My Experience: Brain retraining for symptoms vs repressed emotions

When I talk about the pain-fear cycle, I often use the example of someone who suffered a physical injury. However, the same twinge-fear-pain-fear cycle can also apply to other symptoms.

I found this to be the case with my allergies. I used to get yearly allergies, and I’d suffer from chronic sinus issues. (My nose would literally run nonstop for 2-5 hours, and I would have to sit up somewhere with tissue shoved up my nostrils, replacing the tissues every couple of minutes. I could nearly go through an entire box of tissue or roll of toilet paper in that time. It was gross. Then I’d be sick for days after.) In the past, a twinge in my nose or an itch in my eye always signaled the start of bad symptoms about to start. The allergies were traditional, seasonal allergies, and the sinus issues were often associated with a histamine/food intolerance or exercise intolerance.

Since learning about brain-retraining and with knowledge about the twinge-fear-symptom cycle, every time those twinges occur, I now remind myself that it was just a twinge, it didn’t mean anything, and I’m fine. If it’s a really severe twinge and I second-guess my reassurances, I tell myself that I could always take an allergy medication if things get really bad, but that I am confident that isn’t necessary, and I should give myself a little bit of time before worrying. Then I distract myself with whatever I’m doing, and I’ve consistently forgotten about the twinge and been fine.

That’s worked nearly every single time (only on rare occasions have I needed to take medication), and that’s after having fairly consistent issues for decades. In this case, it seemed to have been an entirely learned response to those twinges, and it didn’t seem to be related to the emotional work. That approach also worked for all of my food intolerances. (Please do not try this with anaphylactic responses.)

I also want to highlight this example because it was a learned immune response, with real, physical symptoms that could, in no way, be construed as “in my head” (notwithstanding all the snot coming out of my head). I also had real, physical tests showing all the foods, animals, grasses, trees, dust mites, etc. that I was allergic to.

With the allergy example, I was scared of the nose twinge, and my nervous system’s learned response to that fear was to trigger a deluge of snot. I had to retrain my nervous system not to respond with fear to the twinge, and thus, no snot. But many of my other symptoms were multi-layered.

My migraines, for example, were triggered by an intense fear of intense emotions, and then exacerbated by a fear of the pain. I followed every tip I came across to retrain my brain not to have migraines, but nothing helped until I started to recognize and address both the really strong emotions I was repressing and my fear of those emotions. Only then could I start to retrain my nervous system to not be afraid of and to not need the pain.

Now, if I start to feel pain on the left side of my head, I can say “Oh. I’m angry for x,y, or z reason. I know I’m angry and it’s okay to be angry. I don’t need to feel this pain because I’m aware of the anger.” Mostly that works. If it doesn’t work, it’s because there’s an emotion that I’ve repressed that I’m not aware of. At that point, I need to go back to JournalSpeak and/or meditate to figure out what’s going on so that I can try to address it.

One other important aspect I found with my personal brain-retraining work: I had to do the work as soon as the first twinge began. If I didn’t catch it early, then the symptom would flare up and my nervous system would be in a complete freeze response. Once that happened, the only thing that helped was time, deep relaxing, and regularly reminding myself that whatever was happening to me was okay just as it was and I didn’t need to feel scared. I have yet to find anything else that helps once a symptom flares up.