Publisher's Synopsis
We live in a world where the numbers of people suffering anxiety, fatigue, digestive issues, auto-immune conditions and various unexplained chronic diseases (including long covid) are increasing year on year to the point where they are threatening the health systems of many developed countries. With the added experience of social trauma from covid-19, many are suffering debilitating symptoms that defy conventional explanation. What on earth is going on? This ground-breaking book, written by an award-winning practitioner, demystifies the many and varied symptoms of stress, trauma and unresolved emotion in the mind and body, which may go some way towards explaining the knowledge gap. Based on 25 years of practice as a therapist and scientific researcher, it describes the latest research on the stress response and how it interacts with a sensitised brain. With a paleolithic brain trapped in a 21st century body, we can see how our evolutionary survival strategies of implicit memory in the emotional brain have become maladapted to a life full of chronic stress. Emotional trauma from early life experience activates this ancient system to be hyper-aroused to the world around it. Anything that then triggers the same emotion in later life activates this system giving us anxiety, fatigue and/ or chronic pain which defies a purely physical explanation. My contention, born out of study of the scientific literature and my own experience, is that the problems are not just physical they are emotional too. Emotions are not just psychological experiences; they are felt in the body as physiological states.In particular, by an appreciation of how any experience in a state of helplessness, is perceived by the body as emotional trauma, we begin to appreciate how many and varied such experiences are. They include: -accidents-bereavement-birth trauma-bullying -parental attachment wounding, depression or divorce-surgery (especially with general anaesthetic)as well as abuse or neglect. The fact that they are common means that very few people escape a childhood without some of these experiences but it is the interaction with particular sensitive predispositions (epigenetics - environmental and genetic) that determines whether traumatic memory formation becomes encoded and whether they become triggered into chronic symptoms in later life.I lift the lid on how the mind creates the symptoms largely through the down-regulation of the energy producing mitochondria in your cells. I show the fascinating truth behind this amazingly ancient process, meant to protect us when our stresses were very different to the ones we have today. Many books have been written on this subject from either a scientific or clinical point of view but this book aims to explain it all to an intelligent reader with examples from my own life and the experience of my clients, in a way that unifies theory and practice towards a new understanding of chronic illness. By giving you information as to how you got this way I also show you, with practical examples, how to overcome these issues using a variety of new techniques of energy psychology and body-based (somatic) therapies to help you change these subconscious programmes and move on with your life. I firmly believe everyone can heal, and I have demonstrated this in my own life and those of my clients. Now updated for 2018 with new research and a fully cross-referenced index. Much has moved on since the original publication in 2015, with awareness of 'Lifestyle Medicine' finally becoming accepted by the mainstream as the way forward out of the dead end of pharmaceutical medicine for chronic disease. Not only is this bankrupting the health service, but it is not working! Even doctors, steeped in the biomedical model, are now realising this and turning to new ideas for helping their patients. I include some of these new ideas from a UK perspective, although the themes are, of course, universal.
