I was torn on what to write about this week, and part of me was tempted to get into an in-depth consideration of terminology. Then I realized that most people aren’t word nerds like me and would probably be more interested in what I learned about healing. (Don’t worry, word nerds, I’ll write about the problems with terminology for these issues someday.)
If you’ve seen my website, ScienceGhost, then you’ve seen that I’ve listed ten techniques that can help with healing, and I don’t want this to be a recap of that list here. Instead, I want to distill some of that down into a short version of my understanding of what went wrong and why those techniques (and others) can help people recover from a multitude of chronic health conditions.
One phrase that I do want to throw out here is “brain retraining.” Brain retraining encompasses the idea that our brains—or as I prefer, our nervous systems—learned to have responses to external and/or internal stimuli that may have served a purpose at one point, but now, because these responses are no longer helpful, we need to train our systems to respond differently.
Brain retraining is often associated with chronic pain. Our brains misunderstand an input, they think it’s a sign something is wrong, and so they send a signal of pain to a certain part of our body. In order to fix the problem, there are a variety of techniques to retrain our brains and nervous systems to recognize that, just because they’ve received some input, they don’t need to respond with pain.
There’s a lot more to the brain retraining healing process, but this is the nutshell version, so we’ll talk about details more later.
The most important thing, in my experience, is the connection between problematic neural circuits that need to be retrained and fear. Fear is ultimately the basis of most incorrect neural circuit connections and pain responses. Brain retraining is most commonly associated with chronic back pain, but many people with conditions like long covid also find brain retraining techniques helpful for symptoms. At its most basic, someone experiences something painful or has a symptom that scares them once, and then when something similar happens, they feel fear, and it retriggers the pain or symptom, even without physical damage. This can create a cycle of pain and fear.
Brain retraining can work with a lot of chronic symptoms, but not all, and many of us also have to do what’s known as “emotional work.” Emotional work is when we tap into our deepest, darkest, most repressed and denied thoughts and emotions, and finally allow them to see the light of day. There are different techniques for this too, which we’ll dive into in later posts.
For now, I want to suggest that emotional work is actually a form of brain retraining, and again, it comes back to fear. If we need to do the emotional work, it’s because we have emotions, thoughts, and memories that our bodies have decided are too scary to process and must be repressed. Our brains and bodies then use pain, fatigue, and other symptoms as a way of distracting us from the “horrible” things we’ve repressed.
I put “horrible” in quotes because, for some people, there truly are horrible memories and experiences they’ve had that they haven’t fully processed because the events were too upsetting, and so they’ve repressed the emotions and possibly the memories. But for many of us, for a variety of reasons, we ended up unconsciously terrified of things that were bad for us as children, but as adults, looking back, the fears are unjustified.
Especially for those of us in the latter situation, our neural circuits again ended up crossed, and we have unnecessary fear responses to all manner of relatively benign events and interactions. However, because our bodies and brains don’t believe it’s safe to acknowledge and process these issues, the fears build up in us over time.
The result, regardless of the initial cause of our fears, is that our bodies end up in a chronic fight/flight/freeze (mostly freeze) state. Our bodies weren’t designed to be able to function long-term in that state, and so we start to have health issues. Then we become scared of the symptoms that are arising, and we end up with a double set of fears: fear of the original repressed issues and fear of the symptoms.
I want to flag a really important issue: this is not something that anyone experiencing symptoms has control over. This cannot be fixed by thinking positively, and it’s not something anyone is just imagining. Our nervous systems are acting automatically to keep us safe. They can be trained to respond differently to these stimuli, but, as with any other type of training, it takes work.
Based purely on anecdotal stories and my own hypothesis around them, for people who had relatively calm nervous systems before covid, but then got long covid, I currently think: They had a fear response triggered in their bodies as a result of covid, which then triggered the symptoms of long covid because their nervous systems had gone into a chronic fear state. My hypothesis (which I don’t have any way to test) is that they may be more likely to get better with just brain retraining techniques, and it may happen faster because the neural circuitry hadn’t been reinforced for so many years and decades.
However, there are also people who seem to be more like me. For any number of reasons, which I’ll also get into in later posts, we weren’t able to fully process our emotional responses to events in our lives. We became fearful of the emotions and repressed them, and thus were already primed to have nervous systems that were in a more chronic fear state. Then, when something like Covid spread terror across the world, and when our bodies were struck with the new and deadly virus, our nervous systems went into a more severe state of fear and, essentially, shut down. I also suspect that for many of us, we simply did not realize how significantly our fear responses were triggered because we were so used to feeling fear that it didn’t seem abnormal (that was my case, at least).
My hypothesis there is that, because our nervous systems had so many decades of being “out of whack,” it takes longer to train them out of responding with the fear response to both symptoms and emotions.
However, these hypothesis are just guesses for now. The important point is that, though it may require more or less time and more or less work, people are able to recover from a multitude of chronic conditions using these techniques.
So, nervous system healing in a nutshell: retrain your brain not to trigger an unnecessary fear response to symptoms or to repressed thoughts and emotions.
It seems so simple, but this is hard!
I want to be here to help support people, and I’ve been part of a group that’s been so supportive of each other, and I hope they’ll show up here as well to also offer support to people who are new to these recovery techniques. So please share your experiences or questions in the comments.
I’m also really curious if others have similar thoughts and experiences with the hypotheses I’ve presented here, or if you have different ideas about why some people seem to recover so much more quickly than others.
We’ll keep going down this path of recovery again next Thursday! (And hopefully earlier in the day so that it’s actually Thursday for most everyone…)
Thank you for sharing you hard-earned and evolving wisdom! As you have keenly observed, for some people, brain retaining will be their way out of long covid. I have (anecdotally) witnessed a similar pattern with other LC treatment protocols, generally: works for some, not for others which. LC is a very individual experience, and recognizing that characteristic helps us understand that different solutions will exist for different individuals. I keep returning to the idea that for many pwLC, brain retraining alone may not be the way out, yet perhaps we cannot fully recover without addressing these subconscious neural pathways.
For myself, I see that brain-retraining techniques are a crucial support in my ongoing recovery, one of several I employ to give my body the best chance of healing. Fear triggers a nervous system response that effects my immune system, endocrine system, digestion, etc. To support my autonomic nervous system and get it back in sync, I use a variety somatic experience and yoga nidra meditations, as well as reiki, to increase my awareness and acknowledgment of sensation without fear or judgement. My health keeps improving, I am building quality of life, and I am much more respectful of my body and it’s integrated needs.
Your hypothesis makes total sense. For some people brain retraining alone does seem to work to resolve all symptoms.
For most, myself included, ending up with a dysregulated nervous system forces us to go back and fix not only the neural pathways that have gotten stuck since becoming unwell, but to do the deep work that builds resilience into our systems so we’re not susceptible to the personality traits re-emerging and living a life with unhealthy processing of emotions that meant we were fertile ground for illness.
It’s like any emotions correlate with other similar emotions from the past so you need process them one by one, peeling back each layer. No emotion is bad, simply that if left unprocessed, it will get stuck and change us and our behaviours and personality which causes disharmony in our lives in some way in the future. It all starts before we can even remember so often we’re put on this path before any we have any level of agency so it’s certainly not in any way our “fault”.
As absolutely horrific as the illness is to endure it can be seen as an opportunity to listen to the wisdom of our body and emerge as a better version of ourselves redirecting us back onto the path we were meant to be on.