It’s ‘All in Your Head’ – Is Your Doctor (Partly) Right?
Now this is a tricky topic to contemplate!
Firstly, we need to explore how a chronic health issue develops and is maintained over time.
Your body has an old ‘reptilian brain’ triggered by adaptive response, with an automatic and subconscious capacity to influence your biochemistry and allocation of critical resources to aid in protecting and sustaining you. This is known as an autonomic nervous system (ANS) response.
When you are under stress, your sympathetic nervous system (one aspect of the ANS)
causes a flight-or-fight response to keep you alive – even if you are not in real danger!
If your body senses a threat (real: actually being chased, or imagined: fear of being chased), it raises cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine driving an inflammatory response. You feel anxious, angry, or afraid. You start sweating, your heart rate increases, your digestion slows down, and your blood vessels constrict. You feel tension, trembling, or vibration. You may clench your fist; you may show guarded body language, feel nauseous and vomit, loose bladder or bowel control, or may feel like running away.
In this circumstance the body is directing signalling and resources away from the immune response, organs of digestion, healing/repair mechanisms, sexual desire, sensation of pain etc as it considers these areas unimportant when you are within a state of threat!
Experiencing this response is appropriate and healthy – this adaptive response is probably what allowed the human to rise to the top of the food chain. However, these are supposed to be acute, short events, not prolonged over many months, years, or decades.
Events like childhood trauma, sexual abuse, or a combination of factors (from diet, environment, and lifestyle exposures) can leave you experiencing this response consistently. When flight-or-fight or shutdown becomes a chronic state, it becomes a problem, draining your resources and increases the risk of both mental and physical health issues.
The take home from this article:
It’s not that your body does not know how and when to heal and recover – it is just not being told to under the direction of a subconscious and automatic directive.
For resolution you must find yourself being consciously pro-active rather than subconsciously reactive in your decision-making processes and response to triggers.
One will allow the allocation of resources to resting, repairing and healing while the other will allocate resources to running and fighting – and the prolonging of your condition.
Be warned that lifting the ‘big metal plate’ on the pit where you have been hiding all your pain and suffering is no small undertaking, and best explored with appropriately qualified guidance and support. However, it cannot be overlooked or locked away forever and imperative to enable the healing response to be signalled and the appropriate resources to be allocated.
Now becoming a ‘mentally self-sovereign’ human being and proving your doctor wrong, is no mean feat.
It means recognising, undoing, and releasing all the historical wrongs and damage wrought, and then protecting yourself from absorbing more.
It means completely re-examining the ‘story’ you’ve been telling yourself all these years and actively creating and writing another one (Yes, you have the freedom to do this).
Being a mentally sovereign human means re-constructing your understanding of reality based on your own investigations, new insights, and your own reasoning. Not those that have been imposed on you and shaped your thinking to date.
It means wanting to know the truth about aspects of yourself that you have kept hidden and compartmentalized out of sight and how you might have been misperceiving aspects of your own field of consciousness this entire time.
It means wanting to know the truth, even if it crumbles every belief you’ve ever had about who you are, and what the world is.
It means wanting to know the truth, even if it hurts; even if it is terrifying and even if it means being wrong.
Clearly this journey is not for everyone but take heart, its only ‘all in your head’ anyway!
The Team @ Core Naturopathics are at your service.