Healing – Page 2 – in thriver words

When You’re Reeling

Sometimes, it can be hard to stop reeling. I just had much of my sewer line replaced. When they marked the underground utilities, they put a flag indicating the gas lines and painted an arrow toward the area that was marked for digging. Being one who makes lots of procedural plans for emergencies, my mind began to explore all the possible effects of a tractor nicking a gas line by my house.

I know full well the damage a slight gas line nick can do. The phone company in my hometown exploded one night after excavation work near the building. The break in the line was so small, the workers didn’t notice. But gas built up and at 4:33am something sparked.

The explosion awakened my parents who lived 8 miles away. Many buildings had to be razed, and others show lingering property damage 44 years later. Obviously, a tiny thing became a big thing.

With that memory and my general inclination to prevent or rehearse responses to dangerous situations, the sewer replacement risk had the potential to leave me reeling from possibilities that might never come to fruition. A similar thing can happen when we’re sent for a medical test. Sometimes, the potential for a life-threatening or chronic illness leaves us reeling to the degree it becomes debilitating. This can also happen after a traumatic event.

For most of us, most of the time, we’ll regain equilibrium fairly quickly. We just need a little time to process whatever it is that has thrown us off. But occasionally, some of us get stuck. We can’t stop spinning.

It’s okay to spin for awhile in most cases. But sometimes we don’t have that luxury. And no one needs to spin so long they can’t get out of that motion. Having a plan (example of my aforementioned planning propensity) before you find yourself in that situation can be helpful.

What can you do to lessen the reeling?

Be kind to yourself. Accept that everyone will have things that throw them off at times. It’s no reason to doubt yourself, hate yourself, or to feel stupid or inadequate. You’re not weak just because you’re momentarily overwhelmed. Being kind to yourself can help keep you from a spiral of negative self-talk.

Support your system. Do your best to consume fresh, healthy food at regular intervals. Drink plenty of water. Allow yourself plenty of time for sleep. Get outside if you can. Move – walk, dance, swim, do yoga, play tennis. Spend time with friends when you can. The body and mind are inseparable. Supporting your body will have positive benefits for your mental state as well.

Get curious. In my sewer situation, it helped to ask the contractor for more information about the process he would use. Who would he send? What king of equipment would be used? Where would they start digging? In a health situation, it’s okay to get curious as well. Your healthcare team can answer questions about next steps, treatment plans, and outcome statistics. Knowing you’re making informed decisions can help you stop reeling.

Feel your feelings. Don’t try to talk yourself out of your feelings. Don’t actively avoid them. Feelings will change more quickly if you’ll allow them to flow.

Sit with your fear. Reeling often includes fear that may manifest as confusion, irritability, or impatience. If you sit quietly with fear, it will eventually dissipate. With practice you’ll be able to move in and out of your feeling with a modicum of control. This will allow you to function and feel less helpless.

Talk to someone. Things that are kept secret sometimes take on a life of their own. And things often seem more daunting before you say them out loud. Talk to a friend or a professional. Just saying your feelings out loud can help you recenter.

Use somatic techniques to calm the lower brain. From breathing to movement to grounding, there are many techniques that can help calm your lower brain. Once the amygdala is calmed, executive function can return.

If you find you continue to be stuck in spite of your best efforts, consider seeking professional help. There are many types of therapy. Not all of them involve verbally regurgitating your problems. You are in control of choosing the practitioner and treatment option that feels most helpful.

Reeling is uncomfortable and unsettling. It can affect your relationships, parenting, and work performance. This may not be pleasant, but it may be a natural part of the process of coming to terms with new information. It’s only problematic if it becomes chronic. Otherwise, you can think of it as a twirl in the dance of life.

Dance it out and let it go.

Do You Deserve to be Healthy?

Do you deserve to be healthy? I recently had occasion to observe someone repeatedly making choices that hurt him. I mentioned that nothing he was doing or saying was hurting anyone but him. At first, he thanked me for caring. He followed that with a drunken phone call in which he had twisted the entire conversation wrong-side out and turned himself into a victim of some great conspiracy that will never end.

There’s some basis for him to lean toward that point-of-view. But he has taken a painful short-term situation in which he was a victim, made it chronic through his choices, and weaponized it against himself. This has cost him a marriage, contact with his children, a lasting career in his field, and the opulent life he craves, not to mention a decline in health.

Does he do this on purpose? This is tough to answer. And in the end, it probably doesn’t matter. What he, and many of us, must find is a way to move past the point around which we circle with no seeming ability to move in a different direction.

We may consciously know we can do better for ourselves, but still maneuver in a way that allows us to avoid the accountability of owning the choices we make that aren’t good for us. There are a million different patterns for doing this. Most are subconsciously designed to help us avoid embarrassment, fear, shame, vulnerability, and potential loss. We have a deeply felt need to save face.

What’s weird about being in this position is the sort of blinders that come with it. It becomes easy to adopt a view of ourselves that doesn’t match others’ experience of us or our actions. When we hit a point in which other people can see we’re making decisions that aren’t helpful and we defend those decisions by twisting indisputable facts they themselves observed, we lose credibility.

Once that credibility is lost, we may also lose their support. Why should someone else spend time struggling to figure out what part of our story is valid so that they can then figure out how best to help us when it’s clear we are not in a position to accept help. We are too busy clinging to a position in which we are unwilling to help ourselves and would lose face accepting help from others.

What sometimes happens at that point is the person making poor choices will sense support is waning and begin to lean even further into stories of victimization to try to manipulate us back into what may feel like connection. And it is connection, but not the healthiest sort.

So when the person making bad choices is us, what can we do?

Obviously, it’s easy to tell someone else they deserve better and to stop making bad choices. But it’s not that easy. Many of us have a skewed self-image from injury or abuse we have suffered at the hand of others. We are subconsciously choosing what feels normal. That normal may be to treat ourselves badly.

Others are attempting to avoid a deep sense of shame. We may believe we have done something unforgiveable. Or maybe someone has told use we’ve done something unforgiveable. Or maybe we have done something we have criticized others for doing.

No matter what we’re attempting to avoid or cover up, we must be able to make conscious choices to improve our lives. That begins with being able to own the choices we’re making. And not just own them but own our choices while granting ourselves grace when we could have done better. And we have to be able to let go of shame.

Brené Brown has written volumes on shame and vulnerability that are worth exploring. Daring Greatly begins with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “Citizenship in a Republic:”

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly….

This is a great passage to keep in mind before asking yourself if you deserve to be healthy. Then, instead of asking that question, first ask yourself:

What is the worst thing I’ve ever done? Name it. Feel it. Say it out loud to yourself. (No need to tell anyone else.)

If someone else did that (whatever you answered), could I forgive them? Could someone forgive them?

When you can forgive yourself your worst wrong, you will be able to hold yourself accountable. When you can hold yourself accountable, you will have no problem owning your choices. They may not all be good choices, but you’ll be able to learn from each one and avoid blaming someone else.

Forgiving yourself your worst wrong will also allow you to shift how you view yourself. What other people think will become less important. This paves the way for recognizing you deserve, we all deserve, to be healthy!

Coda: Mere hours after I posted this, I watch an introductory video for therapists (I am not one) regarding the diagnosis and treatment of moral injury. While it didn’t change anything I previously wrote, it made me recognize I should expand a bit rather than stopping here.

Anyone who has committed acts or made decisions that violate their own moral code may need assistance in achieving self-forgiveness. It doesn’t matter whether those decisions or acts were a result of force, coercion, danger, leverage, direct order, dissociation, freezing, or a desperate need for comfort, we may subsequently view ourselves as irredeemable or contemptable.

Trauma therapy that provides a compassionate response, helps realign actions with internal moral code, and allows us to retain necessary guilt without shame can help to process through events and put them in the past. This will put us in a position to recognize we do not deserve eternal suffering and punishment. We can find ways to follow a path that doesn’t create internal dissonance.

We can change. We can grant ourselves grace. We can feel appropriate guilt and make necessary amends. We are imperfectly human and perfectly deserving of the opportunity to grow, improve, and face our demons. Doing so is difficult, but leads to a healthier existence.

And we all deserve to be healthy!

Author’s note:Some disease and injury are unavoidable. It does not matter who you are or whether you make perfect decisions, you may not be able to be as healthy as someone else who does not suffer the same unavoidable condition. That reality does not change the fact that you deserve to be healthy and can make the best choices possible within the limitations you are given.

Not This Reset

Some resets are good, but maybe not this reset. Last week, my neighbors informed me that there is an electric bed that resets your DNA in our community building. It was purportedly invented by a female scientist with some legitimate sounding credits. But my first response was still…A what?!?

Then one of the reporting parties told a story about having cardiac ablation to fix a heart rhythm problem. That made me curious what the electric bed might do to her? The more I thought, the more curious I got.

I started clicking around. Could such a bed really reset anything?

I didn’t find anything online about our resident electric bed, but I did discover “medbeds.” It appears this term can describe a medical bed or a meditation bed. Either one will come with many ideas about what it is.

With medbeds, some lines of thinking extend to the conspiratorial and far-fetched. Others lean toward holistic medicine but remain outside of mainstream practice.

A company called Tesla BioHealing (No relation to the car company or SpaceX) offers facilities in which you can experience a medbed for about $160. They also sell a home generator for just under $20,000. But what are these and how do they work?

Tesla BioHealing offers Life Force Energy makers or enhancers at two levels of strength – biohealer and generator. You simply put them next to you (or under your bed) and they provide extra life force that, according to their website, will cause cells to activate their self-repair mechanisms.

Yeah, yeah but what is this life force energy?

Interestingly, they don’t attach the words life force energy directly to anything. They do have a section that talks about biophotons. Those are defined as low-level light emissions produced by biological systems such as cells, tissues, and organisms. They may play a role in communication between cells, but the biophotons don’t seem to tie directly back to the healer or generator.

Having been down a few roads with my mother who loved fringe alternative medicine, I’m getting the same feeling I got when she took me to a dentist who put a rod in each of my hands attached to electrical wires which were inserted in small vials of water.

I was to hold the rods for a specified amount of time while my body generated, and the machine deposited into the water, whatever it would need to heal. At the time, I had just recovered from a second bout with psittacosis. I wanted answers and to be totally rid of the organism, but this was a bridge too far.

Like other quick and easy fixes, a product that enhances your “Life Force Energy” to combat many health conditions at once sounds appealing. And it’s possible that it could briefly appear to improve some conditions through the placebo effect. It may also be considered preferrable to the significant side effects of multiple pharmaceuticals to those who prefer a holistic approach to healing. But just because we’d like for solutions to work like magic doesn’t mean they do.

There are MedBeds that appear in scientific studies – they’re electric beds in the sense of positioning a patient comfortably. You know, a hospital bed.

I’m not saying it’s impossible for someone to invent something that will help cells heal – hyperbaric chambers exist after all. But I wouldn’t jump on an electric medbed right now and expect any sort of bump in life force energy.

If you’re looking for a reset, start with the basics – healthy food, plenty of water, lots of movement, and a good night’s sleep. It’s amazing how much your health can improve just from consistently making those part of your day.

A shockingly good electric bed reset will have to come later – when one exists.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

Tolerating Discomfort

When you’re tired of tolerating discomfort, you may have to learn to tolerate discomfort. Why does paradox always feel as though life is laughing at you?

For years, my tummy hurt. My joints ached. My muscles were weak. I broke out. I itched. My eyes were dry. I couldn’t sleep because I was so uncomfortable. Getting better meant I had to tolerate a different kind of discomfort. That’s often how healing goes.

It would be nice if things were always upward and onward, but they just don’t work that way. While the general trajectory may be up, there will be times that feel like dips. During those times, we have to endure and increase our window of tolerance so that we have more resilience when the next hurdle comes along.

You can think of this as emotional weightlifting. The resolve to continue on a healthier path is often affected by emotions. And sometimes, the body has trapped a traumatic response in its muscle memory. Releasing that requires a special kind of tolerance for discomfort.

When it comes to tummy troubles, most of us want to get rid of pain. That’s why we seek medical attention. Getting better begins with refusing to tolerate discomfort. But when we hit a dip in improvement or a treatment plan increases pain, refusing to tolerate momentary discomfort can derail healing. We need to be able to stick with the plan in spite of how we feel.

When it comes to emotional pain left from trauma, it’s possible to experience more discomfort from attempting to let it go from remaining caught in familiar pain. That doesn’t mean you like how you feel. It just means letting go may feel scary to the point of terrifying.

Either way, increasing tolerance for discomfort can be the key to staying on track. So how can you increase tolerance?

Patience. We all think our minds can stay ahead of our bodies. But the lower brain is wired to protect us from perceived danger. If it gets triggered, our behavior can sometimes surprise us. This is a normal part of the process. It’s messy but it doesn’t mean you’ll forever be out of control.

Stillness. You can’t learn to sit with discomfort unless you allow yourself to feel it. That won’t happen if you’re constantly moving, medicating, working, or otherwise distracting yourself.

Practice. Like any sort of desensitization, tolerance is built one step at a time. At first, a minute or two may be all you can handle but each moment will build on the next.

Balance. Regularly including an equal balance of something fun, joyous, pleasurable, or exciting will give you a space to move into that feels good once you’ve reached your current tolerance for discomfort.

Structure. When you feel messy inside, it’s beneficial to have routines, deadlines, accountability partners, and community to provide an environment that feels solid and stable.

Like everything, learning to tolerate discomfort is a process. The experience will be slightly different for each of us. The only thing we all have in common is that to build tolerance, we must start the process. Otherwise, it will not happen.

Talking about it won’t make it happen. Making promises won’t make it happen. Continuing to numb or distract will prevent it from happening.

We are all capable of more than we believe. We can tolerate more discomfort than we think we can. Don’t overthink. Just begin. Slowly, but surely, good things will happen.