During a meditation this morning, I went back to a challenging time in my life, an event that I needed to overcome. I watched this event like an angel above. I realized that after this event for many many years, I didn't even know that I needed help. I didn't know that I changed that day and I had forgotten who I was before the assault.
A survival technique humans have is to forget pain. What about happiness, joy, peace and ease? Do we forget those things too? As a scientist I have always focused on the fight, flight and freeze response from the perception of dissociation and disconnecting from pain. But today, I am shifting that perception and focusing on how we get into these places where we forget the good stuff. The more we get used to being in survival mode, we forget what it feels like to be free, happy and light. I experienced a trauma that for 12 years I maintained that it did not effect me. In reality it shaped me more then anything else had. I didn't have the strategies to stop it from running the show. I did not remember what it felt like before the trauma. When I was innocent and happy. My inner light got dim, distant and I forgot what authentic real happiness was.
I didn't know that I needed help. Luckily a friend at chiropractic school did. Her name was Lisa. We had a brief encounter one day at the gym where she let me know that she saw my suffering. She not only saw it, she could feel it pulsating through me, while I was practically numb to it. The only indicators I had was that I was in severe back pain. I was limiting my activities, I was having trouble sitting in class, I was sad, lonely and tired. But I still had no idea that I needed help. I was so numb and blind and I had no strategies for healing, I was stuck. I was receiving traditional chiropractic adjustments that helped sometimes. I was self medicating with alcohol and drugs which provided a nice roller coaster of fake-masked ease followed by inflamed angry pain. I will never forget hearing Lisa say to me that my pain was emotional. The fake smile that I had plastered on for over a decade got chipped the moment Lisa saw me. She had seen me and I was vulnerable and scared shitless. So, I re-enforced the armor and carried on with my hunt for the "real reason" I was in so much pain. I got the MRI and looked at the physical destruction that the film showed me. My body was in fact a mess. HA! I knew it. I wasn't crazy. But HA I also knew from deep inside, that dim distant light, knew that Lisa was right. The pain was rooted in emotions and I was destroying my body. A few weeks later I called Lisa and said, "Okay, it's emotional, so what can I do about it?". It is amazing to me years later, each time I think of this memory my gratitude expands and grows. A testament to the remembering that this solution brings to you. She had a solution for me. She was practicing network. That day she did what I had been unable to do on my own, through talk therapy or through straight body work, she started helping me put the pieces back together. All the kings horses and all the kings men, couldn't put humpty together again. To bad he didn't have a network doc in the castle.
-Dr. Suzanne
