My Journey with Childhood Trauma and Chronic Illness

Hidden Sensations From Childhood Re-emerge with Recovery

I have had some profound embodied experiences, as I continue to pursue trauma healing strategies to reconnect my mind with my body, my body with the physical world, and my heart with the relational world. Indeed, I've now written extensively about how I believe the root causal factors in my own idiopathic [“of unknown origin”] chronic disease have there origins in my early and developmental traumas, which include being born Caesarean, premature, separated from my mother in the first days, not breastfed, left to cry [as was the parenting advice of the day], and other Adverse Childhood Experiences.

Some years ago, the pain and muscle rigidity symptoms I experience were felt throughout my whole body, face, arms and legs. Having done so much work on mind-body re-connection, self-touch, self-soothing and movement therapies, meditation, etc., together with doing everything I can to reduce inflammation in my system, most of this has now greatly diminished. The remaining bastion of pain and rigidity is in my right neck and in my right shoulder/clavicle/thoracic outlet region, which has been totally disabling. Even this is waning and no longer always painfully present anymore when I am symptomatic, mainly due to my discovery of a self-care, fascia decompression modality, Block Therapy, and working with a therapist to resolve the troubling body memories which are the root cause.

However, recently the pain has sometimes resolved itself into a specific more well-defined sensation. It is quite weird to experience this, and very hard to describe the sensation, but it is like someone pressing hard with a pencil and drawing a very thin line back and forth across the back of my shoulders.

The profound insight which arose from this, however, was the realization I have experienced this odd sensation before! When I felt this again recently, it came flooding back to me that this was a familiar sensation which I experienced frequently as a child. In particular, I remembered that it occurred when I had night terrors and would lie as still as possible (frozen) and barely breathing under the covers [was I teaching my body how to have Parkinson’s even back then?] Night terrors were frequent for me, and in fact, I slept (badly) with my head under the covers until in my early twenties. I did not understand why, until I discovered that I had sometimes been shaken at night as a baby out of frustration [perhaps in part and thanks to the “put to sleep in a separate room and leave to cry” medical advice of the day], which would have activated my fear reflex. So, for me, there really was a “monster” who would sometimes enter my room at night.

The important learning outcome here for me is that as my pain and rigidity symptoms continue to resolve, they are indeed resolving into something from my childhood, which were triggered by unnamed fears. So now I am more convinced than ever that my "idiopathic" (unknown causes) disease is no such thing. The main root causes are indeed in unaddressed issues early in life.

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Learn more about the role of Body Memories and Fascia (Connective Tissue) in chronic illness in the online course on this I have developed with Lilian Sjøberg,

which is also a taster for my full online course Nervous System in Chronic Illness, that seeks to transfer all the knowledge and understandings I have gleaned along the way of my own recovery journey,