The Mind-Body Problem

One of the things that fascinates me most about the human body is its flawless ability to encase emotion. The mind-body problem is one which has bemused scientists and philosophers alike, and we constantly argue about whether the human is a consciousness trapped inside a body, or whether it is a unified whole. However, either way, it would be naïve to think that the mind and the emotions do not have an effect on the body.

I’ve recently been discovering what a magnanimous, cavernous place the body is, and how effectively it can be used to store years’ worth of emotion. It’s as if the chest, lungs, and muscles all have the ability to swallow feelings and thoughts and keep them hidden and untouched. It is, of course, at a cost. Shoulders which carry a weight of stress become tense and painful. Lungs which are told to encase sadness will struggle to draw breath. The whole body suffers when it is forced to contain a life’s worth of emotion.

I don’t like to boast, but I have been an absolute expert at emotion containment since a very young age. As a child I would hear something that frightened me and I would stew for weeks, worrying myself sick but always keeping my fear entirely to myself. I would never speak a word of my fears to anyone. The same is to be said for sadness, confusion, even middle school boy drama. I’ve always been one to ruminate on the “what-ifs” instead of discussing them with people who could help me to see that there is really nothing to be afraid of. I am detrimentally self-sufficient. I was saying “self” before I could even put my shoes on the right feet.

This silent suffering and independent child soon reaped the results of a life lived in self-sufficiency. Something shackling happened to me during a seemingly ordinary and inconsequential moment. It was a moment that most children probably experience, but something about me made the experience so much different. It was only a fleeting feeling of nausea in the middle of class, the sudden appearance of the morning’s breakfast on the desk, and the teacher arousing herself into brisk action to clean up the mess, but in my keen sensitivity to the feelings and responses of everyone in the room, I perceived something different: the other children were disgusted, the teacher was inconvenienced—far too concerned about the mess to see the frightened child—and the child knew who was to blame. Shame followed, and fear. As I later sat in the office waiting for my mom to pick me up, the stench of vomit that came from the sleeves of my white blouse was a filthy sign of my shame—it was indeed a stench, and with it I repulsed others. 

Perhaps things would have been different if, in those first couple of weeks after this small incident, I had spoken aloud my feelings of fear and shame. But I kept them locked away, and only gave them away through seemingly childish actions. In an early demonstration of the power of the mind-body connection, I worried until my stomach hurt, and I’d ask every day if I could go to the office because I felt sick. The response I got after a few days was “the day is almost over, can’t you just wait a few more minutes?” The adult in me longs to give my child-self a voice and yell at the adults around me, “Can’t you see I’ve been terrified ever since I was sick in class? Can’t you see that I need compassion, and for someone to explain to me that it’s normal for a child to throw up at school?” But instead, I was treated as an irrational, dramatic, irritating little girl.

The idea that throwing up in public was a shame and a disgrace and something to be utterly terrified of was reinforced and solidified in my mind over and over again in the coming years. Before school music programs, the teachers would lecture us on how important it was for us to leave the risers immediately if we started feeling sick. Kids would scream “Eeeeww!” and scatter every time one of their peers threw up. Adults would say “You are sick? Don’t get near me, I can’t afford to catch that.” And one time I overheard a girl in the bathroom vomiting and sobbing as if it were the worst possible thing in the world to experience. And for me, it was.

I was quick to pick up on which situations were the most dangerous. Everyone always got sick on field trips. I dreaded field trips. Sometimes people got sick when they ran too hard. I never ran too hard. Roller coasters, spinning rides, cars, and buses gave people motion sickness. I avoided the ones that I could and endured with terror the ones I couldn’t. Each time I found myself in a dangerous situation, I would gulp down my fear and hide it in my chest. I did this for fifteen years. I never once spoke about my fears to anyone because I could see it was a silly fear. While other people feared heights, airplane rides, or dying, I was fine with dying by falling from an airplane at a great height provided I didn’t throw up on the way down.  

This reign of silence began to change when I stumbled upon a website dedicated entirely to emetophobics. Somehow the validation of being able to attach a real name to what I struggled with and the realization that there were actually thousands of people in the world with a similar fear made all the difference in the world to me, and it wasn’t long before I was able to come to terms with my fear enough to speak it out loud, and not long after that before I was able to finally begin to live outside of my fear.

Although this was a huge victory for me and I still thank God every day for how far he has brought me, I have since realized that my emetophobia was only the tip of the iceberg—a mere symptom of a much deeper fear. Within my heart, which should be a thriving and flowering garden, there is an intricate web of fear—a seemingly endless network of dizzying passages in which I have stuffed all of my hurts and anxieties from the time that I was a child. Sorting through them is like trying to feel my way through miles of disorienting tunnels with nothing but a candle and a will to survive.

The good news is that the human body, though amazing in its capacity to imprison emotion, does indeed have a maximum capacity. If it didn’t, we would likely never grow from our difficult experiences. But eventually the body, the mind, and the carefully hardened heart, will rebel against its impossible task-master and cease to be strong, courageous, and untouchable. This is where healing begins.