Roots of Dis-Ease

Let’s talk roots of dis-ease.

How do we spend billions on healthcare and prescriptions and not become well?

Emotions and trauma play a massive role in the paradigm. Perhaps more than what we put in our body. Maybe it’s time to shift from the persistent brow beating of health foods, body mass, and exercise to release of trauma and stuck emotion as a healing modality.

Let’s talk about the LHPA (Limbic-Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal) Axis. Sounds complicated, but it’s a beautiful cascade of the body to keep us safe when we need to be kept safe. BUT, it can also lock us in trauma when the events are overwhelming or constant.

Trauma is processed in sensory systems (the physical body, smell, touch, taste, sight) by the limbic system where fear is detected. In response, the hypothalamus releases adrenal stimulating hormones. Cortisol becomes elevated by the adrenals through the transmission of the fear signals to the neurons in the prefrontal cortex. This causes a sympathetic response including dilated pupils, increased heart rate and breathing, as well as blood movement to the arms and legs and away from the heart, brain, and other vital organs. The body cannot maintain this hypervigilant state and as cortisol continues to ramp up, eventually the adrenals give up. The result of poor functioning adrenals includes apathy, fatigue, and muscular weakness among many other symptoms.

Neurotransmitters such as serotonin, norepinephrine, GABA, and dopamine are depleted by the high cortisol levels.

When the axis is hyperactive, serotonin causes it to calm down and can be easily depleted when in states of constant activation. Low serotonin is often seen in depression, personality disorders, and the inability to produce oxytocin. Oxytocin, our love hormone, allows us to tend and befriend, create attachments, love, make friends, have empathy.

The adrenals also make glucocorticoids in stress and over the time these hormones deplete the immune system and inhibit brain development. The effects of excess glucocorticoids in the blood include anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, and aggression as well as a dysregulation in the immune system. The dysregulation may look like overactivity as in autoimmune disorders, or underactivity (being sick all the time).

Does this sound like anyone you know?

Our telomeres (caps of DNA strands and an indicator of longevity) begin to erode causing further dis-ease and dysregulation of the immune system. We become chronically sick or autoimmune as our weight, inflammation markers, cholesterol, and blood pressure elevates.

Manifestation of disease by trauma.

But this complex LHPA axis isn’t only impacted during the actual traumatic event. It becomes triggered with memories, scents, sounds, movement. The body does not forget and the trauma is stored. And the axis responds to the perceived trauma just the same way as it responds to the actual trauma. According to the DSM, the trauma doesn’t even have to happen to the person experiencing the symptoms. Epigenetics have discovered ancestral trauma passed through generations have massive impacts on our health today.

We aren’t designed to live this way. We are designed to live in parasympathetic states (rest and digest).

What can you do?

Identify the triggers. Sit with the emotion. Breathwork. Journaling. Meditation. Herbal preparations. Psychadelics. Flower essences. Emotional release. Ceremony.

Release emotion. Get your body into nature and move. Breath deeply. Dance. Hug a tree. Sit with herbs and plants.

Find your medicine and use it.

As a practitioner of breathwork and emotional release, I would be honored to work with you. Simply as witness and guide to the healing journey. The work comes from within.

Bring your traumas, your hurts, your despairs. Shortened telomeres and depleted adrenals. It’s all welcome.