Hidden Stressors-Part Two

In a previous post I wrote about how my symptoms were beginning to flare, and how I prayed and got some insights into why.

The first was that I wasn’t honoring my sensitive nature enough, i.e. that I have the inborn trait of Sensory Processing Sensitivity: a nervous system that’s more finely tuned than 80% of the population. That makes me a Highly Sensitive Person.

The second insight was related to the first, but with more of an emphasis on recovery: Your nervous system needs to recover from the traumas you’ve been through.

I have known for a while now that Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN) characterized my past, ever since I came across Dr. Jonice Webb’s excellent books, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect and Running on Empty No More: Transform Your Relationships with Your Partner, Your Parents and Your Children. (You can take the CEN questionnaire on my Free Tools page.)

I believed that I had overcome it all by now, between The Healing Codes and some therapy.

However, when my mother died and I had to deal with settling her estate with a co-executor (sister-in-law), I saw just what my family of origin really was like. A plethora of traumas revealed themselves—though a few years ago, I wouldn’t have thought of them as traumas.

That’s the thing—what our nervous system interprets as trauma might not be what our adult minds interpret as trauma.

And what one person’s nervous system interprets as trauma might be different from another person’s. Two people can go through the same event and for one, it’s a trauma, and for the other, it’s not.

It’s a physiological thing. The nervous system becomes dysregulated. It needs to be resolved by some sort of somatic therapy, or it can lead to autoimmune and other chronic illnesses.

Here’s a good video that describes how this works. Irene Lyon explains why there’s no difference, physiologically, between Trauma (the obvious “bad stuff”) and “little-t” trauma. She gives a case study of how this works with fibromyalgia, so if you have this, be sure to watch the video.

Note that CEN is trauma. CEN happens when you don’t get enough of the nurturing you needed. It’s also been called Type A trauma—the Absence of nurturing.

And it probably happens more often than not with Highly Sensitive People. Not only do HSPs need emotional attunement more than less sensitive people, not getting it also affects them more deeply.

There’s a term for this: differential susceptibility. It means the “bad” things affect you more deeply.

It also means, happily, that interventions such as The Healing Codes, somatic experiencing, and probably most any kind of natural therapies and remedies help HSPs more.

(There was even a study of teenage girls for a program helping them ward off depression. Only the HS girls were helped, to the extent that the study suggested they screen people for the HS trait and only work with them!)

Do The Healing Codes help with trauma? I’m sure they do. I’m convinced that without doing THC for so many years, I would not now be at the point where I can really get at the root of my traumas and heal them.

That’s the third part of the insight I was given: You are finally ready. If I hadn’t been doing The Healing Codes and Immanuel Prayer for all these years, I would not have gotten to the point where I can heal my deepest traumas. (The earliest of which happened when I was hospitalized for the first 7 weeks of my life, underwent major surgery, and got pneumonia.)

I had to grow my capacity to even face that I had all these traumas in my life. My body is telling me they’re not healed yet—but they are finally ready to be healed.

If you have unexplained, chronic physical symptoms, I encourage you to take the CEN and the Highly Sensitive assessments on my web page. Unhealed traumas are a huge hidden stress to your nervous system.

Awareness is always the first step in healing. If you’re afraid to become aware (I was; I was a master at avoidance of my feelings), use The Healing Codes to heal that first. Be gentle with yourself. Healing is a process, but remember this: We are wired to heal.

And: Feelings Buried Alive Never Die. They need to be acknowledged, welcomed, felt . . . and then they will heal.