It’s not in your head!
We need to update our thinking about the mind and body in order to accept new ways to heal
It’s easy to look back at old medical practices and wonder how doctors missed how harmful their approaches were (leeches, dissecting cadavers and then delivering babies without washing their hands in between, believing that women were just smaller versions of men, etc). I believe we have a hold-over belief that’s just as harmful: the belief that the mind and body are separate.
The weirdness of separating mind and body
When I finally paused to think about this in a bit more depth, I realized just how bizarre it was to think that my mind and emotions were somehow separate from my physical body. Somehow we ended up in a world in which we believe that our minds and emotions are floating out in an aether. BUT, even though they supposedly have no physical form, we should be able to control them completely, and therefore they can not and should not affect us physically. Meanwhile, our physical body is a meat suit that is out of our control and can be easily damaged and ravaged by external forces. Moreover, if our physical problem isn’t something that a doctor can fix, then the physical problem somehow isn’t “real.”
The more I thought about that, the more ludicrous it seemed that we ended up believing that our mind and emotions are separate from our physical body. Of course, modern science also makes such a suggestion seem ludicrous, especially when we’re looking at emotions and the body. When emotions are triggered in the body, they release a cascade of physiological and biochemical responses. Brain structures involved in emotions include “the brain stem, amygdale, insula, anterior cingulate, and orbitofrontal cortices,” while biochemicals involved in feeling and regulating emotions include serotonin, cortisol, and oxytocin. When emotions are triggered, a variety of physiological responses occur, including “increases or decreases in heart rate, cutaneous blood flow (blushing or turning pale), piloerection, sweating, and gastrointestinal motility.”
Emotions are not floating out in some aether, they are a very physical part of your body, and sometimes you can consciously control them, but sometimes your subconscious nervous system controls them (and you).
It may not be big news that emotions trigger things to happen in our body, but that last link above also cites research in which the body triggers emotions: “if subjects are given muscle-by-muscle instructions that result in facial expressions recognizable as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, or surprise without being told which emotion they are simulating, each pattern of facial muscle activity is accompanied by specific and reproducible differences in visceral motor activity (as measured by indices such as heart rate, skin conductance, and skin temperature).”
Basically, it’s not just that your emotions trigger physiological responses in your body — your physical body also affects your emotions without you having any conscious control over it!
On top of all of that, our nervous systems can get wires crossed, which can trigger very real symptoms — such as pain where old physical damage should have healed or even “phantom limb pain” — and that’s also just as real as the pain associated with tissue damage. In fact, many researchers have found that all pain, whether due to tissue damage or some other source, seems to be generated in the brain. I love this quote: “the majority of pain, even physical pain, has its roots in the body’s need for help. … the sensation of pain is a combination of physiological processes and psychological needs.”
Why is all of this is important?
First, the mind and body are not two separate things with the mind and its associated emotions floating off in some aether, while the body is a real, physical entity. The mind and body are one, single entity. More importantly, mental health and physical health are not separate.
Second, if we accept my statement above as true (or true enough), then it becomes a lot easier to accept that emotional issues, which include fear, lie at the heart of many chronic health conditions, AND it’s perfectly reasonable and acceptable for that to be the case, AND it’s not your fault.
This is important because one of the biggest barriers to doing this kind of work to get healthier is that people feel like they’re being gaslit when someone suggests that the root of their issues may be an unconscious, automatic fear response or that emotions may be involved. With the perceived suggestion that their health problems aren’t “physical,” people with very real health issues feel like they’re being told that the illness is in their heads or that it’s their fault.
Your illness and pain are real. They are not in your head. They are not your fault. The problem is that we have an outdated and very incorrect way of thinking about what illness is and how the world around us impacts our health.
Emotional responses are at the root of how we process and interact with the world around us, which means that the external world is always the source of our emotional and physical discomfort (and pleasure!), whether that’s a virus, something damaging our physical body, or something triggering an emotional response.
We don’t and can’t live in a vacuum. Even if we try to hide from the world, it still affects us. We don’t have control over whether or not something triggers an emotional response in our nervous system. Period. What we do have control over is how we express the emotion and how we relate to the emotion.
If we repress an emotion, which is itself a fear response, our mind-body will figure out some way to let us know that’s the case. That might mean that we lash out at people with emotions that we have deemed safe, such as expressing rage when someone actually feels sadness or abandonment, or crying when one actually feel rage. It might mean lashing out at whoever is closest if we injure ourselves in an accident. It might mean we repress everything, and we develop chronic pain or illness. It might mean we develop negative, ruminating thoughts that distract us from the underlying source of pain. Or it might look like something completely different for you.
Regardless of the cause, something triggered an automatic response from our nervous system, and so we feel physical pain, we develop symptoms, and/or we have an emotional outburst without conscious control or awareness. However, because our brains and nervous systems are neuroplastic (aka, changeable), we can learn and establish new responses. It’s pretty amazing if you think about it: what’s happening to you now is not your fault, AND you can take control to regain your health.
There’s so much more to say on this topic, and I plan to come back to it someday after I’ve done more research so that I can produce an even more compelling argument that the mind and body and emotions are not separate but are all one entity. For now though, I wanted to at least send this reminder out because it’s an issue I keep seeing arise for people.