Category Archives: Neuroplastic Symptoms

The Drama of the Upside-Down Plate: What I Learned About Emotions as a Child

For many years, I thought I was just “too emotional.” I hadn’t learned to allow and to express my feelings. They felt too big because they were stuck inside, and because of what I had been taught was normal.

My feelings often felt too intense, too easily triggered. Everyone else seemed to have it together while I was a mess inside. It never occurred to me that other people might be having the same feelings—they just weren’t showing them. I was comparing my insides to other people’s outsides.

It also didn’t occur to me that burying my emotions might make me sick.

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How I Learned Not To Abandon Myself

(and What a Mispronounced Name Taught Me)

My body had been speaking what I refused to acknowledge: I was abandoning myself to take care of everyone else, and my nervous system wasn’t having it anymore.

While postpartum with my second child, I was hospitalized for severe depression and anxiety after suffering months of chronic dizziness and nausea. I was released from the hospital after twelve days of inpatient treatment. During those days, I kept solid food down for the first time in months, started to have an appetite, and was just beginning to be able to sleep through the night. I was seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

When I got home and was back in the stressful environment I had left, I immediately felt like no recovery had occurred at all. My husband expected me to be back to 100% right aw…ay, and every stressful moment, even the sound of my son’s voice (needing something from me!), caused a wave of dread, dizziness and nausea to come right back. Clearly, I hadn’t fully recovered yet. So I got put in a full-day intensive outpatient program for six weeks, so I could ease back into “life on the outside.”

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