Early on, we learn there’s something wrong with us. It’s not usually overt. We’re told told to “be nice” or “try harder.” We may hear things like “don’t cry” or “don’t be so sensitive.” We are shut down for having emotions or banished to our rooms.

If we’re lucky, big people talk with us about our upsets, but they often focus on outer events, ignoring our trembling inner world. Well-intentioned adults who weren’t given space for their own emotions are flummoxed or threatened by ours. 

“My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression,” writes Gabor Maté, MD, in his iconic book When the Body Says No.

Yet, we human beings are driven by emotions. They tell us to run, punch or preen, for instance. Maté explains that emotions signal what’s dangerous or benign, what could threaten us or nurture our growth. 

If our feelings aren’t allowed, we’re forced to disconnect from these life-giving signals. Rather than realize the frightening truth that caregivers can’t give us what we need, we blame our self. It’s safer to be defective than neglected. We conclude, there’s something wrong with me. I’m flawed. I’m not enough.

Tragically, we carry that “not enoughness” through life. I’m not strong enough. I’m not smart enough. Not thin enough, voluptuous enough, toned enough. Interesting, I’m not that interesting. Thus, I don’t deserve to get my desires and needs met. (Capitalism swoops in here to sell us the goods.)

When we’re young, we’re sponges that soak up the water around us. Over time, we feel heavy or bloated but we don’t know why. We drown in unprocessed emotions. We find distractions: Netflix, Frosties, fingernail biting, beating ourselves up for our many imperfections. (i.e. being human)

We project those feelings of lack onto our body. There’s something wrong with my body. Really wrong with my body. I feel uncomfortable sensations and I have to fix then. Since we don’t know how, we think we need someone or something else to repair us. The early ache of craving another to comfort us reemerges again and again. 

We mentalize. We medicate. If we’re out of physical options, we might even meditate. For me, yoga and meditation were gateways into my body. Yet after experiencing a traumatic assault, it took years of practice before I could feel emotions again. Sometimes, the inner hurt is too intense and symptoms become an unconscious surrogate. 

Dr. John Sarno explained that our brain represses threatening emotions and converts them into physical symptoms. Let’s say we can’t “stomach” our job or our partner. But we’re scared of our feelings and their repercussions, so we hold them in our bodies.

The fire in our belly starts to burn. Maybe it shows up as menstrual cramps or irritable bowel syndrome. Emotional sensations and physical sensations are different sides of the same coin. When we don’t land on the emotional side, we get the physical side. That tension could take the form of headaches, bladder pain, a stiff neck or fatigue. 

Desperate for relief, we go to doctors trained in the biomedical model. They’re taught to look for physical causes for physical symptoms. With an arsenal of imaging and blood tests, they always find something. If you have a pathological issue, like an infection, fracture or broken bone, you’ve come to the right place: allopathic medicine can help you. It can be limb-saving or even lifesaving.

But once you’ve ruled out structural causes, chronic pain is caused by the brain—not the body. It’s real pain. It’s felt in the body, but the body is not broken.

You are not broken.

Age-related changes like bulging or degenerative disks, arthritis and rotator cuff tears don’t generally cause pain. Studies show that healthy, able-bodied people have the same structural changes as those with chronic pain. Like wrinkles and grey hair, they don’t hurt—other than the turmoil of looking in the mirror in a youth-obsessed culture.

What’s different about people with persistent pain? The emotional centers of their brain light up like chandeliers. The amygdala and autonomic nervous system drive symptoms. Fortunately, we can calm those down with accurate knowledge, a safe haven to feel pent up emotions and reconstruct the often ill-advised thoughts that accompany them.

The same mind-body process happens with other ailments, too: fibromyalgia, interstitial cystitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, all of which I’ve overcome.

When I was still looking for a physical cause for my physical symptoms, doctors warned that my Epstein-Barr levels were off the charts. They convinced me to take a war chest of antiviral herbs. When those didn’t work, a rheumatologist gave me antiviral IVs, injecting potent medications into my veins. Already in a fragile state from years of CFS/ME, the drugs sent me into bed for weeks. It took months to climb back to where I was before them.

It works out that 95-percent of adults test positive for Epstein-Barr. Recently, I found studies that show asymptomatic people can also have high titers of the virus. Researchers in Britain tested first year medical students and found some of these vibrant young people had viral titers as high as those in people with active mononucleosis, the acute version of Epstein-Barr. They concluded that “the viral load per se cannot be the driver of symptoms.” 

For over a decade, doctors told me things that, quite frankly, terrified me: that the virus had seeped into my brain, my immune system was ill-equipped to handle them, and I’d have to live like this. That kept me locked in a hopeless paradigm for years. It’s called the nocebo effect: when patients are told something won’t go well, they have negative side effects from sham sugar pills and feined procedures.  

In my quest for answers, I reached out to mind-body pioneer Dr. Howard Schubiner who explained that high titers of Epstein-Barr simply reveal one was once exposed to the virus and now has harmless antibodies floating around.  

“Viruses don’t cause CFS,” wrote Howard Schubiner, MD, author of Unlearn Your Pain. “High titers are a protective mechanism. Symptoms often start with a cold. Then your brain learns that and stores it in neural circuits. When you get a cold, old circuits are activated.” 

The remedy is to realize the root cause is unprocessed stress, retrain our brain and acknowledge the underlying emotions. Schubiner’s work helped me recover and I am incredibly grateful. 

Why did other doctors tell me that viruses were the culprits? I don’t know. Perhaps they weren’t aware of scientific literature showing that anti-virals don’t bring symptom relief. 

Sadly, practitioners are still telling patients that Epstein-Barr is causing their chronic fatigue. People contact me, worried that they’ll never overcome a latent virus. The same thing is happening with post-Covid patients who have lasting symptoms but no tissue damage. They’re being fed scary ideas, as I was.

Doctors aren’t trained to look at a person’s emotional world. People with Covid-19 were understandably frightened by a new and emerging global threat. Fear activates the flight, fight or freeze response. It floods the body with stress hormones and brings changes in blood flow and nerve firing patterns. This creates mind-body symptoms, but they’ll subside when we quell our fear.

The key to recover from chronic symptoms, whether fatigue, brain fog, anxiety or pain, is to explore the root cause: the way psychological stress affects the brain and nervous system, creating real physical symptoms. 

You can ask: What was happening in your life when your symptoms began? What are you feeling emotionally now? Name the emotion if you can. Are you mad, sad, scared or ashamed? Pause and breath into your body sensations. 

Instead of perpetuating hurts from childhood, we become the witness to our thoughts and emotions. We journal about our emotional landscape. We stay present to our felt experience, as symptoms or emotions arise. We tend to our vulnerability, growing our capacity to feel what’s present. We become the loving adult we may not have had as a child.

As we reconnect to our body as a world of sensation, rather than a maze of mental diagnoses, we realize that there truly is nothing wrong with us. We are precious, sentient beings. A part of us is calling for our attention. It will keep calling until we pause and listen, again and again.

We can take things that numb out the pain, and there is a time for that. But as Dr. Sarno explained, a managed symptom will shift to another one, until we acknowledge the underlying root. For true transformation, we reclaim estranged parts of ourselves to become whole and healed.