Our Body’s Response to Our Emotional State
As noted, since we store our memories physically in our body, we are depositing our trauma physically in our body. As Candace Pert points out in Molecules of Emotion, “Repressed traumas caused by overwhelming emotions can be stored in a body part, thereafter affecting our ability to feel that part or even move it. Certain emotions are associated with pain in different parts of your body.” Stem cell biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton discovered that genes and DNA can be manipulated by a person’s beliefs. Author Louise Hay believes physical symptoms are just tangible evidence of what is going on in our unconscious mind and buried feelings we have inside. Our body responds to our emotional state. There is ample scientific evidence to back this up. In the book You Can Heal Your Life, Hay lists different physical symptoms (illness and/or disease) and why we have them. I have personally found what she shares to be 100 percent accurate with my clients.
I know the impact of emotions on my body all too well. As a kid, I was in and out of hospitals with lower back problems. In my experience, lower back problems are typically caused by finances. I was always afraid of money. I was afraid of having it, not having it, and losing it. In our household, money was always tight even though we appeared to be living the country club lifestyle. When I filed for bankruptcy as an adult, my back flared up, seized, and the whole right side shut down. In both males and females, the right side of our body propels and moves us forward. It is also connected to the masculine part of ourselves or, as I see it, our father. I could never confront my father, so I could never move forward. All but one of my countless injuries, broken bones, and surgeries were on my right side. Then my appendix burst. Stomach problems are caused by fear, especially the fear of something new. When it happened, I had just found out my mother was an alcoholic.
I was born and raised in Denver, but when I would leave in the winters to play hockey and then come back in the summers, I would invariably get sick upon my return. My mere presence in Denver would trigger a feeling memory inside my body. I didn’t know that just being in the environment of past trauma can fire off those chemicals. We don’t have to even relive the event; we just have to be around it. The neural pathway that formed in my brain at age ten was still alive and well during my second marriage when everything began to fall apart. Once again, I became sick and hurt. I was playing professional golf and I was in so much fear. I started having these deep, dark depressive periods where I would basically become immobile for two to four days. I saw specialists and was on massive amounts of medication trying to control it. The true problem wasn’t a brain disorder, as they tried to lead me to believe, and the solution was not all the medications they gave me.
I stopped taking care of myself and, to manipulate my second wife, I was saying yes when I should have been saying no. As part of trying to get her to like me, I started drinking after over twenty years of sobriety. My wife said she wished she knew me when I was drinking. She said, “It would be fun to know that Kenny.” So, I showed her that side. One night we were out and I could feel her disconnection. My exact thought was, “I wonder if she’d like me if I started drinking again?” This is how powerful neural pathways are, even ones that haven’t been used in over twenty years. I immediately stood up, walked to the bar, and proceeded to order a double white Russian. Fourteen drinks later we went home.
The abandonment I suffered from my parents created a neural pathway that sends me into massive self-victimization. Because I could not stand up for myself, the fear of asking for what I wanted and needed was absolutely overwhelming. I was emotionally trained to think that I was a bad person if I did not meet my parents’ needs. Was that their intent? Of course not. But that’s what happened because no one taught them any of this stuff, either. They would have raised me differently if they knew another way.
As you are reading this, you might be thinking this is all voodoo, just crazy eastern medicine drivel. I’m not trying to say that if we are legitimately sick or have a hereditary disease that medicine might not help us. That’s not my point at all. What I am saying, and science backs this up, is that if we are only pursuing medication for answers to our health problems, we aren’t dealing with the real issue. Our feelings/emotions need to be addressed if we want a complete solution. In her book Molecules of Emotion, Pert points out that in the 1940s Wilhelm Reich proposed the link between cancer and the failure to express emotions, especially sexual emotions. In the 1980s, a psychologist from the University of California, San Francisco, showed that cancer patients who kept emotions like anger buried inside had slower recovery rates than those who were more expressive. Both of my parents died from cancer. Pert indicates that denied, repressed, minimized, or ignored emotions related to trauma can chronically constrict blood flow and deprive our brain and other organs of the vital nourishment they need. As a result, we will be less alert and more stuck, which causes us to repeat old patterns of behavior and trigger feelings that are responses to an outdated knowledge base. In essence, this is our Worst Day Cycle.
| Your Journey to Success Steps 1.Create a vision board. Download the worksheet from my website: www.coachkennyweiss.com. 2.Spend each day sitting in the best day of your life. Our brain remembers three negative things to each positive. Being positive creates a neural pathway that doesn’t keep you stuck in your worst day. 3.Become aware of what is triggering your feelings. See Activity 8: Feelization in the Appendix. |
CHAPTERTHREE
TRAUMA = LOSS OF CONNECTION
In his book, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, Peter Levine shed new light on the topic of trauma when it was published in 1977. Today, it is considered a classic. He wrote,
Trauma is a basic rupture—loss of connection—to ourselves, our families, and the world. The loss, although enormous, is difficult to appreciate because it happens gradually. We adjust to these slight changes, sometimes without taking notice of them at all. Contrary to the view of psychiatric medicine—that trauma is basically untreatable and only marginally controllable by drugs—when treated thoroughly, healing can lead not only to symptom reduction, but long-term transformation.”
Author and therapist Levine viewed trauma as a fact of life, but not a life sentence. It’s not a life sentence unless we don’t address it. As we attempt to move away from reliving our worst day and reach for our best day, it’s necessary to explore not only our childhood but additional trauma we’ve endured throughout our life.
We all experience different kinds of traumas—some are big and some are small. For instance, whenever I got in trouble as a child, my dad would call me “Kenneth.” Because no one taught him how to parent without shame, more often than not he used shame to discipline me. Just hearing someone say my full name triggers all those old feelings. That is trauma. All traumas share a common thread—they make us feel bad, scared, ashamed, or hurt but mostly powerless. It’s the feeling we had while the trauma happened, not the actual event or incident, that keeps us stuck. Until we reconcile that feeling, we’ll continue living in one of our worst days and retraumatize ourselves. For some of us, it may feel like we are in the movie Groundhog Day where we keep repeating the same day. The good news is this does not have to be a life sentence; there’s a solution and it’s all contained in working through and becoming an expert on our Worst Day Cycle. In the following chapters, we’ll dissect the Worst Day Cycle and reveal the significance of trauma, fear, shame, and denial and how they are intertwined. Unresolved trauma plays a key role in how we interact with ourselves and the world.
The Worst Day Cycle
Being trapped in the Worst Day Cycle can be suffocating. It’s time to fight to get our authentic self and power back. The first step is to admit the event(s) that initially got us into this cycle. For some of us this can be challenging, as we don’t recall what happened; for others