Wheelchair bound
Just over fifteen years ago, I was depending on a wheelchair to maneuver. I had been diagnosed by 2 rheumatologists as 100% disabled and told to quit work. I was working in accounting and bank management, hardly manual labor. I was only in my 50’s at that time.
DISEASES. My list of diagnoses included vertigo, night sweats, 7 ear infections in one year, snoring, PMS, 4 sinus infections, swollen lymph nodes, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus-like autoimmune disease, constipation, low vitamin D, anemia, hair loss, mastitis, depression (imagine that), swollen joints, adrenal failure, overweight, high blood pressure, irritable bowel, pyloric spasms, level 4+ reflux esophagitis, fatty liver, leg cramps, bloating, vascular problems, asthma, foot rash, fibrocystic breasts, high reactivity to scents and insect bites, and Sjogrens. I had visited a long list of specialists including the Mayo clinic. One specialist had ‘fired’ me saying, “I can no longer treat you. When I treat you as the medical books recommend, your body responds the opposite of how the books say you should”. Another doctor simply said, “Medical books mention that 1% of people might respond differently than all others. Someone has to be the 1%. That must be you.”
THERAPY. Since medical doctors seemed stymied by me, I also was seeing psychologists. My therapy history included working with six different therapists in over ten years, not because I gave up on them, but because several of them gave up on me, forwarding me to others because they no longer had a technique to try.
RELIEF. Enter Brent Baum and Holographic Memory Resolution®. After only three HMR® sessions with Brent, I returned to my local psychologist who dropped her notepad as she exclaimed, “I never had any hope you’d get to this level of healing”. She had been working with me for about 4 years, often weekly, testing my dissociative levels every 4 months or so to see if traditional talk therapy had given me enough relief that she felt comfortable recommending EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing, to treat my childhood trauma. She had cautiously determined, based on the test results, that EMDR might cause me to again experience my trauma at a level from which I might not recover without meds or hospitalization.
GRATITUDE. I’m so thankful for her cautious nature. Had she made another choice, I might never have found HMR®.
TRIGGERS. You see, I was triggered by many things that reminded my reptilian brain of the childhood trauma. These triggers included green chairs, pickup trucks, the smell of leather, horses, saddles, harvested seeds, motor oil, and many surroundings of my childhood home. And, of course, one therapist expected his clients to sit in the big cushy green chair in his office. He quickly realized that wasn’t a safe place for me.
After I experienced HMR® and returned to his office to ask him to please learn HMR® so he could help his other clients like me, his eyes got very big and he stepped forward to stop me as I walked into his office and eagerly and proudly plopped down in the green chair. I giggled as I explained to him that, since HMR®, though I remember all the details of the trauma, they no longer affect my body.
In slightly more scientific terms, each time I was around any of my triggers listed above, my body responded in its protective mode to increase cortisol and adrenaline levels for fight or flight to protect me from the perceived harm. When the body does that, our digestion, thymus cell production, and other basic body functions are squelched or stopped so that all the body’s energy can go toward our protection. Our entire body then thinks it is back at the trauma scene but, because some part of our brain knows we aren’t, confusion and even shame is added to the negativity we are already carrying.
UNTIL LATER. I’ll write more about this later. For now, just know that, because HMR® works with the body first, rather than the narrative, I’m now dancing as I encourage others to learn and experience this amazing, simple, powerful technique.