Healing A Thousand Paper Cuts, One Scar at a Time

My learning in cellular memories and somatic healing for my mysterious chronic illnesses

This feels familiar. The chest discomfort that stems from nowhere. The chill in my extremities (fingers and toes). The familiar feeling that I’m not quite alright, despite focusing on the 3 pillars of well-being: rest, nutrition, and exercise.

I was exhausted. I have been exhausted. In searching for the panacea of unfounded illnesses or mysterious symptoms, my journey took me to deep research into functional medicine and holistic healing. Lately, I’ve found the cellular memories modality and somatic trauma release.

Here’s my experience as I’m stepping into my self-healing authority, to heal myself.

I’m afraid to take a shower

Believe it or not, my relationship with bathrooms throughout my life is seldom positive. My parents’ bathrooms are not quite satisfactory to my standard. This was when I was a child, my late grandparents lived in a better house (they were relatively well-to-do) that had a bathtub.

I didn’t grow up in Western countries, so the concept of a bathtub signifies wealth. The common people don’t (didn’t) have showers installed, as in my home country, the old houses used water tubs (notice the “water” here, not “bath”, because it’s not a place where one can dunk their body. Instead, its only purpose is to store the water from the faucet). Some of them are plastered and covered with ceramics, poorer people use only cement and plaster. Some others use big buckets to store the water. The practice originates from the olden days when no good water infrastructure was common and plumbing was rare.

The way you clean yourself up is as follows. You grab a small water bucket, about the size of a measuring jug, and then scoop the water from the water tub. You then pour the water over your head or body depending on the skin or areas you want to clean. When you use shower gel or soap bars, you place the small bucket on the edge of the tub while lathering your body or shampooing your scalp and hair. When you want to rinse, do the step of scooping and pouring water over.

Nowadays, though, modern houses have showers as water flows 24/7 (although some still want to maintain the presence of a water tub, in modern design). Even in some smaller cities, people can afford to build water towers in their backyards to store the water from the wells where submerged pumps and plumbing have been installed. But many old houses still maintain their old design, not renovating it for showers/bathtubs. 

The bathrooms I saw during my childhood were among my first experiences towards negative emotions of inadequacy that led to envy.

At a young age, this idea was already grooming in my head that I classified people’s wealth based on whether they’ve got showers in their bathrooms. Bathtubs, the Western ones, are bonus points. Although I clearly had no idea how much it cost to install a shower in a bathroom and to ensure there is water flowing through every time the faucet is on, my childhood mind already subscribed to the idea of categorising people’s wealth based on this amenity.

Decades later, when I had left my parents’ house to study in The Netherlands, or to work on another island where the staff houses were modern buildings, where I got access to showers and a bathtub, or occasional business trips to luxurious hotels and accommodations, which ensured I could clean myself under a shower or soaked for relaxation in a bathtub, I never took it for granted.

But then I got married to my ex, and due to some circumstances that played a significant role in resurfacing my triggers, I had to live in his family home since I got a job in a new city where his family lived. The bathroom doesn’t have a bathtub or a shower.

It might sound silly, but in retrospect, that probably contributed little to my overall resentment and trauma building over the years of living with them.

Anxiety-induced shivering

Fast forward a couple of weeks ago, in Scotland where I live. The temperature was objectively high in our standard (9C, as opposed to minus in wintertime). But my body was shivering. Well, my body fat is about 19%, putting me as underweight in body fat-sense but normal in BMI. Low body fat makes people prone to feeling chilly. That’s probably the logical explanation. But deep down, I knew, it wasn’t just about that.

(this could be a book in itself about my journey in battling many things, but let’s focus on this chilly sensation for this article)

I used to be addicted to foods and sugary treats. I documented my journey, utilising a ketogenic diet, to help me recalibrate my taste buds to enjoy more savoury foods and get off the addiction here. However, my mind overcorrected (overfitted) this addiction by swinging from being/feeling too much that induced the binge-eating, into orthorexia. This health freakiness wasn’t rooted in self-love or body compassion to get off the substances that harmed the body but from my anxiety. I suffer from health anxiety, and every time my body displays some symptoms that are out of normalcy, my brain panics.

My brain distinguishes the threat and flies off the handle, sending off stress hormones like cortisol everywhere, elevating my heart rate and making my hands and feet cold. My brain loves me and what she wants is only to help me survive. Therefore, this overcompensation tendency, in my hypothesis, came from this shame and regret that I have done many things that harmed my body in the past, including unhealthy behaviour of binge eating, so I must overcorrect it.

No sugar, nada.

So, when my body showed the symptoms of feeling chill, even shivering, despite having no fever/infection, my brain went into overdrive, googling for many pages that explained this. Although it was shown that it was just another anxiety symptom and not something life-threatening, my brain kept wanting to FIX. IT. ASAP. 

That’s how I operate through life, tbh. Anything’s wrong, I should go into my decision-making algorithm and decide how to fix it. 

I’m a fixer. I get things done. That’s why I’m a good product manager, a product leader in the sense of driving initiatives forward.

But, how? How to fix the random chill? I was helpless. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to turn on the radiator in my bedroom because it was foolish. I was afraid of the quick fix because if I kept turning it on when the actual subzero temperatures came again (we’re still in the middle of winter so I anticipate the colder days, see, this is how an anxious brain looks far to the horizon), it would be more difficult to get into the warmth.

(Notice the conflict the brain created itself here? Creating shiver vs. not wanting to turn on the radiator due to logical reasons, smh . . . )

And showers, especially with my habit of doing a cold shower after finishing with warm water, became a dreadful experience. I dreaded taking a shower before bed. I dreaded . . . wait for it . . . going to the bathroom.

The slightly open window (to let the fresh air in after someone’s taking a shower to prevent dampness and mould) triggered me. 

The helplessness and the irrationality of the fear paralysed me. 

Amidst the crisis, our mind and body go into the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. And I froze, didn’t know what to do. I tossed in bed every night when the urge to pee woke me up in the wee hour, contemplating whether I should wake up and feel the chilly bathroom air. My common sense won, so I woke up. But the uncomfortable feeling of having to think about getting up just to relieve myself became a louder plea, banging on my heart to be resolved.

I couldn’t just power through the words alone, by saying to my body things such as, 

You need to shower every day, anyway. Wouldn’t you do it just because of the irrational chill?

Brace yourself.

You don’t make any sense, body. It’s almost 10 C and you’re shivering.

You’ve published a post about taking a cold shower every day, now you want to back down? What a shame.

And so on.

My brain was constantly at odds with my body. I could find consolation in the morning until the afternoon when I felt relatively warmer. But as the day went on, I felt colder.

I felt happier when I took a walk outside to inhale the fresh air, but I shivered not an hour back in the house.

That was until I found articles about cellular memories and posts on somatic healing, and I found myself poring over the words for a couple of nights, trying to make sense of my symptoms.

My body cells stored the trauma of my past, or maybe even my ancestors’ 

I read a similar Substack from

Dr Miguel Toribio-Mateas

How your mum's stress got into your belly

so that added logical and scientific explanation to my knowledge aboutgenerational trauma being passed over from a mother to her child. I haven’t prodded into family history, yet, and my mum is currently busy as one of the committee members of my home country’s election, so I don’t want to trigger her with unnecessary questions. But one thing I know is I watched her being triggered and hard every now and then if something didn’t go her way. Her temper got hold of her quite easily, and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of such backlash.

I remember crying as a child when my action, which was already forgotten anyway, triggered her and made her see red. I begged for forgiveness, eyes bawling, and nose running. And it was not just once. Many times.

I learned from such a young age: to be safe, understand the rules or expectations, and comply with them. A people-pleaser.

That cost me years of marriage that felt like a prison, that made me write anonymous poems of which the readers (in a poetry writing club) commented that the writer must be in agonising pain as it radiated through the words. 

I never want to reread those poems anymore. They’ve been buried in the past, restfully.

Perhaps, that’s how the trauma of my childhood lies dormant in my body

The combination of the bathroom memories, the shower and the bathtub, and the parenting style that, in retrospect, was unhealthy, was stored in every single cell of my body, waiting for a time to rear its ugly head.

There are plenty of symptoms that I’ve catalogued over the trauma release journaling this week, and each of them connects to something I experienced as a child. I’m going to consolidate that in another post, or a proper article, or even a book sometime, given that Substack might not give its justice over separate posts. I followed the techniques of retrospective trauma recollection and wrote down each experience that I thought might be related. I alternated between the journaling session and meditation, so my mind could be stabilised after the intensive recollection.

Because recollecting the experience, despite how rational and jaded I attempted to be, I couldn’t shunt the feelings. It was not just re-visualising the experience in a blur (because the conscious mind might have forgotten the details), but re-experiencing as well.

And it means revisiting the old wounds.

And boy, did various bodily symptoms reappear. Starting from the familiar cold spells that traversed my body but my spine and core still felt hot, to the flare-ups of my old friend chest discomfort and breathing difficulty. I embraced them all.

(I mean, I used to go out at 1degC only clad like this to a corner shop, so it doesn’t make sense that I was shivering in 9degC)

I recalled being admitted to A&E back in my home country in 2020 due to my chest pain, getting in touch with several cardiologists who confirmed that my heart was in fact in good shape, with no abnormalities (I paid a fortune as well to undergo the MRI and echo). To the unnecessary, felt downright wrong, prescription of the beta-blocker to slow down my heart rate or statins to lower my cholesterol level (which I only took once before my common sense got a grip over me). I was also checked by doctors here in Scotland, and there was nothing wrong with my ECG reading when I felt chest discomfort. Sometimes the pain spread out to my arm and jaw, but it was not because of a faulty heart. I later learned it was the generic anxiety symptoms.

What Happened During the Trauma Release Sessions

I cried during the recollection sessions, sometimes weeping, sometimes soundless. I hugged myself in the child’s pose (yoga position), or sometimes I sat cross-legged, whispering Jesus’ name to hold my hand during the entire journey.

I could remember being scolded in my pre-teens by my late grandmother, who suffered from a mental health problem herself. She was hot and cold, sometimes she said she had loved me and hugged me in my sleep, but oftentimes she was away, distant, shutting everyone out and snapping at me for little offences such as forgetting to open the car door for her. My adult self wouldn’t take it to heart if now somebody barked at me like that, I could simply chalk it up to their emotional problem for being explosive, not me being at fault. But a 12 or 13-year-old girl, having her secondary caretaker acted up after an honest mistake like that . . . that scared me.

My handwriting filled many pages of my journal, now as of typing this post on Saturday, 3 Feb, my gel ink pen has dried out, running out of ink, because of how much I’ve written during the week.

Combining my practice with the IFS articles I read about (dang, I teared up a bit reading its title), I synthesised it into a framework that I exercise regularly, not every day because it’s exhausting. Last Tuesday and Wednesday, for example, I was so drained I slept at 7 pm (I usually go to bed at 8 or 8.30 pm). On Thursday afternoon, my battery was so low after 3 sessions from Tuesday I didn’t even want to get up and cook dinner, but I knew I must still care for my nutrition, so I cooked low-carb veggies soup just to have something brothy to fill me up (I don’t eat simple carbs even though I’m following plant-based, it’s more of clean eating style).

I was battered, so I honoured my “exile” or inner child’s need to rest. Little me had been coaxed slowly to leave her locked room to enjoy the world more. In the brain's limbic system, it’s our amygdala that exhibits reactive or explosive responses towards external stressors. Since my knowledge is also a work in progress, I could only liken the inner child as something located in my amygdala here.

I asked Karden Rabin through the Instagram chat whether it was common to feel exhausted after somatic healing sessions. He said it was “normal” as opposed to “normal” as it didn’t happen all the time. 

I went to the park next to the loch (Drumpellier Country Park) just to play: the slides, the contraption, the tyre swing . . . 

(Didn’t take pictures of the playground, only the canal nearby and the golf course)

And at those moments, something unfurled inside of me. The little Sekar reminisced how it was to play, how to enjoy the playground, and not having to please anyone. 

But what triggered my chills, to be exact? What triggered my anxiety? It was odd because it wasn’t stressful at work. 

(see my causative brain pattern here?)

I assumed that it was my trauma being released because my body knew it was safe now. I’m much safer, and I’ve been doing my inner work since earlier last year. The body recognised the change in situation and just as junks must be expelled, all the trauma resurfaced gradually.

Sometimes, it manifested as hives/skin allergy. Sometimes as GERD or gassy GI tract. Before I learned about somatic healing and the traumatic memories that are stored in our cells, my mind rushed to the quick fix, siloed approaches, such as grabbing paracetamol, loratadine, or Nexium. But I now know that it’s a systemic response. I only need to be patient.

You know when you push a pendulum to one end, it will swing with the same force to another end?

Physically, all the repressed stresses could come out gradually, sometimes at odds with what’s happening now. There’s a saying that the mind works at the speed of light, but the body moves at the speed of water. It creates a mismatch of the timeline between what’s happening in real life (no stressors) and what’s going on in the releasing process in the body.

On the other hand, the swing to the opposite can also be observed in my life journey.

A girl who people-pleased grew up into a woman who’s divorcing her husband. 

A girl who was the A-scorer at school, who earned the top score for the National Exam, ran away from her home country to start a new life.

A girl who had to conform to society’s expectations got burnt in all her ashes.

But the same girl is now a baby phoenix, unlearning the conditioning and learning to love herself more. That she doesn’t need anyone’s validation. That she feels safe in her own skin, that her body is in the process of releasing the trapped traumatic energy slowly.

I hypothesised that the trauma response now was about the chill in my body because of 2 reasons:

• I already learned my lesson that the chest sensation (whether it’s discomfort, tightness, or simply a racing heartbeat) was not due to a defect in my heart. Rather, it’s a flare-up. So, to grab my attention to release the energy from my trauma, it must be something else now. It’s like you’re repeating the same message to an individual, at one point it will fall into a deaf ear. The mind is crafty, but again, the “manager” of the IFS only wants to keep me safe and the exile to be able to play out again.

• Therefore, what could be more appropriate to emulate than the chill response? The outside temperature was perfect to induce this. (I obviously couldn’t shiver back in my tropical home country).

Healing Framework

My framework in combining somatic healing and IFS in treating my trauma can then be summarised in bullet points as follows.

• Be intentional in my daily gratitude journal in the morning or before starting the session (usually in the afternoon after I wrap up work around noon) that I’m going to revisit my exile/inner child

• Sit in silence, asking for God’s presence to be my “spiritual director” here

• Talk gently to my inner child, recall the experiences that resurface

• Observe, but do not judge, all the physical sensations that arise (e.g. tightness in the chest, dizziness, coldness in hands and feet, etc)

• Tell my inner child to “come out and play” because it’s safe here

• Cross my hands on my chest, forehead, and crown, visualising a beam of light from Heaven piercing my skull, destroying the cells with faulty DNA copies, telling my body as well that it’s safe, that I’m the parent of my little me now. I’m well-equipped with resources to ensure nobody can hurt her anymore because my Self can filter and judge the external stimuli before internalising it

• Go out in nature, and walk without music/podcast. Just me and nature, listening to the birds, smiling at other walkers. Touch the tree barks, greet the doggos.

• Laugh at life’s little inconveniences. Sometimes, my restlessness due to my anxiety flare-ups makes me clumsy, such as pouring hot chocolate drinks over my hand or slipping an icy path. Just laugh it off, because there’s no injury occurred (super minor, can be ignored) and move on with life rather than ruminate on what caused this, what caused that.

• And take time to actually play, like at the playground near the loch :) 

• One more thing: I figured that engaging in the habits that had become your safe space/inner sanctuary when you were a child catalysed the progress. My curiosity towards the healing space catapulted after I started reading physical books that I borrowed from my local library. The books have little thing to do with the healing, of course, but the experience of sitting down cross-legged, devouring chapter by chapter (although it’s non-fiction, my favourite in this phase of life) might have reminded my body of a similar experience when I was a child and enjoying my books (I’m the only child and my parents were generous in buying me books)

Don’t force yourself to engage in every single thing every day. Healing is always a work in progress. You always move forward, even at a snail’s pace. After feeling exhausted and sleeping for more than 9 hours a couple of nights this week, last night I couldn’t get back to a full sleep after awoken around 1 a.m. to pee. And I felt hot under the duvet. But that’s alright. I took it as my body adjusted to the shift in energy, and that wouldn’t harm me in the long term. 

My biggest lesson from these activities is to be compassionate: towards my body, towards my caretakers, and my past adult. My caretakers only did what they knew best at that time, my younger self only decided based on the short-term pros and cons of stepping into a married life. My body suffered from all, but just like with neuroplasticity and tissue regeneration, I can start recovering by growing new tissues, a new body, and new life.

And in the spirit of slow living, as you can see in my borrowed books stack, The Slow Fix is my philosophy. Rather than reach for medicines, I ask my body what could have been repressed by the mind.

This post is far from over, but I don’t want to create a novelette out of this journey yet. So, that’s all for this post. And the rest can be written in the next ones, just like how my healing journey is in progress.

Until next time,