 Communication Collapse and Recovery: A Disabling Medical Condition In our lives rich gifts can arrive in unexpected ways. We all live lives of joy and challenge, success and lessons, mastery and stumbling. Life is an adventure that unfolds riches of experience.
For me, my adventure has been to unravel a medical mystery. A puzzle of enormous proportion that has taken me a life time to unravel - and finally solve. For decades, I was challenged to generate and sustain basic body functions - eating, sleeping, breathing, speaking, mental focus and organization. Adaily challenge in the face of a mysterious disabling collapse - a serious medical condition. This journey has been my teacher. I became adept at recovering mental, emotional, physical and communication functions so that I could simply live, work and be in a community. The culprit? A complex combination of factors that started when I was a kid. (more details below) And over time the gifts arrived:
This life-long adventure has influenced every aspect of my life. I consulted numerous medical and health professionals. Unfortunately, they were ineffective to identify the problem or solution to this condition. The systems were complicated and numerous - beyond the education of these well-intentioned professionals. I was compelled to study health and medicine and become a professional, licensed health professional. This is the basis of my work as a somatic practitioner, massage therapist and coach:
See: All Services Initially these physical episodes compelled my curiosity about human communication because my physical ability to communicate would erode. Initially, my curiosity about human communication led me to work in sales, marketing and education within the technology field. As my health declined, I explored the principles of mind, communication and relationship within health, medicine and biology. This is a foundation for the work I do with business people: See: Communication Bodywork for Business Over time, as the medical condition became more severe, I began to study Early Childhood Trauma. This helped me to understand the deep physical, generational and emotional factors to the symptoms I was experiencing. This became the foundation for my work with Families and Children, and adults with health conditions tied to early child trauma: See: Family & Children Over time, from my direct experience, I saw large gaps in medical and health knowledge. These knowledge gaps specifically related to principles of communication and relationship physiology and to child development. I saw the profound impact on business and communities. I served clients who had been visinting health proactitioners for years searching for clues. My insights helped them on their path. With a heart-felt desire to help others avoid the challenges I experienced, I became more active in industry events and organizations to promote solutions and make structural change. See: Industry Initiatives
My life has been forged in the fire of a life-time, disabling complex medical condition. With symptoms starting in my early teen years, over decades the pendulum of my life centered around managing a disabling physical collapse. My life was put on hold: job and career, relationship and family, dreams and desires - all were on pause until my body stablized. In the magic of life, my childhood was filled with a cornucopia of experience: cultural, social, intellectual, sports, gymnastics, martial arts, art, music, dance, social circles, farmland, apples orchards, communities of elders. In my youth I excelled in many activities - mind and body. I was fortunate for such a firm foundation. I was fortunate - because over time I was going to need every mind-body skill and art/science principles I could get my hands on. I didn't know it - but I was about to slip through the cracks of Western Medicine, Integrated Health and Mental Health. My complex condition I was about to experience was ahead of the curve of medical research and clinical practice. Between the ages of 8 and 10 I had three ear surgeries to resolve ear infections. It appears that this prompted a cascade of inflammation in my brain regions, that over time, became a reactive immune condition through my entire body.
During a sporting event at the age of 16 I had some form of brain event/trauma (non-impact) that temporarily darkened a region behind my left eye. I slowly collapsed - the first of many risky, sudden drops in blood pressure and physical, disabling consequences. I took over 35 years to understand and remedy this disabling cascade. A typical load of generational and family trauma contributed to this health burden - the invisible forces of social and emotional factors. Large numbers of dental mercury amalgams also added a toxic weight to my body. It was the combination of these factors that took the stress load to the level of medical trauma and a life-time of a complex medical condition.
My body began a pattern of collapse and recovery that defied Medical Doctors. Small events would disable my physical ability to communicate: - The simple act of eating food
- Intense emotions - Closing my eyes to take a nap This produced complicated symptoms such as: - Near-fatal blood pressure drops and fainting episodes during my sleep.
- Sleep Paralysis
- dysregulation of my Vagus Nerve
- digestive enyme disruption and mal-absorption
- Partial loss of social communication physiology
- symptoms of stroke, circulatory shock, right brain hemisphere trauma.
- Histamine dysregulation and Mast Cell Degranulation Disorder.
This was a serious medical risk - numerous times due to the drops in blood pressure and circulatory shock - I felt like I was dying. Several times I probably almost did.
The physical symptoms at times were sudden and shocking. It felt like being hit by lightening then falling into a dark hole - simultaneous sympathetic and parasympathic extremes. - collapse plus terror. Sudden violent body responses would overwhelm and disorient me, then I'd physically collapse. Hundreds of times I lost partial function of a range of physical and cognitive functions. I would watch helplessly as my physical ability to speak, construct sentences, remember information, coordinate my hand and eye movements, organize my thoughts and remember details would erode - swiftly. It scared me to the edge of my comprehension. For a couple decades I was a functional zombie - with sudden episodes crashing me into dis-orientation - challenging me to the core to recover. At times it would take weeks to recover - just to have it happen again days or even hours later. I became diligent at monitoring my environment and food intake. I became adept at recovering these primary body functions as my physical survival depended on it - my ability to work and pay the rent. From my foundation of self knowledge - sports, performing arts, dance, martial arts - I had a base line of physical high performance by which to measure the loss of my body functions. It was the early training that gave me crucial mind-body skills to physically recover from these collapses. As my body lost function, I had one primary set of symptoms to follow - my ability to communicate deteriorated. My ability to communicate was my main barometer. As these symptoms unfolded in my early teens I became fascinated with communication. I didn't realize that I was having a severe medical condition. As my ability to communicate and be in relationship took dramatic swings, I became fascinated with communication. I worked for computer software companies. I worked for education and training companies selling sales training, communication and personal development courses. I immersed myself in mind-body studies. My loss of communicate functions began as a sense of social anxiety and social disconnection, then evolved to partial and intermittent loss of facial and vocal function, motor and sensory function, right brain/left side function Physically, it appeared that I was having frequency strokes that would last for days and weeks - and then recover function. These appeared to be different that TIA's - Transient Ischemic Attacks. They were longer lasting - sometimes days and weeks. The partial disability remained until I could mobilize my skills and practices to regenerate my body function.
And I did regain the physical function! The swings from collapse and lose of function - to activating these targeted paractices - then regaining function - was dramatic. I developed a rigorous daily fitness practice to sustain my basic bodily and communication functions. This practice centers on directing attention, oxygen and 'chi' to brain and body regions to regenerate the brain and body functions that dys-regulate while I sleep. My life became organized around how well I could sustain stable physical communication and relationships before another episode would occur.
In my self-healing journey, I consulted over 40 Medical Doctors and Health Care practitioners - some of them experts with 30-40 years of experience. Each provided helpful insight, but none were able to pinpoint the complexity and magnitude of the early childhood medical condition and cascade of multiple physical issues. My study of Western Medicine evolved to Integrative Health, meditation, yoga, nutrition, psychotherapy, somatic psychology, and seek guidance from spiritual practices and prayer - always with an interest in communication and relationship physiology. Through determination, discipline and the grace of many teachers and guides, I recovered to a manageable, high maintenance state of recovery. In 1997 I became a professional massage therapist as I could use my unusual body wisdom to financially support myself by helping others. Over time my practice evolved to incorporate Early Child Trauma, Somatics and Trauma Physiology. I began to support people with life-long traumas, medical conditions and mental health issues. I had developed a refined sense of communication physiology and was able to help other people understand, unlock and repair deep mental, emotional and physical conditions. These challenges gave me an uncommon insight. The gifts arrived in unexpected ways. My sight is now set on a broader vision - how can I scale my knowledge to help people? ~ Innovation has no Master ~
Blessings,
Daniel Lappin
December 2012
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