How the Trauma of Chronic Illness Can Impair Physical Healing
If this is you, trust me, I understand. I felt the same way - all of the pain and suffering; the feeling of your job, financial security, relationships, and the essence of who you are being threatened; the disrespectful, neglectful, ineffective, or even harmful medical care you received along the way.
I know many people with chronic illness suffer a great deal and struggle to find any answers, or even worse, are told that they're making it up and need to see a psychiatrist. I also know that these experiences often trigger painful limiting beliefs like "I'll never get better" or "I'm broken" or "I can't trust my body". I also know that those with chronic illness tend to ruminate on what's wrong in their body, what each symptom means, what new treatment to try, what practitioner to see next, whether or not they will ever get better, what they've lost in their lives as a result of the illness, and what they're no longer able to do.
All of these experiences, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs have a profound impact on the neural networks created in the brain related to the illness. The subconscious mind stores every single one of those experiences, and if you experienced them as highly emotional, it will categorize them as important and threatening experiences. It will also use those experiences to form your beliefs about the illness, your body, and your future. The subconscious will then constantly reference these emotional memories in your daily life to try to recognize anything similar that might also be a threat.
If you haven't fully recovered, and are still spending a lot of time thinking about your symptoms or diagnoses, reading or listening to other people's stories about your illness, taking in lots of media about your illness, going to lots of doctor's visits, etc. your brain will likely subconsciously connect these present-moment experiences to your most traumatic memories of the illness and painful beliefs. That will then trigger a danger response in your body. Often this is happening below your level of consciousness, so you're not likely to be aware of it. However, it's incredibly important to interrupt this cycle, so that your brain and nervous system can be calm, which you NEED to sustainably heal. Remember, none of your major body systems or processes work normally when you're stuck in fight/flight or freeze!
Have you ever woken up, realized that you're having a flare of a symptom, and before having any anxious thoughts about it, you start to notice a panic response in your body? That is your subconscious mind creating that response without your control because it believes the symptom flare means that you're not safe based on your past experiences. Unfortunately, I know that for many this kind of situation can turn into a mental and emotional tailspin that can last all day or all week, and dysregulate both mind and body the whole time!
So how can you interrupt this unhelpful trauma patterning so that your body can heal? It requires addressing the traumatic memories, stored emotions, and limiting beliefs that are producing the danger response, and you can effectively do this with neuroplasticity techniques. We now have techniques that harness the way the brain naturally changes its wiring, and we can use those to weaken the neural circuitry of the trauma. This effectively frees you to create new, calmer responses in your everyday experiences with your symptoms so that you can get into the vital "rest, digest, and heal" state more of the time.
Releasing all of this trauma for myself was profoundly impactful on the ambient state of my brain and nervous system, and I've now seen it do the same for many others. I can tell you from personal experience that it can make a big difference for you too!
