Leisha “Conflictolysis: The Moment the Body Knows It Is Safe
Do you ever find yourself suddenly triggered by something? A smell, a song, a familiar place. Sometimes these things bring back warm memories. Other times, they stir something deeper, something heavy. Those moments are trauma triggers, and they can arrive without warning. People often say triggers aren’t real or that others should “just grow up,” but usually those comments come from people who are uncomfortable with their own emotions. Triggers are real, and they deserve to be understood.
When I work with people, I’m always looking at the whole picture, and emotions are a big part of it. Live and dry blood analysis is one piece. Another piece I’ve loved bringing into my work is the perspective of Dr. Ryke Geerd Hamer and his German New Medicine (GNM), a completely different way of looking at illness and healing. And it isn’t only something I share with clients. It is something I live and look at with myself too.
WHAT DR. HAMER DISCOVERED
Dr. Hamer was a German physician. In 1978, his son Dirk was shot and later died. Not long afterward, Hamer was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He began to wonder whether the shock of losing his son and his own illness were connected, and he spent years studying the question in his patients.
As he did, he turned to brain scans. Looking at CT images of his patients’ brains, Hamer believed he could see distinct ring-shaped patterns in specific areas, and that each area corresponded to a particular organ and a particular kind of emotional conflict. He came to see the brain as the control center linking the emotional shock, the organ, and the body’s response. The pattern held together for him, and from it he built what he called German New Medicine, or GNM.
What he arrived at turns the usual view upside down. In the conventional picture, disease is something that goes wrong in the body. In GNM, what we call disease is the body responding intelligently to an emotional shock, following a purposeful biological program.
He called the starting point a biological conflict: an event that is unexpected, intensely felt, and experienced in isolation. This is the part I most want to stress: in GNM, the body’s biochemical reaction to that shock is understood as a healing reaction.
THE CONFLICTS
In GNM, the theme of the conflict, what the shock means to the person in that moment, relates to a particular part of the body. It isn’t the event itself that matters, but how it is felt: unexpected, intense, and carried alone. Two people can live through the same event and experience entirely different conflicts. Here are some of the conflicts Hamer described:
- Mother-child (nest) conflict: Worry for, separation from, or loss of a child, partner, or loved one, or a disturbance in the “nest” of family and home. It is about the instinct to nurture and protect those closest to us. In GNM, it relates to the breast, the organ of nourishing and caring.
- Fright-of-death conflict: A sudden, terrifying shock, such as a frightening diagnosis, an accident, or a moment of feeling that life is at risk. The feeling is of being unable to catch your breath. In GNM, it relates to the lungs.
- Fright or fear in one’s territory: A threat that arrives suddenly in a place where we should feel safe, such as a break-in, an unexpected confrontation at home or work, or an unwelcome intrusion. In GNM, it relates to the bronchial airways.
- Separation conflict: The painful sense of being cut off from a person you need to be in contact with, whether through distance, loss, rejection, or being untouched when touch was needed. In GNM, it relates to the skin, our organ of contact.
- Self-devaluation conflict: Feeling not good enough, not worthy, or defeated, often after criticism, failure, or humiliation. It is a wound to our sense of worth and our inner “structure.” In GNM, it relates to the bones and joints.
- Indigestible anger conflict: Something that can’t be swallowed, accepted, or let go of, often an unfair or hurtful event that is still being chewed on. In GNM, it relates to the colon.
- Can’t-get-the-morsel conflict: Fear of lack, of not having enough to survive, or of losing something essential, such as income, security, or resources. It is a primal worry about getting what we need. In GNM, it relates to the liver.
- Territorial anger conflict: Conflict over home, boundaries, or position, such as a dispute with a neighbor, a threat to your standing, or being pushed out of your place. In GNM, it relates to the coronary arteries.
- Loss conflict: The loss of a loved one, such as a child, partner, or parent, and the lasting emptiness that follows. In GNM, it relates to the ovaries and testes. This is the conflict Hamer connected to his own experience with Dirk.
- Refugee or existence conflict: Feeling abandoned, uprooted, or without a place of safety, as though the ground has gone out from under you. It is a deep sense of not belonging or of fighting for survival. In GNM, it relates to the kidneys.
GNM also teaches that the side of the body involved can relate to a person’s handedness and to whether the conflict involved a partner or a mother and child. Many people carry more than one conflict at a time, and the layers can overlap. That is why the question “When did I first feel this way, and what was around me?” matters so much.
TRACKS AND RAILS
In Hamer’s framework, the moment of shock lays down a track. A track is when the body records the whole scene: the place, the smells, the sounds, the season, the people, the words spoken. Any later reminder carrying part of that scene is a rail. It can pull us back onto the track, and the body responds as though the original event is happening again.
You can recognize a track by:
- Reactions out of proportion to the moment. A small thing brings a big wave of sadness, dread, or tension.
- The same feeling recurring across different situations, relationships, or years.
- Sensory pull. A smell, song, tone of voice, or place shifts your mood or body before you know why.
- Timing. Anniversaries, seasons, or life stages that echo the original event.
- Preoccupation. The mind keeps circling one theme, such as abandonment, being unsafe, or not being heard.
A question I love asking clients is, “When did you first feel this way, and what was happening around you?”
A TRIGGER, UP CLOSE
Yesterday, I experienced a trigger myself. It wasn’t the classic fight-or-flight response. I didn’t feel panic, anger, or hypervigilance. I heard a song. A wave of sadness washed over me and a familiar heaviness I hadn’t felt in in a while. My body remembered a place that once drained me, and it whispered to me “You’ve been here before.” I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it because I know I’m not alone. Many people have felt this same kind of emotional echo that reverberates. I told myself I am okay. I did an internal smile. I sat with the feeling and allowed it to be and to be okay.
THE TWO PHASES: HOW THE PROGRAM WORKS
Hamer taught that every biological program has two phases, and that understanding them changes how we see symptoms.
The conflict-active phase. From the moment of shock, the body is in sustained stress, with the sympathetic nervous system leading. Hamer described cold hands and feet, reduced appetite, poor sleep, weight loss, and a mind that can’t let go of the subject. In his view this is the body mobilizing and adapting. He also taught that during this phase the affected organ responds in a way that serves the conflict, and that the response is specific to the theme of the shock.
Conflictolysis. I love this word. Hamer coined it from “conflict” and the Greek lysis, meaning to loosen or dissolve. It is the moment the conflict is truly resolved, either because the situation changed or because our understanding of it changed. It might be a reconciliation, a loss finally accepted, safety restored, or the realization that “this is not then, and I am not who I was.”
The Health Phase
After conflictolysis, Hamer taught, the body shifts into rest and repair, led by the parasympathetic nervous system. Warm hands and feet, returning appetite, tiredness, and deep sleep are signs of the shift. He also taught that the symptoms people usually fear are part of this repair, including fever, inflammation, swelling, fluid retention, pain, and discharge. In his view these are the body rebuilding what the conflict-active phase changed. He believed microbes arrive as helpers in this phase, assisting with the work rather than causing it. Seen this way, the healing phase isn’t the illness. It is the body finishing its work.
The Epileptoid Crisis.
Hamer taught that healing doesn’t move in a straight line. Near the middle of the healing phase, he described a short, intense turning point he called the epileptoid crisis, named for its resemblance to an epileptic seizure: a sudden surge, then relief. In GNM, it’s a brief return of the stress state, as if the body visits the conflict one more time before letting it go. Hamer described cold hands and feet, sweating, dizziness, a wave of fear or emotion, and a feeling that everything is suddenly worse just when it was getting better. Then the body drops into the warm, heavy tiredness of real recovery.
I know this one. You think you’re healing, and then an old wave comes up. You feel yanked backward and wonder if you’ve lost everything you worked for. In Hamer’s view, that wave isn’t failure. It’s the turning point. When I look at my own my own conflicts, I wonder how many of those waves were really the surge before the settling, the old conflict rising one more time, not to pull me under, but to move through me and out and into healing.
WHEN THE TRACK DOESN’T STOP
This is where Hamer’s view becomes so different. If a conflict resolves, the body completes both phases and returns to balance. But if the track never stops, because a rail keeps re-triggering the original shock, the person can stay in the conflict-active phase, or move in and out of it again and again without ever finishing the healing.
In Hamer’s view, this ongoing process is what we end up naming as disease. It isn’t the body turning against us. It is a program that was never allowed to complete.
That is why the question is so important Instead of only “What’s wrong with me?”, we can ask, “What is my body responding to, and what does it need to feel safe again?”
MY OWN TRACK: THE MOTHER-CHILD SEPARATION
For me, this is not theory. My body is the mother-child separation conflict. I carry it, and I am healing it, and I am healing my body along with it. What may call disease, I see as my body healing.
What I’ve come to understand is that this healing has layers. And, we need to help the body (and the mind) go through this process rather than preventing it or warring with it.
The first layer is the emotions: the grief, the heaviness, the sadness that rises when something touches the old place of hurt and conflict. The second layer is the physical, because the body holds what the heart has been through, and it has its own way of speaking and reatcing. The third layer is the letting go, the quiet realization that I am okay. I am good. I can heal.
As I sat with my trigger, I reminded myself that this was not the same situation as before, and I am not the same person I was back then. I am not surrounded by the same people, and my life, and my love, are completely different now. The trigger didn’t vanish instantly, but repeating these truths helped me reclaim control over how my mind and body responded. This moment was not a repeat of the past. It was simply a reminder. That, to me, is conflictolysis in everyday life: the moment I stop living on the old track and let my body know it is safe now.
SUPPORTING THE BODY THROUGH THE MOMENT
Whatever lens we use, the nervous system is the bridge between emotion and body. When it stays on alert, the whole body feels it, and when it settles, the body has room to rest and repair.
Herbalism has taught me that the body speaks in whispers long before it ever screams. When a trigger rises, herbs can support the nervous system gently, not to erase the emotion, but to help us stay present with it:
- Lemon balm has a bright, citrusy scent that softens emotional heaviness and quiets the mind.
- Tulsi (holy basil) helps the body remember its resilience and brings grounded clarity when old memories try to pull you backward.
- Milky oats nourish a taxed nervous system, especially when emotions feel frayed or overstimulated.
- Lavender slows the breath and releases tension in the shoulders and jaw.
- Rose reminds us of our worth, our boundaries, and our softness when old wounds resurface.
After grounding myself emotionally, I brewed a simple cup of lemon balm and tulsi. I didn’t rush it. I let the steam rise, breathed it in, and allowed the herbs to meet me where I was. The warmth helped my shoulders drop. The scent reminded me that I am safe. The ritual reminded me that I am present.
WHAT I SEE IN THE BLOOD
Live and dry blood analysis isn’t directly part of Hamer’s work, but it is part of my picture. After doing many, many live blood analyses, I can see character. Everyone is unique. The way a person’s blood is organized and the way it moves tells me a great deal about the person it came from, and I find that emotional information a meaningful starting point for conversation with my clients. This is my own observation and intuition, built over years of looking, and I offer it as a doorway into understanding the whole person.
MOVING THROUGH, NOT BEING SWALLOWED
Today is a new day. I won’t pretend I’m back to 100%, but I do feel steadier, more in control of my emotions and more aware of my strength. I know I’ll be tested again, because life guarantees that. But next time, I’ll be even more prepared. You can’t outrun triggers, but you can meet them with courage, breath, and clarity. You can stand your ground and choose the steps, herbal, emotional, spiritual, that help you move through the moment rather than be swallowed by it.
And always remember you are not alone. None of us are! We all carry stories and we can change those stories to help our healing.
