Rebound fear can inhibit healing

Relapses are always part of healing from chronic conditions. They challenge our belief in what we're doing. They make us doubt whether we have the best or the right treatment plan. Let's look at relapses from the perspective of rebound fear.

When we're healing, we are challenging the adaptations that we've made to survive our circumstances. It's like slowly dismantling armour. When we chip off a layer, it frees up new levels of functioning, but there's often rebound of fear. Your survivor-self is fiercely protective and often resists giving up old protective behaviours. Even though healing releases the need for those very compensations, it takes time to teach the survivor-self to feel safe and to trust the new reality.

When rebound fear isn’t recognized and attended to as such, it can create an intense contraction that reverberates through the very symptoms you've been trying to heal. It might show up as an anxiety attack, a migraine, stomach issues, a skin flare up, joint pain, or anything else that you've been working on. If you don't recognize rebound fear for what it is, you may conclude that you're not doing the right treatments. You may even give up on well-indicated treatment plans because you're not attending internally to the emotion of fear, which is a normal and natural part of the healing process.

Next time you find yourself in a regression, make time to be still and feel whether there’s any part of you that’s scared. If you’re not used to checking-in this way, the fear may be hard to access. Keep breathing and staying present with any tension in your body. Tension is usually the access point to uncover where fear is hiding.

Once you access the fear, breathe and be present. Presence may be enough, or you may need to reassure yourself that the change you are endeavouring to make is for the best.