Archive for type a trauma
Hidden Stressors-Part Two
Posted by: | CommentsIn 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.
The Most Important Memories to Heal
Posted by: | CommentsI had visited this memory many times.
I thought I’d healed it, but it keeps popping up.
Each time, I realize there’s some new aspect of it that’s being healed.
There are several memories like this that pop up again and again to heal.
When such a memory is a very early childhood memory, I tend to think of it as foundational. These memories lay the foundation upon which so much of the rest of our life is built.
A foundational memory is like the initial fractal pattern that gets iterated in different ways as we progress through life. (Fractals are patterns that are programmed to “repeat themselves similarly.”)
The difficult thing is such foundational or fractal memories can be very hard to access. They are often buried in the subconscious mind. Sometimes they’re the results of what you didn’t get–the lack of nurturing that’s thought of as Type A Trauma or Childhood Emotional Neglect, which is every bit as damaging as more obvious abuse.
Foundational/fractal memories can also be generational. We now know, from numerous studies, that traumas in one generation can be passed down to the next. For instance, the babies of mice who were exposed to the scent of cherry blossoms and then given a shock, will show a stress response in the presence of cherry blossom scent–even though the babies themselves were never shocked.
How can this be? No one knows for sure yet. My theory is that the memory gets encoded in some kind of “informational energy pattern” in the cells itself, and is passed down through the DNA.
Read More→
A Whole New Layer of Healing
Posted by: | CommentsEvery area of my life got better: health, relationships, and career.
However, since taking a marriage class on How We Love, and discovering the work of Dr. Jonice Webb on Childhood Emotional Neglect (CEN), I’m seeing that there is a whole new layer of healing possible. There is a depth and breadth of emotional experience that I had not realized was possible.- How do you feel?
- What do you want?
- What do you need?
- Why are you angry, or sad, or hurt?
I didn’t. Actually can’t remember one single time when any of those questions were asked. I do remember a few times when I had experienced a trauma, and it was completely ignored. In fact, in one instance, my mother was concerned more about what my father would do when he found out what happened to me, than what I was feeling from the trauma.
Now that I’ve become aware of CEN, I can do something about it. And I’d like to make you aware of what you may also have missed, but just couldn’t put your finger on.
And something more: check in with yourself and your emotions periodically through the day. Take the Love Styles quiz and find out what injured relational pattern you developed from your past experiences. Just start noticing, and healing what you notice.Why Can’t I Find Memories to Heal?
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With The Healing Codes, we look for memories that carry the same kind of feeling as the main issue that bothers us. The idea is that what bothers you now is likely attached to something called “implicit” memory (memories hidden in the subconscious mind), and if we find and heal that original memory, the current issue will resolve.
But what if, like many people, you can’t find any memories with that feeling?
Maybe you’ve had that feeling most of your life. Maybe you have very few childhood memories, period.
All the more reason to use something like The Healing Codes, because the original memories are likely so painful, that your Heart wants to protect you from the pain of remembering.
(This why, by the way, a lot of times “talk therapy” alone isn’t very effective. I had a therapist tell me, point blank, “therapy doesn’t heal anything.” We need a way to get at these implicit memories that carry the original lie.)
If you can’t remember much from your childhood, it may well be for yet a different reason. It could be because you grew up with Childhood Emotional Neglect.
Running on Empty
What happens when you grow up in a family in which emotions were not acknowledged, validated, and dealt with?
In her excellent book, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, Dr. Jonice Webb says that it’s not necessarily what happened to you that can cause problems. What failed to happen for you as a child “has as much or more power over who you have become as an adult than any of the events that you do remember.”
Some call it Type A trauma–the Absence of nurturing. And it can be just as damaging as Type B trauma, where the bad stuff like abuse happened.
Memories are formed when you feel strong emotions around an event. If your feelings were ignored, if no one ever helped you process your emotions, it can have an insidious effect on your life as an adult.
That’s because our brains record events as memories. Things that fail to happen go unnoticed, unseen, and unremembered.
If you have the trait that 20% of the population has, High Sensitivity, where your nervous system is wired to process things deeply (including emotions), susceptible to over-stimulation (sensory or emotional), emotionally reactive, and sensitive to subtle stimuli–Childhood Emotional Neglect does even more harm.
When you’re Highly Sensitive, emotions are your native language. That’s a big part of the trait–emotional reactivity. If your language is not spoken or understood in your family, to them you were constantly speaking gibberish. You may have been shamed or ridiculed. You may have tried to shut down, to turn off those feelings.
Thus you may have few memories, a feeling of emptiness and more likely than not, problems with your health, relationships, and/or career.
Emotion is energy, and that energy has to go somewhere. If it’s appropriately processed, it goes to a memory that becomes part of your life.
If it’s not properly processed, it becomes hidden trauma, and it goes into the body and mind and causes illness and disease. More and more scientific evidence points to emotional issues as the source of many if not most physical problems.
Then of course, there are the mental, emotional, and relational problems that show up because of hidden, unhealed memories.
In How We Love, Milan and Kay Yerkovich identify five “injured Love Styles” that can show up in families where there has been emotional neglect or other circumstances that interfere with a strong, secure emotional bond with caregivers early in life.
What’s the solution? How to you begin to heal what Jonice Webb calls “the invisible force that may be at work in your life”?
Reconnect with Your Emotions
First, you may need to relearn the language of feelings. Just allow yourself to name the feelings, to yourself and others. For some, this may not be easy. You may feel shame for having certain feelings, or having feelings at all.
Or you may have trouble even identifying your feelings. Running on Empty includes several pages of feelings words, and so does How We Love by Milan and Kay Yerkovich.
Ask yourself when you felt that way earlier in your life. If a memory comes up, heal it with The Healing Codes and/or healing prayer.
If no memory comes up, don’t sweat it. Just say in your Healing Code Prayer of Intention, “… from the childhood emotional neglect.” Assume that’s the source.
If you have any fear around the idea of welcoming emotions into your life, start with healing that fear. We always start where we are. Ask, “What’s bothering me? What exactly am I feeling? When did I feel like that before”? If the answer to that last question is, “All my life!” then that’s what you put into the prayer: “from a lifetime of emotional neglect.”
These questions will help you move forward in your healing journey.
And if you ever need more help, e.g. with finding hidden memories, just contact me at www.healingcodescoaching.com for some coaching.
