I’ve been writing in this column about trapped fight-or- flight responses as the origin of post-traumatic stress disorder. The theory is that the primitive part of the brain that controls our nervous system’s response to threat needs to come to completion any time it is startled into action. The body wants to fight or flee and if it cannot, the energy of those powerful impulses are stuck. Imagine your accelerator and brake both […]
It’s a scary idea. That we might have a disease process going on with no symptoms or signs to help us know that there’s a threat. This is the concept that drives the importance of routine physical exams and doctors visits. And certainly some of the diseases that shorten our lives or lead to disabilities can be discovered in their earliest stages in these routine health maintenance visits. But there are some that cannot.
I discussed in my last column the work of Peter A. Levine1. He is the father of what’s called Somatic Experiencing2. It is his hypothesis that many diseases are […]