Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The warmest day of the summer in the Chicagoland area recently, was of course the day our AC decided to suddenly stop working. Interesting sense of timing these things have! Mike showed up right on time and was curious since he had been out to check the unit just 3 weeks ago and all was fine. He went directly to the unit outside, and as I watched from the window, in 2 minutes the fan blade started whirling again. I was relieved and when he came back around the front of the house I eagerly asked, “What did you do?” He said one word, “Earwig”. At first I thought he was joking but then he explained how one of those creepy little bugs had crawled right between the point of contacts on the 220 voltage circuit and blocked the flow of electricity! Money well spent.
Wow! I thought about how such a small thing as a bug, strategically wedged in between two points of contact could shut things down. It made me think of my work and studies with the brain and nervous system circuitry this last year, as I continue to discover the amazing impact of Brainspotting therapy on the circuits of the brain. Trauma can create blockages that result in the shutdown or inadequate flow of neuro-chemical current to other parts of the brain system. This maladaptive survival mechanism, although at one time spared us from overwhelming threat, now later in our development actually becomes an additional source of threat as the flow of energy and information in the nervous system highway gets impaired.
An interesting example of this (I mentioned last time, we now have ways of rewiring and freeing these outdated modes of operating), is demonstrated by a client I saw recently who came in because her “alarm system” was in an overactive state due to both past and more recent experiences with physical injury or threat. Her husband had a sudden and serious medical problem last year which pushed the stored accumulation of unprocessed and blocked energy way over the edge, resulting in continuous worry and anxiety as to when the next bomb would go off. Although she did not tell me this initially, for some time she had this reaction to whenever she would hear a siren from a police car or fire truck, where she would experience a fight/flight response and go into an anxiety reaction. After the first session of Brainspotting, where we began to “clear out” and mobilize blocked networks related to a number of difficult physically threatening situations to her or a family member, she reported that the anxiety reaction to these sounds had stopped! Done…..Finished! We were both amazed and, it has been at least four weeks now and the physical symptoms, particularly increased heart rate, have not returned.We are removing her “Earwig” and allowing new and more adaptive points of contact to be made. Amazing what happens when we give the brain a little help and get the bugs out! When unfrozen the brain does what it knows perfectly how to do, make new connections and resolve the problems. AMAZING!!!!