Remnants of a long conversation linger in my head, dragging out more ideas and different slants on fear, truth and death.
I wonder what some would fear most, facing their truths or facing their deaths.
If you truths were real vanilla and uneventful, of course death would loom large and scary, but what if your past was scarier?
What if you were being asked to look upon a past filled with trauma, then how would your death look?
Death seems like an escape hatch a welcome slide into oblivion, compared to having to feel, deal and heal a wound of abnormal proportions.
Today I was exploring the depths of psychosomatic symptoms in the body and this is what I read.
“Yet even when a patient accepts their symptom is being caused by an emotion—an exceptionally difficult barrier to surmount—the trauma that caused the symptom in the first place is often shown to be so ugly that both patient and doctor can readily understand why the patient’s mind converted it into a physical symptom in the first place: even the mind itself believed the emotional trauma to be easier to handle that way.
Physical symptoms often get better with a pill. Emotional traumas often take years to heal—if even then. The technology we have to heal the scars caused by some traumas—as advanced and helpful as psychology can be—still lags behind the technology we have to treat ailments with purely physical causes.
But we shouldn’t be discouraged. We may all experience psychosomatic symptoms to some degree, but when our symptoms are shown to be so and we accept it, that acceptance becomes the most important step toward resolving them. After all, how can we find a contact lens we lost by looking near a lamppost when we lost it in the shadows? The real work begins, of course, once we start looking in the right place. Dealing with somatization only requires us to bring to the table one quality: courage.” (Alex Lickerman)
Isn’t it amazing that the mind can convert trauma into a physical symptom?
How interesting to read and understand more how emotional trauma affects the body.
And I love how courage is what we need to bring to the table.
Courage.
Courage to face our truths, our past and our hurts, and especially if the truth hurts the images we held of our family.
Courage, wow, I think they forgot a broken heart.
