What I saw happen last week was a classic case of non healing approaches creating a cascading downhill path to a crash.
It started off pretty simply, with a woman whose house had air quality issues, including those caused by someone’s smoking. She also had some other stressful things going on in her life.
So what did she do? Did she heal the situation? Did she do something about the underlying issues?
Oh no.
She whipped out a can of air freshener, and blasted away, a classic example using of a masking approach, one which covers up problems without really solving them.
“good for me” she said.
Maybe.
Now with the air quality issues buried under a haze of probably toxic chemicals made to smell good and other issues still causing stress in her life, sure enough the woman developed a heavy cough, which kept her up at night.
Did she react by dealing with the underlying issues and healing the situation? To a degree she actually did. She started working to get some of the stress and air quality issues dealt with.
At the same time she hurried down to the local pharmacy to pick up some medication. Once again she was choosing a masking approach.
So,
At one point after taking the medication, she lost her footing somehow and somehow was not even able to break her fall.
Slam, she planted her face on the floor, hard, possibly hard enough to crack her skull, and that’s why she decided to go the the emergency room.
The whole thing seemed connected. Was it the lack of sleep, or an effect of the medication or what that had caused her to fall in a way that she had not fallen in years.
However exactly it worked, it seems clear that masking issues rather than resolving them once again led to a crash as it so often does.
Healing Chronicles 
Laura said,
2011/12/16 at 5:40 AM
Can you give me a name for these two people? I have ALS and would like to contact them. Thanks!!
(Then there are others you can notice by reading between the lines. In one case, a blog says that a person’s relatives all expected her to die years ago, and here she still is doing pretty well. Another example is someone who is out there raising funds to support lab research, but wait a minute, a little looking turns up the fact that he has done some inner work and his health has actually been stable for years. Hmm.
Finally there are those you can find out about by talking with people, such as a guy who, I was told had, changed his lifestyle and is still going to his kid’s soccer games seventeen years later, and a guy who used hynotherapy and has completely stabilized and volunteers at the ALS Association eight years after he started experiencing problems.)
PLEASE don’t post my email address! Thanks!
Marty Murray said,
2011/12/16 at 1:45 PM
Hi Laura.
The person who is still around and blogging is Fern Cohen.
The kid who has done the inner work and stabilized his health is Alex Grausnick.