In the last decades, medicine and psychology are discovering the complex relationship between body and mindfurther and further away from the reductionist and naïve Cartesian conception of the human being in which the body was conceived as a machine totally separated from the mind and emotions.
We now know that when emotional damage received in childhood have been very intense or very prolonged in time, their impact is not only produced on an emotional level, but also has physiological consequences. An emotional wound can affect the body in multiple ways: pain, gastric problems, sexual dysfunctions, even, in extreme cases, organs can get sick or neurological symptoms appear. This phenomenon is known as “somatization.”
Somatize, emotional wounds that hurt in the body
Many are the authors who, for more than a century, have told us about this relationship between body and mind. Alice Miller, for example, in “The body never lies”, reviews the biography of well-known characters, analyzing the damage they received in their childhood and how their bodies reflected it years later with different illnesses.
“The violence suffered is stored in the child’s body and, later, the adult will direct it towards other people or against himself, which will lead to depression or serious illnesses” Alice Miller, The body never lies
In my years as a psychologist, I have worked with many cases of somatizations. Today I wanted to tell you Antonia’s story69 years old, who came to my consultation referred by the Pain Unit of his reference hospital.
There, the doctors had tried all the possible treatments with her to mitigate some back pains who had suffered for decades. However, the results had been poor and the pain, despite taking large doses of medication, did not subside. The specialists suspected that much of her pain could have a emotional basis and they asked me to work with her on her personal history.
At just 5 years old, Antonia suffered two big traumas that marked his life forever. His mother died and his father remarried in just a few weeks.
Unfortunately for her, her new stepmother was not understanding of her situation or her grief, and forced the girl to do all the housework Despite his young age. At the age of 6, for example, he had to carry large buckets of water and work hard from morning to night.
One might think that these harsh living conditions wore down her body and were the cause of the severe pain that Antonia suffered, but to find the true reason for her suffering we must understand what was the real pain I felt the girl as she was forced to carry the heavy buckets of water.
As children, if we don’t find an adult around us who shows us respect, empathy and understanding, with whom we can freely express our emotions, we end up feeling alone, confused, helpless and lost. Nobody helps us to assimilate our emotions, to channel them, so we we shut up and hide them in the depths of our selves.
However, no matter how much we camouflage and silence our emotions, to heal, they need to be expressed, verbalized, so that over time, they begin to ask for another way, in Antonia’s case, through persistent back pain that lasted decades. Her pain did not come from the intense physical work to which her stepmother subjected her, but from not having been able to mourn the death of her mother and also from the abandonment suffered by her father, when he remarried and left her in the hands of a adult who mistreated her.
Throughout her therapy, Antonia was locating, expressing and healing emotions that she had been forced to keep quiet and hide all her life. Antonia understood that she had been a mistreated and neglected child who at a very young age had lost the only person who had cared for her, her mother.
The greatest proof that much of his pain was emotional is that, when he was finally able to cry and express his emotions out loud, his pain began to decrease. In therapy, she also worked on how her life was going to be after getting rid of that weight that always tied her to the house with pain. Antonia, she began to go out more frequently, she resumed her leisure activities and finally, she was able to fulfill her dream of going on a Mediterranean cruise with her friends.
When you reach a level of physical damage like Antonia suffered, treatment must combine the medical and the emotional. We should not underestimate the damage suffered by our body and it is necessary to heal it from all fronts. However, the important background work must be to heal the emotional wound to get rid of what has caused us physical damage and thus prevent it from happening again.