Archive for UDIN
How to Prevent a Painful Event from Becoming a Trauma
Posted by: | CommentsDoes every painful event that happens to us inevitably become a trauma?
The good news is: NO!
To understand how this can be–and more importantly, to prevent a life event from becoming a trauma–you need to understand why and how something becomes a trauma.
Trauma and UDINS
I’ve written before about life events that become traumatic because they are UDINs: Unexpected, Dramatic, Isolating, and having No resources, recourse, or solutions.
These four elements are what make something traumatic.
Notice that one and a half of the elements of a UDIN are unpreventable.
You can’t control when some crisis will happen, or how.
You can’t control how bad it will be (half of the Dramatic element).
That’s the one and a half you can’t control.
What you can control of the Dramatic part, though, to at least some degree, is how it will affect you.
And you can control whether you will let it Isolate you, and whether you will believe that there are No solutions or resources.
According to Dr. Karl Lehman, there is a pain pathway in the brain that needs to be traveled all the way through in order for a painful event not to become a trauma. If we can go all the way through the pain processing pathway, we “metabolize” the experience and it does not become a trauma that can then get triggered again and again, and cause all kinds of physical, emotional, or relational problems.
The main reason a painful event becomes traumatic is that we feel alone in it. Relationship has been withdrawn. We become disconnected.
Dr. Lehman explains that “because we live with brains that configure all our reality and experiences in relational terms, we must learn to stay relational in the presence of our pain.”
How do we do that?
Staying Relational in the Pain
Many of us grew up in families that themselves never learned this. When they or we were in pain, it led to withdrawal. The “relational circuits” in the brain (RCs) were switched off. If this happened in our experience, we may come to believe that when we’re in pain, love is going to be withdrawn. Thus we turn off to the pain, or we go off by ourselves to try to deal with it.
Which, if we’re to believe the brain science experts, never works.
So how do we stay relational in the pain, so we can actually process it and not let it become a trauma?
Look for Someone Who Knows How to Be With You in Pain
It can be difficult to reach out to someone when you are in pain, because not everyone will know how to deal with it. Most people will instinctively try to make you feel better, make the pain go away. You may instinctively turn to something to make you feel better, make the pain go away.
The only way out of the pain, is through it. Preferably with someone else.
If you know someone with whom you feel safe, you can kind of coach them along as to how they can help you.
Approach them at a time when you both can talk. Ask them if they would be willing to just listen to you and reflect back how you’re feeling without attempting to change anything.
Note: That someone can be God. God is always with us, and if you believe his Word, he has promised 14 times never to leave you or forsake you. You can journal or pray your way through the sequence below. (For more help with this, I suggest the book, The Joyful Journey: Listening to Immanuel. You can also contact me for some Healing Codes. This is a big part of what I do in my Healing Codes Coaching work.)
Let’s say you just lost someone dear to you, and are feeling great grief.
The VCR of Relief
Here the three steps to working through the pain. Again, ideally you will do this in the presence of someone who has the capacity to be with you in this process.
- Validation: name the feeling and/or belief you have as a result of the event. “I miss my friend so much. She was like a mom to me. Who will I go to now when I need the wise, down-to-earth advice she always knew how to give? I have lost so much, so unexpectedly….”
If you’re processing something with someone and they reflect back your words to you with empathy, you will feel validated and understood. The first step is to stay connected with the experience rather than try to escape or minimize it. Doing this with another person removes the Isolating factor.
2. Comfort: Look for the origin of the negative feeling or belief attached to the event. You may be upset by the event itself, but it may also be triggering an unhealed memory from the past. You may or may not remember what that is, but naming the origin of it as best you know can be helpful.
“This sounds silly, but it reminds me of the time my father accidentally killed my cat when I was young. I used to tell my cat my problems, and I never felt she judged me.” So now we’re dealing with more than losing the friend; we’re dealing with an unhealed memory from the past, that amplifies the pain in the current memory. Just realizing this can be comforting. It can help you begin to make sense out of the pain. “Oh, this is not just about this incident.” (And you will want to address both incidents with The Healing Codes and/or healing prayer.)
Or maybe it is just about this incident, because in itself it’s so huge. “I’ve never lost someone this close to me before. I don’t know how to handle it.” Understanding the level of intensity of the emotion is also part of comfort.
3. Repatterning, or Returning to Joy. When the first two things have happened–validation and comfort–you are then open to new perspectives on the situation. A skilled listener will know just how to help you come to the new perspective yourself, rather than trying to give advice, fix you or make the pain go away. This is where you realize you are not without resources, thus eliminating the N-No recourse or resources–of the UDIN.
The last step in the Pain Processing Pathway is finding meaning in the experience, so that it leads to wisdom and maturity.
This process can take time, or it can be fairly quick, depending on the intensity and scope of the painful event. But when you deliberately reject Isolation and seek help from someone who can Validate, Comfort, and help you Return to Joy, you need not fear that the event will become a trauma that you never get over. You will emerge stronger, wiser and more mature.
If you would like some personalized help in healing your trauma, please check out my custom Healing Codes Coaching. I have wonderful tools for helping you process such pain successfully–and permanently. And I can be that validating presence that will help you get through the trauma to the other side, where wisdom and peace reside.
Symptoms as Signs of Regeneration–Not Disease?
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Here’s a totally different view of symptoms than I’ve ever heard.
If it’s accurate, it turns everything about the way we think of illness and disease on its head.
Most of all, it gives great hope to anyone who has been diagnosed with a disease or condition.
This comes from an interview with Dr. Craig Weiner from the Autoimmune Vitality conference. (The conference has ended, but you can still have access to the whole series. It was very helpful to me, since I’ve been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. My condition got out of whack when the A-V vial in my HALO went bad, and I didn’t realize it. Now that I’m using a good vial, I can tell my system is rebalancing.)
Dr. Weiner is, among other things, a Level 2 META-Health Practitioner certified through the International META-Medicine Association, IMMA.
I’d never heard of META-Health before, but it’s totally compatible with the philosophy behind The Healing Codes:
- Your body/mind is highly intelligent.
- Specific stress trigger, emotions and beliefs affect your specific organ tissues.
- Healing goes through specific points and phases.
This latter point is what I want to tell you about.
According to META-Health, healing goes through specific points, levels and phases. You start with the natural state of the body: health, with normal day activity and night relaxation.
Then perhaps some kind of stress trigger happens, such as a trauma or a UDIN (Unexpected, Dramatic, Isolating, No Resources/Solution type incident). The trigger can also be a conditioned reflex based on some inherited trauma in cellular memory (what we call “hidden memories,” which could be in utero, generational, a birth trauma and very early memories that are recorded in the cell’s information energy pattern).
When this happens, you move into the Stress Phase, where the Sympathetic Nervous system (fight/flight/freeze) becomes dominant, and there is some kind of conflict (often internal and unconscious).
Here’s the interesting part. If you introduce some kind of Regeneration Trigger, such as The Healing Codes or some intervention that truly addresses the situation at its core, you can move into Regeneration Phase A. Now the “stress” is passive, as your Parasympathetic Nervous System (rest and repair) system becomes dominant.
Here’s the kicker, though: This Regeneration Phase A is when the symptoms can show up!
And in fact, they may get even worse. In META-Health they call this the Healing Peak. (Healing Codes jargon calls it a Healing Response.) You may feel like you’re getting worse, but you’re actually getting better!
In fact, the next phase is Regeneration Phase B, where the PNS is again dominant, and excretion–getting rid of the problem–actually happens.
Phase 8 is the Return to Health, in which your system is auto-regulating and organ function becomes normalized. This often happens in waves, by the way. It’s not a steady, even process.
Which leads finally to the last stage: the Return to Health and normal day activity and night relaxation. You have plenty of energy in the day, and you sleep well and get restored at night.
So in this system, as with The Healing Codes, we’re always looking for that original stressor–that trauma, that Original Event that caused the brain to register a stress response. When we address that, the body begins to move toward health, and as it does so, physical things come up.
We think we’re getting sick, but we’re really getting better at the point when the symptoms show up.
A fever is a good example. When some infectious agent enters the body, the body responds with a fever to raise the temperature to kill off the attacker. You think you’re sick, and maybe take some aspirin or ibuprofen, but that actually blocks what the body is trying to do.
If we can respect the body’s wisdom, find and address the root cause (the trauma or trigger), we begin this regeneration process.
Isn’t that wonderful news? Doesn’t that give you great hope? When the symptoms show up–that’s when your healing has started!
It does take a big paradigm shift, though, for many people.
All I can say is, “Try thinking this way.” Try going for the original trauma by asking, as we counsel with The Healing Codes, “How do I feel about this condition?” Then trace that feeling back to other times you felt this way (about anything), and use The Healing Codes and prayer to heal that negative memory, image, or belief.
META Health, the New German Medicine, functional medicine, energy medicine–all these approaches seek to find and heal the original cause, rather than try to make symptoms disappear.
Will you trust your body’s and your heart’s innate intelligence, and look to heal the SOURCE of whatever bothers you? I hope you will.
And if you need some help with this, I suggest you sign up for the free “Getting Started with The Healing Codes” and visit my site at https://healingcodescoaching.com to find out more. For more personalized help, consider getting a Custom Healing Code and coaching to find those “original events.”
