She Learned to Cry, Her Virus Disappeared?
How an identity shift, grief work, and real tears lined up with a stunning change in chronic hepatitis B labs
What if the cure you’ve been chasing wasn’t in another protocol, diet, or drug… but in the tears you’ve been refusing to shed?
That’s the question I was forced to ask when my colleague and friend Naomi, a seasoned nurse practitioner, showed me her lab work. Eight years of stable hepatitis B numbers, then after a year of subconscious work and finally learning to cry… her viral load plummeted. Again and again on repeat testing.
No new meds. No diet overhaul. Same antiviral protocol. Different nervous system.
And here’s the kicker: I didn’t believe her at first.
The Big Idea
Naomi grew up in a military Chinese family. Emotions weren’t just discouraged, they were invisible. She carried childhood abandonment, teenage violation, and decades of silence inside her body. She never told her husband. She never cried.
Then, inside one of our trainings, she finally cracked open. Tears came. Her story spilled out. And for the first time, she felt release.
“The only thing I did differently,” she told me, “was become a Next Level Human coach. And I did a lot of crying. For the longest time, I didn’t know how to cry. I didn’t know how to release emotions. If you ask me what changed… that’s it.”
When her research team saw her numbers, they didn’t know what to do with them. “They asked me, what drugs did you take? What study are you in? And I said, nothing. The only thing I did was subconscious work and learning how to release my emotions.”
I’ll admit, I was skeptical. I told her: let’s wait. Let’s see another lab. And then another. And another. Four, five times in a row, the numbers dropped lower. To the point where her viral load was essentially undetectable.
Hear Naomi tell the story in her own words: CLICK HERE TO HEAR NAOMIS STORY IN HER OWN WORDS
The Breakdown
Here’s what I’ve learned after decades in medicine, therapy, and coaching: most approaches only scratch one layer.
Therapy talks it out, but often gets stuck in the intellect.
Coaching sets goals but rarely touches the subconscious knots.
Energy work can stir things up, but lacks scientific grounding.
Psychedelics or hypnosis can crack you open, but they don’t sequence the healing properly.
DEEP… Depth Enhanced Emotional Processing… does it differently.
We use specific breathing and meditative states to drop the brain into alpha and theta, the same layers where dreams and memories live. From there, we guide the nervous system through a cycle:
Rewrite the story (change the meaning of what happened).
Rewire the emotion (release it somatically, not just cognitively).
Retrain the nervous system (install a new identity response).
This is not random catharsis. It’s a methodical way to loosen the M.U.D.… those Misguided Unconscious Decisions formed in moments of fear and abandonment that still run our adult lives.
And here’s the science: the CPNEI model.
Consciousness shapes your perception.
That perception rewires your psychology.
Psychology alters your neurobiology.
Neurology shifts your endocrine system.
And hormones direct your immune function.
Change the belief, and the cascade runs all the way down to your cells.
Why Emotion Hits the Immune System
For decades, research in psychoneuroimmunology has shown that emotion is not just “in your head.” Grief, suppression, or unresolved trauma directly alter the body’s stress circuitry, which cascades down to the immune system.
For example, studies on bereavement consistently show increases in pro-inflammatory cytokines and suppressed natural killer cell activity—a measurable weakening of immune defense (O’Connor et al., 2009; Seiler et al., 2020). In other words, carrying grief literally blunts your body’s ability to fight infection.
Conversely, interventions that target emotional release and subconscious processing can tilt the immune system in the opposite direction. Mindfulness-based interventions and meditation have been shown to reduce circulating inflammatory markers like IL-6 and CRP (Black & Slavich, 2016). Advanced meditative states even trigger broad immune gene activation, including antiviral pathways (Chandran et al., 2021).
Expressive writing and emotional disclosure studies reveal a similar pattern: people who move from suppression to coherent emotional processing often show improved immune markers, lower doctor visits, and sometimes better disease outcomes (Pennebaker & Smyth, 2016; Niles et al., 2014). The effect size isn’t magical, but it’s consistent: when the nervous system processes what was once locked away, the immune system shifts.
Naomi’s story is an N=1 case. But it sits on a growing stack of evidence that what we feel but refuse to release becomes immune code. And when you change that code, sometimes the body follows.
Closing Thought
Why does this matter for you? Because maybe you’ve done all the right things… seen the doctors, tried the diets, followed the protocols… and still feel stuck.
Maybe the lever you’ve never pulled is the one your biology has been waiting for: emotional release, identity shift, nervous system reset.
Naomi’s story is not about “cure.” It’s about possibility. It’s about what happens when we stop managing symptoms on the surface and go into the basement where the stories were written.
PS Call-to-Action
PS: If you’re ready to break free of old stories, emotional armor, and the health plateaus that come with them… and become the kind of person who naturally rewires their nervous system, restores their immune system, and lives aligned with their Essentia… explore my Next Level Human coaching program today. Spots are limited… don’t wait. 👉 http://www.nextlevelhuman.com/human-coaching
References
Black, D. S., & Slavich, G. M. (2016). Mindfulness meditation and the immune system: A systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1373(1), 13–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.12998
Chandran, V., Abraham, P., et al. (2021). Large-scale genomic study reveals robust activation of the immune system following advanced meditation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(46), e2110455118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2110455118
Niles, A. N., Haltom, K. E. B., Mulvenna, C. M., Lieberman, M. D., & Stanton, A. L. (2014). Effects of expressive writing on psychological and physical health: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Clinical Psychology Review, 34(3), 242–255. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2014.02.001
O’Connor, M.-F., Irwin, M. R., & Wellisch, D. K. (2009). When grief heats up: Proinflammatory cytokines predict regional brain activation. NeuroImage, 47(3), 891–896. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2009.05.049
Pennebaker, J. W., & Smyth, J. M. (2016). Opening up by writing it down: How expressive writing improves health and eases emotional pain (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
Seiler, A., Jenewein, J., & Maercker, A. (2020). The psychobiology of bereavement and health: A review. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 11, 565. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00565
This is a powerful illustration of a critical link, Jade.
As a biochemist, I often think of this in terms of the body's "threat-management budget." For decades, her system was spending a huge amount of its resources managing the chronic, low-grade alarm of that unresolved trauma. This kind of sustained stress often keeps cortisol elevated, which can act as a handbrake on the adaptive immune system - the very part you need to keep a virus in check.
What Naomi's story so incredibly demonstrates is what happens when you finally shut off that alarm. The resources are freed up, the handbrake is released, and the security system can finally go back to doing its primary job.
It's a great example of the biochemistry of storytelling.