The body keeps score - healing beyond the physical
Increasing numbers of people are finally recognising that healing the body cannot take place without also considering our emotional and psychological landscape. This is particularly true of chronic illness, acute pain, anxiety and autoimmune conditions, but is also relevant to a myriad of health complaints.
This doesn’t mean that the pain and discomfort felt in the physical body is just in our head, but more so that the solution is generally not found in the physical body. The pain is very real – contrary to what others may say, especially when we struggle to gain a diagnosis – we are not ignoring it.
Furthermore, our physical pain is not simply a case of our body not working ‘properly’. The pain exists because it is highlighting, drawing attention to, our emotional and mental holding.
Author of the Mind Your Body, Nicole Sachs, argues that while a broken bone will cause pain as protection, encouraging us to slow down and take action to heal, the same is true of a myriad of chronic health conditions too.
This, because the brain and nervous system interpret dark and traumatic emotions as a threat to life, and will slow us down to give us time to address them.
Yes, you did read that correctly - the brain and nervous system interpret dark and traumatic emotions as a threat to life.
The brain and nervous system also interpret inner negativity in exactly the same way - they cannot distinguish between an external predator, and an internal one. By external, I mean another person, animal, etc. By internal I mean a self-critical voice or negative thoughts. Even limiting beliefs can cause harm.
But in terms of slowing down, this is important to understand. A migraine slows us down to horizontal pretty quickly, so does a flare up, or an IBS attack, or acid stomach, or excruciating back pain. Sometimes we unconsciously use the body to allow us time to rest and escape from the rest of the world.
Why?
Well, each of us has an emotional reservoir, and life has this habit of filling this reservoir. The challenges we face; worries about money, anxiety over our children, the demands of elderly parents, relationship issues, juggling responsibilities, and all the triggers that are still there from the trauma we experienced in childhood, the unseen and unheard inner child, for example, they all contribute to the filling of this reservoir.
When the reservoir is filled to the brim, it creates feelings of overwhelm which many of us know well. This is the point at which life feels out of control and a “mess” and the nervous system switches into fight-or-flight mode (sometime triggering freeze or fawn too). At this point, it sends a message to the brain to send signals which lead to the migraine, flare up, an IBS attack, acid stomach, or the excruciating back pain.
What the brain does next is clever in many ways. It distracts our conscious mind with the physical discomfort, so that we no longer feel the unbearable weight of life with all its pressures. Because now there is another priority – getting well, seeking a cure, seeing doctors and healers, and whatever else we need to do to feel as if we are back in control.
Because control, or feeling out of control, is a huge issue for us humans. We don’t do well with the unknown and uncertain, it creates a fear, and fear causes us to try to make things known and certain instead, which means trying to stay in control.
Obviously the idea of being in control is a misnomer. We are never truly in control of anything other than the manner in which we respond to life, but even then, there can be unconscious drivers at play. Yet many of us will still try to control other people and our external environment so that we feel safer - we may also try to control ourselves too.
For those with illness, we may well micromanage our lives to work around (and attempt to ease) our pain, not simply to heal, but so that we feel that we are in control of something.
And in many ways as we retreat from the world and rest up, we will likely feel better, calmer, more in control, because the emotional reservoir has been given a chance to settle – we are not adding to it. Instead we turn away from the weight of the world and from the triggers which triggered us in the first place.
The trouble though, is it’s a short term solution, not a long term one. The repressed emotions, trauma and triggers are likely still there, just that we are no longer adding to them – we have taken ourselves to bed instead.
Many of us repress our emotions because we were never encouraged or allowed to express our emotions in childhood – in many ways we learned this from our parents and from their parents, generations where our emotional body was denied, and expressing emotions was viewed as weak or unnecessary- the British “stiff upper lip” runs deep in many a DNA.
Thus emotions, e-motion, energy in motion, gets stuck. And where energy gets stuck, pain occurs, resonating in cells somewhere. This creates disharmony, and where there is dis-harmony, dis-ease takes root.
The more chronic the holding, the more chronic the pain.
Most people are surprised to learn, therefore, that their very own brain and nervous system is causing them harm. That ironically their illness has become a place of safety affording them the opportunity to prioritise self-care, accept help from others, slow their life down, put better boundaries in place, and ensure that any demands placed on them are eased.
However, many are not prepared to accept that their illness, their chronic condition, their acute pain, their anxiety, their autoimmune disease, is due to emotional repression and an overflowing emotional reservoir.
It is much easier to look outside ourselves and hope for salvation from conventional medicine and take a pill. Yet we also know that the drugs alone don’t work.
It is nothing new though. Herbert Shelton (an American naturopath, who revived the 1830s hygienist movement, based on the Greek philosophy of health and well-being) said back in the 1930s that diseases are not the result of external causes, such as viruses and bacteria, but of derangement in a person's life habits, which go against human nature: eating unnaturally, sleeping little, and consuming harmful substances such as alcohol and cigarettes.
His book, Natural Hygiene advocates for self-healing through fasting, raw vegan diets, and lifestyle changes while rejecting conventional medicine. This because he argues that the advent of conventional medicine and the drugs prescribed, has caused an increase in sickness, not a decrease, and that we are a sicker society for it.
He has a point. And his book makes his point well – it is a huge read though so be prepared!
From a holistic perspective, we appreciate that chronic illness, acute pain, anxiety and autoimmune conditions, as well as a myriad of other health issues, result from the confusion between the nervous system sensing danger, and the response that the brain chooses to protect itself.
Put simply, if the nervous system deems stressful, emotional experiences as dangerous predators, then the brain will choose for us to be at home where it is safe – thus sickness prevails.
Therefore, the key to dealing with chronic symptoms resides in understanding that a person’s stress, repressed emotions, unresolved trauma and daily frustrations can ultimately lead to nervous system dysregulation, coupled with a general fatigue for life.
Furthermore, those feelings hidden deep in our emotional reservoir are clamouring for release - the abandonment when a parent left suddenly in childhood, the shame from perceived sexual inadequacy, the fear from being bullied as a child, the guilt of not doing more to help a sick friend, the anger of being the only one who works hard to hold the family together, the resentment of being the sole earner, all of this is desperate for attention.
There are many authors who have followed in the footsteps of Henry Sheldon. Dr Bessel van der Kolk’s famous book, The Body Keeps the Score, which explores the bodily effect of trauma, especially in soldiers returning from war with PTSD. In this book, he shows how these unprocessed traumas can lead to debilitating physical pain, as well as addiction, and other signs of loss of wellbeing.
Dr Gabor Maté in his brilliant book, When the Body Says No, reaches a similar conclusion. He looks at the link between stress, trauma and addiction and delves into the connection between mental health and physical illness.
Then there’s Dr Candace Pert who wrote Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel, which was ground breaking back in the day, detailing how neuropeptides and their cellular receptors form a biochemical network linking the mind and body. She posits that emotions are not just psychological but are physical messengers driving our overall health and wellbeing.
Challenging the traditional conventional medical view that the mind is located solely in the brain, Pert argued that the mind and body are one integrated system. Receptors for neuropeptides are found on cells throughout the entire body—including the immune, endocrine, and gastrointestinal systems.
Thus instead of the brain being the sole command centre, Pert proposed it acts more like a telephone switchboard. Information constantly flows back and forth between the body and brain, meaning our emotions and physical health are deeply interconnected.
These "molecules of emotion" are distributed throughout the body, Pert suggested that unresolved or repressed emotions can become physically trapped at the cellular level, potentially leading to chronic illness or disease over time.
So what can we do about this?
Well with the predator in our illness being our repressed emotions and the trauma-related triggers, then the key to our healing is finding a way to eliminate the predator so that we can lower the emotional reservoir, and no longer feel so overwhelmed.
To do this, we need to enter the shadows and bring these shadows – the repressed emotions, the unresolved trauma, the negative thinking, the limited mindset – into the light, with kindness, compassion and tolerance for ourselves.
This reality of the mind and body isn’t always easy to accept though, if we have been programmed by conventional medicine otherwise. And while no one can argue that stress often leads to headaches and migraines, that anxiety and fear lead to stomach issues, anger leads to boils and panic leads to hives, people will argue that their illness has no emotional element.
We have to be careful too, as our conventional medicine programming has given us certain beliefs that might get in the way of our healing. We might believe that we get migraines because our mum got them, we might believe that the ankle pain is back at the same site as an old injury, we might feel that we suffer with anxiety because it runs in the family.
Furthermore, we might accredit a bad lower back, for example, to moving heavy furniture a few days earlier. But nothing occurs in a vacuum. It can become chronic pain, when we are faced with the reality of life with a bad back and the impact on those we love and the chances are, the back is a weak spot because of our emotional reservoir and our feeling unsupported, weighed down by responsibility.
Thus to fully embrace the holistic approach to healing, to truly appreciate the mind-body complex, we have to change our perceptions regarding what is wrong with us and how we might heal it. We have to shatter our old ideas of ‘fixing’ (which implies perfection) and instead focus on healing.
We have to appreciate that nothing happens in isolation. To heal our physical body, we not only need to look at our emotional holding and psychological structure, but at the choices we are making in the way we are living, which might also be contributing to our loss of wellness.
The Buddha taught that life involves inevitable challenges, from physical pain and sickness to the subtle stress of impermanence, all of which cause suffering.
Suffering is fuelled by craving, attachment, and aversion. We suffer when we resist reality or cling to things that are constantly changing. And because suffering has a cause, it can be entirely ended by letting go of this craving and ignorance.
We suffer when we don’t get what we want. We also suffer when we get what we want. Because everything is subject to change and it is change, ultimately, that causes our suffering. Even modern psychology recognises this.
Accepting change as a constant in our life can go a long way to creating greater mental and emotional harmony. Accepting our reality as it is in this moment, regardless of what is happening, can help too – it is like a balm to our nervous system.
The work we do here may indeed be painful as we feel the repressed emotions that are encouraged to the surface, and address the unresolved trauma, processing our life experiences, but it is far less painful than the despair, hopelessness and endlessness of living with chronic and autoimmune pain, to say nothing of our depressions and anxiety attacks.
Ultimately we have choice.
We have choice how we think, what we do, what we pay attention to, and how we respond.
We also have choice in our perception.
If we perceive that we are unsafe – even if this perception comes from opening an invoice, or an unkind comment from our boss – then our body will respond that way.
Our perception is our body’s reality.
So we need to look at why the mind is perceiving the threat – questioning what has happened previously to leave this imprint.
Yoga offers us a solution - it asks us to consider our samskaras, the scars and imprints that have left an impression on our mind, so that our mind is no longer tainted by them, and negatively impacting our perception and experience of reality.
Yoga has known what conventional medicine is only now realising – we are the sum part of our experiences, just as we are what we eat.
We have the power to heal ourselves. But we have to believe in this and have the courage to do the deeper work that will ultimately set us free.
We have to be prepared to let go of our emotional repression and make peace with our trauma, opening ourselves up to a new ways of perceiving the world regardless of the changes needed – overcoming our fears in the process and learning to radically and unconditionally accept and love ourselves.
Reiki helps, I have witnessed clients releasing the trapped emotions and memories during sessions and their chronic pain almost instantly easing. The coaching work I do with clients has made a difference too, as it gives them the space to talk and share their deepest feelings, in a confidential and safe environment, while I move it through their body with the Reiki.
The intuitive yoga I teach has made a huge difference to some of my ladies too, to me personally as well, as it asks us to go deeper into the body still, to truly release the stuck emotions and traumas, and to face our Samskaras, the impressions and scars, so that we can consciously shift our thinking into something more positive, releasing the trapped emotions in the process.
There are ways. The first step is to know we can do this, and then take steps. Please do reach out if you need help.
Love Emma x
