Is Brain Retraining Enough to Heal Chronic Illness?

As I have spoken about in this blog, I used Dynamic Neural Retraining System to help me heal from chronic illness. While doing the practices, I basked in positive emotions and felt genuinely happy and at peace each time I did them. I watched as my nervous system began to settle while beginning what DNRS calls a “round”, (positive visualizations ).  It became clear that interrupting pathways associated with illness and replacing them with positive “experiences” was effective in calming my nervous system. Of course, it makes perfect sense, since when ill my system was being bombarded with negative chemicals like adrenaline, cortisol, norepinephrine. I was filling my body with DOSE chemistry (dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin and endorphins), and watched as these stages of calm lasted longer and longer until it was my entire day.  I had seen that in daily life; when I included myself (as hard as it was) in activities I loved, my symptoms calmed (after some worsening before and then after at times).  I did not use only DNRS, I also began to incorporate interventions like vagus nerve stimulation, TRE, compassion exercises, forgiveness exercises, neurofeedback, somatic exercises and of course (re)exposing myself to “triggers” slowly.

They all helped to alleviated my symptoms,  but as time went on my post traumatic glow began to dim, and I went back to baseline. This doesn’t mean I regained symptoms, but I did start to feel old patterns return, patterns that I knew would eventually manifest in a different way physically.

I think programs that help one to shift to positive are good, but I do not feel they are enough to promote physical and emotional well being. In fact, I think many are using them to ignore what the body is trying to say. I believe that in addition to “retraining” such as with programs like Gupta and DNRS, one needs to learn to “be with” the discomfort in order to learn what it may need in order to let go.

Each time I added a new intervention it was very powerful. Each one was a piece of the puzzle of helping to heal my physical and emotional degradation. I felt as I healed a renewed sense of wonder, calm and contentment.  The process of all the practices I was doing throughout the day helped me remember my body and get in touch with it in a way I had not before. I had always heard that trauma was “stuck” in the body and I assumed I was taking care of it. But, as I began coming out of the “glow” of  post traumatic growth (which I experienced as a deep gratitude, awe and connection to everything around me) which I speak about here and throughout my blog, I started noticing old patterns return. They were not all  necessarily negative patterns, just old and  redundant.  I had grown a lot and was in a better place both mentally and physically, but each day I watched as I became more and more “Maria” and the awe and gratitude I had found get smaller and smaller. In its place, I found myself  being “ok”. I described my state as being “content”, and the sensations that I still felt in my body were just something I placed to the side, to reexamine at some point.  There were not the loud symptoms as I had in illness, just small whispers reminding me that I had unfinished business in my body.

I began training in somatic experiencing and through my own personal sessions began to understand what it really means to have a “dysregulated nervous system” and what having “trauma in the body” really looked like. Mindset changes, vagus nerve exercises, neurofeedback, TRE,  do not heal active, living trauma in the body, they just calm it down.  Sometimes, they cause it to get bigger at first since it has been poked at, but in myself it did calm down. The trauma is not just an idea living somewhere in the  subconscious (and consciousness) , it is stuck in the physical body and it is the physical body screaming for attention to be able to finish “what it did not get to do” in traumatic events.  In a somatic experiencing session, a facilitator helps the client’s body with the permission and cooperation of the client following,  move through the place they got stuck at during a traumatic event.

In my sessions, I  watched my body relive different traumatic events and finish what it did not “get to do”, without my mind interfering. It began with an event that occurred in a car, as I speak about here. For a week after this, I noticed a neck tic that I had thought resolved begin to return. Through TRE (traumatic release exercises), this tic  had disappeared. I had thought it was healed, but it had just calmed down and took a step back for a bit.  My body had now understood  it had permission to relive what was being held inside, and that it was safe to do so.

(As an aside I do feel TRE is helpful to reconnect with  the body and show it that it is ok to move. I always felt calmer after a TRE session because energy is moving. However, in SE this energy is moving in a purposeful direction rather than just shaking. I found it to be a good stepping stone. In TRE sessions, I knew there were specific movements beginning to form, attached to specific visuals, but only when training in SE did I learn how to work with them.)

My neck tic began to get worse. I wanted to listen to specific music, I woke up sore on my right side, my waist and neck were achy, my right hand was heavy, and my mind flashed images of another traumatic event. This all occurred in the week between sessions, and each day I began to understand what place I got “stuck” at and what needed to be finished. In my next session, my body began to quickly let me know what it wanted to do. It seemed it had become more comfortable with moving in the way it had wanted to so long ago rather than just giving me smaller sensations, it understood that I was on board with getting “unstuck” , and the movements became smoother and more cohesive.  Each session I began to understand more about how my illnesses had appeared. My system was constantly reacting to these traumas stuck inside that needed to be resolved,  with inflammation and was pushed past what it could handle, and all these sensitivities appeared, and my body became too weak to fight anything else.

One by one I began to peel back the layers living inside.

In my training and personal sessions the same pattern emerged. I would have a resolution in one – two  sessions (of a specific event), feel lighter, very calm, and soon after I would begin craving certain music (this is an over coupling), feeling certain sensations (heavy hand, pain in my side, tic etc), have certain images come to mind) and there would come a point where I had this feeling of knowing exactly what it was my body was asking to finish. In my next session, this would occur.  This was each traumatic event overcoupled with the other.

The nervous system arousal that remained in my body from different traumas had led to many different emotional and physical diagnosis, and in peeling back the layers, I was able calm the arousal. The goal of somatic experiencing is not to just “stay calm” but to be able to handle what comes and bounce back in a more efficient way. My nervous system was still reacting to events of the past and in doing so, could not stay in the present. Learning to be with what was occurring and what the body “wanted to do” rather than override it, or distract from it (such as in DNRS), helped to grow a capacity to hold all sensations and alleviate many.

I do feel brain retraining is helpful, and can help begin stabilizing someone in a deep survival state, but in my opinion it is not enough. In fact, resourcing is part of somatic experiencing.  Pendulating between the positive and discomfort can help build capacity. But, these symptoms are the messages of a  body pushed past its tolerance, and trying to quiet what it is saying can bring about some relief, but living inside is still the thwarted response of some events that may come out in different ways.  If you would like to find out more about somatic experiencing you can find that here.