I paused, this sounded familiar. The same thing had happened before, about eight or nine months ago. R’s wife went somewhere and his back went out. “Do you have separation anxiety or abandonment issues?” I mentioned, half-jokingly. R looked back at me seriously and said, “I don’t know.” His back didn’t seem any different than normal. The muscle tissue was pliable and had good mobility, but his pain was present and we didn’t make any headway on the issue in that session. The next evening, I got a text from him saying, “my therapist wants to talk to you.” The day after that, I got a phone call from a new number. “Hi, is this Paul Chmigelski? This is Dr. L, we have a patient in common—Mr. R—he gave consent for me to talk to you about his case.” I was puzzled and perplexed. “You’ve known R for a long time. I’d appreciate your insight and whatever information you can provide. He’s been seeing me regularly for psychotherapy and we were making good progress for a while, but in the last two months, we hit the wall. That is, until last night, when you suggested to R that he might have abandonment issues. As we explored the subject, it became apparent that abandonment plays a serious role in R’s life.” Needless to say, R’s pain went away shortly after his psychotherapy session as he got clarity regarding the origin of the fears that’ve been controlling his life since his very early years. Our deep-seated emotional issues and old pains, our heartbreaks can appear in our physical body as palpable pain and discomfort. I’ve got stories of my clients’ backs going out after a major financial crisis or a stressful period of family dramas without any apparent physical reasons. Mind-body connection is a very real, very powerful force that can make us almost superhuman when it is healthy and optimized. But
it can also cripple us when the mind is dominated by negative thoughts or emotions. Here are more examples: L was experiencing severe pains in her neck, back, and hips that vanished like a bad dream once she was able to end a toxic relationship with her narcissistic and abusive boyfriend. T came to me with a locked hip,which had no apparent medical cause. He seemed to be at a crossroads and was procrastinating on a major, life- changing decision that he made inwardly but could not force himself to move ahead with. He literally made himself unable to move physically forward. Needless to say, his hip “miraculously” unlocked once he mustered enough courage to change his life. N, a gentle and quiet teenage girl, had the worst case of TMJ I have ever seen. Her parents were going through a messy divorce, and she was totally internalizing her fear, pain, and frustration. She blamed herself for the fact that her mom and dad no longer loved each other. N would go for days without speaking. Instead she was clenching her jaw and biting her tongue literally and figuratively while listening to her parents fight in the next room. Her jaw unlocked and the pains went away once she started getting treatments of EMDR ( Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing technique) with her new therapist. We are extremely complex beings. Some professionals describe human beings as a system of systems. Layers upon layers of billions of cells make up our bodies and connect in myriads of ways to compose each and every one of us. Connections are in the very basic structure of our bodies, minds ,and emotions. We yearn to connect. We learn, grow, love, and evolve through those connections.
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