My Holistic Self-Regulation Story

On a warm, spring day in 1987, I tripped on my clogs and lunged headlong down a flight of concrete stairs. I crashed onto the right side of my head and suffered head trauma. The fall compressed and misaligned my skull and threw my body out of whack, creating scoliosis, intense head pressure, a tight jaw (TMJ), and retinal damage in my right eye that caused ultra visual sensitivity and left me with constant head pressure and severe eyestrain.

To intensify my distress, I became severely sensory defensive. Every noise, bright light, light touch, and strong odor attacked me. Maneuvering through the world was like maneuvering through a sensory minefield, my life an on-going fire alarm.

Self-calming was impossible. If I fixed one problem, like tactile defensiveness (I did this successfully with the Wilbarger Protocol), I remained anxious, jittery, irritable, and stressed because other systems were destabilizing me. In addition to the sequelae from the head trauma, I had a slew of food sensitivities from many years of Candida overgrowth, that interfered with digestion and caused fatigue and light headedness. And I had a bad heart valve that caused palpitations and irregular heartbeat that made me anxious, weak, fatigued, and, at times, panicked, though it took years before this was diagnosed.

Added up, all my symptoms created on-going extreme distress: my head exploded; my heart pounded; my chest weighed a ton of bricks; my feet and arms tingled; my body dragged.

To treat all the systems destabilizing me, I instituted a holistic treatment plan that informs the strategies in this workbook. For over twenty-five years, I’ve incorporated these lifestyle changes daily. Though change came slowly, eventually I achieved a relatively normal and more joyful functional life.

Holistic Approach

As my story elucidates, to become self-regulated, you must take a holistic approach to healing and fix and balance ALL dysregulated bodily systems. If not, you might fix one system but fail to get relief because other systems are dysregulating you.

A holistic approach will involve:

Employing daily sensorimotor activities (called a “sensory diet”)

Utilizing strategies for proper posture

Engaging in on-going relaxation methods

Eating brain healthy food and eliminating toxic food

Ridding your body of toxins

Avoiding environmental toxins

Surrounding yourself with positive energy

Learning emotional regulation