Re: Unprocessed Trauma- Your Likely Root Cause

The mind is where the problem starts. I agree.

First, you have a negative force acting on your mind. Then, you have a negative state your mind takes on.

For example, you could be robbed at gunpoint, and then your mind respond by developing heightened anxiety. Or you could suffer years of intense frustration dealing with your partner, with your mind gradually shifting to higher and higher states of anxiety.

I agree the problem is injury to the mind, injury to the mind caused by either an episode of stress (trauma) or by chronic stress. (I think the term "trauma" may be confusing because it suggests an instance or an episode of damage. "Psychological injury" or "psychological damage" might work, though they don't quite characterize the nature of the damage (which feels to me like maybe a corrosion or abrasion or maybe even a kind of compression), and having a single term would be nicer.)

So either you're experiencing or have experienced ongoing trauma/stress, or you experienced a severe, acute trauma/stress. In any case, it ultimately hurt your mind in a way that's caused an imbalance in how your mind handles stress. Particularly, it makes your mind turn up the volume on the stress channel. Too high. So high that even silence registers as stress.

So your mind is ringing the alarm bells far too often and excitedly whipping the body into action to handle the stress. And the body can't cope, and it breaks down with an almost amusingly complicated and varied array of failures. (Well, maybe not that amusing if you haven't started recovery yet.)

And you're right that we chase down the major symptoms that have showed up in the particular mix of body failures we each experience, and we find some plausible causes for that set of symptoms we're researching, and then we declare that we've got Lyme or Candida or parasites, or thyroid imbalance, or hypoglycemia, or leaky gut or food intolerance, or chemical or mold toxicity, or dietary deficiency. And the thing is, we're usually right. The plausible cause we've researched is indeed making us suffer! But it's not the only thing, and we need not to keep blinders on and over-focus on the idea of the "one true disease" that's got us down. That thing we've figured out to be causing us our symptoms, that plausible factor (not sole "cause") of our suffering, probably wouldn't be a problem if our systems were healthier. If our bodies weren't fuɔked up and failing and flailing about, if our bodies weren't bizarrely misbehaving because our minds had gotten freaked out.

So, yes, the mind is a critical component, the keystone to our illnesses. Not that we shouldn't apply some therapy for the particular factor that's more directly giving us onerous symptoms; it's important and helpful to put on band-aids, absolutely. But if we don't fix the cause of the wounds, we'll spend the rest of our lives applying band-aids.

Here are more of my thoughts on this issue.

What I'd like to cover more of is therapies for the mind component of our illnesses. Maybe we can ... meditate on that some. Tweet