Illness as the norm
The meaning of illness
The seeds of life and death
AIDS -- a paradigm
The earth is ill
Illness as invitation
Illness – as the Norm
For the norm that refuses to process its traumatic history, illness will be its fate.
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The meaning of illness
So much of illness begins in the psyche and is a symptom of trauma. Illness represents denied psychic realities, most notably the wounds inflicted when we were young and impressionable. If we refuse to resolve these traumas, if we fail to tell the truth and feel the hurt, our bodies will speak for us -- through illness.
Some events in our past are too disturbing to bring to consciousness. Yet if we repress these sickening memories, the damage endured doesn't go away, but will bloom into poor health -- physical or mental. Even if we “forget” our past through dissociation, depression, or the blunting brutality of addiction, the body does not forget, but remains a repository of the unfelt horrors we would deny.
Using the body as a garbage dump for pain we refuse to feel invites disease. Denial of stressors directly compromises our immune system and indirectly induces us to act out self-destructively exposing us to an assortment of maladies – some lethal.
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The seeds of life and death
The body carries the seeds of our past, some deadly -- and the seeds of the future, our dreams and aspirations, our true self. The seeds we nurture through the choices we make in our lifetime will bloom into our greatest successes or our demise.
Our body can be misused as a psychic dump, filled with the deadening poison of unfelt grief, traumas, and betrayals from our past. We can use our body as a refuse heap, burying any disturbing reality too difficult to feel. We can insure that we will never feel our emotional pain by numbing our bodies with various addictions that over-load our senses preventing feelings from surfacing. We may turn to anti-depressant medications to further anaesthetize our troubling past. We may sink into depression itself and feel nothing. Drugs and alcohol are numbing stand-bys.
If we refuse to feel and heal our wounds, we live an anemic, bloodless existence, a kind of death. In time our bodies will revolt. Buried traumas erupt in illness, despair, or scandal. If we still refuse to honor the signals our illness is sending us and fail to integrate the emotional suffering of our past, we will die numb, even numbed out on morphine, ignorant of our past.
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AIDS – a paradigm
The AIDS epidemic in gay men is an example of a psychic wound manifesting as illness. The pain of parental, familial, social, and religious rejection has been absorbed by the gay community – and collected over generations into a wound so immense, it was too overwhelming and awful to address willingly. Sadly, to begin the torturous work of redeeming ourselves from our traumatic history buried for generations in the psyches of the gay community – we got sick and many died.
But the principle holds. This wound collected in the unconscious of the gay community must be felt, mourned, and integrated in all its horror for us to get well and heal AIDS. If we don’t address the full meaning of any illness, including AIDS, we will continue to get sick. Even if science finds a cure for AIDS, and we fail to heal our traumatic past, we will get sick with something else, manifesting another epidemic of even greatest intensity.
This paradigm holds true for other individuals and communities as well. Whatever wound remains unspoken and un-grieved, illness will communicate for us through the body, individually and collectively. What the body is saying is this: “Listen to the message I am telling you: look within to find the trauma lodged in your heart and soul so that I, your body, can heal you so that you can thrive.”
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The earth is ill
Because of humanity’s collective failure to resolve our traumatic history that remains buried in our unconscious and our failure to live enlightened lives, we have become mentally ill as a species. Out of our minds, we abuse ourselves, others, and sorrowfully our planet home. The earth is sick because we are sick. We have asked the planet to absorb our exploitative and excessive patterns as the result of our mental unbalance.
As we continuously run from our true selves, we compensate for our emptiness by having children and over populating the planet. We bulldoze nature to make room for more housing, and more fields to produce more food to feed our exponentially growing masses. We use drugs and alcohol for addictive highs to quell our emptiness and to avoid self-knowing. We have compensated for not grieving our childhood tragedy by going on a global shopping spree, exploiting the earth’s resources, getting high on short term profits with no concern for long the term havoc we’re wreaking on Mother Earth. To avoid feeling the pain in our interior, we mindlessly exploit our planet home, turning our backs on the toxic dumps we create that match the toxic dumps within our collective psyche that rules our lives.
We deny that we’re destroying our planet home as we fill up another tank of gas and drive faster, getting nowhere near where we need to go – within ourselves. What we have done to our world is a reflection of the poisonous waste that is within us. We are a sick world with symptoms knocking at our consciousness every where we turn from gas prices to huge hurricanes to needing sun screen to simply walk to the corner because we’ve destroyed the atmosphere. The devastation of our planet home mirrors the neglect we carry within. No self-aware species would mindlessly destroy its host. Bacteria do, viruses do … but when humans do, it is a crisis of conscience. It is time to admit that as a species, Homo sapiens is mentally ill. If we are to survive, we need to heal our individual and collective insanity.
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Illness as invitation
Illness, mental or physical is an invitation to investigate the repressed feelings that clog our psyches and prevent our spirits’ life-giving and healing function. Illness is not a punishment, but an ultimatum from the body: “Know thyself, or I'll stop functioning until you do.”
It may not have been safe as a child, or even yesterday as an adult, to feel certain feelings, but today it is imperative to find a safe place and person to admit the past – and feel it and heal it. Honor the signals the wise body gives. If a body is ill, chances are so is a heart, a mind, and a soul.
Taking a pill may cure a symptom, but it will never heal the disease. Only honest feeling and grieving allows us to heal deeply and fully.
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