A Parkinson's recovery journey

It's psychogenic, folks

In a past post I observed that many of the myriad issues suggested to reflect possible causes of Parkinson's are in fact most easily understood as results of the long-term use of pause.

Following on that observation, it appears to me that a majority of people with Parkinson's and almost all medical professionals treating them want to believe PD has a purely physiological cause that will point to a physiological treatment. Maybe that's a result of the stigma surrounding psychological conditions. Perhaps owing to my training as a psychologist I don't relate to that stigma at all. In fact, I feel lucky to be in the small minority of people whose experience allows them to say without doubt that idiopathic Parkinson's is in fact a psychogenic condition.

Among the experiences making me confident of this have been occasions when I was feeling so racked with symptoms like intense anxiety and fatigue that I feared I had experienced a progression of PD, in a way that felt completely physiological, to the point that those symptoms were now the new norm for me. On these occasions, as I worked the psychological intervention that is the JWH protocol, I experienced, within about a minute's time, a marked decrease, in some instances a complete evaporation of those symptoms. Each time it prompted the thought, “My God, it was psychological after all!”

I first described a couple of those occasions in this post and and its update at the bottom of the same page.

Now I'll tell you a secret. ;–) I believe the experience I describe in that update was likely the actual first time I ever turned off pause. It happened only about 10 months after beginning the protocol, several months before the first “official” time described here. The only problem was that it happened right before bed, it wasn't super dramatic, and it didn't occur to me that pause might have turned off. By the time I woke up in the morning pause was undoubtedly back on, leaving only the memory of going to bed feeling exceptionally good the night before. (There was no return, though, of the bad anxiety/fatigue. There was just the generally crappy feeling of being on pause.)

Lucky for me the next two times pause turned off were quite dramatic with all sorts of electrical tingles and such. So there was no mistaking what was happening. (I speculated previously that the difference might have been due to the depth of pause out of which I was emerging at the time.) It was only months later, after I had several times experienced pause turning off in less dramatic fashion that, remembering the feelings of joy and relief I'd had that night before bed, I realized it sounded an awful lot like turning off pause.

In any event, whether it's a simple diminution of a symptom like anxiety or fatigue in response to working the protocol, or a complete turning off of pause, wherein, within a minute or so, you feel the entire Parkinson's process turn off, making you feel vastly better through and through, the inescapable conclusion from these experiences is that idiopathic PD is psychogenic, a psychological condition. Exactly what JWH has been trying to tell the world! For me and others I know, this awareness brings joy and great hope owing to the resulting realization that PD is indeed curable.