The Awareness Beneath the Symptoms

This is a foundational concepts episode about symptoms being your body calling for attention.

Welcome to Brain Health and Healing. I'm Sandra Lee. This show is for people living with head injuries and the families and supporters who love them. If you are ready to reclaim your life, identity, and dreams for the future, you are in the right place.

I couldn't get out of bed. My back hurt so much. I had to pull with my arms to kind of roll over and get my legs over the side of the bed to go to the bathroom. In the early episodes of Brain Health and Healing, you heard me say, symptoms are your body's call for attention. This is a foundational concepts episode. You may want to listen to this episode more than once any time you want to review. Everything I share is for educational and informational purposes only. It's not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or condition. Please consult your physician for any health issue and before

you make any changes to your health practices. So I used to have chronic pain in my lower back and in my neck and head. In 1986, I rolled my car, hit my head and fractured my frontal bone. I'm extraordinarily grateful that I didn't have any noticeable symptoms of brain injury. However, not having symptoms, I received no care. What began three years later was serious back and neck pain. Receiving chiropractic care and massage got me through that really intense period, and the pain was more than just from the car accident. I was seriously stuck. I was unhappy and had disastrous

relationships, and I was completely unaware of how to do anything about this. Trying to figure it out, I became a massage therapist. It took years of therapy, taking classes, and working with practitioners to start understanding what was going on. At first, if you asked me how I felt, I was confused. I didn't have an answer. I just didn't know what I thought. I didn't know what I felt, and I didn't know what I wanted. My strategy was always escape. When uncomfortable questions came, I shut down and left the conversation. Beneath it all, the truth was, I hated myself and wished I had

never been born. Early life events led me to feel helpless and overwhelmed. The truth was, my childhood was actually really good. There was no abuse, and we had everything we needed. Yet I felt like I was bad, and I hurt people, and I was afraid to bother people. All of this was stored in my body as tension and pain. I discussed in episode one about how, as a massage therapist, I started making connections between my clients' symptoms and the stresses and issues in their lives. I started seeing symptoms as calls for help. I learned terrific language for explaining this during

neuro-linguistic programming training. NLP talks about the conscious mind and the unconscious mind; these concepts are so useful for helping make sense of life experiences. Now, I'm not saying this is the truth. However, looking at things this way helps me make sense of my life, and then I do something about it. Looking at it this way empowers me to help myself. Everything that has happened to me is stored in my body, my energy field, and my mental, emotional, and spiritual states. Let me repeat that: everything that has ever happened to me is stored in the body, in my energy field and in my

mental, emotional, and spiritual states, there are things that I am consciously aware of. I think about them and talk about them. This is my conscious mind. So what I think and talk about is what I consciously know, and there are things that I am not consciously aware of. These are held by my unconscious mind. I don't know about them consciously. They could be things that happened, and beliefs and assumptions about myself and what's possible for me in my life, but they are not conscious. I'm not. Of them, there may be things that happened that felt dangerous to me, particularly early in my

life. Day to day, I am not consciously aware of these things. If I had to think about all of this stuff all of the time, I would never get anything done. I would be overwhelmed. I'm not aware of it yet. It runs my life.

My unconscious mind protects me by holding on to beliefs and assumptions outside of my awareness for my survival. My unconscious mind is holding on to things that have happened and ultimately would be beneficial for me to resolve, heal, and release, so they no longer have an impact on my life. They affect my behavior because they affect my beliefs. For me to address these things, they have to become conscious. I started this conversation talking about symptoms. Now let's get back to them. Symptoms are one of the primary ways that your body and unconscious mind have to get your attention.

Symptoms are a call for attention. This enables you to provide healing for what has been unconscious. Let apply this to my experience. I felt a tremendous amount of pain in my body. I was exceptionally unhappy, and my marriage was disastrous, and I was unconscious of all of it. My body experiencing pain was screaming for my attention. It's taken decades of therapy and training, working with practitioners, and over time, I got the message, learned the lessons, and today, everything is so much better. Learning about the conscious and unconscious minds and listening to the messages

coming from my symptoms dramatically sped my healing process. Now the pain is mostly gone. Life and my relationships are so much better. So that's today's foundational concepts episode about symptoms and about the conscious and unconscious minds. If you ever want to hear this message about symptoms and the unconscious mind again, come back and listen again, and remember the brain heals itself every day of your life. Your body heals itself. Breathe.