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TissueReligion  6mo ago (text post)   1064 thread views

Ways to address underlying emotions that may be causing physical health issues?

Hi there! So I've had a weird variety of physical health issues for the past several years, and seeing a wide variety of doctors / therapists etc. has not done a lot for me. I grew up in a sort of physically violent / verbally abrasive household (I'm going to step back from using the term "abusive," but probably not that far off) and I've always wondered if there's some connection between that and my current physical health issues.

The tricky thing is... I'm just sort of positive / upbeat / feel good basically all the time, and it's hard for me to really identify any conscious emotions or bodily tension or anything that seems related. It's totally possible it's just all suppressed like 4 layers down, because I'm pretty sure I also do this with anger (eg since I grew up with an insanely angry person in the house, I just couldn't really express anger/upset at all, or they would freak out at me).

So I'm trying to figure out what other kinds of approaches to try, because most of the normal therapists I've seen have come up at a loss.

Any thoughts appreciated!

Thanks.

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If it makes you any happier, I've seen this happen to people who came from emotionally stable and supportive backgrounds as well.

Modern medicine is frequently incapable of treating people but no-one likes to hear this, least of all doctors, so they resort to blaming diffuse unprovable mental issues, since that is acceptable. To me this seems eerily similar to how people act in regards to pseudomedicine (your chakra/vitamins/aura/whatever is unbalanced you need my treatment that has no reason at all to work!).

I suspect a ton of things simply are physical and will be discovered be so in the coming decades, like Helicobacter pylori.

Sure, some things are psychological (at least partly) but when someone who is physically and mentally healthy suddenly develops some kind of physical or mental issue without a clear cause, is that due to some kind of diffuse undetectable mental trauma 5 layers down or is it a physical issue we're not aware of yet?

when someone who is physically and mentally healthy suddenly develops some kind of physical or mental issue without a clear cause, is that due to some kind of diffuse undetectable mental trauma 5 layers down or is it a physical issue we're not aware of yet?

It's a great question certainly, and I'm sure the answer is contextual. Initially when I was experiencing all these weird new health problems my prior was that since I was emotionally positive / upbeat all the time, the causes were likely only physical. However, while that's still completely possible in my case, given the large number of (seemingly) independent weird issues (listed here https://www.themotte.org/post/731/ways-to-address-underlying-emotions-that/153116?context=8#context), it becomes more plausible to me that there is an underlying emotional component that is either modulating the symptoms, or leading to some of them.

it becomes more plausible to me that there is an underlying emotional component that is either modulating the symptoms, or leading to some of them.

I'm afraid, but this is a logical non-sequitur.

  • The "weirdness" of a physical symptom does not logically imply that it has an emotional cause. Counterexample: People with rabies panic when presented with liquids to drink. I would say that this symptom qualifies as "weird" — unfortunately, the disease is still deadly virtually all of the time.
  • Even if the symptom is an emotion, such as irrational fear, this does not imply that the cause is emotional. Counterexample: 1) Rabies as above, 2) Depression can be caused by continued ingestion of fructose during fructose malabsorption.

Even more afraidly, I have to point out that current notions of an "emotional cause" have no basis in science — even though there are codified in popular diagnoses, such as F45 ("somatform disorder") in ICD-10.

Specifically, the problem with F45 is the following:

F45 postulates that the inability to detect a physical cause implies the presence of an emotional cause.

But "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence". As Ioper already points out, the physical cause may be unknown and a) there exists no current test for it. In practice, b) the doctor is "too lazy" to test for it.

In fact, the postulated criterion for presence of "emotional cause" is unscientific — by definition, a criterion which is scientific must be falsifiable. Here, this means that there must exist an experiment which is able to reject the hypothesis that XY is the "emotional cause". No such experiment has ever been put forward for F45. (If you know of any such experiment, please do write a reply to this post.)

As for your "weird" symptoms: Mast cell diseases, such as mastocytosis, MCAD or hereditary alpha tryptasemia are known to cause "weird" symptoms.

(This fact is useful, but strictly speaking unnecessary for rejecting F45.)

I hope you've already considered this but your list really suggest that you're either stressed (by far the most likely) or that you have some kind of gi/metabolic issue.

Sometimes it's hard to recognise that you're stressed especially when you feel like you're not "supposed" to be stressed or allowed to be (like with issues around kids). This is doubly true when you're starting to become exhausted. What used to be easy no longer is and that might not be because of an illness but because you're worn down.

Is it possible to cut down a bit and see how that goes or maybe going through your work/stress load with a friend/therapist?

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