232: Physical Pain and Health Issues
Anxiety, after your child dies, is quite common and an experience that feels absolutely uncontrollable. Go watch my free video at meganhillukka.com about anxiety and grief if you’ve been dealing with this. Even if your anxiety feels somewhat manageable and you can function with it day to day, it’s absolutely possible to lessen your anxiety, or even have it disappear completely. So again, go to meganhillukka.com
One thing I haven’t really touched on in the podcast yet is physical pain and health problems after your child dies. The absolute stress of what you are experiencing and going through absolutely affects not only your mental and emotional state but your physical state as well. I was so sick so many times after Aria died. My immune system was just not there because my body was under so much stress.
So I actually want to share a little bit about the Rapid Resolution perspective that I’ve been learning.
So, kind of the way we think is that the way the mind processes data and information is where emotions, thoughts, and pain comes from. So if your body is in pain, it’s because the processor in your mind is causing the pain to try to get you to do something. Or if you are feeling an emotion, it’s because the processor in your mind is trying to get you to do something.
And when your mind continues to perceive a threat and your body is in a constant state of anxiety, fear, panic, worry, whatever it is, everything in your body slows down. So if your mind is perceiving a threat, all the rest and restoration shuts down. There’s no time to recharge, regenerate, heal, and do the work that your body does so well, because it’s more worried about keeping you alive from the perceived threat that your mind is reading.
I have a more personal story to share with you, and it might be kind of long, and again when I share these stories with you, I have no idea if you appreciate them or not. But since it’s my podcast, I get to share them anyways and hopefully it will either be interesting to you, resonate with you in some way, or help you know that if you are experiencing health problems or pain in your body that you are not alone.
So, I get this pain during pregnancy. It’s pretty horrible and makes pregnancy very difficult for me. It’s like a ligament pain that most people get if they stand up quickly or move fast, but for them, it lasts for a couple of seconds to a few minutes. My pain doesn’t go away. I know I’m pregnant because I get the pain, and then it comes on and off for the rest of my pregnancy sometimes daily, sometimes a few times a week, sometimes a few times a day, where I’m pretty much debilitated with pain and can’t move. My kids are kind of on their own when this pain strikes because I can’t move.
So, I’ve tried everything to help with this pain. Literally, everything it feels like. I have asked all my midwives about it, as I’ve had a few different ones. I’ve gone to the chiropractor, I’ve gotten acupuncture, I’ve gotten massages, myofascial release, taken magnesium, taken collagen, massaged my belly, stretched those areas on my body, done pelvic floor exercises and work, gone to physical therapy, done a stomach rehab program after my babies, worn belly support bands, had Justin do a robozo movement on my belly, go swimming in water to take the weight off my belly. I don’t know …what else have I done?
The biggest thing that seemed to help among these things was acupuncture. Though it didn’t take away my pain, it made the pain go further and further apart, and less intense at a time. But the thing with that for me has been it’s not a long-term solution. It’s something I would have to go weekly for during my whole pregnancy to help manage the pain. It doesn’t take away the root cause of the pain. I am always looking for the root solution, not just a band-aid. So…I did do acupuncture…but then this pregnancy we’ve been living on the bus and traveling and getting physical care like that is a lot more difficult so I haven’t gotten much besides my midwife appointments which have been over the phone.
So. I was going to physical therapy, and my physical therapist was so puzzled because she could not recreate the pain. She told me that normally when somebody has pain, you can move the body in a certain way, tighten a certain muscle or something, push on a muscle, and you can recreate the pain so then you have more of an idea of what’s going on. But there was nothing she could do to make this pain come, so she couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.
This was towards the end of all the things I’ve tried. And I started to wonder, I wonder if this is more than just something physical in my body. What if it’s energetic? What if it’s emotional? Because I was 36 weeks pregnant when Aria died. Did my body or mind in some way make pregnancy traumatic and painful? That in some way it believes that pregnancy is dangerous or that there are emotions or trauma stuck somewhere?
As I thought about it, I have had other pains in pregnancy, but this particular pain I don’t think started until my pregnancies after Aria died. So that’s why I came to this conclusion.
There’s a company called Gemisphere that I’ve bought gemstone necklaces from, and one day I called them wondering if they would have any ideas for a necklace I could buy to try to help with this pain. The person I talked to recommended that I try Carnelian gemstone. But at the time, the only carnelian they had available was the precious gemstone which was pretty expensive so I didn’t end up buying it. But when I hung up, I remembered that I had bought a carnelian gemstone, so I went and got the stone and put it on my belly when I got the pain. I was in shock. The pain started to come and how it has gone before is it comes on slowly and just gets more intense and more intense to extreme and there’s nothing I can do, I just have to wait 30-60 minutes until it goes away. But when I put this stone there, it started coming and then it just slowly ebbed away. It never got intense and within 5 minutes the pain was gone.
I couldn’t believe it. I had to have it happen a few times before I could tell Justin about it because it was so weird and odd to me that this little rock, after everything I’ve tried could help with the pain I’ve been dealing with.
So, that was how I managed to get to the end of that pregnancy.
But then, here I am pregnant again, and with every pregnancy, I just want to figure it out so that there’s no pain. I got a Carnelian necklace from Gemisphere, so I always have it with me and can use it when I need it, which has been the only thing that has helped and helped me manage the pain and make it easier.
But then there are times when the necklace doesn’t help for some reason and then it’s awful. But maybe it’s because I haven’t reenergized the gems enough…I’m not sure.
But then here are a few other things that came to me to try. I did two energy sessions with a lady before I left Minnesota that felt so amazing. I just loved the experience of them, though I didn’t know if they helped much with my pain. But I was thinking that I didn’t keep a diary like saying when my pain happened, how intense, how long, those kinds of things, so it could have gotten better and I was just looking for it to be completely gone.
So- I thought about doing more sessions long distance but I just never did.
Then, enter RRT and the training that I was going through. I saw sessions where they were able to clear people’s physical pain, and I actually worked with a mom as well where I assisted her in clearing pain in her womb from her trauma of baby loss. So then, I was like, okay, I guess I need to try this out on my belly pain.
And so I was looking into the energetic, emotional side of it, and from the Rapid Resolution Therapy perspective, it’s more that there’s a blip or something stuck in the way my mind is processing information that needs to be cleared so that my mind can read the information properly and not send pain signals for no reason.
So the first session I had done, the rest of that day, any time my pain came, I had a process I did where I could think the pain away in a sense. I would tell my mind that the pain was unnecessary but thank you, and I had some things that I would inhale and exhale. I know it sounds funny, but if you do a session with me, that will make some more sense to you.
And that whole day, every time I did that, the pain would just go away. Which is so weird to me that I could consciously think the pain away in a sense.
But after the first few days, my pain came back with a vengeance. And then I did another session and I had a pretty long break from the pain, and it’s here again. And I’m still able on some level to talk to my mind and tell it the pain is unnecessary, that there is no threat that I need to be protected from.
I was hoping with this episode that I could have a complete healing and the pain would be gone entirely, but I guess that’s not the case. I might try more sessions, but for now, so far, the best things that have helped me have been my Carnelian necklace and Rapid Resolution Therapy.
And that’s helping me make it to the end of this pregnancy. Again, I was wishing it would be completely over and I would like amazing, how amazing that this pain is gone, but that’s not my reality, and I just thought it was an interesting story in my life to share with you.
I’ve just thought a lot during this, that you never know what someone is going through, and there’s so much emotional pain in grief which is debilitating, but so is physical pain. Physical pain to this extent is not something I’ve really dealt with in my life. Like I’ve had a lot of pains but not like this where it’s constant and feels pretty extreme.
And so, for those of you dealing with health issues, physical pain, and just not feeling well in your physical body, I’m sending you a huge hug. Grief can definitely cause so many things to happen in your physical body as well.
Have you felt anxiety after your child died?
The racing mind, unable to sleep, waiting for the next bad thing to happen, unable to breathe, panicky kind of anxiety, whole body riddled with anxiety?
Watch my free video on anxiety and grief below!
So that you can think clearly, feel calm in your body, and live your life without the chains of anxiety.
