Meri Levy, LMFT, PMH-C, Perinatal Symptom Recovery

12/04/2025

Real Nervous System Regulation

It isn’t Always About “Calming Down” There’s a lot of talk these days about the importance of “nervous system regulation.” We often hear that when the body is in fight-or-flight mode, the brain interprets danger signals and may create physical symptoms or anxiety as a protective response. This is true—but it’s only part of the story. What often gets overlooked is that nervous system regulation doesn’t always happen directly. We can’t always breathe, meditate, or stretch our way out of fight-or-flight, especially if our bodies are sounding an alarm for a real and valid reason....

To regulate your nervous system, you need to know why you're dysregulated and address the root causes, including perfectionism and people-pleasing.

12/03/2025

A wonderful way of explaining neuroplastic pain!

12/01/2025

Many of us learned early on to put others first and ignore our own feelings. Over time, that self-abandonment can show up as chronic pain or unexplained symptoms—our body’s way of saying, “I’m not OK. I need care.”

I often picture these symptoms as my inner child throwing a tantrum, because it hasn’t been listened to. One powerful exercise is writing a dialogue between your inner child (non-dominant hand) and a loving inner parent (dominant hand). Start simply: “What do you need right now?” “I’m here. I’m listening. I’m not going anywhere.”

If this nurturing voice feels unfamiliar, that’s normal—it grows with practice. Your inner child may be angry or distrustful at first, but checking in regularly builds safety.

Tending to this vulnerable part of ourselves can be transformative for chronic symptoms. When we finally offer the love and attention we’ve long needed, healing becomes possible.

If you try this, let me know what you discover. Inner child work can be surprisingly powerful. You can find a more extensive article on this topic at https://merilevy.com/why-parents-should-nurture-the-child-within-too/.

11/24/2025

Don't Abandon Yourself this Holiday Season

For those of us who are susceptible to chronic pain or other physical symptoms, or who tend toward anxiety or depression (all of which can be neuroplastic, by the way), the holiday season can be a time when we need to be especially mindful. It’s all too easy to abandon ourselves in the rush to make everyone else happy.

There’s nothing wrong with caring deeply about the needs of the people we love. That’s a beautiful quality. But for some of us, prioritizing others can tip from caring into compulsion.

So what does it mean to have high personal agency in our lives?

It means we know what matters to us, and we make conscious decisions based on our own values and priorities. It means we can consider our wants and needs alongside those of the people we care about—and choose our actions based on what feels most aligned and meaningful overall.

Many people with a people-pleasing pattern feel obligated to keep others happy, even when it costs them something important. The thought of disappointing someone can feel unbearable, and abandoning ourselves can become the default.

Learning to cultivate high personal agency doesn’t mean you stop being generous or caring. It doesn’t mean you can never put someone else first. In fact, it doesn’t require changing your actions at all. What it does mean is that when you choose to do something for others, you do it from a place of clarity and intention—because, in your own honest assessment, the benefits outweigh the costs.

So this holiday season, what might shift if you chose not to abandon yourself? What could open up if you committed to honoring your own agency in every meaningful decision?

You deserve to be part of the circle of people you care for.

11/19/2025

Please share in your communities!

As many of you know, strengthening California’s perinatal mental health (PMH) workforce has been a core priority in our chapter’s strategic plan. We now have an important opportunity to advance that goal.

On Friday, November 21, 2025, the California Board of Behavioral Sciences will meet to consider whether PMH should be included in pre-or post-licensure education requirements for behavioral health clinicians including LMFTs, LCSWs and LPCs.

We are inviting members who are able to join us either in person or remotely to attend the meeting and offer a two-minute public comment in support of including PMH training in licensure requirements. We welcome your involvement.

The meeting will be held at the California Department of Consumer Affairs in the Lou Galiano Hearing Room, 1625 N. Market Blvd., Sacramento, CA and by WebEx. Get more details by going to https://conta.cc/3K0Cp2j and please spread the word!

11/17/2025

Today a fellow therapist asked me, “Aren’t you worried about treating someone for neuroplastic symptoms when they might actually have a serious medical condition?”

The truth is, most people seeking mind-body treatment have already seen multiple doctors—often every specialist they can get referred to, plus a handful of alternative practitioners. By the time they arrive in therapy, they’ve usually tried the medical route, run the tests, and been told there’s nothing more to do, or they're exhausted from trying alternative treatments.

Many neuroplastic symptoms also don’t behave like medical conditions: they move around, show up after (but not during) exercise, start in both hands or shoulders at once, or flare only under certain conditions (like when it rains, after eating certain foods, or during the full moon!). These patterns don’t fit neatly into medical diagnoses, and doctors often shrug because nothing adds up medically.

Just as I would with a client that presents with mental health symptoms, I always make sure clients have had recent medical care and labs, and the same principle applies to physical symptoms: rule out the medical, then treat what’s left.

When I went through severe neuroplastic dizziness, nausea, and insomnia, my doctors ran every test over a period of months: labs, neurology, MRI. All normal. The medical search only delayed the support I actually needed—mind-body treatment.

You don’t have to choose between medical evaluation and mind-body treatment. Doctors should run the necessary tests and mind-body practitioners can address the neuroplastic piece whenever it’s indicated. If mind-body work helps, that tells us something important: the symptoms were neuroplastic all along.

11/10/2025

If you have chronic physical pain and MRI findings that doctors have blamed for your symptoms, it makes sense that you would believe that your pain is due to a structural cause.

But... did you know that 81% of pain-free adults have disk bulges, and 56% have annular tears on MRI*?

And did you know that 69% of pain-free adults (and 89% of athletes) have hip labral tear(s)s on MRI*?

This is also true of degenerative meniscal tears, spinal stenosis, facet arthritis, as well as shoulder labral and rotator cuff tears.

Most of the time, these findings on MRI are incidental. Like gray hair and wrinkles, these findings are a normal sign of aging, and not to blame for your chronic pain.

Many doctors will blame these common findings for your pain, because they don’t have any other thing to blame. But in general, these findings are the same as seeing no structural damage at all.

MRI findings do not mean that you can’t heal using a mind-body approach. Most chronic pain is neuroplastic, and you can unlearn it using Pain Reprocessing Therapy and Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy. Visit linktr.ee/merilevy to learn more.

* https://buff.ly/72VFAGU and https://buff.ly/SnSy7ou

11/07/2025

California-based followers: Please share this announcement in your communities. The California Chapter of PSI needs to fill a few important roles on our Board, including a Treasurer. We don't only want people already immersed in the perinatal mental health world. We'd love the following types of people to apply, who also care a lot about the wellbeing of California families: stay at home parents and folks in the corporate world with leadership experience, people with political organizing and fundraising experience, momtrepreneurs and dadtrepreneurs, and parents or grandparents of any gender who have fundraising and/or nonprofit board experience and some time to spare. Our board runs our organization, along with our volunteers. At this time we have no paid staff. So bring your great ideas and your energy and apply to join our Board!

11/05/2025

Many of us learned as children to keep our emotions inside, because they made the adults in our lives uncomfortable.

So, we learned to fear our emotions. Suppressing emotions is a fear response. If we don't feel them or say them, they can't hurt us or get us in trouble.

Suppressing emotions creates tension, which contributes to chronic pain & symptoms.

Venting our complaints and talking ABOUT our feelings can sometimes makes us feel even worse, because it focuses attention on our problems, without really getting our emotions out and giving them voice.

Emotional expression is NOT the same as venting.

Expressing emotions is speaking FROM the emotion, giving it a voice to say what it needs to say.

You don't have to speak the emotion aloud to the person you feel it toward. In fact, it's often best NOT to speak to someone you're upset with before you've let yourself express your feelings on your own. You're likely to say something you'll regret.

The best way to express our strongest emotions is to imagine speaking them in your imagination, to write them in a letter that is only for you to see, or to practice expressing emotions with a therapist trained in Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy.

You can even act out your emotions in your imagination, if that is what is needed.

When you give voice to your emotions until they are truly complete, until they have said or done all they need to say or do, your body can relax and you might even feel compassion, or sadness.

The emotion has moved through you and you may feel something completely different now. You can express that, too.

It takes practice not to suppress or to vent, but to express our emotions fully.

If you need help learning how to do this safely and with emotional support, I can help! See link in my bio.

10/30/2025

A large-scale study has confirmed that most people with non-celiac gluten sensitivity actually respond similarly to a placebo, which means that gluten can be a nocebo, and the response to it is a conditioned response, rather than a true sensitivity. This is great news, because it means that the vast majority of people can overcome this sensitivity through mind body treatments. Check out the study at https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2025/october/gluten-sensitivity-its-not-actually-about-gluten

If you or someone you know needs help overcoming gluten sensitivity and other mind/body conditions, including back pain, IBS, fibromyalgia, bladder issues, sciatica, RSI, TMJ and migraine, visit my website to find out more about my work at http://merilevy.com.

10/29/2025

When it comes to mind-body symptoms, knowledge=power.

My own journey with neuroplastic symptoms included recovering from multiple conditions, including Interstitial Cystitis, IBS, dizziness & nausea, TMJ dysfunction, plantar fasciitis, sciatica, RSI in my wrists, and neck, shoulder, back and knee pain. Many of those symptoms lasted for years, and at one point, I saw a functional medicine practitioner, believing that with all those symptoms, there must be one (medical) explanation for all of it.

Well, there was one explanation, but it wasn't revealed in all the medical tests I underwent. I read Dr. John Sarno's The Mindbody Prescription years ago, and once I understood that my symptoms were neuroplastic (mind-body), I began to recover.

Neuroplastic symptoms are generated by the brain, due to unexpressed emotions and/or feelings of danger. These symptoms often make you believe that there's something wrong in your body. But once you know the truth, you can start a journey of recovery that's quite remarkable.

If you answer "yes" to several of these questions, I encourage you to visit the ATNS website at http://symptomatic.me to find out more about neuroplastic healing. And if you need support on your healing journey, feel free to reach out. I'd love to help you recover as I did. Pain Reprocessing Therapy and Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy are evidence-based treatments for these conditions. They can help you release stored-up emotions and reestablish safety in your body, so you can finally heal.

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10/23/2025

This video is from the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms (symptomatic.me). If you're surprised by what you learn from it, please go to their website and find out more. Get the book Unlearn Your Pain by Dr. Howard Schubiner or The Way Out by Alan Gordon. There is a revolution happening in the way chronic pain and other medically unexplained symptoms are being understood, and many people are experiencing what might seem to be miraculous recoveries as a result. https://youtu.be/fpvPNDujUNI?si=uYoP1leiYAcYiWcq

Let's change how we think about pain, illness, and recovery together. To learn more and to support our work, please become a member at https://www.symptomati...