You do not have 1957 different conditions. You have a dysregulated nervous system.
When storing shock, trauma, overwhelming emotional experience, your nervous system works hard. Often, too hard.
Overwhelming memories, fear, despair, and emotions can take physical form and course through your body in ongoing waves of disquieting sensations, discomfort, or pain.
In other words, trauma and repressed emotion actually hurts. At the very least, it can make you extremely uncomfortable in your own skin. If after treatment and trying multiple things, the body is still speaking - it is our invitation to listen. Physical pain and emotional pain map through the same brain areas. So we need to go deeper than symptoms to understand the true nature of our pain and dis-ease.
Frequently in the modern world we minimize the link between body and mind
Restoring the inherent safety and security of your body is at the core of the healing process. To believe that deep disturbance could happen in the mind and not in the body is a grave mistake. One that can lead to prolonged and unnecessary suffering.
Your body and mind thrive together. United, they synergistically spur each other toward optimal health and performance. When repressed emotion, trauma, shock, ancestral trauma mean a disconnect between body and mind, they begin stutter and strain, working against each other.
So, talk therapy is not the sole path to recovery. If trauma is stored in the body, easing that trauma must involve the body.
Taking a bottom-up approach to relief, starting with the discomfort we consciously feel, is crucial. We don’t want to leave stuck, tense, painful places in our bodies unrecognized and unaddressed. The cost to our quality of life is too high.
Often we simply don’t comprehend the warning signs our bodies send us. In a world that teaches us to live in our thinking brain and is traumatised and traumatising, and often in families where feelings and needs have not been attended to (because our parents likely did not have theirs attended to), many people live with little embodiment or connection to our true authentic selves.
That is of course, until the ache, pains, and spasms are chronic and debilitating.
Truthfully, many trauma survivors who don’t benefit from somatic (body-centered) therapy live with a pile-up of health conditions that they never link to their trauma.
The result? Attempts to straddle two painful experiences separately--one rooted in fear and anxious response; the other mired in physical tension and systemic reaction. This can become personally and relationally overwhelming. Doctors are happy to slap multiple diagnosis onto people until they are walking around with various syndromes, auto immune dis-ease diagnosis, chronic infections, and other chronic ‘itis’ and ‘incurable’ ailments. This adds to the existing burden of helplessness and overwhelm. It is also deeply incorrect as once the nervous system heals - most of these symptoms simply resolve (with daily choices aligned with good health of course - sleep, sunlight, movement, nourishing food, connection)
Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D. author of “The Body Keeps the Score” notes how terribly burdensome traumatic memory can be.
Noticing your body is the link to peace. If we don’t take heed you may find the toll trauma takes includes the following:
Emotional Trauma, Perpetual Anxiety, and Your Kidneys
The effect of trauma on kidney function is worth mentioning first. The kidneys filter blood and are responsible for effective circulation. Research tells us that kidney function is impacted significantly by trauma-related stress responses.
If you’ve been traumatized, your muscles are probably tensed around your kidneys so that they are positioned high in your body, perpetually ready for fight or flight. Such sustained states of anxiety can raise blood pressure, elevate your heart rate, and keep too much sugar in your blood. Unaddressed chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease, and cardiovascular disease could result.
Your kidneys are often the best place to start therapy, however, you may be experiencing a myriad of bodily symptoms like those below as well:
Exaggerated Startle Reflex
Trauma in the body can show up as, a highly sensitive startle reflex. Your body overreacts to perceived threats, big, small and imagined.
Essentially, your sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive. Soon your high alert state leads to fatigue and exhaustion.
Tremors, Aches and Inexplicable Pain
Traumatic energy stuck in your body will often show up as back or joint aches or tension in the neck, face, brow, or jaw, even chest tightness.
Some people complain of throat pain or a sense that they are choking, others experience shaking hands, tremors or strange numbness in various extremities. Recent research on women with fibromyalgia and chronic pain indicates a connection to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well.
Recurring Stomach Problems, Digestive Issues, or Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)
Trauma can be rough on your gut too. Your gut biome can be significantly disrupted as a result of impaired kidney function due to stress ( as mentioned above). The vagus nerve is also cubical for good digestion and this can be functioning less well until trauma is further healed. This often leads to weight gain, diarrhea, bloating, food intolerances, constipation and more.
Sleep Disturbance
It's not much of a leap to recognize how traumatic memories, conscious and suppressed, may manifest in nightmares, night terrors, disrupted sleep, and insomnia. The resulting exhaustion and fatigue can affect cognitive ability and physical coordination as well as your ability to heal from bodily wounds.
Suppressed Immune System
Unaddressed trauma has been shown to increase the odds of experiencing high levels of inflammation and autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn's disease, celiac disease, or psoriasis. On a more everyday level, you may deal with more colds or infections, and have difficulty recovering from either. The body keeps under or over reacting until the nervous system is settled and can regulate immunity.
Seek support for complete relief
Trauma can be very scary to confront, but addressing trauma piecemeal is not enough. The toll you pay to hold, bury, or ignore trauma is not worth your happy future.
You can heal and move forward. Somatic experiencing, EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and somatic oriented IFS (internal family systems), breathwork, as well as any movement practice that helps us befriend our body and sensations, are all ways we learn to bring peace to the war inside, and inner organisation from the chaos that trauma creates in our psyche and body.
No one path fits all. This is part of learning to listen inwards - so that we can find how our body and felt senses find relief and release.
Those who stay attached to their multiple illness labels, or refuse to acknowledge the mind body as one complex interdependent system, have a tendency to stay stuck in the paradigm of symptom treatment. I mention this not to be unkind - just to be honest that people that heal have taken the time to learn about the mind body connection, they accept that it applies to them, and they practice ways to heal this this daily in their choices and way of life and with appropriate support.
The body will re organise when there is safety. Safety in the nervous system is not the absence of threat. It is the presence of connection.
That is the ultimate goal of our work and indeed any work to heal these conditions. To re establish safe connection between mind and body, safe re connection to the whole authentic self, and re connection to life, community and the wider world. Over time we slowly regain the response flexibility that was lost through trauma, we regain our connection to our body, the present moment, and the wider world. This is possible for all.
It does take time. It is largely shaped by our daily choices in between our appointments with our caregivers. We have a tremendous capacity to self heal when we stop trying to ‘do’ the ‘right’ thing and we stop trying to ‘fix’ ourselves. We have to instead begin a compassionate inquiry into our sensations, the story of our body mind, so we can learn to speak its language, release its stuck pain, and heal.