I’ve got a new vlog for you today and it’s all about working at a deeper level to help heal adrenal fatigue/burnout. Adrenal fatigue is something a lot of folks experience and it requires work at the level of what I call the ‘stress organs’. Working at this level helps to heal adrenal fatigue but also helps to heal and overcome the many other chronic conditions that accompany adrenal fatigue.
I first learned how to work at this level when I started learning with my colleague and mentor, Kathy Kain. Her work was birthed out of a need to help people who were not getting better with general bodywork, Somatic Experiencing and/or somatic-based practices.
These were people living with and suffering from chronic illnesses such as fibromyalgia, chronic pain, autoimmune diseases as well as other conditions that would render a person highly sensitive to chemicals and electricity. I could go on and list a whole host of other chronic conditions but the key is they all had one overarching theme:
All of these people’s adrenal glands were super fatigued and burnt out.
Through her private practice, asking questions, training students, following the research around The Adverse Childhood Experiences study (The ACE Study), the science of the Polyvagal Theory, her training in bodywork and Somatic Experiencing, Kathy figured out, through trial and error, how to work with what I like to call the ‘stress organs’ so that these unwell and frustrated clients could finally find some peace in body and mind.
What you’ll soon learn if you follow the breadcrumb trails around these topics is that it is untreated trauma from infancy, childhood, and even in utero and past generations that is causing the nervous system’s fight, flight, and freeze responses to be on high alert, along with the entire neuro-physiological and neuro-chemical make-up that ‘thinks’ that the system is still living in a threatening and scary environment.
Because of this, the system defends and mounts responses to this perceived unsafety through its stress organs.
While this might seem complex, in essence it can be boiled down to the simple fact that the body’s physiology still thinks it is living in a bad situation and it is continually trying to protect itself from dangerous circumstances, even though those circumstances might have been in infancy, at birth or even in utero.
This level of charge and what we call ‘survival energy’, burns out the human system and it especially impacts the hot spots that react to stress. These are what I term the stress organs: the kidneys, adrenals, gut, and brainstem.
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When I closed my private practice a few years back I was solely working at this ‘stress organ’ level with my clients and it was evident how important, powerful, and healing this deeper nervous system regulation work was.
In this week’s video I explain what working at this level is all about.
What you’ll learn in this video is that working at this deeper physiological level takes time but it absolutely works if you put in that time.
So if you or someone you know is struggling with adrenal fatigue or the other chronic conditions that all too often accompany it, I hope you’ll take some time to watch this new video or pass it along to them.
If you’d like to learn how to work at this stress organ level that I talk about in this week’s video, be sure to check out my online program SmartBody SmartMind™ (SBSM). Enrollment opens February 15, 2021. Get on the waitlist for this revolutionary program so you don’t miss out on one of the best ways to learn how to become your own medicine.
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Resources I Mention In The Vlog
VIDEO: Q&A with Irene – Healing Trauma, Anxiety, Cathartic Practices & MORE!
BOOK: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
BOOK: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection
BOOK: The Brain’s Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity