Last week I asked whether there might be physical consequences to life with a psychopath. Judging from the many and fascinating reader responses it seems that many people suspect that these relationships have indeed affected their health. Boldily pains, chronic anxiety, eating disorders, weight fluctuations, difficulties with sleep, headaches – all these and more either started or worsened at the time of the relationships. Some ailments straight away resolved themselves when the relationship ended, others linger.
Before I give a brief conceptualisation of a linkage between life events and physical health I must clarify terms. I am not talking here about hypochondria, imagining and and worrying about being ill. I am talking about psychosomatics, a term which has become confused for some to mean, ‘it’s all in your mind.’ Psychosomatic ailments are real ailments. A migraine headache, even if it has a psychological element, has real constriction of blood vessels, real pain, real vomiting, real response to medication – it is not imagined. As you’ll see below, to me it makes no sense to speak of something being only in the mind.
A personal example
Since childhood I suffered from migraine headaches. There is probably some genetic disposition at work – my mother and her sister were both migrainous. There were some physical things that seemed to make my migraines more likely – bright light, dehydration. However, there was also something psychological at work. How do I know? First, while I usually got three of four migraines a year, one year I was migrainous during each weekly session of a class I was teaching – too much of a coincidence. Second, although my migraines weren’t an actual topic during my therapy when I trained as a psychotherapist, somehow my migraines stopped then. Therapy is not all I was doing. I was seeing a chiropractor, doing Pilates, improving my diet, writing.
What happened? In short here’s what I’ve come to. For me migraines were in part the consequence of unexpressed anger. (During the course I was teaching I was angry about something but did nothing about it because one doesn’t get angry with one’s students, right?). Somehow the combination of psychotherapy and other activities untied that particular emotional/physical knot for me and since then it has not been necessary for me to have a migraine. Now if I feel a fluttering in my left temple I say to myself, “There’s something (emotional) going on”, and that redirection of attention seems to be enough.
I’m not suggesting anyone’s else’s journey will go the same way as mine did. In fact I know that’s most unlikely. Each person needs to work out their own – preferably multi-pronged – approach. NB Please do not take this a recommendation to eschew regular medical treatment; when I say ‘multipronged’ I mean tackle the matter from several angles including, of course, medical science.
Psychesoma, MindBody
Body-mind medicine is not everyone’s cup of tea. If you are interested see this review of a recent book on the field’s history.
Here are some notions on psychosomatics from Dr. Brian Broom (see also here and here):
What are some of the assumptions then, of MindBody healing?
- Body and mind are inextricably involved with each other, indeed they cannot be separated.
- Mind elements are important in developing, triggering and perpetuating disease.
- Mind elements also play a role in wellness and protection from disease.
- Sometimes there needs to be a pure focus on the body as the best approach to illness, while at other times a pure focus on the mind is more important.
- In many situations, however, a combined approach is likely to give the best outcome for the patient.
- It is important to attend to ”˜mind’ in all patients, even in what is normally regarded as ”˜physical’ illness. Attending to mind implies many elements including: respect for the patient’s ”˜illness experience’; listening for the meaning of illness; understanding the individual’s model of illness; regard for the role of trauma; attention to family, relationship, societal, cultural, and spiritual forces promoting illness or healing; regard for the influence of sociological factors such as poverty, unemployment, and loss of identity; and the role of biomedicine in rendering mind aspects invisible.
Chronic stress
Life with a psychopath provides great and ongoing inner tension and may also inhibit the ways that tension can be relieved. While it’s neither the whole story nor everyone’s story, it makes sense to me that there may be a lot more bottling up in a relationship with a psychopath than normal and what has been bottled up may well have consequences.
We are beings who, it seems, will make manifest what’s going on inside, whether we do it through action, emotions, expression, or bodily symptoms.
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Next week I will describe one simple method that has been scientifically shown to improve some ‘physical’ ailments which have a psychological component. In the meantime, what have you found that helps?
one/joy_step_at_a_time
circus soundtrack – hallucinogenic, swirling taking one off balance. one of the most chilling movie scenes (well, movies) I have ever seen is dennis hopper with his laughing gas in blue velvet….and as soon as I wrote this first sentence that image popped right into my mind.
i like the fundamental difference between light and pigment – black is the absence of light, or the presence of all pigment. matter vs. wave
lightsaber
oooh that’s so cool – your specific background – I have been wanting to learn that aspect for years
I have to get ready to go out. I’m going out for the night for the first time in AGES!! (well actually like an evening out as opposed to going to the supermarket for cereal LOL). I’m going to see Sherlock Holmes and then for Buffalo wings 🙂
oh p.s. geez my attention span is horrible…YES to Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet!! OMG that is SO fitting. CRRRRRReEEEEPyyyyyyy
I like this edit function as well 🙂
one/joy_step_at_a_time
have an wonderful night wielder of sabers!
we’ll talk more again.
one step
one/joy_step_at_a_time
🙂
sea storm
Thanks for reminding me of the powerful connection between mind and body. I think that my body “knew” that I was not safe with the man I was living with. In February I started to get pains in my legs which over the next five months spread to my whole body. It was painful to be touched. Curiously, my ex partner started his affair at the same time. My body would not let me lie down beside him. It hurt too much. Of course, I was too far into denial to allow the thought of an affair into my conscious awareness but my body knew. Immediately.
He is gone and my body no longer hurts all over. However, the years of stress took a big toll on my body. He was so masterful at lying, and slippery sliding all over my life and finances. At a very deep level I knew that too but could not face the catastrophe of knowing fully.
I started to grind my teeth at night until I was at risk of losing a few of them. I overate. I withdrew from people, job, joy and life. He seemed to need all my energy and more.
Sometimes I get to missing the good times even though the price was too high. It must be an aberration of brain chemistry. Now I know that I don’t have the energy to be superwoman for him. I don’t want that role again ever.
sea storm
Here’s a list of what’s going on with my body AFTER the sociopath and with PTSD:
constant overwhelming fatigue
sleep disturbance
nightmares
constant anxiety
headaches
severe muscle tension
hyper startle reflex
gastro-intestinal and digestion problems
inflamed allergies/sinus problems
constant skin eruptions/hives
severely limited attention span (inability to concentrate)
short term memory loss
spaciness (“spacing out” mentally)
significantly high clumsiness (accidents ”“ ie. dropping things, bumping/walking into things, burning myself while cooking)
impaired cognitive ability and loss of memory (ie. in the middle of a sentence and then get stuck and can’t think of a simple word I’m trying to remember; I try to make a simple point or tell a short story and I suddenly get “stuck” and confused)
ALL of the above were present when I was with the sociopath.
Thanks for the above. I had the same reaction to the psychopath I lived with. Unfortunately, Those things did not disappear and I continue to have PTSD to the point where I am unable to work. This is five years later.
However, I do feel better and I have hope again.
skylar
Congrats, Sea Storm, you understand.
I’m so happy for your escape from the devil.
Ox Drover
Sea Storm,
Welcome to LoveFraud.
Many of us have PTSD, and the stress of the trauma does change your brain’s functioning both physically and chemically, but you are not “broken” just different…some of the symptoms will stay with you, some get better and some will go away. My PTSD started big time when my husband was killed in an accident, but I realize I have had some of the symptoms for years from previous P-encounters.
Don’t despair, just work on the problems and your life situation etc one at a time, and cut out the people and situations in your life that are stress causing, and you will slowly build peace back into your life.
I have two stages in my life…before the plane crash and after the plane crash.
Don’t push yourself too hard, just be GOOD TO yourself and take things slowly. The key is BE GOOD TO YOURSELF. Glad you are at LoveFraud. God bless.
aussiegirl
Sea Storm –
Sounds like you might also need to get checked out for Fibromyalgia.
Although many PTSD symptoms can “cross over” with Fibro symptoms (I am lucky enough to have been diagnosed with BOTH, as are several others here on the blog) (sarcasm intended), some of what you describe points to a separate Fibro diagnosis.
Of course, some of this depends on how long you have been out of the situation and where you are at in your recovery.
Welcome; rest here 🙂
darwinsmom
Sea Storm,
It sounds really weird, but I think my knee cartilege got broken partly because of the relationship. I had quit smoking and started to exercise… at first everything went well… but after a month I had overstretched my ankles, and needed to take a rest for a week. When I restarted soon after I had an issue with my left knee. This was around the same time he was back in Nicaragua, without his sister, after his father died, and he started to neglect me, meanwhile looking for a new long term victim. When I had let it rest long enough and just thought it was stiffness and did a zumba exercise, I fell through my knee the next day when getting up. The doctor thought it was my meniscus, so I had an echo but no sign of tears in my meniscus… he did see some water in the knee which might be a sign of an infection and perhaps something amiss with teh cartiledge. An MRI was in order. I had the MRI and the specialist said it wasn’t the cartiledge, but must be the meniscus. So time for an operation.
Now all this testing and research took several months. In these months he didn’t just cheat on me with one night stands, but long affairs where tried to make the woman hooked on him and take my role instead. By the time I had the MRI he was getting his hooks in the victim who ended up replacing me.
I wouldn’t hear from him for over a week. It was even becoming immensely difficult to catch him on the phone. Eventually I had him on the phone at 3am in the night, while I had to get in the hospital the next morning at 7am. And he was so callous when I mentioned it, that I realized consciously it was over.
I had the operation the next morning. Turned out to be the cartilege after all. I had to walk on crutches and stay home for 2 weeks. I did call him again to make up for my anger the night before my operation. He discarded me a week after the operation.
Now, I do think I might have overdone the exercising to begin with… but I think I did, because it was the sole thing I felt still in control over in my life. And I felt a need to assertm myself. Exercise was one of those means. It coincided with neglect which crippled me physically and mentally. It’s even possible that all the stress from the relationship might have had its effect on my cartilege, making it more prone to injury in the first place.
But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that bleak period of utter loneliness coincided with the knee, and that he cut himself out of my life at the same time the broken cartilege had been cut out of my knee.