Psychosomatics: when the body speaks for us
“Everything is fine with you” — the phrase after which many people come to me. The examinations are done, the tests are clean, and yet the head aches every day, there is a lump in the throat, the stomach reacts to any piece of news.
The body cannot stay silent
When an emotion cannot be expressed, it cannot be cancelled either. It does not disappear; it settles in the body — in a muscular clamp, in the breathing, in vascular tone. A year later it is no longer an emotion but a symptom with a life of its own.
Psychosomatics is not “imaginary”. It is real pain with a real, but not medical, cause.
Where the work begins
First of all, ruling out organic disease. I am a doctor, and I will never say “it is just nerves” until I am certain the examinations have been done. Then we look for the moment the symptom first appeared and what was happening in life alongside it.
Almost always there is an event about which the person says: “Well, that was nothing, I had not even thought about it.” That “nothing” is usually where it all starts.