Treating Adrenal Fatigue with Body Psychotherapy
If you are being diagnosed with adrenal fatigue, where cortisol levels have been elevated for so long the adrenal no longer are able to keep up with production, you are given orders to reduce your stress loads, and it again is stressful.
Something has to give. Your career ambitions, time with friends, or yourself. Sometimes, if you are a new mother, things get doubly difficult. You have already stopped working, your baby needs you almost all the time, and you CANNOT crumble at this juncture. So you seek out a medical professional.
What can be helpful here? You have already started using herbs and supplements with adaptogenic function to help with adrenal function. You have already started eating better for your body. Still, something is amiss.
The Nervous System?
Perhaps, it is the nervous system that has gone awry. An over-activated nervous system may express as sympathetic over-activation, or it may express as parasympathetic over-activation.
Over-activation of the sympathetic nervous system presents as palpitations, panic attacks, chronic muscular tension, inability to sleep or relax, amongst other things. You may have racy thoughts, worry too much or behave in a hypervigilant manner. Some of you may even have rage outbursts and feel that you are ‘not yourself.’
Over-activation of the parasympathetic nervous system present as low energy, low muscle tone, poor digestive function, and a compromised immune system. You may also feel depressed and incapable of connecting with people, preferring to be in your own space, but also feeling the disconnect of isolation.
Some of you may experience concurrent over-activation, with diarrhea alternating with constipation, super-tight muscles in one part of the body compensating for weak muscles elsewhere; anxiety and distress together with flat apathy.
Body Psychotherapy
What can help is a rewiring of your nervous system. This can be done in several way, but it is usually an integrated approach that helps. This is because everybody is so different, and some ways work better for some people.
It can be done with body psychotherapy sessions. We will use a carefully chosen mix of bodywork modalities, as well as other methods that will help you discharge of latent stress by connecting your mind and your body.
We will understand your instinctual brain, discover your existing resources, and learn how to access these resources when they are needed. For those of you stuck in hyperarousal, we will learn discharge sympathetic overwhelm. For those stuck in dissociative state that result in depression and a lack of motivation, we will calibrate the nervous system so that once again it can oscillate healthily between relaxed and stressful states.
Depending on the client, we will use tools of craniosacral therapy, visceral manipulation as well as acupuncture to reconnect the body to the brain, and to create new neural pathways in the brain.
