TRANSCRIPT
I would like to briefly explore the subject of psychosomatics: psychosomatic pain, psychosomatic illness. The reason it comes to my mind now is last night, before I went to bed, I knew that I was going to wake up this morning and try to make a couple of videos. I was nervous about it, realistically so, because I know that when I make these videos, I open myself up, and all this emotion and thoughts and truth and hidden feelings and hidden perspectives that I don’t always share with the world come out. I say it for a camera for a general audience, sometimes of people who really don’t like it, sometimes people who actually really dislike it. And sometimes it really can be very scary for me to put it out.
So a lot of feelings come out. I get a lot of anxiety about it. And what happened is I woke up in the middle of the night, and I felt terrible pain in my front teeth. I actually have a little bit of natural soreness in my front teeth the last few months, but it just struck me in the middle of the night at 2:30 in the morning that the pain I was experiencing in my teeth was far beyond anything I was really actually physiologically feeling. This was psychosomatic pain, and I just knew it. I was like, I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew that this was diverted feelings.
And it’s such an interesting part of being human—the human ability of the human mind and body to convert feelings into pain, into even serious psychosomatic illness in the body that literally physiologically manifests in the body, but that has its root in unresolved feelings, unresolved pain, fear, unresolved trauma. I think of my experience of, for five, maybe more than five years, of having horrible ulcerative colitis, where I was bleeding and pooing constantly and diarrhea and horribleness, where to the point that the doctor said, “If it keeps going in this direction, you’re going to lose your colon. We’re going to have to snip out your colon, and you’re going to have to go to the bathroom through a hole in your gut.”
And he told me, “Oh, we don’t know what causes it.” And I made a whole video on this—how I healed from ulcerative colitis. But what it was, was it was my unresolved feelings. It was all my anxiety about breaking away from my parents and all the stress I was going through from being a psychotherapist and working with people who had a lot of really serious problems, way beyond what most of my colleagues’ patients were going through. And this was all coming out inside me, all simultaneously, and I didn’t have the ability to process it in my rather restrictive life. So it came out in my gut. Literally, my gut was exploding.
What’s interesting is right before that, I was having migraine headaches that went on for a few months, and it was like my head was exploding. And then it was like sometimes I noticed that the cure for my migraine headaches—there were two different cures that I experienced. One cure was when I would grieve. It happened a couple of times. I would sit and journal in the middle of the most splitting migraine headache. I would journal, and I would get to some emotional peace that was connected to it, and I would cry. And it was like the grieving that I experienced just dissolved the migraine headache. It just went away.
But I had, let’s say, 30 migraine headaches over a period of several months, and that happened twice when I grieved. And both times, the headache just dissolved in grief. But the other 28 times, it just stayed, and I took pills, and this kind of helped—painkillers—and it kind of helped bring it down, and I could kind of cope with it. Well, it was kind of like last night. I couldn’t get to my feelings. I just wanted to go back to sleep so I could wake up and make this video. So my mouth was throbbing, throbbing, and some little intuitive part of me knew this was psychosomatic.
I realized it with those migraine headaches. I was like, that was psychosomatic. Now, I grew up with a mother who had terrible migraine headaches, but she was dead set committed to not looking at her inner feelings because there was a world of unresolved feelings in her whole life—her relationship with her parents, her relationship with her career, her relationship with my father. Her false relationship with herself was all based on not knowing who she was on the inside, not connecting with her feelings. So she just said, “My migraines are neurological, and it’s a neurological condition, and these are the pills that I must take to deal with my neurological condition.” No self-reflection whatsoever, and actually anti-self-reflection was how she dealt with it.
But for me, it’s like, wait, I had migraines—the exact same thing—having auras, and sometimes I would throw up, and the pain was incredibly awful. It was just exactly what my mother had, and it was neurological. Well, I said there were two cures for my migraines. One cure was grieving—that was the real cure—but I think it was just too much stuff to grieve. My life was too overwhelming. And so then there was the second cure, because I’ve actually not had a migraine since. It’s been more than 15 years now—literally more than 15 years. The cure was I got ulcerative colitis. It all transferred down into my gut.
How funny was that? It was like literally the psychosomatics changed, and it went into my gut. And I thought, you know, anything is better than a migraine headache in a way, but a bleeding gut where they might have to cut my colon out? Maybe that’s not better. But somehow, I guess it was better for me on a psychological level because there it stayed. It didn’t transfer. Well, it stayed for colitis state for five years. But then I eventually quit being a therapist. I needed to get fully away from my family, even more fully break from them, or much, much, much more fully break from them, where there were much stronger boundaries with these toxic people who would constantly invade me and want to destroy me—who hate videos like this because they’re just too honest. Not just too honest about them, but just too honest about reality.
Even if my parents weren’t my parents, they would look at these videos and they’d say, “This guy is sick. Stay away from him.” But it really, it wasn’t that I really was sick; it’s that I was too healthy for them. They were too sick, and they needed to project their sickness onto me. A lot of people, I think it’s true, this guy, he talks too much truth. But it’s not truth. Unconsciously, they know it’s truth. Consciously, they say, “Oh, this guy is sick. He will mess up my life.” And in a way, it’s true—too much truth can mess up the life of someone who is very confused, someone who is actually committed to having psychosomatic illnesses and other kinds of illnesses that are much easier than facing the really deep, painful truth.
Well, for me, getting away from being a therapist, it right away, almost immediately started curing my ulcerative colitis. I started healing against what all the doctors said. They all—and I never went back to them because I knew they would just say, “Oh, you’re going through a remission.” Well, it’s been what, more than 10 years that I’ve been in complete remission from ulcerative colitis? Is it still remission? Oh, I got better. I started working out my feelings. I was able to connect with my grief. I grieved a lot more—terribly painful, really unpleasant in a lot of ways—a lot of realizing how abandoned I had been as a child, betrayed repeatedly, violated in all sorts of different ways.
But reconnecting with those feelings and loving myself a lot more, really growing and becoming someone who could love myself a lot more—that being the real cure for those primal feelings. But some remnants are still there. I still have my terrors of being rejected. Talking about this kind of stuff, some people really don’t like it, and it makes me anxious. And no wonder I can’t sleep so well. And it’s like, oh, it went into my teeth, and it hurt really, really, really bad. And then what is this? I woke up this morning, my teeth don’t hurt at all. And it’s like, wait, you think if I really had a problem…
With my teeth in my lower jaw, it would hurt more consistently. But no, it’s like the psychosomatic pain was just there. It was like, yeah, there’s a little problem with my teeth, but it’s just a little window for me to play my feelings out into. I think the body knows its vulnerable places, and then it plays out its feelings into those little vulnerable cracks. I think everybody has their vulnerabilities, and that makes me wonder again. You know, I don’t want to be too spiritual. I hear some new age people say, “Oh, every single illness in the world starts in the aura,” and everything. Well, I don’t think that’s really true, but I think there can be a lot more truth to it than the conventional medical system gives it. I mean, even as simple as like there is a mind-body connection. What goes on in our psyche, especially in the unresolved parts of our history and our unresolved trauma, really can play out in the body in all sorts of different ways.
I know people who’ve had the most terrible, terrible back pains, and it’s like nothing will cure it. Nothing can help. And then they start getting in touch with their feelings, and it’s like their back pain starts to clear up. Some people, they connect with their rage, and suddenly it’s like they give voice to their rage, and their rage eventually gives voice to their sadness, and their sadness gives voice to their grieving. And suddenly, like, they can stand up, they can walk straight. They’re not like lying in bed in pain all the time. It’s like amazing how things like that can work.
Am I an expert on things like cancer? How much of cancer is caused by psychosomatics? I don’t know. I mean, I know there are certain genes in the body that make certain people more susceptible to certain kinds of cancer, but to what degree do psychosomatics even influence that? Unresolved feelings influence that? I don’t know. I feel it’s not really explored enough. I mean, I certainly went to enough gastroenterologists when I had colitis who just absolutely told me, “This is not caused by your feelings.” Okay, your stress in your life might exacerbate your colitis a little, but colitis is not caused by what you’re talking about—unresolved feelings and this and that. And then they would go to the next step, which is total contradiction because it contradicted what they said the sentence before. And then they would say, “We actually don’t know what causes ulcerative colitis.” And I’d say, “Well, if you don’t know what causes ulcerative colitis, how can you say that what I think causes mine isn’t?” What’s it? Maybe that’s exactly what it is. It didn’t make sense scientifically.
So I’m just saying basically the conventional medical system, the conventional world, certainly my family system, societies in general, don’t really make the connection between unresolved childhood traumas, unresolved buried block feelings, and what goes on in our body—the pains that we feel now. No wonder again, because dealing with those deep feelings, actually really dealing with them, it’s not easy. There are consequences to deal with these feelings. It really can disrupt relationships in our lives.
Well, I also want to talk about one last little bit. I think I talked about this in my colitis video, but it’s worth it. It bears repeating. You can’t see it so well now because I haven’t been out in the sun too much, but what happened to me is when my colitis went away, I developed—immediately after my colitis went away—I developed vitiligo spots all over my hands, on parts of my body, and my face, and my hips, on my feet, on my knees, even white albino spots. And it was like, what I think happened is all those unresolved feelings just exploded out of me. It went from migraine headache, went down into my gut. Those same feelings, and those same feelings, they exploded out my extremities—my hands, my feet, my knees, my elbows, even my face. And suddenly, I developed vitiligo. And it was like, how strange is this? But I really think that all these things that actually, in a sort of a medical way, bear no connection to each other for me were all connected by that same source. It really gave me a big clue in.
And then there’s one other strange, sad thing that contradicts all of that. I’m going to use my grandmother, my mother’s mother, as an example of someone who lived to be nearly 97 years old, relatively healthy until she was in her mid-90s. And this is the funniest thing: she didn’t develop many psychosomatic illnesses because actually she was so shut down and also kind of pickled on alcohol—drinking a lot of alcohol every day regularly for decades—and having a whole lifestyle that was being dissociated and shutting those feelings down so profoundly that actually I don’t think they played out much in her body at all. That being a strange irony, but I think it’s a really important part of the picture.
Where I’m going to close this video is that I think the difference with me and a lot of people I’ve seen who have psychosomatic illnesses is that they’re not sick enough to totally push down their feelings. They’re not sick enough to totally become a split-off, dissociated zombie. They’re not totally split off enough to become a non-person. They’re not open enough to become really fully healed and to work out these feelings. They’re sort of trapped in sort of a hell in the hallway, in a transitional period of some feelings are coming out, but they’re trying to push it down. And I think some part of me is still sort of in that. It’s like some of these feelings are so confusing to deal with. But in a way, it’s like I think the ideal in society—the ideal that my mother was trying to be but wasn’t sick enough to be—was somebody like my grandmother, someone who was just a happy person who was so shut down, such an emotionally psychologically zombied person, just a real zombie of not having so many feelings that it didn’t even play out in her body because actually on the inside she was dead.