Louise Hay
I grew up with the book You Can Heal Your Life (1984) by Louise Hay, so have always had the understanding that how I thought about myself and my world manifested in my body. If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it to everyone! Louise Hay says, “I believe that we create every so-called illness in our body. The body, like everything else in life, is a mirror of our inner thoughts and beliefs. Our body is always talking to us; we just need to take the time to listen. Every cell within our body responds to every single thought we think and every word we speak.”
It was through practicing therapy that I was able see that it wasn’t just self talk, but the social, cultural & emotional worlds that also impacted one’s health. Then I became more aware of the central nervous system and how it was changed by life, how parts of the body became ‘disconnected’ from one’s perception due to a dysregulated nervous system. I learned that trauma creates a block in the body system causing the body to compensate, which seems to show up through disease, big seemingly uncontrollable emotions, feeling overwhelmed, uncontrollable weight gain or weight loss, addiction, mental illness and hopelessness. When we are aware that something has traumatized us, we can seek healing, but when we are unaware, or it happened outside of the body’s ability to remember, it helps to have someone who can look into you and help you heal ~ energy healing.
Dr. Gabor Maté, MD
I have always believed in a connection between stress and overall health. Many of us have experienced catching a cold due to being overwhelmed in our lives; the body’s immune system decreasing due to stress seems to be well known. However, I have recently begun to understand the connection between long-term illness, autoimmune diseases and trauma.
Dr. Gabor Maté, Hungarian-Canadian physician and author, has become an expert in addiction, childhood trauma and mind-body health; his book When The Body Says No (2003) explores the stress-disease connection. Dr. Maté discusses how research has shown that uncertainty, the lack of information, and the loss of control are the universal factors that lead to stress and that stress affects and involves every tissue in the body.
He shows, using case studies from his years in practice, how long term stress, emotional, physical, spiritual, or mental lead to disease in the body; many people who suffer with autoimmune disorders also suffer within their own minds and nervous systems. “What has happened is that we have lost touch with the gut feelings designed to be our warning system. The body mounts a stress response, but the mind is unaware of the threat. We keep ourselves in physiologically stressful situations, with only a dim awareness of distress, or no awareness at all.” Dr. Maté describes how the world today has created a higher baseline of stress for many people to where they believe they can handle it, but the body is trying to tell us to slow down and the mind continues to believe “I can handle it.” The body then, needing a break, develops a disease that forces the person to slow down and take a look at their life.