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Repression is emotional pain, usually stored from childhood.  It can come from bad childhood experiences or even from a birth trauma.  It frequently leads to depression later on in life.  Many people end up taking anti depressants which is very sad as there’s a far better way of dealing with it.

 

But if M.E. is a physical illness, what has it to do with repression; surely repression is psychological?  And haven’t we had enough of a battle to persuade people this illness is in the body, not the head?

 

But who said repression is only in the mind?  Who’s responsible for this misconception?  Who puts mental in one pigeonhole and physical in another?  Surely not modern medicine?  Oh, you think so?  And where did they get that idea from?

 

We all know about what goes on in our heads and the workings of our thinking, cognitive mind, but did you know that we actually have three brains.  Oh, yes.  Whilst modern medicine consigns all our non physical functions into the ‘all in the head’ section of life, the body quietly beavers away supported by its three brains. 

 

Some clever folks out there do understand the complex nature of these mental/physical bio functions and how they interact, but my body taught me a lot along the recovery path so I’ll tell you about it in my own way.

 

Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin.

Rambo and the Three Levels of Consciousness

Once upon a time, many years ago when the earth was still young, there was a little creature (we’ll call him Rambo) who lived in the big vast ocean along with lots of other creatures.  But this one was different.  One day Rambo crawled out of the ocean and dragged himself up onto the beach.  Many of his kind had tried this before and failed, but not Rambo; he was special.   With legs to walk on and lungs to breathe, he survived.  The only brain he had was a physical brain that controlled his physical functions.  He had no feeling brain and no thinking brain, but didn’t need them; he just needed to survive.

 

Many thousands of years passed and creatures of all sorts now roamed the earth.  Along came Rambo II, another creature who learnt to survive.  He too had a brain stem that controlled his physical body, pulse, heart rate, blood pressure, etc.  But Rambo II was different; evolution had also given him an emotional brain.   It was the ‘fight or flight’ instinct for survival.  Rambo II had feelings and he survived.

 

Many more thousands of years passed and along came Rambo III, together with the TV, the laptop, the telephone and the digital watch.  In order to make these gadgets function he needed a thinking brain and evolution gave him one.

 

We found ourselves with three brains (the three levels of consciousness), physical, emotional and thinking (cognitive).   Evolution did not, however, intend these brains to operate wholly independently with no interaction between them (modern medicine did that).  All brains are meant to work in harmony.  If we don’t keep them that way we may find our bodies get sick.  If one is mistreated it can affect another and an unhappy emotional brain can push the body out of kilter and change the body chemistry in our physical brain.  Repression is a killer.

 

Evolution gave us the most important brain first, the physical one.  The emotional brain came second and the very least important, the thinking brain came last.  The thinking brain is the one needed least to survive but it’s the one we seem to treasure the most.  Knowing how to work the laptop won’t prevent us from developing heart disease and knowing how to manage M.E. won’t cure us of it. We can’t afford to organise our lives continually through the thinking brain at the expense of two more important ones.

 

So how do we get sick?   How did I get sick?  I collected baggage in childhood.  It’s not just psychological, although modern medicine may try to tell us it is.  We are wholly biological creatures and unresolved childhood pain is stored in the cells in our bodies.  It occupies the cells and like any physical trauma it will eventually make us sick.  You wouldn’t walk around with a knife sticking out of your gut but many of us carry emotional pain throughout life.  It damages the immune system just as badly as any other trauma.

 

Stored pain changes body chemistry.  In 1996 a mineral hair analysis test showed my sodium levels to be ten times above the norm and for many years it remained a mystery why.  Between 1998 and 2000 I sobbed out my pain for 50 minutes a day, and every day scraped salt off my face from the tears, until my finger nails were caked in thick crusty salt.  What’s the betting my sodium levels are now normal?  And isn’t the body clever in retaining salt in preparation for expelling it in tears and releasing the pain through crying?  Repressed pain is held chemically within the body in the form of stress hormones waiting to be shed inside our tears. Who thought of that one?  How about evolution which gave us the wonderful interaction that goes on between our three brains?

 

During my two years of deep weeping I felt whole bio systems continually conversing with each other as stored pain was passed each night from subconscious to conscious levels in preparation for the daily weeping session.  Then a full feeling, reliving experience would offload pain, and even my heart rate reverted to that of the original trauma as the original physical memory was accessed and barriers between the emotional brain and the physical one came down, thus allowing body chemistry to change.

 

I felt every bio system working flat out and full pelt day after day to do what evolution had given it the ability to do; to restore the status quo and do it in a way that makes modern medicine look primitive and archaic.  How did my body to do it?  I had to stop living in denial and let it happen.  I had to let the child in me cry, accessing past waystations first through words (cognitive) taking me into feelings (emotional) which finally accessed the physical brain.  I had a great counsellor but nobody fixed me or therapised me. 

 

 If childhood pain isn’t cried out it becomes imprinted into our bodies and stored permanently.  The body will always perceive it as alien and spend a lifetime mounting a chemical offensive against it leading to all sorts of illness.   Repression damages the body and psyche in equal measure.  Repression is a killer.

 

I wasn’t born with M.E.  But just like Rambo III,  I had three brains.  Instead of crying out childhood pain I stored it which resulted in my body retaining sodium.  The repression was imprinted into the immune system in the cells in my gut eventually weakening the bowel and leading to a breakdown in the ecology of the gut, multi food and chemical sensitivity, and systemic candida (aided by antibiotics and mercury fillings).   As my body continued to mount chemical offensives against the imprinted pain, M.E. followed.

 

Recovery meant putting everything into reverse and that’s what I did.  The final key was the deep weeping which undid the disabling influence of repression on the gut, allowed normal muscle function to be restored,  changed back altered body chemistry, restored the status quo and allowed the body to heal.

 

Evolution gave us the tools to shed pain in this way by emotional contractions just as it gave us childbirth by way of physical contractions.  But not many people seem to know about it.  We live with stored pain and throw away the key – evolution holds that key.

 

And it just goes to show; the brain is in the body, not the head.

 

Isn’t evolution grand?

 

Ps  Never stop a child from crying.

February 2005

Repression and Denial – We lock in the pain and throw away the key

Q  What lies in the great unknown where the mental and the physical meet?

A. More than you would dream of!

There’s no such thing as only psychological.