Body Psychotherapy — Stress and body repair

“What you are thinking, feeling and believing is changing the genetic expression and chemical composition of your body on a moment-by-moment basis.” — Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk (author of The Body Keeps The Score).

Our wellness is not just determined by what is going on within us, but also on the atmosphere around us. The genius of physicians like Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk and Dr Gabor Maté (and many others) have thankfully been successful at bringing to light the reality that we need to look at the bio-psycho-social factors at play when addressing dis-ease in the body.

Instead of narrowly looking at symptoms as stand-alone occurrences, the whole scope of a person's experience needs to be considered to properly tend to presenting issues — whether they be physical, emotional, mental, spiritual or environmental.

“Memory, learning, stress and healing are all affected by classes of genes that are turned on or off in temporal cycles that range from one second to many hours. The environment that activates genes includes both the inner environment — the emotional, biochemical, mentals, energetic and spiritual landscape of the individual — and the outer environment. The outer environment includes the social network and ecological systems in which the individual lives. — Dawson Church

This is a big topic, and I'll address more dynamics to this issue in future posts. For now, let's focus on considering 'stress' and how it plays a role in 'recovery' and/or 'healing', and how this influence is actually good news....

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Stress Hormones and body repair

DHEA is the most common hormone in the body. This hormone is associated with cell repair. It's produced by the adrenal glands.

Cortisol — the stress hormone — has the same chemical precursors as DHEA, in that, DHEA turns into Cortisol.

Too much of Cortisol in the system can affect muscle mass, cause bone loss, and impedes generation of new skin cells. It can also contribute to memory loss and learning impediments.

DHEA will adapt depending on the needs of the body in every moment. If the body is in a constant state of fright, flight or freeze (from real or perceived or residual threats), the chronic, ongoing levels of Cortisol required to tend to these issues (real or imagined) suck biochemical resources away from cell repair.

“The stressful thoughts that lead to the secretion of stress-related.. (hormones).. impede our evolutionary-derived natural healing capabilities. These thoughts are often only in our minds, and not a reality. The biochemical and genetic effects, as far as your body is concerned, are the same.” — Herbert Benson MD. 

From Dawson Church (Author of The Genie in our Genes)

“If our system is flooded with stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol for a few minutes, in response, for instance, to a near collision with another car on the freeway, the incident quickly ends as a biochemical event. However, if we hold onto resentments and emotionally painful thoughts for extended periods of time, the very biochemicals that are meant to save us during an emergency become toxins.

Long-term exposure to cortisol and other stress hormones has a host of bad effects. It suppresses immune response, reduces bone formation, decreases muscle mass, reduces skin elasticity, and damages cells in the brain responsible for memory and learning.

If, on the other hand, we quickly release our stress and return to a biochemical baseline, we restore normal cellular operation, and that’s vital to our longevity as well as our health. The same precursor hormones are used by the adrenal cortex to make both cortisol and DHEA. Just as cortisol has negative effects long term, DHEA has positive effects. It has “protective and regenerative effects on many of the body’s systems, and is believed to counter many of the effects of aging".

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Now for the good news...

In the same way that the body will respond to your thoughts as if the event is real and happening now, it will also respond to intentionally created imagery and sensation generated within in the same way — which is exactly what we do in hypnosis.

By using the imaginative faculties (your inner vision), we’re activating and connecting directly with the Limbic brain (also known as the emotional brain and 'the gateway to the subconscious') which governs our parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for the 'rest and restore' state which we exist in while we sleep).

This processing centre of the brain is linked to ‘direct experience’ and deals with the body’s immediate responses which are unfiltered by the conscious, reasoning mind. You can try and talk or think your way in or out of truth — but the body knows immediately. It has consciousness. Many of us are programmed to overrule these initial instincts for a variety of reasons. You can read more about that here.

These somatic instincts never go away though — but it does take intention to recalibrate to the messages being presented via sensation (think: pain, aversion, magnetism, pulsing, numbness etc).

By intentionally using the language the subconscious understands — imagery, sensation/feeling and symbolism — we can create the inner and outer conditions in advance setting the tone and redirecting momentum to the state we want to be in. When we do, DHEA has the chance to do what it needs to do to aid recovery.  

‘Fascination during novel and numinous experiences plays a fundamental role in focusing our attention and engaging activity dependent gene expression, neurogenesis and healing in general. — Ernest Rossi

👇 Check out this article next.