TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to speak on the subject of psychosomatic illnesses. That is, illnesses in the body that result from issues in the mind, in the psyche, in the emotions. And I’d specifically like to talk about it, or at least focus on it, from the perspective of emotions resulting from unresolved childhood trauma.
Well, when I think about psychosomatic illnesses, I think about the mind-body connection and how powerful this connection is and can be. My eyes really opened to this subject first in a most intense way, well, almost 20 years ago when I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. Oh my gut, my colon, my large intestine became inflamed. It was full of ulcers. I was having, well, it’s kind of gross, but I’d like to talk about it—blood in my poop. I couldn’t control my bowels. I would go to the bathroom at times when there was no toilet nearby—diarrhea 10, 15, or more times a day. It was awful. I have a whole other video about this and about how I was cured from it, so I’m not going to go into too much detail now, but I will link to the video in the description box below.
But what I would like to say about it is it started with an upwelling of unresolved, unprocessed grief about my childhood, my traumatic childhood. And it actually didn’t start with colitis—that’s what’s interesting. It started with migraine headaches. But first, let me talk about what happened with the grief because this is really important. It was just the first stage of a deeply profound grieving experience where a huge amount of grief came up. I cried for, it must have been an hour, hour and a half. I can’t remember exactly; this is going back to 2005. But it was all this blocked stuff coming from deep in my unconscious—stuff that I’d had to push down for a long time to be safe in my world as a child, to be safe in my family system, to make sure that my parents would love me, wouldn’t hate me for feeling these feelings that were not allowed—feelings that resulted from the mistreatment of me, the violation of me by them.
Well, in my 30s, it started becoming safe enough for me to really feel those feelings, but not safe enough to process them fully. So they came into this area in my psyche. They came out, but I couldn’t fully process them. And what happened is it went into my head in horrible splitting migraine headaches. At first, I wasn’t really sure why I was having these headaches. I didn’t even necessarily connect them to all these unresolved emotions that were coming up. But the clue that I got is I did a lot of journaling about my migraines, sometimes while I had the migraines. You see, I was trying everything to make them go away, including taking medication, including, well, cold baths, cold showers, stretching, mindfulness—none of it helped.
But what helped? It happened two or three times, maybe more, is while journaling, I got into some thread connecting what I was going through in my head—this painful pounding in my head that was so bad that it could make me throw up. I would have auras beforehand. It was just splitting headaches of a type I had never experienced before. But in my journaling, when I connected it to unresolved emotions, to grief, a few times—not every time, but a few times—I cried in the middle of having a migraine headache. Just had an explosion of tears—again, some further processing of my unresolved emotions—and the migraine went away. It was amazing. And that’s when I got this big clue: ah, this is a mind-body connection. I am having a psychosomatic reaction.
But I couldn’t connect with my grief enough. I think I wasn’t safe enough in my life. I was living actually fairly near to my traumatizer, my parents. I was working full-time as a therapist with a lot of people who had severe trauma, and it was just not a safe enough environment for me to focus on my healing process. And what ended up happening is not that the migraines were cured outright, but they did go away. But they migrated down into my gut. That’s what I say now with perspective. At the time, it was like I wasn’t even sure I made the connection. But I remember seeing blood in my poo and saying, “Oh my God, I got to go to a doctor now. This is serious.”
The doctor totally discounted that my colitis was caused by unprocessed grief, a highly stressful life. He said, “No, your ulcerative colitis, which we have measured through colonoscopies and through tissue samples, this is physical. It can be exacerbated by stress in your life, but it is not caused by stress.” And I said, “So what do you think is causing it?” He said, “It’s idiopathic. We don’t know what’s causing it, but we know it is not caused by stress.” And I said, “Well, that’s not scientific.” Tried saying that to him; he wasn’t interested.
And then I wrote about it a lot in my journal, and I said, “I think he’s wrong. How can you scientifically say we don’t know what is causing it, but then say we know what’s not causing it?” Well, it didn’t go away. That was the problem. I took his medications because I was scared. It was scary. I didn’t want to get colon cancer. I didn’t want to die. Those are the things he told me that could happen if it was left untreated. And I hoped it would go away, and it didn’t. It lasted for several years—four or five years of really a horrible physical life that I experienced. I lost a lot of weight. I lost functionality. It’s like I was scared to go out walking a lot because I was like, “What if I have to go to the bathroom? What if I poo my pants?” It was terrible.
Well, to make a long story short, I ended up, for various reasons, including my colitis, leaving my therapy practice, leaving New York, going and having a much more free life—a free place for me to feel safe to continue my grieving process, continue my healing process, get far away from my traumatizer, breaking from my family much more significantly and grieving much more, such that I did heal from colitis.
Then there’s a third thing that happened psychosomatically, which I find fascinating. Right when my colitis ended—five years later or so, five years after the symptoms began—when I went back to pooing normally, having a normal gut, suddenly I got vitiligo—white patches all over different parts of my body and my hands, under my eyes. You can’t see it right now because I don’t have a tan, but if I have a tan, it’s very visible on my elbows, my feet, my knees, my hips. I remember talking about that with doctors. Nobody made any connection between migraines, colitis, and vitiligo. But for me, there was a connection, and the connection was all of this stuff—all of this unresolved emotion that was brewing around in my miserable and tormented large intestine—a place that’s incidentally full of a lot of the same neurotransmitters that are in the brain: the serotonin, the norepinephrine, etc., etc.
Well, I think what happened is as my grief process continued, as I felt more safe to really grieve, the emotions exploded out of me. They exploded out of my extremities, and where they exploded, I was left with these white patches. I don’t have any better explanations; certainly, no doctors do. And now here’s an interesting thing about explanations: could there be other explanations for my what I call psychosomatic conditions? I would say yes. And also, I would say this to be fair and to be clear: just because I had these problems, these things that I call psychosomatic conditions, doesn’t mean that everybody’s migraines are caused by unresolved emotion or everybody’s colitis is, or everybody’s vitiligo is. But I’m pretty sure it was the case with me.
And as I sat down to prepare to make these videos, I made a list of all these different psychosomatic conditions or experiences that I have or experiences of other people that I considered to be psychosomatic. Well, some of these actually I’ve talked about in other videos, which I can link to again below in the description box. But one is the psychosomatic condition of passing out in times of very high stress—literally becoming unconscious. It’s happened to me a few times while giving blood. I one time, it’s like they kept poking me again and again and again and not being able to find…
A vein, and it was emotionally overwhelming for me, and I literally passed out. It also happened another time when I was in high school at the funeral of a girl I knew, a neighbor and a classmate. She died in a car accident. It was so overwhelming for me to see her casket that my body literally shorted out. Talk about the mind-body connection.
It also happened another time when I was visiting someone who I knew and cared about deeply, who had fallen down a flight of stairs and broken his neck. I was sitting, looking at him in a hospital bed, and some of his family members were there, and they got in a screaming match right over his unconscious body. I got overwhelmed, and I felt myself starting to pass out. Thankfully, I sat down in a chair.
Then I think of other psychosomatic conditions. People who blush, their faces become extremely bright red in moments of emotional anxiety or intensity or embarrassment even. Or then I think of, well, a friend of mine who had really bad GERD, gastroesophageal reflux disorder. When he would, he would spit up stomach acid at night because he was under such stress in a time in his life. Or, well, then I read about in the autobiography of my friend Fred Tim how he got stomach ulcers during a time in the 1980s when a lot of his friends had HIV and AIDS and were dying of AIDS. It was so overwhelming to him, also him being afraid that he might have AIDS too. He didn’t end up having it, but he did develop ulcers in his stomach, and they only cured themselves after he grieved. He did a lot; he went to a grieving group, and it helped him, that and also diet.
Then I think of a few people I know who have had really, really bad constipation, where they can’t go to the toilet. They don’t poop sometimes for days or even many, many days in a row. I think of people I know who had really difficult childhoods, and it’s like, ooh, they became so tight. Everything became really tightly held inside. I think it was like a fear of letting go. That’s what they told me; that’s what they felt their constipation was related to.
And then I think of someone who posted a really interesting comment on my website about having childhood asthma. I’d actually like to read what he wrote because I found it quite interesting. He said, “I personally was diagnosed with childhood asthma, although it disappeared way before adulthood. I’m wondering if it’s connected to my childhood experiences. Asthma being the pathways of breathing being closed off suddenly and feeling severely stuck and in panic. It connects closely to what being terrified as a child by my parents felt like.” And he wondered, could this be true? And I would say most definitely, that really makes a lot of sense to me. But is that the only cause of asthma? Well, I’ve certainly heard a lot of people living in very polluted areas with very polluted air, children especially, and having breathing problems, asthma related to that. But I think, well, in some cases, it could really be related on a metaphorical level or directly to people just having to learn to be tight and being in a place where they’ve lost their voice, lost their ability to breathe, and panic situations resulting from, well, a very traumatic family system.
Then I think about another one that sounds a lot like this, a condition called vaginismus, where women’s vaginas can involuntarily become extremely tight and constricted, maybe when they don’t even want it to, maybe when they’re even aroused and want to have sex. What I have heard from some women who have experienced this, I’ve read about it also, is that it can be related to unresolved childhood trauma or even trauma from adulthood, being sexually violated in some ways, being sexually abused, having very painful experiences in their genitals that maybe weren’t even related to another person doing something to them. It could even be related to a very painful childbirth. Yet it can manifest months later or years later or even decades later in this condition called vaginismus.
And then I’ve talked to a number of men who have erectile dysfunction, where their penises won’t get erect, won’t get hard. And they’ve gone to different doctors, and the doctors have given them pills. “Here, take this pill; this will help you get aroused.” Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But some of these men that I’ve talked to, not all of them, but some of them have made the connection between childhood experiences, childhood panic, childhood humiliation, childhood sexual abuse even, that when they get in positions when they feel pressured to perform, even they want to perform sexually, they want to have a normal, healthy sexual interaction, their body shuts down. They’re unable to. Their unresolved emotions can infiltrate their physical sexual body.
Now, of course, I have also heard of cases of men where their penises don’t become erect at certain times where it’s not related to emotions. It can be related to strictly physical conditions or just old age sometimes. But I think it’s important to acknowledge the possibility that it can be psychosomatic. It can come from unresolved emotions.
And then there’s another situation that I think of. It involves a person I used to know who was public about this story. He had full body alopecia; all the hair fell out of his body, and it happened two different times. It was totally, from what he told me, related to unresolved childhood trauma, feelings that he hadn’t been able to process. What happened was, as an adult, he learned that not only had he been adopted as a baby, but that he’d been abandoned by his birth mother, his biological mother. She’d given birth to him in a toilet stall in a movie theater, and this was going back many, many, many decades. She’d given birth to him in a movie theater and literally thrown him away in a garbage can and fled the movie theater. He was found later by janitors who heard a baby crying in a bathroom garbage can. They pulled him out, and there he was with the umbilical cord still attached. He was adopted to a family, raised well. Later, when he found out the truth of what had happened, it caused such an incredible emotional reaction to him. I think he started connecting with the feelings of violation and abandonment that he’d gone through that all his hair fell out, out of his head, all over his entire body.
Then what he told me was interesting is he had some processing of the emotions, and some of the hair came back. I think maybe even all of it came back for a while. But then he was processing more in a different way, or maybe something happened. Maybe he started putting the feelings down; he started repressing them in some different ways. I can’t remember how he told the story, but it happened a second time that all of his hair fell out again. And then several decades passed where he still had lost all of his hair through alopecia.
But then I think sometimes people can misuse psychosomatic interpretations sometimes in very, very offensive ways. I think about something I heard, oh, 25 years ago or so. I was spending some time with different friends who had a very spiritual outlook on life, and one of the things they said is, “All illness starts in the aura. It starts in the spirit, out in the ether.” And it’s like if you’re open to it, and if you open yourself to it, illness can come in. I didn’t really like that idea then, and I really don’t like it now. I think of somebody who was a very popular writer in the 70s and 80s, Louise Hay. I believe she came out of the Christian Science tradition. She wrote some books that were really, really popular, sold in the tens of millions. I think one, “You Can Heal Your Life,” and another one, “Heal Your Body.” And back then, 20, 30 years ago, I remember looking through, and in one of the books, there were lists and lists and lists of physical illnesses that people had or could have, and everyone being connected to an emotional cause, a spiritual cause. And some of them, well, some of them had some validity, but some of them were just ridiculous.
And I just, I actually just went on the internet, and I don’t have copies of her books, but I found on the internet someone had posted her list of illnesses, and there was just so…
Many, like literally everything you could imagine. And I just went to one alphabetical number, the letter H, and I printed out all of the physical illnesses in the letter H that she considered psychosomatic. I’d like to read this list. I found it interesting.
So, H: hosis, hay fever, headaches, heartburn, heart attacks, hemorrhoids, hepatitis, hernia, herpes. Herpes is psychosomatic. Hip problems, hirsutism. Hirsutism being when women just suddenly abnormally start to develop excess amounts of facial hair and other types of hair, chest hair even, that they didn’t have before. She calls that psychosomatic.
Hives. Well, maybe hives could be Hodgkin’s disease, a type of cancer of the lymph nodes holding fluids. Huntington’s disease. Huntington’s disease, well, I’ve always read that that was genetically caused. That was coming, even most people getting it hereditarily from their parents. Nothing to do at all with psychosomatic.
Hyperactivity, hyperglycemia, hyperthyroidism, hyperventilation, hypoglycemia, hypothyroidism. Well, to me, this gets into the ridiculous. Like, for instance, Huntington’s disease, a known genetic disease. She calls it being caused by resentment at not being able to change others and hopelessness. Well, I’ll guarantee hopelessness does not cause Huntington’s disease. Perhaps it can speed up the expression of it, but it doesn’t cause it.
And she says it’s caused by it, or hirsutism. Hirsutism, I’ve known women who have had hirsutism. It can be really awful for them, and I think it’s really an insult to say that it’s caused by, as she says, it’s caused by anger that is covered over. The blanket is usually fear, a desire to blame. There is often an unwillingness to nurture the self.
Well, I think of two, three women I have known who have had hirsutism, and it was actually caused by having cysts in their ovaries, polycystic ovarian syndrome. And then I’ve read about other women having hirsutism coming from thyroid problems or hormonal problems, but nothing, nothing to do with psychosomatics. Nothing to do with emotions or herpes. Herpes is caused by the herpes virus. That’s what causes it. Maybe it can be expressed in times of a lot of stress, but she says herpes is caused by a mass belief in sexual guilt and the need for punishment, public shame, belief in a punishing God.
Well, I think that’s wrong, and I think that is actually quite dangerous and insulting. I think it’s really not right to say that people have psychosomatic conditions where they actually don’t have them. It’s called, I think the word out there is patient blaming. And part of the danger also is when this attitude comes around that, oh, everything is caused, everything is caused by problems in the aura or the spirit or in the emotions. People end up trying to treat things that sometimes can have a very simple treatment, especially if it’s caught early on, or sometimes a more complex treatment, but that has nothing to do with emotional treatment, nothing to do with grieving and healing or processing unresolved childhood emotions.
I think of a number of cases I’ve read about of children who have cancer, and their parents have beliefs like Louise Hay’s beliefs, and they try to treat the child through praying and spirituality and changing their diet, nurturance and love. And the child actually needs to go to a doctor. The child needs to get physical treatment, and sometimes the children die because they’re not getting physical treatment. And the parents, in that case, to my mind, are extremely neglectful. It’s very wrong to not rule out physical conditions before starting to look for psychosomatic cures.
And I’ve heard that in therapy, there’s even a lot of cases in the literature of it, of psychotherapists who are treating people for, oh, you have major depression, and actually they had brain tumors. And guess what? Psychotherapy is not going to cure a brain tumor. Psychotherapy can strongly help major depression if someone has a very good therapist. And yes, major depression can result from unresolved childhood trauma, from lack of processing of it, but not when it’s a brain tumor.
Now, here’s another thing, and this is something I found very interesting about Louise Hay, where she was saying the cure for so many of these different problems, all these different problems that she’s labeling, is coming from fear and anger and resentment. And if you can let go of the anger and resentment, let go of the fear, if you can forgive, then there will be cures of these psychosomatic problems.
And what’s strange and interesting to me is actually in a lot of cases, I think there can be truth in this because I have personal examples of this. My main personal example is my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who lived to be 97 years old and had a body like a rock. She was incredibly physically healthy, and a big part of it was that she had no stress because her emotions, her unresolved childhood trauma, and she’d had a lot of trauma in her life, a lot of abandonment and rejection and pain all through her childhood and into her adulthood, it was buried.
She had done what Louise Hay said; she had forgiven. She had let go of her resentments. She wasn’t angry. She had emotionally split off from everything. She had pushed it down into her unconscious and buried it, and she was so disconnected from her feelings that her feelings didn’t bubble up into her emotions, didn’t bubble up and leak out into her body, and her body was protected for it.
So this is what I find really interesting. When people can really push down their emotions, suppress them, even repress them deeply, deeply, deeply, dissociate from who they are, from how they feel, they can be very, very physically healthy as the result, but psychologically not healthy at all, very, very immature.
And I think that’s been my goal in life, to become more psychologically healthy. And I think that’s where I’m going to start wrapping up this video is by saying, by bringing up these emotions, by bringing up the dangerous emotions that are not allowed in our families, not allowed in society, often not allowed in religion, the feelings that say, oh, wait a second, my traumatizer were my parents. My parents failed me. My parents failed me in terrible ways, were unable to be confronted when I was a child, loved me less if I felt feelings. I had to push them down.
And me, as an adult, becoming healthier and saying, wait a second, I’m a disconnected person. My life has lost its meaning because I don’t have myself. I lost whole sides of myself by being shut down. I don’t want to be like my grandmother. I don’t want to be like my parents. I want to be a whole person.
And by going through the process of breaking the rules of the family system, breaking the rules of society, the rules of religion, the rules of school even, by bringing up these feelings, by having these unpleasant, tormented, very, very stressful feelings, I became sick. My body expressed these feelings, but I see this place, this band of where all the feelings come up, and it expresses itself sometimes in the body, in all different parts of the body, as being a transitional period of healing where if we can continue with the process, continue the grieving process, then slowly or sometimes even quickly, in certain cases, the body can potentially heal.
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