How Your Behavior and Ailments May Be Part of a Bigger Picture

Part II: How Our Childhood Emotional Dynamics Can Affect Our Current Health, Motivation, Pain, and Illness

In Part I of this article series that I shared a few weeks ago, I began discussing why the dynamics of childhood are so important in any serious analysis of why we do what we do. The patterns that are shaped by our interactions with our parents and the circumstances of our early years become a way of life for us as we grow into adulthood and continue into our later years. This applies to all parts of our life, including health, religion and spirituality, or even political points of view. These patterns and beliefs are all based on survival, at least what our parents thought was important to survive, and they usually serve us very well, or at least adequately, by carrying on those beliefs modeled by our parents.

Sometimes though, our patterns and beliefs are not how we would like to behave as we get older, and we need to become more aware of them if we are to change them. Patterns and beliefs that don’t serve us well can run the gamut from the persistence of unhealthy eating habits to disempowering, and largely unconscious, patterns of behavior that affect our satisfaction with life itself. Changing these patterns is the hard work of dealing with our inner emotional lives, the land of psychotherapy, spirit, and soul.

The subconscious “black box” within us is where the seamless unity of our physical and emotional life resides. It is where we expend 90% of the energy we use every day. Unless we stay aware of our inner emotional life, we take it for granted as we pursue our lives and continually repeat the patterns and behaviors we learned early in life. It helps to think of this part of us as the operating system on a computer; it’s in the background, keeping everything going. And even though we would like to think otherwise, our conscious minds have very little direct control of what goes on in the much bigger “black box.” In fact, it is the other way around—the visceral reality of our inner physical and emotional life, our operating system, largely runs the entire show. If the beliefs held inside us are not serving our body’s health needs, we need to find them and adjust them.

Beliefs That Keep Us Unhealthy

I read a lot about health, including the challenges that face our modern population. Health experts are continually challenged by the resistance to exercise and improving diet among large parts of the “getting older” population. Some would say these people are “stuck in their ways” and don’t want to change. But if we look more closely at why they don’t want to change, especially when considering sedentary lifestyles or a consistent pattern of overeating, I suspect there could be a link to childhood emotional patterns that were learned a long time ago. The extreme cases of breaking these kinds of life-threatening habits can be found in the valuable work of organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Narcotics Anonymous (NA), and Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACA), all of which involve working on the “inner child” who was abused or not given enough love and who substituted destructive abuse of substances or other dysfunctional behaviors as an adult to cope. As noted, these are extreme cases, but is there really any difference if you are sedentary with little to no exercise or consistently overindulging in bad-for-you foods, continuously moving closer to an earlier disease profile than necessary?

Not long ago, I uncovered a behavior pattern that was not entirely healthy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was using physical labor in my 20s, followed by aerobic exercise of all sorts in my 30s and 40s, primarily as a relief from anxiety rather than a health regimen. Being exhausted after a good workout was like a drug to me (and still is), which helped me feel better about everything. That in itself was not the heart of the problem. But burning all those calories allowed me to eat and drink as much as I liked—and it wasn’t exactly health food! It was only later that I began to understand the long-term health benefits and drawbacks of what I was doing (and was able to face and adjust the eating and drinking part), as well as address the underlying emotional factors that were causing me to need that relief in the first place.

An Even Deeper Level

Changing your mind, especially core beliefs formed in childhood, is probably the hardest thing a person can do. Luckily, when our behavior, beliefs, and actions don’t serve us well, they are often accompanied by other dynamics that tell us we are on the wrong track. These could be anxiety, depression, or just having a hunch that something is off and needs to be changed. It could also be a big insight like the one I had about my daughters almost 20 years ago that caused me to drastically change my life. That insight hit me out of the blue. I realized that in order to be around for my very young daughters as they grew up I needed to take care of my health. I needed to begin changing my ways right then and there.

In the first part of this article series, I mentioned Bessel van der Kolk and John Sarno, both leading pioneers in the mind/body/trauma synergy that I am discussing here. Central to their successful work with many patients in their long careers is that the painful emotions we hold from childhood are stored in our visceral, feeling body, and our minds will go to extraordinary lengths not to feel the soul-shaking vulnerability these emotions hold. This includes disguising the emotion as a physical discomfort, disease, or pain until the actual underlying cause of the issue is worked out in a therapeutic setting or a spontaneous realization of the link between the two. This is territory that most people don’t want to embrace but is more widely being explored, understood, and practiced by a variety of leaders in this field, notably Peter Attia, Gabor Mate, and Alain de Botton, all of whom are featured in major press outlets.

A recent book on the subject that I recommend is by Dr. Dan Ratner called Crushing Doubt: An Advanced System for Mind-Body Pain and Symptom Relief. It is a comprehensive update of John Sarno’s work, with worksheets and how-to advice to diagnose mind/body issues. Dr. Ratner is a second-generation follower of Dr. John Sarno, having healed his own chronic, 8-year-long bout with severe back pain. The ultimate irony, like many other pain sufferers, is that there was never anything wrong with his back medically, and his years of seeing chiropractors, getting massages, stretching, taking pain-relief medication, reducing physical activity, and trying anything else he thought might work came to a crashing halt when he made the emotional connections to his childhood that he had been suppressing all that time. The pain and discomfort disappeared and have been nonexistent or manageable ever since. He has returned to full activity and a renewed life of both physical and inner emotional awareness that he didn’t have before. In fact, he has turned his psychology practice into a full-time, pain-relief practice.

All this is to say that the emotions we hold in our subconscious are very powerful factors in health and healing. Self-healing can be as much bigger force than any medical treatment. Unlike drugs and other ways of relieving pain symptoms, healing actually cures the problem. Healing is the work your body is doing 24/7 to keep you alive and is a vital part of life. It operates seamlessly in your mind as well as your body. This is a giant subject, and I am only touching the surface. The actual work, which I am doing, involves deep personal work and is part of an inner journey of life that I believe most people would benefit from.

For those brave enough—or desperate enough due to chronic symptoms that seem to have no real cause or that no one has been able to “fix”—it is a very worthwhile journey. Uncovering emotional patterns from my childhood has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my later life. The level of physical and psychic freedom I have attained has helped me enormously to more clearly navigate these precious years. It has helped me be a better parent and a better friend. Most of all, it has enabled me to be kinder to myself, which in turn has fueled my health and longevity practice.