Dysfunction and Unlimited Variables
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. ~ Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5
Yes, Hamlet, it is a curious world in which we live and perhaps a strange message that I share today. We live in a world filled with coincidences, odd circumstances, and baffling occurrences. I’m waxing metaphysical today, as I reference two books by Louse Hay, Heal Your Body, and Heal Your Life, and draw a connection to Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in my efforts to provide you with the most bang for the buck health advice available anywhere. Today’s health tips cost exactly nothing, but they may turn out to be quite difficult to implement. Today we propose to heal the body by healing the mind. Many people lead dysfunctional lives and suffer physical ailments because of it, while they are completely unaware of the underlying issues.
In her books, the author discusses how prayer, meditation, positive thoughts, and forgiveness can act to heal physical and emotional ailments and she proposes that these actions can even affect such seemingly unrelated matters as personal relationships, job searches, and the outcome of negotiations or litigations. The metaphysical principle is that the energy, the vibrations if you will, that emanates from us and reverberates within is, has the power to influence, not only the functioning of our bodies, but even the functioning of our relationships, and inanimate objects around us, that our energy attracts people and circumstances, all ultimately serving a positive or instructive purpose, if only our minds could grasp it properly and if only we could see all things for what they truly are.
While that may seem a bit out there to some, if we simply confine ourselves to the workings of our bodies, it has been demonstrated that your thoughts, and attitudes, your general outlook, your relationship with God, all these things can significantly impact your health. Getting your mind right can make your body right. Taking it a step further, it would seem logical that being in a constant state of peace and maintaining a positive outlook would certainly result, not just in better health, but in better interpersonal relationships. For now, let’s not get lost in whether your prayers and meditations can cause tangentially related effects at a distance; Let’s discuss what they can do for our health.
A common question in psychology is, would you rather be right, or would you rather be happy? It turns out that you can seldom be both. The reason is that we are usually the most adamant about things we want to be true, but which we cannot prove to be true, most often because they simply aren’t. When we despair over a lost relationship, a breakup, the most constructive view is to recognize that the relationship was flawed, perhaps deeply, and that one or all of the participants came to that realization and ended it, making room for something far better to manifest. We usually aren’t ready to accept that fact; psychology is hard. When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” ~ Lao Tzu
In math and science a problem with two variables is easy to solve. Each additional variable added to the equation increases the complexity. The challenge in solving human problems, whether physical or psychological, is the existence of a seemingly unlimited number of potential variables. For example, I have found that many physical problems can be vastly improved through corrections in the gut microbiome, reestablishing a normalcy that has been disrupted not only by environmental toxins, including medications, but even psychological traumas great and small. But that’s not a single corrective action, nor is it simple; it involves a complex process. I have also found that a significant part of physical healing is often psychological healing, but again, far easier said than done. I would state my agreement with Ms. Hay’s underlying message, that a positive attitude is clearly beneficial to your health, while reminding her that it’s far from automatic. There are other factors, including genetics, but I have previously written that the various unique genetic profiles are simply the map from our starting point; they don’t dictate our journey. It is what happens along life’s highway that truly determines our future, and your thoughts and emotions do play a significant role.
Much of my life has been devoted to helping people and my greatest pain, my greatest disappointment is the ones I couldn’t help, often just because I couldn’t reach them, often because they didn’t see the problem or didn’t believe I had something of value that could help. As I have grown, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, I have found it more challenging because of the unfathomable complexity of the human condition. In my early days, I helped people by using my knowledge of psychology to help them better understand themselves and to recognize, as we all should, that the majority of our problems are of our own making and therefore the solution seldom if ever requires others to change, which is a good realization to have, because others will not change for you, although they might lie to you by pretending to change. Since physical health can be greatly influenced by the emotional, understanding our own psychological profile can work miracles.
While my current focus is on the physical aspects of health, it cannot be denied that the connection between physical and emotional/spiritual health is a two-way street where externally induced chemical changes, such as mood elevating drugs, can alter the body’s chemical profile and function (hormones, neurotransmitters, etc.) while very similar changes can be generated internally, by our thoughts. Most of the time, you don’t need drugs to fix emotional issues, and most of the time they don’t actually result in any substantive or lasting improvement. So which came first, the chicken (surge in oxytocin) or the hug and kiss, or even the thought of the hug and kiss which can produce the same surge in “happy hormones?” And theoretically, you could take a pill for that, but the result would be hollow and temporary. And is your elevated blood pressure the result of a poor diet, or does your personality move you in the direction of stress, resulting in elevated BP, which might have also been caused by a bad diet of comfort foods? While western medicine doesn’t even ask this question, TCM addresses it head on.
The chemistry of the human brain, which dictates thoughts and emotions, can be influenced by diet, exercise, nutrition, environment, and spiritual practices. While happy thoughts generally contribute to a healthy body, the reverse is equally true where a healthy person is more likely to manifest healthy thoughts, and it matters not which came first. The person who suffers from emotional issues is likely, in my opinion, to manifest aberrant physical conditions as a result, while a person with a perpetually sunny disposition will demonstrate both a better mood, and a better internal chemical balance. The secret then, is to move your inner self to happier places.
Today’s thoughts will include a long excursion into some confusing rabbit holes, but it is my hope that after reading this you will look at your world differently, and evaluate personal challenges, both your own and the challenges of people close to you, in a different and more effective way. After all knowledge only has value if it can be applied. And as much as someone might wrong or offend you, we should always try to assume that such was not their intention. People universally do what they perceive is best for them, which can sometimes leave victims in their wake.
Emotional and physical issues intertwine. Issues involving kidneys, liver, stomach, eyes, brain, and even joints, will often be reflected as, or reflective of, mental and emotional conditions. Stated briefly, a diseased (broken) heart could be the cause of an inability to find emotional fulfillment, or it could be the result of failing to find it. In either event, the connection, as is believed in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and other ancient practices, will be there.
The following example, while extremely limited in scope, should be thought of allegorically, and universally, recognizing that the sort of attitudes and ailments discussed could manifest in other areas of life and in other organs besides the ones mentioned here. Today we take a limited look at both physical and emotional heart and liver problems, looking at a somewhat theoretical scenario showing human health as a metaphysical equation. And it is a glimpse into just how convoluted it can become, trying to find the origins.
What follows is a devastating scenario affecting multiple lives, where a woman suffered such an immense sexual trauma from her childhood that she spent her adolescent and adult life conquering and subjugating men in a series of meaningless, to her at least, sexual conquests. What mattered to her was the “win,” and never the relationship. The various men involved were interchangeable faceless drones to her, and yet her actions affected all of them, perhaps some quite severely. Consider the devastation caused by lies, and the healing that could have occurred if all of the affected parties had only known, and told, the truth.
While random promiscuity has traditionally been thought to be a male characteristic, the emotional emptiness leading to such behavior can equally apply to women. This woman’s life was so tangled that although she presented herself outwardly as charming and physically beautiful, she was unable to sustain healthy relationships with men or women. Perhaps her captivating personality was a defensive or even an offensive mechanism she had perfected. She had many acquaintances, but virtually no friends; she had barriers so that no one could truly get close, even as she told them they were. Her oldest friendship dated back less than 6 years, and even that friendship was frighteningly superficial. When asked, some of her friends seemed to know surprisingly little about her. They knew the stories she told, but most of those were untrue. Although she had remained married for over 40 years, she was repeatedly unfaithful, and had chosen as her husband a man so emotionally weak that he enabled her unfaithfulness. A stronger man would have divorced her.
Her husband, by all accounts a kind wonderful man, died of liver cancer at a devastatingly young age. The liver is tied to emotions in TCM, and liver issues can be expressed as, or can be caused by, negative emotional states like depression, PTSD, lack of connection, or feelings of emotional numbness; that door swings both ways. The liver is also associated with menstrual cycles, and links to hormonal mood issues in women. Was his liver cancer the result of emotional issues exacerbated by an unfulfilling marriage, or perhaps a weak liver was the cause of him seeking marriage to a woman incapable of fidelity? In either event, his liver cancer was perfectly consistent with TCM and Heal Your Body. There is an intricate relationship between the liver and emotions, where imbalances in one can affect the other. It is likely that he could have lived longer by accepting that he had made a mistake, and corrected it by divorcing her, by spotting this behavior even earlier and simply not marrying her, or by her getting the help she needed. It is unarguable that he would have had a happier and healthier life. And if not for him, might she have sought the help she needed?
Our lead actress in this drama had had one friend who had been like a brother, emotionally by her side through thick and thin for 30 years. He was her only long-term relationship and perhaps the closest thing she had to a true and deep friendship, although much of what she shared with him was fiction, and she kept her sexual proclivities secret from him. Perhaps that relationship was kept alive because he never saw the truth of what she was and because he never gave her the slightest hint that she could have him physically. Because she didn’t conquer him sexually, the mystery remained fresh for her. He was a man of such moral character that she knew he couldn’t be seduced as long as she wore a wedding ring, and so she never made any overt advances toward him.
He came to her aid and comfort after the death of her husband. She lamented to him that she was unable to find peace or happiness living alone, that she was not OK and her life seemed somewhat empty. Even though her marriage had been a travesty, having a man sleep next to her was a crutch without which she felt adrift. So she confided in her one true friend that she had always imagined having a romantic relationship with him. Unable to resist her beauty and her charms, and unrestrained now that she was single, a widow, he engaged in a passionate, romantic relationship with her, although one impeded by geography. He did not live close enough to date her in any normal way and so their “dates” consisted of one to four weeks of living together in her house and engaging in sex and romance when he was able to be there, interspersed with periods of separation.
Perhaps because he could not be there every day this relationship, distinct from all of her others, lasted for a period of six years. During those six years he believed their relationship was exclusive, but it was hardly that. And who could blame him. She exuded an innocent sweetness, confided that he was only the second man in nearly fifty years to share sexual relations with her, and her physical beauty was breathtaking. The truth about her was inconsistent with the persona she had shown him for 25 years. It is, after all, easy for most men to be taken in by a beautiful woman. She looked to be about half of her true age and projected an alluring sensual presence.
During times of his absence and unbeknownst to him, she would have brief sexual dalliances with other men rarely lasting more than a week or two. She did have one longer relationship, but it was with a married man who saw her only as a friend, and who ran from her the moment she tried to seduce him. She did, however, conduct one relationship with a married man who had allegedly been her late husband’s close friend, but with whom she had shared her sexual favors behind her husband’s back. Her inability to fully conquer him, which would have required him divorcing his wife, kept the challenge of that highly dysfunctional relationship alive. As it turns out, he was much like her late husband in that he was willing to accept or ignore the fact that their relationship was not at all exclusive. Had he divorced his wife, she could have fully possessed him, after which she would most likely have discarded him and moved on.
She presented her married lover to her distant lover as having been her husband’s best friend and therefore rather like a brother, and as someone in whom she had absolutely no romantic interest. Meanwhile, she made a similar representation, asking her married lover to believe that despite her spending weeks at a time sharing her bed with her distant lover, that the two of them had not consummated a sexual union. The two men became friends, although it would have been challenging to consider friendship if either man had been fully aware of the sexual relationships going on behind their backs. The purely platonic long-term relationship that the two (our girl and the man who lived far away) had had made him believe that it was quite possible for her to have another platonic male friend, especially one who had been there for her dying husband, and that there had been no romance between the two. One struggles to believe that her married lover could have failed to recognize the absurdity that she was regularly sharing her bed with a single man, but somehow claiming there was no intimacy, especially since he was aware that she had cheated on her husband and was also in a position to be aware of at least a few of her other conquests.
After a few years, she and the distant boyfriend decided to commit to a lifetime together, and he left his job and friends to live with her with the expectation that he would become her second husband. Sadly, it didn’t take long for the connubial bliss to turn sour. They went from being a blazing fire of romance to the sort of dull transactional relationship one commonly sees after 30 to 40 years of marriage. He still loved her with a fiery passion, worshipping the very ground she walked on, but she withdrew, showing less and less affection as time went on. Her focus, unbeknownst to her dedicated partner who was still waiting to set a date for their marriage, was now on the married man who wanted her but just not quite enough to divorce his wife. She had conquered her longtime friend, and he was no longer a challenge nor an objective that mattered to her. The married man, however, now there was a challenge.
To conclude the story, the married man’s wife passed away, and the two of them immediately wed, without what polite society might consider a decent or respectful interval. By some reports, they married when the dying wife was still alive and in hospice care. Our girl was in such a hurry to possess him that she married him without breaking up with her fiancé and continued to live with and sleep with him for a period of weeks or months after her marriage (the actual date of the marriage was obscured), forcing her new husband to stay away, a behavior so bizarre that those of you not suffering from mental illness can’t imagine it.
After numerous weeks, she kicked out her former fiancé, who was caught completely by surprise, but continued to share email and text messages that had begun on the day she threw him out, where she asked for time to “get her head together,” suggesting that she might reunite with him, and not sharing the fact that she had now been married for numerous weeks. These text messages continued for several weeks, until two men he knew approached to console him and tell him that they had been intimate with her during the time he had been courting her from afar, thinking their relationship was exclusive, and that they were aware that she had had numerous other sexual partners during that time, which was why they had each disconnected from her. Each of them said that she had presented herself as a grieving widow who had only had sex with one man in the decades before meeting them. While she never informed her former fiancé that she had married the other man, he did discover the fact six weeks after the breakup and several months after the marriage had taken place. Now, if your head is reeling as much as mine, let’s examine the physical properties that were causal or perhaps caused by this strange episode of the Twilight Zone. To be generous, it is clear that one or all three of the actors in this drama were mentally and emotionally challenged, but our interest today is in examining how these emotional issues (psycho) translated into their bodies (somatic). While most folks think of psychosomatic illnesses as being illnesses of the mind, they are in fact illnesses of the body, whose origins were in the mind.
Some of you may recall the story of Mante Te’o, the Notre Dame football player who was catfished by a man posing as a woman on the internet. The unfortunate lad gave “her” money and was expecting to marry “her.” While it may have seemed absurd that he was so taken with a woman he had not physically met, most of us long for that sort of connection, and so catfishing is a real danger, especially for younger men. What happened to the man I’m calling the distant lover, is simply a more selective version of catfishing. The woman simply used him as a placeholder, but to him it was going to be a blissful marriage, something she had offered him, even though she never intended to go through with it.
Physically, the woman suffered from both liver dysfunction of her own and gall bladder, heart and menstrual issues, in addition to being incapable of a deep and meaningful relationship. While the liver links to emotions in a negative sense, the heart is associated with more positive emotions like joy and love, and as with the liver, disturbances in these positive emotional states can manifest as physical symptoms such as insomnia, anxiety and irritability, as well as leading to manifestations. While it might be easy to place blame, one might ask if she was so deluded or in such denial that she actually believed some or all of her various “cover stories.”
She suffered with hypertension (high blood pressure) and periods of tachycardia (dangerously elevated pulse rate) and suffered from vertigo (also connected to the liver in TCM) and sleep disorders, which are common in those with emotional issues. She was regularly awake and up by 3:00 a.m. As to the vertigo, those who have difficulty finding balance in relationships might be expected to have difficulty physically balancing. While appearing outwardly healthy, she takes numerous medications including hormones and several drugs for her heart and liver. She also suffers from dry eyes and poor vision, which Ms. Hay and TCM would both find unsurprising in someone who resides in an alternate reality, not able to see truth anywhere and not being even able to recognize her own lies. She is obviously incapable of commitment or fulfilling relationships, making up in quantity what she lacks in quality.
The married lover, her eventual second husband was, like his newest bride, incapable of a loving relationship, being primarily interested in sexual conquest; he didn’t love her, an emotion not in his skillset, but wanted to own her. He was known to have had multiple sexual partners during his marriage and during the time that he was periodically copulating with the woman who would become his second wife. Somehow it didn’t seem to bother him that he would meet her for a brief sexual encounter, after which she would return to the house and the bed that she was sharing, first with her husband and later with the man who had come several hundred miles expecting to marry her. He suffers from knee issues, which Ms. Hay suggests demonstrates an inability to see truth and move forward in life, as well as a brain or mental condition in which he sometimes goes into a severe and debilitating fugue state for hours or even days at a time, which could be symbolic of his inability to properly evaluate the actions of his new partner or even himself. Since I didn’t interview him, I can’t comment on his heart or his liver, except to say that it would not be surprising to find commonality with her first husband’s profile.
The lover who relocated to be with her may appear to have been the most emotionally healthy of the three, but we need to note that he was blind to a reality that certainly had to have left clues. In fact, he was legally blind at birth, having debilitatingly severe myopia, so severe in fact that he was considered retarded prior to the myopia being diagnosed at age eight. He also suffers from damage to his heart and lungs, from a near-fatal incident in his college years. It may be tempting to see those preexisting conditions as unrelated, but both TCM and Ms. Hay profess that there does not need to be a close temporal nor even a logical timeline. According to TCM and Heal Your Life, his “problems” both his myopia and his cardiopulmonary injury manifested for metaphysical reasons, requiring no logical “chain of custody.” Such was also the case with our heroin above, whose sexual trauma in early childhood resulted in dysfunction that didn’t manifest immediately and then lasted for decades, and perhaps it will haunt her until the end of her life, a life that might never know a true connected relationship.
The moral of this story? It is proactive to watch what you eat, to exercise, to take supplements and even to try to stay abreast of the latest research. But something we can all do, and at no cost whatsoever, is to follow some of the wisdom of The Twelve Steps, starting with accepting that there are more things in the functioning of our psyches than were dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy, and moving right on to a fearless inventory and believing in a power greater than ourselves. Our psychological makeup, formed primarily during the early years of our lives and consisting of events we don’t remember, can have dramatic effects, not just on our social relationships, but also on our health.
It is also helpful, for ourselves, to seek first to understand that those who harm us may not be meaning to do so, doing the hurtful things for themselves rather than to us, and then looking to see what will benefit us, which will exclude either blaming of fixing the other party. So, do we all need to find ourselves a good psychotherapist? No, simply being aware of our own emotions, fearlessly aware, we can learn to heal ourselves. When you find yourself reacting, to a person or a scenario, in a manner disproportionate to the events or words you just experienced, that’s the time to ask yourself, “what is it that upsets me here” and “what would I like to come from this situation?” Recognize that there are clues all around us, if only we would pay attention. I say this, but I’m as guilty as the next person in defending my errors and overreactions (to myself) and failing to recognize the many red flags being shown to me.
I’m pretty sure that we all have our “buttons,” events, words and people who cause us to act irrationally, even while we probably feel 100% justified. And none of us is even remotely objective regarding our own behavior, so we need to set up a method, or perhaps an agreement with our partner and our closest friends, that when they suggest that our reactions may have been out of proportion, that we take a moment to evaluate step #5 of the 12: Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
I think I’ve kept you too long already, so I won’t belabor these points. I just suggest that you start and end each day by a fearless inventory of your thoughts, emotions, and reactions, and take a moment to look behind the curtain. And remember that love, true agapé love, the love we hold for family, our closest friends, and our pets, is the only true emotion. All others are defense mechanisms that help us to be “right” but unhappy. When your body doesn’t feel right, ask yourself if it could be your higher consciousness trying to send you a message.