Learned Response From My Immune System?

[ScottyVP]

Can the body remember the a way to deal with illness away from the typical immunological (CD4 etc) in a far more general way?

A bit of a back story to my thinking/question: about 7 years ago I got (presumed) paralytic shellfish poisoning in South Africa, it killed a few people and nearly killed me too. The symptoms were back cramps that were strong enough to cause severe hyperthermia, very high blood pressure and sickness that took about 2/3 weeks to abate with a 30+kg weight loss.

Survived, chin up and carry on. However... About a month later it happened again, while flying back to the UK, with the same symptoms but no shellfish eaten.

So this pattern continued fairly regularly for about a year, with slight changes in symptoms such as more pronounced migraine over back pain, and slowly calmed down. I did however notice that almost any illness or physical stressor would result in the repetition of some or all of the original symptoms to a lesser or greater degree, even this year I got the Australian flu and sure enough I get the same symptoms.

So is there a reflex action to a more general immunity away from specific responses or is my immune response damaged by such a strong stressor?

 

[Waynish]

Probably recurring from when you got sick. Look into recovering completely from the damage :)

 

[Dave Clark]

Sounds like what they call re-tracing. I don't know much about it, except that it usually is a temporary thing, where the body's similar pathways are woken up, but then if healing is happening it should not last. Maybe do a search on that term and you might get more info on it.

 

[InChristAlone]

Yeah sounds like such a sickness was extremely traumatic for your body it probably thought it would die so you've been stuck in a kind of post traumatic stress disorder. I would go in that direction if I were you. Look up somatic experiencing by Peter Levine.

 

[zewe]

Yeah sounds like such a sickness was extremely traumatic for your body it probably thought it would die so you've been stuck in a kind of post traumatic stress disorder. I would go in that direction if I were you. Look up somatic experiencing by Peter Levine.

Great advice! I have many of Peter Levine's books. The thing with near death experiences [yours or others] that you've gone through is that the body remembers and the energy of that experience gets trapped in the body.

For those with severe PTSD, researchers find that trauma is physically manifest within the brain’s ancient limbic system [where “fight or flight” resides], which tends to become activated more quickly than the cognitive, rational part of the brain.

This means that when a person is reminded of a past trauma, it is relived instead of rationally remembered—the flashback activates the brain in the same way it did during the moment of the trauma.

Furthermore, those who experience trauma cannot always access or describe their experience because it first becomes encapsulated physically within the bodies via the limbic system, and is not processed by the language portion of the brain. So trauma is felt instead of cognitively remembered. Language helps integrate experience into a narrative; without it, the body and mind relives trauma as if it is happening in the moment.

Until you access that, you will continue to have those physiological symtoms when triggered.

Sometimes you can't understand that something could be a trigger....like feeling, let's say, heat in your body.

Another pioneering doctor/author on Somatic Healing is, Bessel Van Der Kolk. Look for his book, "The Body Keeps Score."

I used to listen to this on a free audio, years ago, and tried to find that link for you....alas, I didn't find it. The book is widely available, however.