Today’s thoughts are coming a bit late as this Monday started like most Mondays.
Why is that?
Even with a seven day work week, I still get a case of “the Mondays”. There should be no back-to anything when there is no break-from anything. That aside, it was and is a Monday.
I love Tuesdays. Tuesdays are the most normal feeling day in all the days of the week for me. Tuesdays are brown. They start with coffee on the back porch and end with a walk in the park. Tuesdays feel like grandfather clocks and crocheted blankets.
Mondays are like moving through tar.
So, let’s move through that tar and warm it up a bit. This morning, that is a perfect picture as I am thinking about moving through the uncomfortable to get back to the comfortable more quickly.
Around 37 years of age, I started to suspect I may have the “female presentation” and form of autism. Highly masked and “highly sensitive” myself, I started seeing traits in my children that could be defined as “on spectrum” and began reading everything that I could get my hands on to help them.
As I read more and more about the autism spectrum, some things began to click for me. The “Gifted/High IQ” and “ADD but not ADHD” diagnoses I had received as a child. The sensory issues. The introversion but also desire to create strong connections. Perhaps most tellingly, what I now can see and identify as periodic meltdowns that I used to wonder about when the rest of my life seemed and felt balanced and “fine”.
I intensely dislike conflict and discomfort. I will go out of my way to walk the same paths and eat the same foods to keep from feeling it. I spent so much time and energy trying to keep myself from “falling apart”, that I got to a point where my bottled up emotions were beginning to play with the electricity around me.
I understand how this sounds- bear with me for a moment.
When my nervous system is in fight or flight and I’m overstimulated by sensory experience or people around me, it begins to feel like static building in my body. This feels like Restless Leg Syndrome on steroids and not confined to the legs.
The shop that I was working at around that time began having electricity issues. I would feel that staticky feeling set in and our radio would cut out. The breakers would blow multiple times a day. One time the glass light bulb popped and shattered above me. My co-workers narrowed these happenings down to only when I was there. That feels great, right?
It got to a point, that I’m almost embarrassed to admit, the shop owner asked paranormal investigators to come in with their EMF readers to find out what was going on and they pointed back to me. Again, that feels great- I’m the cause of all these crazy abnormalities?? At home, we would go through multiple toasters a year, multiple coffee makers, washing machines and so on.
I started connecting the dots and while it sounds like the plot of a great sci-fi movie, there was some actual science behind such happenings to remove some of the mystery.
We are electric beings. Our bodies are wired in with a Central Nervous System (CNS). This Central Nervous System carries messages from our sensory input receivers to the relay center in the brain- the thalamus. When the sympathetic nervous system is overloaded, as can happen with mixed interoception (a common autistic experience), this creates hypointeroception in some areas of the body. This could look like a certain sensory input feeling like it is raw, overexposed and extra sensitive.
Energy runs along our CNS through energy meridians and centers and this energy can affect and interact with our surroundings. When an energy conductor is overloaded with a higher surge than it can handle, the fuses blow and the breaker is blown.
We can experience something similar in our body. Let’s call this the “meltdown”. When there is tension or resistance during the building to this meltdown, we can actually prolong the discomfort.
I have learned, over time, that allowing my body to have frequent “releases” or “blows” instead of resisting them actually allows me to move through them more quickly and get back to a regulated nervous system.
These “meltdowns” can look different for different people. Mine look like crying, usually a short period of asking “what is the point?” to whatever it is that I am worried about, and curling up without any extra sensory input for a short period of time while being held and hugged by my husband.
When I am able to accurately label this stage as “a meltdown” I can go through this process in as short as 15 minutes sometimes. It is a reset point similar to the red reset button on a GFCI electrical outlet. Before I could accurately identify this stage, I felt like my world was falling apart and my gut was yelling a warning. The reset took much longer from this perspective and contained an unwillingness to “go through the discomfort”.
Now, while I am describing something that seems individualized, I have noticed this cycle playing out in similar ways that just don’t seem as obvious with my clients, friends and acquaintances. We ALL have a nervous system. We ALL get stressed and overloaded. We ALL don’t like discomfort.
Pain avoidance and tensing against or resisting pain is one of the largest contributors to pain perception in pain management techniques. We must melt into the pain to transcend it.
Yes, this could all sound like metaphysical mumbo-jumbo but I promise, scientific reasoning backs it up. We must move through discomfort to ease it. Like relaxing into pain. Relaxing into release.
At 38 years old, I found the practice of reiki and was interested in controlling the electricity running through my body in healthy ways. I was familiar with energy meridians and energy centers used in reiki through the lens of my herbal studies but wanted more practical ways to work with this energy.
I view reiki somewhat different from many practitioners in that I see it as a tool for directly working with the nervous system and look at a reiki session as a “reset” point for the electrical circuits that are in the human body. It is a modality that seems somewhat vague and hard to explain to many. When you try to explain that energy work is like a massage for the nervous system, that is a pretty confusing message but this work has become essential to my current state of being which is much more grounded, at peace, and balanced than I have ever been before in my 41 years of life.
I haven’t even blown a breaker in years 😂.
I want to encourage anyone reading this that has felt the tension that comes with emotional avoidance of discomfort or the physical avoidance of pain to experiment with melting into it to move through it.
If you need support in doing so, I’m here.
Warmly,
Jennifer Ferrante, CHt.
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