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Some unexplained physical symptoms may be caused by unresolved emotional trauma

164 points by adriand 8y ago

bloak 8y ago
It sounds like Sigmund Freud all over again. There have been so many new talk therapies over the last 120 years it must be really hard to come up with something that really is new.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  Yes; the "dynamic" in the method's name refers to a family of theories that center on interactions between conscious and unconscious thought. It's a tradition heavily influenced by Freud.
Someone1234 8y ago
Just want to say that for tens of years Multiple Sclerosis was considered a mental health disorder, and Crohn's Disease continues to be commonly misdiagnosed. And while this team's results speak for themselves in certain cases, I'd be interested to hear about the patients who it isn't effective for and where they're left after. The medical field has to deal with a lot of Somatoform Disorders (or similar mental issues), but the problem is that once you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. So if it is an uncommon diagnosis and symptoms aren't easy to demonstrate, people often get thrown into that category (or worse a note on medical records stops new doctors considering additional options). I'm actually extremely enthused about this therapy. My questions more relate around: If it is tried and fails, are the doctors going to consider OTHER medical explanations or just give up, pushing it into the "mental health" catch-all?
- phkahler 8y ago
  >> And while this team's results speak for themselves in certain cases, I'd be interested to hear about the patients who it isn't effective for and where they're left after. The others are left out in the cold.
  - faoijef984jfj 8y ago
    So, I work in psychiatry and have worked on many types of units for various reasons over my career. My impression is the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that the vast majority of patients left in the cold are those who do have mental health problems. For a lot of these patients, it's not just that the physical symptoms are unexplained, it's that they don't make physical sense. For example, the same arm movement in one context causes pain; in another it's not painful at all. The tremors don't make sense, the seizures don't make sense, the EEG readings don't make sense, whatever. All the other stuff that is plausible is a long tail that overlaps with misunderstood non-psychiatric problems. And in many cases, it's painfully obvious. Like, someone develops a mysterious unexplainable physical symptom right after they are divorced, or their child dies. Nothing can treat it except antidepressants. But they're also very defensive about any other possibility other than an unrecognized non-psychiatric problem. Combine this with the general zeitgeist in medical care where everything non-neurological or physical in focus is ridiculed, and it's a horrible problem. It's all made worse by a tendency to introduce mind-body dichotomies where they don't exist, to criticize anything that isn't reductionist. That is, the logic is everything is based in the brain, so it's all physical, therefore any discussion of anything at other than that level is ridiculed, even when the people working at the higher level (mental) themselves aren't suggesting any kind of Cartesian duality. We could go on... like all the modern psychotherapies (CBT) don't actually work any better than anything else when you look at the meta-analytic evidence, that a lot of modern cognitive science is based on two-system theories (Kahneman anyone?) which are essentially psychodynamic in all but name, that these discussions never admit for the possibility that maybe some individuals do fit a classical psychodynamic profile... I really don't know anything in particular about this guy other than what the article stated, but I'm sort of frustrated by the tendency to think that because medicine went way overboard with psychoanalysis decades ago, that it means there wasn't something essentially accurate about it in some cases, and that every claim by every patient about their symptoms should be taken at face value because it feeds some contemporary medical paradigm. In any event, I always feel weird defending this stuff at all because I wouldn't say I'm psychoanalytic or anything... it just increasingly seems to me that there's kind of a identity politics that plays into healthcare, where it's not really about actual evidence or plausibility or anything. False positives and negatives get pushed around in both directions depending on your threshold. If every medically unexplained symptom is nonpsychiatric, you lose the psychiatric problems; if it's all psychiatric, you lose the nonpsychiatric cases. Lots of evidence over many studies shows that the rate of false positive diagnoses of psychiatric somatoform disorder (that is, something is labeled as psychiatric when it's not) are not any different than for any other diagnostic category. Yet we continue to discuss them as if it's huge.
- cpncrunch 8y ago
  The article says that "every possibility has been explored" before undergoing this treatment, and that "his team has sent patients back to the referring specialist, recommending more tests", so it clearly isn't some kind of "mental health catch all". Also bear in mind that stress is a known trigger for MS, and psychological therapy has shown to be effective at reducing MS fatigue (see for example, Rona Moss Morris' recent trial, and others), so we're perhaps close to coming full circle with MS, recognising that psychological factors are important in triggering it, and also in treatment. (Although I suspect when I say "close", we're talking about another 50 years before neurologists -- especially in the USA -- get the memo).
biztos 8y ago
I have to say, that's a pretty classic click-bait headline. "Mysterious illness blabla. Look what happened when unexpected blabla!" How about: "Canadian psychiatrist claims unexplained physical symptoms can be caused by unresolved emotional trauma" I'm sure some people will still find it worth reading.
- kalkaran 8y ago
  I would have gone with "Canadian Psychiatrist is rebranding 40 year old treatment". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno
  - 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
    As far as I can tell, Sarno himself is mostly rebranding much older ideas from psychosomatic medicine and psychodynamic psychotherapy, with his main contribution being that he presents them in a way that people are less likely to reject than the "proper" forms.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Yeah this is Dianetics i.e. Scientology! I'm not supporting them at all, they are a cult, but the the original basis for Scientology was Dianetics and it's related to this.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  I think it's more that Dianetics and this class of methods both derive from classical psychoanalysis. The broad concepts are similar, but the specific methods seem to be very different.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    That's a good point. But not only is the rough observation of 'previous episodes of trauma causing seemingly irrelevant malaise and illness' interesting ... the methods is similar in some case as well. For example, for soldiers with PTSD, one of the more beneficial therapies seems to be having a health professional help the soldier 'revisit' the experience. They do this over and over until there's less PTSD associated with the event. This is remarkably similar to the process of 'auditing' in Scientology - at least in terms of discovering and revisiting points of trauma. They call it 'processing'. As far as I am concerned they are the same thing, point blank. But I also agree that Dianetics probably did not entirely originate this, rather making the point that this has been popularized already for some time.
- bryanSmith0 8y ago
  I also was reminded of Scientology and what they call "Engrams". It's popular to criticize Scientology and thus its ideas are often dismissed without evaluation. Perhaps Scientology and other controversial ideologies contain valuable elements or methods which are absent from more reputable institutions. They would not gain such a devoted following if they offered 0 value.
- e40 8y ago
  And the website.. global and mail... seriously, this is not HN worthy.
costcopizza 8y ago
Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading ‘The Body Keeps the Score’. The body is the mind and vice versa.
DubiousPusher 8y ago
> Yet if a bad day can cause a headache, why can’t many bad days cause more serious physical problems, even decades later? Wow. That's quite a leap.
- defined 8y ago
  Not really such a leap. It’s pretty well-known[1] that unmanaged long-term stress leads to physical ailments (some of which can be deadly serious), including - Anxiety - Depression - Digestive problems - Headaches - Heart disease - Sleep problems - Weight gain - Memory and concentration impairment [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress/art-20046037 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-manageme...
  - DubiousPusher 8y ago
    I'm not impuning the conclusion but the awful logic used to reach it. This is tentamount to saying, "a good meal of delicious food can lift one's spirits, therefore eating a rich diet everyday will make one happy!"
    - Apocryphon 8y ago
      What’s wrong with that, assuming the rich food is nutritious and in reasonable portions and accompanied by exercise and adequate sleep.
    - naasking 8y ago
      > This is tentamount to saying, "a good meal of delicious food can lift one's spirits, therefore eating a rich diet everyday will make one happy!" That doesn't strike me as a faithful analogy. The original proposition is: emotions caused ailment at time t1, so why can't emotions cause ailments at time t2? That's a perfectly valid hypothesis reached from simple deduction. You assert a false equivalence of the two key propositions (lift one's spirits/make one happy) which invalidates it as an analogy.
purplezooey 8y ago
I have unresolved emotional trauma from November 2016.
crazygringo 8y ago
I'm struggling to see what's new here -- this has been known for decades. Just look into any decent book on myofascial release massage, or rolfing, or somatic meditation -- our long-term emotional states, repression, etc. directly affect our muscles, posture, digestion, back pain, etc., and releasing those emotional states can be achieved via a combination of psychotherapy to address the emotional sources, and massage/rolfing to simultaneously address their physical manifestations. Performers like actors and singers tend to be especially aware of this, as becoming physically free enough to perform at a high level often requires both extensive therapy and bodywork, depending on your background. I've heard Broadway singers talk about how reaching that level of tone production is 90% psychological and only 10% technique. True, most doctors as well as the general public seem mostly unaware of this, but it's not exactly a secret or new either.
- thaw13579 8y ago
  I'd be interested to read more about this -- can you recommend any references, particularly regarding benefits for performance?
  - stevenicr 8y ago
    its been some years, so I'm a bit foggy - but some times ago some of the intro classes for massage school here went into some details about various, techniques that are not used as often or known as well even by those 'in the industry' - I think the Alexander Method, and Feldenkrais method were described as being beneficially used to help actors (including voice actors) and performers better their craft. noted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique#Uses see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method I am sure several types of exercises can benefit voice and acting - certainly tai chi, yoga, chi kung, breathing exercise in general.. this new 'laughing yoga' I've heard about - surely would make things better and not usually worse - probably measurably.
  - crazygringo 8y ago
    I mean there's so much, but to start: it was Alexander Technique (see Gelb's "Body Learning" for an overview) that started it all, with regards to voice in acting. For the link between psychology and vocal production, see Jennifer Hamady's "The Art of Singing". The classic text on acting voice production and the psychology behind it is Kristin Linklater's "Freeing the Natural Voice", which also draws from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's work such as "Descartes' Error" which provides a scientific basis for how our mind is reflected in our body. In terms of bodywork, start with Mary Bond's "The New Rules of Posture" and Davies' "The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook".
neom 8y ago
First time I tried acupuncture I lay and balled my eyes out uncontrollably and it wasn't related to physical pain but emotional release. Probably one of the most bizarre things that have happened in my life.
- medion 8y ago
  Same - as a born skeptic I was never sure about acupuncture. I tried it once after my mom urged me, and I had never felt such a powerful sense of emotion and calm afterward. Now that I'm thinking about it again, I have no idea why I don't get it done regularly...
AltruisticGap 8y ago
I think for this "intensive" approach to therapy the quality of presence and non-judgemental approach of the therapist is really key for it to be effective. This is easier said than done. It's quite common to have therapists who have themselves unresolved issues, thus limiting their ability to be truly present with the patient. People open up only when they feel safe, so the main "danger" underlined by the critics in the article is to cause the patient to close up even more. I did talk therapy and it was useful, but sometimes I wished it was more "intensive". Unless you are super motivated to open up and bring things to the table, the therapist is perfectly happy to hear you talk , for years if need be. I think part of the reason for this is that from the therapist and patient's perspective, a talk session will almost always have some effect. Simply to be able to vent relieves a bit of stress (and associated symptoms)... but if the patient keeps his shield up, and the therapist doesn't push buttons... or ask salient questions... then this can just go on and on. I don't see a problem with the "intensive" apporach described in the article, so long as they are addressing patients with physical symptoms who have been in and out of the medical support for years. Those are typically people who are NOT already open to the idea that they may have unresolved trauma, and even downright averse to it. So they are the ones who would benefit the most I think, for a bit of a button pushing.
pizza 8y ago
Sometimes people on HN recommend the book "The Body Keeps Score" by Bessel van der Kolk. Anyone read it? Thoughts?
- mindgam3 8y ago
  Cannot recommend it highly enough for anyone living with PTSD or childhood trauma.
- sbenitoj 8y ago
  I’ve written about this on here numerous times, it’s changed my life. Here’s one of the threads where I mentioned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18573069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18573069
pella 8y ago
http://www.istdp.com/research http://www.istdp.com/research
mindgam3 8y ago
Anyone who has ever experienced deep emotional release during physical activity like yoga or massage knows that there is a connection between emotions and the body. It is weird, at least to the typical western-conditioned mind, but it is definitely there.
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rvn1045 8y ago
In vipassana meditation the meditator focuses on sensations on the body from head to toe, systematically moving down top to bottom and noticing the sensations in each part - head, eyes, ears, nose, shoulders etc. when thoughts arise you notice the sensations they create and over time you develop a map of thoughts to sensations. as you meditate some past traumatic experiences may arise and you may start to mentally react to it, but you notice that thinking about that particular insult from the past may just be causing this discofmrting sensation in some part of the body and you are reacting to the discmfort/pain caused by that. by training your mind to maintain equanimity, you realize that all these thoughts are doing is creating a sensation and causing you to react, and over time you can become a little more detached to it. what is weird though about these sensations though is that there might be these knots tied up in your chest, and by focusing on the pain of these knots you start to release a lot of old memories that caused you some kind of pain in the past. the pain of those memories are stored as sensations in the body. if your in a bad situation in your life mentally and psychologically it will absolutely manifest itself in terms of physical symptoms. additionally I have found that the combination of meditation and any kind of drugs - marijuana or psychedelics can cause of a lot of that trauma to be released.
tomhoward 8y ago
I’ve been testing this hypothesis - as best as one possibly can without conventional medical support - for the past few years. I’ve found that with persistence, emotion-based therapies are effective at bringing about healing of chronic physiological illnesses. Prior to that I’d spent several frustrating years seeking diagnosis for conditions that were debilitating but not apparently identifiable or treatable. To me they manifested as chronic muscle and joint pain, digestive issues, fatigue/lethargy, skin conditions, signs of inflammation. Medical tests found only mild deficiencies of Vitamin D and iron, with recommendations to treat with diet or supplements but otherwise nothing wrong. Yet the pain and fatigue was debilitating and made it impossible to live a normal life. In desperation I turned to unconventional therapies and came across a set of techniques that seek to identify and resolve traumas/complexes/phobias stuck in the subconscious mind. I’ve been undertaking these practices consistently for about 6-7 years now, and slowly but surely my symptoms are subsiding and all aspects of my life are improving. Why does has it taken so long? It turns out there was a huge amount of emotional baggage to work through. Not obvious stuff like childhood abuse; just a lot of unpleasant experiences that began from being an anxious child, and snowballed as life progressed. I’ve now worked through several thousand instances of trauma from throughout my life. Much of it is minor or seemingly trivial, and some of it is profound, but it all seems to play a role, and the process of identifying/understanding/resolving it is directly correlated with the alleviation of my symptoms. I’m now quite certain that this concept would have a huge impact on the medical world if it were to be embraced by the mainstream, but there’s huge resistance to it so it seems set to remain confined to the fringes for a long time to come. Recently there's been coverage (on HN [1] and elsewhere [2]) of Dr. Gabor Maté, a veteran physician who has studied the role of trauma in addiction and chronic illness. He advocates the position that there is near enough to a perfect correlation between chronic illness or addiction and trauma. From my own experience and from what I've observed in other people I know, this rings true. I'm not sure what it will take for this notion to be embraced more widely and researched more deeply, but it seems pretty important. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497985 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGGNPAK6uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGGNPAK6uw
- whatshisface 8y ago
  How do you know that you did not have a natural recovery that just happened to coincide with the new intervention?
d--b 8y ago
Seriously? Western medicine waited 2018 to figure out that psychoanalysis is real?!
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isomorph 8y ago
I've found that my migraines have responded more to counselling than medication although there are physical triggers too. My rosacea is also reduced in severity by counselling, although not as dramatically.
everdev 8y ago
Many therapists and spiritual guides will say that trauma is physically stored in the body. Things like movement, dance, yoga, sounds, etc. help to loosen the body and therefore loosen the grip of these traumatic experiences. While I've seen and felt the benefits of how healing the body can heal the mind is that phrase "storing trauma in the body" literally true or more of an phrase that just helps people start talking better care of their body?
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hollerith 8y ago
The concept of the so-called cell danger response strikes me (not a health-care practitioner or researcher) as a promising explanation for how psychological trauma causes chronic physical illness: in particular, the trauma causes persistent changes in the brain, which keeps on activating the cell danger response.
idclip 8y ago
I’m a religious atheist, or a mystical one, by choice. (Please don’t pick on my choice of words) That road is full of drama and pain, and I’m very glad to have discovered Carl Jung, Alan Watts and Robert Bly. Health wise, it may be too late, but I’m still very very thankful, and wish I discovered all this earlier. If anyone here is suffering, send me a message. I will do my best so you suffer less in this world.
OpenBSD-empire 8y ago
I'm surprised no one in this thread brought up the Adverse Childhood Experiences study. An ACE of 6/10, as compared to a 0/10, may actually have worse deleterious effects than a lifetime of smoking. A six score on average dies twenty years younger than a zero (when correcting for lifestyles and risk-behaviors between the two groups)!

164 points by adriand 8y ago

It sounds like Sigmund Freud all over again. There have been so many new talk therapies over the last 120 years it must be really hard to come up with something that really is new.

0xcde4c3db 8y ago
Yes; the "dynamic" in the method's name refers to a family of theories that center on interactions between conscious and unconscious thought. It's a tradition heavily influenced by Freud.

Someone1234 8y ago

Just want to say that for tens of years Multiple Sclerosis was considered a mental health disorder, and Crohn's Disease continues to be commonly misdiagnosed. And while this team's results speak for themselves in certain cases, I'd be interested to hear about the patients who it isn't effective for and where they're left after. The medical field has to deal with a lot of Somatoform Disorders (or similar mental issues), but the problem is that once you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. So if it is an uncommon diagnosis and symptoms aren't easy to demonstrate, people often get thrown into that category (or worse a note on medical records stops new doctors considering additional options). I'm actually extremely enthused about this therapy. My questions more relate around: If it is tried and fails, are the doctors going to consider OTHER medical explanations or just give up, pushing it into the "mental health" catch-all?

phkahler 8y ago
>> And while this team's results speak for themselves in certain cases, I'd be interested to hear about the patients who it isn't effective for and where they're left after. The others are left out in the cold.
- faoijef984jfj 8y ago
  So, I work in psychiatry and have worked on many types of units for various reasons over my career. My impression is the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that the vast majority of patients left in the cold are those who do have mental health problems. For a lot of these patients, it's not just that the physical symptoms are unexplained, it's that they don't make physical sense. For example, the same arm movement in one context causes pain; in another it's not painful at all. The tremors don't make sense, the seizures don't make sense, the EEG readings don't make sense, whatever. All the other stuff that is plausible is a long tail that overlaps with misunderstood non-psychiatric problems. And in many cases, it's painfully obvious. Like, someone develops a mysterious unexplainable physical symptom right after they are divorced, or their child dies. Nothing can treat it except antidepressants. But they're also very defensive about any other possibility other than an unrecognized non-psychiatric problem. Combine this with the general zeitgeist in medical care where everything non-neurological or physical in focus is ridiculed, and it's a horrible problem. It's all made worse by a tendency to introduce mind-body dichotomies where they don't exist, to criticize anything that isn't reductionist. That is, the logic is everything is based in the brain, so it's all physical, therefore any discussion of anything at other than that level is ridiculed, even when the people working at the higher level (mental) themselves aren't suggesting any kind of Cartesian duality. We could go on... like all the modern psychotherapies (CBT) don't actually work any better than anything else when you look at the meta-analytic evidence, that a lot of modern cognitive science is based on two-system theories (Kahneman anyone?) which are essentially psychodynamic in all but name, that these discussions never admit for the possibility that maybe some individuals do fit a classical psychodynamic profile... I really don't know anything in particular about this guy other than what the article stated, but I'm sort of frustrated by the tendency to think that because medicine went way overboard with psychoanalysis decades ago, that it means there wasn't something essentially accurate about it in some cases, and that every claim by every patient about their symptoms should be taken at face value because it feeds some contemporary medical paradigm. In any event, I always feel weird defending this stuff at all because I wouldn't say I'm psychoanalytic or anything... it just increasingly seems to me that there's kind of a identity politics that plays into healthcare, where it's not really about actual evidence or plausibility or anything. False positives and negatives get pushed around in both directions depending on your threshold. If every medically unexplained symptom is nonpsychiatric, you lose the psychiatric problems; if it's all psychiatric, you lose the nonpsychiatric cases. Lots of evidence over many studies shows that the rate of false positive diagnoses of psychiatric somatoform disorder (that is, something is labeled as psychiatric when it's not) are not any different than for any other diagnostic category. Yet we continue to discuss them as if it's huge.
cpncrunch 8y ago
The article says that "every possibility has been explored" before undergoing this treatment, and that "his team has sent patients back to the referring specialist, recommending more tests", so it clearly isn't some kind of "mental health catch all". Also bear in mind that stress is a known trigger for MS, and psychological therapy has shown to be effective at reducing MS fatigue (see for example, Rona Moss Morris' recent trial, and others), so we're perhaps close to coming full circle with MS, recognising that psychological factors are important in triggering it, and also in treatment. (Although I suspect when I say "close", we're talking about another 50 years before neurologists -- especially in the USA -- get the memo).

biztos 8y ago

I have to say, that's a pretty classic click-bait headline. "Mysterious illness blabla. Look what happened when unexpected blabla!" How about: "Canadian psychiatrist claims unexplained physical symptoms can be caused by unresolved emotional trauma" I'm sure some people will still find it worth reading.

kalkaran 8y ago
I would have gone with "Canadian Psychiatrist is rebranding 40 year old treatment". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Sarno
- 0xcde4c3db 8y ago
  As far as I can tell, Sarno himself is mostly rebranding much older ideas from psychosomatic medicine and psychodynamic psychotherapy, with his main contribution being that he presents them in a way that people are less likely to reject than the "proper" forms.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

Yeah this is Dianetics i.e. Scientology! I'm not supporting them at all, they are a cult, but the the original basis for Scientology was Dianetics and it's related to this.

0xcde4c3db 8y ago
I think it's more that Dianetics and this class of methods both derive from classical psychoanalysis. The broad concepts are similar, but the specific methods seem to be very different.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  That's a good point. But not only is the rough observation of 'previous episodes of trauma causing seemingly irrelevant malaise and illness' interesting ... the methods is similar in some case as well. For example, for soldiers with PTSD, one of the more beneficial therapies seems to be having a health professional help the soldier 'revisit' the experience. They do this over and over until there's less PTSD associated with the event. This is remarkably similar to the process of 'auditing' in Scientology - at least in terms of discovering and revisiting points of trauma. They call it 'processing'. As far as I am concerned they are the same thing, point blank. But I also agree that Dianetics probably did not entirely originate this, rather making the point that this has been popularized already for some time.
bryanSmith0 8y ago
I also was reminded of Scientology and what they call "Engrams". It's popular to criticize Scientology and thus its ideas are often dismissed without evaluation. Perhaps Scientology and other controversial ideologies contain valuable elements or methods which are absent from more reputable institutions. They would not gain such a devoted following if they offered 0 value.
e40 8y ago
And the website.. global and mail... seriously, this is not HN worthy.

costcopizza 8y ago

Anyone interested in this might enjoy reading ‘The Body Keeps the Score’. The body is the mind and vice versa.

DubiousPusher 8y ago

> Yet if a bad day can cause a headache, why can’t many bad days cause more serious physical problems, even decades later? Wow. That's quite a leap.

defined 8y ago
Not really such a leap. It’s pretty well-known[1] that unmanaged long-term stress leads to physical ailments (some of which can be deadly serious), including - Anxiety - Depression - Digestive problems - Headaches - Heart disease - Sleep problems - Weight gain - Memory and concentration impairment [1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-management/in-depth/stress/art-20046037 https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-manageme...
- DubiousPusher 8y ago
  I'm not impuning the conclusion but the awful logic used to reach it. This is tentamount to saying, "a good meal of delicious food can lift one's spirits, therefore eating a rich diet everyday will make one happy!"
  - Apocryphon 8y ago
    What’s wrong with that, assuming the rich food is nutritious and in reasonable portions and accompanied by exercise and adequate sleep.
  - naasking 8y ago
    > This is tentamount to saying, "a good meal of delicious food can lift one's spirits, therefore eating a rich diet everyday will make one happy!" That doesn't strike me as a faithful analogy. The original proposition is: emotions caused ailment at time t1, so why can't emotions cause ailments at time t2? That's a perfectly valid hypothesis reached from simple deduction. You assert a false equivalence of the two key propositions (lift one's spirits/make one happy) which invalidates it as an analogy.

purplezooey 8y ago

I have unresolved emotional trauma from November 2016.

crazygringo 8y ago

I'm struggling to see what's new here -- this has been known for decades. Just look into any decent book on myofascial release massage, or rolfing, or somatic meditation -- our long-term emotional states, repression, etc. directly affect our muscles, posture, digestion, back pain, etc., and releasing those emotional states can be achieved via a combination of psychotherapy to address the emotional sources, and massage/rolfing to simultaneously address their physical manifestations. Performers like actors and singers tend to be especially aware of this, as becoming physically free enough to perform at a high level often requires both extensive therapy and bodywork, depending on your background. I've heard Broadway singers talk about how reaching that level of tone production is 90% psychological and only 10% technique. True, most doctors as well as the general public seem mostly unaware of this, but it's not exactly a secret or new either.

thaw13579 8y ago
I'd be interested to read more about this -- can you recommend any references, particularly regarding benefits for performance?
- stevenicr 8y ago
  its been some years, so I'm a bit foggy - but some times ago some of the intro classes for massage school here went into some details about various, techniques that are not used as often or known as well even by those 'in the industry' - I think the Alexander Method, and Feldenkrais method were described as being beneficially used to help actors (including voice actors) and performers better their craft. noted here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique#Uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Technique#Uses see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method I am sure several types of exercises can benefit voice and acting - certainly tai chi, yoga, chi kung, breathing exercise in general.. this new 'laughing yoga' I've heard about - surely would make things better and not usually worse - probably measurably.
- crazygringo 8y ago
  I mean there's so much, but to start: it was Alexander Technique (see Gelb's "Body Learning" for an overview) that started it all, with regards to voice in acting. For the link between psychology and vocal production, see Jennifer Hamady's "The Art of Singing". The classic text on acting voice production and the psychology behind it is Kristin Linklater's "Freeing the Natural Voice", which also draws from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's work such as "Descartes' Error" which provides a scientific basis for how our mind is reflected in our body. In terms of bodywork, start with Mary Bond's "The New Rules of Posture" and Davies' "The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook".

neom 8y ago

First time I tried acupuncture I lay and balled my eyes out uncontrollably and it wasn't related to physical pain but emotional release. Probably one of the most bizarre things that have happened in my life.

medion 8y ago
Same - as a born skeptic I was never sure about acupuncture. I tried it once after my mom urged me, and I had never felt such a powerful sense of emotion and calm afterward. Now that I'm thinking about it again, I have no idea why I don't get it done regularly...

AltruisticGap 8y ago

I think for this "intensive" approach to therapy the quality of presence and non-judgemental approach of the therapist is really key for it to be effective. This is easier said than done. It's quite common to have therapists who have themselves unresolved issues, thus limiting their ability to be truly present with the patient. People open up only when they feel safe, so the main "danger" underlined by the critics in the article is to cause the patient to close up even more. I did talk therapy and it was useful, but sometimes I wished it was more "intensive". Unless you are super motivated to open up and bring things to the table, the therapist is perfectly happy to hear you talk , for years if need be. I think part of the reason for this is that from the therapist and patient's perspective, a talk session will almost always have some effect. Simply to be able to vent relieves a bit of stress (and associated symptoms)... but if the patient keeps his shield up, and the therapist doesn't push buttons... or ask salient questions... then this can just go on and on. I don't see a problem with the "intensive" apporach described in the article, so long as they are addressing patients with physical symptoms who have been in and out of the medical support for years. Those are typically people who are NOT already open to the idea that they may have unresolved trauma, and even downright averse to it. So they are the ones who would benefit the most I think, for a bit of a button pushing.

pizza 8y ago

Sometimes people on HN recommend the book "The Body Keeps Score" by Bessel van der Kolk. Anyone read it? Thoughts?

mindgam3 8y ago
Cannot recommend it highly enough for anyone living with PTSD or childhood trauma.
sbenitoj 8y ago
I’ve written about this on here numerous times, it’s changed my life. Here’s one of the threads where I mentioned it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18573069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18573069

pella 8y ago

http://www.istdp.com/research http://www.istdp.com/research

mindgam3 8y ago

Anyone who has ever experienced deep emotional release during physical activity like yoga or massage knows that there is a connection between emotions and the body. It is weird, at least to the typical western-conditioned mind, but it is definitely there.

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rvn1045 8y ago

In vipassana meditation the meditator focuses on sensations on the body from head to toe, systematically moving down top to bottom and noticing the sensations in each part - head, eyes, ears, nose, shoulders etc. when thoughts arise you notice the sensations they create and over time you develop a map of thoughts to sensations. as you meditate some past traumatic experiences may arise and you may start to mentally react to it, but you notice that thinking about that particular insult from the past may just be causing this discofmrting sensation in some part of the body and you are reacting to the discmfort/pain caused by that. by training your mind to maintain equanimity, you realize that all these thoughts are doing is creating a sensation and causing you to react, and over time you can become a little more detached to it. what is weird though about these sensations though is that there might be these knots tied up in your chest, and by focusing on the pain of these knots you start to release a lot of old memories that caused you some kind of pain in the past. the pain of those memories are stored as sensations in the body. if your in a bad situation in your life mentally and psychologically it will absolutely manifest itself in terms of physical symptoms. additionally I have found that the combination of meditation and any kind of drugs - marijuana or psychedelics can cause of a lot of that trauma to be released.

tomhoward 8y ago

I’ve been testing this hypothesis - as best as one possibly can without conventional medical support - for the past few years. I’ve found that with persistence, emotion-based therapies are effective at bringing about healing of chronic physiological illnesses. Prior to that I’d spent several frustrating years seeking diagnosis for conditions that were debilitating but not apparently identifiable or treatable. To me they manifested as chronic muscle and joint pain, digestive issues, fatigue/lethargy, skin conditions, signs of inflammation. Medical tests found only mild deficiencies of Vitamin D and iron, with recommendations to treat with diet or supplements but otherwise nothing wrong. Yet the pain and fatigue was debilitating and made it impossible to live a normal life. In desperation I turned to unconventional therapies and came across a set of techniques that seek to identify and resolve traumas/complexes/phobias stuck in the subconscious mind. I’ve been undertaking these practices consistently for about 6-7 years now, and slowly but surely my symptoms are subsiding and all aspects of my life are improving. Why does has it taken so long? It turns out there was a huge amount of emotional baggage to work through. Not obvious stuff like childhood abuse; just a lot of unpleasant experiences that began from being an anxious child, and snowballed as life progressed. I’ve now worked through several thousand instances of trauma from throughout my life. Much of it is minor or seemingly trivial, and some of it is profound, but it all seems to play a role, and the process of identifying/understanding/resolving it is directly correlated with the alleviation of my symptoms. I’m now quite certain that this concept would have a huge impact on the medical world if it were to be embraced by the mainstream, but there’s huge resistance to it so it seems set to remain confined to the fringes for a long time to come. Recently there's been coverage (on HN [1] and elsewhere [2]) of Dr. Gabor Maté, a veteran physician who has studied the role of trauma in addiction and chronic illness. He advocates the position that there is near enough to a perfect correlation between chronic illness or addiction and trauma. From my own experience and from what I've observed in other people I know, this rings true. I'm not sure what it will take for this notion to be embraced more widely and researched more deeply, but it seems pretty important. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18497985 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGGNPAK6uw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUGGNPAK6uw

whatshisface 8y ago
How do you know that you did not have a natural recovery that just happened to coincide with the new intervention?

d--b 8y ago

Seriously? Western medicine waited 2018 to figure out that psychoanalysis is real?!

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isomorph 8y ago

I've found that my migraines have responded more to counselling than medication although there are physical triggers too. My rosacea is also reduced in severity by counselling, although not as dramatically.

everdev 8y ago

Many therapists and spiritual guides will say that trauma is physically stored in the body. Things like movement, dance, yoga, sounds, etc. help to loosen the body and therefore loosen the grip of these traumatic experiences. While I've seen and felt the benefits of how healing the body can heal the mind is that phrase "storing trauma in the body" literally true or more of an phrase that just helps people start talking better care of their body?

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hollerith 8y ago

The concept of the so-called cell danger response strikes me (not a health-care practitioner or researcher) as a promising explanation for how psychological trauma causes chronic physical illness: in particular, the trauma causes persistent changes in the brain, which keeps on activating the cell danger response.

idclip 8y ago

I’m a religious atheist, or a mystical one, by choice. (Please don’t pick on my choice of words) That road is full of drama and pain, and I’m very glad to have discovered Carl Jung, Alan Watts and Robert Bly. Health wise, it may be too late, but I’m still very very thankful, and wish I discovered all this earlier. If anyone here is suffering, send me a message. I will do my best so you suffer less in this world.

OpenBSD-empire 8y ago

I'm surprised no one in this thread brought up the Adverse Childhood Experiences study. An ACE of 6/10, as compared to a 0/10, may actually have worse deleterious effects than a lifetime of smoking. A six score on average dies twenty years younger than a zero (when correcting for lifestyles and risk-behaviors between the two groups)!