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Subscriber First Name, People have been asking me about how the techniques I teach in my Self Healing the Root workshop work with their current mental health diagnoses, like anxiety or C-PTSD. To answer that, I’d like to share a small piece of what I’ve learned in the last month from Linda Thai (a trauma therapist and my somatic embodiment teacher). First, remember, this is for educational purposes only, as I’m not a licensed medical professional. I don’t diagnose or treat health conditions. Talk to your licensed healthcare professional for medical advice. Linda Thai presented that certain diagnoses commonly correspond to certain activation levels of the nervous system. It goes like this: You have a window of tolerance where you feel safe. Windows vary in size depending on who you are and what trauma you’ve been through. When something happens that activates fear in you within your window, your nervous system responds. It may stay in your window of tolerance if you are great at regulating, co-regulating, and are truly safe, but it can also go above or below it, immersing you in flight, fright, freeze, fawn, or collapse responses. If you’re chronically in fear (or a stress response), you may live on the edge of or outside of your window. When you get stuck on the edge or outside of your window, that’s when diagnoses tend to show up. For example: When you live on the edge, this is where borderline personality disorder tends to show up. When you live mostly in flight, this is where generalized anxiety disorder tends to show up. When you live mostly in fight, this is where conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, and intermittent explosive disorder tend to show up. When you live mostly in freeze, this is where panic disorder tends to show up. If you exist mostly in collapse, this is where depression shows up. When you exist in flight, fight, or freeze, which are above your window (as opposed to below it in a collapsed state), you can often also see diagnoses of coping such as substance use, disordered eating, gambling and other behavioral addictions. Bipolar, dissociative disorders, personality disorders, and schizophrenia can show up across the spectrum of nervous system states, even within your window, where fawn typically occurs.
I’d like to add, therefore, when you go through the exercises in Self Healing the Root to recognize what your nervous system reactions are and what it feels like when your nervous system shifts into different states, you gain an awareness that enables you to reshape your nervous system. This awareness helps you know when to regulate, how to regulate in the best way for your nervous system, and then make different choices with your new knowledge. When you make a new choice in the face of your observed nervous system reactions, you are choosing healing through action. When you do this over and over, you are integrating healing through repetition. Through repetition over time, you change how your nervous system reacts. You grow your sense of safety and agency, which builds trust and confidence. Does this take time? Yes—probably lots. Is it easy? Not usually. But… Doing this self-guided work can change your life. What does that mean in relation to your mental health diagnoses? Doing work to recognize and break your trigger/trauma loops expands (or reshapes) your window and therefore can lessen the symptoms of your diagnosis, and in many cases, can even help them go away in time. I healed my own C-PTSD symptoms in this way, starting 7 years ago. Remember, mental health “disorders” are often injuries and symptoms of injuries, not life sentences, and certainly aren’t who you are.
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