The Healing Techniques
8 Techniques to Recover Your Health
How to get started
Ultimately, the key to recovery is to tap into your body to better understand and respond to what it needs, to stop pushing your body beyond its capacity, to address and process repressed issues, and in doing those things, to calm your nervous system.
I’ve identified a combination of techniques and states of mind that seem to be critical to recovery. On this page, I list the techniques I identified, which were based on research, my personal experiences, and talking with others who have also recovered or are on the path to recovery. I’ve listed these below in the order I recommend starting and working through them.
I know everyone wants to recover quickly and get back to their lives, but if your body has shut down and is in a chronic freeze state, you likely need to give it extra time to re-regulate and transition into a calmer state. Some people may be able to dive into all of these techniques at once, or start with either JournalSpeak or Building a Sense of Safety, however, for many people that will be too much and further overstress their nervous systems. You may need to spend at least a month — or more — with each new technique before adding the next, though there is also space for overlap with some of these. I’ll write about which ones can overlap more easily with others and which ones will be better off spending a few weeks with before you start a new technique. Once you’re comfortable with a technique, you’ll keep using it as you add the others.
Any health issue you have is 100% real and physical. None of this is in your head.
That said, cultivating certain states of mind does seem to be critical in helping shift our nervous systems into a calmer state. These states of mind include: awareness, acceptance, curiosity, self-compassion, and belief. Learning to cultivate these states of mind is also something that can be done even if you’re bed-bound, so they can be a really good place to start. In hindsight, I realized that acceptance was the very first technique I practiced, and it opened me up to trying so many of the other techniques listed on this site.
Somatic meditations are meditations that help you feel into your body. Most of us — possibly all of us — with chronic pain and illness are disembodied. We cannot feel into our bodies, and we cannot communicate with our bodies about what they need. All of the techniques listed here help us become more embodied, but somatic meditations can provide a calming first step for the nervous system. Somatic meditations can help you feel safer with your body and to begin to listen to your body’s true needs. These are very different from the sitting meditations that many of us have heard of and possibly tried, and there are many different types of somatic meditations. So don’t be discouraged if you’ve tried some meditations in the past and they didn’t work.
When the nervous system enters a fight-or-flight stage, the body is flooded with extra energy in order to act (either fight of flee). If you don’t fight or flee, that energy just gets trapped in the body and stays there. Part of recovery will involve releasing that old stored energy. Early on, this will likely involved allowing your limbs to shake and tremble, while laying in bed. Later, and only when your body is ready, you can also use exercise to help release the energy. Trembling and shaking may organically occur with somatic meditations, and it’s also a natural part of feeling and processing emotions.
So many of our chronic illnesses and chronic pain stem from the fear of repressed thoughts and the energy necessary to keep them repressed. JournalSpeak is the most powerful tool I’ve discovered for learning about what’s really going on inside of you and for accessing and processing repressed thoughts and emotions. JournalSpeak is a process that allows you to safely express what different voices inside of you really felt about something, regardless of how socially unacceptable or truly awful those thoughts are. No other technique was as critical to my own recovery as this was, but all of the others were necessary for this one to work as powerfully as it did.
Once you begin to uncover repressed emotions, you have to feel and process them. For many of us, we repressed these emotions because they were considered unacceptable and so we have both a fear of the emotions and we may not even know how to process it once it comes up. Learning how to feel safe with and process your emotions will become especially important once you begin JournalSpeak, and it is also a critical skill to develop and maintain a healthy life.
Parts Work, also known as Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy, is essentially an extreme version of working with your inner child. Rather than having one inner child, we actually have many, many parts within us that broke off during events that were too traumatic for us to process. The goal of Parts Work is to identify each of these parts, help them process the trauma that happened, and reintegrate them into your whole, adult self. This work can be done during meditations, during JournalSpeak, or even in the middle of the day, once you’re more familiar with the process.
This is actually a collection of techniques that focuses on building a sense of safety, mostly around various physical symptoms, but also somewhat around repressed thoughts and emotions. Many of the techniques in this section are similar to practices developed to retrain the brain to not feel pain unnecessarily. I tend to think that all of the work on this site involves brain retraining, which is why I’m calling this section Building a Sense of Safety, but the techniques in this section represent the more common techniques associated with brain retraining programs.
Your body needs more rest than you think, and how you rest matters. You should not be emotionally stimulated. So spend time resting without the TV on. Or sleep. Sleeping is good too. Most importantly, allow yourself rest without feeling guilt or shame or disappointment or frustration. Rest is something your body needs now in order to start being active again later. Feeling safe with rest helps set the stage for feeling safe with everything else that you’ll be working on later. Throughout the entire recovery process, and possibly even longer, you should expect to actually need far more rest than you think you need.
What About Therapy?
I also worked with a somatic therapist because I didn’t know how to feel emotions, and I worked with a couples somatic therapist because so many repressed issues are connected to flawed relational and attachment issues. These therapy sessions were critical for my recovery, and they weren’t cheap. I don’t include therapy as a recovery technique because I wanted this list to be something anyone can work through, regardless of their financial situation. I’ve done my best to share what I learned from my therapists so that anyone who can’t visit a therapist for whatever reason can still recover. However, if you can afford to work with a somatic therapist in addition to doing the work above, I highly recommend it, especially if you’ve dealt with major traumas in your life or if you find you have emotions that are too scary to tackle on your own. I’ve put some tips together for finding a therapist here.
Learn more
In the articles below, I dive deeper into topics, tools, and techniques regarding this component of healing. This is where I share what I did to heal and where I’ll add updates as I learn new information on these issues. So make sure to look through these posts as well.
Other Resources
The Healing Pathways Newsletter
Get the latest posts and information about how to heal and reset your nervous system by signing up for the newsletter.
