When my clients diagnosed with MS come to my office, they always come with one pressing question “Why Did I Get Multiple Sclerosis?”  So I wanted to write this article on multiple sclerosis to lay out what my clients discover.

Before I begin, I wanted to explain briefly what I do.  I am a medical hypnotherapist. It is not a known field, even within hypnosis professionals.  In medical hypnotherapy, we not only help relieve symptoms, stress and change bad habits, we also communicate with the subconscious, kind of like in a waking dream, to discover what has caused the body to react and create disease.  So this article on multiple sclerosis is going to review what my clients with MS have discovered in these  “Why Did I Get MS?” sessions.

To lay out the groundwork of this article on MS and understand where MS came from, we need to take into account that “why did I get MS?” won’t be just prior to the first exacerbation or experience of symptoms. As Gabor Mate, M.D. says in “When the Body Says No”:

“Multiple sclerosis is not an abrupt new development in adult life, but a culmination of life long processes.”

That incident, or group of incidents, such as a divorce, your partner’s addiction getting out of control, getting fired or stressed you’d be laid off, a loss of a family member or other extreme stress was only the last straw.  The roots of it began, most probably, in childhood and the decisions made about life, ourselves, and how we need to be in the world.

What My Client’s Learned from Their MS

To explain in this article on multiple sclerosis what they learned, I will take a few clients cases, change A FEW genders and other details so that their privacy remains intact, and share their bodies messages:

Client 1

At first, this particular client’s MS began the “Why Did I Get MS?” session expressing the problem: it was an object moving around, alert, trying to see anything that is happening.  It constantly needed to be on watch. It hoped that then it would be able to find peace, calm and quiet and know that it is safe.

This coping strategy, of constant alertness, came in in childhood after the loss of a loved one.  My client had felt alone and lost and needed to regain a sense of safety and protection and not be alone.

Her subconscious explained to her that the symptoms of MS showed up 25 years later as a way to not allow my client to always give 150%. If multiple sclerosis had not come in, my client would never have stopped but kept running and running.

“Know that you are ok just the way you are rather than trying to be better all the time.” 

The MS also wanted my client to not always try to please everyone.  Multiple sclerosis wants her to be all of herself.  All sides, not just the nice, friendly, and intelligent but also the sad, weak, afraid, playful and insecure. She needed to learn to accept them for these aspects are creative and balancing, beautiful and melancholic. Playful even.  They are part of what makes music and art. They give inspiration, deepness, and calm. She does not need to be strong all the time.  These parts hadn’t been welcome.

You don’t always have to be strong and tough.

It asks her to focus on herself.  Ask herself what she is feeling in regards to what she is doing, how she is emotionally and her body.  Is she doing ok?  It is feedback and will give her a greater sense of self.  It will allow her to confirm if she is doing well, if she should continue or if she should do something else rather than not stopping.  Her subconscious does not want her to ignore the body or be deaf to its needs. If she experiences a symptom, do something. The body is communicating it is not comfortable.  Take action.

MS told her that she can be in control by making her own decisions based on her values.  Try to figure out what really matters rather than listen to other people’s opinions, values, and expectations.

It didn’t want her to always meet expectations, her own and those of others.  She didn’t have to be perfect.

Client 2

MS kept this second client from being responsible for her life and to not be criticized.  It was an outlet to not have to meet other’s high expectations.

My client had a deep desire to not be dependent on others.  The subconscious explained that is not the solution. The solution is healthy interdependence and balance.  Then he can discover he can trust other people.

Love yourself. And love everybody else. Let go of being angry.  Put your needs first.

His multiple sclerosis explained that it is not selfish to put his needs first and that he will not be abandoned or alone if he does.  It will give him the freedom to be able to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it with balance (which is what he had been striving for by being so independent).

MS let him know that life doesn’t have to be hard.  Don’t try to figure it all out.  Focus on being happy and content.

Client 3

This client’s MS took us to a time when my client was 25.  She was sad yet wanted to just be light. She didn’t feel safe in her thoughts.  She had gone through a tragic loss of a parent.

MS told her that she didn’t have to be strong all the time.  At 25 she had she run from herself to be strong. It was ok to be so sad. Allow any and all emotions. ”You be you”.

The purpose of the MS symptoms was for her to stop running.  To make her soft and slow her down. MS wants her to be less mean to herself and more forgiving of herself and more focused on her dreams and wants and remember what is important.

“Do what you love to do. Just do it.” It asked her to stop putting so many deadlines on herself.   “Time keeps going.  We always have it. It will keep coming, it doesn’t stop. There’s never going to be the right time.”

Client 4

In this case, this client “Why Did I Get MS?” session presented her client, in the dream-like state of hypnosis, with a box full of photos. It says it represents everything that is her. What she knows and doesn’t know. The pretty and not so pretty. She had wanted to get rid of the ugly and fight to ignore it but it’s needed.  It’s all a part of her.

MS is there to help her see herself and accept everything. Then she will find peace.  It explained that she doesn’t want to even think about the ugly. Over emphasizing expectations so that everything looks good.   By doing that she separates from what is really going on around her. Negatives are actually positive.

MS is there for her to understand she is not all powerful.  That she needs more than just herself and that it is ok. Slows her down. She is not to be it all.

Her body wants her to know she is a good person.  She needs to accept herself and treat herself better. It doesn’t want her to not even be on her to do list or the last thing she considers.

Client 5

MS first appeared as a person that was constantly controlling and monitoring the fear of failure.  Always all the time. It explained that it was my client’s strategy to find safety and peace.

Stop fearing failure and being concerned with what others think.

The purpose of MS was for my client to have to change.  To correct the path from avoiding failure and always bettering oneself to one of finding joy, loving self, and others, of enjoying the present, and of calm.

The Body Reflects Our Minds

These are what is called, in medicine and science, psychosocial factors behind chronic disease.  These factors, beliefs, and behaviors put additional stress on ourselves and that gets reflected in our bodies. As you read the cases above, you can see there are common beliefs and behaviors.  With other chronic diseases, other beliefs and behaviors appear.

I wanted to write this article on multiple sclerosis – “why did I get MS?” to share these messages in hopes you might find some insights into what your body is reacting to. Do these messages resonate with you? Do you share some of these behaviors and beliefs?

Article on Multiple Sclerosis – A Brief Summary

This is only a brief summary of just a few of my clients and what they discover.  The changes they made weren’t immediate. It took hard work and much deprogramming of old beliefs and fears. They spent a year transforming and developing a healthier mindset and connection to their bodies. And through it, they experienced profound changes in their symptoms, increased energy and balance, eliminated incontinence, lowered pain and gained greater trust in their ability to manage not only their bodies and its needs but also their lives.

If you want to explore if medical hypnotherapy can help you understand why you have MS, contact me.

Understanding Multiple Sclerosis Through the Lens of Human Design

In this month’s series, we interview Karen Curry regarding multiple sclerosis and human design. Karen is an international speaker and bestselling author of “Understanding Human Design The New Science of Astrology: Discover Who You Really Are.” Her personal development firm uses Human Design to help her clients discover their unique gifts and best strategies to create a healthier, wealthier, and most fulfilling life. Karen, a former nurse, has also developed a program, “Healing by Human Design” to help people get to the heart of their pain: physical, emotional, mental or spiritual.

What is Human Design

Human Design is a personality assessment tool based on our birth date, time and place.  It incorporates Eastern and Western Astrology synthesizing it with the I’Ching, the Kabbalah, the Hindu Chakra System and Quantum Physics. The result is an amazing tool that allows us to understand our unique blueprint and way of being in the world.

Human Design helps us understand how each of us is meant to use our energy in the world,  how each of us best takes decisions, what our gifts and talents are, where we might lose sight of ourselves and become ill, and our potential for healing.

Human Design and Chronic Disease

Through the lens of Human Design and Karen’s experience, one of the possible root causes of chronic disease is that we spend too much energy being who we are not. Society, our family’s genetic code, our experiences, and our collective beliefs about who we ‘should be’ mold our behaviors and ways of being. When these behaviors and ways of being don’t fit our energy blueprints, they end up requiring our bodies to spend excessive energy trying to hold up an allusion or mask that isn’t us. If one holds this mask for too long, the body burns out. Human Design helps us discover what is our unique energy blueprint so that we can live more in accord with who we are meant to be.

One of the things that Human Design teaches us is that there is no one size fits all formula – for living well, for health, for ways to get burned out, or for getting particular diseases.

Multiple Sclerosis and Human Design

In the case of human design and multiple sclerosis, there might be tendencies in common yet each chart is individual. Each person’s chart can show us where that particular person might spend energy being someone they are not that might eventually lead to disease and burnout. The chart can also show us a person’s individual formula for what their bodies require (time to rest, joy, time alone, etc.) to work optimally.

Here are a few examples:

Gate 49 the Body Barometer

In the chart example below of someone diagnosed with MS, this person has gate 29 defined (see the black vertical line coming out of the red box in the lower-center of the chart). A person with this gate has an extreme body barometer. This means that their bodies will tell them very clearly, “Hey, I’m done. This is too much.” (while someone without this gate defined might not have such an immediate body response when they’ve done too much).

The Defined Will Center

This same chart also has a defined (small triangle on the right) Will Center. Interestingly enough people with defined Will Centers absolutely need consistent cycles of rest. If they save their vacation time for later and stop taking breaks trying to prove their value by overworking; they will become extremely depleted. This center is the center of vital aspects of the immune system. When those with this center defined don’t give themselves consistent cycles of rest (rest meaning play and deep rest not working on your computer in the backyard or lay on the coach but worry about work), they can burn out. This kind of burn out is not just mental (I hate my job), but physical (I have no energy to keep doing this).

In Human Design, areas in our chart that are white or “undefined,” are areas where we can absorb other people’s identity and loose connection to who we are. We can live other people’s stories rather than our own.

The Undefined Sacral Center

The next example charts below, and the majority of charts of those diagnosed with MS that Eva M Clark sent to Karen for this interview, all had an undefined Sacral Centers (box second from the bottom). 30% of the general population have an undefined sacral. This is the center for workforce and life force energy. Because it is white in so many of the charts of people diagnosed with MS, the majority of those with MS “borrow” or absorb other people’s energy. Borrowing energy feels awesome, yet it’s unsustainable as it is not one’s own. If you have an undefined sacral and try to work like you see so many people around you, working from 9 to 5 and trying to prove yourself through your hard work and sacrifice, you will burn yourself out midway through life (35 to 40 years of age sometimes earlier). Those that try to be workhorses when they do not have a defined Sacral Center will eventually find themselves struggling to get out of bed because their bodies will not collaborate. They are wiped out (this kind of fatigue could be what many describe as the “MS sleeps”).  As Karen points out in the interview, a 2-week vacation is not enough if you have run yourself into the ground in this way. This might result in long-term need of rest and restoration. It often times take as long to get unburned out after getting burned out in this way. Not just resting the body, while your mind is a mile a minute, for you burn just as much energy, but a total rest of body, mind, and spirit.

One of our struggles in this society is that we’ve related self-worth with work. Society has erroneously said those with Sacral Centers defined have worth (70% of society) and those that don’t have it defined don’t. What is beautiful about Human Design is that it teaches us how to get off the treadmill of societal expectations and definitions of worth and understand our unique value and to  share that as our contribution to the world.

There is No Formula to Why We get Illness

Just as Human Design teaches us how unique we are, in our energy, in how we decide,  and in our values and gifts, it also lets us understand that there isn’t one reason or formula for why we get sick.  According to Karen and her experience:

• Some people have thrown into the adventure of some kind of illness into their life path as part of their soul’s journey.
• Sometimes people get illness because its the marker that they are out of sync and not being our true selves.
• Sometimes it something they’ve agreed to live out to clear their family system from this energy
• Sometimes its literally the toxins in their environment and it has nothing to do with theirmindset or behaviors but just an unfortunate series of events.

The No-Formula Model for Healing

“There is no one formula for healing as there is no-one else like you” says Karen Curry. She  advises us to listen to different modalities and if we don’t resonate with it, don’t use it!

Know you are not an accident. We all have a unique place in the cosmos. That occupation that you fill IS your contribution. There is not something you have to do as your life purpose and then burn yourself out trying to find that thing to do. According to Human Design, your being and maximizing the full expression of yourself is the purpose.

Your Unique Formula for Healing Multiple Sclerosis and Human Design

To find your unique formula for healing MS:

1. Start following the things that you do that make you feel better. We are so conditioned to think that it has to be hard work and that we will need to sacrifice. In Karen’s practice, she constantly asks her clients “Does that feel good?”. If the answer is “yes” at that moment, then she asks them to do more of it and if its “no” then to stop. Sometimes the body just needs a couch day and if being on the couch feels really good and we are open to experience a couch day, then we can benefit from that experience.
2. Explore the beliefs behind the guilt, resistance and should’s that are keeping you from following what feels good. If we are in resistance, feel guilty because it feels so good or decide we ‘should’ be doing something else because we’ve bought into a formula of some kind of what is appropriate, then we won’t benefit from the experience.
3. Study your Human Design chart and understand your unique blueprint, especially how you are meant to use your energy, your decision strategy, and what areas to address that might be affecting your multiple sclerosis.
4. Work with some kind of energy psychology techniques such as EFT, NLP, and hypnotherapy to unprogram and reprogram your beliefs.
5. Support the process with subtle body therapies such as acupuncture or energy healing to stabilize the energy as you continue to make cognitive and emotional shifts.
6. Give yourself time. It’s not hard, but it does take time.

Resources Multiple Sclerosis and Human Design

To get your free Human Design chart and material to begin to understand your blueprint, visit Karen Curry’s site, Human Design for Everyone.

Visit Eva M Clark’s Healing Multiple Sclerosis Program to unprogram and reprogram your beliefs.  To learn more about the beliefs and patterns behind multiple sclerosis, visit the post The Mental Patterns of MS.

Read and watch our Creating Health presentation on how Chinese medicine and acupuncture addresses multiple sclerosis.

If you would like to receive interviews and models of healing multiple sclerosis, subscribe to our newsletter.

Is there a multiple sclerosis personality? An MS personality?  Behaviors, attitudes and ways of being common to those diagnosed with multiple sclerosis?

Take the Personality Test

What is Personality?

To begin this discussion, we must first understand ‘what is personality?’  Because personality is not “just the way I am!“.  Personality is the behaviors learned and the goals that motivated us in childhood.  And these behaviors and goals became stable over time.

And once they become stable, they become unconscious.  Just like driving a car. Once you’ve learned and done it enough times, it can become habitual, and you drive without much of an awareness that you are doing it. Similarly, we learn these patterns of behaving, and they become our automatic response to life.  It is not your identity. These are adaptations to childhood stressors.

“Adaptations that help you survive the immediate stress in childhood become sources of pathology later on.  They are unconscious.  No one chooses to behave in these ways.”  Gabor Mate “When the Body Says No”

And unless you get a wake-up call of some sort, such as multiple sclerosis, you’ll continue to respond this way.

Is There An MS Personality?

Are there habits, beliefs, and behaviors common to those diagnosed with MS?  Take the test below and then continue reading or watching the presentation.

Note: As you take the test, consider how you were before you began to get symptoms of MS as there are behaviors that you are no longer able to do because of the symptoms (and there is a reason for that that we’ll discuss shortly) –

Take the Personality Test

How is the Multiple Sclerosis Personality Formed in Childhood?

Interestingly enough, the personality traits that were most admired and encouraged in childhood are the ones that later become multiple sclerosis.  Why?  Because as they develop further and gain incredible importance in our lives, they become unsustainable.  The almost superhuman traits cannot be maintained by the human body.

Traits such as being a good student, the favorite daughter or the hard worker or athlete become, as it continues to motivate us and increase its importance, a never-ending strive for success, overachievement, and to do lists.  Things can always be done even better… Even carrying for others develops into an inability to say “no” even when we are exhausted.  Helper becomes an automatic way of being, jumping at any request, and being helped is nowhere in the picture.  Emotions?  Emotions are for others as, through childhood and early adulthood, we’ve learned that they are not ok and thus repress them.

These are some of the examples of how some of the multiple sclerosis personality traits are developed.  Everything is ok and a strength, until these behaviors and beliefs takes over our lives. We need to develop the resources to create balance in our behaviors.

Creating Balance of the Multiple Sclerosis Personality through NLP

Neurolinguistic programming( NLP) can help create the balance of these behaviors that turned into extreme personality traits.  There is no judgment of these behaviors. Instead, there is a curiosity about what created this behavior and kept it in place so many years. NLP presupposes the following:

“Every behavior is useful in some context.”

“Behind every behavior is a positive intention.”

By understanding the positive intention behind the behavior and when it’s useful, we can begin to understand healthier ways to achieve that intention.

Additionally, symptoms of MS are not, according to NLP presuppositions, ‘failure of the immune system.’

“There is no such thing as failure, just feedback”

“Symptoms are a communication about needed action.” 

Symptoms are only feedback.  The body is saying ‘this way of behaving is not sustainable.’  It is requesting action.  Once the action behind the symptom is taken, the symptom is no longer necessary.

Working through the MS Personality to Heal Multiple Sclerosis

“People diagnosed with MS have ingrained habit patterns of the mind specific to their symptoms.  When those habit patterns are transformed using a combination of methods that bring (1) insight into a person’s habit patterns and (2) resources to modify those patterns, the symptoms decrease and frequently disappear.”  – Eva M Clark “The Effectiveness of Hypnotherapy in Treating MS” 

By working through the MS personality traits that have become major problems in adulthood, you could effectively reduce the symptoms of MS.  An example of the work you would do using medical hypnotherapy in the Healing Multiple Sclerosis Program would be –

— Understand the cause and meaning behind MS and each specific symptom

— Eliminate the inner critic and create the inner coach.

— Make peace with perfection.

— Creating inner congruency and balance. Become conflict-free.

— Master anxiety.

— Create strong boundaries around others.

— Removing the belief “I’m not enough / worthy” once and for all.

— Get your needs met. Put yourself first before helping others.

— Understand and harness your relationship with control.

— Become guilt and shame-free.

 — Exploring any unconscious inner obstacle to healing. Is MS serving you more than you think?

— Release the trauma of a negative diagnosis and the expectations it’s going to get worse.

— Creating a compelling empowering and fulfilling future

Healthy Personality Traits

As these personality traits begin to change into healthier mental patterns, they become sustainable and fulfilling, and the body is relieved of its burden and can begin to heal.  The amazing results of those that have worked with me as well as those I interviewed during my journey to develop the most effective healing program for multiple sclerosis is testimony of the incredible shifts that can occur.

Don’t do this alone.  There is help. Your MS personality is not who you truly are; it’s who you learned you had to be.

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This series was produced by Eva M Clark and recorded at the National MS Society Self-Help MS Group in Santa Cruz, CA. The National MS Society respects the rights of people with MS to obtain any and all information they want related to MS, including information on wellness, medical treatments or complementary therapies, and products or services. The information presented at these meeting does not necessarily reflect the views or official position of the Society, nor carry the endorsement or support of the NMSS.  Read our disclaimer here.