Set the Stage for Powerful Synergy
When you learn about therapy or self-help for symptoms like long-haul Covid, depression, and pain, you learn about one treatment at a time. More advanced approaches might be called “integrative” and involve more than one treatment. They do work together, but there are things about integration that many people miss.
This article is part of a series where I show you how three key ingredients of therapy and self-help can work together in surprising ways. Right now, you’re going to learn about a valuable “side-effect” that you’re probably hearing about for the first time.
As a therapist who has decades of experience with this combination of ingredients, I’m still amazed at how valuable it can be, but also amazed at how this is not getting into public awareness. So I’m making it my mission to make it easy to understand and to do as self-care, not just with a therapist.
Right now, I’ll share a key “side-effect” that can be life-changing, and how to achieve it.
Attacking “Mystery Symptoms”
This article focuses on the mystery symptoms that don’t have a good medical explanation but won’t go away. For example, I mentioned long-haul Covid, but sometimes they are emotional symptoms like depression. By now you’ve probably heard about how symptoms can get “stuck” like an on switch that keeps reproducing them. We know this is a reality because of phantom limb pain, where there definitely is not a physical location for the feelings that are happening. We also know that, with the right somatic work, long-term symptoms can really improve.
But there’s a problem that binds us even more to these symptoms: it’s the confusing mix of uncertainties about what is making us worse or keeping us from moving forward. You don’t just have the symptoms that are the most obvious; there are emotional reactions and there are sensitivities to various things that you’re learning to detect and handle. For these things, “handle” might simply mean getting them out of your life. Those sensitivities could be as simple as doing too much in a day, too much exercise, or emotional triggers like a type of person or attitude.
But all this can become a confusing, distracting, fatiguing, disempowering mess. Let’s talk about an important way to turn this into clarity.
The “Side Effect” That Changed My Life
When you do successful somatic work that combines the unifying ingredients, you can get a remarkable side-effect that can lead to a huge improvement that frees you to make further progress as you continue. It can make you less willing to tolerate the things that are making you worse. You don’t just become more aware of problems—you become more motivated to actually do something about them. There is this feeling of clarity that can emerge.
This happened to me at an important point in my recovery from long COVID. My only intention at the time was to get that all-important shift from negative to positive symptoms. (That is a fascinating part of the process I will be sharing in guided experiences, articles, and videos.)
Doing this unified work often produces unexpected improvements, and here is what happened to me: I suddenly became much more aware of something in my diet that I was reacting to. But that’s not all: I didn’t just notice it and file it away like I had before. I became genuinely intolerant of continuing to put up with it. I felt more determined—almost militant—about making the change. This is the kind of “clarity shift” that comes from unified somatic work.
But I can’t stress enough that this is NOT what I expected. It isn’t what I was trying to achieve. What you usually hear about with this kind of somatic work is making your negative symptoms (sick, pain, depression, or whatever) less powerful. And that is a benefit that I was getting from the work, but this “side effect” was a wonderful boost that I didn’t know I was going to get because the problem was not clear to me.
The shift was remarkable. Suddenly, it felt easier to change. I had to admit that deep down, I already knew this dietary change needed to happen. But with everything else going on in my life and feeling sick and inconsistent, I needed this process to give me the mental leverage to finally make it a priority.
This is the real power of somatic work: it doesn’t just give you insights—it gives you the inner drive to act on what you already know needs to change.
This unified somatic work deserves a solid explanation as well as instructional materials. For this short article, I’ll start by telling you what the main ingredients are:
The Three Ingredients: Memory Work, Somatics, and Hypnosis
When you combine these ingredients in your somatic work, meditation, or relaxation, you can accomplish things that previously you’d have to stumble into out of sheer luck.
Here are the three main ingredients:
- Memory Work (Desensitization): This is about helping your brain process memories or feelings that keep you stuck in symptoms. This work frees you to take wisdom from your lived experience as well as to “take out the trash” by separating toxic feelings from the good feelings that have been hidden from you. Techniques like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) help your brain reprocess these memories so they don’t trigger as much stress or pain. This includes symptoms that are stuck in the “on” position. We don’t usually think of them as memories, but they act a lot like memories, and can be helped or even cured with this work.
- Body Awareness (Somatics): This work empowers the memory work by making your physical and emotional feelings part of the process in a powerful way. It allows you to tune into your body in a way that helps it feel safe and positive again—maybe better than you can recall as you think back through your life. Illness, injury, and emotional stress can all turn into symptoms that are stuck in the “on” position. Somatics helps you move from “fight or flight” into a positive reconnection with your true self as a positive, fully alive organism.
- Hypnosis or Relaxation: Deep relaxation is a key ingredient to the memory work. It separates your good feelings and memories from the harmful ones so that you can, in a sense, “purify” your memory network. This is a proven, time-tested piece of the recovery puzzle. Desensitization, as clinicians call this kind of memory work, is made possible by relaxation or any similar “state shift” that produces feelings that are incompatible with the negative ones. I’ll be explaining more about this in other publications, because it’s so simple, people have trouble accepting it.
Do it Now, for Free
You can have a guided experience right now. This one is a very general self-esteem focus, with very strong body awareness relaxation. It doesn’t do the targeted memory work, but it’s very good for getting started with the ingredients as an overall experience.
The description: “Inner Sanctuary delivers deep, soothing relaxation with self-esteem messages. Spoken by Robert A. Yourell, a clinician with decades of licensed experience. Time: 22 min. plus 8 min. of ocean surf sounds. Details: Ericksonian hypnotic language, embedded self-esteem prompts, no subliminals. High-quality stereo audio.”
