The Root Cause of Chronic Illness
The root cause of Autoimmune Disease, Fibromyalgia, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Long Covid, Anxiety, Depression and other “energy” conditions is not the mystery it’s made out to be.
Neither is it a dysregulated nervous system or nutritional (such as food intolerances and/or vitamin deficiencies).
Certainly, a nervous system that is out of whack is a key feature and the nutritional side of things is very common in sufferers, but these are not the root of it all.
The root is found when you dig deeper - when you explore what is causing these things, which then can lead to the manifestation of the more noticeable, physical symptoms.
The root cause is prolonged lack of emotional safety and subsequent accumulation of suppressed emotions.
How and why the hell does this happen?
Well, we have emotions for a reason – they are our inner guidance system – there to help us navigate through life in the easiest and best way for us.
This is the role of our emotional, or body, brain: to guide us towards what feels good and away from what doesn’t.
Emotions are sent as messages from our emotional brain to our thinking brain so we can become aware of how we are feeling and why and then take appropriate action.
So, when our emotional and thinking brains work together in this way, all is well. But this doesn’t always happen; most of us aren’t taught about emotions - the range of them or how to explore them - let alone how to deal with them effectively.
Instead, in this society, we are conditioned to ignore them; to suppress them; to stuff them down so we can carry on with what we “should” be doing and thinking.
The reason doing this doesn’t feel good is that it is out of alignment with the messages our emotional brain is trying to send us – remember it’s job is to keep us on the right path for us; to keep us feeling emotionally safe.
So when we ignore these messages (whether we mean to or not), our emotional brain will keep trying to get our attention. It does this by sending danger signals to the hypothalamus in our brain, switching on the body’s stress response.
This is a biochemical response designed to be short-lived, to help us to take flight or to fight in response to some kind of physical threat or danger.
When the threat passes, it switches back off and the release of chemicals stops.
But when it gets triggered in response to an emotional threat which remains for a prolonged period, the hypothalamus can go into overdrive.
Since the hypothalamus is responsible for keeping homeostasis (everything regulated) within the body and is linked to every system within it, it’s easy to see the potential wide-ranging physical effects of it being in overdrive and continuing to flood the body with more stress response chemicals than it is able to use up.
So this suppression of emotions happens when the thinking brain rejects the message and sends it straight back to the emotional brain.
The other way the thinking brain can “deal” with emotion, though, is to latch onto it, overthink it and make it bigger or distort it so it becomes something other than the primary emotion it began as; it becomes a secondary emotion which distracts us from the primary emotion which, therefore, still goes undealt with/ignored/suppressed, causing the same alarms to be raised.
In short, suppressing our emotions over time, instead of being aware of them and acting appropriately on them, can cause us to get jammed in fight or flight mode and often leads to a lowered immune system and a host of physical symptoms including chronic pain, brain fog and fatigue, as well as keeping us in a constant state of anxiety and even hypervigilance.
However, knowing how all this is caused means we know there is a way to reverse it; learning how to stay emotionally safe will allow the hypothalamus to return to normal function, switching off the biochemical stress response and therefore, the production of symptoms.
What kind of things cause us to feel emotionally unsafe?
Well, as much as emotional issues can be incredibly complex and wide-ranging in terms of degree and depth, it can be helpful to reduce the kinds of emotional issues we all - as humans - face, to a few simple categories.
This isn’t done to dismiss the severity or range of issues that can be experienced, but to provide a useful method of identifying emotions, issues and any subsequent repeating behavioural patterns.
Our issues are usually around unfair treatment and lack of boundaries, not meeting enough of our own needs and the subsequent suppression of our emotions.
This is why work to clear emotions and trauma, calm/reset a nervous system, change diet to remove food groups and adding supplements etc. can only go so far in most cases - none of this deals with the emotional root cause and is, therefore, firefighting with someone or something external in control of the water hose.
To gain proper control - and for that control to be in the hands of the person concerned - effective action around dealing with these emotional issues has to be taken because, until we learn to deal differently with them, they will keep playing out in our current lives.
- If we are people pleasers who ignore our own needs in favour of those of others, we will continue to be that way and to neglect ourselves until we make real changes.
- If we allow people to treat us unfairly and make us feel bad about ourselves, we will continue in that pattern until we start to respect ourselves by installing healthy boundaries.
- If we have always kept how we feel to ourselves, our emotions will keep building up within us, causing unwanted emotional and physical feelings until we start to work with them in a way which allows them to move through as they are meant to; by expressing ourselves and dealing with issues as they arise.
No one else can do this for us, so if you don’t want to make changes, then you could be in for a lifelong game of whack-a-mole with someone else holding the bat. (Yes, I like analogies and will either use one to death or use several to make one point!).
But if you do want to be the one in control; if you do want to tackle symptoms at the root cause so you can stop and prevent them; if you want to be able to view symptoms as helpful messengers from your body, rather than something to be feared and masked at all costs…
Know that you can; that there is a way to reverse it.
And that the shorter-term discomfort of making the changes is worth being altogether more comfortable - emotionally and physically - for the rest of your life.
However, we aren’t generally taught how to do any of this, which is why so many people are ill and in emotional crisis in the first place.
So if you would love some expert guidance and support, have a look and see if I offer an option that you feel would work well for you: