The Origins Of Mind Body Illnesses - Why Emotions Matter

When we have as adaptive response like freeze, fawn/collapse, flight in order to survive a perceived threat (often in childhood); like embarrassment, not being seen, shame, guilt, fear; not being able to express ourselves - or we were unable to escape the situation due to the real helplessness of being a child and not having power, what happens?

We freeze or collapse/fawn to avoid the emotional pain - hardwiring in that memory and along with it. To a child’s brain that imprints this response, the belief is formed that this the only way to cope or respond. This is perfectly valid as a child without power or resources. It is a deep freeze so to speak as it gets into the deepest layers of our survival brain and memory banks; it gets baked it. Our limbic system will flag it as something on the ‘definitely remember’ list as it was a response that was crucial for survival, and if there is even a whisper of the same feeling, situation, sensory experience again - it will mount the same emotional and behavioural response. It does not matter that now as adults we do have access to resources, power, and response ability. The area of the brain responsible for that present moment response flexibility is offline when we have trauma or chronic stress, and instead the brain will simply default to the known one or few survival adaptions that were so needed to protect us long ago.

It becomes a lens that we perceive the world through. Seemingly innocuous situations can trigger a massive emotional response of rage, victimhood, overwhelm, helplessness etc. Signs of this are also found in our thoughts. This response creates cognitive distortions like all or nothing/black and white thinking, emotional reasoning (I feel bad so everything is bad), catastrophising, fortune telling (it was bad so it will always be bad), discounting the good, and personalising (much more on these later). These thoughts create the same feelings and round we go in our own personal hamster wheel of suffering.

We hardwired in a procedural conditioned response on how to handle future scenarios based on feeling continually helpless - which is no longer true but the system truly doesn’t know this and it is NOT a personal failing at all! Your mammalian system is set up to log what helped you survive. It does not know that it is not able to help you thrive.

This helplessness is deeply reinforced by the medical industry - all too ready with scans and labels to tell you what is ‘wrong’ and what can’t be ‘fixed’. The focus on the structural ‘abnormalities’ and all the treatments that we get add to our false belief and our attention on our physical symptoms grows. As we know from neuroscience, where you place your attention is where you build pathways. Lo and behold, we get worse over time - re affirming there is definitely something wrong with us. Cue fear, helplessness, and another 30000 turns in our hamster wheel. We get further away from the true cause in our minds and the repressed emotional energy builds in the system, constantly triggering the danger alarm in the brain, which in turn stimulates the stress response and creates our symptom patterns.

With each new conflict or trauma throughout life - we screen the new threat through the faulty perception of the memory - and we re experience helplessness - forever stuck, reacting the same way. This is seen in other anxiety manifestations like OCD too. 

The lack of expression or of being heard results in an internalisation of what energy should have been released and our personality does something interesting to protect us. It will adapt personality parts to manage this pain, in other words it creates psychological defences. Enter the perfectionist, the people pleaser, the helper, the inner critic, the worrier/doubter and other parts. It is a hyper adaptation to emotional pain. Necessary for survival adaption, but in later life - this can become maladaptive and cause us to suffer in our health, relationships and life.

However adept the psyche is in suppressing the emotional energy - it will always reach critical mass. Repression leads to an increase in potential energy. If enough energy is pent up - havoc ensues in the mind-body. This can be pain for many ranging from mild to disabling, fatigue, numbness, tingling, digestion issues, changes in muscles and tissue, migraines, frequent urination, arthritis -and many more symptoms. This actually then can go on to reinforce defence mechanisms as the person turns their attention to the physical manifestation of emotional pain and gets caught up in the hamster wheel of treating the symptoms.

This will continue to be stored in our limbic system and body; and replayed in our lives and bodies until properly discharged or recognised for what it truly is. When we begin to think psychological and feel somatically, instead of focusing on structural - we are on our way.

My personal belief is; as Carl Jung believed too, that we are meant to integrate our shadow and remember we are whole. To show us the way - this energy overflow will often begin to speak through the mind body in symptoms. If we were taught at a young age to go straight to looking at our thoughts and unexpressed emotions, we would save ourselves such suffering. We can go a life time of hamster wheeling our way through the medical establishment before finding our way home to what is truly going on and realising our tremendous innate power to heal. This is where the transformation begins. Welcome.

Reading:

Dr Gabor Mate - When the Body Says No

Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk - The Body Keeps The Score

Dr John Sarno - Healing Back Pain, The Mind Body Prescription, Divided Minds

Steven Ozanich - The Great Pain Deception

Back In Control - Dr David Hanscom

Dr Candace Pert - The Molecules Of Emotion