When You Don’t Say No, Your Body Will Say It For You
How chronic stress and childhood trauma affect your physical health.
A few years ago, I started experiencing many physical symptoms I had never experienced: jaw clicking, anxiety attacks, muscle knots, digestive issues, fungal infections… Everything, all at once.
First, I panicked. Then, I went through a phase of denial, trying to rationalize my experience. And finally, it became pretty clear why I was having so many “unexplained” issues.
My mental health had been deteriorating day by day for almost a year. My body had been asking me to listen, but I was too busy to pay attention. Naturally, it did what it is designed to do when whispering is not enough: it started to scream.
This led me to a healing journey in which I was forced to become aware of many psychological issues I had been suppressing for years. Besides, I was committed to finding answers: how exactly did my mental health affect my physical health?
I’ve indeed found many answers, and I’m here to share them with you.
The Cost of Hidden Stress
We already know stress is linked to many health issues. From high blood pressure to heart attacks and fertility problems, every part of our body can be physiologically affected by stress. Besides, we also know it weakens our immune system.
The problem is that when we think of stress, we think of short-term stress. We think of a traffic jam, a problem at work, or maybe an argument with our partner. But what about chronic stress?
What about that kind of stress that has been present for so long that we’re not even aware of it anymore? What if some early childhood experiences have conditioned us to be chronically stressed — to be constantly ready to fight or flight? Unfortunately, this is the kind of stress that leads to disease.
When we’re not given the tools to process certain emotions — or when certain experiences are simply unbearable — our bodies don’t know how to respond, and that creates stress.
Things get even worse if:
- the circumstances that have caused the stress are still present, meaning we’re chronically experiencing certain emotions (anger, sadness, anxiety…)
- we’ve become disconnected from our body, so we don’t even know which emotions we’re experiencing (because we either ignore them, deny them, or suppress them, which only reinforces the stress);
“The body is good at handling episodes of acute stress. We’re designed to recover quickly from short-term stress.
The body isn’t so good at handling chronic stress, however. Over time, chronic stress gradually increases your resting heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate and levels of muscle tension so the body now has to work even harder when it’s at rest to keep you functioning normally.
In other words, chronic stress creates a new normal inside your body. And this new normal can eventually lead to a host of health problems”
When The Body Says No
Research has linked emotional repression — in most cases expressed as niceness and people-pleasing— to decreased immune function.
Besides, there are many studies that show how adverse childhood events (ACEs) can affect a variety of illnesses later on in life. ACEs are negative experiences that occur during the first 18 years of life. They can include all kinds of dysfunction, from emotionally unavailable parenting to physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
Another study examining trauma-informed care for survivors of childhood trauma found that those with higher ACE scores may also be at higher risk for autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, as well as frequent headaches, insomnia, depression, and anxiety, among others.
If you’d like to dive deep into this topic, I highly recommend reading When The Body Says No by Dr. Gabor Maté. Drawing on deep scientific research and Dr. Maté’s acclaimed clinical work, the book clearly shows how certain emotions are related to certain diseases and provides answers to many questions about the mind-body connection.
In his medical practice, Dr. Maté realized most of his patients had lifelong histories of emotional repression.
Almost all of them had a huge sense of duty to others, and would often prioritize the well-being of their friends and family no matter how much they were suffering.
Their selfless personalities were the result of childhood experiences that taught them their needs and feelings were irrelevant.
In what comes to autoimmune diseases specifically, the body’s defenses turn against the self. According to Dr. Maté, this immunologic confusion perfectly mirrors the unconscious psychological confusion of self and non-self. In this disarray of boundaries, “the immune cells attack the body as if the latter were a foreign substance, just as the psychic self is attacked by inward-directed reproached and anger”.
In this interview, he said:
“The medical profession doesn’t look at the evidence. There’s a lot of evidence, published in medical journals… The relationship between stress and disease, the relationship between early childhood experiences and disease, the way that emotional factors affect the immune system. There’s nothing new about this. People have been studying this for decades and decades… But our western medical mind is trained not to look at certain evidence that it doesn’t feel comfortable with.”
Our emotions, thoughts, and beliefs, impact our biology. With all of these factors combined, they play a major role in influencing our physical health.
Physical health and emotional health are intimately connected. The mind and the body are not two separate entities — although they are often treated that way.
In my case, my body was definitely saying no. It had been forcing me to listen for a very long time. The good news, this experience has increased my self-awareness and taught me to focus on my well-being.
What is your body telling you?
