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TissueReligion  1yr ago (text post)   1286 thread views

Ways to address underlying emotions that may be causing physical health issues?

Hi there! So I've had a weird variety of physical health issues for the past several years, and seeing a wide variety of doctors / therapists etc. has not done a lot for me. I grew up in a sort of physically violent / verbally abrasive household (I'm going to step back from using the term "abusive," but probably not that far off) and I've always wondered if there's some connection between that and my current physical health issues.

The tricky thing is... I'm just sort of positive / upbeat / feel good basically all the time, and it's hard for me to really identify any conscious emotions or bodily tension or anything that seems related. It's totally possible it's just all suppressed like 4 layers down, because I'm pretty sure I also do this with anger (eg since I grew up with an insanely angry person in the house, I just couldn't really express anger/upset at all, or they would freak out at me).

So I'm trying to figure out what other kinds of approaches to try, because most of the normal therapists I've seen have come up at a loss.

Any thoughts appreciated!

Thanks.

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I’m not sure what kinds of activities you’re trying to do, but I think you might be overthinking here. Before you go completely into the weeds of “this has to be a mental hang up” have you tried stretching activities like yoga or qi gong or tai chi or even calisthenics. I think people tend to make things worse by always jumping to the answer of mental issues. Go find someone to teach you to exercise and stretch properly at a gym and see if six weeks doesn’t move the needle a bit.

This course has some interesting techniques if you're curious: https://nsmastery.com/

Also Joe Hudson's podcast the Art of Accomplishment can help a good bit with emotional understanding/growth.

Being overly introspective isn't helpful to a lot of people. You can get stuck in your head and spiral.

Sunshine, exercise, and community connection is generally better.

Join some kind of sports league and make and effort do nice things for people you care about. Help a friend or relative do yard work.

Basic bitch coping skills are not going to do the trick.

Right, clearly the right solution is to used watered down Scientology to audit away his body thetans.

I think you are not supposed to speak flippantly about things you have no idea about on this site.

What makes you think that?

Anyways basic bitch coping skills are pretty underrated -- how do you think our ancestors survived?

I think they struggled along with lots of pains and suffering, dying before 60.

What OP asked for are ways to get at the root of emotional problems. I know from personal experiences that getting the basics in place, as useful as they can be for mild depression and the like, are not going to touch that.

In the case of my immediate ancestors, they struggled on with lots of pain suffering depression and whatnot -- dying pretty near a hundred. What of it?

Life is pain.

Have you read the body knows the score?

I've heard good things about that one as well. SSC review here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/

I haven't really yet, skimmed a bit of it, but I should probably go back and read it. Thanks for the suggestion.

It's hard to know whether that's the case for you without more information.

It's possible that buried stress, trauma, trapped emotions, insecure childhood attachment etc can cause physical issues that can be hard to diagnose. Some people even get a severe chronic fatigue that leaves them bedridden due to a subconscious module shutting down the body without the conscious person having any idea what is going on. Toxins affect us in many ways, whether that is something in your current physical environment, or your current or past psychosocial environments. But the fact you feel good all the time makes me less sure that you are particularly traumatized. But it's hard to say without knowing more.

You may want to look at this and see if anything rings a bell: https://themovementparadigm.com/how-to-map-your-own-nervous-sytem-the-polyvagal-theory/

In any case, here are some things that worked for me:

Basically you'll have to introspect regularly. Meditate. Therapy can also be useful, but not on its own, because I do not fancy the odds of finding the needle in the haystack, the actually supremely competent therapist who can help you fully. More likely you will have to do much of the looking and healing yourself. If it is the case that you have something within your mind that is making your body dysfunctional, you're the one who has to discover it and work with it.

There is a treatment protocol called Ideal Parent Figure meditation. It's good for those who have attachment disturbances. If one or both of your parents did not provide secure attachment for you, you may draw benefit from repairing that. I recommend a teacher called Cedric Reeves (www.attachmentrepair.com). These guided meditations were pretty huge for me. The way it works is that the mind does not differentiate between reality and fantasy when it comes to establishing procedural memories of things like the emotions of having a secure attachment to parents in early childhood. That means you can imagine yourself as a child and replace the problematic situation with a new one where you are truly seen, heard, understood, loved, cared for. This will put in place a healthier basis for existential safety, which is pretty important for many bodily and mental functions.

Then there's something called Internal Family Systems. It purports that we consist of many parts in the mind, with varying degrees of agency and motives. I only tried this briefly. It definitely seemed to map something that exists, and seemed useful, but it was not the right treatment modality for me at the time.

Apart from IPF, the thing that has helped sort out various mind/body imbalances has been daily mindfulness meditation. Once the mind unifies, it can inspect itself and let go of programs, delusions, emotion complexes that are not necessary anymore. It lets you take in what is actually extant in your current reality and let go of old sub-optimal models.

Basically you'll have to introspect regularly. [...] If it is the case that you have something within your mind that is making your body dysfunctional, you're the one who has to discover it and work with it.

I appreciate this framing. More productive than trying to find the needle-in-the-haystack therapist for sure.

I'll definitely a look at ideal parent figure meditation, and internal family systems. I've been sort of following the mind illuminated's path for awhile, with the general goal of hoping that will lead to increased mindfulness and ability to address these sorts of things.

Thanks!

You're welcome! TMI is a good manual, but it can lead to striving, if you're not careful. The whole stages concept can lead to a feeling of needing to get to somewhere other than precisely where you are.

It can be helpful to discuss these things with a group/sangha. Having access to a teacher is always very useful too.

So I've had a weird variety of physical health issues

Could you elaborate on the issues in question? It's a bit hard to even begin evaluating you when your only specific complaint is just being a happy go lucky person!

I'm just sort of positive / upbeat / feel good basically all the time

Here, a diagnosis of anti-depression and a prescription to boof an anti-depressant in the hopes that PR administration will reverse the mechanism of action. Then again, if you get hit with ED, then you might as well end up depressed!

You don't sound manic or even hypomanic, and while a dysthymic person like me might wish otherwise from sore grapes, being happy is neither a crime nor a disease.

Could you elaborate on the issues in question? It's a bit hard to even begin evaluating you when your only specific complaint is just being a happy go lucky person!

Haha yeah. So

a) hot showers make me tired and foggy for the next 24ish hours

b) some chronic gi issues, have trouble digesting meat / fatty foods. Have seen a lot of gi doctors, haven't made much progress

c) some kind of weird endocrine-related thing where if I eat "faster" carbs (=sugary foods, white rice, white flour, etc) I feel super fatigued, and heat/cold sensitive for a few days afterward. This is not gluten related, and my blood sugar/a1c numbers are all pretty normal.

d) Chronic tension headaches, which I've been trying to address with various prescription meds.

e) Had bizarrely bad seasonal allergies abruptly pop a few years ago, but allergy shots helped dramatically.

f) I get headache-y from bright screens, so I eg wear sunglasses if I'm watching a football game on a friend's tv at their place.

Here, a diagnosis of anti-depression and a prescription to boof an anti-depressant in the hopes that PR administration will reverse the mechanism of action.

Lol. I'm pretty upbeat / positive despite having all these random issues, but I would still like to address them somehow. It seems plausible to me that there is some underlying emotional issue that is modulating these symptoms.

If it makes you any happier, I've seen this happen to people who came from emotionally stable and supportive backgrounds as well.

Modern medicine is frequently incapable of treating people but no-one likes to hear this, least of all doctors, so they resort to blaming diffuse unprovable mental issues, since that is acceptable. To me this seems eerily similar to how people act in regards to pseudomedicine (your chakra/vitamins/aura/whatever is unbalanced you need my treatment that has no reason at all to work!).

I suspect a ton of things simply are physical and will be discovered be so in the coming decades, like Helicobacter pylori.

Sure, some things are psychological (at least partly) but when someone who is physically and mentally healthy suddenly develops some kind of physical or mental issue without a clear cause, is that due to some kind of diffuse undetectable mental trauma 5 layers down or is it a physical issue we're not aware of yet?

when someone who is physically and mentally healthy suddenly develops some kind of physical or mental issue without a clear cause, is that due to some kind of diffuse undetectable mental trauma 5 layers down or is it a physical issue we're not aware of yet?

It's a great question certainly, and I'm sure the answer is contextual. Initially when I was experiencing all these weird new health problems my prior was that since I was emotionally positive / upbeat all the time, the causes were likely only physical. However, while that's still completely possible in my case, given the large number of (seemingly) independent weird issues (listed here https://www.themotte.org/post/731/ways-to-address-underlying-emotions-that/153116?context=8#context), it becomes more plausible to me that there is an underlying emotional component that is either modulating the symptoms, or leading to some of them.

it becomes more plausible to me that there is an underlying emotional component that is either modulating the symptoms, or leading to some of them.

I'm afraid, but this is a logical non-sequitur.

  • The "weirdness" of a physical symptom does not logically imply that it has an emotional cause. Counterexample: People with rabies panic when presented with liquids to drink. I would say that this symptom qualifies as "weird" — unfortunately, the disease is still deadly virtually all of the time.
  • Even if the symptom is an emotion, such as irrational fear, this does not imply that the cause is emotional. Counterexample: 1) Rabies as above, 2) Depression can be caused by continued ingestion of fructose during fructose malabsorption.

Even more afraidly, I have to point out that current notions of an "emotional cause" have no basis in science — even though there are codified in popular diagnoses, such as F45 ("somatform disorder") in ICD-10.

Specifically, the problem with F45 is the following:

F45 postulates that the inability to detect a physical cause implies the presence of an emotional cause.

But "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". As Ioper already points out, the physical cause may be unknown and a) there exists no current test for it. In practice, b) the doctor is "too lazy" to test for it.

In fact, the postulated criterion for presence of "emotional cause" is unscientific — by definition, a criterion which is scientific must be falsifiable. Here, this means that there must exist an experiment which is able to reject the hypothesis that XY is the "emotional cause". No such experiment has ever been put forward for F45. (If you know of any such experiment, please do write a reply to this post.)

As for your "weird" symptoms: Mast cell diseases, such as mastocytosis, MCAD or hereditary alpha tryptasemia are known to cause "weird" symptoms.

(This fact is useful, but strictly speaking unnecessary for rejecting F45.)

I hope you've already considered this but your list really suggest that you're either stressed (by far the most likely) or that you have some kind of gi/metabolic issue.

Sometimes it's hard to recognise that you're stressed especially when you feel like you're not "supposed" to be stressed or allowed to be (like with issues around kids). This is doubly true when you're starting to become exhausted. What used to be easy no longer is and that might not be because of an illness but because you're worn down.

Is it possible to cut down a bit and see how that goes or maybe going through your work/stress load with a friend/therapist?

I suspect a ton of things simply are physical and will be discovered be so in the coming decades, like Helicobacter pylori

The brain is a physical organism after all, and delineation between physical and "psychiatric" disease is an artificial demarcation of convenience. Something like obesity can well be called a psychiatric illness, and let's not even get into the weeds of psychosomatic conditions like fibromyalgia (nonexistent in India, if that makes anyone update).

The issue is, of course, teasing out the associations, and it's possible that in certain cases where we know what's faulty upstairs, we have no way of fixing it. At least before the Singularity I suppose..

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