The Scar That Won't Heal

Book excerpt: We live in a world where the numbers of people suffering anxiety, and various unexplained chronic pain and fatigue syndromes is increasing year on year to the point where they are threatening the health systems of many developed countries. This groundbreaking book, written by a clinician and researcher, demystifies the many and varied symptoms of stress, trauma and unresolved emotion in the mind and body. Based on 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 an understanding of how a paleolithic brain became trapped in a 21st century body, we can see how our evolutionary survival strategies of implicit memory in the emotional brain have maladapted to a life full of chronic stress. Anything that triggers the same emotion in later life then fills us with anxiety and/ or chronic pain which defies a purely physical explanation. My belief, born out of study of the scientific literature, is that the problems are not just physical they are emotional too. In particular, by an appreciation of how any experience, if it occurs during a state of helplessness, can be considered trauma, we begin to appreciate how many and varied such experiences are. They include bereavement, difficult birth, accidents, surgery, poor parental attachment, bullying and abuse. 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 personality styles that determines whether traumatic memory formation becomes encoded and whether they become triggered into chronic symptoms occur 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 somatic therapies to help you change these subconscious programmes and move on with your life.