The face of mental illness

Doesn't much look like it does it? Me and all the gear I used to play with most of the time. Been a while since this shot.

On Christmas Day of 2011, I had a nervous breakdown. I was on medical duty, and as any volunteer knows, especially those of us in small towns, who make up 80% of the firefighter/EMTs in the US, you will eventually end up on a call involving someone you know. This was the one for me. The perfect Storm. The straw that broke the camels back.

Interestingly, I didn't know what the awkwardly named "psychological" trauma was. I knew to look for whatever made you bleed too much, what made you not breathe enough, or what made you think you were an alien, or Joan of Arc, or Francis Bacon.

On Christmas Day, I crashed under the weight of my own sorrow, losses, and the neurophysiological madness that trauma really is. Without knowing what it was. And I stayed that way for some time. At the time I started to recover, I had left my home and marriage, and was encountering the reality of a malignant growth on my back.

I was introduced to tremoring as the evolutionary built in process to heal trauma in late 2013. And wow, what a tool. As I started healing, over the first two years my path and identified diagnosis looked like this: General "trauma" ► PTSD ► ACE score ► Childhood non-malevolent neglect and some malevolent abuse, aka developmental trauma. It was a collection of dots that finally revealed the picture of what I had been dealing with all my life: the childhood behaviors, the addictions, the imposter syndrome, the freeze, the hypervigilance, the dissociations, the emotional inabilities, the so-so grades, the trouble with relationships all through my life. The lack of boundaries, putting up[ with way more than I should have on jobs. All the while dealing with the inner shame of what a irreparably broken underserving loser I was and the craziness not knowing what was causing it or how to deal with it. And as I write these words, I realize that had i said something I might even now still be living with all that shyt and having issues with all the different medication I could/would have been on to mute the symptoms. I am very glad I didn't have the ability to speak up in this case!

A lot of my life could have been easily labeled as "mental health issues." The root of it all was my trauma. And despite having gone to therapists for my issues, never once was trauma addressed. Until I met Dr. Berceli, and started to heal via the evolutionary neurophysiological tremor he taught me how to activate and use. All those symptoms above, and more? Gone. The mental health stuff? Healed, and not surprisingly, much of it has a root in trauma.

If you're having questions about this sort of thing, do a little investigating. Here are just two assessments you can take to sort of snapshot what your life was like. Some issues you might have to deal with. And let me say that you don't need talk therapy to do it. I never talked about my stuff in my healing. I can now, and do as a matter of marketing and story sharing. I'm not ashamed to do so, I don't get choked up, other than with the absolute joy of the freedom of being healed.

On this mental health day, consider that the issue of your mental health my be in your neurophysiology. In your body first and foremost. And not between your ears where the craziness feels like it's living, or in the heart that to me, often felt like a ossified because of how wounded it was. You don't need to talk about it or even have a diagnosis to heal it. Or even remember it. Your body knows all that. Healing is very possible.