She Still Had Cereal in Her Mouth When the Call Came.
Dr. John Erickson, DC | Laser & Chiropractic Center of the Rockies | Loveland, CO
Case 017 | Series Post #17
The Worst Call of Her Life Arrived at the Breakfast Table
She was feeding her young children breakfast. Dry cereal. A normal morning.
The phone rang. It was her mother. Her father had been killed in a bizarre accident the night before.
She still had cereal in her mouth when she got the news.
A Woman Whose Body Had Made a Decision She Didn’t Know About
She was a young woman with children at home. The call came without warning – the sudden, shocking kind of loss that doesn’t give you time to brace for it. The kind that finds you in the middle of an ordinary moment and turns that moment into something it was never supposed to be.
In the weeks and months that followed, she noticed something strange. When she ate cereal – particularly the same brand she had been eating that morning – she didn’t feel right. Her mouth developed ulcers and irritations. She felt unwell. The reaction was consistent and reliable.
She wasn’t allergic to cereal before that morning. She was after it.
She came in to find out why.
Her Body Had Tagged the Cereal as the Source of the Danger
The nervous system is constantly doing one thing above all others: looking for patterns. When something bad happens, the nervous system immediately begins scanning for the cause – not necessarily the real cause, but the most prominent sensory input present at the moment of the event.
She was eating cereal when the worst moment of her life arrived. The two things were happening simultaneously. Her nervous system – flooded with stress hormones, in a state of acute alarm – made an association. The cereal was there. The catastrophe was there. The nervous system tagged the cereal.
It wasn’t a logical conclusion. It was a survival mechanism. The nervous system always seeks to identify where problems originate so it can prepare for the next one. That morning, it prepared by flagging the cereal as dangerous.
Every time she ate it after that, her body mobilized as if a threat were present.
An Allergy Driven by Memory, Not by the Food
Assessment identified reactivity to the cereal – specifically the kind she had been eating that morning. But the deeper finding was that the reactivity appeared to be emotionally encoded. The substance itself hadn’t changed. What had changed was what the nervous system had associated it with.
In NAET, we recognize that allergic responses can be emotionally or traumatically conditioned. When a substance becomes linked to a traumatic event through nervous system association, the immune response that follows is real – it produces real symptoms – but it is being driven by memory and encoding rather than by anything inherently harmful in the substance itself.
The NAET process can address these associations directly. The goal is to unlink the memory of the traumatic event from the substance – to allow the nervous system to process the cereal as cereal, separate from what it now represents.
Patient-Reported: The Cereal Became Just Cereal Again
Following treatment – which addressed both the sensitivity to the cereal and the emotional encoding associated with it – she reported that the reaction she had experienced consistently with cereal consumption no longer occurred.
The mouth ulcers and irritations that had appeared with cereal stopped appearing. The general sense of feeling unwell after eating it resolved.
The cereal, which had become a physical trigger for her nervous system’s grief response, became food again.
Grief Changes the Immune System. This Is Not Metaphor. It Is Biology.
Research published in Biological Psychiatry has documented that bereavement measurably reduces natural killer cell activity – a key component of immune function – with effects visible even before the death occurs, during anticipatory grief.[1] The emotional experience of loss produces real, measurable changes in immune response. The nervous system and immune system are not separate in moments of grief. They are the same system, responding together.
Research published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics has further documented that critical life events alter brain neurotransmitters and contribute to somatic symptoms – and that emotional events can be transduced into long-lasting brain changes involving neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and receptors.[2] A single traumatic moment can produce neurochemical changes that persist. What was present at that moment can become permanently associated with it in the nervous system’s encoding.
Her body didn’t develop an allergy to cereal. Her nervous system developed an allergy to that morning. The cereal was the signal that morning was happening again.
Sometimes What the Body Is Reacting To Is Not What It Appears to Be
She came in with what looked like a food sensitivity. It was, in a sense. But underneath it was something the conventional allergy model was never designed to find.
In practice, I see this pattern more than people might expect. A reaction that starts at a specific moment in time. A substance that was simply present when something significant happened. A body that made a connection no one meant to make.
If you have a food or environmental reaction that started suddenly – especially at a time of significant stress, loss, or trauma – the trigger may be the event, not the substance. That distinction changes what the solution looks like.
— Dr. John Erickson, DC | Laser & Chiropractic Center of the Rockies | Loveland, Colorado
To learn more about NAET at Laser & Chiropractic Center of the Rockies, visit laserchirorockies.com or call 970-412-3212.
Individual results vary. This story is de-identified and shared with permission. It represents a reported patient experience and is not a guarantee of outcome. NAET is a complementary wellness approach and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or medical condition.
[1] Irwin, M. et al. “Plasma Cortisol and Natural Killer Cell Activity During Bereavement.” Biological Psychiatry. 1988;24(2):173-178. PMID: 3390497. DOI: 10.1016/0006-3223(88)90272-7
[2] Biondi, M. & Picardi, A. “Clinical and Biological Aspects of Bereavement and Loss-Induced Depression: A Reappraisal.” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. 1996;65(5):229-245. PMID: 8893324. DOI: 10.1159/000289082