When Nothing Shows Up on Tests - But Something Is Clearly Wrong
You have consulted the medical providers. You’ve had all the blood tests done. You’ve been told you’re “normal” – but in the morning things seem to be running out of gas! Pain that moves around. Dreadful tiredness that persists after resting. Sudden or unexpected worry. An unsettled digestion. Physically alert, tense or weak.
This is not in one’s mind. And it’s not a secret.
For many suffering from chronic, unexplained symptoms the secret that’s puzzled them is not how to obtain a diagnosis for their symptoms, but the effects on the body due to accumulated stress and unresolved emotional experience over time. Shaping our Trauma & Chronic Illness Recovery Program is based on this knowledge. It focuses on root cause – not symptom management – and is for people who know that they’re not doing well yet still hear that they are.
What "Trauma" Actually Means - And Why It Matters for Your Health
The word trauma is a weighty one. Most people relate it to life changing events like accidents, losses, abuses, etc. Expanding and enriching those experiences is ample, but they are just on one end of a very broad spectrum.
Trauma in a body based way of recovery means any experience that was too much, too fast or too soon for your system to deal with fully at the time. It may be a challenging home atmosphere. Chronic home or work stress. A procedure, which was somewhat frightening, to the medical community. An extended uncertainty. Life’s repeated lack of them viewing, situating and supporting one.
These experiences don’t actually have to be big; it’s the impact they make.
If the body is unable to resolve the challenge, it creates a sort of pattern for storing unresolved charge. That pattern exists in the nervous system, it’s there in posture, it is there in your breathing patterns and where it’s going in your body when you are stressed, it’s there in how your system responds to being calm and alert. Beginning to the nth power, those patterns begin to alter your physiology over time without your awareness and only as symptoms of disease make themselves known.
Hidden trauma patterns have less to do with blaming or diagnosing. Knowing that their body holds the memory and that it has the power to be read, worked on and changed.
The Nervous System: Why Your Body Won't Switch Off
The nervous system is the key element in this work, more precisely the part that controls your FEAR response.
When danger arises your body has a survival system in place to protect you! It will trigger a stress response (faster heartbeat, slower digestion, tense muscles, keen focus) when it feels threatened. This is a healthy, intelligent response in a time-limited, real threat situation.
The issue that can result is when a threat response gets stuck.
Nervous system dysregulation occurs when your body’s ‘alarm system’ becomes constantly ‘on’, or ‘off’, in the absence of a perceived threat. May feel like:
Usually feeling very jittery or constantly alert, even in safe environments
Feeling like the world is too much for them and then going into a complete down cycle in consciousness. Extreme emotional outpouring and down entire meltdown
Unavailability or disconnection from emotions or diminished sense of grey in everyday life
Problems sleeping even if you’re tired
Fingers that hang stiff and straight or have a clenched fist, or body that is never able to relax
Reactions that appear out-of-sorts when they aren’t – and embarrassment about the reactions
If the nervous system gets “hooked” in this pattern, it impacts all systems in the body. Digestion. Hormonal function. Immune response. Sleep architecture. Pain thresholds. Inflammatory load. All of these systems will not work at their best at times when the body on a physiological level feels it is unsafe.
This is not a downside. This is physiology
How Stress Physiology Drives Chronic Symptoms
Knowing more about stress physiology will change your perspective on chronic illness forever.
If the activation is maintained chronically the body enters an internal state of emergency. The level of stress hormones is still high. Inflammation increases. Gut permeability rises. Sleep becomes shallow. Its immune system is either hyperactive, like to attack itself, or it’s underactive, so that you keep picking up infections, are ill for a sustained period, don’t wound heal quickly and so on.
This constant pressure of hundreds of months or years leads to the development of the chronic symptoms. Not due to a fault, but because the body has been on a survival programme for such a long time that they have lost the sense of what ‘safe’ feels like.
Many chronic conditions are associated with an ongoing stress physiology, such as:
– Chronic tiredness which will not go away after sleep
– Body fatigue or rarely painful that varies in position
– Various gut and digestive problems such as bloating, IBS symptoms and food reactivity
– Recurrent infections or slow recovery from infections
– Physical issues mood related physical symptoms, low libido, irregular cycles
– Conditions that may get worse during stress and better during relaxation autoimmune flares
– Anxiety and low mood as perceived to be experienced throughout the body rather than in the mind
It is seeing them as connected which makes lasting recovery possible (not viewing each separately).
Root-Cause Wellness Coaching: What This Program Actually Does
Management of symptoms is appropriate. However, if the underlying pattern making the symptoms happen isn’t addressed then the symptoms continue to recur, sometimes in a new manifestation.
Wellness coaching is different, however.Wellness coaching is not like that, however. Rather than enquiring, ‘how do we suppress this symptom?’, it asks, ‘what is this symptom reacting to – what does the body require to feel safe enough to allow this symptom to drop away?
Four work areas are interwoven into this program:
1. Pattern Recognition
First, we chart your symptom and stress history as well as your present nervous system operation. This is not about re-experiencing bad things - this is finding patterns that are recurring in your body and deciphering what they're reacting to. For most, this is enough to start with! A named pattern breaks out of the invisibility veil.
2. Nervous System Regulation Skills
You discover tools that you can use with your body that move your system from activation to safety. These are not meditation exercises, breathing exercises or scripts for meditation; they are specific techniques that are very much somatic (body-based) and address the physiology of the stress response. These tools really do alter the way your body reacts to and carries stress with them if used consistently with practice.
3. Nutrition and Lifestyle Alignment
Eating, sleeping, getting light & movement, the way you organize your day, all convey messages to your nervous system: messages of safety or messages of threat. Your nutrition & lifestyle are programmed to fit your way of life in recovery from chronic stress physiology precisely. It's not about limitations. It's creating the biology environment that allows healing to occur.
4. Identity and Belief Patterns
Chronic illness alters one's identity. There are many deeply held, unspoken, and even unconscious beliefs that many people in long-term recovery have - everything from “my body can't be trusted” to “I'm a burden on people” to “I'll never get better.” These beliefs can't be personality traits. These are learned adaptations. We work with them gently and directly and know they have a measurable effect on physiology - shifting them is part of genuine recovery.
Who This Program Is Designed For
This program has been created for the person who:
- You have found no answers to conventional medicine which endure to you
- You have symptoms you know to be true but your results are “normal”
- There is a sense of connection between your stress level or emotional state and your body’s health
- You have never found the supplements, diets or lifestyle modifications that work for you, despite having tried them all
- You may feel as if you’re in a cycle that you can’t find your way out of
- You’ve reached the point where you can take a holistic, root cause approach to health – with the proper guidance
This program is not intended to be a substitute for medical treatment. It functions in harmony with one’s existing healthcare plan – care program – a care program which is built on the base of symptoms that may be not documented in and unreachable by conventional care plans.
Frequently Asked Questions : Trauma and Disease Links
What is a trauma and chronic illness recovery program?
A programmatic, root cause approach to wellness that connects unresolved stress patterns, nervous system dys-regulation and chronic physical symptoms. It integrates in a synergy the recognition of the patterns, the regulatory tools of the body, the intervention on nutrition, and the work on belief to release the body from chronic stress and stimulate its recovery in a real phase.
Do I need a trauma diagnosis to join this program?
Many of the participants process causal information that has never been socially diagnosed as trauma. Many have never come into contact with the label ‘trauma’ and feel nothing remotely connected to the word. It’s important to notice if your own body has symptoms that are chronic – that is, continuous, or if it feels like your nervous system is continually misregulated or if there’s a pattern in your body that you can’t figure out on your own. That is an entrance, it’s not a label.
How is this different from therapy?
The thinking mind is a primary mechanism by which therapy – especially talk therapy – impacts a person. This programme focuses on the body. These two approaches complement each other, and a lot of participants are at therapy at the same time. The key difference is: Physiological level – how the nervous system stores stress, how that impacts systems and how to set requirements for the body’s transition.
How long does the program run?
The course is 12 weeks long. A significant, lastingNS change is not something that happens overnight but will take some time – it is not a resetting but a changing of the pattern in how you hold and react to stress. Participants commonly see concrete alterations in symptom portraits and in their stress response 3-4 weeks after starting.
Will this work if I've had symptoms for a long time?
Yes – and it does seem to be especially suited for those with symptoms lasting long-term. Chronic presentations frequently are rooted in deeply embedded nervous system patterns that drive them. The longer these patterns are in operation, the more apparent the pattern becomes during the assessment, and that’s so natural assessment isn’t so, so natural after all
What does a typical week in the program look like?
Every week contains a weekly structure coaching session, a series of regulation practices to use with the body daily, food and lifestyle recommendations specific to that time period and access to written materials that support that week’s focus. Outside of sessions, there is about a 20- to 30-minute weekly time commitment to create real change, which is enough to create actual change but doesn’t need to overwhelm an already busy system.
Is this suitable if I'm currently on medication?
Yes, in most cases. This program won’t conflict with any prescription drugs. Nutritional and supplemental recommendations are modified by prescription medications on intake. The rule of thumb is to let your prescribing physician know you are doing a systematic wellness program.
What if I find the emotional aspects of the work difficult?
This is, of course, expected and one of the many things we carefully work with. The program will run at a reasonable rate for your system. We are not seeking to force into harder material before the tool of regulation in the nervous system is ready for the task! Safety is number one at ALL times. We sometimes slow down at points when the work is very activating and build capacity again before we do more.