“Your pains are psychological,” is the last thing you want to hear when you go to a doctor. You don’t know whether to be sorry or glad.
The message given by the words, “Your pains are psychological,” is read by the receiver as,
· There is nothing wrong with me.
· I’m making all this up.
· If I stop worrying about something, it will go away.
The person who receives this message either goes on visiting one doctor after another, or rebels against everybody who he/she thinks has wronged him/her, saying, “You are the reason for my aches and pains…”
This wrong impression arises from the person seeing his/her body and psyche as entirely separate entities. Psychology and physiology are not independent of each other. When you are unhappy, upset about something or under stress, your hormonal balance is not the same as when you are happy, and life is going in the right direction.
It is not pure chance that you get stomach cramps just as you are experiencing events in your life that you find difficult to digest, your hands start tingling when you are finding it difficult to hold on to life, or you hear the diagnosis, ‘polycystic ovary’ from your doctor at a time when you are thinking that you produce a lot but cannot get recognition for them. This means;
· There is a real problem.
· You are not making all this up, but you cannot control it.
· Even if you don’t worry about a single thing in life, it will not go away, because what you actually need to do is to find out what it is related to, and make target-oriented changes.
Feelings, thoughts, the body, and the intuition arising from them are a whole. If a person orients him-/herself to only one of these, and is unable to receive the messages coming from the others, life becomes very difficult. First, you only feel a reluctance to go to work. If you don’t get the message and start thinking about what it is that is bothering you, and why you are finding it difficult, and make the necessary changes, you will catch yourself thinking about work almost everywhere. If this message also fails to reach you, you may be sure that migraine headaches will start that will make you unable to go to work.
Of course, making these connections is not very easy. Therefore, it is necessary to start by considering everything you have experienced in your life as a whole, as parts of the same system. The next step is to determine when the pains started, and what exactly was going on in your life just then. Then you should focus on the function of the places where you feel the pains most intensely.
If you are hearing your doctor’s statement that your problem is psychological as, “I don’t have a problem,” today, and you are not focusing on the brain-body relationship, it may be possible that, after a while, you create an injury in that body that will not be possible to heal by psychological intervention. Furthermore, even if you manage to treat that physically, it will crop up again with some other illness as long as the underlying issues remain.
The body is at least as wise as the mind. One should listen to what it says.
Derya Gulterler
