My body has always reacted intensely. In my infancy – light sensitivity like a lightning strike. In my childhood – years of exhaustion disproportionate to the energy I’ve expended. In my teens – sensitivities that make ordinary foods feel radioactive. In my twenties – hand inflammation that precluded typing or holding a book. In my thirties – migraines that arrive like weather systems.
I have chased mold spores, nutrient deficiencies, inflammatory triggers, and obscure biochemical pathways. Some interventions help. Some don’t. Patterns emerge, and I obsess over one pattern to the exclusion of another. I look for that one root thing I can blame. I seek a single cause when I’m better off with a unifying theory.
I’ve sought the one food. The one toxin. The one mistake. But what if illness is rarely – or never – about one thing at all? What if illness – like everything else, it seems – is an emergent phenomenon? I think it is, and I think I can finally spell it out for you – and for my future self who I don’t quite trust to remember this insight.
Childhood trauma creates a baseline allostatic load. This trauma load is a foundational level of stress and physical inflammation. The higher this baseline, the more likely we are to have allergies, mast-cell over-activation, hyper-active immune responses, sensory sensitivities, social anxiety, and also – everything else too.
Acute stress raises the stress load from its baseline. Acute stresses include physical exertion, interrupted sleep, emotional pain, and any form of malnourishment – including lacking physical touch, mental stimulation, and the ability to be authentic. While stress includes things that are non-emotional, “stress” is primarily a word for “emotional burden.”
Genetics create dispositions for how the stress load “pops out.” If we have genetic predispositions associated with insulin resistance or beta-cell dysfunction, then becoming diabetic is a possibility for how the stress turns into “disease.”
Environment and lifestyle create another axis for how stresses “pop out.” Even with the genes for it, you won’t manifest diabetes in particular without extraordinary levels of hormonal dysfunction wearing out your pancreas, or, more typically, dietary factors.
The first two factors – childhood trauma and acute stress – are two places on a timeline which affect the same axis: the emotional component. Thus, we have three axes which intersect to create every illness: emotions, genes, and environment.
The emotional component, like the other two axes, can go deeply into negative spaces with intense traumas, but it can also have bolstering factors – like profoundly comforting relationships. Those bolstering factors can be so beneficial that they buffer negative factors along any of the three axes.
It feels strange to call the third one “environment” – because this breaks into two categories: that which you can control (your grocery selections, your sleep hygiene, etc) and that which you cannot (industrial pollution affecting water, foods, land, and air everywhere). Nonetheless, whether it’s mold growing in your home, fluoridated water, or selecting conventional produce laden with glyphosate – these are environmental factors upon your body.
There are so many times in my life when I’ve chased purely physical solutions for weeks, months – or even years – and had minimal results. Whether I was trying to resolve migraines that cropped up, debilitating inflammatory joint pain, or eye strain – these problems always responded at least a little to my new lifestyle and dietary protocols and interventions. Yet when solutions elude even the most diligent, researched approaches, I’d find myself asking questions like: what am I repressing? What am I avoiding? How does this symptom mirror my emotional distress?
In my early twenties I asked, “Is my throat closing up and chronically sore because of the words I’m not speaking?”
In my late twenties I asked, “Are my connective tissues breaking down because of a lack of connection in my life?”
Last week I asked, “Are my migraines obliterating my life because I’ve obliterated my emotional truth?”
From there, I had a breakthrough. I put on the music I was afraid of and let myself be sucked completely into my emotions. I collapsed on the bathroom floor and sobbed. It wasn’t a sweet and quiet cry, but the sort of cry that causes someone a few rooms away to come find out if you’ve broken a bone. That “epic cry” really did relieve my migraine – despite the fact that the environmental trigger (soy) was still part of my life.
And why am I sensitive to soy in the first place? This, once again, would be an intersection of my genetics (high sensitivity genes), my trauma (childhood experiences with food, illness, and loneliness), and my environmental factors.
All of these factors continue to be relevant, and yet, I’ve repeatedly observed huge emotional releases shifting even the most stubborn chronic pain. Previously I’ve experienced it with inflammatory joint pain, which was so bad I couldn’t walk. I’ve experienced fevers rising and breaking after days of persistence – and finally, it’s “the big cry” that shifts things.
I’m suspecting now that “the big cry” does more than remove a hair’s breadth off the allostatic trauma load. If that was all it took to eliminate these big illness patterns, then one big cry should resolve the issue more-or-less permanently (unless environmental factors or acute emotional burdens became worse). I have two theories for why the big release creates a big relief – often a full remission of symptoms for at least a day, if not three days, before relapse.
My first theory is best explained through an analogy: let’s say your trauma load is a backpack that weighs two-hundred pounds. It’s enormous, and it’s doubling you over with practically crippling force. And yet, it’s so constant that you hardly notice it anymore. It’s just “how things are” for you. But the big cry happens and now four ounces are lifted from that backpack. You’re still carrying two-hundred pounds, but that four ounces is really noticeable at first, because after constancy that may have been going on for months – or decades – there is finally a change. So the relief feels enormous. Then you equalize again, and the symptoms return.
My second theory is that the relief itself has more physiological temporary impact via neurotransmitters and parasympathetic activation. In other words, “the big cry” might be akin to taking anti-depressant drugs in a way. Perhaps it causes a rush of oxytocin and/or alters serotonergic signaling. Thus, for the next few hours or days, via hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal modulation of stress hormones, inflammation in your entire body is reduced – alleviating symptoms.
Honestly, I just realized these two theories are the same theory. The first is the emotional cause, and that leads to the physiological change at the brain level, which then leads to the physiological change across the body.
This three-axes theory (emotions, genes, environment) explains why people can get “so far” with one method (like purely working on their environmental factors through eliminating as many toxins from their home and diet as possible), but then eventually succumb to disease, and then either die of it – or have a miraculous recovery due to a huge emotional shift (like deciding to stop being a people-pleaser and finally chase their dreams).
This also explains why many people with complex chronic conditions appear to have no genetic contributors – because stress and environment can do their work without them. Genes are almost always only affecting the expression of an illness – not causing it. (There are single-gene conditions, but these affect far less than one percent of the population.) But hardly anyone wants to hear that their health is a combination of emotional and environmental factors because it feels too much like victim-blaming and nobody needs yet more shame heaped on them. The shame is already the mountain that’s making most of us unwell in the first place!
Hence, we have to find a way to face the truth without heaping blame on anybody – including ourselves. Besides, there isn’t anyone to blame anyway. So your parents abused or neglected you? Well, they did that because of their upbringing. And your grandparents did what they did because of their upbringing. So your society oppressed you? Well, all the individuals in that society did that because of their upbringing. And if we go back up the generational chains we’ll find wars – but those weren’t the start of things going wrong, but giant climaxes of horror that were born from horror in the upbringing of the people “most responsible.” What we’ll find, if we keep going back, is natural disasters taking away entire families – particularly if these tragedies happen while a child is developing secure attachments and then loses them. Those wounds will be passed on with each generation, and without the social technology known as healing, they just keep getting passed on.
Many shamans, doctors, and writers have come to understand healing and what it means and how it’s done – but it’s a gargantuan task. We don’t just carry the allostatic load from our own childhood, but imprints from the worst traumas in our ancestors going back many generations. While we only have some preliminary studies evidencing the reality of inter-generational trauma in mice, we have countless anecdotes of people accessing memories of traumas that happened to their ancestors and only finding relief after facing those traumas.
Nonetheless, it’s really not the horrors that our great-grandparents may have faced that make healing quite so challenging. It’s the cultural programming that tells us not even to begin. How often do we hear a character in a show or movie say, “Don’t cry.” We’re still in the dark ages when it comes to emotional intelligence. We might as well be saying, “Don’t heal.” Or, “Hold onto this pain forever.” Or even, “Hold onto this pain until it turns into cancer and kills you.” Suddenly the phrase “don’t cry” goes from innocent to insidious.
We’re also taught that emotions themselves are dangerous. We link jealousy to the murder of one’s partner. We link anger to setting a house (or city) on fire. We link shock and grief to suicide. Yet the emotions were never the problem. Ironically, our meta-emotions about the emotions – our fear and shame around having them and expressing them – are what make emotions turn into dangerous behaviors. If we learned to feel our fear, anger, grief, jealousy, envy, and panic when we were still toddlers – as we’re meant to – and we were given co-regulatory containment for these emotions back then, back when the stakes were still small, we’d learn critical life skills like: how to listen to our emotions, how to decipher their meaning, how to communicate about what we’re feeling, and how to responsibly address the root cause of the feeling.
Instead, we’re often forced to grapple with these emotions as adults, having never experienced co-regulation or containment. We often have no idea what it would mean to manage these emotions responsibly. And now, as adults, we have a lot more power than we did at two. Instead of throwing a sippy-cup against a carpet, we’re now very capable of breaking every dish in the kitchen with our anger – and injuring more than the dishes in the process. Now, with all this power in our hands, we can’t afford to just let our emotions “run rampant.” And if we did, we’d be labeled unstable, ill, immature, and unfit for society. So the cultural norm and mantra is repress, repress, repress.
This repression practice didn’t manifest as the same illnesses a couple hundred years ago – but we had less acute stresses (emotional or psychic burdens) bombarding us before telephones and television. We also had fewer environmental burdens before refined sugar, hydrogenated oils, microplastics, and glyphosate were just “normal” parts of every meal of the day. We also used to have a much stronger social network when “entertainment” meant weekly gatherings to play cards rather than scrolling on our devices.
Maybe I can finally stop trying to isolate the cause between “emotions” and “foods” in my life. It’s hard. I was raised with the western notion of scientific thinking – reductionist methodology and linear causality models. Isolate factors. It’s a mental discipline which serves me well, making me even more attached to it. But the problem with “isolating” a cause is that it is virtually always false. There’s no one person “to blame” for any particular outcome. The issues are always systemic.
If we look at illness as an intersection of emotional load, genetic predisposition, and environmental burden, then healing must also occur at that intersection. We cannot biohack our way out of unprocessed grief. We cannot cry our way out of industrial toxins. And, sadly, we don’t seem to be able to meditate our way out of single-gene disorders. But we can reduce load where we can. We can buffer where we can. We can stop adding shame to systems already under strain. Healing is not about finding the one cause. It is about reducing total burden.
If we’re going to be agents of positive change, we have to confront some very ugly and uncomfortable subjects. Violent activity isn’t the choice of one person – it’s the symptom of a sick society. Those of us who pride ourselves on being conscientious and responsible are still part of the systems we inhabit, and we’d do well to ask ourselves how our culture contributes to the despair and violence we see.
No matter how virtuous we are, we’d do well to ask ourselves how we are contributing to teens shooting other kids at school. Did we tell those teens, “Don’t cry.”? Did we write that into our movie script, or say that to our friend? No snowflake in an avalanche feels responsible because not a single one of us alone is “to blame.” It’s about having responsibility: response ability. Are we able to respond in such a way as to start creating a positive change? Can we face the truth of our own traumas, stresses, and environmental contributions? Are we brave enough to do it without having anyone to blame?
Instead of asking, “What is to blame?” we begin asking, “Where is the load?” Instead of isolating one variable, we look at the system. Instead of throwing up our hands in defeat and saying, “It’s just my bad genes,” or, “It’s the whole society at fault – what can I do?” we can just take the step in front of us. Some days it may mean removing a trigger-food from my diet, and other days it may mean crying about that time I was slapped because I was upset. One day it may mean testing my bedroom for mold residue, and on a different day it’ll be telling my parents how much I love them – with the full force of forgiveness behind it.
As within, so without. As without, so within. The problems we face as a culture, a country, a society are systemic – and so are the illnesses we carry in our bodies. And empowerment only ever lives in this moment. In this moment I can sit up straighter. In this moment I can breathe deeper. In this moment I can offer my writing to the world as an authentic expression of the best I have to offer. In a future moment, I’ll say something kind to a stranger. In a future moment, I’ll eat a healthy meal. In a future moment, I’ll cry me a river and it will carry me downstream. That’s healing. That’s the best we can do. That’s enough.
— Raederle Phoenix
Related past essay: Reaching the Breaking Point: How Emotions Become Illness (2017)
