Insomnia and Being Out of Body

insomnia and being out of body, they go hand in hand. My latest set of patients this month, the diagnosis du mois, has led me to a discovery. I am starting to think that there are many, many of you out there lost and still searching for answers. Here are the constellation of symptoms: all your life you have not felt right in your body, you feel disconnected from and almost existing outside of your body; in the medical terminology you are dissociated, you have anxiety, you cannot sleep, as you get older the physical body ages and you develop “medical disease” with a diagnosis…i am starting to understand this as very real and your body bears this type of posture/appearance. you are locked in a body that is beyond your control and beyond your conventional doctors’ understanding. you report your symptoms but they look at you as if you are speaking a foreign language, that’s if they have any sympathy for your issues. if they don’t, they blow you off as a psycho, new age, hippie. despite this, you continue to search all your life. you tend to be very narrow in the face, you walk with a lordosis (curve, in the old terminology, a “swayback”) and you feel like your butt sticks out, even though it may or may not look like it. The cause is ancient…sometime in your early beginning, in the newborn period or in infancy up to the first two years, you had a…surgery under general anesthesia. the action of intubation is a physical violation, but just prior to that they gave you an anesthetic. your conscious mind is suppressed while it is forcibly yanked up and out your dead, weightless, anesthetized body. you, the infant or toddler you recovers, but things are never the same. because you are neurologically naive and not yet fully formed, you grow up into that body as “normal.” then life happens and you…slip and fall and whiplash your neck, you get into a car accident and whiplash your neck, or need multiple dental procedures and end up confined in a dental chair that keeps your head and neck in a hyperextended position, or eventually all those visits to the hairstylist washing your head in that cut-out sink add up and lock you in a static whiplash position. unfortunately, the rest of your body cannot help but follow. and if you look back, exacerbations of the “out of body-ness” will coincide with events such as these. i don’t know what to tell you…i don’t believe it will be very easy to find an osteopathic physician doing OMT, make sure you do your research. It took me this long to recognize the issue of “dissociation” as both a pyschological and physical state (13 years in practice). These last two weeks, i believe i have found the cure…my patients still cannot describe what they are feeling as i induce changes in the physical body with a treatment, but within a day or two they have a sleep that they have never had in their life. unfortunately, it only last several days. each subsequent treatment helps to reset the body and allows the concious mind to descend and gel down into the “self.”