. Boundaries are imperative for mental health and healing of all kinds!
When we are busy, working with other people in their emotional field, it is easy to lose our own emotional strength. Grounding exercises are extremely beneficial to bring your heightened or low emotions back to stability. Examples of grounding exercises can be short, guided meditations, visualization and even essential oil inhalation.
The way we talk to ourselves is influenced by our beliefs about ourselves. We call ourselves names, beat ourselves up and continue with negative beliefs about ourselves that lead to more negative attractions. Oftentimes these beliefs begin with a traumatic event(s). The work is to shift the negative self talk to positive self talk and affirmation, therefore retraining the brain to cultivate and hold positive self beliefs. I recommend a book called “I Am Enough” by Marissa Peer, which helps walk you through exercises to retrain the brain, however working with a behavioral therapist is extremely beneficial as well!
Your brain is a powerful organ that can dictate sequelae. Positive expectations lead to positive health outcomes. Similarly, negative expectations lead to negative outcomes. So expect what you want to attract!
A growth mindset is a belief that you have the power to change the outcome of your situation, your health, your future. When you believe you can improve you are more likely to adapt to failure, which is inevitable in life, and much less likely to feel hopeless about where you’re at. If you believe that you can improve your anxiety or pain, you will more likely take the steps to seek help and take actions required to improve health. This is usually cultivated with little reminders daily until new habits and mindsets form, such as using the “I AM” app or repeating “You can change your outcome” to yourself daily.
Working with a functionally based Naturopathic Medical Doctor can reveal root causes of your symptoms that are not so obvious and aid you in finding solutions to the most complex of pictures. A therapist or NMD will help guide, simplify and educate you on how to best find your optimal health.
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