When most people think of allergy treatments they think of getting prescription or over-the-counter medications that suppress an allergic response.  With food allergies, people often consider special diets or temporary periods of avoidance that may help the allergy or sensitivity fade out or disappear.

Whichever approach one has used to deal with allergies, it is helpful to begin exploring what allergies are and how they function.  Allergies involve some type of seemingly dysfunctional reaction by the body to something you come in contact with.  The contact could be via inhalation, skin contact, or ingesting (eating) something.  The body reacts as though it is being stressed in some way and needs to protect itself.  For example, mucus buildup and sneezing are the body's tools to trap and dispel harmful substances.  Skin inflammation and hives or rashes occur when something irritating is close to the skin.  There is often no immediately recognizable explanation for WHY the body is reacting to something in the way it is.  However, mind-body healing approaches often include the understanding that there is a psychological or emotional source of the body's subconscious response to its environment.

When we are under stress, either biological or emotional stress, the mind-body system seeks to protect itself.  Anything in our environment at the time of the stressor can be associated with that cue by the subconscious and lead to later allergic responses.  This is similar to the psychological condition of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder/syndrome) where a person has flashbacks and reacts as if in the traumatic circumstance when something occurs that is a trigger/reminder to the subconscious of the past stress.

So, smells, tastes, sounds, images, etc, can all be triggers.  These are how the memory of an experience is encoded and processed in the mind.  When the mind is overwhelmed by a stressful situation it resorts to whatever resources it has preprogrammed for self-protection and self-preservation.  Sometimes, these self-preservation programs get generalized to other situations that contain some sensory reminder of the original stressful experience.  There are many reported cases where a person who was regressed to a past stressful experience under hypnosis had an allergy go away after the session, as the re-viewing of the event shifted the way the subconscious encoded it, since the person was able to view the experience from an empowered state in which the anxiety/stress was no longer problematic.  Using hypnosis, energy psychology techniques (EFT, NMT, Psych-K) and other kinesiology-oriented techniques can help the mind and energy system release and clear the original stress and neutralize the previous triggers (allergies).  This has worked for many people.  There are a variety of approaches to allergy clearing using energetic and mind-body methods.  Some work with the energy system (chakras, meridians, etc.) to neutralize the energy state when the trigger is brought to awareness.  Others bring the patient into an altered state where the subconscious mind (often associated with the right brain hemisphere) is accessed and the original experience and it's encoding or energetic imprint are released and/or reprocessed.  Hypnosis and NLP are a couple of the reprocessing methods, with EMDR being another technique related to NLP that involves accessing brain hemisphere processing.

I have witnessed many shifts in allergies with these mind-body and energetic healing approaches and I encourage readers to learn more.  Allergies may often be something that can be fully cleared rather than merely suppressed or adjusted for.

Jed Shlackman, LMHC offers holistic healing therapies and counseling in Miami, Florida
www.phinsights.com

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