By Jenny Peterson
Do you ever feel like you have tried everything to get rid of your chronic symptoms, yet they are still there? When I mean everything, this includes diet changes, cleanses, supplements, brain retraining, nervous system regulation, emotional work, subconscious work or even working with other GNM practitioners.
Things will get better and then come back. Your symptoms just don't go away! Or new ones pop up and you wonder, "Now what is that?" You wonder, "Will I ever get back to normal?"
My friend, your efforts haven't gone unnoticed, you really have tried.
The problem isn't that you haven't tried. You've done the best you could based on what you know. AND what if despite feeling like you have tried everything, there were some critical pieces to your healing that you've never been shown?
Reasons that would explain why nothing has worked.
If you’ve been looking for the missing pieces to your healing, I've got you covered. I will give you the 5 reasons why your chronic symptoms aren't going away no matter how hard you try, so you can finally make sense of it all.
Chronic symptoms are classified as symptoms that come and go or don’t go away after 3 months. These chronic conditions get labeled with many different names and are often blamed on foods, genetics, chemicals, mold, nervous system dysregulation and so much more.
The truth is these chronic conditions have biological reasons why they are not going away, and they are not those external things that are easy to blame. As you have learned through my other posts, when the body doesn’t feel safe, it needs to adapt to survive. Your symptoms are a part of that adaptation process. If your body didn’t adapt, you would not survive. Your body is taking the hit when your mind is unable to adapt.
So, if your symptoms are not going away, there are biological reasons why. Your body knows how to heal and when it doesn’t complete the healing process, there is something that is telling it it's not safe to. It needs to continue adapting because there is still a message of threat coming from your subconscious.
The other biological reason is how your brain is designed. There are certain things that must happen for your brain to be programmed and unprogrammed.
So these 2 areas- the threat messages and your brain's design- are going to be key areas that need to be looked at when addressing your chronic symptoms. The reasons why your symptoms are not going away are going to fall into one of these categories. If you are not working from both of these directions, long term healing success will be limited.
THREAT MESSAGES
Remember that your brain only cares about one thing at all times- am I safe or unsafe? Messages of threat that are being sent to our body are often not consciously seen. They are so automatic because they have been with you for years that they run subconsciously.
These messages of threat are a contributing piece to why your chronic symptoms are not going away.
Fear is a big message of threat to your brain and body.
When people come to me, they are loaded with fear. Fear of symptoms, fear of them not going away, fear of things not working, etc. This fear comes from the programming that we have taken on from society, our family, the medical, holistic and functional medicine worlds.
Fear is a huge block to getting well because it doesn’t signal safety to the body. When we are in fear we activate our sympathetic nervous system and our body feels like there is a tiger is chasing it. Healing is not a priority in those moments, only survival is.
When we are in this state, our amygdala is fired up in our brain. We don’t think clearly, we make decisions based on fear and emotions and we don’t give our body the relaxation it needs to focus on healing.
I have heard time and time again how people will go to get help from a mind-body perspective and immediately jump into doing work on their symptoms, finding the subconscious connections, etc. This is a disservice to someone who has never done this work. Your subconscious is not going to be ready to make the subconscious shifts needed to resolve your chronic symptoms this quickly.
If you have had chronic symptoms for years, there are years of old patterns around your body, healing and symptoms that first need to be addressed. Your amygdala is on fire due to fear and instead of putting out that fire you are jumping to the next thing hoping it will work.
Where I see this happening the most is with those that are trying to help others that have never been chronically ill before. There are plenty of practitioners out there that are helping those that have never experienced what their clients are going through. They don’t know what kind of thoughts a person with chronic symptoms has: the fear they feel daily, how it consumes their mind day in and day out. So they learn German New Medicine and tell their clients, just think differently about what happened before you experienced your symptoms and they will go away. Excuse me? I’m sorry, but it's really not that simple when we understand the brain and how it works. Those subconscious patterns are strong and it's going to take re-education, shifting of old patterns, and a new level of awareness to make those shifts.
Fear of your body, symptoms and healing all need to be addressed before diving into working on your symptoms. Otherwise, there will be resistance in the subconscious and a constant battle of activating the sympathetic nervous system when not needed. This one thing is a huge player in why symptoms are not going away.
This leads to my second reason symptoms are not going away….
You're too focused on getting rid of your symptoms.
Again this comes from programming. We have been programmed to believe that symptoms are bad, so we need to get rid of them. But when you do this work, that all needs to shift. The focus can’t be on symptoms anymore. Think about it, if that was the solution, you would be better already. You’ve been focusing on them for years and trying to get rid of them. It's time to shift your focus.
The focus needs to be on becoming a 2.0 version of yourself. The version that you are now is not the version of you that is going to heal yourself. The 2.0 version is. This is the version of you that responds to your body and life situations in healthier ways.
You probably don’t know what that version of you looks like right now because it feels very unfamiliar. It's not until you dig up all the subconscious patterns that are sending messages of threat to your body that you will be able to see what that 2.0 version of you looks like. It will be the opposite of those patterns. When you put the focus on becoming that 2.0 version of you instead of your symptoms, that is when you will heal. That is when your body will no longer be getting messages of threat and feel safe enough to heal. Remember, your body knows how to heal, your symptoms are actually a sign of your body healing. Focusing on them isn’t going to move the needle. You have to focus on WHY the body is not completing the healing process, which is back to the messages coming from your subconscious.
The 3rd reason why your symptoms are not going away is back to the unconscious subconscious patterns that are being sent to your body. These are messages of threat. These come from unprocessed experiences in your past, limited beliefs, triggers and old perceptions.
This is what I call the deep work. It's the targeted work that you must do to identify the subconscious patterns that are blocking your healing. This work is going to be tailored to you and your life experiences. It's the work that a lot of people want to avoid and they stick with doing surface level work like meditations, feel good protocols, or generalized protocols instead to avoid it.
Now people that have been in therapy for years may think that they have done the deep work but most often that is not the case when it comes to therapy. Emotional work also doesn’t cover this deep level work. It's not emotions that we are trying to change, its perceptions. So you can tap emotions away all day, but if you don’t actually shift your perceptions it won’t do anything. It doesn’t create change in the subconscious.
Now let's shift gears here to your brain's design.
YOUR BRAIN’S DESIGN
When we are working on old patterns, it's crucial to know how your brain works. Without knowing this, you will fail at un-wiring and re-wiring subconscious patterns.
Our brain loves consistency and is programmed by repetition. Once something has been repeated many times, those areas of the brain become wired together and they start firing automatically. The reason why the brain loves repetition is because once something has been wired in, it no longer has to spend energy on programming it or learning something new. It wants to work as efficiently as possible.
So the way you think, your beliefs, your fears, your perceptions have already been programmed into your subconscious. They are what you have been operating from since you were a child. You have been unconsciously consistent with making those pathways in your brain stronger and stronger over the years. So to break those old patterns, you have to do exactly what you did to wire them. Have consistency and repetition.
The 4th reason your symptoms are not going away is because there isn’t consistency with working on your old patterns. This is why having one time sessions with a coach doesn’t work and it's not the magic formula to healing. It's the work that you do on your own, in your daily life that actually is the magic formula. Once you know what your patterns are, you have to use your awareness muscle to consistently change them. This is what we do in MBR, we provide you with a daily plan for changing your patterns. It's because of this consistency that we are able to help our clients get long term healing and create changes in their brain and body in less than a year. Rewiring your old patterns doesn’t happen from listening to meditations or having a session once a week. It comes from taking daily action to create change in your brain, which will add up and create changes in your body.
If you go to the gym whenever you get a burst of energy or a couple times a month, you can’t expect results. If you increase going to the gym 1-2 times a week, you will see small shifts. But when you go consistently to the gym daily for a few months, you can expect to see changes.
Healing is exactly the same way. You have to be consistent with the work that you do if you want to get results. Doing a few things here and there for a few short weeks isn’t going to move the needle.
A daily routine of nothing but meditation, positive thinking, smiling, and deep breathing is not the consistency that I'm talking about either.
Society has taught us that healing should be overnight, just take a pill, drink this concoction, etc.
But here is the deal....you have spent 30-50 years of your life consistently doing the same things, thinking and responding the same way. That is wired into you, specifically into your subconscious. You didn't do it consciously; it was done subconsciously below your awareness.
Now, to make changes, you have to consciously make changes consistently. Conscious work is much harder to change because you're going against what you have "wired" in over the years.
This rewiring is necessary to heal. You have to rewire different messages from your subconscious, so your body is no longer getting the message that it needs to respond to a threat.
This conscious work requires patience and small baby steps every day. Those small changes every day add up to big changes in the subconscious over time.
The last reason why your symptoms may not be going away is resistance. Again, this is back to the brain's design.
Remember what I said about efficiency? Change, according to the brain, requires work and putting out extra energy. Think about it, when you drive your car on your normal route, you don’t have to expend any extra energy because you seem to automatically get there without even having to think about it. That is because it's a program in your brain based on you repeating it over and over again.
Now let's say you change your route and you don’t know where you are going and you have to look at your surroundings, look for road signs, etc. This is going to require more energy from your brain. You may even find a way to convince yourself that you should just take the old way because it's easier. This is your lovely brain doing exactly what it's designed to do, stay comfortable and operate from old patterns.
Knowing this information, you need to expect resistance and have a plan for how you are going to address it. Let's say you know that you need to set boundaries with someone in your life but you fear when you do that, they will get mad at you. Even though this action is probably required of you because your body is telling you through your symptoms, you will most likely resist doing it because of your brain. It says that you could be hurt, which is scary based on past experiences and that speaking up feels unfamiliar and it would just be easier to not say anything because that is what feels comfortable.
This is resistance and most people don’t know how to deal with it, therefore they don’t make the changes they need to in order to heal. Their body is telling them through their symptoms what they need to do but their brain is too scared to do it because it requires change that feels uncomfortable. This is why it's so important to work with someone that understands the brain, what resistance looks like and what to do about it.
Most people try doing this work on their own and will often quit around the 45 day mark. Why is that a common place when people quit? Because by day 45, there is real change starting to happen in the brain if the person is being constant with the work. So, the brain can feel this change and it will do whatever it can to get back to familiar pathways. So, a person will say this isn’t working, I can’t do it, find excuses, give into negative thoughts, etc. and the resistance wins. This is where having a coach and support around you will help you move through the resistance and give you the action steps needed to beat those old patterns in your subconscious.
SUMMARY
There you have it, 5 reasons why your chronic symptoms are not going away. Let me review them quickly again:
Fear keeping you in a stressed state
Focusing on getting rid of symptoms rather than stepping into your 2.0 self
Unconscious patterns that are sending messages of threat
Lack of consistency with unwiring and rewiring patterns
Not knowing how to address resistance
It's important to note that these are the top reasons that I see that are blocking healing. There are other areas that need to be looked at, like medications and supplements that could be interfering along with individual specific things that need to be addressed. As always, this work is individual and I can only summarize what I see from all of those that we have worked with.
I want you to know that healing chronic conditions is possible. It's going to require work, it's not as simple as saying positive things to yourself. When you cover these key areas, messages of threat and your brain's design in your healing plan, it really does cover all areas to ensure long term healing success.
You are unique, your symptoms are connected to very specific patterns within your subconscious.
Without a plan unique to you, you will continue struggling and miss out on the life you deserve to be living! To help you get started on your long-lasting healing journey, we would love to provide you with a healing plan that is unique to you. Get your custom healing plan today!
You can also download my free healing guide, “Why Can’t I Heal” where you will learn the 5 reasons that you haven't healed despite everything you've tried. These are the missing pieces to your healing and the key to resolving your symptoms for good.
Jenny Peterson is the founder and CEO of Mind Body Rewire (MBR). She teaches those that are overwhelmed with trying to heal chronic symptoms how to simplify their healing by focusing on just one place, the subconscious mind. Learn more about MBR here.
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