The other day Karen was in for her regular visit. At one point she asked me “I thought I was supposed to get calmer with this?” I asked her to tell me more.
Karen responded by telling me that she’s been noticing herself feeling more intensely anxious compared to before her starting care. Now it might sound funny to you hearing this, because you’d think that if we’re working to help the nervous system heal, that Karen would feel less anxious. And that does happen with some people.
However, sometimes as a person heals, they’ll feel things more intensely. The defense tension that is part of survival mode is meant to numb us so that we don’t feel as much. When the nervous system starts to heal, those feelings can sometimes get more intense.
This is why we don’t judge a person’s progress solely on their symptoms. We use objective measures to tell us if we’re headed in the right direction and if we need to adjust our course.
During the entrainment sessions, we can also tell if we’re on the right track by seeing how your body is responding from visit to visit.
Oftentimes, we’ve learned to suppress our feelings and emotions, to deny them or ignore them. It’s increasingly easier to do that especially when there’s a whole industry dedicated to creating products to help us suppress our feelings and emotions. Additionally, we’re bombarded with messages to buy products that will give us a hit of dopamine so that we feel “good” momentarily.
It reminds me of a scene in “the Matrix”, when Neo has been freed from the Matrix and asks why his eyes hurt. He’s told that it’s because he’s never used them before. His eyes were adjusting to real life as opposed to a computer simulation.
It’s much like that when we come out of survival mode. Everything can be brighter, louder, more intense, because we have not been using our full range of perception while in survival mode. And there’s a time of adjustment.
However once you adjust to this new level of perceiving, life becomes more vibrant and meaningful!