A New Paradigm for Healing.

(6-minute read)

A little while back, I had the most profound experience that changed how I viewed the illness and dysregulation I have been dealing with.

It was after emotionally processing, in a session of EMDR, that I felt a real, physical shift in my neuro symptoms, which had been troubling me for so long.

The session was intense, my body was shaking, I was almost lashing out, jolting, shouting.

And then afterwards, the pressure, deep in my brain, the pins that seemed to be using my brainstem as a pin cushion, shifted.

This is a slightly bold claim, but I now truly believe the root of these symptoms is trauma and emotional repression, and that the way out is through feeling, and not ‘fixing’.

The Hidden Pattern: Repression + High Sensitivity = Stuck Processing

It’s no secret that people prone to Long Covid, ME/CFS, chronic anxiety, OCD etc. often share the following:

• Emotional repression or disconnection from their bodies

• High emotional sensitivity, empathy or perfectionism

• Long term in environments where emotions didn’t feel safe

If you’re reading this, I bet you can tick off at least a few of the following: perfectionist, high-achiever, high pain tolerance, over-thinker, and high-functioning yet hides emotions.

But the issue is, every time a difficult emotion arises and isn’t felt fully, the survival response is triggered but not completed. Tipping into sympathetic now and then is normal, but rather than returning to a ventral, balanced state, the inability to complete the response edges you more and more into a sympathetic state.

Over time, this builds internal tension and allostatic load — the wear-and-tear from chronic nervous system imbalance.

Over time the system becomes tipped toward sympathetic over-activation or freeze/collapse. This type of Somatic suppression has been linked to autoimmune expression, vagal dysfunction, and altered limbic system reactivity.

The Trigger: One Final Push Sends the System Haywire

As will have been the case for many of you, a kind of crash point will have tipped you over the edge. Maybe an illness, burnout, an accident - something that finally overwhelms the system’s capacity.

The brainstem, limbic system & vagus nerve then enter a loop of protection, and become stuck trying to finish what it was never allowed to process — using symptoms as a way to surface it.

For me, this happened both after my initial covid infection and then after the silent meditation retreat. My covid infection followed a period of intense exercise and partying (as a distraction for uncomfortable mechanisms that were already trying to surface). And then the retreat was 8 days of rumination, where all of this repression bubbles up at once in a deeply overwhelming manner.

But it’s so physical?

Trust me, following my silent retreat, the symptoms I felt were so deeply, deeply physical, I could not believe that ‘repression’ could have anything to do with it - what nonsense.

The pain in my head was overwhelming, the dizziness so sickening, and the dissociation and paranoia so disturbing, that I was checked for all sorts. A week in hospital, scan after scan, a lumbar puncture, and multiple cross references - nothing was found.

But this doesn’t mean nothing ‘real’ was going on.

For example, chronic stress inflames microglia, disrupting cognition and increasing sensitivity. This can lead to glial cell (brainstem immune cells) inflammation - no wonder the stabbing feeling there.

High allostatic load can also lead to interoception distortion, where the brain misreads internal signals as danger, leading to POTS, dizziness, fatigue, etc. Think, have you noticed yourselves becoming hyper sensitive and noticing every breath, heartbeat, sensation and so on?

I now see what happened after the meditation retreat: the swirling behind my eyes, the dizziness, the brainstem pain, the dissociation, the sudden jolts through my chest. All as a protective response of a system that had met its allostatic load, entering shutdown as it could not complete its survival loops

The Loop: Why Symptoms Persist

I think it fundamentally comes down to this:

The body keeps trying to finish what you still believe is dangerous to feel.

The body tries to complete the survival response by bringing the emotion/memory/sensation up again, via symptoms or intrusive thoughts.

You resist, fix, analyse, or manage → the body interprets this as confirmation of danger.

The loop continues.

To reiterate, this does not mean your ‘thoughts’ are generating symptoms. Whenever I heard about this ‘unconscious loop’, this is what I would hear, and this isn’t so.

Emotions are not generated by thoughts; they originate in ancient, subcortical regions, which is why I believe they manifest so physically and become so deeply embedded into the limbic system.

Repression leads to somatic storage within the body, that energy has to go somewhere, and this leads to looping symptoms.

The survival mechanism explained

The mechanism of ‘trapped’ and unprocessed emotional energy was explained brilliantly by Peter Levine.

Take a baby gazelle in the wild, for example. This animal could undergo a horrific amount of ‘trauma’ in its life. It might have numerous near-death experiences, it might see its friends and family torn apart. All without showing signs of PTSD.

Photo by Karly Nelson on Unsplash

The reason is in this shaking mechanism.

By shaking after an event of such, the animal can dispel its stress hormones and discharge that survival energy.

Yet certain people, for whatever reason, struggle with this processing. They freeze, suppress, ignore and continue by mentally ruminating or staying in high alert mode.

This energy stays in your system, and has to be surfaced somehow.

The Shift: From Resisting to Allowing

I’ve spoken a lot about how brain training helped me at the start of my journey. It opened my eyes to this constant loop and helped me notice my symptoms and associated negative thought patterns.

But the methods of simply ‘swatting’ away symptoms didn’t seem to resonate with me; if anything, they generated more avoidance.

As I mentioned, these symptoms are survival mechanisms trying to complete, and whilst noticing them can be good. This ‘swatting’ is simply another form of repression. And for those with perfectionist and obsessive tendencies, it becomes just that.

Another obsession.

Further to this, 80% of the messaging your nervous system receives is from the body. So a highly cognitive approach to brain training (i.e. interrupting thoughts and visualising) is inferior to simply feeling, in my opinion.

A Breakthrough

Following my silent retreat, my 8 days of hellish rumination, I had intrusive thoughts that were so unpleasant it would send a wave of full-blown panic through my chest and spine.

The more you try not to think of them, the more they surface.

And so I started practising exposure therapy, where you not only become aware of the thoughts, but you welcome them in, cheerfully, like a friend.

Now, obviously, they are still deeply unpleasant, but my physically acting and allowing in that way tells your system in a very physical way that you are safe.

Over time, these thoughts dissipated, and I did the same process somatically as well. That is, I welcomed in symptoms and emotions, both doing somatic work and in EMDR, and I noticed the most remarkable shifts.

It’s truly bizarre how in EMDR, I can physically feel these fight/flight loops trying to surface and finish. I feel an energy bubbling up in my body, vibrations through my leg, and even lashing out and clenching fists.

Little by little, processing happens.

You can read a little more here about how non-judgmental attention reshapes the nervous system, and Peter Levine’s work on somatic completion (how trauma is released through felt experience, not cognition).

The Practice: What Actually Works

My whole thesis for recovery is based upon completing stuck survival patterns.

In the moment, day by day, I try to bring attention to unpleasant sensation or thought loops that are going on.

Things like:

• Physical symptoms

• Thoughts on, will I ever recover?

• Other negative thoughts

• Deep feelings of fatigue

I notice these symptoms and thoughts, I welcome them, and I stay with them a little while, before re-engaging with what I’m doing.

It can feel so very easy to be consumed by your thoughts and symptoms. As though you ARE the thoughts and symptoms. But one thing that helped me was to think about who, exactly is observing these thoughts?

When the thought of ‘my case is different’ goes by, who exactly is watching, and who is saying the thought?

My answer would be that you are the observer, and that thought comes from your subconscious ego. The ego that is trying so desperately to bring your attention to keep you safe.

It wants a reaction, it wants you to notice, to react.

For me, saying the words ‘I hear you’ and actively talking in a cheeky way seems to help. ‘I’m actually so glad you’re here again!’

Not in a cheesy ‘mantra’ type way, but because it allows you that separation to observe and allow without judgement.

Actionable Tips

Another idea that keeps me grounded when doing this is to anchor through somatics, that is, physical sensations.

You’ll doubtless have been told by other brain training courses to ‘visualise full health’ to gently reassure your nervous system.

When you’re someone who struggles with over-cognition, this is bullshit.

As mentioned before, the nervous system takes 80% of its messaging from the body, so instead I do this.

1. Notice the sensation/ thought

2. Welcome it, ‘I hear you’

3. Drop into your chest, your body → what do you feel like doing, stay with it

4. Notice the thoughts that come with it → allow them and don’t engage

5. Reconnect with a deep breath, a stroke of the arm → paying close attention to the sensations in your body

6. Re-engage with your day

On top of this, I’ve been doing work that helps to complete these survival mechanisms in a variety of ways.

One is EMDR, which, as I mentioned, has been unbelievably beneficial - and I still do this once a week.

Another is various somatic exercises, also using bilateral stimulation. Bringing awareness to sensations and then using bilateral stimulation to enhance the processing. We cover all of this weekly in On the Mend + in case you were interested.

Conclusion

The last year has been the most miserable of my life.

I spent 4 years gradually improving from my life being turned upside down, only for it to nearly be ended by this most brutal of retreats.

But without this, I never would have discovered or believed this new paradigm of healing.

I’m not easily convinced by ‘woo woo’ stuff.

Repressed emotions, uncompleted survival mechanisms all sounded a bit far fetched for me, even when i was deep down the 'brain training and nervous system rabbit hole.

My physics brain doesn’t like to believe until I see, well, that’s exactly what happened.

When the pressure in my head simply shifted after EMDR. When the dizziness stopped briefly after crying. When I had 10 hours of complete bliss on the retreat after emotional release.

And most importantly, with the fact that I now am loving life again, training, working, and most importantly, still here to tell the tale.

And hopefully, when you look at the above, along with references and explanations, it becomes more clear that this is very much grounded in real science & physiology, not woo woo.

With this undeniable stack of proof, I believe my body has just been trying to complete this survival mechanism, of all that has been repressed for so long. And maybe it is the case for you too.

It’s our job to help it.

If you would like support in your recovery, with a no-BS but supportive approach using the techniques above, you might like to check out On the Mend + ☘️