Retrain Your Amygdala to Overcome Chronic Pain: Why Resolving Long Term Emotional Stress is Crucial for Recovery
One of the keys to overcoming chronic pain is to resolve the emotions that keep you operating out of your amydalae, the fight, flight or freeze centers of your brain.
Simply put, resolving long term emotional stress is crucial for your recovery from chronic pain.
It’s my experience as a medical intuitive healer that you won’t permanently relieve your chronic pain — no matter how many heavy duty drugs or natural supplements you take — until you resolve the emotional patterns that caused them.
Over the years, I have worked with countless clients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia and other multi-system, autoimmune painful illnesses not easily alleviated by traditional medicine.
Clients have come to me even on oycodone, one of the strongest opioids, and I can attest to the fact that no amount of schedule 2 narcotics can accomplish the degree of long-term pain relief you can experience from giving up the emotional patterns you hold at the cellular level.
Medical science now corroborates the fact that retraining the amygdala, the alarm center for your brain, and becoming less emotionally hypersensitive is essential for resolving these illnesses as there is a direct connection between hyperactive amygdalae, inflammation and chronic pain.
Science has now proven that long-term activation of your amygdalae will cause inflammation in the body, leading to chronic pain and depression.
Simply put, if you are stuck in chronic emotional stress you will be certain to stuck in chronic pain.
It is my experience as a medical intuitive healer with 23 years of experience in natural healing that the key to resolving chronic pain is to release the emotional patterns in your amygdalae that have kept you stuck.
What Are Your Amygdalae?
Although people often talk about your amygdala, singular, you actually have two amygdalae.
These are football shaped structures located on either side of your brain in your temporal lobes. They are considered part of your limbic system, the brain system responsible for managing your emotions, long-term memory, behavior, motivation and smell.
In my book Unlimited Energy Now, I explained that being stuck operating out of your amygdalae — as opposed to out of the frontal lobes of your pain — is a major cause not only of chronic pain but also chronic exhaustion.
“It’s my experience that you can’t actually clear any illness unless you also release the emotions that caused it,” I wrote in Unlimited Energy Now.
“When you understand the correlation between clearing your emotions — not just talking about them or even understanding them but actually moving beyond them — and your unlimited energy, you will want to take the steps necessary to stay emotionally clear.”
I like to keep things simple so you can understand, so here’s the way I like to explain how your amygdalae operate.
When information comes into the brain, the amygdalae act like the control tower at the airport.
You can locate your amygdala about three quarters of an inch inside your brain about at the level of your hair line in front of your ears.
If you feel safe, the amygdalae send the signals to your frontal lobes, where you can think logically, produce your own natural antidepressants and anti anxiety neurotransmitters.
You take in the information and can then act from all the wisdom you have gathered throughout your lifetime.
If, on the other hand, the information hits your amygdalae and you feel any sense of stress or alarm, your amygdalae send the signals to the back of your brain, your reptilian brain, where you simply fight, flee or freeze.
When you operate out of your reptilian brain, you are in survival mode.
Your muscles lock in chronic tension, your inflammatory markers go up, your breath tightens.
All logic goes out the window.
You become unable to access the wisdom of your frontal lobes and you simply react.
This is known as an amygdala hijack.
You could be a Harvard-trained Ph.D. or have years of experience in natural healing and still find yourself stuck in a high degree of physical and emotional pain.
What Are the Emotions That Activate Your Amygdalae?
It’s helpful to understand which emotions trigger your amygdalae to send you into this stuck pattern of chronic pain and tension.
What are these key emotions that trigger your amygdalae? Let me list for you from the chart created by Bruce and Joan Dewe for professional kinesiologists.
- Surprise: stupefaction, shock, stunned, startled, astonishment, dumbfounded, amazement, wonder, dazed, awe
- Disgust: revulsion, scorn, abhorrence, contempt, disdain
- Fear: apprehension, panic, wariness, terror, nervousness, dread, fright, edginess, concern, anxiety, qualm
- Anger: irritability, hatred, exasperation, resentment, annoyance, animosity, outrage, hostility, wrath, fury
- Shame: chagrin, humiliation, mortification, regret, embarrassment, remorse, guilt, contrition
- Sadness: sorrow, melancholy, cheerlessness, self pity, depression, gloom, grief, loneliness, dejection, despair
- Love: acceptance, phileo, friendliness, trust, kindness, affinity, devotion, eros, infatuation, adoration, agape
- Enjoyment: contentment, delight, happiness, rapture, bliss, amusement, relief, satisfaction, thrill, gratification, pride, sensual pleasure, euphoria, whimsy, ecstasy, mania, joy
Just naming the emotions that hold you back is a major step forward because it takes you out of the experiencer into the observer state.
Can you observe your emotions instead of being controlled, strangled, overwhelmed and ruled by them?
If I am doing a medical intuitive healing, the second thing I do after identifying the goal (e.g., a good goal might be, “I JOYFULLY RELEASE THE PAIN IN AN EASY HEALTHY WAY”) is to identify your emotional pattern that has kept you stuck in the pain.
The third thing I do after identifying your emotional pattern is to find the age or ages at which your emotional pattern started.
Then I go about identifying all the triggers and root causes.
Then I proceed with the healing.
It is my experience that until or unless you release the emotions that you are holding all the way not only in your organs and muscles but in your actual cells that you will continue to suffer.
You may experience temporary relief but I have found that if you don’t release the emotional pattern the force of energy of that strong emotion will just morph into another disease pattern in another area of your body.
When I was studying natural healing, we spent hours and hours and hours finding emotional patterns behind every conceivable disease.
Although there are common emotions associated with specific kinds of pain, your emotions will be unique to you because you have had a specific life history and experience.
You are a vibrational being, so ask yourself, “What vibe am I living in today?”
If you suffer from chronic pain, it’s very much worth your while to study the list of emotions I just wrote out for you.
If you are unsure which emotions have you stuck, just ask yourself, “What vibe am I living in today?”
You are a vibrational being.
Your heart is electrical.
Your brain is electrical.
When you stand up, you are of course vertical, and this electricity creates an energy field perpendicular to your body. The new age people call this your aura.
Other people can feel the energy you give out even if you don’t speak about what is bothering you.
All illness and disease — no matter what label you put on it — is slowed down vibration.
As an energy healer, if I put my hands on a painful area, I may feel heat, congestion or a total block.
True healing occurs when you increase your frequency.
You put yourself in the vicinity of high vibration energy — love, beauty, understanding, kindness, forgiveness, fresh air, sunshine and healing foods — and your frequency shifts.
You may yourself have experienced pain relief simply by walking in the park, by giving and receiving hugs, by taking a deep breath and saying a heart-felt prayer.
Or you may have experienced relief from Reiki when I put my hands on you and channel healing energy.
If you are unsure of the emotional patterns that are keeping your chronic pain stuck in place, ask yourself what you notice people bring out in you.
If you constantly feel frozen and unable to move forward in your life, you may be in some degree of surprise. Shock is so disempowering it may shut you down completely I have a whole system of taking you out of shock. You hold shock in every joint in your body — your feet, ankles, knees, hips, wrists, elbows and neck, so if you are suffering from constant joint pain ask yourself if you have experienced shock or surprise.
After 9/11 in 2001, I spent an entire month taking every client who came to me out of shock. You could witness this on the streets of Atlanta as there were fewer cars on the road than usual. Life seemed to come to a halt for awhile as our entire country processed the emotional aftermath of the loss of the twin towers in New York.
If you feel contempt and look down on others, you may be suffering from disgust.
If you can’t relieve your anxiety, you are stuck in fear.
If other people constantly piss you off and make you endlessly frustrated, you are suffering from chronic anger.
If you can’t get over deep embarrassment, you may be suffering from shame.
If you have experienced loss in your life and can’t get out of your depression, you may be stuck in sadness.
It’s interesting to note that even love may activate our amygdalae, but upon reflection we can recall the sense of excitement that we feel when falling in love.
And finally even deep enjoyment may activate your amygdalae when it borders on mania.
Upon humble reflection, what you may notice is whatever you think you experience from out there — outside yourself, in the world from others — actually comes from inside of you.
Whatever you feel deep inside is what you tend to experience in the world today because you project your emotions everywhere.
That’s why learning to release your negativity is an essential life skill for being happy, healthy and pain-free.
What’s the level of your chronic tension?
Once you have humbly acknowledged your emotions, the next key is to move the energy.
Emotions are nothing to be afraid of. They are simply energy in motion — as long as you keep them in motion.
As an acupuncturist friend of mine, now deceased, once said to me, “There are death, taxes and emotions.” These are all unavoidable aspects of human experience.
Even when you are healthy you still experience death, taxes and emotions — the key is how do you handle them?
Failing to keep your emotional energy moving results in stuck energy in the body that any highly trained energy healer such as myself can sense.
Ask yourself these questions:
- On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being none, what is the level of tension in your body?
- On a cale of 0 to 10, with 0 being none, what is your pain today?
- What can you do right now to release the tension, even if you could just reduce your tension by any amount, say 2 percent?
Once you recognize the direct, immutable connection between your chronic tension and your interminable pain, you may motivate yourself to finding even the smallest, easiest ways to lower your tension.
Here are three FREE ways to lower your tension and relieve your pain and suffering that I’ve put together for you:
- Yoga. Visit my yoga poses gallery at this link. Learn from yoga videos at this link. Activate the healing power to release long-term patterns with yoga mudras at this link.
- Qi gong. Follow along to three series of qi gong exercises I filmed just for you at this link.
- Breathwork. Learn a simple, easy and incredibly profound way to release deep emotional tension with pranayama at this link.
The value of these resources is that they are ALL free and can be done anytime, anywhere with no therapist.
All three modalities — yoga, qi gong and breath work — allow you to redirect the energy from the survival centers of your brain to your frontal lobes.
By practicing yoga, qi gong and pranayama, you learn how to live your life with much less stress and thereby much less pain.
You literally retrain your amygdalae.
You can reduce your tension and pain dramatically and in so doing learn the degree to which you have power over your direct experience.
Even if you can reduce your tension by a mere 2 percent — and most certainly probably more than that if you practice yoga, qi gong and breath work regularly — you can experience much less pain.
What happens when you are doing all you can and you are still in pain?
The average client who comes to me for a medical intuitive reading has seen at least seven other practitioners — the medical doctor, the physical therapist, the nutritionist, the psychiatrist, psychologist, energy healer, homeopath, chiropractor and more.
All of these are wonderful, highly effective modalities, but you may need someone who can give you a big picture perspective and integrate healing for your body, energy system, emotions, thoughts and soul.
You may be practicing yoga, qi gong, pranayama, meditating, eating a gluten-free paleo diet and still suffering.
You may even recognize the emotion or emotions that have caused your pain but not been able to totally release the powerful energy of these feelings.
As a new client with chronic pain in her mid-6os said to me this past week, “I’ve talked about my feelings enough.”
She has done decades of talk therapy, is fully aware of her issues but has not been able up to now to release them.
I truly love my work because I consider myself a body detective.
I ask at your soul level:
- Do you need further help with your physical body? This could mean therapeutic exercise, body work, nutrition, supplements, food healing or more. You may need to identify your most stressed organs and give them the love and attention they deserve.
- Do you need assistance with your energy body? This could be breath work, energy healing, chakra balancing, acupuncture, acupressure, hara line healing, chakra repair work, cutting cords between yourself and one or more other individuals or more.
- Do you need emotional work? This may require you to talk about your feelings but it may also mean other non-talk therapies to release your emotional patterns. Emotional clearing is crucial because your feelings can shut down literally any physiological process.
- Do you need to shift your mental body? This could be identifying and changing the thought forms and beliefs that have kept you in a state of hopelessness, despair and distress. These beliefs may not even have started with you. They may be beliefs you inherited from your family or culture that you unconsciously accepted without knowing how or why.
- Finally, do you need healing for your spiritual body? The simplest forms here include forgiveness and prayer but may also include past life regression, reintegrating your soul-body fusion, karmic clearing, release of vows from past lifetimes, clearing of negative spiritual energies and more. The spiritual body is always the most powerful place to work in healing as your soul controls literally every other aspect of your being.
What is healing? Healing happens when you take your power back and address the root causes of your emotional and physical pain.
To set up an appointment for a medical intuitive healing, call 678–612–8816 or email catherine@catherinecarrigan.com. I can work with you by phone, Skype (catherinecarrigan all lower case all one word) or Zoom.us video conference from anywhere in the world.
