Psychosomatic Symptoms and Working Through the Pain, #1
Tuesday July 17, 2007
Dear Alice,
I hope you are well. I wrote you an email about a month ago regarding forgiveness and the profound influence your work and therapy-based realizations are having on my own therapeutic experience. Once again, Thank you. May the Truth continue to set me and others free.
I have suffered from Chronic Fatigue, Fibromyalgia, Fully body Pain, for the past three years, and it was only until this year, about 8 months ago I decided to stop treating the body and working on the level of the mind-body/ emotions,dealing with my own personal history. It has been 8 months of therapy with an enlightened witness, and my psychosomatic symptoms are the worst they have ever been. I have more pain than imaginable and many days cannot get out of bed and feel insane with the thoughts I am having surrounding the pain.
My doctor claims that this is all good because it proves the psychosomatic origin, and he claims that a lot of time, with patients like myself, things have to get worse before they can improve. He claims the pain is there to distract me from dangerous and threatening unconscious emotions, the conflicts in the deepest realm of my mind. He claims once you starting digging into the unconscious, the mind has to intensify its strategy, and create even more pain and/or even different symptoms to try and continue its defense strategy. In other words, he claims the mind has the power to alter the physiology/processes of any part of the human body to create symptom, which serve as distractions.
That is all fair, but for me, my life is currently torture. I stayed away from medications for the first 8 months, but have recently been put on Klonopin, which helps with my panic attacks and the pain for some reason.
Anyways, Dr. S. is firm in his belief that the physical diagnosis (that there is something wrong with the body) must be repudiated and the patient must totally focus on the repressed emotions/traumas from childhood, life pressures, and pressure imposed by the individual. He does not desire for his patients to do anything more than psychotherapy: to delve deeply into their personal histories and present lives: looking specifically at perfectionism and goodism in their lives.
For me, that is all fine if you have lower back pain, or Carple Tunnels, but I have a full body pain that makes it difficult to walk and to stay active for more than a couple of hours. Obviously some days are better than others, but in general the symptoms have reached a new height.
I have often looked into homeopathy and I am now looking into nutri-energetic systems to maybe help my pain and fatigue. I was wondering what your take was on coming at therapy/ self-healing from more than one angle? In other words, and I know that you have said this before, but do you truly believe that for someone with such a wide array of psychosomatic manifestations as myself, psychotherapy and revealing my own history will be enough to reverse this pain mind-driven process? Will it hurt me more to try other avenues of healing such as homeopathy and nutri-energetics, which deal with vibrational medicine and re-aligning the human electro-magnetic field? Do you even believe in such things as an electro-magnetic field (Aura) surrounding the human body? The more of these holistic healers I encounter, the more the make me feel like there is something wrong with me. They fear everything from pesticides to laundry detergent.
Also, during this whole three-year episode, I have become increasingly spiritual and concerned with self-mastery of the mind, which I think at times, makes things much worse, often talking with holistic healers/ Gurus who speak about karma and past lives, and how my body is toxic, and I need to eat all organic foods and take all these herbs, etc. All of which I cannot afford. Also, they claim that this pain is karmic and I agreed to this before I came on this planet. Things like this severely anger me, who would really agree to hell and total pain for three years.
Personally, I think many things can help, but as long the deep conflicts in the unconscious mind exist, the mind will continue to create symptoms, they just may be different from the original one. It is like if someone is depressed, the psychiatrist gives an anti-depressant w/o psychotherapy and then they develop athritis a year later. What good did alleviating the symptom do there?. That is why I am not to thrilled to be on the Klonopin, but it has reached a point where I need something to just allow me to me somewhat functionable.
In other words, I know you have more experience with psychosomatic illness than anyone that I know, besides my medical doctor. But he does not even want to hear about my pain or symptoms, he says they are meaningless. But to me, they are not meaningless, when I wake up in the middle of the night and have such bad pains in my eye balls that I want to gorge them out. Please, any advice on all this would be appreciated. I trust you, and thank you once again for all your work.
Love and Light, M. D.
AM: Were you beaten in your childhood? Can you remember these incidents? Were the beatings painful? Was it your father, your mother or both who punished you? For which deed were you punished? What can you remember from this time? Can you cry?